It's hard to think of a time when I hadn't read Ursula Le Guin's work. I suppose I can date it fairly precisely if I think about it. A Wizard of Earthsea was lent to my sister Anne by her standard four teacher, a thin, dark-haired, intense young woman whose name escapes me now. And since Anne was only a year ahead of me at school, that would make it 1971, when the book (first published in 1968) was only a few years old. That means I've been reading Le Guin for roughly 47 years - amazing, really, when you think about it.



Already a fan of such writers as Alan Garner, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, I could see that this was something quite different: different, but equally valid.

The Tombs of Atuan (1971), which we all read next, was a very different kettle of fish: more layered, subjective and intensely personal. I didn't like it as much as the more objective, epic voice of A Wizard of Earthsea, but (once again), even at that age, I could see it was just as valid.



The Farthest Shore (1972), when it came out the next year, seemed to combine the best features of the two styles.

By then I was hopelessly hooked, and - soon after - started my long, slow immersion in her early science fiction: first The Lathe of Heaven (which my father had in a scruffy little paperback edition: still possibly my favourite among all of her books), then the far more difficult Left Hand of Darkness - which still terrifies as much as it enthuses me - and finally her wonderful 'ambiguous Utopia', The Dispossessed.



After those early books came a long period of disappointment for me. Her early work seemed to me to constitute a touchstone of excellence in speculative fiction that only the greatest could hope to equal. But what was I to make of The Eye of the Heron or Buffalo Gals?

It seemed to me as if (to quote C. S. Lewis's witty denunciation of H. G. Wells) she "had sold her birthright for a pot of message." The wonderfully subtle and nuanced gender relations in books such as The Left Hand of Darkness or the original Earthsea Trilogy had been traded in for the strident excesses of militant feminism.



The thing about addicts, though, is that it's very hard for them to break free from their addictions. By now the habit was formed, and I dutifully read book after book of hers, hoping against hope for a return to form. This even after she'd dared to politicise the pristine fantasy world of her own Earthsea with the bitter pill of Tehanu (1990).



The years came and went, the books piled up: particularly the collections of short stories, a form which has always seemed particularly congenial to her. Eventually even I, the stupid mule, began to get it, began to read back with a bit more insight, began to see how my adolescent judgements of her work simply betokened a lack of political maturity.

Now even those novels and stories of her middle period seem to me clearly integrated into her work as a whole - it makes me blush to realise how blindly stuck in my ways I must have been to think otherwise: to fail (for instance) to see the merits of such a wonderful story as 'Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight.'



Interestingly enough, I didn't share the adverse reaction to Always Coming Home when it first came out - after, that is, I'd learned that it had to be read straight through: songs, folklore, ethnologies, etymologies and all, if one was to have any hope of understanding the narrative all those things frame. Do they exist for the story, or does the story exist for them? It's an interesting question, but one - by its very nature - which remains unanswerable.



Always Coming Home remains her most ambitious novel: the one which really betrays how much she was her father's daughter: Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960), one of the most influential ethnologists who ever lived, famous (or infamous, depending on how you read it) as one of the protagonists of the so-called Ishi saga, the story of which was eventually written as Ishi in Two Worlds (1961) by Theodora Kroeber, Ursula's mother - who never met Ishi himself - after her husband's death.



Always Coming Home, for those of you who haven't read it, is a strange combination of a fantasy novel set in the near (or far) future, and an ethnography of a people called the Kesh, inhabitants of what is now Northern California. It includes accounts of their religious rituals, castes and guilds, stories and poems, their diet, and virtually the whole of their life-style from birth to death. It’s a hugely ambitious text, involving the creation of a whole imaginary future people, but – of course – also aspires to be a readable story.



It’s always seemed obvious to me that it was, at least in part, inspired by her father's work: his Handbook of the Indians of California, or one of his many, many other works on Native American culture and folklore, such as Indian Myths of South Central California (1907) or the posthumously published Yurok Myths (1976).

Her mother's influence is just as strong, though: perhaps a unique case of a novelist daughter influenced by her linguist and anthropologist father and her biographer mother - who followed up her first, more scholarly book Ishi in Two Worlds with a more popular, lightly fictionalized version, Ishi: Last of His Tribe - in creating a work which can really only be described as ethno-speculative-fiction.



Whether or not you agree with that reading, it's clear that all three of these writers, mother, father and daughter do have in common a deep kinship with the region they live in: the North-West Coast of the United States.

Perhaps her most potent expression of this feeling came in the book Searoad, an innovative book of linked short stories which combine to create the sense of a single place: Klatsand, a small town on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Given this unity of conception, I've classed it as a novel in my bibliography of her work below, but actually it would fit just as well in the list of books of short stories.

That's quite characteristic of Le Guin, actually. She defies simple classification into genres. Her potted biography on Amazon.com reads as follows:

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry, and four of translation.

Given that they go on to say: "Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia [2008], Words Are My Matter, an essay collection [2016], and Finding My Elegy, New and Selected Poems [2012]," one can't help wondering how up-to-date these statistics are actually meant to be.

Myself, I count 13 'adult' novels alongside 9 for YA readers, which I would say adds up to 22. Given the doubts I've already signalled about Searoad, however, as well as the fact that The Word for World is Forest (1977) and Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (1976) are really more novella than novel-length, albeit published as stand-alone volumes, one could certainly argue for any figure around the 20s.

11 volumes of short stories does sound correct to me (including, as it should, her 2001 book Tales from Earthsea). The four collections of essays is hopelessly out-of-date, however. I count at least seven major volumes of these - although one could easily expand that to 8 if one included the British collection Dreams Must Explain Themselves (or, for that matter, 9, with the addition of the posthumous volume of Conversations on Writing with David Naimon).

The 12 books for children have risen to 13, the 6 books of poetry to 12, but the 4 of translation still seems accurate. By my count, then, 72 books (ignoring - mind you - a number of the chapbooks listed on her Wikipediabibliography page), plus at least 10 volumes of collected works, ranging from the various editions of the Earthsea series to the four-volume Library of America collection.

It's an impressive total. It's not so much how many there are as how many masterpieces there are among them, though. She really was one of a kind.

Novels:


1. Rocannon's World. 1966. A Star Book. London: W. H. Allen & Co., Ltd. 1980.


2. Planet of Exile / Thomas M. Disch. Mankind under the Leash. Ace Double. New York: Ace Books, Inc., 1966.


3. City of Illusions. 1967. Panther Science Fiction. St Albans, Herts: Panther Books, 1973.


4. The Left Hand of Darkness. 1969. Panther Science Fiction. St Albans, Herts: Panther Books, 1975.


5. The Lathe of Heaven. 1971. Panther Science Fiction. St Albans, Herts: Panther Books, 1974.


6. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. 1974. Panther Science Fiction. St Albans, Herts: Panther Books, 1975.


7. The Word for World is Forest. 1977. Panther Books. London: Granada Publishing, 1980.


8. Malafrena. 1979. Panther Books. London: Granada Publishing, 1981.


9. Threshold. [As ‘The Beginning Place’, 1980]. Panther Books. London: Granada Publishing, 1982.


10. Always Coming Home. Artist: Margaret Chodos. Composer: Todd Baron. Geomancer: George Hersh. 1985. London: Victor Gollancz, 1986.


11. Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand. 1991. London: Victor Gollancz, 1992.


12. The Telling. 2000. London: Gollancz, 2003.


13. Lavinia. 2008. Mariner Books. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009.

Short Stories:


14. The Wind's Twelve Quarters. 1975. 2 Vols. Panther Books. London: Granada Publishing, 1978.


15. Orsinian Tales. 1976. Panther Books. London: Granada Publishing, 1978.


16. Virginia Kidd, ed. The Eye of the Heron and Other Stories. By Ursula K. Le Guin et al. [As ‘Millennial Women’, 1978]. Panther Books. London: Granada Publishing, 1980.


17. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Compass Rose: Short Stories. 1982. London: Victor Gollancz, 1983.


18. Buffalo Gals, and Other Animal Presences. 1987. A Plume book. New York: New American Library, 1988.


19. A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. 1994. London: Vista, 1997.


20. Four Ways to Forgiveness. 1995. HarperPrism. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.


21. Unlocking the Air and Other Stories. 1996. HarperPerennial. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.


22. The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. 2002. London: Gollancz, 2003.


23. Changing Planes: Stories. Illustrated by Eric Beddows. Orlando, Fl: Harcourt, Inc., 2003.

YA Fiction:


24. A Wizard of Earthsea. 1968. Drawings by Ruth Robbins. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


25. The Tombs of Atuan. 1971. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


26. The Farthest Shore. 1972. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


27. A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else. [As ‘Very Far Away from Anywhere Else’, 1976]. Peacock Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


28. Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea. London: Victor Gollancz, 1990.


29. Tales from Earthsea. 2001. London: Orion Children’s Books, 2002.


30. The Other Wind. 2001. London: Orion Children’s Books, 2002.


31. Gifts. Annals of the Western Shore, 1. 2004. Orlando, Fl: Harcourt, Inc., 2006.


32. Voices. Annals of the Western Shore, 2. 2006. Orion Children's Books. London: Orion Publishing Group Ltd., Inc., 2007.


33. Powers. Annals of the Western Shore, 3. 2007. Orion Children's Books. London: Orion Publishing Group Ltd., Inc., 2008.

Children's Books:


34. Leese Webster. Illustrated by James Brunsman (1979)


35. The Adventure of Cobbler's Rune. Illustrated by Alicia Austin (1982)


36. Solomon Leviathan's Nine Hundred and Thirty-First Trip Around the World. Illustrated by Alicia Austin (1983)


37. A Visit from Dr. Katz. Illustrated by Ann Barrow (1988)


38. Fire and Stone. Illustrated by Laura Marshall (1988)


39. Catwings. Illustrated by S. D. Schindler (1988)


40. Catwings Return. Illustrated by S. D. Schindler (1989)


41. Fish Soup. Illustrated by Patrick Wynne (1992)


42. A Ride on the Red Mare's Back. Illustrated by Julie Downing (1992)


43. Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings. Illustrated by S. D. Schindler (1994)


44. Jane On Her Own. Illustrated by S. D. Schindler (1999)


45. Tom Mouse. Illustrated by Julie Downing (2002)


46. Cat Dreams. Illustrated by S. D. Schindler (2009)

Non-fiction:


47. From Elfland to Poughkeepsie (1973)


48. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. 1979. Rev ed. London: The Women’s Press, 1989.


49. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. London: Victor Gollancz, 1989.


50. Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew. Portland, Oregon: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1998.


51. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2004.


52. Cheek by Jowl: Talks & Essays on How & Why Fantasy Matters. Seattle, Washington: Aqueduct Press, 2009.


53. Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writer’s Week. Northampton, Mass: Small Beer Press, 2016.


54. No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017)


55. Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Other Essays: 1972–2004 (2018)


56. Conversations on Writing: Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon (2018)

Poetry:


57. Wild Angels. 1975. In The Capra Chapbook Anthology. Ed. Noel Young. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1979.


58. Hard Words and Other Poems (1981)


59. Wild Oats and Fireweed: New Poems (1988)


60. Going out with Peacocks and Other Poems (1994)


61. [with Diana Bellessi] The Twins, The Dream: Two Voices / Las Gemelas, El Sueño: Dos Voces (1997)


62. Sixty Odd (1999)


63. Incredible Good Fortune (2006)


64. Four Different Poems (2007)


65. Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country. Photographs by Roger Dorband (2010)


66. Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems (2012)


67. Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014 (2015)


68. So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014-2018 (2018)

Translation:


69. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. A Book about the Way & the Power of the Way. Translated with J. P. Seaton. 1997. Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1998.


70. Gabriela Mistral. Selected Poems (2003)


71. Angelica Gorodischer. Kalpa Imperial (2003)


72. Gheorghe Săsărman. Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony. Translated with Mariano Martín Rodríguez (2013)

Collected Editions:


73. The Earthsea Trilogy: A Wizard of Earthsea; The Tombs of Atuan; The Farthest Shore. 1968, 1972, 1973, 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.


74. The Earthsea Quartet: A Wizard of Earthsea; The Tombs of Atuan; The Farthest Shore: Tehanu. 1968, 1972, 1973, 1990. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.


75. Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions. 1964, 1966, 1967. An Orb Book. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1995.


76. The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume 1: Where on Earth. 2012. Gollancz. London: Orion Publishing Group, 2014.


77. The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume 2: Outer Space, Inner Lands. 2012. Gollancz. London: Orion Publishing Group, 2015.


78. The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas. Saga Press. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2016.


79. The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition – A Wizard of Earthsea; The Tombs of Atuan; The Farthest Shore: Tehanu; Tales of Earthsea; The Other Wind. 1968, 1972, 1973, 1990, 2001, 2001. Illustrated by Charles Vess. Saga Press. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2018.


80. The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena; Stories and Songs. Ed. Brian Attebery. Ursula K. Le Guin Collection, 1. The Library of America, 281. 1979, 1976. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2016.


81. The Hainish Novels & Stories, vol. 1: Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions; The Left Hand of Darkness; The Dispossessed; Stories. 1964, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1974. Ed. Brian Attebery. Ursula K. Le Guin Collection, 2. The Library of America, 296. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2017.


82. The Hainish Novels & Stories, vol. 2: The Word for World is Forest; Five Ways to Forgiveness; The Telling; Stories. 1977, 1995, 2000. Ed. Brian Attebery. Ursula K. Le Guin Collection, 3. The Library of America, 297. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2017.


83. Always Coming Home: Author’s Expanded Edition. 1985. Ed. Brian Attebery. Ursula K. Le Guin Collection, 4. The Library of America, 315. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2019.

We flew down for this event. Partly from curiosity, I must confess. I haven't really spent any time in Christchurch since the earthquake (though Bronwyn has), and I wanted to see what it was like.



Also, the hotel we were staying at, Rydges Latimer, was the scene of a haunting a few years ago, when Pakistani cricketer Haris Sohail had his bed shaken by an invisible something, so that constituted a bit of a temptation, too.



Nothing like that happened to us, but when we compared notes later, we realised that each of us had woken up during the night to find the room bathed with light from the clock radio beside the bed (this despite the fact that I'd covered it with a pillow before going to sleep). The pillow was certainly still there, in place, next morning - what can have led us to think that it had shifted, or been lifted off, by something or someone, in the middle of the night, then?



Perhaps these are mysteries we'll never understand. Valiant Christchurch is still in many ways a troubled city, though: witness many of the poems and stories read out at the awards ceremony.



Not only that, but it's also an intensely atmospheric one to wander around at night.



For the rest, we certainly had a great time while we were there, doing touristy things around the Square and the Avon, and then (next day) taking the bus out to Lyttelton and the Tannery.





It seemed strangely appropriate to have ended up in a restaurant called "Original Sin' - certainly their pasta was to die for!



The event itself was run very smoothly and professionally by the Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors. Every reader stuck to their allotted time - perhaps because the sheer splendour of the surroundings made us all determined to mind our p's and q's.



Here's the fiction shortlist:

NZSA Canterbury Heritage Book and Writing Awards 2018

Judge: Fiona Farrell

1. Harvest by Christine Carrell (Nugget Stream Press 2017)
2. The Life of De’Ath by Majella Cullinane (Steele Roberts Publishers, 2018)
3. Finding by David Hill (Puffin 2018)
4. This Mortal Boy by Fiona Kidman (Vintage Penguin Random House 2018)
5. The Annotated Tree Worship: List of Topoi / Draft Research Portfolio by Jack Ross (Paper Table 2017)
6. Gone to Pegasus by Tess Redgrave (Submarine Press 2018)

No fewer than 18 novels were entered for this part of the competition, apparently - along with 24 in the non-fictional book category, and many poems and essays. The judges certainly had their work cut out for them.



The winner was Dame Fiona Kidman's powerful novel about capital punishment in New Zealand, This Mortal Boy. The runner-up was David Hill's wonderful YA historical novel Finding. I was more than a little surprised, then, when Fiona Farrell announced that she'd insisted on creating a special category for my novel The Annotated Tree Worship, since (as she said) experimental fiction has a vital place in the literary firmament, too.

So here I am, looking proud as punch, with my 'Highly Commended' certificate. Thanks, Fiona:

It's tempting to be facetious about the strange worlds of H. P. Lovecraft, "the twentieth century horror story's dark and baroque prince," as Stephen King famously described him.

I think a quick peek at the picture above will cure you of any notion that Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was gifted with much of a sense of humour. Life, for him, was a terrifying and frustrating business.

Here's a little photo-montage to enable you to visualise him more clearly:



What kind of a writer was he? An over-the-top, boots-and-all, pedal-to-the-metal user of every adjective and adverb under the sun to get the extreme effects he craved. His prose may not always be pretty, but it does have a certain brute effectiveness to it.

Here's an example of his early fantasy writing, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," a long novella deeply indebted to Lord Dunsany:

Well did the traveler know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukranos that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colors of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dangle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.

And here's a piece of his more mature writing:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I guess what those of us brought up on his stories relish most, though, are the fragments of unknown, hellish languages he liked to mix into his stories. Here's a wonderful example from 'The Shadow over Innsmouth', cunningly blended with New England dialect:

"Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside—that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of the faithful—Order o' Dagon—an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct—Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn—"

He's best known for his creation of a thing called the 'Cthulhu Mythos': a more-or-less consistent, interconnected mythology which gradually came into being in such stories as 'The Call of Cthulhu' and 'The Dunwich Horror,' and reached its full flowering in the late novel 'At the Mountains of Madness' and his final completed story 'The Shadow Out of Time'.



The artist Steve Thomas has created a series of mocked-up travel posters for particularly significant Lovecraftian destinations:



Chief among them, of course, is Arkham, Massachusetts, home of the Miskatonic University, whose library boasts a copy of that most recondite of volumes The Necronomicon, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, and a source of considerable inconvenience to everyone who encounters it, whether in the original or in its variously expurgated translations into a myriad of tongues.



Arkham (allegedly a blend of Salem, Massachusetts, and the author's hometown Providence, Rhode Island), has more than its fair share of demons, hauntings, empty graves, corpses with their faces gnawed off, spectral beasts, and even radioactive meteorites from outer space.

Nor is there any sense in pretending that Lovecraft was just playing around with these things for poetic effect. His paranoias and neurotic fears were very real. Take, for instance, the following conversation about "H. P. Lovecraft's Phobias" on Yahoo Answers!:

Question: I've heard that Lovecraft had various phobias, what were they?

Best Answer:

• Gelatinous seafood and the smell of fish (severe).
• Unfamilar types of human faces that deviated from his ethnic norm (severe).
• Doctors and hospitals (mild).
• Large enclosed spaces (subway systems, large caves etc., mild).
• He also seems to have had a mild phobia about tall buildings and the possibility of being trapped under one after a collapse.
• Very cold weather (probably justifiable, since he tended to faint in it).

- Source: David Haden

If you'd like to know more about that or other recondite matters, you could do worse than consult the following tome, by the indefatigable Leslie S. Klinger, annotator of Sherlock Holmes, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Alan Moore's Watchmen and a host of others:

• Klinger, Leslie S., ed. The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. Introduction by Alan Moore. Liveright Publishing Corporation. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2014.

The main thing to emphasise is that this strange mixture of aesthetic recidivism, obsessive compulsion, and perverse white supremacism somehow combined into a body of work almost as influential on the twentieth century as Poe's was on the nineteenth.

If you think I'm exaggerating, just try googling "H. P. Lovecraft in popular culture" sometime.

Nor is his fan base entirely confined to readers of comics and pulp paperbacks with their caps on backwards (a proud group of human beings I'm happy to belong to: with the exception of the cap, that is). He recently joined the very select company of the Library of America, the only twentieth century horror writer as yet to do so (with the exception of the comparatively high culture Shirley Jackson):

• Lovecraft, H. P. Tales. Ed. Peter Straub. The Library of America, 155. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2005.

One of the most pleasing of the recent tributes to his influence is Alan Moore's remarkable series of comics set in a slightly alternative America of the 1930s:

1. Neonomicon. Illustrated by Jacen Burrows. Rantoul, Illinois: Avatar Press, 2011.
2. Providence: Act 1. Illustrated by Jacen Burrows. Issues #1-#4. Rantoul, Illinois: Avatar Press, 2017.
3. Providence: Act 2. Illustrated by Jacen Burrows. Issues #5-#8. Rantoul, Illinois: Avatar Press, 2017.
4. Providence: Act 3. Illustrated by Jacen Burrows. Issues #9-#12. Rantoul, Illinois: Avatar Press, 2017.

Composed in his characteristic cross-genre mix of 'straight' comics and associated prose pieces and appendices, Moore's narrative described the odyssey of a hapless journalist over a thinly disguised version of Lovecraft's New England, resulting in the usual dire consequences for the entire human race.

Let's just say that these comics go some places that other fan fictions seldom do. They take a good look at Lovecraft's xenophobia and misognyny but pay full tribute to the power of his mythopoeic imagination, also. Not always to comforting effect, it should be said:



Beyond that, I have to say that I can't help but find amusing some of the Lovecraftian spoofs that seem to throng the web. This one, for instance, parodying those 'Sea-monkey' adverts so madly attractive to us as kids - when we were lucky enough to come across a stash of bona fide American comics, that is:



I guess that a lot of the 'shoggoth' references, and mentions of the "Great Old Ones' - not to mention 'Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos', or 'Shub-Niggurath, Goat with a Thousand Young', or even great Cthulhu him - it? - self, don't really make much sense to the uninitiate, but this one, at least, has a pleasing brevity to it:



And these are all very sound rules if you ever be unfortunate enough to find yourself caught in the midst of a Lovecraftian scenario:



On and on and on they go: Lovecraftian ice-cream flavours, carnival exhibitions, you name it, it's there:





But back to the serious world of bibliomania and book-collecting. I still remember the disquieting experience of asking in a Takapuna bookshop if they had any Lovecraft books, only to be solemnly informed by the shop assistant that not only did they not, but that she doubted the very existence of such books. I recall the slightly roguish expression on her face when I brought out the dread syllables 'Love-craft,' and the distinct impression she gave that I was on some kind of subterranean quest for porno. Fat chance in the New Zealand of the early 1970s!

To add insult to injury, I'd seen those very books in that same bookshop only a month or two before. So her denials were, to say the least, somewhat disingenuous. When I tell you that what I'd seen was something like this, though, you may understand better her reluctance to engage with such "literature." God bless pulp cover illustrators!



Never mind. In spite of the opposition of such petty minds, I eventually managed to assemble the six garish paperbacks which constituted the Master's collected horror fiction:

1. Lovecraft, H. P. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. 1951. London: Panther, 1970.


2. Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror. 1966. London: Panther, 1973.


3. Lovecraft, H. P. The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. 1964. London: Panther, 1973.


4. Lovecraft, H. P. The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales. 1964. London: Panther, 1970.


5. Lovecraft, H. P. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. 1967. London: Panther, 1973.


6. Lovecraft, H. P. The Tomb and Other Tales. 1967. London: Panther, 1974.

If you looked carefully enough (I did), you'd observe that these six paperbacks actually constituted trimmed-down, British versions of the following three American hardbacks, all edited by by Lovecraft's most faithful disciple August Derleth, and published by Arkham House, the firm Derleth started to perpetuate the Master's work after his untimely death at the age of 47.

1. Lovecraft, H. P. The Dunwich Horror and Others: The Best Supernatural Stories. Ed. August Derleth. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1963.


2. Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. Ed. August Derleth. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1964.


3. Lovecraft, H. P. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. Ed. August Derleth. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1965.

The first two collections of Lovecraft's work issued by Arkham House are now fabulously rare and valuable. Here they both are (I'm sorry to say, if you're wondering, that I don't own copies of either of them):





Note the advertisement, above, for a book by Clark Ashton Smith, who, along with Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, constituted the 'Big Three' of the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales, which flourished - largely because of their work and that of other members of the Lovecraft group - throughout the early to mid-1930s.

There are innumerable modern editions of Lovecraft - many of them 'corrected' or at least re-edited by horror story polymath S. T. Joshi:

1. Lovecraft, H. P. The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. 2001. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.


2. Lovecraft, H. P. The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.

There's also a weird, less easily classifiable penumbra of works 'edited by' Lovecraft (this was indeed the main way he made his meager living), or 'based on' his manuscripts, or 'inspired by' his themes (particularly those embodied in the Cthulhu mythos). I have a small collection of these, but the field is a vast one:

1. Lovecraft, H. P., & August Derleth. The Shadow out of Time and Other Tales of Horror. London: Victor Gollancz, 1968.


2. Lovecraft, H. P., & August Derleth. The Lurker at the Threshold: A Novel of the Macabre. 1945. London: Victor Gollancz, 1968.


3. Lovecraft, H. P. & Others. Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Ed. August Derleth. 1975. London: Grafton, 1988.

Then there's the miscellaneous and secondary literature. There are collections of letters, of poetry (including his masterwork in this form, 'Fungi from Yuggoth'), of essays, of virtually anything you please. There are also numerous biographies and critical studies.

Of these I have only the first, somewhat dismissive one by L. Sprague de Camp, along with Colin Wilson's pioneering essay of 1962. Since then, however, the field has expanded vastly, due initially to the combined efforts of Derleth and Joshi, but now thanks largely to the incremental effect Academia tends to have on all such harmless pursuits:

1. De Camp, L. Sprague. Lovecraft: A Biography. 1975. London: New English Library, 1976.


2. Wilson, Colin. The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination. 1962. Abacus. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1982.

And what, pray tell, does 'peripeteia' mean when it's at home?

a sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, especially in reference to fictional narrative

is the best definition the online dictionary can provide.

I guess, in the case of Frances Yates, it refers to her transformation from an immensely learned but fairly dry-as-dust scholar of the intellectual life of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Europe (with particular reference to the flourishing of hermetic and magical discourses in the allegedly proto-scientific late Renaissance) into a kind of pop culture guru: the High Priestess of the more respectable side of New Age Occultism.



Her earlier books, on John Florio, the first translator of Montaigne into English (1934); Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, 1936), and such apparently recondite subjects as The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (1947) and The Valois Tapestries (1959), gave few signs of what was to come.

Reviewers were cautious about some of her 'wilder' conjectures, but for the most part she appeared just another habitué of Aby Warburg's superb library, transferred to England to avoid Nazi repression in 1933, and (as the Warburg Institute), affiliated with the University of London in 1944.

1. John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England. 1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.


2. A Study of Love's Labour's Lost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.


3. The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. 1947. London: Routledge, 1989


4. The Valois Tapestries. 1959. London: Routledge, 2010.

The sea-change came with her next two publications: the double-whammy of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and The Art of Memory (1966). Wow! Talk about time, place and opportunity all coming together.

It was the age of The Morning of the Magicians (UK, translated as 'The Dawn of Magic': 1963 / US: 1964), Louis Pauwels' and Jacques Bergier's 1960 bestseller about the wilder side of twentieth century occultism. It all sounds familiar enough nowadays, but at the time most people had never even heard of the 'Vril Society' or the 'Thule Spceity" - let alone their philosophical connections with Nazism.

Le Matin des magiciens mixed up information about "conspiracy theories, ancient prophecies, alchemical transmutation, a giant race that once ruled the Earth, and the Nazca Lines" into what (in retrospect) seems a kind of blueprint for New Age nuttiness generally. Some of it may actually have been true, mind you.

It's not, I hasten to say, that Frances Yates's serious study of the memory systems of Ramon Lull and Giordano Bruno, and of the Renaissance Hermetic tradition generally had anything in common intellectually with Pauwels and Bergier's rather formless compendium of mid-twentieth century bugaboos and conspiracy theories, but it's impossible to deny that the same readers were attracted to both.

The Art of Memory in particular, outmoded though it may be in some few particulars fifty years after its publication, remains one of the most exciting books of intellectual history I've ever read. Its devotees are many, and the number of memory system addicts it has spawned must be many (even TV mentalist Derren Brown has claimed to practise its precepts).

1. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. 1964. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul / Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1982.


2. The Art of Memory. 1966. A Peregrine Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

All of which brings me to the second meaning of peripeteia in my title above.

I wish I could date it precisely, but it must have been sometime in the mid-1980s that I was browsing through Anah Dunsheath's Rare Books on High Street, when I stumbled across a little pile of books shoved to one side of the entrance to her shop.

They were, in fact, four. As well as the two books mentioned directly above, there were also:

1. Frances Yates. Lull and Bruno. Collected Essays 1 (of 3). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.


2. Scott, Walter, ed. & trans. Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus. Vol. 1: Introduction / Texts and Translation. 4 vols. 1924. Boulder: Hermes House, 1982.

All in all, it looked as if some budding Occultist had bought a bunch of exciting looking books about all sorts of esoteric matters, and had either found them too boring and abstruse for their taste, or else found a more desperate need for ready cash. Reader, I bought them.

Bought them and took them home with me and immediately started in on The Art of Memory and, really, nothing has been the same for me ever since. It was just so strange and fascinating: it gave an entirely new angle on classical antiquity, on figures as well known as Simonides and Cicero, but then - in the later chapters - it completely overturned any notions I'd had that Giordano Bruno had been a martyr to science, or that any number of my Renaissance heroes had been devoted to "reason" in any modern sense of the term.

It was, I must confess, a long time before I read the first part of her diptych, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, which seemed to me then (it doesn't now) a bit anticlimactic after the highs of The Art of Memory. Nor did I get very far with the rather boring translation of the Hermetica. The book of essays, Lull and Bruno, was very good value indeed, though, and offered a whole series of new perspectives on this matter of the Hermetic tradition.

There is a certain amount about Ramon Lull in The Art of Memory, but the essays collected here gave a glimpse of her mind at work: her painstaking way of collecting evidence, venturing conjectures, and building on them to make immensely pleasing - if not always entirely convincing - wholes.

Anyone who's at all familiar with my own fiction (a somewhat select group, admittedly) will have observed the pervasive Yatesian influence. It's particularly strong in my first two novels, Nights with Giordano Bruno (the title is a bit of a giveaway), and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (which lent its name to this blog), but also in the novella Trouble in Mind (2005).

After that the fever subsided a bit, but Frances Yates still is my go-to gal when it comes to any kind of abstruse or coded information. Her work has its ups and downs, definitely, but basically I consider her both completely intellectually honest and greatly gifted creatively - the models she came up so regularly with in her works of intellectual history have a huge mythopoetic force to them.

Her later work is more of a mixed bag. It was assured of a much wider sale than most historians of ideas enjoy, which led to jealousy from less fortunate colleagues. It also, at times, advanced some rather dubious conjectures on such subjects as the underlying design of Shakespeare's Globe theatre, and the precise influences at work in the court of King Frederick of Bohemia (whose ousting from the throne led directly to the Thirty Years War in Germany).

Here are her five late books, copies of all of which I've collected along the way:

Theatre of the World (1969)



1. Theatre of the World. 1969. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.




The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972)



2. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. 1972. A Paladin Book. Frogmore, St Albans: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1975.




Astrea (1975)



3. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. 1975. Ark Paperbacks. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.




Shakespeare's Last Plays (1975)



4. Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach. 1975. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.




The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979)



5. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. 1979. Ark Paperbacks. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that she was having fun in these last books. They touch on all the themes dear to her heart, and they're all exhaustively researched, and yet they're not quite so convincing as the best of her mature work. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, in particular, is a dazzling read. Whether or not "Christian Rosenkreuz" and the various strange letters circulating around the continent in the early seventeenth century can really be explained by reference to the politics of the Holy Roman Empire may seem doubtful at times, but certainly nobody else has succeeded in making more sense of that strange tangle of esoteric philosophy and partisan religious politics.

Similarly, I'm not sure that she proves her point about the shape and structure of Shakespeare's various theatres, but she brings in Robert Fludd, John Dee, and an awe-inspiring range of learning which gives one some idea of just how complex and delightful such intellectual puzzles can be.

Nowadays, of course, these things have been vulgarised and made ridiculous by such absurd gallimaufries of half-digested platitude and pointless factoid as The Da Vinci Code and its progenitor The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. When Yates was writing, though, one could still theorise without the haunting shadow of Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon, and Benjamin Gates (from National Treasure).

By contrast, it's never safe to assume that Yates has gone out too far on a limb, or that she doesn't really know what she's talking about. All of her books, in the final analysis, constitute tentative suggestions for future researchers in the field. She's no crank, but is always evidence-driven and willing to change her mind as and when new facts and theories emerge.

I've often dreamed of completing my Frances Yates collection: buying up all the older books I don't have, as well as the remaining volumes in her collected essays. They are quite expensive, for the most part, though, so I guess I'm still waiting for some blessed windfall like that day 35-odd years ago when I bent over to look at a stack of dusty-looking books on Anah Dunsheath's floor.

1. Lull and Bruno. Collected Essays, vol. 1 of 3 (1982)


2. Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. Collected Essays, vol. 2 of 3 (1983)


3. Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance. Collected Essays, vol. 3 of 3 (1984)

I used to feel a bit ashamed of reading books by Colin Wilson. They definitely fall into the 'guilty pleasures' category. As you can see from the list below, I collected his fiction fairly assiduously up until the end of the 1970s, but then let the habit lapse.

I do have most of them, though - with the exception of the late 'Spider World' series (1987-2002), and a few others such as The Janus Murder Case (1984), The Personality Surgeon (1985), and the posthumous Lulu: an unfinished novel (2017).

The first one I encountered - and it's still my favourite - was The Mind Parasites (along with, to a slightly lesser extent, its successors The Return of the Lloigor and The Philosopher's Stone).

I'm not quite sure why I liked it so much at the time. True, it was full of bookish information, and ended with one of those characteristic Campbell-era Sci-fi Man-plus resolutions, but there was an unmistakable zest about it.

Fiction:


1. Ritual in the Dark. 1960. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1976.


2. Adrift in Soho. 1961. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.


3. The World of Violence. 1963. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.


4. Man Without a Shadow. 1963. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.


5. Necessary Doubt. 1964. London: Panther Books Ltd., 1966.


6. The Glass Cage: An Unconventional Detective Story. 1966. New York: Bantam Books, 1973.


7. The Mind Parasites. 1967. Berkeley, California: Oneiric Press, 1983.


8. 'The Return of the Lloigor.' In Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Ed. August Derleth. 1969. London: Grafton, 1988. 439-501.


9. The Philosopher's Stone. 1969. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.


10. The God of the Labyrinth. 1970. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.


11. The Killer. 1970. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.


12. The Black Room. 1971. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1977.


13. The Schoolgirl Murder Case. 1974. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.


14. The Space Vampires. Granada Publishing Limited. Frogmore, St Albans, Hertfordshire: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd., 1976.


15. 'A Novelization of Events in the Life and Death of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin.' In Tales of the Uncanny. New York: The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1983. 487-606.

Already, though, I could see some of the features of Wilsonian fiction in general: the weird lack of affect, of any attempt to convey an atmosphere of reality - an atmosphere of anything, really, except people reading books and meeting other people to plan meeting more people to talk about the books and the ideas in them.

One might charitably call it Shavian, after one of his greatest influences, George Bernard Shaw. He too, eschews stylistic and tonal effects in favour of raw ratiocination.



The thing about Shaw, though, is that he makes difficult ideas sound simple. He has a lot of sensible things to say about a great many features of the world around him. Colin Wilson really only has one idea, dished up again and again in slightly different forms.

That idea is (in its simplest form) that we don't use our brains to the uttermost - that if there were some way in which we could protract and/or artificially induce what psychologist Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences," then mankind could be transformed.

Now whether or not this is a good idea is beside the point. Maslow denied the possibility that the euphoria of peak experiences could be brought on in such a way, but Wilson was convinced that he was wrong. Most of his - very extensive - work on the occult was concerned with whether or not certain mystics and clairvoyants had succeeded in doing so.

His interest in H. P. Lovecraft was mainly to denounce him as an enemy of this "positive" vision of life. That is, until he started writing Lovecraftian fiction himself, after which he used the mechanics of the Cthulhu Mythos to promote the idea of - guess what? - peak experiences, only by now he'd started calling them "faculty x."



Wilson was an appallingly prolific writer. There were, no doubt, many reasons for this: the need to make a living on book advances must have constituted a considerable temptation to pitch an endless series of books to his publishers (many of them thinly disguised re-hashes of what had gone before).



In critical terms, however, this is what doomed him to the literary fringes. The reviewers who'd hailed his first work The Outsider (1956) as an amazing piece of cultural insight, written by a 24-year-old working-class genius, were somewhat disconcerted to see Religion and the Rebel come thumping down the book-chute the very next year. They began to suspect they'd been had.

In reality, of course, The Outsider was not nearly as original and ground-breaking as they'd thought. It's a sign of the shallowness of British book culture of the time that names such as Dostoyevsky and Hamsun and Rilke, mentioned by a man who'd clearly actually read them, seemed unduly impressive to a great many of these half-educated bigmouths. But then, its successors weren't nearly as bad as they claimed either.

Wilson's first six books, known collectively as "The Outsider Cycle": Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Age of Defeat (1959), The Strength to Dream (1962), Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), Beyond the Outsider (1965) and the summary volume Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966) may sound a bit monotonous at times, but they did introduce readers to one of his most considerable virtues: the ability to summarize other people's books and ideas clearly and interestingly - albeit at great length.

You may see this as a journalistic rather than a strictly writerly skill - but it does explain why even Wilson's more reluctant fans (such as myself) are prepared to lend shelf room to so many of his tomes.

Speaking personally, I could give a shit about 'faculty x'. None of the stuff he says about it seems to me to make it sound more than an agreeable fairy tale. He always cranks round to it sooner or later, though - except, perhaps, in some of his later, more unabashedly commercial, compilations, such as the 1991 Mammoth Book of the Supernatural, 'edited' by his son Damon Wilson, who also co-wrote a number of these late works. That particular tome, despite its considerable size, didn't even make it to the (admittedly rather flawed) listings on Wikpedia's Colin Wilson Bibliography page).



His bestselling book The Occult (1971) and its sequels Mysteries (1978) and Beyond the Occult (1988), as well the host of others on telemetry, past lives, poltergeists, After-death experiences, etc. etc. consist mainly of retellings of classic ghost stories and other strange happenings. That's why they're so very entertaining to read.



If you've tried the experiment of going from Wilson's version to the actual published work it was based on (as I have in the case of T. C. Lethbridge), you find just how grossly he simplifies, and how blatantly he bends their insights to fit in with his vision of a 'faculty x' dominated universe. This is bad.



On the other hand, however, I would probably never have encountered T. C. Lethbridge, or Catherine Crowe, or Atlantis theorist Rand Flem-Ath, or a host of other fascinating people and writers without the nudge given me by Colin Wilson's many, many works of summary and synthesis. It may not make him a great mind, but it certainly makes him a benefactor of a sort.



Of course, there will always be mockers and scoffers who see Colin Wilson as a bit of a fraud or even (what's worse) a joke. If you'd like to read the case for the prosecution, I do recommend the very amusing chapter on Wilson and his acolytes (principally novelist Bill Hopkins and pop philosopher Stuart Holroyd) in Harry Ritchie's 1988 book Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950-1959 (conveniently summarised in this 2006 article):

[When he] handed his journals over to the Daily Mail [in December 1956] ... Wilson's private thoughts made for juicy copy. "The day must come when I am hailed as a major prophet," was one quote. "I must live on, longer than anyone else has ever lived ... to be eventually Plato's ideal sage and king ..."

Harry Ritchie is okay in my book. I met him once in a pub, and he insisted on shaking me by the hand when he discovered that I was the only other human being he'd ever met who'd actually heard of, let along read Kingsley Amis's first book of poems Bright November (1947). I'm not sure if I dared to admit to him that I actually had a xeroxed copy of the book shelved with all my other Amis-iana at home in New Zealand ...

Is Ritchie right about Wilson? Objectively, I fear he may well be. But that doesn't really account for the fact that I've had so much pleasure reading about obscure supernatural events in the endless pages of Wilson's stream-of-consciousness reading-notebooks-in-the-form-of-individually-titled-volumes. As one of G. K. Chesterton's characters once remarked (in his first novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill):

Next to authentic goodness in a book ... we desire a rich badness.

Wilson may be, in many ways, a bad writer, but it is a rich badness - and, really, who, even (I was about to write 'especially') among geniuses, isn't a bad writer at times?

So here it is, then, in all its glory, my own private library of Colin Wilsoniana. You'll note that it even includes a few of his many books on murder and serial killers, but that aspect of his interests I don't share at all. It's the occult and paranormal investigation stuff that really fascinates me:

Non-fiction:


1. The Outsider. 1956. Pan Piper. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1963.


2. Religion and the Rebel. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1957.


3. [with Patricia Pitman]: Encyclopedia of Murder. 1961. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.


4. The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination. 1962. Abacus. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1982.


5. Origins of the Sexual Impulse. 1963. London: Panther Books Ltd., 1966.


6. Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs. 1964. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.


7. Colin Wilson On Music (Brandy of the Damned). 1964. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.


8. Beyond the Outsider. 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.


9. Voyage to a Beginning: A Preliminary Autobiography. Introduction by Brocard Sewell. London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1969.


10. The Occult: A History. 1971. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.


11. Order of Assassins: The Psychology of Murder. 1972. Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1975.


12. Strange Powers. 1973. London: Abacus, 1975.


13. Tree by Tolkien. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1974.


14. Mysteries: An Investigation into the Occult, the Paranormal and the Supernatural. 1978. London: Granada Publishing, 1979.


15. Starseekers. 1980. London: Granada Books, 1982


16. Poltergeist! A Study in Destructive Haunting. London: New English Library, 1981.


17. The Psychic Detectives: The Story of Psychometry and Paranormal Crime Detection. London & Sydney: Pan Books, 1984.


18. Afterlife: An Investigation of the Evidence for Life after Death. London: Harrap, 1985.


19. Beyond the Occult. London: Guild Publishing, 1988.


20. The Mammoth Book of the Supernatural. Ed. Damon Wilson. London: Robinson Publishing, 1991.


21. [with Damon Wilson]: World Famous Strange Tales & Weird Mysteries. London: Magpie Books Ltd., 1992.


22. [with Damon Wilson & Rowan Wilson]: World Famous Scandals. London: Magpie Books Ltd., 1992.


23. From Atlantis to the Sphinx. London: Virgin Books, 1996.


24. Ghost Sightings. Strange But True. Sydney: The Book Company, 1997.


25. [with Rand Flem-Ath]: The Atlantis Blueprint. 2000. London: Warner Books, 2001.

Perhaps all wars require a mythic dimension to put alongside their otherwise irredeemable horror and brutality. The abduction of Helen by Paris adds a romantic sheen to what may actually have been a protracted struggle between the Achaean and Hittite Great Kings over trade access to Asia Minor.

In Homer's version of the Trojan War, of course, the irony of the whole thing lies in the fact that Helen is back as reigning Queen of Sparta by the beginning of the Odyssey, and is clearly inclined to see the whole thing as a youthful bagatelle. There's a slight edge to it all still, though.

In her version, she was the only one to recognise Odysseus when he entered the besieged city disguised as a beggar, and aided him in his mission, having (by then) repented her past indiscretions:

... since my heart was already longing for home, and I sighed at the blindness Aphrodite had dealt me, drawing me there from my own dear country, abandoning daughter and bridal chamber, and a husband lacking neither in wisdom nor looks.

Her husband Menelaus's account is, to say the least, a little different. He sees her as, if not an active collaborator with the Trojans, at any rate somewhat ambivalent in her support of the Greeks:

You circled our hollow hiding-place, striking the surface, calling out the names of the Danaan captains, in the very voices of each of the Argives’ wives. Diomedes, Tydeus’ son, and I, and Odysseus were there among them, hearing you call, and Diomedes and I were ready to answer within, and leap out, but Odysseus restrained us, despite our eagerness. [Odyssey 4, 220-89]

The Allied soldiers who fought at Gallipoli, just across the straits from Hissarlik, the probable site of ancient Troy, were by no means unaware of these parallels. Their classically trained young officers were, indeed, preoccupied by the subject - possibly to the exclusion of other, more vital, concerns.



Take, for instance, Patrick Shaw-Stewart's famous poem "Achilles in the Trench":

I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
I ask, and cannot answer,
if otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning
Upon the Dardanelles:
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting
Across the Aegean Sea;
Shrapnel and high explosives,
Shells and hells for me.

Oh Hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese;
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest, and I know not;
So much the happier am I.

I will go back this morning
From Imbros o'er the sea.
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.

The poem is valorised not only by those remarkable last two lines, but also by its author's own death, on active service, in 1917. I suppose what it's always recalled to me, though, rather than all of Achilles' dazzling deeds in the Iliad, are the last words we hear in his own voice, when he encounters Odysseus on his own journey to the Underworld:

Odysseus, don’t try to reconcile me to my dying. I’d rather serve as another man’s labourer, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead. [Odyssey 11, 465-540]

The American Civil War famously began in Wilmer McLean's front yard and finished in his back parlour.

McLean, a wholesale grocer, was so appalled by the experience of having his farm fought over in the first major engagement between the Union and Confederate armies, that he relocated his family in 1863. Unfortunately, the place he chose, an obscure little hamlet called Appomattox Courthouse, turned out to be the location of Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in 1865.



That's what I mean by a mythic dimension. There's no real meaning in this strange coincidence, but it seems to betoken some kind of cosmic symmetry in things: a design behind all the relentless bloodshed human beings seem determined to mete out upon one another.



Another, of course, is the awful fatality of Wilfred Owen's life and death. He died, on the 4th of November 1918 - almost exactly one hundred years ago - in an assault on the Sambre–Oise Canal. However, as the Folio Society are at pains to remind us in the advertisement for their sumptuous new illustrated edition of his selected poems:

... his parents received the telegram announcing his death on 11 November itself, just as the church bells rang out in Shrewsbury to mark the end of the Great War.

There lies the apparent design. The poet who wrote in the draft preface to his as yet unpublished poems:

This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak
of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour,
dominion or power,
Except War.
Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.
The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.

could somehow not be permitted to survive the war. Like Abraham Lincoln, or Achilles himself, he had to fall victim to it in order to achieve his full status as a sacrificial victim.

"He died that we may live." That's the kind of unctuous platitude that tends to come out on these occasions. And yet, it's hard to avoid a sense of strangeness about the whole thing, about the idea that the author of "Anthem for Doomed Youth" could not himself be allowed to outlive the war that turned him into perhaps the greatest of all war poet since Homer.



Mary Renault perhaps puts it best, in her novel The King Must Die (about the myth of Theseus), where she tries to explain the Ancient Greek concept of moira as:

The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn round it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end. Moira is all these things.

"The king must go willingly, or he is no king." Whether it is Abraham Lincoln going to Ford's Theatre to show himself to the public one last time, Wilfred Owen refusing to accept non-active service away from the Front Line, or Achilles weeping with Priam over the body of Hector, there is something superhuman about all these noble, almost transcendent gestures.

The armistice itself is replete with legends: many of them clustering around the strange symmetry of "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month."



In the cult British TV Sci-fi classic Sapphire and Steel, for instance (pictured at the head of this post), the storyline called "The Railway Station" concerns an out-of-the-way deserted railway platform haunted by a First World War soldier.

The precise nature of his grievance, and the reason he's been able to gather so many other disgruntled souls around him, hinges on the armistice: specifically, on the equation he keeps on drawing on the windows of the building:

11 / 11 / 11 / 11 = 18

It turns out that he was killed eleven minutes into that eleventh hour, and was thus an altogether unnecessary sacrifice to the gods of war.



An even more complex set of ironies is explored in Thomas Keneally's 1975 novel Gossip from the Forest (subsequently made into a powerful, atmospheric film), about the German deputation sent to negotiate the surrender, and the subsequent murder by a right-wing fanatic of their leader, politician Matthias Erzberger, whilst walking in the Black forest a few years later.

From the Forest of Compiègne to the Black Forest, in fact.



I don't mind admitting, though, that my favourite of all of the poetic moments associated with the armistice is the one recorded in Siegfried Sassoon's great poem "Everyone Sang":

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Sassoon survived. He went on to write many (mostly disappointing) further volumes of poems, but also a wonderful series of war memoirs and autobiographies. He got married, had a son, lived a long life. So let's not get too beguiled by the beautiful symmetries and high-mindedness of these seductive legends:

It is well, as Robert E. Lee said, that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.

Or, as the somewhat more mordant A. E. Housman said in his "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries":

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

There's an early Alan Garner story called "Feel Free" included in Susan Dickinson's anthology The Restless Ghost and Other Encounters and Experiences (1970). I read it while I was at Intermediate School, but I've never seen it collected anywhere else.

I remember it surprised me quite a bit. It was too advanced and complex to be as satisfactory to me, then, as the other stories by the likes of Joan Aiken and Leon Garfield in the same collection. There was something very intriguing about it, though.



The story begins with a boy, Brian, who is copying a design from an old plate in a small provincial museum:

The dish stood alone in its case, a typed label on the glass: "Attic Krater, 5th Century BC, Artist Unknown. The scene depicts Charon, ferryman of the dead, conveying a soul across the river Acheron in the Underworld."

He persuades the curator to let him take it out for a moment:

"Tosh, look!" Brian nearly dropped the dish. On the base was a clear thumb print fired hard as the rest of the clay.
"There he is," whispered Brian.
The change from the case to the outside air had put a mist on the surface of the dish, and Brian set his own fingers against the other hand.
"Two thousand year, Tosh. That's nothing. Who was he?
"No, he'll not have a headache."
Brian stared at his own print and the fossilled clay. "Tosh," he said, 'they're the same. That thumb print and mine. What do you make of it?

Tosh, the curator, is at first disposed to scoff. Eventually he admits: "Very close, I'll allow, but see at yon line across the other feller's thumb. That's a scar. You haven't got one."

Brian is unconvinced: "But a scar's something that happens ... It's nothing to do with what you're born like. If he hadn't gashed his thumb, they'd be the same."



Later Brian meets his girlfriend Sandra for their date at the open day at the local holiday camp:

Hello! Hello! Hello! Feel free, friends! This is the Lay-Say-Far Holiday Camp, a totally new concept in Family Camping, adding a new dimension to leisure, where folk come to stay, play, make hay, or relax in the laze-away days that you find only at the Lay-Say-Fair Holiday Camp.

"Where shall we go on now?" asks Brian, after they've wandered around for a bit, and gone on most of the rides:

"There's the Tunnel of Love, if you're feeling romantic," said Sandra.
"You never know till you try, do you?" said Brian.

The tunnel is predictably cheesy, but a little macabre as well:

Beyond the gate was a grotto of plaster stalactites and stalagmites, and the channel rushed among them to to a black tunnel.
"Queer green light there, isn't it?" said Sandra. "Ever so eerie."

The heel of Sandra's shoe gets caught as she tries to climb in the boat, and he is unable to free it in time for her to join him:

She was swinging away from him, a tiny figure lost among stalactites. He stood, looking, looking and slowly lifted his hand off the nail that had worked loose at the edge of the stern. He had not felt its sharpness, but now the gash throbbed across the ball of his thumb. The boat danced towards the tunnel.

I guess what I like, still, so much about this story is the way in which it manages to introduce all the characteristic themes Alan Garner is known for in such a short compass of time.

There's the idea of artefacts carrying baggage with them from the past (like the patterned plates in The Owl Service, or - even more so - the stone axe in Red Shift). There's also the (implicit) comparison between a dignified, layered past of cottage industries and individual destinies and the mass-produced, plastic present.

There's something uncomfortably prescient in the passage where Brian and Sandra sit together in the Willow Pattern Garden:

"No. Look, said Brian, and leant backwards to gather a handful of earth from a rockery flower bed. "Soil isn't muck, it's ... well, I'll be ... Sandra? This here soil's plastic."
Smooth, clean granules rolled between his fingers.
"The whole blooming lot's plastic - grass, flowers, and all!"
"Now that's what I call sensible. It helps to keep the costs down," said Sandra. "And it doesn't kill bees."

As it turns out, there are no bees to kill. "They were each mounted on a quivering hair spring, the buzzer plugged in to a time switch."

In someone else's hands, this could be quite a heavy-handed story. But Garner leaves an air of mystery about almost every aspect of it. Does the fact that Brian has now acquired a scar to match the one left on the ancient plate mean that he is going to join its owner as his own boat moves towards the dark mouth of the tunnel? There's certainly something a bit ominous about the fact that the pattern of the plate shows Charon the ferryman carrying souls to the land of the dead.

And then there's the title, "Feel Free." The point appears to be that while Brian may feel free, his actions are somehow predetermined by an inexorable, inescapable past. For all the wondrous patina on the artefacts in the old museum, they can exert an uncomfortable, even (possibly) an unhealthy influence on the present.

Brian and the other character's use of a few provincial turns of phrase also seemed pretty innovative to me when I read it first. Garner's characters move downwards in social level as his work progresses. Colin and Susan in his first two books talk standard English to the other characters' Cheshire dialect. The children in Elidor are closer to the working classes, but they still use something resembling received pronunciation.

Class becomes an issue for the first time in The Owl Service, but even there it's a more standard Middle-Class English / Working-Class Welsh contrast. After that, though, Garner's characters mostly speak in dialect, though there are always a few toffs around in the stories - reflecting their author's own divided identity, I guess.

The story, like the old Greek plate at its centre, is a small masterpiece: better than one has any right to expect in such a context. The museum, its curator, Brian himself, are sketched deftly, in a few strokes. Only the fun fair descends to caricature (Sandra, too, I fear: a typically unimaginative female who could have walked straight out of any story from the Angry Young Man era).

The focus really isn't on Sandra, though, it's on Brian: Brian whose sense of rightness and perfection in design has made him blind to the charms of the present, and predisposed him to flirtations with the dark past:

"Have you ever hidden anything to chance it being found again years and years later - perhaps long after you're dead?
"No," said Sandra.
"I have," said Brian. "I was a great one for filling screw-top bottles with junk and then burying them. I put notes inside, and pieces out of the newspaper. You're talking to someone you'll never meet, never know: but if they find the bottle they'll know you. There's bits of you in the bottle, waiting all this time, see, in the dark and as soon as the bottle's opened - time's nothing - and - and -"
"Eh up," said Sandra, "people are looking. You do get some ideas, Brian Walton!

It's not hard to see the analogies here between Brian and his creator: Brian Walton / Alan Garner. Writers, too, bury things in the dark, hide them inside the containers they make: "You're talking to someone you'll never meet, never know: but if they find the bottle they'll know you."





That may be a lot of significance to lay on one short, uncollected story - dating from 1968, if we can trust the acknowledgments section above - but if anything is apparent in Garner's work in general, it's that he expects each page, each line, each word even to do a great deal of work. It's no accident that his books tend to be short. The weight of significance each one of then bears is disproportionate to the number of pages: in that he has far more in common with a poet than a more conventional prose writer.

His publications to date fall into several discrete groups. Before continuing any of these trains of thought, I think I'd better outline just what we're talking about. First of all, both chronologically and in popularity, there are those books which - despite their increasing subtlety and complexity - still have to be thought of as primarily for children:

Alan Garner: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960)



1. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley. 1960. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1990.




Alan Garner: The Moon of Gomrath (1963)



2. The Moon of Gomrath. 1963. An Armada Lion. London: Collins, 1974.




Alan Garner: Elidor (1967)



3. Elidor. Illustrated by Charles Keeping. 1965. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1971.




Alan Garner: The Owl Service (1967)



4. The Owl Service. 1967. An Armada Lion. London: Collins, 1974.




Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)



5. Red Shift. 1973. London: Collins, 1973.




Alan Garner: The Stone Book Quartet (1976-78)



6. The Stone Book. The Stone Book Quartet. 1. 1976. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1979.


7. Tom Fobble’s Day. The Stone Book Quartet, 2. 1977. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1979.


8. Granny Reardun. The Stone Book Quartet, 3. 1977. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1979.


9. The Aimer Gate. The Stone Book Quartet, 4. 1978. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1979.

These six books (I think one can describe the Stone Book Quartet as a single work, despite its quite separate sections) range from the madcap magical adventurousness of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to the terrifying intensities of The Owl Service with no diminution of quality at any point. Garner is one of those rare writers who is content only with masterpieces, and who constantly racks up the pressure with each new work.

Alongside this very original sequence of imaginative works, though, there is a very different set of publications. I don't have all of these folktale anthologies and retellings, but this is most of them. They are quite exceptionally good of their kind, I would say, and I speak as one who has read more than his fair share of such books. The figure of the trickster appears to appeal particularly to Garner, and he writes of him brilliantly and (at times) quite disconcertingly:

1. Garner, Alan, ed. A Book of Goblins. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska. 1969. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


2. Garner, Alan, ed. The Guizer: A Book of Fools. 1975. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1980.


3. Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales. Illustrated by Derek Collard. 1984. London: Collins, 1988.


4. Garner, Alan, ed. A Bag of Moonshine. 1986. Lions. London: HarperCollins, 1992.


5. Collected Folk Tales. London: HarperCollins Children's Books, 2011.

Which brings us to his novels for grown-ups. Or at least I suppose that's who they're for. They require such careful, attentive reading, that I guess they're for anyone prepared to invest in them fully.

The first, in particular, is another masterpiece. And while one can recognise many elements of the earlier Garner of the 'Weirdstone' books: the obsession with Alderley Edge, for instance, Strandloper is really sui generis as a novel. It is, among other things, the work of someone determined to reinvent himself wholly for each new project - a pretty terrifying prospect for other, more workaday writers.

Alan Garner: Strandloper (1996)



1. Strandloper. 1996. London: The Harvill Press, 1997.




Alan Garner: Thursbitch (2003)



2. Thursbitch. 2003. London: Vintage, 2004.




Alan Garner: Boneland (2012)



3. Boneland. Fourth Estate. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2012.

The last of these is the oddest and - to my mind - probably the least successful. It attempts to close off the 'Weirdstone' trilogy, fifty years after it was begun. And yet it's hard to see exactly who it was written for. Certainly not for the children who enjoyed those adventurous encounters with magicians and dwarves.

Neither is it really for admirers of his previous two novels, though it shares many features with them: allusiveness in place of direct utterance, absence of affect where one would most expect it, and intricate pattern-making of an almost Celtic, Book of Kells-like, nature.

Which brings us to the last set of books. His recent memoir and his book of essays:

Non-fiction:


1. The Voice That Thunders: Essays and Lectures. London: The Harvill Press, 1997.


2. Where Shall We Run To? A Memoir. London: Fourth Estate, 2018.

The picture these two books paint of their author is not an entirely positive one. The memoir concerns only his early childhood, before he went off to Grammar School, and contains little more compromising than the revelation that his 'scientific' curiosity about the effects of dock-leaves on nettle stings inspired him to push one of his friends, Harold, into a field of them at one point:

I'd not heard a boy scream before. It went on. It didn't stop. It wasn't Harold. I ran. I ran all the way home, up the stairs, fell on my bed, and yelled and yelled, still hearing the scream in my head, and cried and cried; but I hadn't got any dock-leaves.
The next day, Harold called me a daft beggar and a mucky pup.

The book is constructed in a curiously spiral manner. It concludes with a few late anecdotes (one about Harold), but the narrative proper ends with the author sitting the eleven-plus examination in Manchester. We've already heard the results of this at the end of chapter two, shortly after the nettling incident, however:

A letter came for me in the post some time after, and my mother was waiting for me at the end of School Lane when lessons were over. She told me I'd won a scholarship.
That evening, the gang were playing round the sand patch. It was Ticky-on-Wood. Harold's mother came out of the house. Her face was different. 'Well, Alan,' she said, 'you won't want to speak to us any more.'
I didn't understand. I felt something go and not come back.

In a sense, it's clear that everything Alan Garner has written since - all the novels, the essays, even the retellings of folktales - has been one long attempt to understand this moment when something went and did not come back.

The course is called New Zealand: History & Culture, and it's taught this year by six visiting Academics from Massey University: Associate Professor Kerry Taylor, Dr. Peter Meihana, Professor Peter Lineham (all History), Dr. Gillian Skyrme (Linguistics), Professor Michael Roche (Geography) and Dr. Jack Ross (English).



So the net result of all this is that I've been asked to fly to Beijing to give two lectures on New Zealand literature to the students there: those lucky souls studying at the NZ Centre, at any rate.

It's simultaneously exciting and terrifying for a homebody such as myself. Never mind, we shall see what we shall see. I've divided the lectures into "Then" and "Now" (original!).

Here are some of the writers and books I'll be discussing with the students:

Lecture 1: Then

• Frank Sargeson (1903-1982)


Frank Sargeson: Conversation with My Uncle (1936)



• Ruth Dallas (1919-2008)


Ruth Dallas



• Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008)


Hone Tuwhare: No Ordinary Sun (1964)



• Janet Frame (1924-2004)

Janet Frame: An Angel at My Table

Lecture 2: Now

• Witi Ihimaera (1944- )


Witi Ihimaera: The New Net Goes Fishing (1977)



• Cilla McQueen (1949- )


Cilla McQueen



• Alison Wong (1960- )


Alison Wong



• Scott Hamilton (1974- )

Scott Hamilton: To the Moon, in Seven Easy Steps (2007)

And here's what I'm roughly hoping to cover:

In the first lecture, covering the early to mid-twentieth century, we will look at two things:

1. Writing by settler Europeans in New Zealand
2. The beginnings of Maori writing in English

The Class (28/11/18)

There are three major topics in the second lecture, covering the late twentieth century to the early 2000s:

1. Witi Ihimaera was the first Maori writer to publish a novel in New Zealand. His work is part of a major regrowth of Māori culture.
2. Alison Wong’s poem about the poll-tax paid by Chinese settlers in New Zealand is an example of the important work now being done by writers from many immigrant groups, Chinese-New Zealanders among them.
3. Cilla McQueen’s poem comes from the late twentieth-century Women’s Movement, which demanded complete equality between the sexes.

I had two lectures to give: one on the Wednesday after I arrived, the other on the Wednesday I left. For the most part, the time in-between was free for sightseeing or "Academic exchange" (i.e. talking to colleagues about this and that).

I found that the one thing I was determined to do was to see the Great Wall. Admittedly there's a lot of it to be seen, but just one of the sections open to tourists would be enough for me. I've dreamed for so long of walking along it, from fort to fort.



Apparently there's a Chinese proverb that claims that "He who does not reach the Great Wall is not a true man." So, yes, I'm afraid that I did fork out for a certificate to that effect, counter-signed by my guide Zhang Ping, together with an "official" photo of the event (which looks a bit better in its original frame, without the camera flash at the bottom.













It was rather a foggy day, as you can see from the greyness of many of the pictures, but given my general lack of fitness, that might have been just as well. I was certainly sweating after scaling some of these slopes!













There's a lot of graffiti written up here and there, despite all the signs warning you of dire penalties if you disrespect the rules. There are a lot of them:





I presume these padlocks are left here by couples as proofs of eternal fidelity, just like the ones on the Pont Neuf in Paris.



I'm afraid I couldn't resist adding a New Zealand twenty-cent piece to the ones in this little wishing pool. Hopefully it will bring me good luck.



A long time back - twenty years ago, in fact - I wrote a poem called "Journey to the West," inspired by repeated readings of the four classic Chinese novels: The Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, Journey to the West, and The Red Chamber Dream.

The last part of that poem runs as follows. It seems appropriate, somehow:

Is it high?
It touches heaven.
Deep?
It reaches hell.

White clouds surround the mountain
black mists swim
red-blushing plums / jade bamboo
dark-green cypresses / blue pines
_____________________________

Ten-mile pavilion: no travellers leave
nine-faced heaven: stars have set
on eight harbours: boats are docked
in seven thousand cities: gates shut
six palaces: officials gone
five departments: ledgers closed
four seas: fishing lines sink
three rivers: waves subside
two towers: bells resound
one moon lights earth and sky

Here I am, just along from that classic view of Mao's portrait, about to enter the Forbidden City: the emperor's private domain, reserved solely for the royal family and their courtiers.

"The Emperor — so they say — has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his death bed and whispered the message to him. He thought it was so important that he had the herald repeat it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of the verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those who have come to witness his death — all the obstructing walls have been broken down and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs — in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forward easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvellous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. He will never win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally did burst through the outermost door — but that can never, never happen — the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream to yourself of that message when evening comes."

- Franz Kafka, "The Great Wall of China" (1917)

Here's my guide, the intrepid Xiaotong, a student at Peking University who offered to show me around in exchange for the chance to practise his English a bit. Without him, I wouldn't have got very far!























"That's not interesting," said Xiaotong, as I took yet another picture of a sign. He wanted me to photograph useful things such as gold thrones and doors with 81 nails on them (9 x 9 - the imperial number). I just love stuff like that "Book - Cultural and Creative" inscription, though.





But wait, there's more. Outside the gates of the Forbidden City, all the rest of the massive central area of Beijing lies spread before you.













Apparently they call this immense structure "the egg" - because it looks like an egg that's been left in the middle of a pond. It's pretty striking, though.



All in, Xiaotong and I must have walked for hours. After we'd got out the back entrance to the Forbidden City, we had to trek all the way round again to the front, and that took ages.

So, if you imagine us taking a walk through the streets of Beijing towards Peking University, this is our starting point: the massive Ariva Hotel.



From there you can take either of two routes. Either the subway:



Or else the half-hour walk along Suzhou Street, through all the traffic and noise:







In any case, eventually you have to go in by one of the gates, showing your ID to get in. This is the West Gate:



And here's the main administration building (no less a personage than Mao Tse-Tung himself was once the librarian at Peking University, but that was when it was still located near the centre of the city):





It really is quite a spectacular campus. The most beautiful part of it is undoubtedly Weiming Lake:











The ruins of the old Summer Palace are a little way north of the campus. They were destroyed by barbarian invaders - i.e. us - in 1860 during the second Opium War. The rebuilt palace is some distance away, and is a celebrated beauty spot (I didn't get the chance to go there, unfortunately).





Here's another interesting sight: a memorial to Edgar Snow, author of Red Star over China (1937), the first comprehensive account of Mao Tse-Tung, the Long March, and other historic details of the Chinese communist party's rise to power.



The NZ Centre is fortunate to be housed in a building so near the most beautiful part of the university. My friend Xiaotong told me that all through his childhood he had dreamed of walking by the Weiming Lake as a student of Peking University. Now that he'd achieved that ambition, he felt a little lost.







My hosts were kind enough to invite me to dinner at a very famous restaurant, Quanjude Peking Duck Restaurant, to sample the celebrated delicacy ("you can't go home without trying it"). It was certainly very tasty, though a trifle complicated to eat.



So there you are. It was certainly a great experience. I hope the rest of the course goes well - I've already sent in my exam questions for the students, so now it's all up to Hongzhong and the others. I did get lost once - on the way back from the university, the first time I went there, but luckily a kind English-speaking passerby took pity on me, and gave me directions back to the hotel.

I definitely feel like breaking out the champagne today. One million hits on my blog! That seems like quite a lot to me.

It all started in 2010, when they introduced a new feature on blogspot which made it possible to access easily a range of vital statistics about your site/s. As well as the basic count of how many hits each blogpost achieved, you could study your main sources of traffic, the ways in which visitors accessed your site, and other intriguing pieces of trivia.



I started The Imaginary Museum back in 2006, so I'm not sure if those earlier posts (half of the 462 to date) are included in the tally. Whether they are or not, though, I find it rather amazing that this most self-indulgent of websites, dedicated to so many subjects which I suspect I'm quite unusual in finding fascinating - bibliography, ghosts, poetry, the 1001 Nights, poetry readings and book-launches - should have clocked up so many individual hits over the past eight years.



Mind you, I do understand what a blunt instrument such counters can be. There's nothing qualitative about this data. A long read of a post will show up just the same as a momentary glance at a headline or an image.

They're not all from me, either. There's a little link you can click on to make sure that your own pageviews don't get counted in the total, otherwise it would all seem a bit incestuous.



And as for the countries the hits are coming from, why so many from Russia, for instance? Why more from Belgium than from Australia? It's hard to reach clear conclusions about such matters, beyond noting the bare facts.

More to the point, though, I recently conducted a census of all the various websites I operate (you can find a complete list of them here, if you're curious). The nearest contender to The Imaginary Museum was my book collection site, A Gentle Madness, which has reached 276,970 pageviews. Most of the others were considerably less than that - though I was pleased to see that my Leicester Kyle site had clocked up more than 50,000 hits.

In total, they came to more than 3,000,000 pageviews, so I'd have to say that this long experiment on online writing / publishing must be seen as a success. I don't see how I could ever reached anything like that number of people by conventional means.

No doubt Whale Oil and the Daily Blog get more than that number every hour, but then they are targetting a rather different audience.

Complete Poems: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War / Clarel / John Marr and Other Sailors / Timoleon / Posthumous & Unpublished. 1866, 1876, 1888 & 1891. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 4. Ed. Hershel Parker. The Library of America, 320. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2019.

I remember remarking to a fellow Melvillian (or Melville-omaniac, if you prefer), A/Prof Alex Calder of the University of Auckland, how great it would be if the Library of America decided to follow up their three-volume set of all his prose works with an equally complete edition of his poetry. He agreed, but clearly thought it unlikely ever to happen.

1. Typee, Omoo, Mardi. 1846, 1847, 1849. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 1. Ed. G. Thomas Tanselle. The Library of America, 1. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1982.


2. Redburn, White Jacket, Moby-Dick. 1849, 1850, 1851. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 2. Ed. G. Thomas Tanselle. The Library of America, 9. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983.


3. Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales & Billy Budd. 1852, 1855, 1856, 1857, 1922 & 1924. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 3. Ed. Harrison Hayford. The Library of America, 24. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985.

It's with a certain satisfaction, then, that I've just seen on Amazon.com a pre-announcement of just such a volume. Mind you, the timing of it is not exactly a surprise. Even by the somewhat lax standards of other magisterial editions of American writers, the completion of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's complete works has been a long time coming: almost fifty years, in fact.

1. Melville, Herman. Published Poems: Battle Pieces; John Marr; Timoleon. 1866, 1888 & 1891. Ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising & G. Thomas Tanselle. Historical Note by Hershel Parker. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 11. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 2009.


2. Melville, Herman. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. 1876. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker & G. Thomas Tanselle. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 12. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 1991.


3. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings: Billy Budd, Sailor; Weeds and Wildlings; Parthenope; Uncollected Prose; Uncollected Poetry. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Robert A. Sandberg & G. Thomas Tanselle. Historical Note by Hershel Parker. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 13. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 2017.

It all started with a hiss and a roar in the mid-1960s. The first volume appeared in 1968, with a vague estimate that the whole project might take five years or so. As you can see from the dates listed above, it took a bit longer than that: the final volume devoted to Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings finally appeared last year, in 2017.

Admittedly it was volume 13, which might be thought to predispose it to bad luck, and the trawl through the archives for unpublished and uncollected material always takes longer than editing the works that appeared in an author's own lifetime. (If you're curious, you can find Meaghan Fritz's account of the whole strange saga here, on the Northwestern University Press website.)

Melville, Herman. Collected Poems. Ed. Howard P. Vincent. Chicago: Packard and Company / Hendricks House, 1947.

Until that monstrous feat of scholarship was complete, however, it was no good even thinking of a new edition of Melville's Complete Poems to replace Howard P. Vincent's pioneering Collected Poems. Probably the best that could be done was the volume below, a collection of all three of the books of poems published during Melville's lifetime, with a few selections from Clarel to give an idea of its scope and complexity:

Melville, Herman. The Poems of Herman Melville: Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War; John Marr and Other Sailors; Timoleon. 1866, 1888 & 1891. Ed. Douglas Robillard. 1976. Kent, Ohio & London: Kent State University Press, 2000.

As America's Civil War obsession grew and grew - especially after the success of Ken Burn's 1990 documentary TV series - more attention came to be focussed on Melville's 1866 book Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, probably the only collection of its kind which can stand comparison with Whitman's Drum-taps (1865). Facsimile and other separate editions of that began to appear, also:

Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces: The Civil War Poems. 1866. Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 2000.

At this point a little-known critic named Jack Ross decided to weigh in with his own opinions. This is what he had to say on the subject on Amazon.com in 2005 (underneath Douglas Robillard's 1976 edition of The Poetry of Herman Melville, pictured above):

J. Ross:

4.0 out of 5 stars
Is Melville's poetry really worth reading?
October 22, 2005
Format: Paperback

If the difficulty of getting hold of it is any indication, then most people think Melville's poetry isn't worth it. I've been waiting for years for the poetry volume of the Northwestern-Newberry edition to appear (it was promised for 2002, but still shows no signs of coming out). That will be the ultimate answer, as it'll include all the materials, commentaries, etc. that one could desire.

In the meantime, it makes a lot of sense to collect Melville's own three published volumes of verse in this beautifully compact book. This may not represent his poetic legacy as a whole, but it shows (at any rate) his public face as a poet.

And a very odd poet he is indeed. He has a lot in common with Thomas Hardy, I think: both are addicted to convoluted diction, impossibly complex and confining stanza forms and metrical schemes, a general sense of labouring over every line and of lack of music and ease.

Hardy is, nevertheless, a great poet. When the occasion demands it - "The Convergence of the Twain" about the Titanic disaster, the superb poems of 1912 about his dead wife - there's a kind of clumsy power about him which overpowers any reservations.

Melville's technical shortcomings are - if anything - even greater. The chains of rhyme and metre chafe him more than virtually any other nineteenth-century poet I can think of. He seems to have almost no natural facility for verse.

And yet (as all readers of his prose are aware) he is a genius. His prose-poetry in Moby-Dick, "Benito Cereno" and "Las Encantadas" is incomparable. And every now and then it glimmers out in the midst of the most clotted poems. There are certain lines from his Civil War poems included in Ken Burns' PBS documentary series which seem almost to beat Whitman at his own game:

In glades they meet skull after skull
Where pine-cones lay ...
... Some start as in dreams,
And comrades lost bemoan:
By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged -
But the Year and the Man were gone. [102]

The equation between the skulls and the pine-cones is haunting, yet unobtrusive, and the invocation of Stonewall as a kind of force of nature works brilliantly. There's a mythic force in some of these Civil War poems which is unsurpassed.

Once you get over the surface defects, then, there's a lot encoded in the depths of Melville's verse - a submerged continent of perceptions every bit as vivid as his fiction. The wait continues for the definitive edition, but for now I'm just grateful to have this one. It seems somehow characteristic that he should have to wait so long for the critical establishment to do justice to his talents in this field -- Herman Melville (both as a man and a writer), was, it seems, born to be overlooked.

Certainly that bit about my long wait for the poetry volume of the Northwestern-Newberry edition rings true - I didn't then realise that there would be two: one for the poetry published during his lifetime, and another for his posthumous and uncollected work. I already had a copy of their edition of Clarel, which was some comfort, at least.

I see from their site that I first ordered books from Amazon.com in 1997, and virtually the first things I went after were Melville's Poetry (Northwestern-Newberry edition) and the Complete Poems of W. H. Auden (a two-volume edition, edited by Edward Mendelson, then promised for 1998). I 'pre-ordered' both, only to endure years of delays and excuses and finally their complete disappearance from the site.

The Melville project has now - almost - cranked to a close, awaiting just that last Library of America volume to complete the tally. Auden's Complete Works, however, took a long detour through six volumes of his collected prose, on top of two of his plays and libretti, and so, twenty years later, I'm still waiting for those poems. Never say die, though: I'm sure that when they do eventually appear, they'll be very thoroughly collated and annotated.



So do I have much to add now to the rather self-assured remarks I made in 2005? I read somewhere recently that America's three greatest nineteenth-century poets were Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson - and Herman Melville. That does indeed seem to be the view which has become prevalent, judging at any rate by the amount of critical prose spewed out on each of them.

Certainly it's a shift from Emerson, Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Whittier and all those other Boston Brahmins who seemed to have the field sewn up at the time, in the late 1800s. Poe is still in the running in either schema, I suppose.

These new "big three" do indeed have a lot going for them - if contemporary obscurity can be seen as the most reliable gauge of merit. Dickinson was almost invisible till well after her death. Melville's early vogue as a writer of sea-going romances did not translate into a scintilla of interest in his later poetry. Whitman was visible: but more as a figure of fun or opprobrium than someone to be taken seriously except by a few disciples and true believers.

More to the point, perhaps, all three are strange: their poetics defy the conventional practice of the time, and yet have gone on to have an immense influence on the writing of the twentieth century (in particular).

In Harold Bloom's terms (The Western Canon) they are canonical because otherwise unassimilable: they simply can't be pigeonholed beside anyone else - even each other. I do think this Library of America volume will be timely for Melville enthusiasts to try to substantiate their claims, therefore. It's not much use calling him one of America's greatest poets if readers can't get proper access to his work.

It'll always be a tough nut to swallow: harder even than Dickinson and Whitman, given his more earnest attempts to accommodate himself to conventional nineteenth-century prosody - but I think, in the end, there's no point in trying to overlook it any more. If Moby-Dick - then Clarel. The latter is not that much more difficult than the former. He is weird, though: best to bear that in mind from the start.

Here's "The Portent," his poem about the "martyr" John Brown:

Hanging from the beam,
Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.

Hidden in the cap
Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.

"Lo, John Brown", eh? ... Law / more / war and Shenandoah as rhymes ... You see what I mean about the strange clumsiness of his proceedings? There's generally something to it, though - his choice of words ("weird John Brown" / "the meteor of the war") repays scrutiny.

In any case, here are some more samples from my own Melvilliana:

1. Melville, Herman. Romances: Typee; Omoo; Mardi; Moby-Dick; White-Jacket; Israel Potter; Redburn. 1846, 1847, 1849, 1851, 1850, 1855 & 1849. N.p.: N.p., n.d.


2. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. 1851. Ed. Harold Beaver. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


3. Melville, Herman. Pierre, or The Ambiguities: The Kraken Edition. 1852. Ed. Hershel Parker. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.


4. Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. An Authoritative Text / Backgrounds and Sources / Reviews / Criticism / An Annotated Bibliography. 1857. Ed. Hershel Parker. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971.


5. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Edited from the Manuscript with Introduction and Notes. 1891 & 1924. Ed. Harrison Hayford & Merton M. Sealts, Jr. 1962. A Phoenix Book. Chicago & London: The University Of Chicago Press, 1970.


6. Leyda, Jay, ed. The Portable Melville. 1952. The Viking Portable Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


7. Branch, Watson G., ed. Melville: The Critical Heritage. 1974. The Critical Heritage Series. London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1985.


8. Parker, Hershel, & Harrison Hayford, ed. Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts (1851-1970). A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970.

Alan Bennett's 2009 play The Habit of Art, a curious work devoted almost wholly (it would seem) to denigrating the late great W. H. Auden (cf. the Guardian article on Bennett entitled "why Auden the bore almost turned me off writing") was broadcast as a "live theatre" performance to cinemas all over the world in 2010.

One of those locations was the Bridgeway theatre in Northcote, Auckland. As an Auden fanatic - unaware at the time of Bennett's views on the poet - I duly turned up to watch the strange farrago unfold.



Reading between the lines, it seems probable to me that Bennett set out to write a play about Auden's unhappy last days domiciled in Christ Church, Oxford. It must have got away from him somehow - perhaps it seemed too nakedly spiteful, even to him? - so he decided to turn it instead into a play-within-a-play. "The Habit of Art," then, actually consists of a dress rehearsal for another play called "Caliban's Day". As Bennett explained to the author of the article mentioned above:

in order to address the many queries and notes on the text ("do we need this?"; "too much information") from the play's director, Nicholas Hytner, he invented a framing device: the play would be set in a rehearsal room.

"Queries about the text could then be put in the mouths of the actors who (along with the audience) could have their questions answered in the course of the rehearsal."

In other words, any crappy writing in the Auden play could then be explained away by someone in the cast exclaiming: "what crappy writing!" - one of the many reasons (I speak as one who knows) why such metafictional structures tend to appeal so much to authors and so little to their audiences.

The device also allowed Bennett to introduce the character of the author – himself – who complains about real cuts that Hytner suggested to the play.

The tone of the whole was set early on, when one of the other characters makes a remark about the latest book by Auden's old friend and teacher, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien. "More fucking elves," quips Richard Griffiths (standing in for Michael Gambon at this particular performance).

This may very well encapsulate Alan Bennett's views on Tolkien's Middle-earth, but it seems most unlikely to represent Auden's, given that the poet praised The Lord of the Rings so fulsomely, in so many places, over the years.



Who knows, though? Maybe the worm had turned by the early 70s, when the play is set. There was, after all, a famous controversy between the two over Auden's alleged "denigration" of the house Tolkien lived in (he was quoted in the New Yorker in 1966 as having called it as “a hideous house — I can’t tell you how awful it is — with hideous pictures on the wall.”)



Another less forgivable dig in Bennett's ill-natured play is what seems a weirdly unmotivated assault on the memory and reputation of Tolkien's first biographer, Humphrey Carpenter. As the wikipedia summary puts it:

Auden has hired a rent boy, Stuart (Tim) and when Humphrey Carpenter (Donald) - who will write biographies of both Auden and Britten after their deaths - arrives to interview him, Auden mistakes him for Stuart.

It isn't quite so simply as that, in context, though. In the actual play as broadcast, the actor playing Carpenter comes on in drag, screeching like a lunatic, and generally embodying some of the "research" the former has been doing on him - as he explains to the director when the latter objects to this rather over-the-top impersonation.

And, yes, apparently Carpenter was a keen amateur musician, who occasionally performed in drag, and generally came across as somewhat larger than life. It's only after that exchange that the play limps on into the long, unfunny and unbelievable scene of Auden's mistaking Carpenter for the teenage rent boy he has "ordered."

To add insult to injury, Bennett tries to undo the rather spiteful impression given by this awful set of caricatures of Auden, Britten and Carpenter by giving his own alter-ego, the author, a long pompous monologue about the "value" he places on each of these lives - the rentboy as much as the poet, the bit-player as much as the star - towards the end of his melodrama.

I guess the reason this rings so false is that the actual nature of these walk-on parts is so stereotyped and perfunctory that one would never know from internal evidence that the writer placed the slightest importance on any of them. If Bennett had made them strong characters in the first place, he wouldn't have needed the face-saving soliloquy.

Why do I dwell so much on this rather forgettable play of Alan Bennett's? I guess because it should remind us all of how fickle is literary fame and reputation. No-one's really in much danger of forgetting the fact of Humphrey Carpenter's remarkable series of trail-blazing biographies, but at the same time their author seems to be receding more and more into oblivion. His wikipedia page doesn't even contain a partial bibliography, though there are a couple of paragraphs describing his books, some not even with their correct titles.

Here's my own attempt at a list (most - though not all of them - from my own collection):

1. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977.
2. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978.
3. Jesus. Past Masters Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
4. W. H. Auden: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981.
5. O.U.D.S.: A Centenary History of the Oxford University Dramatic Society 1885–1985. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
6. Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985.
7. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. London: Unwin Hyman Limited, 1987.
8. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1988.
9. The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends. London: Faber, 1989.
10. Benjamin Britten: A Biography. London: Faber, 1992.
11. The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–1996. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996.
12. Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.
13. Dennis Potter: A Biography. London: Faber, 1998.
14. That Was Satire That Was: The Satire Boom of the 1960s. London: Victor Gollancz, 2000.
15. The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s. London: Allen Lane, 2002.
16. Spike Milligan: The Biography. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004.
17. The Seven Lives of John Murray: The Story of a Publishing Dynasty. London: John Murray, 2008.




Humphrey Carpenter: The Angry Young Men (2002)


Edited:


18. [with Mari Prichard]. A Thames Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
19. [with Christopher Tolkien]. Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981.
20. [with Mari Prichard]. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
21. Shakespeare Without the Boring Bits. London: Viking, 1994.

Of course, that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Carpenter. His interest in children's literature manifested itself in a strong desire to make a lasting contribution to the field. After a few ranging shots with such works as The Joshers: Or London to Birmingham with Albert and Victoria (1977) and The Captain Hook Affair (1979), he eventually arrived at Mr Majeika. Long before Harry Potter made the whole idea of wizards as school-teachers a commonplace, the former gave rise to a dizzying variety of titles:

1. Mr Majeika
2. Mr Majeika and the School Trip
3. Mr Majeika and the Lost Spell Book
4. Mr Majeika and the Ghost Train
5. Mr Majeika and the Dinner Lady
6. Mr Majeika and the School Caretaker
7. Mr Majeika and the Music Teacher
8. Mr Majeika and the Haunted Hotel
9. Mr Majeika and the School Book Week
10. Mr Majeika and the Internet
11. Mr Majeika and the School Inspector
12. Mr Majeika joins the Circus
13. Mr Majeika and the School Play
14. Mr Majeika Vanishes

Mr Majeika was also successfully filmed as a children's TV series (1988-90), which resulted in the spin-off book The Television Adventures of Mr Majeika.

But who exactly was Humphrey Carpenter, and why has his star gone into (at least partial) eclipse? When you add to the works listed above a punishing schedule as a radio presenter and interviewer - not to mention his regular gigs as a jazz musician (the double-bass was his instrument) - the answer must surely include the words "a workaholic."

One of the last of the great English eccentrics, Humphrey Carpenter was brought up in the Warden's Lodgings at Keble College, Oxford, where his father worked until his appointment as Bishop of Oxford. He lived virtually all of his life in Oxford, though his work as a biographer took him all over the world. There's an interesting aside in the acknowledgements at the end of his monumental life of Ezra Pound (p. 973):

my American hosts in the spring of 1985 ... coped with me on my whirlwind research trip when I was at least as mad as Ezra Pound was ever supposed to have been.

What exactly is that supposed to mean? Ample evidence for eccentric behaviour on Pound's part has been given in the 900-odd pages preceding this disclaimer - for Carpenter to describe himself in similar terms is really saying something, therefore.

Perhaps, then, the grotesque caricature who comes flouncing out in Bennett's play is not so far from the reality of Carpenter's ebullient personality as might have been thought from the thorough-to-the-point-of-sober-sidedness nature of (at least) his scholarly books. Who knows? Certainly I don't.

There's room, I would have thought, for a life of Carpenter himself. He must have been a fascinating, many-sided man. Some at least of his biographies can never be superseded, given their priority in setting the terms of the discourse on such authors as Tolkien and Auden. Some of the others (the Pound, the Waugh, for instance) are already receding from view as a result of the ever-increasing outpouring of writing on certain mid-century literary figures.

The sheer range of his interests: not just literary but musical, not just theatrical but theological, too, may have perversely worked to his disadvantage. Only a reader interested in all of these things is likely to notice the solid work done by him in virtually all of the fields he touched.

Carpenter's life of Tolkien was read by all the Lord of the Rings obsessives in my family - which was most of us - the moment it appeared in 1977 (as a double-bill with the first edition of The Silmarillion). We hated it. The lack of empathy he seemed to show with his subject (whom he only actually met once) contrasted greatly with Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper's life of C. S. Lewis, which preceded it by three years.

Over time, though, I came to appreciate the distanced, nuanced nature of Carpenter's approach to biography. he didn't really major on scandal, but he never ignored it, either. His pioneering life of Benjamin Britten, for instance, examines in detail all the sexual innuendos alleged against the composer at various points in his life (and afterwards) with admirable balance and finesse. He isn't so much concerned to make you like his subjects, as to understand them better.

Having a Humphrey Carpenter biography about you guarantees a certain standard of scholarly documentation and research. Far from the grotesque figure of fun of Bennett's play, he shines as a man of protean talents who applied them cannily to create a major and lasting body of work.



Closer examination of his otherwise prodigious rate of production reveals certain recurrent patterns. There is, for instance, his tendency to produce at least two books rather than one from the same approximate area of research. His work on J. R. R. Tolkien (1977) led to a 1978 book on his circle of friends, the Inklings (C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, et al.) - as well as an edition of Tolkien's Letters (1981), co-edited with Christopher Tolkien. His 1981 biography of w. H. Auden must have helped immensely with his later work on Auden's early friend and collaborator Benjamin Britten a decade later, in 1992. His 1988 biography of Ezra Pound is closely shadowed by Geniuses Together (1987), a book on American writers in Paris in the 1920s.

Need I go on? Work on Spike Milligan also informs his work on British satire in the 1960s (not to mention the OUDS). Secret Gardens (1985), his book on classic children's writing, comes hot on the heels of his magisterial Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1984).

I guess that everyone works like that to some extent: one project motivating and informing the next. In aggregate, though, it does have the effect of making Carpenter seem like a kind of octopus, with a finger in every cultural pie.

Efficient workers work efficiently. It would be different if Carpenter had produced a series of slipshod, perfunctory, ill-researched books. In fact the opposite is the case. There's nothing belletristic in his approach to his craft. If anything, at times one could wish him to be a bit less self-effacing.

They certainly were a remarkable clan. And what better way to start off the New Year than with some bibliographical reflections on all these Garnetts, young and old?

I'm in the rather unusual position of having encountered the eldest of them first, in multiple adolescent readings and rereadings of Richard Garnett's entertaining short story collection The Twilight of the Gods (1888).



Let's start with him, then. Richard Garnett (1835-1906) was, in the succinct words of his wikipedia entry, "a scholar, librarian, biographer and poet" - distinguished in each of those fields. Mainly, though, he spent half a century, from 1851 to 1899, working in the Reading Room of the British Museum, first as an assistant, and finally in the top job as "keeper of printed books."



Mind you, this choice of career was already a bit of a family affair. His father, also called Richard Garnett (1789-1850), also worked in the British Museum. His main distinction was as a philologist, though he also penned some attacks on the then-current Roman Catholic theory of miracles.

So what's so entertaining about The Twilight of the Gods? T. E. Lawrence wrote of it, in his preface to the 1924 edition:

The scholarship in these tales is beautiful: so deep, so unobtrusive, so easy and exact ... It wants no learning to enjoy the Twilight of the Gods; but the more learning you have, the more odd corners and hidden delights you will find in it.

The Gods are the main element. Poisons, the science of toxins, are perhaps third element. Second place, I think, falls to black magic. Here again, so far as my competence extends, Dr. Garnett is serious. His spells are real, his sorcery accurate, according to the best dark-age models. His curious mind must have found another escape from the reading-desk in the attempts of our ancestors to see through the veil of flesh, downwards.

"It will be a tough business," observed the sorcerer. "It will require fumigations."
"Yes," said the bishop, "and suffumigations."
"Aloes and mastic," advised the sorcerer.
"Aye," assented the bishop, "and red sanders."
"We must call in Primeumaton," said the warlock.
"Clearly," said the bishop, "and Amioram."
"Triangles," said the sorcerer.
"Pentacles," said the bishop.
"In the hour of Methon," said the sorcerer.
"I should have thought Tafrac," suggested the bishop, "but I defer to your better judgment."
"I can have the blood of a goat?" queried the wizard.
"Yes," said the bishop, "and of a monkey also."
"Does your Lordship think that one might venture to go so far as a little unweaned child?"
"If absolutely necessary," said the bishop.
"I am delighted to find such liberality of sentiment on your Lordship’s part," said the sorcerer. "Your Lordship is evidently of the profession."

It seems to me that the learned Doctor would have been in some danger, too, if the nineteenth century had been the ninth or the seventeenth.

"Yet they say it never sold," was Lawrence's reluctant conclusion. It has always remained a bit of a secret vice for many readers: a complex set of stories which, in aggregate, emphasise all the untrodden byways of the Greek and Roman classics: the bits forbidden to public schoolboys, who might find them just a bit too interesting.



As for their legacy, I think it's pretty obvious that James Branch Cabell must have read them. His imaginary kingdom of Poictesme, the setting for such works as Jurgen (1919) and Figures of Earth (1921) is not dissimilar in style or attitude (though more self-consciously erotic, certainly). They no doubt influenced Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, too - a heritage of the comic fantasy narrative which culminates in contemporary masters such as Terry Pratchett and Jack Vance.



The influence of Richard Garnett's stories at the time can be seen directly in Kenneth Grahame, Lord Dunsany, and a number of other writers who came to prominence in the 1890s. As for his other writings - his rich crop of editions of Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, and a host of other authors, his translations from myriad languages, and his own original poetry - these have faded with time, but The Twilight of the Gods will, I think it's safe to say, continue to be read.



As for the rather surprising literary dynasty he founded, the first truly notable member of it is undoubtedly his son, Edward Garnett (1868-1937), famous not so much in his own right, as for his Max Perkins-like influence on an impressive set of early twentieth century geniuses: D. H. Lawrence, certainly, but also Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, John Galsworthy, T. E. Lawrence, and Edward Thomas. Like Perkins, he was the reader for an important publishing house (first T. Fisher Unwin, then Gerald Duckworth and Company, and finally Jonathan Cape), but his efforts on behalf of 'his' authors went far beyond this.



In retrospect, however, his reputation as a kingmaker has been somewhat dwarfed by that of his wife, Constance Garnett (1861-1946), whose translations of Russian literature are still in common use; as well as his son, writer and ocasional Bloomsburyite David Garnett (1892–1981).

I've been collecting their respective works for some time now, as part of my affinity for Edwardian writing generally, I suppose - certainly for its leading lights: Chekhov, Conrad, Kipling, Mansfield, Masefield, Wells and Woolf. I don't think I can do all those other Garnetts justice in one blogpost, though, so I'll talk about Constance and David in separate posts.

In other words, watch this space!

1. Garnett, Richard. The Twilight of the Gods. 1888. Rev. ed. 1903. Introduction by T. E. Lawrence. The Week-End Library. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head Ltd., 1927.


2. Garnett, Richard. The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales. 1888. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947.


3. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. The Garnett Family: The History of a Literary Family. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1961.


4. Jefferson, George. Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.

Roughly seven years ago, I wrote a post detailing my views on the work of Robert Lowell's then two principal biographers, Ian Hamilton (1982) and Paul Mariani (1994).



Now, however, there's a new book out, by psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, herself a sufferer from bipolar disorder, and therefore uniquely placed (one might think) to give us insights into the true nature of Lowell's mental illness - both its nature, that is, and the effects she alleges it had on his own creativity.



I remember when I first discovered Robert Lowell's writing, back in the early eighties, remarking to my then guru, Prof. D. I. B. [Don] Smith of Auckland University, that it sounded as if Lowell must have been a horrible man. This was based on my reading of Hamilton's biography, then freshly out, hence the major source of information on the subject.

"I'm sure that's quite untrue. Who wrote the biography?" responded Don.

"Ian Hamilton," I replied.

"Oh, the shit!"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, we prescribed a selection of Robert Frost's poetry a few years ago with an introduction by Hamilton. Instead of talking about Frost's poetry, he went into lots of detail about what a terrible person he was: completely unnecessary! Even if it's true, it didn't need to be said."



Don generally had a new angle on virtually any topic one raised with him. Part of it came from his long years of study and teaching in the UK and Canada, which seemed to have resulted in his meeting virtually every significant literary figure of the time (he had some original views on Alan Bennett, whom he'd met at Oxford - on Auden, as well - but that's another story).

"Lowell was a delightful man," he went on to say.

"How do you know? Did you ever meet him?"

"No, but I've just been reading his essay on Ford Madox Ford, and the man who wrote that must have been a wonderful man."



Ever dutiful, I went off and duly read the essay on Ford, and started to see what Don was driving at. His point was, I think, that whatever the arc of one's biography - moving from misery to happiness to pain, or whatever pattern we impose on it from a distance (the diachronic view, if you prefer that terminology) - the actual experience of being that human being, or even meeting him or her - i.e., the synchronic section cut across that larger chronology - can be completely different.

The Lowell of the Ford essay came across as kindly, relaxed and wise (quite a lot like Don Smith, in fact, if the truth be told). I began to realise that a person only really exists as a series of moments, and the artificiality of any tragic arc - the largely malign one drawn by Hamilton, for instance - should always be taken with a grain of salt.

It's not, mind you, that people always come out better taken moment by moment, or (alternatively) that tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner [to understand all is to forgive all]. It's just that one should never take any biographical construct too seriously, particularly if it's been concocted by someone who never met - or met only fleetingly - their subject.

Meeting Lowell - just like being him - could clearly be hellish at times, but Lowell-on-paper does not come across like that. He reads like someone who found life, not death, an 'awfully big adventure,' and who never gave up on its possibilities, even in the extremes of despair.



Since Hamilton's book in the 80s, the only really significant biographical studies have been by Mariani (mentioned above), as well as the tireless Jeffrey Meyers, author of 25 or so biographies to date, among them books on Hemingway, Mansfield, and a host of others, including no fewer than three volumes on Robert Lowell and his circle.



The first two of these appeared in the late 80s, but his most recent effort is Robert Lowell in Love (2015):







It's safe to say, then, that the actual incidents of Lowell's life have had a fairly thorough airing in the various accounts above. Jamison begins wisely, then (in my opinion) by stressing that what she has written is "not a biography." Instead of that, she goes on to say:

I have written a psychological account of the life and mind of Robert Lowell; it is as well a narrative of the illness that so affected him, manic-depressive illness. ... My interest lies in the entanglement of art, character, mood and intellect. (5)

Quite a tall order, one would think. After all, when in doubt, a standard, common-or-garden biography can always take refuge in a bit more detail: a few more addresses, a few more laundry lists and bank receipts. Once one has thrown away that crutch, it's hard to know exactly what to fall back on.

Jamison (unfortunately) has a tendency to fold in pages of pretentious waffle about the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, or any other uplifting subject whenever she runs short of material. Mainly, one is forced to conclude, because she has to admit to knowing little about poetry, and is therefore at the mercy of the contradictory critical assessments of even Lowell's major works, let alone such late books as Day by Day (1976), which she alone seems to see as ranking with Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and Life Studies (1959) as one of the jewels in his diadem.

What expertise she does have lies elsewhere:

My academic and clinical field is psychology and, within that, the study and treatment of manic-depressive (bi-polar) illness, the illness from which Robert Lowell suffered most of his life. I have studied as well the beholdenness of creative work to fluctuations of mood and the changes in thinking that attend such fluctuations. Mood disorders, depression and bipolar illness, occur disproportionately often in writers, as well as in visual artists and composers. Studying the influence of both normal and pathological moods on creative work is critical to understanding how the mind imagines. (5) [my emphases]

I don't have a problem with this agenda per se. There's always something new to be learned from any new approach, and Jamison's close scrutiny of Lowell's psychological records - allowed here for the first time by kind permission of Lowell's daughter Harriet - might certainly be seen to justify a study on this scale (if, like me, you persist in seeing Lowell as one of the most significant twentieth century American poets, that is).

I have underlined out those two statements above, however, since I think they demand further attention. The first appears to posit a link between creativity and mania which one would have thought had long since fallen casualty to the romantic notion of the artist-creator.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact ...

Jamison is careful to buttress it up with endless clinical details and citations, but she is, it appears, genuinely of the opinion that occasional bouts of mania were of assistance to Lowell in his writing, and provided "material" for him to work over later in the depressions that inevitably followed them.

As her strange saga proceeds, moreover, one begins to realise that its basic postulate is that Lowell can do no wrong (possibly because she too is a sufferer from the same debilitating condition, and therefore can't bear to think otherwise). Even though Lowell himself castigated himself profoundly after each period of madness for the verbal and physical cruelties he had inflicted on those dearest to him, this is - to Jamison - simply proof of his superior "character."



And, of course, there's a certain truth in these ideas. One can't really assess Lowell (or, for that matter, Hölderlin, or John Clare, or Christopher Smart) without factoring the influence of their "madness" on the totality of their work (thus perhaps justifying the second bolded-out sentence above). But was it of genuine advantage to them? I think a very strong case could be made for the negative in each case, though of course a final decision on the matter is not really attainable.



It's all very perilous, however: I would see it as a profoundly dangerous way of thinking. It's the kind of stuff John Money spouted when he was trying to persuade the young Janet Frame to commit herself (voluntarily) for psychological treatment: Schumann, Van Gogh, Hugo Wolf were the examples he used to see madness as an essential part - almost as proof - of an artist's character.

That didn't work out so well, and I have to say that Lowell was probably better off with the doctors he had at the time than with one as starry-eyed as Jamison. While (fortunately) a strong believer in the virtues of lithium, she does seem to believe that "poets" are some kind of arcane race of superhumanly gifted beings. Even if that were so (and I don't believe it is), it's rather pointless to use that as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to charting their biographical progress.

There are many things to like and admire in her account. It's very interesting at times. However, with the best will in the world, I'm unable to award it, as a whole, even the qualified thumbs up I conceded in my earlier post to the Hamilton-Mariani double-act. One explanation for this lies in the immense amount of redundancy weighting down her book. As an example of the kind of padding she far too often permits herself, savour these parting words about Lowell's funeral:

A foot of snow lay on the ground outside the church and the wind blew to the bone; it was winter in Cambridge. Had the mourners looked up at the bell tower of the church as they left the service for Robert Lowell on that March day they would have seen the bell that tolled for him. But they would not have been able to see the words carved into the shoulder of the bell. Words for the dead, they had been chosen by Lowell's cousin nearly fifty years earlier, when, as president of Harvard, he donated the bell to the college church. In Memory of Voices That Are Hushed, the bell read. In memory of the dead.

The voices of the living could be hushed as well. Lowell's great-great-grandmother had lived a silent death in madness; her son had said that only as much of her remained as "the hum outliving the hushed bell." The poet's voice speaks for the dead, the hushed, the valorous. It signifies the hours, reminds of death. It gives depth and resonance to blithe times, solace in the dark.


The bells cry: "'Come, / Come home ...,' Robert Lowell wrote. "'Come; I bell thee home.'" (403-4)

Not, I think, since Carl Sandburg's six-volume hagiography of Abraham Lincoln has an American writer permitted herself to go quite so far as this into the realms of footling hyperbole. I remember once reading a long quote from The Prairie Years (1926) about the significance of Lincoln's rocking cradle which did indeed rival the above on the bullshit meter, but it was a pretty close call.

Unfortunately Jamison has failed to learn the distinction between poetry ("the best words in the best order" - S. T. Coleridge) and the poetic (vague, dirge-like words strung together for some kind of solemn - or somnolent - effect).



I'm afraid, however, that where Jamison really falls down for me is in the ethical colour-blindness which continually undermines her version of Robert Lowell's life. Take, for example, her account of the controversy over Lowell's use (without permission) of extensive quotes from his then-wife Elizabeth Hardwick's letters in his 1973 collection The Dolphin, which, as a whole, chronicles the beginning of his new relationship with wife-number-three Caroline Blackwood.

The precise details of the argument to which this has given rise - over the limits of poetic "licence" (as it were) - are a bit niggly. I've chronicled the matter in rather more detail in a lecture originally given in a university course on Life Writing, so I won't bother to rehearse it all again here.



Suffice it to say that Lowell's close friend and poetic colleague Elizabeth Bishop took great exception to this act for the following reasons (as she explained to him in a long, fascinating letter):

One can use one's life as material - one does, anyway - but these letters, aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission - IF you hadn't changed them ... etc. But art just isn't worth that much. I keep remembering [Gerard Manley] Hopkins's marvelous letter to [Robert] Bridges about the idea of a "gentleman" being the highest thing ever conceived - higher than a "Christian," even, certainly than a poet. It is not being "gentle" to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way — it's cruel.
[Letter of March 21, 1972]

Not only had Lowell not received permission to quote from the letters; he'd even taken it upon himself to rewrite them substantially (all within quote marks, mind you), and thus put things she never actually wrote or said into his wife's mouth.



When I mention this in class, along with various other examples of Lowell's playing fast and loose with other people's words, I've noticed that most students tend to take Bishop's side. Jamison doesn't see it that way at all, however. Her reasons for this are interesting, to say the least.

First, it was all a long time ago:

It has been more than forty years since the publication of The Dolphin, and the indignation over Lowell's taking lines from Hardwick's letters has lessened but not disappeared. Time has a blanketing effect on outrage. (344)

No doubt time does "have a blanketing effect on outrage," but that seems a particularly foolish extenuating cicumstance for a biographer to advance. If outrage wears so thin over time, how about our interest in the minutiae of Lowell's clinical diagnoses and treatment?

Second, it wasn't that bad in the first place:

In many respects, as literary and historical controversies go, the appropriation is not particularly egregious. The issue was an important one to many of those most involved, however, including critics, friends, and, of course, Elizabeth Hardwick, Caroline Blackwood, and Lowell himself. Elizabeth Bishop's burning words to Lowell ... "Art just isn't worth that much" - are repeated still. They raise general questions about the use of private observation in art; they also raise questions of hypocrisy. (344)

So if it's still being discussed, as well as having had the effect of galvanising everyone involved, even peripherally, at the time, then I'd have to say that still sounds pretty important: even, perhaps, "egregious" - to me, at any rate.

Like ex-NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani skating around the latest porkie from his client, the President of the United State, Jamison proceeds to pour even more fuel on the flame, with her admission that "for years he had taken bits of conversation and correspondence from his friends" [a long list of friends and other public sources follows].

Lowell [she informs us] had a poet's magpie eye and an imprinting ear: he spotted, snatched, rejected, revised, incorporated. Words of others became part of his available stock. But it was his imagination that picked, sorted and built. That created poetry. (345)

No doubt he did. But were any of the people she mentions the opposite party in an increasingly acrimonious marital dispute, soon to culminate in divorce? No, they weren't: he may have quoted from Eliot, Pound, Homer, Sophocles, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all on many occasions, to little controversy, but that was under completely different circumstances.

You might as well say that Lowell had written and published poems before - to no particular objections - so why were they all protesting now? It's deliberately misleading chicanery on Jamison's part, in other words.



Perhaps the most devastating attach on Lowell's behaviour over The Dolphin was expressed in a contemporary review by former friend and fellow-poet Adrienne Rich:

What does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names [For Lizzie and Harriet - also 1973], and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife's letters written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife? (346)

"The book," she went on to say, was "cruel and shallow," and the "inclusion of the letter poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry."

Ouch! That must have stung a bit. But not for Lowell, who never seems actually to have understood what all this controversy was about. In his reply to Bishop's letter (quoted above) he said only:

Lizzie's letters? I did not see them as slander, but as sympathetic, tho necessarily awful for her to read. She is the poignance of the book, tho that hardly makes it kinder to her. ... It's oddly enough a technical problem as well as a gentleman's problem. How can the story be told at all without the letters. I'll put my heart to it. I can't bear not to publish Dolphin in good form.
[Letter of March 28, 1972]

In other words, yes, it is a bit rough on her, but the alternative would probably be to scrap the book entirely, and that's just not going to happen. He enlarges on this a bit in another letter to his friend, the eventual editor of his Collected Poems, Frank Bidart:

I've read and long thought on Elizabeth's letter. It's a kind of masterpiece of criticism, though her extreme paranoia (For God's sake don't repeat this) about revelations gives it a wildness. Most people will feel something of her doubts. The terrible thing isn't the mixing of fact and fiction, but the wife pleading to her husband to return - this backed by "documents"
[Letter of April 10, 1972]

And what is Jamison's response to all this? Rather than attempting to engage with them, she is content to call Adrienne Rich's strictures 'a stretch':

Whatever legitimate criticism of Lowell's including excerpts from Hardwick's letters, it is far from the one of the most vindictive acts in the history of poetry. There is too much competition. (346)

In other words, sure, it was bad, but it wasn't the worst - worse things happen at sea. And the culminating point of all this havering around the point is the following piece of pomposity: "Scandals blaze; they die down. Art lasts or it doesn't."

Two years after Lowell died, Elizabeth Hardwick told an interviewer that Lowell was "like no one else - unplaceable, unaccountable." Unplaceable, unaccountable. Perfect words: wife to husband, writer to writer. (348)

Do you see what I mean? The net result of 400 pages of this kind of thing is, unfortunately, to obscure all the paradoxes stated so starkly by Ian Hamilton (in particular), and to make one alternately yawn and gag as one turns the next page to ever more egregious excesses of Lowell-worship.

"Art lasts or it doesn't" - what a crock of shit. If anything in Lowell's art looks likely to last, it certainly isn't that mad rush of sonnets from 1967-1973, culminating in the weird biblioblitz - History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin - of 1973. And, in any case, how could that ever be the point?

The point for my Life Writing students is that they have to make their own decisions on what personal and family details they choose to reveal in their writing. There are precious few signposts on this particular road, and one of them is this particular controversy between Bishop and Lowell. How dare Jamison refer to it simply as some old, dead "scandal"!

True, that's pretty much the line taken by her hero Lowell, who clearly - in his letter to Frank Bidart, at any rate - sees it as more of a technical challenge than a moral one, and goes on to attributes the vehemence of her reaction more to Bishop's "paranoia" about revelations than to any real problems with his own behaviour.

There are no special rules for artists: no special code of conduct that excuses 'great' poets from the normal codes of conduct that apply to the rest of us. Do you hear that, Kay Redfield Jamison, through the blinkered spectacles of your Carlylean "great man" theory of history?

"How far can I go?" is a real, practical problem, which applies to writers - and not just ones in the fields of memoir, autobiography and confessional poetry - every day of their lives. Am I justified in letting the cat out of the bag when it comes to family skeletons - or only about my own misdeeds? Can I really write all those mean things about people without getting ostracised?

Lowell took it pretty far. That's one of the reasons he remains interesting, and still well worth reading (imho). Jamison thinks he's worth reading because he found interesting metaphors and descriptors for the particular madness he suffered from. That may well be true, also. But don't obscure that simple, basic point with a whole lot of palaver about "character" and "moral fibre," as if a self-indulgent, womanising drunk were really some kind of unsung Saint. If he had been he would be boring - it's his flaws that sell him, as he himself knew all along.

"In the kingdom of the dumb, the one-track mind is king." Jamison's hagiography has, it seems, reaped a certain amount of praise from those equally ignorant of the true nature of Lowell's work, but even the most sympathetic reviews acknowledge a certain failure to edit: to cut out all those long apostrophes about Captain Scott (another exemplar of moral heroism, it would appear - you know my views about that), bio-sketches of distant relatives who also ended up in asylums, and - really - just random blah.

The way she writes off Rich's and Bishop's concerns about playing fast and loose with other people's lives and reputations is terrifyingly slick, however - "Satan hath made thee mighty glib," as my old Dad used to say whenever anybody looked likely to best him in argument.

It sounds, in fact, uncomfortably like what we've become used to from PR spokespeople and other paid apologists for any unpalatable view: racism, genocide, fraud, or just plain old lies in general - there's nothing, really, you can't massage with those old cons about how "it was a long time ago and let's hope it never happened. And if it did happen it wasn't my fault. And if did happen and it was my fault then I'm sorry you feel that way about it - let's move on, what's the point of dwelling on it? You really are pathetic in still wanting to drag up that old stuff. Get a life!" I think you all know the kind of thing.

In short, then, I'd like to like Jamison's book, but I just can't. Nor can I really conscientiously recommend it as a valuable contribution to Lowell studies. For the moment, I'd say that those of you still curious about the poet would be far better off reading the fine, comprehensive editions of his poetry, prose and letters which continue to appear forty years after his death.

Poetry:


1. Land of Unlikeness. Massachusetts: The Cummington Press, 1944.


2. Lord Weary's Castle. 1946. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947.


3. Lord Weary's Castle and The Mills of The Kavanaughs. 1946 & 1951. A Harvest / HBJ Book. San Diego, New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1974.


4. Poems 1938-1949. 1950. London: Faber, 1970.


5. Life Studies. 1959. London: Faber, 1968.


6. Life Studies and For the Union Dead. 1959 & 1964. The Noonday Press. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.


7. Selected Poems. 1965. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1969.


8. Near the Ocean. London: Faber, 1967.


9. Notebook 1967-68. The Noonday Press N 402. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.


10. Notebook. 1970. London: Faber, 1971.


11. History. The Noonday Press N 513. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.


12. For Lizzie and Harriet. London: Faber, 1973.


13. The Dolphin. London: Faber, 1973.


14. The Dolphin. 1973. The Noonday Press N513. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.


15. Raban, Jonathan, ed. Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection. 1973. London: Faber, 1974.


16. Selected Poems: Revised Edition. 1976 & 1977. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981.


17. Day by Day. 1977. London: Faber, 1978.


18. Hofmann, Michael, ed. Poems. London: Faber, 2001.


19. Bidart, Frank & David Gewanter, with DeSales Harrison, ed. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.

Plays:


20. The Old Glory. London: Faber, 1966.

Translation:


21. Phaedra: A Verse Translation of Racine’s Phèdre. 1961. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1971.


22. Imitations. 1961. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1971.


23. ‘Poems by Osip Mandelstam.’ The Atlantic Monthly, 211 (June, 1963): 63-68.


24. ‘Poems by Anna Akhmatova.’ The Atlantic Monthly, 214 (October, 1964): 60-65.


25. The Voyage and other versions of poems by Baudelaire. Illustrated by Sidney Nolan. London: Faber, 1968.


26. Prometheus Bound: Derived from Aeschylus. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.


27. Prometheus Bound: Derived from Aeschylus. 1969. London: Faber, 1970.


28. The Oresteia of Aeschylus. 1978. London: Faber, 1979.

Prose:


29. Giroux, Robert, ed. Collected Prose. London: Faber, 1987.

Letters:


30. Hamilton, Saskia, ed. The Letters of Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005.


31. Travisano, Thomas, & Saskia Hamilton, ed. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Secondary:


32. Axelrod, Stephen Gould. Robert Lowell, Life and Art. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.


33. Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. 1982. London: Faber, 1983.


34. Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1994.


35. Jamison, Kay Redfield. Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire - A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character. 2017. Vintage Books. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2018.

There's a fascinating passage in David Garnett's autobiography The Golden Echo (1953), where he describes how his mother set about her translations from the Russian:

Constance used to get up by half-past six or seven in the spring and summer, and we soon sat down to our breakfast of porridge, with milk for me and coffee for her. Her day contained so much that I cannot easily fit it all in. First thing in the morning she used to go round the garden, while the dew was still on the plants, and collect those miscreants, the slugs. This was a moment of self-indulgence, for the serious day's work was still before her. Some of the housework had to be done, then I was called in and my lessons started and, leaving me to work out a sum or to learn a proposition of Euclid, Constance would open the Russian volume which she was translating and begin work. Sometimes, but not always, I would work in the same room with her and, letting my pencil lie idle on the paper, I would watch the changing expressions on her face, eager, frowning, puzzled or amused. The Russian words were translated not only on the foolscap piece of paper in front of her, but into English features and flesh and blood. Her face was so expressive that I could guess at the emotional tension of what she was reading. Even if I did not interrupt, there would soon be a knocking at the back door, or Edward would come in with a letter in his hand, worried until he could read it to her and work off his irritation by a discussion. [53-54]

Given that she translated so much: the collected works of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Turgenev, together with substantial amounts of Tolstoy, Herzen and sundry others (NB: I've supplied a complete list at the end of this post), and that it's all now in the public domain, the merits of Constance Garnett's translations from the Russian continue to attract controversy.



Principal among her critics was Vladimir Nabokov, who described her versions as "dry and flat, and always unbearably demure." Poet Josef Brodsky went further, saying:

The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.

It's worth noting, however, that Nabokov also believed that the ideal translator should always be a man, and that his own translations - the four-volume Eugene Onegin, for instance - have hardly attracted universal acclaim.



Was she inaccurate? At times, it seems, yes - especially at first. She began working on Russian in the mid-1890s and kept going until the 1930s. The jewel in her crown is undoubtedly her massive edition of Chekhov (17 volumes: 1916-26). It would be no exaggeration to compare the influence of this work to that of Scott-Moncrieff's pioneering versions of Proust (1922-30). It gifted the English-speaking world with an entirely new conception of the short story, just as Proust revolutionised contemporary notions of the novel.

David Remnick's 2005 New Yorker article "The Translation Wars" gives something of the atmosphere of that discovery:

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recounts scouring Sylvia Beach’s shelves for the Russians and finding in them a depth and accomplishment he had never known. Before that, he writes, he was told that Katherine Mansfield was “a good short-story writer, even a great short-story writer,” but now, after reading Chekhov, she seemed to him like “near-beer.” To read the Russians, he said, “was like having a great treasure given to you”.

Close family friend D. H. Lawrence recalled her:

sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high — really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.

The inaccuracies have been exaggerated, too (often by rival translators, hoping to find a market for their own new version of some classic novel or other). Donald Rayfield, in his Chekhov Omnibus (1994):

compared Garnett's translations with the most recent scholarly versions of Chekhov's stories and concluded: "While she makes elementary blunders, her care in unravelling difficult syntactical knots and her research on the right terms for Chekhov's many plants, birds and fish are impressive.... Her English is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable."

That's not to say that accuracy is unimportant, but it's important to note that Garnett did not work alone. Taught Russian, initially, by Russian exile Feliks Volkhovsky (pictured above), she subsequently worked with his colleague Sergius Stepniak (below) on her first translations - of Goncharov and Tolstoy - both published in 1894.



Soon afterwards she made a trip to Russia - a journey described in loving detail in David Garnett's The Golden Echo. She met Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, but was forced to turn down his offer of more of his works to translate as she'd already made a start on her massive edition of Turgenev.

After Stepniak died in 1895, his wife Fanny worked with Garnett on her translations. From 1906 onwards, however, she was replaced by Natalie Duddington, daughter of esteemed Russian novelist Alexander Ivanovich Ertel, whom she met in Russia and in whom she found "real intellectual companionship" (as her grandson Richard Garnett reveals in his 1991 biography Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life, 251).



Another important thing to remember about translation in general is that the texture of the translator's prose is probably more important in creating an impression on the reader than the actual literal accuracy of each phrase. The latest translation of a book is not necessarily the best. I recently had the experience of reading a new translation of Bulgakov's classic novel The Master and Margarita, which advertised itself as "complete and unexpurgated" - inlcluding numerous passages previously suppressed - and generally a great improvement on the earlier versions:

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. 1938. Trans. Michael Glenny. London: Collins Clear-Type Press / The Harvill Press, 1967.

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. 1929-40. Trans. Diana Burgin & Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. Annotations and Afterword by Ellendea Proffer. 1995. Vintage International. New York: Random House, Inc., 1996.

It was virtually unreadable! So cloth-eared was the prose, so clunky the annotation, that if I hadn't already encountered the novel in Michael Glenny's smooth and delightful version, I would have concluded that Bulgakov was massively overrated!

Moreover, when Constance Garnett put out a translation, it fell instantly into the hands of the likes of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and the entire Bloomsbury set. Was her diction overly "demure," as Nabokov claims? Not in their eyes. And this was, arguably, the best period in history for stylish English prose.

As Rayfield comments above, and it's a point worth stressing: "Her English is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable." Constance Garnett is the closest thing we can get to a contemporary window on Chekhov - and the same applies to Tolstoy, too (though less so, admittedly, to Gogol and Dostoevsky, where her temperamental affinities are more strained).

Coming back to Hemingway, his verdict on the cumulative effect of those of her translations he read was as follows:

In Dostoevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoy. Tolstoy made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house.

That's not to say that new versions of these classic texts should not continue to appear. That would be quixotic in the extreme. But the credentials of the translators as prose writers need to be as impressive as their command of the language they're translating from. There's always a need for good, accurate cribs for students to use, but to compose a new version of a great book requires real literary skills. These don't come ready-made.

And neither is it always possible to trust the verdicts of native speakers of the translated language. Nabokov and Brodsky were no doubt correct in thinking that Garnett does not convey the true flavour of Dostoevsky, in particular. But could either of them have done better? English has its own rules, its own stylistic norms. If Nabokov's own work as a translator had been less perverse, less deliberately discordant, it might be easier to accept his views. Brodsky worked mainly as a translator of his own verse from Russian into English. Again, it is unfortunately far easier to discern the merits of that work in English translations by other hands, I'm sorry to say:

Brodsky, Joseph. Selected Poems. Trans. George L. Kline. Foreword by W. H. Auden. Penguin Modern European Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Brodsky, Joseph. Collected Poems in English: Poems Written in English and Poems Translated from the Original Russian by or with the Author. Ed. Ann Kjellberg. 2000. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

It was, I think, William Faulkner who said, when asked what were the three greatest novels of all time, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina.

It may seem a bit presumptuous of me to question the judgement of Brodsky and Nabokov on the merits of Constance Garnett as a translator. Clearly, both as great Russian writers and as profoundly learned students of Russian literature in their own right, the competition is a somewhat unequal one.

I do feel strongly, though, that their strictures would apply just as much to more recent translations of these authors, and that what they are looking for - a kind of mirror of the genius of certain masters of the Russian language within the very different medium of English - is not really attainable in this world.

A brief experiment would therefore seem to be in order. I propose to take the famous opening passage of Tolstoy's great novel, and compare the different versions of it by various translators.

I hasten to say that my own Russian - a few memories of my schooldays, when it was taught to us as an "advanced" alternative to Latin - is rusty in the extreme. I can, however, read the language to some extent, so I'm not flying entirely blind:

Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.

Все смешалось в доме Облонских. Жена узнала, что муж был в связи с бывшею в их доме француженкою-гувернанткой, и объявила мужу, что не может жить с ним в одном доме. Положение это продолжалось уже третий день и мучительно чувствовалось и самими супругами, и всеми членами семьи, и домочадцами. Все члены семьи и домочадцы чувствовали, что нет смысла в их сожительстве и что на каждом постоялом дворе случайно сошедшиеся люди более связаны между собой, чем они, члены семьи и домочадцы Облонских. Жена не выходила из своих комнат, мужа третий день не было дома. Дети бегали по всему дому, как потерянные; англичанка поссорилась с экономкой и написала записку приятельнице, прося приискать ей новое место; повар ушел вчера со двора, во время самого обеда; черная кухарка и кучер просили расчета.

- Russian text (1878)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarrelled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

- Constance Garnett (1901)

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was upset in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered an intrigue between her husband and their former French governess, and declared that she would not continue to live under the same roof with him. This state of things had now lasted for three days, and not only the husband and wife but the rest of the family and the whole household suffered from it. They all felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that any group of people who had met together by chance at an inn would have had more in common than they. The wife kept to her own rooms, the husband stopped away from home all day; the children ran about all over the house uneasily; the English governess quarrelled with the housekeeper and wrote to a friend asking if she could find her another situation; the cook had gone out just at dinner-time the day before and had not returned; and the kitchen-maid and coachman had given notice.

- Louise and Aylmer Maude (1918)

All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.

Everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household. The wife had found out about her husband' relationship with their former French governess and had announced that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This state of affairs had already continued for three days and was having a distressing effect on the couple themselves, on all the members of the family, and on the domestics. They all felt that there was no sense in their all living together under the same roof and that any group of people who chanced to meet at a wayside inn would have more in common than they, the members of the Oblonsky family, and their servants. The wife did not leave her own rooms and the husband stayed away from home all day. The children strayed all over the house, not knowing what to do with themselves. The English governess had quarrelled with the housekeeper and had written a note asking a friend to find her a new place. The head-cook had gone out right at dinner-time the day before. The under-cook and the coachman had given notice.

- Rosemary Edmonds (1954)

Let's take, first, that most famous of opening sentences for a novel (alongside, perhaps, 'Call me Ishmael" and 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"). The Russian reads:

Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.

Vsye schastliviye syem'i pokhozhu drug na drug, kazhdaya nyeschastlivaya syem'ya nyeschastlivaya po-svoyemu.

[All happy families resemble one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way]

One would have to admit that the Maudes are somewhat more literal in their observance of the exact order of words in the Russian sentence. Garnett's slightly rearranged version does sound rather more epigrammatic in English, however. There's not a lot in it. The meaning of the sentence is not really in doubt in any of them. Edmonds is admirably concise.

Все смешалось в доме Облонских.

Vsye smyeshalos' v domye Oblonskikh.

[Everything was mixed-up / topsy-turvy in the house of the Oblonskys]

Жена узнала, что муж был в связи с бывшею в их доме француженкою-гувернанткой, и объявила мужу, что не может жить с ним в одном доме.

Zhyena uznala, chto muzh byl v svyazi s byvsheyu v ikh domye frantsuzhyenkoyu-guvernantkoy, i ob"yavila muzhu, chto nye mozhyet zhit' s nim v odnom domye

[The wife had learned that her husband was in connection with the former French governess in their house, and had told her husband that she could not live together with him in the same house.]

Положение это продолжалось уже третий день и мучительно чувствовалось и самими супругами, и всеми членами семьи, и домочадцами.

Polozhyeniye eto prodolzhalos' uzhye tryetiy den' i muchityel'no chuvstvovalos' i samimi suprugami, i vsyemi chlyenami sem'i, i domochadtsami.

[This situation was continuing for the third day, and was painfully felt both by the spouses themselves, as well as all members of the family and the household.]

Все члены семьи и домочадцы чувствовали, что нет смысла в их сожительстве и что на каждом постоялом дворе случайно сошедшиеся люди более связаны между собой, чем они, члены семьи и домочадцы Облонских.

Vse chlyeny syem'i i domochadtsy chuvstvovali, chto nyet smysla v ikh sozhityel'stve i chto na kazhdom postoyalom dvorye sluchayno soshyedshiyesya lyudi boleye svyazany myezhdu soboy, chyem oni, chlyeny syem'i i domochadtsy Oblonskikh.

[All members of the family and the household felt that there was no point in their living together, and that at any inn, the people who happened to come together were more connected with one another than they, the members of the Oblonsky family and household.]

Жена не выходила из своих комнат, мужа третий день не было дома. Дети бегали по всему дому, как потерянные; англичанка поссорилась с экономкой и написала записку приятельнице, прося приискать ей новое место; повар ушел вчера со двора, во время самого обеда; черная кухарка и кучер просили расчета.

Zhyena ne vykhodila iz svoikh komnat, muzha tryetiy dyen' ne bylo doma. Dyeti byegali po vsyemu domu, kak poteryannyye; anglichanka possorilas' s ekonomkoy i napisala zapisku priyatel'nitse, prosya priiskat' yey novoye mesto; povar ushyel vchyera so dvora, vo vryemya samogo obyeda; chyernaya kukharka i kucher prosili raschyeta.

[The wife did not leave her rooms; the husband was not at home for the third day. Children ran all over the house like lost souls; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper and wrote a note to a friend, asking her to find her a new place; the cook had left the day before during the dinner service; the kitchenmaid and the coachman had asked for their wages.]

There are no very important divergences in meaning in any of these three translations. How could there be? The latter two had the advantage of Garnett's translation to guide them, but all were competent Russian scholars, perfectly capable of understanding the surface meaning and the underlying nuances of Tolstoy's wonderfully balanced prose.

You can see from the literal version above, though, that differences of idiom between the two languages make it difficult to preserve the insistent repetitions of such phrases as "vsyemi chlyenami sem'i" [all members of the family] and "domochadtsami" [household staff]. With the best will in the world, something is lost here in translation between Russian and English.

But does it matter? The Maudes certainly make a virtue of being less "free" than Garnett is in her transpositions and remodellings of the passage to sound like good English prose. In keeping with the ethos of the Penguin Classics, Edmonds tries to make the language of her translation sound as unpretentious and contemporary as possible - though given that there's now more distance between us and her (65 years) than there was between her and Constance Garnett (53 years), it's hard now to detect that much difference between them.

If you're a student of Russian needing a crib, I suspect that the Maudes would suit your purposes best. For sheer ease of reading, Edmonds is hard to beat (I once read most of her translation of War and Peace on an eighteen-hour plane flight, so I know what I'm talking about). Why do we still need Constance Garnett, then? Distinguished Slavonic scholar and teacher Gary Saul Morson summed it all up rather nicely when he wrote, in 1997:

I love Constance Garnett, and wish I had a framed picture of her on my wall, since I have often thought that what I do for a living is teach the Collected Works of Constance Garnett. She has a fine sense of English, and, especially, the sort of English that appears in British fiction of the realist period, which makes her ideal for translating the Russian masterpieces. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were constantly reading and learning from Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and others. Every time someone else redoes one of these works, reviewers say that the new version replaces Garnett; and then another version comes out, which, apparently, replaces Garnett again, and so on. She must have done something right.

Quite so. Garnett brings with her a flavour of a classic era in English prose, and given her much greater proximity to the golden age of Russian prose, you discard what she brings to the table at your peril.

Perhaps it would be easiest to say, then, that you need never feel ashamed of concentrating most of your attention on Constance Garnett's translations of the great Russian prose writers. Would we had anyone capable of performing such a feat for the great Russian poets - Pushkin in particular - whose merits will have to continue to be taken on trust by English readers.





Constance Garnett's wikipedia page lists her as having published 71 volumes of Russian literature in translation, which also happens to be the total I've reached below. David Remnick's 2005 New Yorker article The Translation Wars gives the total as 70 (presumably by subtracting the collection by Maxim Gorky, only partially translated by Garnett).

The bibliography on pp.207-8 of Carolyn Heilbrun's The Garnett Family (1961) includes one additional book, Madame Lenev's Folk Songs of Great Russia, translated by Garnett, but published privately on an unspecified date.

Perhaps this is why Edna O'Brien's 2011 review of the reissue of Richard Garnett's 1991 biography Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life revises the total up to 73. How that number could otherwise have been arrived at, I'm not really sure.

In any case, the list below is as complete as I can make it. I've combined information from my own collection with the online listings here, as well as the dates and publication details given by Heilbrun (op. cit.).

•

[in chronological order]:



Ivan Goncharov: A Common Story (1894)


Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891)

[1 vol: 1894]

1. Gontcharoff, Ivan. A Common Story. 1847. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1894.




Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace (3 vols)


Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)

[8 vols: 1894-1922]

2. Tolstoy, Leo. The Kingdom of God is Within You. 1894. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1894.


3. Tolstoy, Count Leo. Anna Karenin: A Novel. 1877. Trans. Constance Garnett. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1901.


4. Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and Other Stories. 1886. Trans. Constance Garnett (1902)


5. Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. 1869. Trans. Constance Garnett. 3 vols. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1904.


6. Tolstoy, Leo. Christianity and Patriotism. 1895. Trans. Constance Garnett (1922)




Ivan Turgenev: The Torrents of Spring (1897)


Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883)

[18 vols: 1894-1934]

7. Turgenev, Ivan. Rudin. 1857. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 1. London: William Heinemann, 1894.


8. Turgenev, Ivan. A House of Gentlefolk. 1859. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 2. London: William Heinemann, 1894.


9. Turgenev, Ivan. On the Eve: a Novel. 1860. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 3. London: William Heinemann, 1895.


10. Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Children: A Novel. 1862. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 4. London: William Heinemann, 1895.


11. Turgenev, Ivan. Smoke. 1867. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 5. London: William Heinemann, 1896.


12. Turgenev, Ivan. Virgin Soil. 1877. Trans. Constance Garnett. 2 vols. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 6-7. London: William Heinemann, 1896.


13. Turgenev, Ivan. A Sportsman’s Sketches. 1852. Trans. Constance Garnett. 2 vols. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 8-9. London: William Heinemann, 1895.


14. Turgenev, Ivan. Dream Tales and Prose Poems. 1882. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 10. London: William Heinemann, 1897.


15. Turgenev, Ivan. The Torrents of Spring, etc. 1872. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 11. London: William Heinemann, 1897.


16. Turgenev, Ivan. A Lear of the Steppes, etc. 1870. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 12. London: William Heinemann, 1898.


17. Turgenev, Ivan. The Diary of a Superfluous Man, etc. 1850. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 13. London: William Heinemann, 1899.


18. Turgenev, Ivan. A Desperate Character, etc. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 14. London: William Heinemann, 1899.


19. Turgenev, Ivan. The Jew, etc. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 15. London: William Heinemann, 1899.


20. Turgenev, Ivan. The Two Friends and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 16. London: William Heinemann, 1921.


21. Turgenev, Ivan. Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 17. London: William Heinemann, 1922.


22. Turgenev, Ivan. Three Famous Plays: A Month in the Country; A Provincial Lady; A Poor Gentleman. 1850, 1851, 1841. Trans. Constance Garnett. Introduction by David Garnett. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd. / New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934.




Alexander Ostrovsky: The Storm (1899)


Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovsky (1823-1886)

[1 vol: 1899]

23. Ostrovsky, Alexander. The Storm. 1859. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Duckworth, 1899.




Maxim Gorky: Twenty-Six Men and a Girl (1902)


Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)

[1 vol: 1902]

24. Gorky, Maxim. 'Chelkash,' in Twenty-Six Men and a Girl. 1899. Trans. Constance Garnett et al. London: Duckworth, 1902.




Constantine Feldmann: The Revolt of the "Potemkin" (1908)


Constantine Feldmann (?-d.1937)

[1 vol: 1908]

25. Feldmann, Constantine. The Revolt of the "Potemkin". 1908. Trans. Constance Garnett (1908)




Constance Garnett, trans.: Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky (12 vols)


Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)

[12 vols: 1912-20]

26. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. 1881. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 1 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1912.


27. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. 1869. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 2 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1913.


28. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Possessed. 1872. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 3 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.


29. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. 1866. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 4 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.


30. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The House of the Dead. 1862. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 5 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1915.


31. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Insulted and Injured. 1861. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 6 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1915.


32. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. A Raw Youth. 1875. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1916. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 7 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1916.


33. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Eternal Husband, and Other Stories: The Double / A Gentle Spirit. 1870, 1846 & 1876. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 8 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1917.


34. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Gambler, and Other Stories: Poor People / The Landlady. 1867, 1846 & 1847. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 9 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.


35. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. White Nights, and Other Stories: Notes from Underground / A Faint Heart / A Christmas Tree and a Wedding / Polzunkov / A Little Hero / Mr. Prokhartchin. 1848, 1864, 1848, 1848, 1848, 1849 & 1846. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 10 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1918.


36. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. An Honest Thief, and Other Stories: Uncle’s Dream / A Novel in Nine Letters / An Unpleasant Predicament / Another Man’s Wife / The Heavenly Christmas Tree / The Peasant Marey / The Crocodile / Bobok / The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. 1848, 1859, 1847, 1862, 1848, 1876, 1876, 1865, 1873 & 1877. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1919. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 11 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1919.


37. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Friend of the Family, and Other Stories: Nyetochka Nyezvanov. 1859 & 1849. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1920. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 12 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1920.




Anton Tchehov: The Witch and Other Stories (1918)


Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904)

[17 vols: 1916-26]

38. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. I: The Darling and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. Introduction by Edward Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1916.


39. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. II: The Duel and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1916.


40. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. III: The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1917.


41. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. IV: The Party and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1917.


42. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. V: The Wife and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1918.


43. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. VI: The Witch and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1918.


44. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. VII: The Bishop and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1919.


45. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. VIII: The Chorus Girl and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.


46. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. IX: The Schoolmistress and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.


47. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. X: The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1921.


48. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. XI: The Schoolmaster and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1921.


49. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. XII: The Cook’s Wedding and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922.


50. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. XIII: Love and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922.


51. Tchehov, Anton. The Plays of Tchehov, Vol. I: The Cherry Orchard and Other Plays. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923.


52. Tchehov, Anton. The Plays of Tchehov, Vol. II: Three Sisters and Other Plays. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923.


53. Garnett, Constance, trans. Letters of Anton Tchehov to His Family and Friends. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.


54. Garnett, Constance, trans. Letters of Anton Tchehov to Olga Leonardovna Knipper. London: Chatto & Windus, 1926.




The Works of Nikolay Gogol


Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852)

[6 vols: 1922-28]

55. Gogol, Nikolay. Dead Souls. 1842. Trans. Constance Garnett. 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922.


56. Gogol, Nikolay. The Overcoat and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923.


57. Gogol, Nikolay. Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1926.


58. Gogol, Nikolay. The Government Inspector and Other Plays. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1926.


59. Gogol, Nikolay. Mirgorod. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1928.




Alexander Herzen: My Past and Thoughts (vol. iii)


Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870)

[6 vols: 1924-26]

60. Herzen, Alexander. My Past and Thoughts, 6 vols. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1924-1926.



•

[in alphabetical order]:

Chekhov (1916-26): 17 vols
Dostoyevsky (1912-20): 12 vols
Feldmann (1908): 1 vol
Gogol (1922-28): 6 vols
Goncharov (1894): 1 vol
Gorky (1902): 1 vol
Herzen (1924-26): 6 vols
Ostrovsky (1899): 1 vol
Tolstoy (1894-1922): 8 vols
Turgenev (1894-1934): 18 vols

= 71 volumes in all


Osip Braz: Portrait of Anton Chekhov (1898)

Among the founders of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882 were psychologist Edmund Gurney (1847-1888), philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and classicist Frederic W. H. Myers (1843-1901).

It was hoped, not unreasonably, that these learned and dedicated pioneers in the field of parapsychology might make some concerted attempt to "come through" after their deaths, given their sustained interest in the question of some kind of survival of bodily dissolution.



Myers' immense tome Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was published posthumously, in 1903. He certainly believed that he had provided in its pages both strong evidence for survival and for the existence of a soul.

The strange phenomenon of the "cross-correspondences" (so-called) which unfolded over two decades, beginning with some automatic writing scripts by Cambridge Classics lecturer Margaret Verrall in 1901, is therefore either the strongest - albeit, also, one of the strangest - chains of evidence for human survival of bodily death, or else a colossal piece of delusion and self-deception afflicting some of the acutest minds of the time.

Essentially, by choosing your authority, you choose the view you will be encouraged to take of the story. If, for instance, you read Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death (2006), you will be left with a lingering sense of mystery and doubt surrounding the whole business.



If, however, you read Ruth Brandon's trenchant The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983), you may be left wondering why anyone could ever take seriously so bizarre a congerie of frauds and misfits?

The essence of the cross-correspondences was that it involved different mediums, on different continents, who separately received obscure and apparently nonsensical scripts which - when pieced together - produced more-or-less complete statements from (allegedly) specific individuals on "the other side."



The three principal conduits for these scripts were Mrs. Verrall (mentioned above), together with her daughter Helen; Mrs. Winifred Tennant (disguised under her professional name "Mrs. Willett"); and Mrs Alice Fleming, sister of Rudyard Kipling (who practised under the name of "Mrs Holland", thanks mainly to family disapproval).

As well as these, there was also some involvement from William James's favourite medium Leonora Piper in America. This geographical range from the United States to India has undoubtedly contributed something to the continuing fascination that still surrounds this psychic cause célèbre. And yet, what do these supposed "correspondences" actually amount to?

One of the earliest instances was noted by Alice Johnson, research officer of the Society for Psychical Research. While sorting through some of the papers held at their office in London, she noted some strange similarities between them:

in one case, Mrs. Forbes' script, purporting to come from her son, Talbot, stated that he must now leave her, since he was looking for a sensitive who wrote automatically, in order that he might obtain corroboration of her own writing. Mrs. Verrall, on the same day, wrote of a fir-tree planted in a garden, and the script was signed with a sword and a suspended bugle. The latter was part of the badge of the regiment to which Talbot Forbes had belonged, and Mrs. Forbes had in her garden some fir-trees, grown from seed sent to her by her son. These facts were unknown to Mrs. Verrall.

Taken alone, this might easily pass for coincidence, especially since, as she went on to say: "We have reason to believe that the idea of making a statement in one script complementary of a statement in another had not occurred to Mr. Myers in his lifetime — for there is no reference to it in any of his written utterances on the subject that I have been able to discover." However, in aggregate, she found the phenomenon less easy to dismiss:

Neither did those who have been investigating automatic script since his death invent this plan, if plan it be. It was not the automatists themselves that detected it, but a student of their scripts; it has every appearance of being an element imported from outside; it suggests an independent invention, an active intelligence constantly at work in the present, not a mere echo or remnant of individualities of the past.

Another frequently mentioned example was the famous (or infamous) “Hope, Star, and Browning” correspondence. In this case three mediums made independent allusions to the poetry of Robert Browning. As Jill Galvan describes it:

First, Margaret Verrall wrote a script mentioning “anagram” and containing the phrases “rats star stars” and “tears stare,” along with a second script with the word “Aster,” which is both Greek for star and another anagram for tears and stare. Additionally, this second script contained a phrase beginning with the Greek word for passion and continuing, “the hope that leaves the earth for sky — Abt Vogler for earth too hard that found itself or lost itself — in the sky.” The investigators took the phrase to be an allusion to Browning’s “Abt Vogler” (1864), specifically to line 78, “The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky”; the script substitutes Browning’s original skyward “passion” with “hope.” Then, a couple of weeks later, a script by Piper asked if Margaret Verrall had gotten the message about “Hope Star and Browning.” Around the same time, Helen Verrall received a couple of scripts that each mentioned “star” and featured a drawing of one, as well as [alluding] to Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin” (1842), and one of these scripts also offered anagrams for star in “arts” and “rats.”

This is the case which so impressed occult investigator Colin Wilson. And it does, on the face of it, seem difficult to interpret except as a series of allusions to essentially the same matter. Though precisely what was meant to be conveyed remains unclear.



One explanation for this, however, may be supplied by the sheer difficulty of transmission of ideas when one has left the earthly plain. Or so the defunct Frederic Myers explained at a séance with fellow psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge:

Lodge, it is not as easy as I thought in my impatience ... Gurney says I am getting on first rate. But I am short of breath ... I am more stupid than some of those I deal with ... It is funny to hear myself talking when it is not myself talking. It is not my whole self talking. When I am awake I know where I am.

He stated further:

We communicate an impression through the inner mind of the medium. It receives the impression in a curious way. It has to contribute to the body of the message; we furnish the spirit of it ... In other words, we send the thoughts and the words usually in which they must be framed, but the actual letters or spelling of the words is drawn from the medium’s memory. Sometimes we only send the thoughts and the medium’s unconscious mind clothes them in words.

Another explanation of the process came from another psychic researcher, Dr. Richard Hodgson, via American medium Leonora Piper:

I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying to find his hat, and I am not wholly conscious of my own utterances because they come out automatically, impressed upon the machine [the medium’s body] … I impress my thoughts on the machine which registers them at random, and which are at times doubtless difficult to understand. I understand so much better the modus operandi than I did when I was in your world.

The last word, though, must remain with Myers:

Oh, if I could only leave you the proof that I continue. Yet another attempt to run the blockade - to strive to get a message through. How can I make your hand docile enough - how can I convince them? I am trying, amid unspeakable difficulties. It is impossible for me to know how much of what I send reaches you. I feel as if I had presented my credentials - reiterated the proofs of my identity in a wearisomely repetitive manner. The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulty of sending a message is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass, which blurs sight and deadens sound, dictating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary. A feeling of terrible impotence burdens me. Oh it is a dark road.

On April 24, 1907, while in trance in the United States, ... Mrs [Leonora] Piper three times uttered the word Thanatos, a Greek word meaning "death," despite the fact that she had no knowledge of Greek. Such repetitions were often a signal that cross-correspondences were about to begin. But it had begun already. About a week earlier, in India, Mrs Holland [ie: Alice Kipling] had done some automatic writing, and in that script the following enigmatic communication had appeared: "Mors [Latin for death]. And with that the shadow of death fell upon his limbs." On April 29th, in England, Mrs Verrall, writing automatically, produced the words: "Warmed both hands before the fire of life. It fades and I am ready to depart." This is a quotation from a poem by nineteenth-century English poet, Walter [Savage] Landor. Mrs Verrall next drew a triangle. This could be Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. She had always considered it a symbol of death. She then wrote: "Manibus date lilia plenis" [give lilies with full hands]. This is a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid, in which an early death is foretold. This was followed by the statement: "Come away, come away, Pallida mors [Latin for pale death]," and, finally, an explicit statement from the communicator: "You have got the word plainly written all along in your writing. Look back." The "word," or "theme," was quite obvious when these fragments, given in the same month to three mediums thousands of miles apart, were put together and scrutinized. And in view of the lifelong interest of the communicator, it was certainly an appropriate theme. Death.

- Trans4mind

Kipling's famous poem "En-dor" (1919) warns sternly of the dangers of false comfort from spirits - or, rather, their dubious lieutenants, mediums:

The road to En-dor is easy to tread
For Mother or yearning Wife.
There, it is sure, we shall meet our Dead
As they were even in life.
Earth has not dreamed of the blessing in store
For desolate hearts on the road to En-dor.

He was himself no stranger to the subject. The death of his son John in combat at the Battle of Loos in 1915 was a blow he never really recovered from. It was made worse by the fact that he had had to exert all his special influence to ensure that John would be allowed to serve. He had already been rejected for active service due to his poor eyesight.

His poem "My Boy Jack," though ostensibly about the drowned dead of the Battle of Jutland, seems to refer obliquely to his own grief, also:

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind —
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

There's an almost Modernist fragmentedness about the gradual breakdown of the ballad form in this poem: a grief too great for the traditional forms Kipling had hitherto been sedulous in preserving.



If you want some sense of the contemporary atmosphere of a kind of half-life lived in the shadow of these immense crowds of thronging war dead, Charles Sturridge's 1997 film FairyTale - about the strange saga of the Cottingley Fairies - does a wonderful job of conveying it. Virtually all the literature of the time, the immediate post-war era - not simply such obvious examples as Eliot's Waste Land or Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" - should be read with this in mind.

Kipling's own short stories and poems chart his own steadily less unavailing attempts to come to term with his own intolerable loss. From the harsh "Mary Postgate" (1915) he moved through the healing mechanisms of "A Madonna of the Trenches" and "The Janeites" (both 1924) to his most emotional and heartbreaking story of all, "The Gardener" (1925).

John Radcliffe & John McGivering's 2011 notes on “En-dor” (on the Kipling Society website) record the history of Kipling's engagements with spiritualism and the occult in general:

This ranges from his early story "The Sending of Dana Da" (Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888) - inspired by his father's scepticism about the claims of Madame Blavatsky, one of whose séances he attended in 1880 - to "They" (1904), whose unnamed narrator suggests that the company of the dead may be permitted to those who have not known them in life, but not to those who (like himself) are searching for a particular dead child. This story appears to have been inspired by the death from pneumonia of his elder daughter Josephine, or "Josie" (1892-1899).



Kipling was, it seems, only too aware of the presence in himself of something resembling the "second sight" common among the MacDonalds, on his mother's side of the family. He wrote sceptically of this ability in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), but is careful - if one reads between the lines - not so much to deny its existence as to disavow its usefulness to the living:

... there is a type of mind that dives after what it calls ‘psychical experiences.’ And I am in no way ‘psychic.’ Dealing as I have done with large, superficial areas of incident and occasion, one is bound to make a few lucky hits or happy deductions. But there is no need to drag in the ‘clairvoyance,’ or the rest of the modern jargon. I have seen too much evil and sorrow and wreck of good minds on the road to Endor to take one step along that perilous track.

Any unbiassed reader of his work will find it difficult to ignore the obvious fascination with telepathy, precognition, and other paranormal gifts which lies behind such stories as "Wireless" (1902), "The Wish House" (1924) and (perhaps most autobiographical of all) "The House Surgeon" (1909).

Nor would it be true to say that the perils of the "Road to En-dor" were more apparent to him after the First World War than before it. His simultaneous attraction-repulsion towards the occult seems to date from all stages of his career as a writer.

There are no reliable accounts of his own return from beyond the grave to answer any of the many questions raised by his works. His own comment on that is unequivocal. His late poem "The Appeal" - first published in 1939 - reads as follows:

It I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:

And for the little, little, span
The dead are born in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.

The fear of such "unknown forces" was certainly great in Rudyard Kipling, but the temptation to write about them was evidently greater.

His younger sister Alice, known to the family as "Trix," who shared with him the appalling experiences of child-abuse and neglect - recorded in his classic story "Baa Baa Black Sheep" (1888) - which occurred when they were sent "home" to England from India in 1870, and who showed almost equal literary promise in her youth, took a rather different approach.

On her return to India at the age of 16, she married British army officer John Fleming, and, in 1893, "initially experimented with automatic writing." Her biography in the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology remarks somewhat euphemistically:

After a long illness she returned to England in 1902 and in the following year read the classic study Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, by F. W. H. Myers. As a result she contacted the secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), London, regarding her own automatic writing.

This "long illness" is presumably the "recurrent mental illness" referred to in Radcliffe & McGivering's notes on her brother's poem "En-dor" (quoted above), which overtook her in "her thirtieth year":

Trix's family linked her madness with her psychic interests. When asked whether he thought there was anything in spiritualism, Rudyard Kipling replied "with a shudder": "There is; I know. Have nothing to do with it." He is presumed to have been thinking of his sister.

The Society for Psychical Research appears to have treated her abilities equally seriously, but rather more analytically, as is evidenced by a series of papers on the "cross-correspondences" controversy published by their research officer Alice Johnson in the Society's Proceedings:

• "On the Automatic Writing of Mrs. Holland."Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 21 (1908).
• "Second Report on Mrs. Holland's Script."Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 24 (1910).
• "Supplementary Notes on Mrs. Holland's Scripts."Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 22 (1909).
• "Third Report on Mrs. Holland's Scripts."Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 25 (1911).

Then (as now) we are left with a stark choice: either to follow the hints, the half-stated truths "known to nobody else", and the endlessly frustrating lack of definitive, convincing evidence of "survival" - or else to reject the whole business as cruel deception on the part of "sensitives" together with wish-fulfilment on the part of the client. Dr Johnson perhaps summed it up best, when remarking of ghosts:

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

- Boswell: Life of Johnson (1791)

And yet, and yet ... thirty years before, in Rasselas (1759) he had commented with almost equal cogency:

That the dead are seen no more ... I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.

"Some who deny it with their tongues, confess it by their fears." Kipling was very afraid of mental disturbances in the late 1890s, in the middle of a devastating quarrel with one of his wife's brothers (the "unstable" Beatty Balestier) which threatened to undermine his and Carrie's experiment of living in the United States.

His sister's mental illness, followed swiftly by the death of the Kiplings' daughter Josie, must have constituted a great temptation to give in to what Sigmund Freud, in 1910, referred to as "the black tide of mud of occultism." That temptation is already achingly strong in the story "They," and after John's avoidable death ten years later at the Battle of Loos, it may have seemed almost overwhelming.

The poem "En-Dor," then, is simply one instalment in that ongoing struggle with himself and with circumstances. For all the cogency of its description of spiritualism, one can't avoid the fact that - unlike Robert Browning, whose "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium'" (1864) comes from a place of total non-belief - Kipling's resistance to communication with the dead seems to arise more from his conviction of its dangers to the living than from any inherent improbability in its claims:

Whispers shall comfort us out of the dark —
Hands — ah, God! — that we knew!
Visions and voices — look and hark! —
Shall prove that the tale is true,
And that those who have passed to the further shore
May be hailed — at a price — on the road to En-dor.

But they are so deep in their new eclipse
Nothing they say can reach,
Unless it be uttered by alien lips
And framed in a stranger's speech.
The son must send word to the mother that bore,
Through an hireling's mouth. 'Tis the rule of En-dor.

And what better summary of the cross-correspondences themselves can be found than the one contained in the following stanza?

Even so, we have need of faith
And patience to follow the clue.
Often, at first, what the dear one saith
Is babble, or jest, or untrue.
(Lying spirits perplex us sore
Till our loves — and their lives — are well-known at En-dor)....

"All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." Quite so. There are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying has it. It's not that the question is - or, it seems, ever can be - definitively settled. But I think Ursula Le Guin was right to say, in the third book of her "Earthsea" series, The Farthest Shore:

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

Rudyard Kipling, I suspect, would have agreed with her wholeheartedly.

A lot of people have used that title - The Mysteries of ... [somewhere or other] - since Ann Radcliffe first dreamed it up in 1794. She may have been laughed off stage by Jane Austen in her early novel Northanger Abbey, but Radcliffe's Gothic cliffhangers remain surprisingly readable:



The most famous example of this would have to be Eugène Sue's phenomenally successful serial Les Mystères de Paris, which - when eventually collected in book-form - ran to over a thousand pages of blood-and-thunder romance:



Eugène Sue's book also gave rise to the (so-called) "city mysteries" fictional subgenre, which eventually included:

• George W. M. Reynolds'The Mysteries of London (1844)
• Paul Féval's Les Mystères de Londres (1844)
• August Brass's Die Mysterien von Berlin (1844)
• L. van Eikenhorst's De Verborgenheden van Amsterdam (1844)
• Johann Wilhelm Christern's Die Geheimnisse von Hamburg (1845)
• Ned Buntline's The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848)
• Camilo Castelo Branco's Os Mistérios de Lisboa (1854)
• Émile Zola's Les Mystères de Marseille (1867)
• Francesco Mastriani's I misteri di Napoli (1869-70)

and many, many others - culminating in Michael Chabon's affectionate hommage to the form, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988).



But how does all this connect up with Ashburton, the ostensible subject of this post? Besides that extraordinary shot of the Ashburton Post Office above, there are many other reasons for finding Ashburton a strangely interesting place.





Or so we thought, at any rate, when we arranged to spend some time there earlier this month:



What on earth is this extraordinary structure, for instance? A piece of monumental art? A public convenience? It certainly serves to mark off very emphatically the railway lines which run straight through the centre of town from the rest of the Ashburton CBD.













Does the inscription read "f O R e s t"? Or could it be "f [infinity sign] r s t"? It's hard to tell. The first would certainly make the most sense, but that sideways eight does seem visible, also.



The stones, too, are in the shape of a symbol of some kind: perhaps an arrowhead? Is it pointing somewhere? Or is it indeed that "X marks the spot"?





Unimpressive, you think? You were expecting a little more? Wait, there's more ...



The idea of a grove of trees labelled "forest" reminds me a little of the moment in Janet Frame's late novel Living in the Maniototo when one of her characters, obsessed with the idea of taking a long journey through the desert, decides to undertake a short test-run near Berkeley, California. The other members of the group "deposit Roger beneath a road-sign marked ‘DESERT’." One of them comments:

it doesn’t seem real. In a country like the USA where public information is intimate and discursive, you don’t see abrupt signs like that! [171]

As Matt Harris unpacks the scene in his 2012 Doctoral thesis, Metafiction in New Zealand from the 1960s to the present day:

The sign is less designating a geographical region than it is a linguistic marking of the boundary between reality and the quixotic imagination. This is the ‘DESERT’, but not the desert Roger had idealised. ... Although he is certain that he will experience an epiphany, if not on this simulated journey then on a later journey across one of the great deserts, no such revelation is forthcoming and he begins to “feel irritated with himself for his engrossing concern for the “real” desert, the “real” journey so vivid in his mind …” [175] Perhaps unsurprisingly, Roger decides at the end of his sojourn that the real journey might not be necessary. “Why indeed go into a “real”, “utter” desert?” he asks himself. “It was in trying to test the reality that one met all the problems and failures, not only of the thing itself but of the mind that is occupied obsessively with dualism.” [185]

So what's so significant about Ashburton? What brings in visitors - besides those who simply stop in briefly on their way down the Coast Road from Christchurch to Dunedin? The main things Trip Advisor can find to mention are: the Ashburton Domain (pictured above), the Ashburton Art Gallery (which had on, during our stay, an intriguing exhibition called Snark: A Victorian Odyssey, inspired by Lewis Carroll's famous poem); The Plains Vintage Railway & Historical Museum; skydiving; and trout-fishing.

As well as all these, I'd add the fact that there's a rather marvellous bookshop just a few kilometres out of town:



What I didn't find in there, though, despite an extensive search, was a copy of Ashburton's principal literary claim to fame: the pioneering science fiction novel entitled The Great Romance (1881), published pseudonymously by someone describing himself simply as "The Inhabitant", and printed on the presses of the local newspaper.



And, yes, it was that which drew me to Ashburton. Not that I expected to pick up any real clues about the identity of its author, or even - really - to flesh out any of its narrative details with local colour, but really just to get a sense of the place: 138 years later, admittedly, but sometimes you can catch a lucky break on these little expeditions.





Here are some extracts from "The Inhabitant"'s account of his heroes - Weir, Moxton and Hope's - approach to the planet Venus in their space ship Star Climber:

The poles of the planet Venus are at such an angle that about half the planet enjoys alternately a day of three months — a long dim day of twilight, and then night; as a natural consequence, the regions approaching this country are strangely affected. When we woke in the morning we saw the first proof of this in the low sun, still hanging at the same altitude, the live-long night he had been thus creeping around, so that here there was no day or night, morning or evening, and the waste of desert around us seemed as if made for these monotonous periods.

We spread out the wings of our vessel and went on our way ... We had determined to go right over the pole of the planet, but, as we did not like to shut ourselves up again, we were soon obliged by the rarified air to turn to the lower and warmer regions, going away swiftly till grass and wood and water again began to reign, then sailing slowly, and not too high, that we might observe if anything like humanity should appear — we saw troops of beasts, four-legged and two-legged—ape-like creatures — kangaroo, or more properly three-legged animals; but none of them seemed struck with wonder as we glided slowly above them — they all fed and played and fought, as though there were nothing new under their Heaven, and if we swept down near them went away with screams and cries to their shelters. Their forms were very strange — ever recalling something we knew, yet always differing from it; yet what we most noticed — what seemed to be an unvarying characteristic — was that, whether large or small, they all moved in troops and bands, all fed and fought together, and all seemed well provided for either attack or defense; but nothing human appeared, nought of a nature similar to our own.

I can hardly tell how much we wished — how our hearts would have gone out towards any living creature which should have risen above the level of the animal world, or how out thoughts wondered over the intellectual union which might arise, should two such experiences join their pleasures, their results; yet here there was enough to recall the wildest wandering thoughts, as we went hither and thither to and from every new object, everything that promised a revelation, over lakes and mountains, rivers and forests, till we felt ourselves in the tropical regions, with the high sun blazing overhead, and the great bush herbage, and vast trees all about us.

- The Great Romance, Volume One: chapter XII

Is it just me, or is there a certain sense of the Antipodes of our own planet in these descriptions? The kangaroos, and the 'great bush herbage, and vast trees all around us'?

Presumably, given the date of his story, this "inhabitant" must have been an immigrant to New Zealand, and his voyage from the cities of the future described in the first section of his novel, to these more verdant regions, does sound like lived experience, however much he's tried to mask the fact with these interplanetary trimmings.

Yet none of this would please Moxton, he would press on to the winter half of the planet, to the land of shadow, and we expected of ice and snow, for warm as the planet was, we thought that three months' exclusion from the sun's heat, would bring the temperature very low. Yet we could not help lingering, turning to each new beauty of flower and fruit, leaf, or herbage, skimming near the edge of the forest, or the waters of the rivers, hoping to see some new elephant or huge mastodon ... So we were borne steadily onward through the fresh air of the new world — were always eager to behold something fresh — unsatisfied with the wonders of Heaven — we seemed to forget the leagues that we had travelled, unmindful of our great fate, to run like older babes in the wood from flower to flower as fancy guided us.

Yet stopping often as we did, our immense speed led us fast from clime to clime, and before the natural day would decline the sun began to grow low on the northern horizon; the tropical forests to be replaced by grassy plains and rolling, scantily timbered hills. Sometimes, too, we came on arid sand — huge dry deserts without even the proverbial vulture to enliven them; then succeeded strange twilight, with the sun low down, and its beams striking along the world — the air seemed to grow vague and yellow, a thickness and foggyness pervaded everything. How changed seemed the vegetation — rotting leaves and bare boughs; huge stalked grass, half-decayed — and here, too, we saw more birds, great downy owls, and bats to which the devil of the middle ages was a mild creature, it also seemed the land of frogs and toads — huge speckled tawny creatures, not good to look at; and the vegetation altered fast now, the reign of the fungus seemed to have begun — the ground, the trees, the water, were covered with minute forms, and in the opener spaces huge growths stranger than the cactus or fungus of the world, immense groups of all shapes, so strange were they, that even Moxton agreed to come to a stand for a while.

After they land, it is agreed that Weir and Moxton will continue their explorations in Star Climber, while John Bentford Hope stays behind on the surface of Venus. The place they choose to leave him in is described as follows:

We had selected a spot some hundreds of feet above the common level, for here all the water seemed land-locked, standing like inland lakes at all sorts of heights, rising and falling, with the season, and with no general inter-communication. It was a fine sweeping plain within the tropics, but kept cool by its elevation, and by the fact that on the still higher ground spread a large lake. There were a few trees scattered here and there, sometimes in clumps, and under a near group I had a large tent fixed for comfort in the warmer weather. [64]

"There is no doubt we were fools," said Weir, "to arrange to leave you here. There [could be] many things on this planet of which we know nothing - even the beasts have almost sense enough to besiege you. If I were you I should not travel except in the air. You are quite safe in that little boat, and even when you are about here I would always keep a revolver in my hand - make a habit of it." [67]

As it turns out, though, Hope has no need to travel in order to find out more about the planet's inhabitants. Instead, they come calling on him: a pair of aliens, with "intelligence, knowledge, in every line of their features, and with low, strange voices" [71-2]:

I woke to the sense of their presence, to seem them gazing down, arms linked to each other, male and female, gazing with soft eyes on my yet recumbent figure, their fine bodies covered with a down - neither of bird nor animal - soft and dark, and their heavy, lithe limbs, such as might have developed form the earliest of prehistoric elephant, had not the heat of a younger world debased him, and nature's giant youth pushed him in her recklessness to balk rather than serve. [71]

Judging from the description above, they sound a little like clones of Babar the Elephant. It's hard not to humanise them in one's own imagination, though.



After they've visited with him for a bit, the two aliens - refusing his invitation to enter Hope's "castle" (as he calls it). Instead:



Instead, Hope himself fires up his airship, the Midge ("she could run, or fly, or swim" [76]) and pursues them to the upland lake they'd rowed across the previous day.



The Venuses lead him trustingly back to their home, "a small mossy cabin, with a strange, bird-like air pervading it," where they appear to live all on their own:

But were they indeed so completely alone? I thought and asked, as I looked out again and could see no sign of other habitations ... and as I looked at their provisions I divined the reason - if they lived without tillage on the fruits of the ground, they must need be few in number, and live far apart. [77]

The idyll is broken by a sudden resurgence of the colonial mentality in Hope:

Yet, after all, it was they who had to learn. Their mind in its best phases had little that was superior to humanity. Some happier thoughts - some sweet companionship - some feelings of freedom and pleasure - new perhaps to any inhabitant of my native world; yet of that great body of thought which has arisen from our mechanical and omniverous [sic.] propensities, they knew nothing, and as I afterwards found out, were saved from stupidity and savageness by the long-continuing slowness of their mental emotions, and by their wonderful care of, and kindness to, each other. [77-78]

He promptly teaches them "the mystery of fire" and starts to plot their future subjugation. After all, he and his friends:

had come to find a future home for the growing millions of their native earth, and here all around the tropical zone was a region fitted with everything necessary, while the dim polar regions would serve to exercise all the latent ingenuity of the coming man. [88]

This rather chilling vision is exacerbated by the author's strange habit of switching from first person to third person narration in adjacent chapters. It's tempting to see in this a device for showing the divided nature of his protagonist, simultaneously attracted by and scornful of these gentle inhabitants of the new planet he is exploring. Certainly, at times, his thought processes are described in quite violent terms:

I laughed aloud as one in madness at what I knew not, except that all things jarred and frayed, and roughened all my spirit, and the Venuses sat on without turning a thought or eye towards me or my wild motions. [79]

The author's clumsiness of diction and general lack of narrative sophistication would seem to argue against this conclusion, but one would certainly have to acknowledge the intensely experimental nature of this piece of proto-science fiction. It is as if he is literally trying to invent a new genre as he goes along.

Another interesting aspect of Hope's courting of the Venuses is that it is juxtaposed with chapters describing Weir and Moxton's explorations among the asteroids. This second volume of his work (which must surely have been intended to have a sequel, even though no trace of it has ever been found) ends, in fact, on a literal cliffhanger, as Weir tumbles off the side of a planetoid, plummeting (as it turns out) forever:

Moxton saw him with arms wide-spread falling, falling and turning - good God! Would he never cease to fall? The huge rock fell and struck, and fell again - but Weir [...] out in space. Moxton thought his brain would burst. Would Weir never cease to fall? [102]

These are the last words of his story.



What then, is one to make of The Great Romance? Contemporary critics were pretty harsh:

This is evidently the work of a young and unpractised writer. It is full of crudities of style and matter which lay it open to criticism on almost every page; but there is something about it a little out of the common way. It exhibits an exuberant fancy, and an adroitness in avoiding obvious difficulties, that redeem it from absolute inanity, though the absurdities of its plan and the impossibilities of its details render it a fair mark for ridicule. The two “volumes” are, in reality, only pamphlets; and, as there is yet more to come, we can only faintly guess what the whole will be. The interest is well sustained so far, and lovers of Jules Verne’s delightful voyages of discovery into the unknown will find amusement for an hour or two in “The Great Romance,” even as far as it has gone. The writer, who takes the name of J. R. [for ‘B’] Hope, goes to sleep in 1950 under the influence of a chemical sleeping-draught of wondrous potency, and wakes up in 2143 in another state of existence. Finding his old friends and his ladylove greatly sublimed and glorified, he is naturally anxious to rise to the same level. He determines to start off with his friends, Weir and Moxton, in an aerial boat which he finds ready to hand, does so, and arrives at the planet Venus, where he is left by his friends, and is beginning his explorations when the second part closes. The descriptions of the voyage are ingenious, though we cannot say that the writer has the wonderful art possessed by Jules Verne of making everything appear quite natural.

[I omit here a long extract from volume 1]

... It is useless to argue about probabilities when the whole plan of the romance is founded on impossibilities, else we should say the writer had a very crude idea of the Magellan clouds, and of the possibility of life outside an atmosphere, and so on. The “Coming Race” and a recent New Zealand work – “Erchomenon” – have familiarized the minds of most readers of this sort of literature to the possibilities of speculation, with electricity and the flying-machine for materials. These books have, however, a foundation of philosophy, and the great defect of the little work before us is that at present it seems to have little but wild fancy to commend it, and no substratum of philosophical ideas on which to build its shadowy superstructure, But, as we have said, there is more to come, and we have no desire to be hypercritical.

The only other contemporary comment laid emphasis solely on the primitive nature of the production, though it did do posterity the considerable service of naming the author for us (whether accurately or not is difficult to say - there seems no obvious reason to doubt the attribution, however):

AN ASHBURTON AUTHOR. – Mr. Henry Honor, a gentleman resident in Ashburton, has at present in the Press a work of imagination entitled “The Great Romance: by the Inhabitant.” The tale is an account of a perilous voyage amongst the stellar worlds, the voyageurs being three men, and their vessel a sort of half-and-half craft called the “Star Climber.” The first “volume,” a booklet of 55 octavo pages has been issued. It has suffered a good deal at the hands of the printer, whose work is decidedly not productive of a thing of beauty.

The principal modern critic of the story, Dominic Alessio, whose 2008 edition I have hitherto been quoting from, sees it in its contemporary context as:

a promotional piece encouraging emigration. As Clute and Nicholls point out [in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction], because of New Zealand’s distance from Old World centers of power, the colony became ‘a convenient setting for moral and Utopian tales’ … The emphasis on friendly aliens may even be part of a booster strategy intended to assure European readers concerned about rebellious Maori in the post-1860s New Zealand wars climate [xliv-v].

While Alessio is eager to claim that "The Great Romance ... demonstrates that western representations of the Other are often far more complex and ambiguous than Said’s [Orientalism] assumed" [xlvi], he is nevertheless forced to conclude that:

If one deconstructs the story as an alternative ontological history of contact between the Maori and the British over the course of the nineteenth century, one which merely uses the alien-human story as a surrogate for this relationship, then it is not surprising that things still turned out the way they did despite the initial optimism for cooperation that followed in the wake of the signing of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi [xlviii].

For myself, I hope that this post has made clear my sense that a lot of the haunting strangeness we can still feel in - especially - the second, Venusian, part of The Great Romance comes from its strong roots in the local landscape.

Of course I realise that Ashburton in 2019 has little in common with the town that stood here in 1881, but such prominent features as the still spectacular Lake Heron can have changed little in the intervening 140-odd years. It does seem strangely reminiscent of the 'Venuses' lake dwelling, while the basic lines of the town would not appear to have greatly altered either. And is it wrong of me to see something of Hope's "castle" in the extravagant lines of the local post-office?



More to the point, the feeling of intense dislocation which must have prompted the "inhabitant" (or should I say Mr. Henry Honor?) to start composing his interplanetary romance are still strongly in evidence for outside visitors. There seems something inevitable about the fact that a book based on that most puzzling of nineteenth-century poems, Lewis Carroll's immortal Hunting of the Snark (1876), should also have been written here, also after an 140-year gap: David Elliot's Snark: Being a True History of the Expedition That Discovered the Snark and the Jabberwock and Its Tragic Aftermath (2016).



The most surprising thing of all, perhaps, is the concerted efforts "the inhabitant" made to circulate his work. Volume One would appear to have been printed at the office of one of the local Ashburton newspapers (though volume Two was farmed out to the presses of the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin). It seems doubtful that a third volume will ever now emerge from the stacks, but if it does I'll certainly be eager to know whether Hope is compelled by the better angels of his nature to leave the poor Venuses in peace - more to the point, whether Weir can ever be rescued from his Lucifer-like fall off the asteroid.

I'll never know, I guess. To be honest, I'm a little surprised that no-one has - as yet - undertaken to write a continuation of the story. Dickens' posthumous mystery story Edwin Drood has been "finished" by numerous other authors. Why not The Great Romance?

Well, like everyone else in the western world, it seems, I duly watched the Netflix documentary on the absurd act of hubris that was the Fyre Festival. And like everyone else, I felt disgusted and sickened by the sheer grovelling stupidity of the whole saga: above all, by what it said about our celebrity-dominated culture - more so, surely, than any polity since Ancient Rome?

There was a strange familiarity about the whole thing, though. I began to realise that I'd heard this story before:

Sinclair, David. The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History. 2003. London: Headline Book Publishing, 2004.

The perpetrator of that earlier fraud, Sir Gregor MacGregor, was apparently every bit as charismatic as more recent conman Billy McFarland:



True, the two events were two hundred years apart, but maybe that just goes to prove that there's nothing new under the sun. And don't you think that the two of them look very similar? Maybe there's a family connection - though the MacGregors hail mostly from Argyll, as I understand it, and the MacFarlands from the headwaters of Loch Lomond ...

Egregious though Billy MacFarland's crimes may appear at present, though, they don't really compare to Gregor MacGregor's. Billy invented a spurious island in the Bahamas, and alleged that he was able to mount a music festival there. Sir Gregor MacGregor invented an imaginary country out of whole cloth. He called it "Poyais," and alleged that it could be found in the Gulf of Honduras. More than 250 prospective settlers set sail for his chimerical kingdom in 1822. More than half of them died there.



Perhaps the most disconcerting moment in the netflix documentary came when one of the chuckleheads being interviewed revealed that he and his group of friends, after claiming one of the tents which were the only accommodation available onsite, proceeded to rampage around ripping and destroying all the other tents in their immediate vicinity so "they wouldn't have to put up with any close neighbours."



The grinning face of this creature, as he skited about how he'd personally pissed on as many mattresses as possible so they couln't be slept on, had to be seen to be believed. Along with the infamous shot of the cheese sandwich - the sole survivor of so many fake promises of luxury food and accommodation - this revelation of just how close we are to the skull beneath the skin was certainly arresting.



Things in Poyais were not much better, I'm afraid, when the first settlers arrived there in the early 1820s. MacGregor didn't own any of the land, for a start, but even if he had, the verdant acres and thriving towns he'd spoken of so eloquently were really tiny villages on the edge of a mosquito-infested swamp. And yet, after all, surely the author of this lovely Poyaisian vista had actually been there. Hadn't he? I mean, what more evidence could you need?



The most convincing thing of all, of course, was the Poyaisian currency and documentation MacGregor was so eager to hand out to his investors. So rich was the land, it was almost as if money grew on trees!



Today we're so much wiser, of course. Our currency of choice is frolicking models in bikinis:



Perhaps the saddest thing of all about the Poyais debacle was the fact that it constituted a kind of ghastly parody of a much sadder and infinitely more destructive event 130-odd years before: the Scottish Darien scheme of the late 1690s.



The whole thing is too sad to joke about. I'll content myself with quoting the dignified simplicity of the Wikipedia summary, instead:

The Darien scheme was an unsuccessful attempt by the Kingdom of Scotland to become a world trading nation by establishing a colony called "Caledonia" on the Isthmus of Panama on the Gulf of Darién in the late 1690s. The aim was for the colony to have an overland route that connected the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. From its contemporary time to the present day, claims have been made that the undertaking was beset by poor planning and provisioning, divided leadership, a lack of demand for trade goods particularly caused by an English trade blockade, devastating epidemics of disease, collusion between the English East India Company and the English government to frustrate it, as well as a failure to anticipate the Spanish Empire's military response. It was finally abandoned in March 1700 after a siege by Spanish forces, which also blockaded the harbour.

All of this took place just a bit down the coast from the eventual site of 'Poyais', in fact. But why was it so devastating to the Sottish economy?

As the Company of Scotland was backed by approximately 20% of all the money circulating in Scotland, its failure left the entire Lowlands in substantial financial ruin and was an important factor in weakening their resistance to the Act of Union (completed in 1707). The land where the Darien colony was built, in the modern province of Guna Yala, is virtually uninhabited today.

In other words, whether by accident or (more probably) by design, William III and his ministers orchestrated the failure of the scheme in order to weaken the independent kingdom of Scotland to the point where virtually its only chance of survival was to surrender sovereignty in the 'Act of Union' (so-called). Ever wondered why the Scots feel so bitter towards those oh-so-friendly southern neighbours of theirs?

Mind you, the plan was pretty mad to start with, and it didn't take much to put a spanner in the works. The sheer petty spite with which the English sabotaged it doesn't make pretty reading, though, even three centuries later. So you can see that the prospect of another bunch of poor Scots travelling off to the fever-ridden swamps of Central America in the 1820s wasn't really seen as a subject for mirth at the time.

Why were they so dumb? Not from choice, that's for sure. The Celtic diaspora was well underway by this time, propelled in Scotland by a lovely thing called the Highland Clearances, subject of another heartbreaking book by John Prebble.



It was, I think, Karl Marx who remarked that history does indeed repeat itself: "first as tragedy, then as farce." I don't know if there's really a precedent for this degree of repetition, though an old term from Star Trek does come to mind: "replicant fadeout" - the tendency of copies to become less and less successful over innumerable generations.

One thing's for certain, though, there will be more of this sort of thing. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," as George Santayana somewhat sententiously observed. Maybe if a few of those queuing up to disburse their riches on luxury cabanas and private yacht parties at the Fyre Festival had been in the habit of cracking a book from time to time, the whole thing might have come as less of a surprise to them.

Enough negativity for a while, though. After all, there's always part two. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?