Of Kings And Things
Of Kings And Things: Strange Tales and Decadent Poems
by Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock
Edited by David Tibet
Published by Strange Attractor Press 2018. Second printing 2019.
ISBN: 9781907222573
Cover design by Ania Goszczyńska
Layout by Jamie Sutcliffe
The font used in this book's design was created by Ania Goszczyńska as an expansion of the font used on the boards of the first edition of Studies of Death (David Nutt, London, 1894), designed by Aymer Vallance.
David Tibet has asserted his moral right to be identified as the editor of this collection in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Strange Attractor Press
BM SAP, London, WC1N 3XX, UK
www.strangeattractor.co.uk
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And London, England.
d_r0
Contents
Introduction A Catch of a Ghost
Stories Hylas
Narcissus
The Death of a Vocation
Viol D’amor
The Egg of the Albatros
The True Story of a Vampire
The Worm of Luck
The Other Side
Faust
The Story of a Scapular
A Modern St. Venantius
La Girandola
The Child of the Soul
The King's Bastard
A Secret Kept
La Mazurka Des Revenants
Poems, Songs, and Sonnets εἰς τὸν ἐρώμενον Or, A Decade Of Sighs On A Lost Love: Prelude
VII
Finale
The Ballad of the Dead Sea Fruit
The Song of the Unwept Tear
Cradle Song
Child Grief
The Two Sleepers and the One That Watcheth
From Ζιγάνια
Dedication to My Unknown Ideal
Song I Preludium
Song III
Valse Des Bacchantes
A Dream
The White Rose
Sonnet V on a Dream
The Lunatic Lover
Sonnet VII
Insomnia
The Vampyre
The Singing Sisters
Song XIII to a Boy
Gabriel
Viol d’Amor
The Death-Watch
Autumn Song I (Nocturne)
Autumn Song II (Vespertine)
May Blossom (A Vision)
Fragment
Sonnet II
Sonnet VI
Sonnet VII
Nocturne (A Prose Poem)
Sonnet V (On a Picture by Simeon Solomon)
Song
Night and Her Twin Children, Sleep and Death
The Lunatic Lover (A Fantastic Ditty to J. H*****S)
London Bridge Is Broken Down
Essay The Myth of Punch
Afterword
Editorial Note
A Note on Sources
Bibliography
Dedication
Studies of Death, David Nutt, London, 1894.
As Oscar Wilde's champion Robert Ross said of Stenbock's friend, the artist Simeon Solomon, after his public disgrace: “For poor Solomon, there was no place in life. Casting reality aside, he stepped back into the riotous pages of Petronius.” The same description could equally be applied to that enigmatic, and most decadent, poet and writer Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock.
In his lurid and excitable The Magical World of Aleister Crowley (1977), the popular historian of magic Francis King wrote of Stenbock that:
“[he] made an attempt to understand his own homosexuality in terms of traditional occultism, eventually coming to view his condition as an aspect of vampirism and lycanthropy… torn between Catholicism and diabolism… he died, deluded that a huge doll was his son and heir, in 1895.”
This fantastical portrait of a decadent and his doom is as much as even the most dedicated enthusiast of baroque fiction might have known at that time about Stenbock, a deeply mysterious writer described by W.B. Yeats, in his anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, as “scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men”. Here then are some sketches of the ghost of Count Stenbock, of his kindness to humans and animals, of his idiosyncrasies, and of the balloons he set free at Dorpat.
Eric was born, on March 12 1860, to Lucy Sophia Stenbock (née Frerichs), the daughter of a well-to-do German cotton importer who had moved to England, and her husband Erik Friedrich Diedrich Magnus Stenbock, a member of the extended Swedish and Russian aristocracy, with large estates in Estonia, having the beautiful manor house at Kolga (known in German as Kolk) as the family seat.
He was christened Eric Magnus Andreas Harry, and brought up at Thirlestaine Hall in Cheltenham. His father was not to live long, dying (from drink, it is said) the following year at his estate in the Tyrol, whilst his wife was in England. Lucy soon remarried, to a gentleman called Frank Mowatt, a clerk in the British government's Treasury Office; he was to become Permanent Secretary in 1894.
Information about Eric's life is often scanty. But we do know that his health was poor as a child; his stepfather stated, in a letter of 26 July 1881 to Eric's uncle Nikolai Stenbock, that “during his infancy and boyhood Count Eric's health was very weak and that it was only by unusual care that his life was preserved.”
The young boy entered a school in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1874, as desired by his stepfather: “when his health became stronger, about his 15th year, I thought it would be better that he should complete his education in England and Germany…”
A letter from Mowatt, again to Nikolai Stenbock, dated January 15 1877, shows the family's hopes for Eric: “Your nephew Eric is doing very well at Wiesbaden where he attends the Gymnasium and also learns the Russian language… At the end of the year 1877 we intend to send Eric to Russia to study the Russian language and to enable him to prepare for his examination for the army.” But, although the family continued to make further lacklustre attempts to place Eric amongst the Tsar's troops, it seemed that the Russian army were not to have Eric join them.
Stenbock at the age of 18.
Leaving Wiesbaden in 1877, he went up to Balliol College at Oxford University, again in accordance with the wishes of his stepfather, who had written on 26 July 1881 to Nikolai Stenbock:
“until he was 17 years old, I had hoped that he would have been able and willing to have become a soldier in the army of his country [Russia]. But he gradually showed a great dislike to a military career and when he became 18 his mother and myself changed the plan of his education—I decided to send him to the university of Oxford, as we hoped that this would fit him for his future life as a landholder of Kolk.”
Love, Sleep, & Dreams, A. Thomas Shrimpton & Son, Oxford/Simpkin, Marshall & Co., London, [1881?].
But he remained at Oxford for only 4 terms. In a letter from 8 May 1880, Mowatt writes to Nikolai Stenbock, saying:
“I do not think that any good object will be obtained by Count Eric returning to Oxford to finish his studies, and it will therefore be necessary to make arrangements to enable him to study either at Kolk or Reval… Eric has, as you know, become a Roman Catholic. It is a very great grief to his mother and myself and will I am sure cause sorrow to all his family. He is however still young, and perhaps at Kolk, where there are very few priests, he may grow wiser as he gets older, and a
gain join some less ridiculous religion. Eric's health until the last few years has been not good, and it has made his education very difficult. He is now however quite well and strong as you will find when he comes to you… He will discuss with you whether he shall become a soldier…”
Myrtle, Rue, and Cypress, Hatchards, London, 1883.
The problem was not just Eric's conversion to the “ridiculous religion” of Roman Catholicism (at which he had taken the name Stanislaus, in honour of one of his favourite saints, St. Stanislaus Kostka). Frank Mowatt foresaw future problems that would arise from Eric's idiosyncratic and profligate nature:
“I strongly recommend that he should not be allowed to spend too much money. I will supply him with an allowance of £400 a year which ought while he remains with you to be sufficient for his entire expenditure including the amount which he will have to pay to his tutor and professors. If he is allowed to spend more money or to get into debt I am afraid from my knowledge of his character that he will easily become extravagant.”
A dedication by Stenbock to Alys Whitall Smith, whose middle name he misspells as “Whiteall”, written by Eric in his second book of poems, Myrtle, Rue, and Cypress. The Russian phrase says “Women have no soul, only vapour [or “exhalation”].”
In 1881, at the age of 21, Eric published his first book, Love, Sleep, & Dreams, a short collection of haunting, melancholic, and tortured poems, including an untitled piece about a “passionate male heart” that loved the subject of the poem when he “was a boy”. No reviews of the book are known; the book itself, like all of the other volumes of his work published during his lifetime, is exceptionally rare.
Two years later, he was to publish Myrtle, Rue, and Cypress, a somewhat longer collection. He dedicated it to the extraordinary pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon, who had been arrested 10 years earlier for homosexual activity in a public toilet, and who had begun his long and sad journey into public opprobrium and alcoholism. It was also dedicated to one of Eric's cousins, Arvid Stenbock, with whom he had had a close relationship—one close enough to be looked on disapprovingly by his family—and also to Charles Bertram Fowler, the sixteen-year-old son of an Oxfordshire clergyman, who had died of consumption in 1880. The contents of the poems are desolate, suicidal, spectral, and supernatural, and Eric's love of young men is increasingly evident, as is the darkness that surrounded him. Once again, no reviews are known.
Spending time travelling in Russia, Germany and Estonia, in 1884 he exiled himself to Belgium, to escape the debts he had amassed with his printers, and perhaps also through the luxurious life foretold by his stepfather. He lived in financial hardship, primarily in Bruges, until 1885, when his grandfather died and Eric inherited the palatial family estates in Estonia. Eric moved swiftly into the manor house at Kolga, the Stenbock residence.
He was to be a generous, and much-loved, master of his lands. It was, however, already obvious that he was unlikely to marry and have children. Theophile von Bodisco, the daughter of Eric's aunt Adele von Wistinghausen, lived at Kolga as a child when Eric arrived. In her fascinating Versunkene Welten (Sunken World), she recounts Eric's arrival, and her impressions of him.
“He had belonged to that Oscar Wilde circle… He was an æsthete through and through, a spoilt young man who had never worked for a living and who considered labour as being below the dignity of a man of such noble birth…
“My first impression was that he was unlike any human being I had ever seen. He seemed special because of his eyes which were a bit too narrow and the long and beautifully-coiffured curls framing his extremely slender face. His mouth was long, but beautifully drawn, his hair a reddish blond, his eyes of a light blue. His dress, too, was extraordinary, made of exquisite fabrics—it seemed slightly too comfortable, not tight-fitting—a sign of his Englishness I imagined. He seemed so extraordinary…
“Eric changed the wallpaper in his room and bought new furniture. His salon was Pompeiian red, the sleeping chamber of a dark green and adorned with a statue of Eros. All of his countless silk shirts were hanged, neatly-ironed, into the cupboard. He brought only very few suits to Kolk. In the morning he always used to dress in these heavy, beautiful silk shirts, shirts of many colours: green, yellow, red and blue. Around midday he would change into a dress-coat, English style.
“The young coachman would come every day to shave him and take care of Eric's curls, having learned the trade at the city barber. Eric would rise at about 12 o’clock and, dressed in a colourful silk morning-gown, call for his barber. ‘Louis, Louis where is my figaro?’ Then one of the children would call the waiting coachman. Eric had his little pet monkey, which he would cradle in his arm, and his snake which he would drape like a boa around his neck, as well as his delightful tiny bear sent from St. Petersburg. Whilst this naturally made a huge impression on us children, Uncle Nikolai did not approve of such behaviour. Eric didn't change our dining routine much, he only ordered some delicacies as he couldn't grasp how one was to enjoy lobster or oyster without truffles. For lunch, wine would now be served.
“In the morning hours Eric was all but invisible; if he did make an appearance for breakfast, he was usually very pale, and his eyes seemed almost extinguished. But during the course of the day, that would change; in the evening his eyes would sparkle almost black, and his vitality bordered on exhilaration. He would play and dance with us. His many fancy garments came in very handy when he would stage his tableaux. Eric was an opium-eater—he swallowed opium pills to be precise, pills of which one would have killed a normal human being. Eric used to take several at once. When the grown-‐ups found out about that they were quite dismayed. My mother consulted a physician in Reval, who suggested to try to break the habit, by slowly cutting the dose day–by–day. Eric would have had to hand over his supplies to my mother, which in fact he did, as a sign of his great trust in her. This is how she succeeded in ridding him of his opium addiction. He was that close to her heart, she would have made every kind of sacrifice in order to save him. And he, too, loved her very much.
The first page of a letter by Stenbock to the composer, Norman O’Neill.
“Eric used to talk a lot of nonsense, too. For example he used to claim that poor people were terrible, ugly, and distasteful. Only luxury was worth anything. He thus laid the foundation for a strong new-found craving for luxury on [Eric's young cousin] Karin's part. Eric was highly talented; he used to play the piano by ear and wrote marvellous poems. His German was immaculate, although he had a slightly different accent from us. The language of his thoughts was English, though. He also said that no-one in Estonia knew the meaning of comfort, that everything was so primitive. He never dealt with the business-‐side of Kolk, he only devoted time to the park and gardening. He employed a special gardener called Kasso, if I recall correctly; he used to call him Cassius. He bought beautiful plants and had a paradisiacal lawn. There were entire alleys of his much-beloved sunflowers. Near the ponds a cage was built for the bear, which was beginning to become too dangerous. At first the bear used to roam freely through the rooms and act most enchantingly, but then he began chewing on boots and so on, and had to be taken outside where he would hunt for ducks and geese. There were foxes, a wolf and later even elks in Eric's zoo.
“Eric loved perfumes above all and used to create his own mixtures. When he had walked in the hall one could tell for a long time due to the scent.”
Theophile also recounts how Eric once went on a visit with her to see her young brother, Renaud, in the Estonian city of Reval. Renaud took a dislike to Eric due to his dress and behaviour. Nonetheless, Eric “bought all of the colourful balloons available, and we attached a note with one of Eric‘s poems to each and every one… Eric had composed a song on [the Estonian town] Dorpat too, which he used to sing with his beautiful high-pitched voice.”
There is some disapproval in young Theophile's recollections of Eric. However, her sister Erika was enchanted with her remarkable cousin. In an unpublished memoir she remembe
rs the moment she and her siblings went to serenade Eric at his bedroom door the morning after his arrival at Kolga; in it, she refers to herself as Violet.
“The door was opened, but who was that? Violet had to suppress a loud laugh. Because in front of them was a big boy with curly blond hair in a gold-embroidered kimono and in his arm there was a monkey… [Eric] led them into his big room, sat down by the piano and began to play a song. ‘This is what you'll have to sing, a dance-along like the street urchins in Belgium,’ and he jumped both his feet closely together from the right to the left. ‘I will teach you to sing a lot, oh yes’. Violet laughed out loud, full of joy in a way she hadn't been since Grandpa's death. ‘This cousin really is great fun!’
“And that was the beginning of a new life in the old castle, a life full of fantasy, a fairy-tale land, because Cousin Eric could do everything: play the piano and compose, sing and write poems. There was something happening every day, plays or charades, otherwise he couldn't bear the life of a big house in the country. The children cheered him on and he showered them with gifts—he could well afford it. If a bank note was not clean and new enough by his standards, he would burn it, no matter its value. Eric was wonderful; when he took a walk with the children Violet had to look for and collect frogs, toads and lizards and carry them home in the ‘basket of abominations’. The animals were then given a new home in her room and Eric would coax out the lizards by playing his flute. Eric would tell such funny tales about the animals. His monkey, a snake whom he often placed around his neck, and turtles shared his room which was filled with plants and beautifully-smelling resins, which would burn constantly in a small stove. The walls were covered in English art, mostly by the pre-Raphaelites, and it was lit by a dim red lamp, with furs covering the floor. His bedroom was even more peculiar. The walls were painted peacock-blue, there was an altar in front of the marble fireplace, covered in Indian shawls, peacock feathers and copper cups from which the sweet smell of resins rose. In the middle of the altar there was a bronze statue of Eros, the god of love, in front of which there were little lamps as used by the first Christians in the catacombs. ‘This is my god,’ said cousin Eric. ‘Does he have a church as well?’ asked Violet.
Of Kings and Things Page 1
