Nights of the Round Table is a commanding collection, with not one weak example among the twelve. The stand outs might be “Morag-of-the-Cave,” “Death Valley,” and “Vlasto’s Doll,” but that simply emphasizes the very high quality of those three particular titles, and does not demean the remaining nine. All of the stories are characterized by a superior descriptive writing style and by strong plots. The prose is admittedly dated to a minor extent, and there are perhaps a few too many exclamation marks and occasional awkward attempts at local dialect that tend to be distracting and interrupt the narrative flow. Overall these are excellently told tales that linger in the memory.
In certain of them, there is a marked conflict between modern level-headedness and ancient powers that, although archaic, still retain a grim potency, such as those featured in “Robin’s Rath,” “Death Valley,” and “The Curse of the Stillborn.” Those powers do not always bring ruination, as is seen in the lighter “How Pan Came to Little Ingleton.” This last is an exception, for most of the stories end on a cheerless note—there are few happy endings, although sometimes the darkness is not as unbounded as it may first have appeared, ultimately offering solace as in “The Woozle,” “Morag-of-the Rock,” and “The Haunted Saucepan.” Using the Round Table structure of a storyteller relating to an audience meant that Lawrence was able to turn a tale which seemed to have ended darkly into something positive by elaborating and expanding on matters in an epilogue.
Nights of the Round Table was well received and was reprinted several times. In the succeeding few years, she published several novels and Snapdragon, a selection of conventional short stories. In 1932 a second Round Table volume appeared, The Terraces of Night. The majority of the stories included in both of her genre collections had been previously published in contemporary English periodicals such as The Tatler, The Sovereign Magazine, and Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine, and indeed it is possible that all of them were previously published but that the initial publication of each and every one has yet to be traced.
An appropriately ominous Chinese proverb serves as an epigram to introduce The Terraces of Night: “He who goes walking on the terraces of night has only himself to blame if he meets with strange things.” There are strange things indeed within the pages of what was Lawrence’s tenth published work. Although specifically stated to be “further chronicles of the Club of the Round Table,” with the one exception of “The Dogs of Pemba” there are none of the prologues or epilogues that featured in the bulk of the stories in the first volume, although the very high standard of that book is maintained.
The Terraces of Night opens with “The Crystal Snuff-Box,” in which a man buys an antique snuff-box and then finds himself subjected to horrific nightmares. He becomes aware that he is being stalked by the presence of a beautiful woman, a witch who was executed in 1668, who is seeking to possess his soul. It is only the courage and determination of the man’s fiancée that saves him in this well-paced, exciting story.
“Mare Amore” (originally published as “Storm”) is an atmospheric piece about a sailor whose whole life has been spent aboard ships and who dearly loves the sea in all of its moods and aspects. He is talked into retiring by his domineering wife, but little do either of them realize that the sea does not willingly give up one of its own. The prose is impressive in its descriptive authority as the storm comes rushing in from the ocean, and again there is the depiction of an elemental force with a resolute power transcending familiarity and rationality and ultimately triumphing in a deadly manner.
The light but agreeable “Tinpot Landing“ is about a man whose death in West Africa is not the end of his existence, his post-mortem presence ensuring his fiancée’s future happiness. There is an overtly spiritualist theme to the story which in an Author’s Note Lawrence purports to be “true both in substance and in fact.”
In “The Portrait of Comtesse K,” an artist paints a picture of the woman he loves and it is so good that it brings him immediate fame and fortune. But her love is ephemeral and she scornfully leaves him for another man, leading the artist to take revenge using her portrait and the dark arts he had learned in his youth but set aside for love. The loss of that love means that his relinquishment of sorcery no longer has any meaning and he uses it to full fatal effect.
“Nannory House” (first published as “The Curse of Nannory House”) finds a couple moving into what appears to be an idyllic country retreat, only to find that it is haunted by the specter of a wronged abbess who swore vengeance on a rebellious nun many centuries earlier. The new lady of the house seems to be the reincarnation of that nun, and the aging servant was in a previous lifetime the lover who led her astray. A final dramatic conclusion at last lays things to rest.
In “The Room at the Rosenhaus,” a middle-aged governess in Austria starts a relationship with a much younger boy of the village. When the inevitable end comes, she disappears and her lover is arrested, assumed to have murdered her and hidden the body. Her spirit returns to guide a holidaying Englishman to her body and prove the innocence of the boy in a poignant piece demonstrating the strength of love over even death.
“The Ikon” tells of an obnoxious wealthy woman obtaining a religious work of art decorated with beautiful rubies to depict the blood of Christ. She has the rubies removed to make a brooch, but whenever she wears the brooch she becomes psychically stigmatic, bearing the physical pain of crucifixion and its unavoidable end result. The story is interesting and inventive, and it is followed by another unusual and original tale, “The Dream,” which has an unequivocal sexual element as its primary focus: a young man has had an invisible female spiritual companion since birth with whom he shares everything. Their deep love is necessarily sexless, but as he grows older the man has the need for a physical relationship, one that cannot be consummated with his spiritual companion. She tells him that she will try to reach his world, and that she may succeed, but perhaps not in the way he wants, “for the gods give, truly, but they give in their own grim way....” As his life descends into one of unhappiness and regret for the purity of that which he has lost, he learns the truth of her words in an unexpected finale.
“The Dogs of Pemba” is the atmospheric and powerful tale of a malevolent curse striking at a man in a remote part of Zanzibar. He has wronged a native woman and the tribesmen take vengeance on her behalf, afflicting the man in such a way that he is slowly transformed into a ravening dog.
In “The Strange Case of Miss Cox,” a forlorn woman still longingly thinks of her first and only love, a man killed in the war, years earlier. An act of kindness and a balloon turn out to be the catalysts for her finally finding happiness in what is an affecting story; the ending echoes that of “Mare Amore,” with a coroner musing over a cause of death that makes no sense at all to him.
“The Death Strap” is a strap used for executions which comes into the possession of a normal family; its pedigree seems to have given it a life of its own and in particular the need to persuade its owners to hang themselves.
The concluding narrative in The Terraces of Night is “The Shrine at the Cross-Roads,” and it is one of the best of the twelve works. It tells of a shrine in northeastern France where once a year the statue of a nameless saint seeks to change places with a mortal for an hour to enable her to put flowers on the grave of the man she loved before she was chosen to take a different path. It transpires that the saint is Joan of Arc and the price of changing places with her is to vividly relive her experiences, including that of her death at the stake. This excellent story has a pleasing and uplifting ending that stylishly rounds out what is another strong collection.
As in Nights of the Round Table, Lawrence demonstrates an aptitude for well-written and interesting fiction. Written with assurance and flair, and not shying away from the sexuality of her characters, these are tales that have considerable impact, whether telling of the ancient African curse in “The Dogs of Pemba” or the haunting of “Nannory House,” or indeed dealing wi
th quite original weird concepts as in “The Ikon” and “The Dream.” The one thing that Lawrence displays consistently is her ability to bring something new to her storytelling to gain the reader’s attention and involvement.
It must be said that there are two stories in The Terraces of Night—“Mare Amore” and “The Strange Tale of Miss Cox”—that do not convince as Round Table stories, good though they are, as their provenance is immediately questionable. This structure of storytelling—relating supposedly factual accounts to an audience—is inevitably limited to what the narrator can reasonably be expected to be aware of. The subjective endings of the two stories mentioned—where the only character experiencing what is being described does not live to tell the tale—could only be regarded as a fiction by the Round Table audience. This would therefore break the inferred rule of the Club, that the accounts be based on personal experience, first or second hand.
Margery Lawrence wrote many more supernatural stories than those included in her two Round Table compilations, and there was another major collection published in 1936, The Floating Café. There were also several stories of the uncanny in a subsequent 1941 volume, Strange Caravan. Her psychic detective Miles Pennoyer debuted in Number Seven Queer Street in 1945, followed by Master of Shadows in 1959. After that, Lawrence published at least one novel a year until her death in 1969, the bulk of which were mainstream with just the occasional departure into the realms of the outré, such as The Tomorrow of Yesterday (1966) and Bride of Darkness (1967).
There were no more tales of the Round Table, and thus there are just the twenty-four stories in the two volume series, each and every one of which bears the hallmark of its talented author. Although Margery Lawrence is not now remembered as one of the great writers of the supernatural, there is no question that she was, and the two Round Table books in particular display that convincingly. Few writers have produced collections of such potency, and the fact that their author is relatively unknown and unlauded is just as out of the ordinary as the splendid stories with which she so capably regaled her readers.
Mike Barrett lives in Wilmington, Kent.
The Round Table Stories
Nights of the Round Table (1926)
“January: The Occultist’s Story: Vlasto’s Doll”
“February: The Poet’s Story: Robin’s Rath”
“March: The Hypnotist’s Story: The Woozle”
“April: The Barrister’s Story: Floris and the Soldan’s Daughter”
“May: The Golfer’s Story: The Fifteenth Green”
“June: The Priest’s Story: How Pan Came to Little Ingleton”
“July: The Soldier’s Story: Death Valley”
“August: The Egyptologist’s Story: The Curse of the Stillborn”
“September: My Own Story: The Fields of Jean-Jacques”
“October: The Host’s Story: Morag-of-the-Cave”
“November: The Superintendent’s Story: The White Cat”
“December: The Engineer’s Story: The Haunted Saucepan”
The Terraces of Night, Being Further Chronicles of the Club of the Round Table (1932)
“January: The Antiquarian’s Tale: The Crystal Snuff-Box”
“February: The Sailor’s Tale: Mare Amore”
“March: My Own Tale: Tinpot Landing“
“April: The Concierge’s Tale: The Portrait of Comtesse K”
“May: The Business Man’s Tale: Nannory House”
“June: The Civil Servant’s Tale: The Room at the Rosenhaus”
“July: The Priest’s Tale: The Ikon”
“August: The Poet’s Tale: The Dream”
“September: The Traveler’s Tale: The Dogs of Pemba”
“October: The Dreamer’s Tale: The Strange Case of Miss Cox”
“November: The Schoolmaster’s Tale: The Death Strap”
“December: The American Girl’s Tale: The Shrine at the Cross-Roads”
Jane the Plain, written by August Schulenburg, directed by Kelly O’Donnell
reviewed by Jen Gunnels
Produced by Flux Theatre Ensemble, featuring Alisha Spielmann and Chinaza Uche. Fourth Street Theatre, New York.
In the interests of self-disclosure, in high school I was a geek. Studied hard, didn’t date or attend prom, played Dungeons & Dragons. Game consoles were primitive, and we all thought that George Lucas was done with Star Wars. Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t premiere until a year after I graduated, so we contented ourselves with the original series in reruns on Saturdays. Really, high school is an exercise in Campbell’s myth analysis. Decades later, we can point very accurately to who played the wise Mentor, the Gatekeeper, the Trickster. August Schulenburg’s Jane the Plain nods to the epic nature of high school (and it does feel epic when you’re going through it) with its struggles to know who we are and how we fit into the greater universe. The result is a funny, poignant, and sometimes brutal look at how those four years leave a lasting mark.
The story follows Jane the Plain who is, well, plain. Played by Alisha Spielmann, Jane is not too pretty, smart, a little geeky—utterly average and trying to fit in at Plainview High. She’s noticed by Scotty the Hotty (Chinaza Uche), the Jaguars’ star quarterback, and, instead of studying chemistry, she gives in to chemistry of another sort. After Scotty leaves her in his bed, Jane decides to take a nude selfie and send it, along with some touching words, to him. This quickly makes the high school rounds—text after text. Soon, Leeson the Decent (Chester Poon), Leonard the Awkward (Isaiah Tannenbaum), Lexi the Sexy (Sol Crespo), and Betty the Pretty (Becky Byers) know everything. Leonard, who has spent all his time in Jane’s friendzone, feels betrayed, while Betty, who wants Scotty for herself, attempts revenge. All Jane reaps from this is humiliation after Scotty largely ignores her.
Running into the rain in a futile attempt to escape, Jane sees the Glowing Girl about to be hit by a car. Shoving her out of the way, the saved supernatural being grants Jane a glimpse of the universe, of the beauty of creation, and a part of this beauty attaches to Jane. The other students can’t resist her. Everyone wants to be with her, to be her friend; even Becky can’t seem to help herself. Only Lexi seems to realize that Jane has been changed and tries to warn her. Jane, however, is too entranced with this new-found popularity and power.
Betty does manage to get revenge by staging a cheerleading accident for Jane. While in the hospital, Jane begins to realize that perhaps Lexi was right, especially when Scotty attempts to rape her. But Leonard walks in recording everything on his phone, which stops Scotty. But what Scotty sees is not a phone but something more sinister from his past. Jane just wants to be left alone, which angers her one-time friend. In retaliation, Leonard joins up with Betty, and the two alter the footage, providing a voice-over to make it sound like Jane rejects Scotty because she’s a lesbian. Once again, the material goes viral, leaving Jane’s reputation in tatters. Only Lexi tries to understand Jane, coming out to her, and the two start a tentative relationship.
As with all good high-school dramas, the action culminates at the Homecoming dance and game. Lexi and Jane are named homecoming queens. Scotty remembers his childhood nemesis, the Mirror Man, who spreads death, and runs off into the night, leaving Leeson to QB for the Jaguars. At this point, the overachieving Betty has had it and uses her AP-level knowledge of chemistry to make a bomb to kill Jane, because no one would expect a pretty girl to be smart enough to make a bomb. Her plans don’t come to fruition. Scotty attempts to jump from the Jumbotron to kill himself. Rather than making for the end zone where the bomb is planted, Jane, Lexi, and the now reconciled Leonard attempt to save him with the Homecoming float. What results is an epic battle between Jane and Scotty, the avatars of the Glowing Girl and the Mirror Man, the universe and beauty versus emptiness and death. The bomb goes off, the universe wins, and all things return to as they were before Jane met the Glowing Girl.
Except Jane.
BETTY: She walked, away from the burning grass blazing in the dusk, and t
hought about lust, and thought about love, and then thought—
LEXI: There should be a word for the thing between lust and love.
BETTY: That thing that seems like love when the light is right.
LEESON: That game two people play when they want to love and be loved so much, days can go by—
BETTY: Whole weeks—
LEXI: Where they remember to forget that it isn’t, not really.
LEESON: Jane walked, knowing if she could find the word for that between thing, losing it wouldn’t hurt so much.
LEONARD: She knew the word needed to begin with “l” and be one syllable. “Life.... That was the sound for all this between.”
Kelly O’Donnell once again directed an ensemble cast with the same innovative physicality she utilized in the Flux Theatre Ensemble production of Dog Act (NYRSF 274). Alisha Spielmann made Jane an Everywoman with her earnest naiveté concerning social circumstances which complemented in many ways Chinaza Uche’s clueless beefcake portrayal of Scotty the Hotty. In the final showdown as the avatars for Glowing Girl and Mirror Man, the two actors truly appeared larger than themselves in the battle for humanity’s existence.
In many ways, the story belongs to Jane and yet is told through all of the characters, who each act as a narrator at points in the play. I continue to love watching Becky Byers morph into whatever character she plays. Betty the Pretty was no exception; Byers was deliciously evil. I’m not just saying this because cookies were served to the audience during the prom scene. Okay. Maybe. But they were Entenmann’s chocolate chip, so I think I can be forgiven any bias. Isaiah Tanenbaum, Sol Crespo, and Chester Poon rounded out the various student clique representations as Leonard the Awkward, Lexi the Sexy, and Leeson the Decent. Schulenburg’s script gave each of them a delightfully meaty moment in which the character fractured, allowing the audience to see the uncertain teen inside—one much greater than the role they played in the high school hierarchy and beyond the simplistic titles hinting at their personality.
The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue 310, June, 2014 Page 7
