by Roger Dobson
The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size . . . The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern. . . .
In each of the angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture.
Zaleski would have felt at home amid such dark splendour. There is a long lineage for such settings: these romantic eyries date back to Horace Walpole and Mrs Radcliffe. Few readers even today possess the wherewithal to reside in such apartments (Poe himself lived in a succession of humble dwellings), and so it is a façile method of creating a vicarious thrill for both author and reader.
The situation of detective mastermind and faithful companion, amanuensis and Boswell, reflects Poe’s Dupin tales. We discover that Zaleski’s companion is named Shiel halfway through the first tale. In ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ the nameless narrator (Poe himself, in dreams?) and Dupin inhabit ‘a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St Germain’. Dupin, like Zaleski and Roderick Usher, enjoys the gloomy and crepuscular:
It was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?) to be enamoured of the Night for her own sake; and into this bizarrerie, as into all his others, I quietly fell. . . . The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighted a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams—reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness.
Besides Dupin, Zaleski’s origins have variously been attributed to the character of Count Stenbock, Prince Florizel from Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights and The Dynamiter and Eugene Sue’s princely characters from The Mysteries of Paris and Paula Monti. Stenbock was a flamboyant Estonian aesthete and decadent. Stephen Wayne Foster in ‘Prince Zaleski and Count Stenbock’ in Shiel in Diverse Hands (1983) writes: ‘Stenbock’s rooms at Kolk [his mansion in Estonia] were filled with Pre-Raphaelite paintings, oriental shawls, peacock feathers, rosaries, a bronze statue of Eros, and so forth.’ Stenbock was an opium-addict, though Zaleski’s drug habit may have been suggested more directly by Sherlock Holmes’s indulgence in cocaine.
Like Dupin, Zaleski is able by pure reasoning to solve the first two cases (or the first two we hear of) without stirring from his retreat. He pronounces:
‘I tell you, Shiel, I know whether Mary did or did not murder Darnley; I know—as clearly, as precisely, as a man can know— that Beatrice Cenci was not “guilty”, as certain recently-discovered documents “prove” her, but that the Shelley version of the affair, though a guess, is the correct one. It is possible, by taking thought, to add one cubit—or say a hand, or a dactyl—to your stature; you may develop powers slightly—very slightly, but distinctly, both in kind and degree— in advance of those of the mass. . . . ’
Zaleski looks forward, as Shiel did as a social Darwinist, to evolution improving man’s faculties and moral sense: ‘ . . . and who shall say what presciences, prisms, séances, what introspective craft, Genie apocalypses, shall not then become possible to the few who stand spiritually in the van of men’. The optimistic Shiel was not to know that mankind would become so reliant on technology in the succeeding century that our undoubted psychic gifts have atrophied rather than advanced. And he was woefully off-target in predicting an end to world war (see below).
The first tale, ‘The Race of Orven’, concerns the death of Lord Pharanx, who is found at Orven Hall lying on his bed stabbed through the heart, with a bullet in his brain. The tale is full of surreal and macabre touches such as the ‘front phalanges of a human hand’—those of the chief suspect Maude Cibras—found outside the window. The second story ‘The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks’ concerns a stolen gem which a wily Persian, Ul-Jabal, secretary to Sir Jocelin Saul (a scholar of ‘Pre-Zoroastrian Theogonies’), attempts to steal. The story reflects Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, in Ul-Jabal’s nocturnal haunting of Sir Jocelin’s bedchamber. Zaleski’s mummy, a Memphian priest, figures slightly in the plot, and though Shiel utilises the eastern legend of the Assassins and the Old Man of the Mountains to good effect the working out of the mystery is grotesquely unbelievable.
The Zaleski tale that has generated the most fascination, because of its philosophical dimension, not to mention its controversial and prophetic nature (consider the title), is ‘The S.S.’ In this story we learn that the mansion is ‘R—— Abbey, in the county of M——’. (In later years, in ‘The Missing Merchants’, the county becomes Monmouthshire and Zaleski’s abbey is not far away from Arthur Machen’s Caerleon.) The greatest mystery in the story is the date of its setting: 1875. In 1875 Matthew Phipps Shiell (the original spelling) was an adventurous ten-year-old scaling mountains tops and circumnavigating sulphurous springs in his native Montserrat. Perhaps Shiel didn’t wish to be too closely associated with the ‘Watson’ character; or did he prefer his readers to imagine he was an older, more authoritative figure than the twenty-nine-year-old of reality? Did he perhaps wish Zaleski to ‘predate’ Sherlock Holmes as the first consulting detective? Or was it simply a literary jest? Shiel also put himself into his turn-of-the-century trilogy, The Purple Cloud, The Lord of the Sea and The Last Miracle, as the recipient of the notebook transcripts of the future visions of Mary Wilson, the psychic, who under hypnosis, relates the future events of the novels; though, as has been pointed out, the three novels present inconsistent projections of the future. The only way to reconcile the differing scenarios is to invoke the concept of alternative worlds, with divergent histories. Perhaps Shiel delighted in presenting his readers and critics with such ambiguities: the inconsistencies surely must have occurred to him while he was writing the books. Shiel also refers to Britain as ‘my country’ in Prince Zaleski—an odd turn of phrase for an Irish Montserratian.
The deaths in ‘The S.S.’ begin with that of an elderly wealthy man of science, Professor Schleschinger, a consulting laryngologist. He plans to marry a beautiful and accomplished young woman, in order to create a direct heir: his own children, from his first two marriages, having died. Shortly before the wedding the professor is found dead in his stately mansion near the Unter den Linden in Berlin. Lying by his bed is a piece of papyrus ‘on which were traced certain grotesque and apparently meaningless figures’. This strip was taken from a woman’s mouth after her death in a slum area of the city. A doctor examining Schleschinger finds that ‘neatly folded beneath the dead tongue, lay just another piece of papyrus as that which he had removed from the bed.’ The strip is coated with honey but contains no poison. Within weeks of the professor’s death, a ‘frenzied death-dance’ begins: eight thousand people in Germany, France and Britain die, whether by suicide or murder; many have ‘figured, honey-smeared slips of papyrus beneath their tongues’. Shiel’s readers will have known that no such epidemic of suicides occurred in Europe in 1875. Perhaps Shiel was testing how far he could get readers to suspend disbelief. In this tale Zaleski leaves the abbey to track down the assassins, the Society of Sparta, dedicated to purging the race of the sickly and diseased. Paradoxically, Zaleski sympathises with the concept of eugenics:
‘We no longer have world-serious war—but in its place we have a scourge, the effect of which on the modern state is precisely the same as the effect of war on the ancient, only,—in the end,—far more destructive, far more subtle, sure, horrible, disgusting. The name of this
pestilence is Medical Science . . . Do you know that at this moment your hospitals are crammed with beings in human likeness suffering from a thousand obscure and subtly-ineradicable ills, all of whom, if left alone, would die almost at once, but ninety in the hundred of whom will, as it is, be sent forth “cured”, like missionaries of hell, and the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, to mingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their protean vileness? . . . What then, you ask, would I do with these unholy ones? To save the State would I pierce them with a sword, or leave them to the slow throes of their agonies? Ah, do not expect me to answer that question—I do not know what to answer. The whole spirit of the present is one of a broad and beautiful, if quite thoughtless, humanism, and I, a child of the present, cannot but be borne along by it, coerced into sympathy with it. “Beautiful” I say: for if anywhere in the world you have seen a sight more beautiful than a group of hospital savants bending with endless scrupulousness over a little pauper child, concentrating upon its frailty the whole human skill and wisdom of ages, so have not I.’
Shiel doubtless witnessed such scenes as a medical student at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Zaleski’s phraseology—‘these unholy ones’—chills the blood. To our eyes, after the Nazis put these doctrines of ‘racial hygiene’ into practice, the concept of eugenics and selective breeding of the fittest seems immoral and obscene; but such ideas were common in Victorian and Edwardian society, among right and left political thinkers. Consider this: ‘ . . . whole masses of the human population are . . . inferior in their claim upon the future . . . they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power . . . To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.’ The new masters must ‘check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men’. The coming world order must ‘tolerate no dark corners where the people of the Abyss may fester’. A Hitlerian rant from Mein Kampf or the Nuremburg rallies perhaps? No, these passages come from that friend of humanity, H.G. Wells. They appear in Anticipations (1901). Such a naïve philosophy fails to recognise that healthy people are not automatically virtuous. Mankind cannot be improved morally simply by making individuals fitter. Beethoven was deaf and Homer and Milton blind. Pope was a dwarf, and who would be without Stephen Hawking?
A scientific creed which seems practical in an armchair in a book-filled Victorian study leads inexorably to the gas-chambers of Auschwitz. But as an evolutionist Shiel cared more for the race than for individuals, and so he was able to write of such things with a cool detachment.
Encouraged by the more businesslike Gawsworth, Shiel resurrected Zaleski in his old age, though with little success, and a fourth tale, ‘The Return of Prince Zaleski’, was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1955 and in Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk by Arkham House in 1977. This was rewritten by Gawsworth from a story called ‘Land-Lease’ and is also known as ‘The Murena Murder’. In a ‘Survivor’s Note’, reproduced in The Works of M.P. Shiel (Vol. II, 1980), Gawsworth states: ‘ . . . The Missing Merchants and The Return of Cummings King Monk are M.P.S. text (90%) J.G. text (10%) collaborations. I have yet to spur myself to complete The Hargan Inheritance [which exists as a six-page manuscript fragment] and permit Prince Zaleski to sleep more soundly than Count Dracula.’ Whether the statement about the percentage of Gawsworth input is accurate can hardly be determined now. But Gawsworth, for all his ego, knew that Shiel’s name on a tale meant a great deal and his name comparatively little. A later tribute, ‘Prince Zaleski’s Secret’, appeared in Mark Valentine’s Seventeen Stories (2013), alongside homages to Holmes and the Victorian Indian sleuth Khala Persad. Like Dracula and Holmes, Zaleski refuses to fade away.
‘Dog & Duck’ weekend, Mouselow summit, Hadfield, Saturday 8th July1989. L-R: Graham Cooling, Roger, Mark Valentine, Mike Butterworth, Iain Smith, John Coulthart, John Clark.
REMEMBERING RENJIE: THE WRENNE JARMAN MYSTERY
From the grave of Wrenne Jarman, poet (1905-1953), East Sheen and Richmond Cemeteries, Richmond, London.
The Lost Club Journal, No. 3, Winter 2003/Spring 2004
pseudonym ‘Anthony Carter’
The mystery associated with Wrenne Jarman’s grave was alluded to in our tribute to Father Brocard Sewell in the Lost Club Journal No.2. The journalist and poet Wrenne Madeleine Jarman was a friend of Montague Summers in his last years, spent at Richmond-on-Thames in Surrey, and a magnetic personality in her own right. No one will ever write a biography of Wrenne since there is presumably insufficient information available regarding her life, so she seems an eminently suitable candidate for assessment by the Lost Club.
Father Brocard provided a portrait of Wrenne in Tell Me Strange Things, the tribute to Montague Summers (The Aylesford Press, 1991). Wrenne came from a comfortably off Richmond family—her father Job Jarman was a builder—and worked as a journalist on the Richmond and Twickenham Times. Father Brocard suggests that she met Summers through a series of articles she wrote on local notables. (We believe we may have identified Wrenne’s profile: an article on Summers appeared in the Richmond Times in winter 1945. Although there is no byline, Wrenne may have been responsible for the piece, for one sentence, referring to Oxford, suggests that the reporter was female. Our investigations are continuing.) Her verses appeared in the Poetry Review, Poetry Quarterly, Punch and other periodicals of the day. Her first book, The Breathless Kingdom, appeared in 1948, from the Fortune Press (oh, for a time machine to travel back to the London of the Forties to see how Wrenne got on—or not—with Reginald Caton, the eccentric owner of the Press! See Timothy d’Arch Smith’s The Books of the Beast [1987] for a candid chapter on the incorrigible old rogue1).
The Breathless Kingdom, by Wrenne Jarman, Fortune Press, 1948.
Wrenne Jarman from the frontispiece to Nymph in Thy Orisons, St Alberts Press, Llandeilo, 1960.
After Wrenne’s death a second collection, Nymph, in Thy Orisons (1961), edited by her brother Archie Jarman, a poet and painter, was published by Father Brocard at the Saint Albert’s Press in a limited edition of 250 copies. Walter de la Mare, Edmund Blunden and Clifford Bax among others expressed admiration for Wrenne’s poetry. Her friend Mrs Eileen Garrett, president of the Parapsychology Foundation of New York, described her as ‘a brown-eyed, gazelle-like creature’. Indeed, the studio photograph of Wrenne reproduced in Nymph, in Thy Orisons shows her to have been breathtakingly lovely; more movie star than poet, and an easy face to fall in love with, if only posthumously. To his shame, the present writer took no interest in Wrenne when he encountered her name in Joseph Jerome’s Montague Summers: A Memoir (1965): clearly a spinster poet who was of little account. Then, sometime later, he saw the photograph in Nymph, in Thy Orisons, and all was changed. No wonder Wrenne attracted the attention of Aleister Crowley. Although a devout Catholic—many of her poems concern religious themes—Wrenne became friendly with Crowley, who lived in Petersham Road and in a Queen Anne house on Richmond Green (has it ever been identified, one wonders) in the 1940s.
Joseph Jerome, in the Summers biography, says that Wrenne met Montie through the poet and editor Charles Cammell and his wife Iona (perhaps they introduced her so that Wrenne could write her newspaper profile): ‘Summers came to have a high regard for Miss Jarman, who was extremely gifted and able intellectually to meet Summers on his own level . . . her courage and sense in ignoring gossip about Summers and taking him as she found him were admirable.’ Mr Jerome (or should that be Fr Jerome?) quotes a kindly letter from Summers to Wrenne, written in 1946: she was ill and was about to enter a nursing home (at Amblecote): ‘Eat well, drink well, sleep well, rest well—and be well. And may our Lady of Lourdes look after you as She will of course do.’
The poet and author Derek Stanford met Wrenne when he was working at Eric Barton’s Baldur Bookshop on Hill Rise, Richmond, in the 1940s. In his essay ‘Boutique Fantasque’
in the London Magazine (August/September 1988), Mr Stanford has left a poignant sketch of Wrenne:
One of those literary hostesses—Betty Shaw-Lawrence on The Green was another—who collected lions and lovers, Wrenne had been, still was, a very beautiful woman. She had independent means, a charming old house, and enough talent and sex appeal to set her up successfully as a lyric poet in the minor mode of the pre-Sparkian Poetry Society.
She invited me to supper shortly after I had met her in the bookshop and asked me if I liked beautiful women. I replied that I did—especially when they were amusing as well—and this appeared safely to circumvent a possibly romantic moment à deux. She was full of those confidences which the garrulity of self-preoccupation seems to sponsor.
It was not only the evident—I might almost say protuberant—attractions of her person which justified her in regarding herself as a femme fatale. Her current lover, a young middle-aged, good-looking but balding, sexological man-of-letters, had just passed away; and this sort of thing appeared to be the norm.
‘All the men I love, and who love me, die, Derek. Is it something about me, do you think?’
I rather supposed it might be a question of emotional over-work, Wrenne was, after all, very intense.
Indeed, there did seem to be certain traits of fatality attached to her. Sometime during the war years, Aleister Crowley had lived at Richmond; and it was inconceivable that such a womaniser should not have come up against Wrenne. What their relationship was I do not know—Don Juan versus La Belle Dame sans Merci?—but she protested sadly that it was he who had ‘wished’ his asthma on her, which she had suffered from ever since.
