However, I digress. I quote the letter from the Herald at length because it seems to me to demonstrate some aspects of Undercliffe’s character; not that he wrote it (at least I shouldn’t think so), but he did enclose it with his first letter to me, though it is hardly the sort of enclosure most of us would choose when initiating a correspondence. However, Undercliffe’s sense of humour was wry — some might call it cynical or cruel. I’m inclined to believe it was the product of a basic insecurity, from what little I know of his life. I never visited him, and his letters were rarely self-revelatory (though the first of the batch here published is more so than he might have wished). Most of them were first drafts of stories, signed and dated; he kept a copy of every letter he wrote — these were carefully filed in his flat — and several of the incidents which he described to me in the two years of our correspondence turned up virtually verbatim in his short stories. In particular the description of the disused station in The Through Train was lifted bodily from his letter to me of 20 November 1966.
If this says little about the man himself, I can only maintain that for the rest of us Errol Undercliffe was the Mr Arkadin of the horror-story world. “Errol Undercliffe” was almost certainly not his christened name. His refusal to provide biographical details was not as notorious as J. D. Salinger’s, but it was fully as obsessive. He seems to have been educated in or near Brichester (see the first letter here) but I cannot trace his school, nor the friend whose engagement party he describes. I never saw a photograph of him. Perhaps he thought the aura of mystery with which he surrounded himself carried over to his stories; perhaps, again, he was bent on preserving his own isolation. If so, he served himself ill as far as his final ordeal was concerned; he had nobody to whom he could turn.
When I went down to Undercliffe’s flat on hearing that he’d disappeared, I was less surprised than saddened by the experience. The Lower Brichester area, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is the sort of miniature cosmopolis one finds in most major English towns: three-storey houses full of errant lodgers, curtains as varied as flags at a conference but more faded, the occasional smashed pane, the frequent furtive watchers. Somebody was tuning a motorcycle in Pitt Street, and the fumes drifted into Undercliffe’s flat through a crack in the pane and clouded the page in his typewriter. The landlady was making ready to dispose of this, together with Undercliffe’s books and other possessions, as soon as the rent gave out at the end of the month. I finally persuaded her to let me handle the disposal, after a good deal of wrangling and invocation of August Derleth (who’d never published Undercliffe), the Arts Council (who’d never heard of him, I imagine) and others. Having ushered her out at last, well aware that she’d be prepared to search me before I left the house, I examined the fiat. The wardrobe and chest-of-drawers contained two suits, some shirts and so forth, none of which could have looked particularly stylish at an engagement party. The bed commanded a fine view of an arachnidial crack in the ceiling (clearly that crack which “suddenly, with a horrid lethargy, detached itself from the plaster and fell on Peter’s upturned face” in The Man Who Feard to Sleep). The wallpaper had a Charlotte Perkins Gilman look; once Undercliffe complained that “such an absurd story should have used up an inspiration which I could work into one of my best tales”. The window looked out on the fuming motorcycle, now stuck stubbornly in first gear, and its fuming owner; at night I suppose Undercliffe, seated at his typewriter before the window, might have waved to the girl slipping off her slip in the flat across the street, and I carried on his neighbourly gesture, though without much success. On the sill outside his window cigarette-stubs had collected like bird-droppings; he tended to cast these into the night, disliking the sight of a brimming ashtray. He’d go through a packet per thousand words, he once told me; he’d tried chewing-gum once, but this drew his fillings, and he was terrified of the dentist (cf. The Drill). All this, of course, is trivial, but I needed — still need — distraction. I’d already followed Undercliffe’s search through the first three letters printed here, and that page still in the typewriter — a letter to me, probably the last thing he wrote — told of what he found. I removed it, unwillingly enough, and left; the landlady let it go. Later I arranged for transportation of the contents of the flat. The books — which seemed to be Undercliffe’s treasured possessions, books of horror stories bought with the profits from his horror stories, a sad and lonely vicious circle — are now held in trust by the British Science Fiction Association library; the rest is in storage. I wish more than ever that Undercliffe would come forward to claim them.
Undercliffe’s first letter to me (15 October 1965) contains a passage which in retrospect seems informed by a macabre irony. “The implicit theme of your story The Insects from Shaggai,” he writes, “is interesting, but you never come to grips with the true point of the plot: the horror-story author who is sceptical of the supernatural and finally is faced with overwhelming evidence of its reality. What would be his reaction? Certainly not to write of “the lurid glow which shines on the razor lying on the table before me”!! This is as unlikely as the ending of The Yellow Wallpaper. I’d be interested to hear whether you yourself believe in what you write. For myself, I think the fact that I take great pains to check material on the supernatural here in our Central Library is eloquent enough. By the way, have you come across Roland Franklyn’s We Pass from View? The author is a local man who has some quite arresting theories about reincarnation and the like.”
Which brings us to Franklyn and We Pass from View, in themselves as mysterious as the fate of Undercliffe; but I suspect that the two mysteries are interdependent, that one explains the other — if indeed one wishes to probe for explanation. Before discussing Franklyn, however, I’d like to note some of Undercliffe’s work; I feel obliged to bring it to the notice of a wider public. His favourites of his own work were The Drains (the blood of a bygone murder drips from the cold tap), The Carved Desk (the runes carved on what was once a Druid tree call up something which claws at the ankles of anyone foolish enough to sit down to write), and The Drifting Face (never published: originally intended for the ill-fated second issue of Alien Worlds, it now cannot be traced). I favour his more personal, less popular work: The Windows in the Fog (in which the narrator’s glimpses of a girl across the street mount to an obsessive pitch until he accosts her one night and rebuffed, murders her), The Steeple on the Hill (where a writer fond of lonely walks is followed by the members of a cult, is eventually drawn within their circle and becomes the incarnation of their god), and The Man Who Feared to Sleep, which lent its title (Peur de Sommeil in France) to Undercliffe’s best collection, under the imprint of that excellent publisher who rediscovered such writers as Purse-warden and Sebastian Knight and made again available Robert Blake’s legendary collection The Stairs in the Crypt. It is amusing to note that the entire contents of Undercliffe’s collection — including the title story, which is surely a study of insanity — was listed under “Supernatural Phenomena” in the H. W. Wilson Short Story Index (in an earlier volume than that which placed my own Church in High Street under “Church Entertainments”, making it sound like a parish farce or a Britten mystery play). Undercliffe was latterly working on a script for Delta Film Productions, but producer Harry Nadler reports that this was never compel ted; nor was his story Through the Zone of the Colossi, a metaphysical piece based on a reference in my Mine on Tuggoth coupled with material from We Pass from View.
Which brings me back to the necessity of discussing Franklyn’s book, a duty which I fear I’ve been avoiding. I’ve never seen the book, but I have little desire to do so. I refrained from consulting Brichester Central Library’s copy when I went to Undercliffe’s flat; I suppose I could obtain this through the National Central Library, though I suspect that in fact the copy (like all others, apparently) has mysteriously disappeared.
Although, as Undercliffe points out, We Pass from View displays marked affinities with the Cthulhu Mythos in certain passages, such Lovecraft scholar
s as Derleth, Lin Carter, Timothy d’Arch Smith and J. Vernon Shea can supply no information on the book. I understand that it was published in 1964 by the “True Light Press”, Brichester; references in Undercliffe’s letters suggest that it was a duplicated publication, originally circulated in card covers but probably bound by libraries taking copies. I have not been able to discover where, if anywhere, it was on sale. An odd rumour reached me recently that almost the entire edition was stolen from the “True Light Press” — actually the house of Roland Franklyn — and has not been heard of since; perhaps destroyed, but by whom?
Here is the little information I’ve obtained from various sources. The British National Bibliography gives the following entry:
129.4 — Incarnation and reincarnation FRANKLYN, Ronald
We pass from View. Brichester, True Light Press, 9/6. Jan 1964. 126 p. 22 cm.
However, the Cumulative Book Index, which lists all books published in English, does not acknowledge the book; at least, neither I nor the staff of Liverpool’s Picton Library can trace the reference.
While correlating notes I was surprised to turn up in my commonplace book the following review, which might have been copied from the Times Literary Supplement:
PSEUDOPODDITIES
The last few decades have seen the emergence of many disturbing pseudo-philosophies, but We Pass from View must rank lowest. The author, Roland Franklyn, has less idea of style than most of his kind; however, the ideas behind the writing are expressed with less ambiguity than one might wish. His basic thesis seems to be that the number of souls in the universe is limited, by some illegitimate application of the conservation of energy principle, and that humanity must therefore acknowledge an infinite number of simultaneous incarnations. The last chapter, Toward the True Self is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the theory, concluding that the “true self” is to be found “outside space”, and that each human being is merely a facet of his “self”, which is itself able to experience all its incarnations simultaneously but unable to control them. There is a suggestion of Beckett here (particularly L’Innomable), and Mr Franklyn has infused enough unconscious humour into many passages to cause hilarity when the book was read aloud at a party. But a book which advocates the use of drugs to achieve fulfilment of black-magic rites is worth attention not so much as humour (and certainly not as it was intended) as a sociological phenomenon.
Laughter at a party, indeed! I still find that remark rather frightening. What copy was being read aloud? The TLS review copy, perhaps, but in that case what happened to it? Like so much in this affair, the end fades into mystery. I doubt that many indignant letters replied to the review; those that were written probably weren’t printable. In 1966, I heard vaguely of a book called How I Discovered my Infinite Self by “An Initiate”, but whether it was ever published I don’t know.
Undercliffe quoted several passages from We Pass from View which, though I find them faintly distasteful, I had better include. I still have all of Undercliffe’s letters; someday I may edit them into a memorial article for The Arkham Collector, but it seems in rather bad taste to write a memoir of a man who may still be alive somewhere. The letters printed here are, I think, essential.
In his letter of 2 November 1965 Undercliffe wrote: “Here’s a bizarre passage which might set you off on a short story. From the first page of We Pass from View: “The novice must remind himself always that the Self is infinite and that he is but one part of his Self, not yet aware of his other bodies and lives. REMIND YOURSELF on sleeping. REMIND YOURSELF on waking. Above all, REMIND YOURSELF when entering the First Stage of Initiation”. As for this first stage, I’ve traced references later in the text, but nothing very lucid. Franklyn keeps mentioning “the aids” which seem to be drugs of some sort, usually taken under supervision of an “initiate” who chants invocations (“Ag’lak Sauron, Daoloth asgu’i, Eihort phul’aag” — that ought to ring a bell with you) and attempts to tap the novice’s subconscious knowledge of his other incarnations. Not that I necessarily believe what Franklyn says, but it certainly gives you that sense of instability which all good horror stories should provide. I can’t discover much about Franklyn. He seems in the last year or two to have drawn together a circle of young men who, from what I hear, visit Goatswood, Clotton, Temphill, the island beyond Severnford, and other places in which you’re no doubt as interested as I am. I’d like to get in on the act.”
I replied that he surely didn’t need drugs for inspiration and that, warnings from Dennis Wheatley aside, I didn’t feel it was advisable to become involved in black magic. “Experience makes the writer,” Undercliffe retorted. Subsequently he avoided direct quotation, but I gathered he had not joined Franklyn’s circle; his own decision, I think. Then, in September 1966, when he was writing The Crawling in the Attic (I’d just started library work and sent him the manuscript of The Stocking to read, which he didn’t like — “elaborately pointless”), he quoted the following:
“Today’s psychologists are wrong about dreams coming from the subconscious mind. Dreams are the links between us and the experiences of our other incarnations. We must be receptive to them. TELL YOURSELF BEFORE YOU SLEEP THAT YOU WILL SEE BEYOND YOUR FACET. The initiate known as Yokh’khim, his name on Tond, came to me describing a dream of long tunnels in which he was pursued but could not see his body. After several sessions, he managed to see himself as a ball of hair rolling through the tunnel away from the Trunks in the Ooze. The ball was known on Tond as Yokh’khim. He has not attained the stage of Black Initiate and spends his time beyond his facet, having set aside all but the minimum of his life on Earth.”
I hadn’t much to say to that except to suggest that Franklyn had plagiarized the “Tond” reference, provoking Undercliffe to reply: “Surely Franklyn has undermined your complacency enough to make complaints about copyright a little trivial. Anyway, no doubt he’d point out that you knew of Tond through your dreams.” I couldn’t decide whether his tongue was in his cheek; I passed over his comment, and our correspondence fell off somewhat.
In February 1967 he quoted a passage which is significant indeed. “What about a story of a writer who haunts his own books?” he suggested. “Franklyn has a paragraph on ghosts: “The death of a body does not mean that the soul will leave it. This depends on whether there is an incarnation for it to pass into. If not, the body continues to be inhabited until it is destroyed. The initiate knows that Edgar Allan Poe’s fear of premature burial was well-founded. If the death is violent, then it is more difficult than ever for the soul to leave. FOR HIS OWN SAFETY, THE INITIATE MUST INSIST ON CREMATION. Otherwise he will be hopelessly attracted back to Earth, and the burrowers of the core may drag off his body from the grave with him still in it to the feast of Eihort.”
Interesting, I said somewhat wearily. I was rather tired of this sort of verbal delirium. On 5 July 1967 Undercliffe reported that the Brichester Herald had noted Franklyn’s death. This meant little to me at the time. Then came the final sequence of letters.
7 Pitt Street: Lower Brichester, Glos: 14July 1967 1.03 a.m.:
slightly intoxicated
Dear JRG:
Always this point at a party where the beer tastes like vomit. Pretty putrid party, actually. Friend of mine from school who got engaged and sent me an invite. Can’t think why, I’d just about forgotten him myself, but I wanted to meet him again. Didn’t get near. Great fat bluebottle of a woman he got engaged to pawing over him all the evening and wanting to be kissed, messily at that, whenever he tried to act the host. Good luck say I. So I had to make my own way round the conversations. I just don’t know where he got them from. All bow ties and “God, Bernard, surely you realize the novel is absolutely dead” and banging down tankards of ale which they’d bought to be all boys together, sloshing them over and making little lakes down these trestle tables in the Co-op Hall (another blow for the old town and the Brichester folks — our engaged friend kept patting his bluebottle and bellowing “I had a wonderful c
hildhood in Brichester, absolutely wonderful, they’re fine people”, no Palm Court for him). Whole place murky with smoke and some tin band playing in the fog. Hundreds of ashtrays surrounded by those pieces of ash like dead flies. Finally our friend fell to his feet to give thanks for “all the superb presents”, which didn’t make me feel any more accepted, since I hadn’t known it was done to bring one. I feel a little
Better. Repartee: the morning after. Beg pardon, I shouldn’t have mentioned engagements and fiancées. Still, I’m sure you’re better off. Writers always bloom better with elbow room. I have your letter by me. You’re right, your last argument with your girlfriend in Lime Street Station cafeteria with bare tables, balls of cellophane and someone next to you trying not to listen — it’d never come off in print, even though it happened to you they’d be sure to scream Graham Greene was here first. And then her calling down “I love you” through the rain before her mother dragged her back from her window — yes, it’s very poignant, but you’ll have to rewrite before you can print. More on our wavelength, what you say about this other girl running out of your haunted Hornby Library in panic certainly sounds promising. You going to lock yourself in there overnight? I’d give a lot for a genuine supernatural experience.
There was this idiot at the party wanting to know what I did. Horror stories I said. Should have seen him blanch. “Why do you write those things?” he asked as if he’d caught me picking my nose. “For the money,” I said. A young couple sliding down the wall behind us laughed. Great, an audience I thought. No doubt if I’d said I wasn’t joking they’d have laughed harder. “No, but seriously,” said this poor man’s F. R. Leavis (you couldn’t write for anything as base as money, you see) “would you not agree that the writer is a sort of Christ figure who suffers in order to cohere his suffering for the reader’s benefit?” The extent of his suffering was his bank manager calling him on his overdraft, I’ll bet. “And don’t you think the horror story coheres (I wasn’t cohering myself by that time) an experience?”
Demons by Daylight Page 4
