Late Reviews
Also by Douglas A. Anderson
Prefaces Without Books (forthcoming)
Edited by Douglas A. Anderson
A Background Reader to “Tolkien On Fairy-stories”
Late Reviews
Douglas A. Anderson
Nodens Books
2018
Late Reviews
First published by Nodens Books, 2018
This edition copyright © Nodens Books, L.L.C.
ISBN 9781987512564
Printed in the United States of America
First edition: April 2018
Nodens Books www.nodensbooks.com
PO Box 493
Marcellus, MI 49067
All contents copyright © 2018 by Douglas A. Anderson.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form, by any means, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Introductory Note
“Late Reviews” are reviews that were not composed contemporaneously with a book’s original writing or publication. This volume collects such reviews as I have written—covering books from the late nineteenth-century onwards—for my “Late Reviews” column in the first thirty issues of Wormwood: A Journal Dedicated to Writings about Fantasy, Supernatural and Decadent Literature, edited by Mark Valentine and published by Tartarus Press, from Autumn 2003 to Spring 2018. I have also included my “Late Reviews” from other sources, going back to some that appeared in the mid-1990s, and I have added a number of previously unpublished ones written specifically for this collection. A good number have been silently revised, when I have learned additional details (usually about the author) since the original review appeared.
For help in various ways—from the loan of books to many other kindnesses—I am grateful to Russ Bernard, Deidre Dawson, Michael Dirda, Kevin Dodd, James Doig, Dimitra Fimi, Robert Knowlton, John D. Rateliff, Xavier Legrand-Ferronnière, John Pelan, Jim Rockhill, Mark Samuels Lasner, and Boyd White. For allowing me to have this lengthy presence in Wormwood I thank editor Mark Valentine and publisher R.B. Russell.
Douglas A. Anderson
Late Reviews
A
Adcock, A. St. John. The World That Never Was: A London Fantasy (London: Francis Griffiths, 1908). Illustrated by Tom Browne.
Arthur St. John Adcock (1864-1930) was a literary gadfly of the early twentieth century, for many years the editor of The Bookman, and an acquaintance to a large number of literary writers, including Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson. He is remembered today chiefly for his two volumes of impressions of contemporary authors, Gods of Modern Grub Street (1923) and The Glory That Was Grub Street (1928), but one of his more enduring volumes should be his study For Remembrance: Soldier Poets Who Have Fallen in the War (1918; revised 1920).
Amongst his diverse output is one fantasy novel, The World That Never Was. It is actually a children’s fantasy, about young Olive and her brother Tony, and their adventures in London at night. They meet various characters, some from folklore and legendry like Bluebird, Dick Whittington, Mother Hubbard, and the law-breaking Bill Stickers (known from the common sign “Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted”), before returning home the next morning. The children are cloying to the modern reader, and the story never casts a spell. The book is unremarkable and eminently forgettable.
Aickman, Robert. The Late Breakfasters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964).
Robert Aickman (1914-1981) wrote two novels: The Late Breakfasters, published in 1964 after circulating in manuscript for some years; and Go Back at Once, written around 1975 and still unpublished. A third work, sometimes erroneously called a novel, is the late novella, The Model, published posthumously in 1987 as a standalone story, but with it comprising in length something less than 33,000 words, it cannot be really be classified as a novel.
All three works are curious affairs, different in ways from the “strange stories” that were Aickman’s métier. The Late Breakfasters begins by telling the entire plot of the novel in the initial three sentences of the first paragraph:
Griselda de Reptonville did not know what love was until she joined one of Mrs. Hatch’s famous house parties at Beams, and there met Leander. Her brief and blighted association with Leander led rapidly, as a reaction, to her marrying the unsatisfactory Geoffrey Kynaston. After Kynaston’s death, she took up with an unpopular baronet, and lived with him very happily.
So, there is the outline, but what a difference the details make, for Griselda’s love is not for the like of Leander, a young man who in the classical story is loved by the Greek priestess Hero, but for Louise, a maid at Beams. Their delicate love comes to a quick end when Mrs. Hatch discovers the two in bed one morning, and she orders Griselda to depart immediately. Thereafter Griselda attempts to find Louise without success, and finally relents to Geoffrey Kynaston’s proposal of marriage. The result is not very happy for Griselda.
The story is set just before World War II—a few details point specifically towards 1938—but outward events do not really intrude in Griselda’s story. As Louise tells her in Chapter VIII, the problem everyone must solve is “finding someone, even one single person, you can endure life with.” Aickman does not use labels such as lesbian or homosexual anywhere in this novel (this is not really surprising, as the decriminalization of homosexual acts in England didn’t begin until 1967), but doubtless this was for Aickman an artistic choice. Throughout the book there are hints or oblique statements about the sexual natures of other characters (e.g., the elderly bookstore owner who takes Griselda under his wing notes in Chapter XVI that “my eros veers almost entirely towards Adonis”; Griselda tells her future husband in Chapter XIX that she is not entirely “that way”; Griselda’s friend Lena remarks offhandedly in Chapter XXIV “I’ve never succeeded with men”; and Hugo Raunds, the unpopular baronet whose very unconventional household Griselda joins at the end, is described in Chapter XXXV as “a very secret man”—the implication is clearly sexual in nature, and Louise had told Griselda in Chapter X that Hugo “understands people like us”).
Aickman’s reflections on marriage pepper the book as well. Kynaston emphasizes that what he wants is “a suitable woman to manage my life for me. Without that, even my poetry will be still another dreariness and misery” (Chapter VI). Griselda notices that a friend is “suffering from that cancer of will which Griselda had observed so often to accompany matrimony” (Chapter XXIII). And after Kynaston and Griselda have intercourse, Griselda notes “at the very end, there was very little mystery left, and less wonder” (Chapter XXXI).
Despite mentions of Stephanie, the occasional ghost at Beams, there isn’t much supernatural about the book, and only in the odd scene at Sir Travis Raunds’s deathbed, which Griselda stumbles through a woods to witness, does Aickman approach the kind of symbolic storytelling that one finds in his “strange stories.” As a novel, The Late Breakfasters—the title refers to people like Griselda who arrive late for Mrs. Hatch’s breakfasts at Beams—is not very successful. It begins promisingly, but continues with long stretches through which Aickman’s prose and light wit are about the only attractions to keep one reading.
In Race Against Time: How Britain’s Waterways Were Saved (1990), David Bolton notes that the manuscript of The Late Breakfasters “had been doing the rounds of the publishers without success” (note that Aickman at this time was a literary agent himself, the last member of the Richard Marsh Agency) when Aickman was contacted by Herbert van Thal, who asked if Aickman had “anything in his locker.” Within ten days of receiving the manuscript van Thal had sold the book to Victor Gollancz. Aickman dedicated the book to “Herbert van Thal—Magician.” Gollancz published it in May 1964, in
the usual Gollancz yellow jacket, but oddly with only this very brief description: “A novel of disturbing wit: gaily unpredictable: rich in eccentrics: often very funny: always delightful.”
Bolton also notes that in April 1965 Aickman published a series of valedictory pieces in the Inland Waterways Association Bulletin. One was a brief autobiography, which concluded: “Those, if any, who wish to know more about me, should plunge beneath the frivolous surface of The Late Breakfasters” (p. 239). This is a very odd comment, which doubtless can be interpreted in multiple ways.
Aickman, Robert. Panacea (unpublished; v, 1037 pages).
Robert Aickman (1914-1981), now renowned for his “strange stories,” wrote two autobiographies. The first, The Attempted Rescue (1966), covers Aickman’s childhood and youth roughly up to World War II. The second, The River Runs Uphill (1986), was published posthumously, and details Aickman’s involvement in the founding and the subsequent history of the Inland Waterways Association. The 2014 Tartarus Press edition of The River Runs Uphill restores a chapter and other passages that were not included in the original edition. Aickman planned a third autobiography, but it never came about.
Both books are more impressionistic than comprehensive, and they are selective about the subjects that they discuss. Specific details are often murky, and actual dates are rare, so the chronology is often nebulous. Basically Aickman has shaped his own life-story into a narrative in a manner suited to his own views and interpretations. Thus it is by far more subjective than objective.
One of the most curious matters in the book, discussed only briefly, is Aickman’s first major literary effort. Here is what Aickman writes of the book:
I spent just over a year producing a book named Panacea. (For me no writing, large or small, had ever gone well unless I have the right title from the outset.) The public examinations for Mandarins in Imperial China set a single task: Write all that you know. Panacea was a book of that kind, except that the learning was freely oxygenated with comment, largely aesthetic. I did not claim to solve every problem, but those I did solve, I solved lucidly and for ever. The whole ran to about 150,000 words; written almost entirely during mornings and afternoons. . .. During the whole course of the work, I had no friends at all. I sent the hideous heap of holograph, closely packed on both sides of each sheet, to be typed at Leigh-on-Sea by an enterprise which advertised its sympathetic attention to authors’ peculiarities. The work was done excellently, but I had a correspondence about the bill, in which I suspect that I was in the wrong. I simply had no more money available. I sent Panacea to J.C. Squire, who was then associated with a literary agency named John Paradise. Incredibly, Squire himself wrote to me that he thought the book had exceptional qualities. It would be very difficult to sell, but he was willing to try. He tried about ten publishers, but, not surprisingly, had no success. After the dilapidating mass came back to me, I did nothing further with it. I appear since to have lost all three typescripts, to say nothing of the original manuscript. I had a good look for them some years ago, but could find them nowhere. (p. 187-8 of the 2013 Tartarus Press edition).
The reference to Sir John Collins Squire (1884-1958) helps date the enterprise. Squire was the editor of The London Mercury from its founding in 1919 through August 1934. He also served as the principal reader for the publisher Macmillan from about 1930, and had an office there from which he did most of his literary work. His involvement with John Paradise was short-lived—it apparently began in 1936 and ended sometime in 1938 after Squire had signed a contract with Macmillan that gave him a secure income. Advertisements for “John Paradise Literary Agent” that appear in The London Mercury of the time period list “Sir John Squire” as one of two partners. Thus Aickman’s writing of Panacea probably dates to 1936-37.
Aickman’s holograph manuscript and one typescript survives in the Robert Aickman Collection at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Another typescript is held by the Aickman estate. I’m grateful to Ray Russell of Tartarus Press and the agents for the Aickman’s estate, Artellus Limited, for allowing me to give some public account of this important work.
Its full title is Panacea: The Synthesis of an Attitude. The main body of the typescript consists of 1,037 pages, comprising a foreword, eighty numbered chapters, and a final “Note on ‘Hamlet.’ ” Aickman estimated the length at 150,000 words, but in fact it is closer to 265,000 words. The chapters are not of even lengths, and the book itself is divided into three parts. The first part comprises some 313 pages and includes the foreword and the first 49 chapters. Part II includes chapters 50 through 68 (342 pages); and Part III comprises chapters 69 through 80, plus the final “Note on ‘Hamlet’ ” (380 pages). Ray Russell, one of the few people who has read Panacea, is completely correct in characterizing the whole as “an incoherent and rambling mess of a book.” And he is equally correct in noting that there are very interesting parts in the book, even if they don’t add up to a satisfying whole. Here I will attempt to give a summary of the contents of the book.
Aickman’s fourteen page foreword, headed “Read This First,” is doubtless the best way by which to approach such an odd work as this. Aickman begins: “It is essential that the reader first learn that this book merely attempts to set down, or rather to suggest, an attitude to life. There is in it no reforming intent whatever.” So far, so good, but quickly Aickman moves on to subjective and eccentric positions. “The attitude considered is shared by the reader and the writer, for if the writer is a good writer, and the reader knows how to read, they are really the same person. The word ‘we’ in this book refers to at least two persons.” Aickman’s views are often expressed in an epigrammatic manner, didactic, and without supporting details. The flow of thought is erratic, and it often seems self-contradictory, and at times repetitive.
Here follows some brief notes, snippets, and paraphrases from each of the chapters. These are not to be taken as synopses, but merely as representative strands of thought to be found in each respective chapter. (I also note that it is particularly unfair in giving such short comments on the later, longer chapters, but space limitations are necessary in what is intended to be only a glimpse at a very long work.) Each of the chapters is titled, and I present the typescript page number given in parentheses immediately after.
Part I
Foreword (1)
1. “The Problems Loom. The Alphabet of Sociology” (15)
Mankind has low aspirations, and throughout history only a small minority has known any gratification or fullness of well-being.
2. “The Start of the Search for an Appropriate Attitude” (17)
Those of mankind who show original thought are outcast from the herd. A rift in human society occurs when some people consider the welfare of others, as well as of themselves. This allows the selfish to present themselves as leaders, and they suppress new and independent thinking. “Freedom for the individual is essential.”
3. “Individual” (20)
Attempts at achieving racial purity must fail. History shows many examples of the improvement in living standards with the infiltration of one culture by another. The term “race” means very little.
4. “Squire” (23)
Man lived in small settlements, usually to the benefit of all, until the industrial revolution.
5. “After the Wheel” (25)
The real change in the mentality of mankind brought about by the invention of power machinery has not yet been understood.
6. “The Philosophy of Work as a Virtue” (26)
The necessity of food, via farming, brought about the philosophy of work as a virtue.
7. “Definition of a Word” (28)
When a man works not for money but for love of the task, he works far harder. This questions the definition of the word “work.”
8. “The Philosophy of Work as a Curse” (29)
Life is short, but in order to really live, man needs to be free, especially from forced labor.
9. “The
Pack Horse” (30)
The reign of the pack horse as the principal means of transport was ended by the steam locomotive, though inland waterways had been an improvement until they were strangled by the railway companies. The internal combustion engine put roadways back into importance.
10. “Faster Still” (33)
The telegraph brought about quick communication between distant locales.
11. “Description of a Risky Situation” (34)
Wireless communication will make future wars different from past ones, and another world war might cause the destruction of the human race.
12. “The Baby” (37)
The infant mortality rate has fallen because of advances in medicine and hygiene. The world population is increasing rapidly, thus also increasing the belligerent standings of nations.
13. “Eugene—Old Style” (43)
A discourse on the historical problems between English kings and their barons.
14. “Eugene—New Style” (46)
The vestiges of hereditary rule in England have given rise to the application of so-called eugenics, particularly in the aristocracy.
15. “The Pig Has No Morals” (49)
Some questions about the objectives in the breeding of men.
Late Reviews Page 1
