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MORE BOOK REVIEWS

By

BARRY VAN-ASTEN

Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Study – by Theodore Wratislaw.

Published in 1900 this 212 page volume is a brilliant critical analysis of A. C. Swinburne (1837-1909) the ‘singer of abnormal loves’ and his poetry, by the little known British poet Theodore Wratislaw (1871-1933); concerning his poetry he goes into quite some depth and breathes new life into some of his more tired compositions. The author gives us a brief biography of the flame-haired poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne who in facial features resembles a missing-link between Poe (1809-49) and Paderewski (1860-1941), later alighting perhaps upon Charles Dickens (1812-70), was born in London in 1837 and educated at Eton and Balliol (he left Oxford without his degree). At Oxford he became acquainted with D. G. Rossetti, Edward Burne Jones and William Morris and published his ‘Undergraduate Papers’ in 1858 which consisted of essays on: ‘The Early English Dramatists’ (Marlowe and Fletcher), ‘Church Imperialism’ and ‘The Monomaniac’s Tragedy and Other Poems by Ernest Wheldrake, Author of Eve: A Mystery. 1858’. In Italy he met the poet Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) whom he admired immensely. When he was twenty-three he published ‘The Queen Mother and Rosamund’ (1860), two plays, the former the Shakespearean influenced play concerning Catherine de Medici and the latter, a Browning-esque drama in five scenes about the mistress of Henry II.

His next work, ‘Dead Love’ of 1864, is a prose story about a French Lady named Madame Yolande who falls in love with the dead body of a French gentleman! But it is his masterpiece of 1865 which cemented Swinburne’s name in literary history – ‘Atalanta in Calydon’, a play of perfection in blank verse which soars with lyrical metre:

‘O fair-faced sun, killing the stars and dews

And dreams and desolation of the night,

Rise up, shine, stretch thine hand out with the bow

Touch the most dimmest height of trembling heaven,

And burn and break the dark about thy ways,

Shot through and through with arrows; let thine hair

Lighten as flame above that flameless shell

Which was the moon, and thine eyes fill the world

And thy lips kindle with swift beams; let earth

Laugh and the long sea fiery from thy feet…’

[Prologue. Atalanta in Calydon.]

Wratislaw swoons like a blushing schoolgirl over ‘Atalanta’ where we find Althaea, thinking of her son Meleager, dying with his ‘loveliest loving lips’ and ‘little lightening eyes’ and well he should for it is a masterful work of art by a highly skilled poet, a poet on everybody’s lips whose dark mystery is born where the ‘hoofed heel of a satyr crushes/ the chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root’. The play is, as Wratislaw rightly says ‘as musical as Shelley, as noble as Sophocles, as pathetic as Shakespeare’. (p. 24) Then, ‘when the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces…’ Wratislaw turns his attention to ‘Chastelard’ (1865), a dramatic poem which he rates highly; ‘Chastelard’ is the first in a trio of Mary Stuart plays, the others being the historic drama in five acts, ‘Bothwell’ (1874) and ‘Mary Stuart’ (1881), but it is with the poet’s magnum opus, his ‘Poems and Ballads’ of 1866 that Wratislaw sings with ecstatic wonder over its originality and its variety of metre combined with its lyric quality and erotic imagery woven in rhythm and rhyme in such poems as: ‘The Triumph of Time’, ‘Dolores’, ‘Laus Veneris’ with its Tanhauser theme, ‘Itylus’, ‘Anactoria’, ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, ‘Ilicet’, ‘Faustine’, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, ‘Hesperia’ and ‘Felise’. The volume caused praise and scandal in equal measure. Leaving ‘Poems and Ballads’ (which was also published in a second series in 1878 and a third series in 1889) he has good things to say about ‘Songs before Sunrise’ (1871) and ‘Songs of Two Nations’ (1875) before moving on to ‘Erectheus’ a tragedy in Greek imitation of 1876 which he finds ‘intolerable’; neither does he like ‘Studies in Song’ (1880) with its fifty stanzas of sixteen lines each. The long narrative in heroic couplets of ‘Tristram of Lyonesse’ of 1882 comes under his watchful eye and he discredits Tennyson’s ‘objective prejudice’ in his ‘The Last Tournament’ from ‘Idylls of the King’ and Matthew Arnold’s ‘stupid doggerel’ in his ‘Tristram and Iseult’ (1852) and elevates Swinburne’s telling of the lovers tale to the height of Wagner in his musical rendition which some would say is sacrilegious but Swinburne captures the mood of the romance between Tristram and his beloved Queen Iseult of Brittany, their marriage and his death perfectly.

The later works come under the author’s scrutiny such as ‘A Century of Roundels’ (1882) and ‘A Midsummer Holiday’ (1884) which are easily dismissed and he fixes his attention upon ‘Marino Faliero’ of 1885, a quite unremarkable dramatic poem upon which he scatters passionate petals of praise before slumping disparagingly through the poet’s most recent work to date (1900): ‘Locrine’ (1887); a mediocre play titled ‘The Sisters’ (1892), ‘Astrophel’ (1894), ‘The Tale of Balen’ (1896) and finally ‘Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards’ (1899). It can be seen that Swinburne has lost the fiery passion of youth, the erotic inspiration of the likes of Byron and Baudelaire, and withered, faded into a pale version of Browning.

The second half of the volume is concerned with Swinburne’s prose: ‘Notes on Poems and Reviews’ (1866), ‘William Blake’ (1868), ‘Under the Microscope’ (1872) and his excellent ‘Essays and Studies’ of 1875 which is a high watermark in literary criticism. This is followed by ‘George Chapman’ (1875) the Elizabethan dramatist, ‘Notes on Charlotte Bronte’ (1877) and then comes the highly praised ‘A Study of Shakespeare’ (1880), ‘A Study of Victor Hugo’ (1886) whom Swinburne greatly admires – alas Wratislaw does not share the enthusiasm; ‘Miscellanies’ (1886) in which he sings of his admiration for Charles Lamb and attacks Byron, literally demolishing his work and calling into question his quality as a man! But Swinburne is not done yet, in ‘Studies in Prose and Poetry’ (1894) it is Keats, that beautiful boy whom he wields his sword against, mercilessly attacking him for what he sees as his ‘abject unmanliness’.

Swinburne clings to life for another nine years so we do not have the luxury of knowing what Wratislaw would have made of his ‘A Channel Passage and Other Poems’ (1904), ‘The Age of Shakespeare’ (1908) and ‘Shakespeare’ (1909) but we can guess. In the ‘Epilogue’ he says that Swinburne is the ‘greatest living English poet’ and that his early works with their erotic emotion are greater than Tennyson or Browning, or at the very least equal to them but he fails to mention (and who can blame him with the object of his study and his admiration still resisting death) that Swinburne succumbed to alcohol and other excesses which almost destroyed him around 1878 and if it were not for his friend (whom Wratislaw touches upon in the Prologue) Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832-1914) he would have died before his later achievements. In 1879 he moved to the Pines in Putney with Watts-Dunton who weaned him from the drinking and restored his health. It is easy to let personal opinions cloud one’s critical judgement and Swinburne’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Walter Savage Landor (another notable Wratislaw does not share enthusiasm for) may be a point in case, but who is to say that Wratislaw is not guilty of the same critical errors in his own admiration for Swinburne and his works? Much of Swinburne’s ‘appetites’ it has been suggested were merely a pose adopted to create an air of wild excesses, yet here is something unspeakable about Swinburne of which it is not spoken! But who is this man Wratislaw? Who is this admirer who dares to trample in the temple of decadence? Perhaps a brief outline of the author’s life is in order as many will not have heard of Wratislaw, the elusive ‘decadent’ of the eighteen-nineties ‘fin de siecle’ who was himself greatly influenced by Swinburne in his poetry. Theodore William Graf Wratislaw, (the ‘Graf’ is German for ‘Count’), was born in Rugby, Warwickshire on 21^st April 1871 and educated at Rugby School from 1885-88. After leaving school he entered his father’s firm of solicitors; his relationship with his father was always strained. His first volume of self-published poetry ‘Love’s Memorial’ appeared in 1892 together with a second volume ‘Some Verses’, both printings limited to 35 copies. Wratislaw saw himself as a decadent poet and in the early nineties dallied on the fringes of Oxford University’s homosexual aesthetes, known as the Uranians, such as Charles Kains Jackson; and he became friends with Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons, Lord Alfred Douglas and the ‘tender soul’, Ernest Dowson. In 1893 he moved to London and published his third collection of poems ‘Caprices’, in a run of 120 copies. In September of that year he spent a weekend as Oscar Wilde’s guest at Goring-on-Thames where he probably made little impression upon the great wit but he did become known amongst certain literary circles and his poems were published in The Strand magazine and The Yellow Book. In November he passed his final law exams and briefly returned to Rugby before returning to London in the autumn. Two years later in 1895 he published ‘The Pity of Love’, a verse play and in August of that year entered the civil service at the Estates Duty Office at Somerset House in London which he described in a letter of 1914 as ‘penal servitude’. In May 1896 his fourth collection of poetry ‘Orchids’ was published as a limited edition. In 1899 he married a Jewish London opera singer named Sarah Esther Caroline Harris (born 1875) who contracted tuberculosis and died in 1901 aged twenty-six. He published his much praised study of Swinburne in 1900 and in April 1908 he married his second wife, Theodora Russell (nee Bankes, born 1875) which was a disaster and they divorced in 1912. He became bankrupt in 1914 but fortunes began to turn when he met the wealthy Ada Ross (born 1878) and they were married in May the following year. They moved to York Lodge, Walton on Thames in Surrey in 1927 and three years later, after suffering ill health he retired from the Duty Office, began an unfinished memoir called ‘Salad Days’ and died on 13^th September 1933 following his last published work, a translation of Francois Villon’s ‘Two Ballades’ (60 copies).

Wratislaw, who has been sadly too overlooked as a poet, has written an admirable introduction to Swinburne and his works and I consider his slim literary output as something rather strange and beautiful, not merely because I so happen to share the same birthday as Wratislaw, but because through all the commonplace annoyances of life he adhered to his poetic principles. Like the author, I too was infatuated with Swinburne in my undergraduate days and ‘touched gently’ the gate of the poet at The Pines in Putney where the poet died on 10^th April 1909, aged 72; two decades later I ‘hath sat upon the great man’s grave at Bonchurch and inwardly wept and warbled my inadequacies and unworthiness as a fellow poet!’ A marvellous book indeed!

Caprices: Poems – by Theodore Wratislaw.

This slim volume of 44 poems which drips with ‘eighteen-nineties decadence’ was published at the end of 1893 in 120 copies by Gay & Bird. It is Theodore Wratislaw’s third published work after ‘Love’s Memorial’ and ‘Some Verses’ both 1892 and these ‘symbolist’ impressions in verse sing with his favourite themes: the pleasure of music halls and dancing (he was infatuated by dancing girls) – ‘You, fair as heaven and as rainbow bright, /You, queen of song and empress of the dance, /Flower of mine eyes, my love, my heart’s delight!’ (The Music Hall); the transient nature of love: ‘Sweet love, thy heart is red and deep,/O take me in thine arms to sleep/Within this bosom all the night.’ (Song in Spring), and ‘In the crepuscule’s dying gleam/Love’s tears and kisses vainly pass:/Our days have faded like a dream, /And like a dream our nights, alas.’ (The Relic).

But throughout the collection there is the distinctive scent of death, as in this poem ‘Trance’:

‘Ah! Press thy heart to mine and lay

Thy lips upon my lips and heed

No whit the griefs that rose today

Nor those the dawn is sure to lead.’

And the poem continues in darker mood – ‘Swooning deathwards blend/Our spirits in one perfect kill!’

Wratislaw also touches upon his own death in the poem ‘Inscription’ (he is only twenty-two years old) and imagines his body in the ground, as a stranger passes; his lifeless shell sleeping amongst the ‘silent dead’ beneath ‘withered flowers and faded ivy wreath,’ – beautiful.

Like Dowson’s remarkable works there lingers a dark melancholy which permeates the collection and seems to cloud the poems in a sad and wistful mist that shall ‘weep for pleasures dead too soon,’ (Odour) as in the poem ‘Le Piano Que Baise’ where the poet asks: ‘What is this sudden lull so quickly born/That slowly sways my poor heart to despair?’

Many of the poems recall the sea and flowers which he uses to good effect but it is the overwhelming sense of desire and inner longing which remains un-satiated: ‘O flower of flesh, O beauty rare,/Yield up thy pagan grace to me!’ (In Summer) and when it is satiated he wearies ‘of the heat of hell, /The perfumed palace of thy love;’ (Satiety).

The mention of ‘perfume’ evokes the two poems ‘Opoponax’ and ‘Frangipani’ named after perfumes, something the decadents, with their love of the ‘artificial’, especially Oscar Wilde, held in high importance – Wratislaw was Wilde’s guest for a weekend in September 1893 at The Cottage, Goring-on-Thames which he rented from June to October of that year; Wilde’s family and Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) stayed there (Bosie worked on a translation of Wilde’s ‘Salome’): ‘Oscar proposed to spend the morning on the river and later on joined me, clearly spraying himself with a scent which filled the room. I inquired its name. “It is white lilac.” he said. “A most insidious and delightful perfume.” [Oscar Wilde: A Memoir. Theodore Wratislaw (John Betjeman and Karl Beckson). London. Eighteen Nineties Society. 1979]

Wratislaw, who is not homosexual – ‘God is with me, God who for my right/Of old took arms against the sodomite!’ (L’Eternal Feminin) is probably most well-known for his uranian poem ‘To a Sicilian Boy’ which captures perfectly the atmosphere of the fin de siecle’s sexual ambivalence and predilection towards taboo subjects:

‘Love, I adore the contours of thy shape,

Thine exquisite breasts and arms adorable;

The wonders of thine heavenly throat compel

Such fire to love as even my dreams escape:

I love thee as the sea-foam loves the cape,

Or as the shore the sea’s enchanting spell:

In sweets the blossoms of thy mouth excel

The tenderest bloom of peach and purple grape.

I love thee, sweet! Kiss me again, again!

Thy kisses soothe me, as tired earth the rain;

Between thine arms I find mine only bliss;

Ah let me in thy bosom still enjoy

Oblivion of the past, divinest boy,

And the dull ennui of a woman’s kiss!

Wratislaw has so often been classed as a uranian poet on the basis of this one poem when really he was on the circumference of the Oxford poets and although in some ways these poems fail to strike the perfect chord (some readers may even find him dull) I find these simple and in many cases short verse rather enchanting!



Eros’ Throne – by George Ives.

This little book of poems published in 1900 by George Cecil Ives (1867-1950) contains forty poems over ninety-five pages, some of which are quite good. Ives, a campaigner for penal reform as well as a poet, manages to capture, intentionally or unintentionally, an odour of confinement amongst his verse (mostly written between 1898 and 1899), many of which are love songs – ‘The fairy span of heavens bow,/ Valhalla’s bridge to Spirit-land,/Shines while the cloister-arch lies low/And rock-piled cities are but sand;’ (‘A Recollection’). Amongst the sense of claustrophobia comes a quite moving piece entitled ‘An Eton Boy’ which deifies a ‘widow’s only son; crushed by a train when returning to school.’ A boy with ‘fifteen summers’ work so well/ To break the mould of the spirit ere clay was hard.’ A boy whose unstained soul death came and ‘snatched the agile form, untimely in earth laid.’ Unfortunately I found that many of his so called ‘love poems’ failed to attain any level of conviction: ‘So true love lifts the weight of all the world/ In scorn of gravity and man’s restraint,/And casting up the many-towered hill/He bids it circle as a satellite.’ (‘Mark how the Sea’) or this from the end of ‘My Soul’ which almost becomes a religious experience, or would have been in a greater poet’s hands: ‘And blessed and cursed are those who feel/Condemned to greatness, thus, to pain,/Where Nature makes its mute appeal,/And stars give not their light in vain.’ Other poems reek with a sense of darkness (or just a little shade) such as ‘For the Funeral’, ‘The Plague’ and the delightful ‘The Autumn Bud’ and ‘In Camera’ and this revelatory stanza from ‘Shrine of Huitzilopochtli’: ‘Man hath a soul, they say, and yet no beast/Hath dug down to the depth of his disgrace/To offer up the font of human love/Before the nightmare spectre of his brain.’ Perhaps the greatest work in the volume is ‘Eros’ Throne: The Ascent of Life and Love’, an ambitious piece in nineteen parts which goes from ‘Boyhood’, ‘Girlhood’, ‘Divergence’, ‘Will’, ‘Emotion’ and ‘Beauty’ etc. The first section, ‘Boyhood’ contains these rather good lines: ‘Under all the sun’s vast vision/ He is the most lovely.’ and ‘Sappho sang in vain to Phaon, /Venus mourned her sylvan boy, /And another than Briseis/Steeped in blood the plains of Troy.’ Not a bad collection but I thought much of it fell short of the mark and there was that overwhelming smell of the prison which lingered and spoilt my enjoyment, but on the whole no too bad!


The Magic of My Youth – by Arthur Calder-Marshall.

Published in 1951 by the novelist and critic Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908-1992), ‘The Magic of My Youth’ is a beautifully written autobiography which moves serpent-wise through the threads of the author’s past, gently alighting upon distant visions and occurrences, but mostly the book recounts his fascination with magical and spiritual themes and his acquaintance with ‘Vickybird’ (Victor Neuburg, the poet and disciple of occultist Aleister Crowley) – ‘having spent the first fifteen years of my life in ignorance of Crowley’s existence, I became aware of him from four separate sources in the course of six months: from a Sunday newspaper, from my brother at Oxford; from a vision of the Tiger Woman, Betty May, in full Bacchanal at a Bloomsbury Hotel and, most remarkable of all, from the Steyning Poet.’ [Neuburg] (The Poet and the See-er: The Illusionist of Islington. p.19.) Calder-Marshall summons up the way in which magic (or magick as it is rightly spelt) seems to occur naturally, as if events are subtly manipulated so that the desired intention is brought to pass, almost unobserved; this is described perfectly in the tale told by Tom Driberg concerning ‘Cosmo the Great Illusionist’ in the opening chapter, the Prelude. The author evokes a picturesque vision of Steyning in the 1920’s and of the poet, Neuburg, who ‘each morning’ would ‘emerge from Vine Cottage with a string bag and an obese white bitch and make for the High Street.’ (p.23) Vickybird really comes to life through Calder-Marshall’s tender descriptive touches: ‘He carried an ash stick, and he was always dressed in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with stockings which rode in rucks around his spindly legs, and shoes so old that the leather was cracked.’ With his ‘thin venous hands’ and a ‘head which, by nature disproportionately large for his body, was magnified by dark Medusa locks which rose from his scalp and tumbled curling down his forehead.’ The bedraggled poet with his razor cuts and threadbare clothing must have been quite a sight in quaint old-fashioned Steyning!

Young Arthur and his brother Robert, four years his senior, made friends with the odd poet as children and later when Robert went to Oxford Arthur learnt all sorts of tales handed down from ‘Bobby’ concerning the adventures of the harmless and amusingly eccentric poet, Victor Neuburg and his relationship with notorious magician Aleister Crowley – “In the first decade of the century, it appears that he went into the middle of the Sahara with Aleister Crowley and, drawing a circle in the sand, they summoned up the Devil.” (p.31) As in all books which reference the Beast Crowley the usual sensational diabolic nonsense surfaces because as humans we naturally gravitate towards the exaggerated truth spiced with a little ‘invented myths’ which is after all more interesting than the mundane. Neuburg corrects Arthur on their meeting, saying “in the first place, we did not go into the middle of the Sahara, but merely into the desert a few miles out of Marakhesh. And we did not draw a circle, but a pentacle, which from a magical point of view is a very different matter.” (p.34) The author describes a lovely scene in which Arthur’s father, calling the author’s bluff visits Vine Cottage to meet the clumsy and seemingly awkward Vickybird and his wife Kathleen, drawn with a light touch of comedy; and young Arthur goes to Oxford and meets Vickybird’s equally eccentric Aunt Helen, the See-er for tea with her two mongooses, a parrot and a half-blind pine-marten – ‘She must, I thought, have been a very beautiful woman when she was young. Even now, with her height and slenderness accentuated by the long black gown, her tawny hair bound with a broad fillet of python-skin, she was strikingly handsome.’ (p. 69) In London she got to know Neuburg and Crowley and became interested in the occult and read the stars; she lived on credit and perpetuated the war between ‘Artists’ and ‘Philistines’. When the bailiffs came calling it was Arthur who took care of her precious things in his Oxford rooms until the University forbade him to visit her again. She died quite insane.
There are some fascinating reminiscences of Arthur aged fifteen living in Bloomsbury when his brother was at Oxford, of seeing the ‘Epstein model’ Betty May, the Tiger Woman, which leads us naturally into Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu and the young St John’s College, Oxford poet who married Betty May: Raoul Loveday (1900-1923) whose ‘poetry was as wildly romantic as his love-making. He admired immensely decadents like Dowson and Lionel Johnson who hid the pretty in grandiloquence, bridging the gulf between reality and splendour with alcohol. He drank whisky by the toothglass.’ (p. 111) A man who, Calder-Marshall tells us was ‘more than half in love with death.’ (p.113)
At Oxford Arthur performs a ‘Black Mattins’ in his college rooms and rumour of the Black Mass swept through the colleges and an hour after it was performed he was sent for by the Dean and asked if a Black Mass took place and if he had ‘the Consecrated Host and a defrocked priest.’ Actually it was a harmless ‘Esbath’ celebration, but he was almost sent down for it! He became Secretary of the Oxford Poetry Society and he invited Neuburg to give a talk which he at first declined but accepted on the promise of a suit from Arthur to wear for the occasion. He was originally to lecture on Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ but decided upon ‘Poetry and Poesy, or the Making, Mating and Matching of the Word’, spending two months in preparation for it; the lecture was terrible but Neuburg felt invigorated by it and deemed it a wonderful success! Arthur tells Vickybird that he intends to invite Crowley to speak and the Steyning poet opens up about himself and Crowley and tells Arthur that ‘one evening they were invoking Mars, and the ceremony started as usual with Crowley as the High Priest declaring, “The Temple is Open.” There were the appropriate liturgies and invocations, and then Vickybird, who had been given a drug which he did not specify, rose to ‘dance down’ the God. ‘Dancing down,’ as I understood it, involved the abnegation of the dancer’s own personality. He became a vacuum into which he drew the God.
“And then,” said Vickybird, “instead of declaring that the Temple was closed, he deliberately dismissed us. He pretended later that it was forgetfulness. But he could no more forget that than a Catholic priest could forget the Ite, missa est.” and he continues – ‘”The first thing I remember was squeezing back into my soul. It was like being in a very small room with an immensely powerful man who wanted to kill me by sheer pressure. I told you that you wouldn’t understand, and pray God that you never will. The God Mars is a killer and he wanted to use my body. I fought him for seventy-two hours before I gained possession of my body again.” (p. 163-4) Then of course we hear all about the Ione de Forrest episode on Thursday 1^st August 1912, Neuburg’s lover who committed suicide – would Neuburg really have said something so cruel as ‘All right, kill yourself!’ to her plea of ‘If you go out of that door I shall kill myself!’ I don’t think so, but the young poet was under mental distress at the time and attached to Crowley so anything is possible. Vickybird blamed himself and Crowley for her death and guilt confined him to the obscure pastures of Steyning. Meanwhile, Arthur’s brother Robert dies and we hear all about the bohemians who inhabit London’s Fitzroy Tavern, The Plough, and the Marquis of Granby, painters, writers and models drowning their creative genius in alcohol. And of course he meets the socialite Betty May who informs him that Crowley is in London and determined to see the Beast he meets Crowley at the Eiffel Tower near the Fitzroy Tavern one evening after dinner and they settled a date for Crowley to give his lecture to the Oxford Poetry Society – its subject will be Gilles de Rais! Naturally the lecture is banned a few days before it is to take place and the lecture was published and circulated through the colleges. Arthur meets the Beast one more time in December 1929 at a cottage in Knockholt, Kent where the magician is staying with his wife Maria Teresa, and the two men do psychological battle over a bottle of brandy, Crowley turning on the old hypnotic charm and Arthur not falling for it, comically matching him across the table attempting to outstare the Mage!
Towards the end of the book Arthur writes his first rejected novel having taken three months to create it and he takes a six weeks teaching job as Senior Classics Master at Bogglesham Grammar School. In the Epilogue, ‘The Ship Comes In’, there is a delightful re-acquaintance between Arthur and Vickybird in London, when the poet had found new love and a new job as Poetry Editor for the Sunday Referee.
‘The Magic of My Youth’ has been a wonderful experience and Calder-Marshall practices no pretence and indeed it shall be a book I will turn to again. Being a great admirer of Crowley it is nice to get this different perspective of him from one who met him; a picture which does not place the great magician centre stage but like a prowling tiger around the circumference and of course anything on Neuburg is a delightful revelation as there is not enough on this gentle magician-poet. The author keeps the narrative light and introduces some wonderful moments of humour throughout the 226 pages. This really is an immaculate little book (my copy has acquired a ‘loving energy’ from sensitive hands and a delicate aged aroma familiar to all book lovers!) Excellent!


Wild Apples – by Jeanne Robert Foster.

This exquisite little book of poems (196 pages) by the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster (born Julia Oliver 1879-1970) was published in 1916 and it is divided into seven parts: I. ‘The Great Sea Fight and Occasional Poems’, II. ‘Sonnets’, III. ‘Songs, Ballads, Pastorals’, IV. ‘The Blazoned Rose’, V. ‘Silhouettes’, VI. ‘Orifiel’ a dramatic fragment and VII. ‘The Eve of Sanhain’.
One of the most striking poems which opens the book is ‘When I am Dead’ in which the author asks – ‘Do I wish my name to be a Master-Word, /Whispered whenever the awe and terror of power is stirred.’ And she answers: ‘No, none of this, - /Neither beauty nor power, - for the groping hands of men/Will scatter my dust from its quiet place, and re-create me again.’
There are some very accomplished poems such as the worthy memorial poem to the poet Robert Lamier: ‘So brief his flight, so short his nesting time/Hardly within him had ripe genius moved;’ – there is the essence of Yeats (in fact she dedicates the poems to the poet’s brother, the artist J. B. Yeats R.H.A. 1871-1957) and her poem ‘W. B. Yeats – Reading’ has some magically inspired lines which conjure the great Irish bard, who ‘rose/in the lamp’s flare, grave as the dark waters;/forgetful of each face, sense winged beyond/The preen of curios eyes and whispered praise.’ She describes his voice ‘murmuring of Dooney and of Innisfree’, who made a dream ‘Not of thyself, but of the Mystic Rose/Thou singest, and the Vessel of the Grail.’ Other Yeatsian poems in the collection such as: ‘The Fairy Woman’, ‘Riders to the Sea’, ‘Songs of Bally Shannon’, ‘The Emigrant’ and ‘The Stranger in the Glen’ all have a sense of the other world beyond the veil where there is ‘drooping numbness with narcotic calm.’ (‘Moonrise’)
The author has a light touch too as can be seen in the frail poem ‘Moth Flowers’:

The pale moth

Trembles in the white moonlight;
Thus my heart trembles with love!

The rose petals fall –

The red petals of my heart;
On, the breath of love!

Cool, sweet tears

Of honey, the jasmine weeps;
Burning fall the tears of love.

Oh, how bitter

Is the White Poppy, Death;
There are no more dreams of love.

In another poem she compares herself to a ‘Wayside Flower’ that ‘loves and lives/and all itself to love so freely gives,’ a flower that ‘droops and dies,’ yet ‘bravely dying knows not pain/If only memory of its grace remain.’ Many poems also show a desire for motherhood (alas she was infertile) and she weaves a delicate thread of magic such as in ‘The Eternal Triangle’:

'Do not speak –

Twilight burns on the hills; exorcise now
Those phantoms of old loves; death comes apace
And Spring no more will rim the barren bough.
Here swings the censer; here the incense burns;
Here the Eternal Athanor of Power,
Body supreme, transmuter of our dross –
The Rose Alchemical – the Magic Flower.’

It will come as no surprise that a year previous to the publication of ‘Wild Apples’ the author was in a relationship with the occultist Aleister Crowley whom she met on 10 June 1915; she took the magical name ‘Hilarion’ and was also known by Crowley as the ‘Cat’ because of her feline nature and physical appearance. Aficionados of Crowley will know that she is the magical mother of Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones 1886-1950) who crossed the magical Abyss at the Autumn Equinox of 1915 to become a Master of the Temple; the spiritual ‘child’ prophesied in Liber Al vel Legis, but that is another matter and it should not influence the poems. 

Throughout the book the author, the possessor of extreme feminine beauty, clings to her mystical beliefs in a spiritual loneliness and longing for God: ‘The bosom of God/From whence I came, /To which I have been eternally returning.’ (‘Refuge’) She is also a competent writer of sonnets and one also finds the influence of Poe where lingers an odour of the grave: ‘I would the seeping graveyard rain/Could wake thee into life again, /And while in hell I burn thou couldst/In some red rose forget thy pain.’ (‘The Soul’s Farewell’) These poems may not be to everyone’s liking (let’s face it, there are some pretty awful ones too) but there is a mood which pervades the book and that mood is for change, a spiritual transformation or enlightenment and a physical longing for love and God – “Zariel: ‘Old worlds spin down to vapour in the void/And new worlds rise, but Law remains unchanged.’” (‘Orifiel’) Quite lovely!


Witchcraft: It’s Power in the World To-Day – by William Seabrook.

Published in 1941, William Seabrook’s oft’-cited book on witchcraft has become a staple of occult literature and is a fascinating read. William Seabrook (1884-1945) was an American travel writer with a life-long interest in the occult, a man who proudly admitted to having eaten human flesh and studied under various witch-doctors in Africa; he committed suicide by taking an overdose. Once the reader has got over the initial arrogance of the author in his Foreword ‘Exploding a Non-Sequitur perched on the Horns of a Dilemma’ one actually finds it quite an engrossing book. Its 299 pages are divided into three parts: I – ‘The Witch and her Doll’ which explores the origins and general use of the ‘witch doll’ in various cultures, such as the ‘Monstrous Doll in Africa’, the ‘Doll de Luxe in London’ and the ‘Nail-Studded Doll in Toulon’. Part II looks at the ‘Vampire and the Werewolf’, recounting such cases as Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614), the ‘Vampire 1932 from Brooklyn, New York’, the ‘Panther-Man from the Ivory Coast’, the ‘Caged White Werewolf of the Saraban’, and the ‘Werewolf in Washington Square’. Part III ‘White Magic, Professor Rhine, the Supernormal, and Justine’ opens with a ‘Presentation of an Open Question, to which a Negative Answer may not be the Final Word’ and he gives examples from his own experiences such as the ‘Astral Body on a Boat’, ‘Upton Sinclair’s “Mental Radio”’, ‘W E Woodward with a Hatpin driven through his jaws’, Justine Dervish Dangling’ and ‘Justine in the Mask’ (Justine was his then girlfriend who assisted Seabrook in their experiments with ESP and exploring future Time events). The Appendix has a plethora of ‘Supplementary Notes, Anecdotes, and Illustrations’. It will not come as any surprise to the reader for the author spells it out endlessly that he does not believe in the existence of spirits and all the other ‘mumbo-jumbo’- connected with the occult or the ‘supernormal’ of which he says is ‘anything which occurs contrary to the fixed, known laws of time-space, the fixed, known rules of logic, or endours its supposed possessor with senses and powers outside those laws and rules as known up to now’. (p. 145) In fact, I found his opinions, although he has much knowledge and practise in the occult, quite infuriating, as he remains sceptical as to the effectiveness of witchcraft where there is no human intervention to cause the desired results: ‘when the intended victim believes the force attacking him is super-human the doll, for him becomes a fatal image of certain doom, and he tends more easily to crack up emotionally and functionally.’ (p. 46. ‘Wooden Doll in a Cave’) Of course there is always the human element when a natural or unnatural desire is set in motion and psychologically if the victim is aware that a ‘curse’ has been placed upon them the result will be that more effective, but to dismiss the world of spirits is absurd in my opinion. He maintains that all magical phenomena occurs solely through human ‘physical’ and ‘psychological’ intervention or ‘induced-autosuggestion’ and fails to understand the simplest laws of natural magic (or magick as I prefer to spell it) in which the practitioner must have faith in his or her intentions and observe the correct magical procedures to bring about those intentions just as if one were to cast a fly onto the surface of a stream, by the proper motions a salmon is landed. His arrogance does not let him understand the power of the mind during conjuration (invocation and evocation) – the God Mars is just as tangible as the Pope and just as deadly! Although he is correct in his assumptions that ‘dolls’ are merely symbols in sympathetic and imitative magic; a fetishistic point to focus the force or current of the will and create a magical link, in dark magic it is the focus of concentrated hatred and destructive thought.
In part III – ‘Our Modern Cagliostros’ he mentions three ‘white magicians’ in the world today, who have real power, two of whom he came to know: I. George Gurdjieff (1866-1949), who seemed to have power over his acolytes to cause them to perform unbelievable feats of acrobatic skills and physical endurance; II. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the founder of the Great White Brotherhood whom he met through Frank Harris in 1917 in New York, and III. Pierre Arnold Bernard (1875-1955), a yogi known as the ‘Great Oom’ and founder of a ‘love cult’ whom Seabrook did not meet and has little to say about. Interestingly he gives examples of his meetings with Crowley, whom he describes as ‘a strange, disturbing fellow, with a heavy pontifical manner mixed with a good deal of sly, monkey-like, and occasionally malicious humour. He wore an enormous star sapphire on the forefinger of his right hand, and had his head shaved’ (p. 173) He goes on to give details about Crowley’s ‘Magical Retirement’ for forty days and nights, travelling up the Hudson River in a canoe with his tent to Esopus Island:
‘The provisions looked suspicious and since we’d paid for them we decided to inspect them. They consisted of fifty gallons of red paint, three big house-painter’s brushes, and a heavy coil of rope. We investigated further. He hadn’t bought so much as a tin of beans or a loaf of bread. He’s blown every cent for the red paint. He had nothing in his pockets except the ticket for the trip up the river.
“What are you going to eat, for crying out loud?” we asked, and he replied, in his heaviest pontifical manner:
“My children, I am going to Esopus Island, and I will be fed as Elijah was fed by the ravens.” (p. 175-6) He was indeed fed, but not by ravens, by kindly farmers for forty days!
‘all summer excursionists going up and down the river saw painted on the cliffs south of Kingston two enormous legends:
Every Man and Woman is a Star!
Do What Thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law.’ Seabrook adds that he had ‘rigged himself a sling, and painted, we were told, from sunrise to sundown. Thereafter he had sat cross-legged on the ground in front of his tent.’ (p. 176) After Crowley returned to New York in September, the next day Seabrook invited him to the Plaza for lunch and Seabrook asked him what he had gained from his forty days as a hermit to which Crowley said he would show him. They took a walk in the park – then 5^th Avenue, near to the Public Library and crossed 42^nd Street, ‘ahead of us was strolling a tall, prosperous-looking gentleman of leisure, and Crowley, silent as a cat, fell into step immediately behind him. Their footfalls began to synchronize, and then I observed that Crowley, who generally held himself pompously erect and had a tendency to strut, had dropped his shoulders, thrust his head forward a little, like the man’s in front, had begun to swing his arms in perfect synchronization – now so perfect that he was like a moving shadow or astral ghost of the other.
As we neared the end of the block A.C., in taking a step forward, let both knees buckle suddenly under him, so that he dropped, caught himself on his haunches, and was immediately erect again, strolling.
The man in front of us fell as if his legs had been shot out from under him – and was sprawling.’ (p. 177) He also mentions Jane Wolfe’s (although he does not name her) experiences at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu and the death of Raoul Loveday. Despite such visual evidence he still clings to his sceptical stance although he does admit that Crowley had real powers and he comes close to admitting the possibility that ESP may be a genuine factor in experiments of thought transference, all this from a man who confesses to have ‘eaten cat in Naples and caterpillars on the Ivory Coast. I have also eaten stewed young man. I have drunk the sacrificial blood of goats and bulls at voodoo altars.’ (p. 181) A little erratic but thoroughly compelling!


The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney – by George Wickes.

Published in 1976 (I read the 1978 edition) ‘The Amazon of Letters’ is a compelling biography of the American writer, feminist and legendary lesbian socialite who made Paris her home, Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972). At first glance one can be forgiven for thinking the book a sprawling mass of nonsense about another frivolously wealthy, independent, sexually liberated young woman collecting lovers and admirers, particularly amongst the well-to-do and notable celebrity socialites who frequented the Paris salons, and who wrote almost unreadable atrocious poems and you would be half right! When first picking up a book I like to sit with it a while before I begin reading it, to get to know its idiosyncrasies and get a general idea of the landscape ahead; to awaken my sense to it and the ‘Amazon’ took a little longer than usual as I savoured its flavour and indulged in the foreplay before the intercourse! So, upon a second glance one gets the impression of the beautiful, brilliant and witty Miss Barney, the ‘sad and gentle page boy whose studies could be summarized in a couplet: my only books/were women’s looks’ (I. Origins. p. 17) as a female Don Juan seducing women; a scandalous cultivator and mediator of friendships and a master of the epigram (she met Oscar Wilde in 1882 when she was just five years old). In fact, it was in the spring of 1898 when she was twenty-two that she first went to France and saw and fell in love with the celebrated courtesan Liane de Poughy (Anne-Marie Chassaigne) whom she sought to rescue from her plight! Natalie dressed as a page boy with flowers to meet Liane, looking like ‘an angel from a painting by Fra Angelico.’ (p. 43) and so their love affair began! In 1901 Liane wrote ‘Idylle Saphique’ which portrayed Natalie as ‘Flossie’ and described their romance together. When Natalie’s father caught her reading a love-letter from Liane he sent her back to the States to mould her into ‘eligible marriage material’! It was not the first time her father had cause for concern for in 1900 Natalie published her first book, ‘Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes’, a volume of 34 poems dedicated to her female admirers such as Evaline ‘Eva’ Palmer, one of her early lovers; her father, Albert Clifford Barney attempted to buy-up all the copies and destroy them but Natalie fortunately managed to save several copies!
After her father’s death in 1902 Paris became her permanent home and her sexual hunting plain – she met her first real love: the English writer Pauline Tarn who wrote in French under the pseudonym Renee Vivien, a poet with a preoccupation with death! Renee would prove to be her greatest love which sadly ended tragically, told exceptionally well in chapters 5 and 6. She also became friends with the poet Pierre Louys and in 1902 produced her second book: ‘Cinq Petits Dialogues grecs’. She became acquainted with the prolific French writer and recluse, Remy de Gourmont in 1910; the author suffered from lupus and Capote describes him cruelly as ‘the ugliest man in Paris’ (p. 289) – Remy fell for Natalie’s charms and amusing wit just as many intellectual writers fell for her. Another great love of Natalie’s life was Lucie Delarue-Mardrus who was twenty-two when she first met Natalie and Eva through Vivien; Lucie was married to the orientalist, Dr. Joseph Charles Victor Mardrus, sometimes referred to as ‘Jesus Christ Mardrus’; Lucie and Natalie became inseparable and the love affair lasted from 1902-4 but the friendship lasted for life. The author also has much to say on another love – the Duchess de Clermont-Tonnerre: Elizabeth de Gramont, or ‘Lily’ who was close friends with Natalie from 1910-15 and of course there is  the famous Friday salons at Natalie’s home, 20 rue Jacob; the romance and love affair with the American painter Romain Brooks and her friendships with Bernard Berenson, Ezra Pound, Colette, Ford Madox Ford, Paul Valery, Mata Hari, Andre Gide, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Dolly Wilde, and hanging onto the fringes are James Joyce, T S Eliot and Marcel Proust, until we reach Natalie’s last lover Janine Lahovary who seems an unsavoury kind of woman but she did remain with Natalie to the end and took care of her – Natalie was a very wealthy woman!
Part II ‘Epilogue’ is a series of interviews by the author, George Wickes, two with Natalie in 1971, the year before she died, and several with Berthe Cleyrergue, Natalie’s servant since 1927; Janine Lahovary, friends, Jean Chalon, Francois Chapon and the American student Cheryl Hughes. The delightful reminiscences continue in part III from Eyre de Lanux, Virgil Thomson, Bettina Bergery, Truman Capote and Janet Flanner.
Wickes has produced a mesmerising journey through the Paris of the fin-de-siecle and beyond and a picture of the pagan, Hellenistic culture at the centre of that world and of the creative and intellectual salons unfolds and amidst the perfume and the philosophy and the talks on books is a charming, hedonistic lover of women who made a lasting impression in the minds and hearts of all those who came to know and love her – a witty and fascinating read!


Tiger Woman: My Story – by Betty May.

Betty May has led an exhausting and adventurous life and she was only 36 when ‘Tiger Woman’ was published in 1929. Throughout the eight chapters of the book we find a headstrong, earthy and quite child-like personality, almost a victim of her own fate who intrudes upon one improbable moment to the next; she could not help but become a figure of hedonistic notoriety – ‘I have never tried to be ordinary and fit in with other people. I have not cared what the world thought about me, and as a result I am afraid what I thought has often not been very kind.’ (Introduction) Betty and her three siblings were raised in squalor and misery in London’s Tidal Bay, but because of her misbehaviour she was sent to live with her cruel and drunken father (he had a penchant for bashing cats’ brains out against walls) who lived in a brothel with a Jewish woman named Sarah. The father showed no sign of love towards Betty and was eventually arrested (by his own father who was a Police man) for living off immoral earnings and given two years in prison and Betty went to live first with an Aunt on a barge and later with an Aunt on a farm in Somerset. Following a sexual encounter with an older man, a Master of the local Grammar School she was sent out into the world and naturally drifted towards London. She wasn’t long in London when her beautiful yet wild looks began to attract attention and when she failed to submit to the abuse, assaults, bribes and threats of a man who proclaimed to love her, he took her by taxi to a club in Leicester Square and pushed her down the stairs – it was her first glimpse of the smoky underworld of London’s nightlife with its dancing and jazz music and she became intoxicated by it. She began to frequent clubs such as the Endell Street Club and the Café Royal where artists such as Jacob Epstein, Augustus John and the art critic Roger Fry hung-out and held court amongst the bohemians like Nina Hamnett and the artist’s models. Suddenly, Betty goes to Bordeaux on a whim (all her adventures seem to be on a whim) with a man she later finds out to be a ‘white slaver’ and she manages to escape his clutches; homeless and hungry, she finds work dancing at a Café before being abducted by a street gang leader known as ‘White Panther’ and taken to Paris where she becomes a member of his gang and she is referred to as ‘Tiger Woman’. One of her more shocking and shameful episodes concerns Betty leading a young English undergraduate on and taking him to the gang’s headquarters where he is robbed and dumped outside Paris; the young man informs the police who raid the HQ (the gang had prior notice and fled). Betty is blamed and given an ultimatum: bring back the man or suffer the consequences (in other words they would kill her) so she hunts the man and finds him and lures him to the gangs new HQ and she is forced to brand the young man with a hot knife on his breast before he is again dumped in Monmartre. Again he goes to the police, the HQ is raided and gang members are taken into custody – Betty returns to England and her adventures make her the toast of the Endell Street Club and the Café Royal crowd.

She gets engaged to a man named Arthur and the next day gets engaged to marry Dick and lives with his parents in a village Rectory for three months, utterly bored – she escapes and returns to London and on seeing Arthur she agrees to marry him in a week’s time. The night preceding the eve of the wedding she is at the Café Royal where she meet her friend ‘Bunny’ who declares his love for her – they get married on the same day she was to marry Arthur! They honeymoon in Scotland and she finds Bunny is a cocaine addict and Betty succumbs to the drug also – they are thrown out of the hotel and back in London live at the home of Stewart Gray, the man behind the ‘back to the land’ movement. At the outbreak of war Bunny joins up and when he goes to France in December 1914 she is bored in Richmond, working at a hairdresser’s and a tobacconists; she fears she has contracted leprosy (from one of the hair nets manufactured in China) and she and Bunny agree to divorce (as it turns out Bunny dutifully dies in battle) and Betty escalates into a world of dope and drink and even becomes psychotic and suicidal. Before Bunny’s death she had met an Australian Major who fell for Betty and they get married and he attempts to help her get off the drugs and alcohol. While she is living in Hastings free of drugs she finds out her husband has been unfaithful with a French woman and they get divorced.
She gets noticed by the sculptor Jacob Epstein who makes the bust of her known as the ‘Savage’ which brings her minor celebrity (and artistic immortality) until she met a brilliant, young Oxford undergraduate in 1922 named Raoul Loveday; within a month they were married. Raoul, who had secured a First in History at St John’s College, Oxford was interested in Egyptology and the occult and he soon became acquainted with the notorious Aleister Crowley who asked him to join him at his Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Sicily; Betty is fearful but afraid of losing Raoul to the magician decides to go with her husband and they both travel to the Abbey in November 1922. She describes life at the Abbey (if you are fond of cats look away!) as she fights the hold Crowley (whom she does not name but refers to throughout as the ‘Mystic’) seems to have over the young Raoul and we are escorted through the events which lead up to poor Raoul’s death just three months after arriving from drinking unclean spring water. Back in London, poor and in her Soho room, Betty’s luck changes when a journalist offers to pay her £500 in return for her life story; the newspapers are filled with the scandals concerning Crowley, the Abbey and Raoul’s death! She then meets a strange woman by the name of Princess Waletka, a mind-reader and she travels to America with her, spending three months in her company and in her stage-show. Betty returns to England alone and gets engaged (again!) to a man named Carol, a sporting journalist whose mother is suitably unimpressed with Betty. They marry and there is a great stand-off between mother and daughter-in-law until one day when Betty is ill in bed she can take no more and Betty throws a cup of tea over her mother-in-law before rushing off to London. Her husband on hearing this resigns from his work, bundles her in a taxi and takes her back – she is bored of hearing about the sport (hunting, shooting and fishing) and of family history from Carol’s mother so Betty pitches a tent and opens a cake and sweet shop in the village, making all the confectionary herself, before growing tired of it and giving it up. One day Carol went out shooting rooks and Betty joined him, wringing the necks of those which were only wounded; a week later Carol is ill and Betty nurses him; her mother-in-law accuses her of killing her son and Betty at the end of her rope attacks her before doing what she does best – escaping back to London!
Throughout the book Betty leaps from one wild adventure to the next, willing to settle down with first this man and then that man, but it was inevitable that she would fail at marriage, even the most ardent lover would find it difficult to cage a tiger. The absence of a father-figure in childhood seems to me the single point which continually propels her into marriage and into a Freudian un-satisfaction of being dominated and conforming to what is expected and acceptable. She walks blindly into matrimony just as she walks blindly into the excesses of London’s ‘bright, young people’, obliterating the memory of war’s devastation, and in this she is in many ways, a modern woman, quite fearless and determined, easily prone to boredom and fierce when needs to be. She does not look for sympathy; she places her story down for the world to gawp at and merely says accept it for it is who I am! Much of her tale concerning the Abbey differs to Crowley’s version of events in his ‘Confessions’ – Crowley was not always wholly reliable and prone to exaggerate while I think Betty does tell the simple truth, if perhaps a little clouded by time as she never mentions keeping a journal which would have been of vital importance for the sake of historical accuracy, nevertheless, ‘Tiger Woman’ is the account of someone who did not fall for Crowley’s magical personality and someone who breezed through life at the cruel hand of fate and accepted it, good or bad! An astounding story and an extraordinary life indeed!



Gerard Manley Hopkins – by G F Lahey.

Published in 1930 (I read the 1969 edition) this fascinating little book of a mere 172 pages does credit to the author who obviously has a strong appreciation for Hopkins and his work and he shows us a precocious, delicately honest and sensitive child who is aware of ‘moral disorder and physical ugliness’; he brings the young Hopkins into the light and exposes his youthful character which is not the serious, brooding aesthete one assumes but a playful and stubborn adolescent absorbed in the world around him; the world of nature and the frailties of humanity – at school he observed that everyone drank too much liquid so he decided to abstain from drinking all liquid for a week; the result of course was that he collapsed but his determination and his will to endure proved almost beyond human physicality; he did the same with less drastic results with salt! Acts of such self-denial would become a common theme throughout his life. The young Gerard was a dreamer and a lover of poetry, a ‘fairy child in the midst of a commonplace, workaday world.’ During the Christmas term of 1863 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford where he studied under Jowett, Riddell and Pater, becoming a disciple of Pusey and Liddon, and he made some of his great friendships here such as his cousin and fellow poet Robert Bridges (later Poet Laureate), Digby Mackworth Dolben and William Addis. Dolben of course is an interesting personality in himself; a young man who had a ‘mind no less penetrating than his friend’s [Hopkins] and a soul equally sensitive to the seductive glow of nature and of art!’ Lahey says that his ‘personality was intense and affectionate, but buoyant and romantic.’ (p. 27) Like Hopkins, Dolben became a Puseyite and under the name of Brother Dominic he joined the Third Order of St. Benedict organised by Rev. Joseph Leycester Lyne. ‘I have written letters without end’ [to Dolben] Gerard reports to Bridges, ‘without a whiff of answer.’ (p. 28) These are of course the celebrated ‘dead letters’ to ‘dearest him’ and the same sense of romance permeated Hopkins’ chivalrous desire for Dolben as Dolben’s attachment to a boy at school whom he wrote love poems to. One would have to be unbelievably naive to assume that Hopkins was not overcome by terrible erotic thoughts for Dolben and would have wanted a deeper intimacy between them and it is probably correct to say that he was warned against such a relationship, a relationship which must remain by correspondence only if he desired to walk a spiritual path. Intense friendships were forged in the all-male society of public schools and colleges – if you have taken the trouble (as I have done) to wade through that fairly innocuous curio published in two volumes in 1881 which tells of the adventures of Jack Saul or the recollections of a Mary-Ann, under the unassuming title ‘Sins of the Cities of the Plain’ (‘milking a cow will never seem the same again!’) you will realise that homosexual practises did not begin and end with the Ancient Greeks! But too much importance is placed upon Hopkins’ sexuality or lack of it and his work should stand for itself as poetic masterpieces.

Dolben’s eccentricities were well known such as his liking for dressing as a monk – ‘Walford believed that Dolben had been mobbed in Birmingham. He went in his habit without sandals barefoot’ Hopkins wrote to Bridges. Although they only met once, Hopkins unrequited love for Dolben remained intense but at the time of Dolben’s death he had cooled towards him or at least gave the impression that he had, writing to Bridges that he would ‘someday like to see Finedon and the place where he was drowned.’ I have made that curious little pilgrimage myself to Finedon and laid my hand upon the cold stone of the young poet Dolben and left something of my sadness there with him.
In the third chapter ‘Hopkins and Newman’ we are presented with the correspondence between them and the meetings which took place and the four letters from H P Liddon to Hopkins dated 16^th, 18^th, 19^th and 20^th October 1866 imploring Hopkins not to be hasty in his decision to be confirmed into the Catholic Church – Hopkins was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Newman in Birmingham on 21^st October 1866. We get a sense of Hopkins the man through his friendship and correspondence with the poet Coventry Patmore who greatly appreciated Hopkins’ mental criticisms of his poetical works, even to the point that he tossed his manuscript of ten years work called ‘Sponsa Dei’ into the flames on Christmas Day 1887 after Hopkins’ critical comment that to publish it would be ‘telling secrets’. (p. 66) The author takes an in-depth look at Hopkins’ poems and the poetical structures he utilises in his Sprung Rhythm and analyses the aesthetic conceptions of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’. We also hear Hopkins’ theories on Keats whom he compares to the young Shakespeare in his letter to Patmore dated 24^th October 1887 and the letters from his friend Richard Watson Dixon almost read like the blushing declarations of the heart in their favourable friendship. This is a perfect little book about a curious man with a deep sense of devotion and vocation.

The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, edited with Notes and an Introduction – by Claude Colleer Abbott.

Claude Colleer Abbott, who was Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Durham, has produced a splendid book which brings together the correspondence of two gentle minds and two poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (1833-1900). Canon R W Dixon was a distinguished if overlooked poet and a great historian who attended King Edward VI School in Birmingham before going up to Pembroke College, Oxford (graduating in 1857); after his ordination he was assistant master at Highgate School (1861) for a short time and it was here where he met the seventeen year old Hopkins as a pupil who had won the school’s Poetry Prize in 1860. Dixon was a friend of the artist Edward Burne-Jones and the poet Rossetti. Dixon became a parish priest and wrote his monumental six volumes of ‘The History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction’ (1878-1902) and various volumes of poetry including ‘Christ’s Company and Other Poems’ (1861) which has touches of Browning and Tennyson; his rather dull ‘Historical Odes and Other Poems’ (1864), ‘Mano: A Poetical History’ (1883), ‘Odes and Eclogues’ (1884), ‘Lyrical Poems’ (1887), ‘The Story of Eudocia and Her Brothers’ (1888) and ‘Last Poems’ published posthumously in 1905. He was later vicar of Hayton, Cumberland, and of Warkworth, Northumberland.
Published in 1935 (I read the 1955 second impression) these letters which begin with Hopkins’ first introductory letter to Dixon dated 4^th June 1878 from Stonyhurst College, Blackburn in which there is high praise for the older poet and many kind words of admiration and so begins a firm friendship between these two crusty, literary men of God; in fact, an honourable trust is established and Dixon values Hopkins’ critical judgements of his poems greatly and both are gracious towards each other as throughout the charming correspondence which throws up subjects on poetic form such as Hopkins’ notion of ‘Sprung Rhythm’ the sonnet and poetic metres (something he goes into great detail about); Keats, Tennyson, Milton, Carlyle and Wordsworth all get their glory – there are some interesting views of fame too, not to mention poem recommendations. They managed to meet once after several attempts which their heavy workloads prevented and Hopkins’ calls Dixon ‘shy’ in the letter following their meeting which really brought the old Canon to life. It is true to say that Dixon was the first to really recognise Hopkins’ ‘terrible pathos’ and great poetic ability; he even attempted to have Hopkins’ poem ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’ published in a Carlisle newspaper which provoked the younger poet to protest against it, resolved to the renunciation and sanctity of his ecclesiastical work under the discipline and self-surrender of St Ignatius. There are a few holes in the tapestry as some letters are missing which should have been preserved but nevertheless, what remains gives a telling picture of two deeply religious, thoughtful and literary-minded men – Dixon’s last letter is dated 7^th July 1887 from Northumberland and Hopkins’ 29^th July 1888 from University College, Dublin – Hopkins died on 8^th June the following year aged 44. The Appendix contains ‘A Prayer’ by Hopkins, his letters contributed to Nature; his interests in art and music and there are ‘Poems by R W Dixon copied by G M Hopkins. Many of these letters will seem familiar if you have read widely on Hopkins and so they almost appear as old friends. A very touching and affectionate book!



An Experiment with Time – by J. W. Dunne.

The British philosopher, soldier and aeronautical engineer, John William Dunne (1875-1949) published his astounding theories on the nature of time and consciousness which he termed ‘serialism’: ‘An Experiment with Time’ in 1927 (I read the 1934 3^rd edition) to a welcome audience already becoming familiar with Einstein’s Relativity and the concept of quantum mechanics. Dunne became curious about ‘time’ as a young boy and endeavoured to explain an adequate theory to determine whether time or the chronological order of things (past, present and future) can be viewed as in pre-cognitive dreaming to perceive future events. His first ‘episode’ of pre-cognitive dreaming, or ‘clairvoyance’ occurred in 1898 when at his hotel in Sussex he dreamt that his watch had stopped at 4.30 a.m. and on waking he found his watch had stopped at precisely 4.30 a.m. having re-wound his watch he returned to sleep and on waking found that his watch had only lost a few minutes so it was logical to assume that he woke at 4.30 a.m. having had the dream impression at the same time and the few minutes lost were due to his winding of the watch. Dunne then began keeping detailed records of his dreams which he found contained images of previous and future events in his life to ascertain whether there existed a displacement of time in the fourth dimension, whereby minor events can be observed. His early hypothesis demonstrates that the state of being ‘awake’ in reality caused a mental barrier to all knowledge of the future which led him to the supposition – ‘what was the barrier which, in certain circumstances, debarred him from the proper and comprehensive view?’ (p. 69) Several experiments with others discounted the theory that temporal experiences or pre-cognitive phenomena was a supernormal faculty and that it was a ‘normal characteristic of man’s general relation to Time.’ (p. 91) He also records ‘waking experiments’ which also proved fruitful.

He draws on the conceptual theories of the British mathematician Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907), British Astronomer, Professor Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) and the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and concludes that Time has many levels, a multi-dimensional theory of Time in which the time-line of the observer and a higher time-line of the observer’s ‘conscious mind’ which experiences Time, or the movement of Time, co-exist, in fact, infinite dimensions relative to various perceptual states occur. ‘The Time dimension, for any given observer, is simply the dimension in which his own world-line happens to extend through the four-dimensional continuum.’ (p. 147) The theory illustrates the notion of death in which the physical body is separated from the first dimensional level of Time but the ‘consciousness’ remains on a higher, second dimensional level, which is an interesting theory but it does not explain the perception of future events fully and essentially the concept is flawed. He outlines his theory admirably in part four ‘Temporal Endurance and Temporal Flow’ and makes a clear definition of ‘Serial Time’ but time has shown in modern philosophical studies that the multi-dimensional theory of Time is incorrect. Dunne published four more works along similar lines: ‘The Serial Universe’ (1934), ‘The New Immortality’ (1938), ‘Nothing Dies’ (1940) and ‘Intrusions’ (1955).
I have unfortunately not read much on modern theories of the subject as yet but my own opinion is that any theory should take into account spatial-gravitational influence, human biological ‘sentient’ awareness (with the small and limited range of sensual stimuli inherent) and species-specific perception (temporal 'presence') to determine the nature of Time; of course other factors shall yield new information and paths of investigation but as to ‘seeing the future’ and even the concept of Time-travel, which I believe is a genuine future possibility of mankind, but that of course is a whole new paradox and only Time will tell! A compelling case indeed!

Poems and Songs – by Richard Middleton.

Like so many things I stumbled upon the name Richard Middleton accidentally. I had never heard of the name of Richard Middleton (1882-1911) until I came across him while reading a book of uranian verse, ‘Men and Boys: An Anthology’ edited by Edward Slocum and published in 1924 in which was reproduced his poem ‘The Bathing Boy’ which Frank Harris called ‘finer than Herrick, nearly as beautiful, indeed, as The Grecian Urn,’ well not quite, but it is particularly lovely: ‘And so I wept; I have seen lovely things,/ Maidens and stars and roses all a-nod/ In moonlit seas, but Love without his wings/ Set in the azure of an August sky,/ Was all too far for my mortality,/ And so I wept to see the little god.’ and something about him reached out to me and so I began another voyage of discovery! Richard Barham Middleton was born in Middlesex in 1882 and he worked as a bank clerk from 1901-07, a position which he detested; at night he moved in Bohemian circles. ‘Poems and Songs’ (1912) is the only collection of his published poetry (published posthumously) which is an accumulation of his work from various magazines such as The English Review, and it has an Introduction by his friend, Henry Savage. The volume, which he dedicates to another friend Frank Harris (I read the second impression, also 1912), contains seventy-five poems which have a richly haunting, melancholic sense about them which remains long after the poem’s initial reading, (there are some fantastic lines also which stand alone): ‘We are but moments in the tide of love, / Yet are we one with love’s eternity.’ (‘To H. S.’) and in ‘Lament for Lilian’ we find: ‘The yearning of the morning for the night, / The timeless passion of the hemispheres.’ And again later in the same poem: ‘A human blossom glad for human eyes/ Made pagan by a child’s serenity.’ – truly beautiful poetry!  His verse chimes with musical tones that lifts the heart and speaks of despair – ‘And when in dreams my lips repose on hers/ Kissing the pretty words that nestle there, / Her sweetness numbs my aching brain and stirs/ Like a dim sound of her, the dream-hushed air,’ (One More Song’). Middleton, like some large and bearded pirate had a child-like enthusiasm and he evokes a lost pagan energy of childhood as here in ‘Chant-Pagan’: ‘No son of man shall fear you, / No woman shall come near you, / Your lips may cry from your riven sky, / And the lovers shall not hear you.’ And again in ‘On a Dead Child’: ‘A little rose among the little roses, / And no more dead than they,’ Many of his poems have inspired imagined dedications to girls such as ‘To Dorothy’, Marjorie, Marguerite and Diana etc. and he fantasised about a young and beautiful image of the ideal girl, a maiden pure of heart and he inwardly raged towards his passionate ideal: ‘The love that made you mine shall bear/ Harsh fruit before the end of this, / For in the darkness you shall hear/ An echo that is none of his, / And you will droop with sudden fear/ Beneath his fond, adulterous kiss.’ (‘Epithalamium’). His poems, which are mostly love poems often echo the bitter longing and romantic wistfulness one finds in Housman, but there is no English stoicism here as he opens his heart like some morbid Browning. In ‘To C. M.’ which begins ‘Dear dreamer, with the wonderful wide eyes, /You are not mine to love,’ there is the realisation that he cannot attain the love he desires, and in the next stanza we find ‘I know I am as nothing in your place/ Of sombre love and strange, magnificent flowers, / But I have loosed your hair about my face/ To witch my midnight hours;’ what a wonderful line that is – ‘To witch my midnight hours’, and it ends: ‘There is a bitterness in love for me, /For every kiss shall burn my flesh with fire, / I am a prince of thwarted ecstasy, / Of unasuaged desire. / Yet would I know your new-bewitched skies, / Dear dreamer, and your passionate, wide eyes.’ From such devotional verse we know that Middleton drew inspiration from the young girls he knew (it seems he had more in common with Frank Harris than their editorial work for Vanity Fair) such as Lilian, Christine and Irene where he is ‘grieving in the graveyards of the moon’ (‘Irene’). That Middleton had an obsession with death there is no doubt and we find it in lines such as ‘Come, Death, and free me from these earthly walls/ That heaven may hold our final festivals/ The white stars trembling under!’ from ‘Love’s Mortality’ and again in ‘To Melisande’ – ‘Let down your hair, let down your hair, / I’ll make my shroud of it.’. Other poems of note are: ‘The Ballad of the Bacchanals’, ‘New Love’, ‘On a Dead Youth’, ‘Pagan Epitaph’, the Elizabethanesque ‘Any Lover, Any Lass’, ‘The Silent Lover’, and the passionate ‘After Love’. There are echoes of Poe in ‘The Dream’ with its lips, - ‘cold as stone’ – ‘Nightlong I heard the passing-bell/ And knew the mourner’s smart.’…’All night your icy kisses fell/ Upon my grieving heart.’

Middleton’s inner turmoil is revealed in the poem ‘The Ascetic’s love Song’: ‘She doth not call me old, in her embrace/ My body is made lovely, intricate/ With throbbing veins and nerves that interlace/ My bones with threads of fire; more passionate.’

It will come as no surprise that Middleton, a melancholic depressive who will be mostly remembered for his collection of supernatural tales ‘The Ghost Ship and Other Stories’ (1912) took his own life at the age of 29 in Brussels on 1^st December 1911, and ‘Poems and Songs’ is an enchanting volume of splendid poems by a very gifted yet tortured poet!

Richard Middleton: The Man and His Work – by Henry Savage.

Throughout the twelve chapters of this delightful book published in 1922 there is a sense of real friendship by the author, Henry Savage for his friend the poet Richard Barham Middleton (1882-1911) whose sad and short life Savage draws for us beautifully. Middleton attended various schools from London’s St Paul’s and Merchant Taylor’s to Quernmore House, Bromley, Kent and Cranbrook Grammar School. He went on to the University of London and in July 1900 passed the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate examinations (elementary and additional mathematics, English and Natural Philosophy). He was a dreamer, a child-like figure with a love of cricket – his friend Louis J McQuilland said of him that he was a ‘shaggy Peter Pan with a briar pipe’ and in looks he certainly was with his shock of black hair and wild beard. Of his own childhood Middleton says ‘I do not lament, and I hope I shall never have to endure that state of aggrieved helplessness again.’ And he goes on to say that ‘the whole atmosphere was charged with ugly mysteries like an Ibsen play, and I was too introspective to be a happy child.’ (taken from and unpublished autobiography, quoted on p. 4) In early 1901 he became a temporary clerk in the offices of the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation and nine months later became a permanent member of staff – he was with them for five years and he hated every minute! He haunted the cafes as a clerk and lost money on horses and bought countless books and wrote poetry. At the age of twenty-three in 1905 he replied to an ad in the ‘Academy’ seeking members for a new club, a society called the New Bohemians; he was invited to the Prince’s Head for the ‘initiation into the mysteries’ and attended their Thursday night gatherings (McQuilland was its secretary). Along with Frank Harris and Austin Harrison, he asked Housman to lunch and they were sadly disillusioned with the reality of the poet. Flying the family nest at Hampton Court in 1906, Middleton took two rooms at 7 Blackfriars Road and transcended into the bohemian poet counting among his friends the likes of Henry Savage, Arthur Machen, Randal Charlton, T Michael Pope and even Lord Alfred Douglas. He resigned from his work as a clerk with the intention of making money from his pen, not an easy task and there were moments of great depression for him: ‘You see I am cheerful and I rejoice that it takes as little to make me happy as it does to make me suicidal.’ (p. 68) Frank Harris who knew him quite intimately from their editorial roles at Vanity Fair said that his ‘characteristic attitude was a dignified, somewhat disdainful acceptance of life’s perverse iniquities.’ (p. 78) It is probably doubtful that he ever tasted the wondrous sensations of real love without squalid attachment and not some vision of his ideal which acted as muse to the poet; Savage discloses that he was ‘most powerfully attracted towards the young girl who first inspired him, and later, and yet more powerfully, towards that other – the Christine of his poems – through whom the greater part of his poetic work was accomplished.’ (p. 79-80) Middleton confesses to Savage in a letter that he wants ‘to love something or other anyhow: Love kills the ego with a surfeit of egoism, and I appreciate but do not like mine.’ (p. 81) Between 1908-9 he suffered much poverty and pain from his neuralgia and we even find a mention of him meeting the notorious Aleister Crowley on page 129! He got behind in his rent and ‘starved for four days and walked back from Brighton’ (p. 130) and so in early 1909 he took lodgings at 3 Alexandra Road, Wimbledon before returning back to his parents in the summer at St Albans. Savage suggested a holiday in Brussels and Middleton is at first reluctant but they go in February 1911 and in Brussels they take a room at 10 Rue de Joncker where after Savage’s return home to England, Middleton remained. His book of poems ‘Dust and Dreams’ failed to make an impression on publishers, in fact, no book of his was published during his lifetime! In Brussels he became more despondent and his letters to Savage are filled with his melancholy anguish such as here, dated 5^th November 1911 – ‘I myself am so much in the deeps that I grow more hopeful. This is no paradox, but a plain statement of my attitude towards existence. To-morrow I shall have been here four weeks, four weeks of drunkenness and riggishness and unbroken idleness. During the whole of that period I have been distinctly ill and very unhappy. I have no nerves left and my stomach is completely disordered.’ (p. 177) Savage implores him to return home but Middleton resisted the temptation of doing so, perhaps seeing it as yet another sign of failure and decided to stay for ‘another month and see how things go.’ adding ‘When I feel the need I shall create God for myself; and I shall certainly not make him in my own image.’ Middleton seems to sink lower and lower and his mood turns quite dark – ‘I do not wish that I were dead: I wish that I had never lived…’ (from a letter dated 15^th November 1911. p. 185) His girls, Christine and the others who were chorus girls left Brussels on the following day for Bordeaux and he could not say goodbye; perhaps something ugly had occurred for in the same letter (15^th November) he adds ‘Poor Christine had better marry her Swiss boy…’ His next letter (20^th November) sees him in a more cheerful mood and he says that he has started writing prose again – ‘The girls have gone and I hope I have done with love for a long, long time.’

Savage’s reply was dated 1^st December and it was found unopened in Middleton’s room at 10 Rue de Joncker – the same day, Savage received the telegram from Middleton’s landlady, Mme Grey informing him that his friend was dead. The following day (2^nd December) Savage and a friend Randal Charlton travel to Brussels and Charlton breaks down the door that the police have sealed and collects Middleton’s papers and letters, amongst which was found a farewell message on a postcard intended for Savage but not posted: ‘Good-bye! Harry I’m going adventuring again, and thanks to you I shall have some pleasant memories in my knapsack. As for the many bitter ones, perhaps they will not weigh so heavy now as they did before. “A broken and a contrite heart, oh Lord, thou shalt not despise.” Richard.’ (p. 193) On another message written on an envelope received at Brussels and dated 25^th November addressed to him from Christine, it simply said: ‘Poor little girl. Someone must write to her nicely to break the news.’ (p. 195) Middleton had killed himself with chloroform (which he probably took for his neuralgia) and ‘in order to make more sure of the effect of the chloroform he had stuffed cotton-wool in his nostrils.’ (p. 195) The following day his burial was arranged and he was buried at Calvoet Cemetery on the outskirts of Brussels. He died penniless, in pain and alone but thankfully his poems and prose are left to us such as his ‘The Ghost Ship and Other Stories’ (1912), ‘Poems and Songs’ (1912), ‘The Day Before Yesterday’ (1912) and his ‘Monologues’ (1913) for all the world to wonder at his masterful writing and in reading, honour the memory of a strange and enchanted man whose death was a miserable tragedy!

A Problem in Modern Ethics – by John Addington Symonds.

This 1896 publication is subtitled ‘an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion’ and Symonds steps delicately through the history of the ‘invert’ from the Christian opinion during the age of Justinian and throughout the world of literature with its pornographic and descriptive works such as Francois Carlier’s ‘Les Deux Prostitutions’ (1887) with its study of female prostitutes and homosexuality within the military; and of course he brings in the medical-forensic aspect of literature on the subject with Auguste Ambrose Tardieu (1818-1879) and the psychological does not escape his attention either with the impressive likes of Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804-84), Benjamin Tarnowsky (1837-1906), Richard Krafft-Ebbing (1840-1902) and Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909). From the Historical and Anthropological world Symonds brings the figures of Moritz Herman Eduard Meier (1796-1855) and his ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’, Julius Rosenbaum, Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) and Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910) to the arena while not forgetting the polemical writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) and the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-1892), on whom Symonds writes well and for me was probably the most interesting. In fact, I found it difficult to like this book despite Symonds’s authority on the subject and his engaging power as a writer; an inner hatred and aversion to much of what he says grew measureless and at several points I was for abandoning the book but with determination I continued, like the early Church which condemned such a natural expression of love yet practiced it profusely to become the vice of Popes and Kings alike. Symonds rightly suggests that the ‘invert’ or the homosexual (male or female) is not a product of any disease or mental disorder brought about by abuse, poverty or masturbation, but is in fact an innate condition. He brings to the table various actual accounts from ‘sufferers’ who tell their tales and we endure all the legal statistics churned out for those ‘Medical Psychologists and Jurists’ the book is ‘especially addressed to’. Frankly, I much preferred Symonds’s earlier work ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’ (1873) and this volume became rather tedious and dull and the high moralistic attitude of thankfully long-dead, over-righteous hypocrites who planted the rotten seeds within the Church and the genteel population, who like good sheep were satisfied by the deeds of the shepherd… it all seems ridiculous and rarely do I regret reading a book but this volume has just won that coveted award!

The Ghost Ship and Other Stories – by Richard Middleton.

This delightful volume of strange tales published in 1913 after the author’s death the previous year introduces the reader to the magical and somewhat disturbing world of Richard Middleton, who masterfully weaves these fantastic pieces with moonlight and fairy dust to create a sometimes nonsensical, sometimes perplexingly horrific world. Had he lived he would have surely established himself among the likes of Machen, Blackwood and Le Fanu, as it is the title story has secured him lasting fame in the world of supernatural writing. In fact, it is Machen who writes the preface to the volume and his enthusiasm and delight at the tales is touching as he explains a little of the ‘alchemy’ behind the tales and the ‘puzzle’ within them. ‘The Ghost Ship’, the best known story, is narrated by John Simmons, an inhabitant of Fairfield Village, a most peculiarly haunted village frequented by numerous ghosts where the story is set following the Great Storm in the spring of 1897 (Jubilee Year). The Landlord of the Fox and Grapes has found that a great wooden sailing ship has been blown into his turnip field, fifty miles from the sea at Portsmouth. On Jubilee Day, the Captain of the ship, Captain Bartholomew Roberts, fires off a round of canon and blasts a hole in Farmer Johnstone’s barn. Drunkenness becomes rife amongst the villagers and the ghostly population since the ship dropped anchor in the turnip field. When it left during the second great storm of that year it took all the young ghosts with it leaving the female ghosts to weep for its arrival which of course it does not return. A strange and mesmerising tale indeed! Other stories in the volume are: ‘The Drama of Youth’, ‘The New Boy’, ‘On the Brighton Road’, ‘A Tragedy in Little’, ‘Shepherd’s Boy’, ‘The Passing of Edward’, ‘The Story of a Book’, ‘The Bird in the Garden’, ‘Children of the Moon’, ‘The Coffin Merchant’, ‘The Soul of a Policeman’, ‘The Conjurer’, ‘The Poet’s Allegory’, ‘Who shall say - ?’, ‘The Biography of a Superman’, ‘Blue Blood’, ‘Fate and the Artist’, ‘The Great Man’ and ‘A Wet Day’. Machen declared (of The Ghost Ship) that he ‘would not exchange this short, crazy, enchanting fantasy for a whole wilderness of seemly novels’ and I quite agree, for this is an intensely rewarding read and these fabulous tales will remain long after the book is finished!

The Quiet Singer and Other Poems – by Charles Hanson Towne.

Charles Hanson Towne (1877-1949) was an American author, editor and poet, born in Kentucky the family moved to New York when he was three and he remained there to become a well-known ‘New Yorker’. ‘The Quiet Singer’ was published in 1908 and consists of eighty-seven poems (I read the 1914 edition) including the forms of quatrains and sonnets and sections titled: ‘Songs of New York’ and ‘Songs out of the Orient’. My enthusiasm waned and my attention wandered in places as much of the poetry is derivative but there are a few wonders which describe elements in nature and human expressions, such as: ‘I shall know, ere you will guess/ (Though with life I have no part),/ What new golden loveliness/ Stirs within the old earth’s heart,’ from ‘A Distant Star’ which ends: ‘And the dreams that I shall dream,/ In that Spring when I am dead,/ May arise until they seem/ Blossoms white and blossoms red!’ There is also a sense that the author yearns towards God as in ‘Aere Perennius’ which begins ‘As long as the stars of God/ Hang steadfast in the sky’.

And of course that old spectre Love rears its ugly head as in his ‘Love, the Victor’:

‘No strength of mine can hold thee back, O Love!

I thought that I was safe beyond the will;
But after long, long years, lo! here am I,
Obedient still!’

Other noteworthy poems include: ‘A Rose Whispers’, ‘The Great and Silent Things’, ‘Villanelle’, ‘The House of the Heart’ with its wonderful ‘Your footfall in my heart’s great vacant ground,/ Your voice to sing and sing forevermore’ and this from ‘Haunted’: ‘I am the ghost of that pure deed/ You might have done, but did not do;/ I am the ghost of that good seed/ You might have sown when Life was new.’ Not bad at all and Towne is an admirable writer of the sonnet of which here are five and the simple beauty of ‘After reading Keats’ and ‘How bravely now I face the marching days’.

Youth and Other Poems – by Charles Hanson Towne.

Towne attended City College in New York and went on to become editorial assistant at Cosmopolitan and then assistant editor of the ‘Smart Set’ in 1901 before taking on the mantle of editor from 1904-7 and later Harper’s Bazaar. This collection of poems was published in 1911 and the volume (just 82 pages) is dedicated to his friend Richard Le Gallienne. The long poem ‘Youth’ which takes up half of the book has some worthy lines and there are a few poems which interested me such as ‘Love’s Ritual’, ‘Night’, ‘Midsummer’, ‘At the end of September’, ‘Of Death’ and ‘Shelley’s Skylark’ – ‘From empyrean heights for ever shall fall/ Thy silver madrigal.’ Overall I found the collection quite poor but still worth reading.

Beyond the Stars and Other Poems – by Charles Hanson Towne.

This collection of thirty-one poems published in 1913 seems to be an improvement on his previous ‘Youth and Other Poems’ and the long poem ‘Beyond the Stars’ written in blank verse is quite outstanding as verse goes and Towne lifts his poetic derivations into new heights of near originality – ‘I clomb beyond the sun, beyond the moon;/ In flight on flight I touched the highest star; / I plunged to regions where the Spring is born, / Myself (I asked not how) the April wind, / Myself the elements that are of God.’ Other poems fall into the mundane rhyme which in Towne’s hands seems a little lacklustre but they are not beyond minor praise: ‘Peace’, ‘The Ballad of Shame and Dread’, ‘Love hath a Chalice’, ‘Two Songs of London’, ‘An Easter Canticle’, ‘April Madness’, ‘How softly runs the afternoon’, ‘An August Night in the City’, ‘Penance’ and ‘The Dead March’. Towne went on to teach poetry at Columbia University (one of his students was J D Salinger) and his autobiography ‘So far, so good’ came out in 1945. Other poetic works include ‘Manhattan’ (1909), ‘Today and Tomorrow’ (1916) and ‘A World of Windows’ (1919) which I shall leave for posterity to decide whether his verse rises above the amateurish consistency he aims to achieve.

Jane Wolfe: The Cefalu Diaries 1920-1923.

Published in 2008 by the Temple of the Silver Star and compiled and introduced by Dr. David Schoenmaker who is the founder and Chancellor of that Magical Order, ‘The Cefalu Diaries’ contains the bulk of the surviving diaries handwritten and typed by Jane Wolfe during her magical training under Crowley at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu.

Sarah Jane Wolfe (1875-1958) was an American actress born in Pennsylvania, who in 1910 moved to Hollywood and played minor, supporting roles in silent films. A few years later she became interested in the occult and read Crowley’s magical publication The Equinox and she felt drawn to magick and contacted Crowley through the ‘International’ in which Crowley had published some of his works and a correspondence was struck up. Crowley became increasingly passionate towards Jane, there was something mysterious about her, about the name which seemed to signify a young, lithe and athletic wolf-like creature which appealed to him and a meeting was arranged at Bou Saada on 25^th June 1920; Crowley then changed the meeting place to Tunis and sent a telegram to Jane which she did not receive and so while she sat it out in Bou Saada feeling foolish and dejected, Crowley was in Tunis wondering why this fascinating woman did not arrive! Jane, ever resilient and determined, took it on herself to travel to Cefalu and so she met Crowley in July and all the romantic illusions fell immediately away; Crowley was deeply disappointed and Jane thought Crowley and the Abbey filthy beyond belief. But, she had made the long journey there from Los Angeles and it was her will to be there and there she stayed and she proved a loyal and devoted student of Crowley and magick as the diaries show, she practices her Asana, Pranayama and Dharana techniques in meditation, recording her visions. Crowley accepted Jane as a Probationer of his magical order on 11^th June 1921 and she took the name Estai; two days later on 13^th June she undertook a 31 day Magical Retirement, taking a vow of silence and living in Crowley’s tent on the beach near the Abbey. Unfortunately the diary for this period is missing. But there is a wealth of insight into the magical training at the Abbey with a few descriptions of Abbey life and its ritual regime, the children, Leah Hirsig and Ninnette Shumway, the fleas and of course Crowley’s comments are invaluable such as here when on 29^th May 1921, Frater Genesthai (C F Russell who was also a Probationer at the Abbey) did a Tarot Divination for Jane (Crowley is bemused as Genesthai ‘can’t do Tarot yet’); Jane types the results out for Crowley in her diary after which Crowley adds, like a teacher marking a schoolboy’s exercise book – ‘This is the most unintelligible drivel I have read for a long time.’
Wolfe went on to help found South California’s Agape Lodge of the OTO, in fact she was Lodge Master and she died at the age of 83 in 1958 and throughout her magical career she remained a devoted friend of Crowley to the end, of which there were few. For an excellent biography of Wolfe one can do no better than go to the College of Thelema’s ‘In the Continuum’ by Soror Meral who was admitted as a Probationer by Wolfe on 3^rd June 1940. We have Soror Meral (Phyllis Seckler, 1917-2004) the magical student of Wolfe’s to thank for preserving these valuable documents which also contains Crowley’s comments written in pencil and produced here in facsimile. Wolfe’s magical diaries may be of little interest to those who do not appreciate Crowley’s system of Magick or Thelema but to those who do they are quite beautiful as we get close to her through the writing which contains copious spelling mistakes, some quite amusing such as ‘math of the poon’ for ‘path of the moon’ – all that opium can become distracting and take its toll on grammar and besides, all ‘Spelling is defunct;’ (Liber Al. III. 2.) I would have liked to see an abundance of footnotes but then I’m a footnote freak and one can never have too many! An enlightening read!


Autobiography of an Androgyne – by Earl Lind.

Published in 1918 under the assumed name of ‘Earl Lind’, the author, who also goes by the names of ‘Ralph Werther’ and ‘Jennie June’, has written a fascinating account of his double life as a respectable if somewhat effeminate university-educated office worker and as an androgyne – a man-woman or as we would term it today, a transgender male. The book is edited with an introduction by Alfred Waldemar Herzog (1866-1933) who had the book published ‘as a psychological study’ after it was refused countless times by other publishers. Earl Lind, or perhaps it is more correct to call the author Jennie June and refer to her as a woman for she is indeed female mentally and psychologically and only part masculine physically, inscribed the book to ‘Nature’s Step-Children – the sexually abnormal by birth – in the hope that their lives may be rendered more tolerable through the publication of this Autobiography’. Born in Connecticut in 1874, Jennie June, a most learned individual, reveals the often sad and disturbing events of her life in the pursuit of fulfilling her natural instincts as a woman, although shunned by society as an abnormal and disgusting ‘monster’. She informs us of her childhood as a sensitive and misunderstood boy who wanted to be a girl and please the other boys in displaying feminine characteristics. From a young age Jennie was highly sexual and addicted to fellatio (her father thrashed her with his boot when she was discovered under a desk in the act). She attended the University in the City of New York in 1891 and so the need for a double-life was called for as Ralph, a man who spoke several languages and studied and as Jennie who paraded herself around the Bowery and other seedy locations in pursuit of male attachments of the virile labourer and criminal type; she emphasised her weakness and spoke as a baby-girl, flattering the men she encountered, impressed with their strength and physical beauty. Highly emotional, Jennie was prone to fall in love with one charming young thug after another and repeatedly robbed, beaten, blackmailed, threatened, raped and on some occasions almost half murdered! She suffered regular bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts and as a deeply religious person implored God to make her wholly woman – at the age of twenty-eight she was castrated. She found some solace hanging around the soldiers, the strong, brave masculine types she adored at their camps where she was known as a ‘fairy’; she would worship these ruffians even at the cruel hands of their cruelty and be beaten beyond recognition, such was her masochistic desire to be dominated. The sexual acts are written in Latin which gives it an air of respectability; a sense of the ecclesiastical in a profession where Latin covers many a sin. In fact, I had to keep reminding myself throughout the 265 pages that this was occurring in the 1890’s and not the more recent past. Also included in the appendix are the author’s thoughts on Oscar Wilde and ‘Impressions of the Author by a Business Associate’. Alfred Herzog who found the subject matter ‘nauseating’ says wrongly that there is little scientific or literary value in the work and wanted to edit the autobiography, ‘butchering’ it in his clumsy hands. Thankfully it stands pretty much as Jennie June wrote it, for the ‘general reader’ and for those like Jennie who suffer the same sentence through life. Now we look upon such people with more compassion and understanding of their natures, but towards our enlightened stance, many have been viciously beaten, incarcerated and murdered. Herzog, although he had the foresight to have the volume published, seems the more repulsive for his failure to understand the nature of the androgyne, or ‘invert’ as he also terms it and future publications would suffer no loss at his removal from the volume and the remarkable story of Jennie June should stand alone as a curious and deeply moving tale of courage and of man’s ill-treatment against that which he does not understand!

The Female Impersonators – by Earl Lind.

Again Lind, (Jennie June) in the second part of her autobiography published in 1922 and again, the jewel has been tarnished by the filthy hands of Alfred W Herzog in his attempt at editing and providing an introduction which shall be overlooked. Jennie relates her ‘Sequel to the Autobiography of an Androgyne and an account of the author’s experiences during his six years career as instinctive female impersonator in New York’s Underworld; together with the life stories of androgyne associates and an outline of his subsequently acquired knowledge of kindred phenomena of human character and psychology’. Written in eight parts over 295 pages with 17 illustrations, The Female Impersonators summarises much of Jennie’s life as given in the Autobiography of an Androgyne with some new revelations and an interesting look at androgynes in mythology and history such as Apollo, Hermaphroditos, Ganymede, Socrates, Plato, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Michelangelo and Raphael; she also assumes, to my utmost displeasure and violent rage, that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s works on the defence that Shakespeare was too masculine to have composed such ‘androgynistic characters’ and to be the author of those beautiful sonnets – never underestimate a Warwickshire man! Of great interest also are the biographical details of other female impersonators such as ‘Frank – Eunice’ and ‘Angelo – Phyllis’ (poor Phyllis became another murdered statistic) and ‘Newspaper Accounts of Murder of Androgynes’, ‘Medical Writers on Androgynism’ and  some verse penned by Jennie. Those of you wanting to know more can turn to Jennie’s third volume of autobiography, ‘The Riddle of the Underworld’ (1922) a ‘closing volume of the trilogy depicting the life-experience of a bisexual university “man”’.

The Day Before Yesterday – by Richard Middleton.

This volume of 33 astounding short stories by the hugely talented author Richard Middleton was published in 1912 after his suicide and each miniature masterpiece confirms Middleton’s genius as a writer and also the great loss to literature after his death. Middleton, who was something of a child himself in many ways observes the world in these stories through the eyes of a child who wonders at all the strange and often inexplicable delights of nature; of the world of imagination and make-believe which flourishes in childhood and diminishes with the grown-ups or ‘Olympians’ as the author calls them. Stories such as ‘The Enchanted Place’, ‘The Magic Pool’, ‘Children and the Spring’, and ‘On Digging Holes’ reveal the magic the author conjures as childhood interacts with the natural world around them where every woodland glade is a haunted dell; where treasure lurks beneath each spadeful of earth and pirates drink and sing deep in coastal caves; the simplicity of imagining a small pool as a boating lake and sailing walnut shell boats upon it; stories of far away imaginative travel as in ‘The Magic Carpet’ or sworn allegiance to one’s choice in the boat race in ‘Oxford and Cambridge’; the author also writes from the standpoint of an adult either reminiscing about the joys of childhood as in ‘On Nursery Cupboards’, ‘Real Cricket’,  and ‘On going to Bed’ or entering their innocent play as in ‘A Secret Society’ or just writing fantastic pieces as ‘A Distinguished Guest’ about a cat the author took care of for a short time which is simply wonderful! Charming and spellbinding, Middleton is marvellous and these stories are some of the most beautiful I have ever read which captures the magical essence of childhood and the naïve delicacy which makes everything appear other-worldly and much more interesting than the ordinary way in which things are viewed and experienced.

The Crucifixion and Other Poems – by Benjamin George Ambler.

This volume of verse published in 1880 contains along with the title poem, 64 miscellaneous poems and 11 sonnets over 140 pages but for me it was the title poem ‘The Crucifixion’ which anchored this book in the sea of almost greatness and lifted it from the murky depths of the really awful and almost unreadable! The poem is in four scenes: 1. the ‘Hall of Judgement’ which sees Christ confronted by Pilate; 2. ‘The Temple’ where Judas makes his appearance; 3. ‘Mount Calvary’ where Christ is crucified between two robbers and Peter mingles with the crowd and the Angel Gabriel, and 4. ‘The Sepulchre’ where we meet Mary Magdalene, the two Angels in the tomb and Christ once more. Apart from this initial poem I found little to get excited about and although I find a lot of satisfaction in unearthing an obscure or neglected poet, I usually always find some worthwhile beauty somewhere and there were several small examples here I thought, such as in the poems ‘Invocation’, ‘Shadows of Life’, ‘Graves’, ‘In Memoriam – the Princess Alice’, ‘The Dying Poet’, ‘The Night Winds’, ‘A Requiem’ and ‘Ode to Silence’ with its gentle ‘Sadness incarnate, for the dark eclipse/ Must fall on all, the sunny moments spend/ Themselves, thus swiftly pass, all pleasure hath an end.’ Disappointing and unadventurous!

Song Favours – by C. W. Dalmon.

Charles William Dalmon (1862-1938) is a little read Sussex Poet and ‘Song Favours’ at a little under a hundred pages and published in 1895 is the author’s second published work. John Betjeman found much to enthuse about Dalmon, the 1890’s decadent who contributed to the Yellow Book. The poems, many of them revisit the theme of King Arthur; have a tendency to drift towards W. B. Yeats and William Blake in their magical symbolism and faery-haunted folklore and mythology such as ‘Pan Eating Honey’: ‘Stops to pipe a tune;/ Now to sing a ditty; / Now to look and smile at me/ Out of love and pity.’ Other poems of worth are ‘Night Shades’, ‘Narcissus’, ‘The Sussex Muse’ and ‘Nimue’ which has echoes of Tennyson – ‘The white owl crossed the moon path on the mere,/ And sank into the shadow silently./ Transformed, and fallen, with no lover near - /Ah! Lady Nimue,’ The book ends on a round of Drinking Songs and other published volumes worth searching out are: Minutiae (1892), Flower and Leaf (1900), A Poor Man’s Riches (1920), Singing as I go (1927) and The Last Service (1928).

Monologues – by Richard Middleton.

This collection of thirty-two essays written by Richard Middleton and published in 1913 is really insightful and we get a glimpse of the table-talk of the large bearded man which was said to be most eloquent with witty turns of phrases and intelligent gems plucked from the world of literature. There are some dated expressions but the simple variety and spellbinding range of his thought make up for that as he talks about such things as ‘the decay of the essay’, ‘the tyranny of the ugly’, ‘the true Bohemia’, ‘suicide and the state’, ‘why women fail in art’, ‘the virtues of getting drunk’ and ‘the philosophy of gambling’. In ‘the gift of appreciation’ he delivers a masterful analysis of heroes and hero-worship and some of his essays have something prophetic about them. I found such enjoyment in these refreshing writings that I would refer anyone interested in learning the art of essay-writing to study them diligently and wonder in amazement at Middleton’s views of the world around him.

Shades of Eton – by Percy Lubbock.

Percy Lubbock (1879-1965) has written a fascinating account of his time at Eton in this volume published in 1923 (I read the 1932 ‘Life and Letters’ series) and he positively chimes with devotional love and admiration for the hugely influential gods of Eton, men of stature and simple characters but all towers of scholastic learning, such as the Reverend Edmond Warre (1837-1920), Headmaster of Eton from 1884-1905. Lubbock sketches the respectable Head with fond memories and deep compassion for the boys; then there is James John Hornby (1826-1909) Provost of Eton from 1884 till his death twenty-five years later; we are led through the dusty corridors and meet such estimable Masters as Edward Daniel Stone (1832-1916) the Greek and Latin Master, Pecker Rouse the mathematics Master and Frank Tarver the French Master. We are also presented to the Eton before Lubbock’s time and introduced to the scholar-poet of ‘Ionica’ fame, William Johnson Cory (1823-1892), a ‘difficult spirit’ who ‘in his day was a figure at Eton like none other…’ a man who ‘stayed as a stranger and a sojourner for his day.’ (p. 74) He was assistant Master in 1845 and resigned from Eton under some suspicion in 1872. Lubbock also goes on to mention the terribly gifted Greek scholar Walter Headlam (1866-1908) who was a poet and a Master of Eton; Headlam, a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, ‘forgot everything, forgot the hours and the days as he sat among his books, reading and reading; and a call into the open brought him out bewildered, staring wildly and comically; and then he caught up at last with the new discovery of the day, and plunged into chuckling enjoyment of it.’ (p. 76) Lubbock gushes over Francis Warre-Cornish (1839-1916), Librarian and Vice Provost of Eton from 1893 until his death, and his wife Blanche who were housed in the cloisters; Mrs Cornish delighted the boys with her talk and an invite to the Cornish household was a significant affair (Francis also wrote a splendid volume on William Cory which I heartily recommend). Lubbock’s tutor and House Master, the poet and novelist Arthur C. Benson (1862-1925) is also honoured by the pen of the author; Benson won a scholarship to Eton in 1874 and taught there from 1885-1903; Benson introduced the young Lubbock to Edmund Gosse and the author Henry James – Lubbock also wrote a volume on Benson’s Diaries which is very extensive and definitely worth reading! Other stars in the Etonian star system include the Reverend William Adolphus Carter (1815-1901), Bursar of Eton and the Reverend Edward ‘Badger’ Hale, the Science Master; Sir Walter Durnford (1847-1926), a House Master of Eton; Herbert Francis William Tatham (1861-1909), Arthur Campbell Ainger (1841-1919), the Latin Master and Edward Compton Austen Leigh (1839-1916) an Eton scholar in 1857; Leigh became the Lower Master from 1887 until he retired in 1905. But as with Benson and Cornish whom the author admires, it is with that worthy gentleman artist Henry Elford Luxmoore (1841-1926) whose garden at Eton was much talked about that Lubbock has great affection and admiration for. Luxmoore was an Eton Master from 1864-1908 and throughout these eighteen chapters Lubbock conjures the old Eton ghosts back to life, a race of sturdy men remembered fondly for their learning and enthusiasm.

The Craft of Fiction – by Percy Lubbock.


Originally published in 1921 (I read a 1963 reprint), The Craft of Fiction over 276 pages and eighteen chapters lifts the lid on the art and the craft of writing, in fact he goes into detail on the distinction between the writing of the novel as a ‘craft’ or an ‘art’. He looks at the form of the story, the scenes and the characters, the direction of the drama and the main themes in such classic novels as Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘War and Peace’; Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’ and Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ to ‘Henry James’s ‘The Ambassadors’. Lubbock picks at each selected author’s scabs to reveal, as in ‘War and Peace’, Tolstoy’s method or representing time and its length to the reader and the truth of the character; Flaubert’s narration techniques – the voice of the author and the voice of the character; his ‘indirect’ drama and the authenticity of the character as opposed to Defoe who uses a more ‘direct’ method in his drama and utilises ‘historic truthfulness’. We are shown the ‘portrayal’ of Emma Bovary as a protagonist and the ‘character’ of her world; the ‘panoramic scenes’ of ‘Vanity Fair’ which unlike Dickens is not melodramatic and the chronology of the story. The author’s ‘pictorial descriptive method’ is also laid before us – Thackery makes his presence known on the page like Turgenev as a ‘reflective storyteller’, unlike Flaubert who remains hidden. This is all very interesting but I couldn’t help thinking that Lubbock was having too much fun with the reader showing off his impressive knowledge and critical analysis of some of the greatest novels ever written, and in nearly all cases from memory; he parades before us the likes of Stendhal, Maupassant, Fielding, Scott and Samuel Richardson; he winks knowingly as he pontificates on the narrator in the character of the first person, as in Dickens’s ‘David Copperfield’ and Meredith’s Harry Richmond; Lubbock scoffs with a glint in his eye, expounding the theory of the third person as in Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ and Henry James’s ‘The Ambassadors’; the conscious thought process of the characters and the ‘drama’ of the ‘mind’ before Lubbock wrestles the reader into submission with the method of dialogue – Henry James’s ‘The Wings of the Dove’ and the dramatic subject – ‘The Awkward Age’ and Walter Pater’s ‘Marius the Epicurean before striking the fatal blow with Balzac’s descriptive prose – the Human Comedy. Lubbock tears away at the illusion to expose the bricks and mortar of the writer's craft and reveal the magician's tricks and destroy the mystery which is all very well, yet at the end of the book one feels that nothing really has been desecrated and no sacred idols have been defaced, the writer's craft is still a noble mystery with or without the bag of tricks being displayed for the uninitiated!

A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass – by Amy Lowell.

Lowell’s first collection of poetry published in 1912 (I read a 1955 reprint) takes the title from Shelley’s poem Adonais: ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity.’ She divides the collection into Lyrical Poems of which there are thirty-three, Sonnets which contains twenty-eight poems and ‘Verses for Children’. From the Lyrical Poems I found the most interesting to be ‘Before the Altar’ with its ‘Empty and silent, I / Kneel before your pure, calm majesty. / On this stone, in this urn/ I pour my heart and watch it burn, / Myself the sacrifice; but be / Still unmoved: Divinity.’ And from ‘Petals’ – ‘And the stream/ As it flows / Sweeps them away, / Each one is gone / Ever beyond into infinite ways. / We above stay / While years hurry on, / The flower fared forth, though its fragrance / Still stays.’ Also noteworthy are ‘Behind a Wall’ and ‘March Evening’ with its ‘Dying, forlorn, in dreary sorrow, / Wrapping the mists round her withering form, / Day sinks down; and in darkness to-morrow / Travails to birth in the womb of the storm.’ From the Sonnets which were moderately accomplished I liked ‘The Poet’ who ‘spurns life’s human friendships to profess / Life’s loveliness of dreaming ecstasy.’ which could almost be my own epitaph; ‘At Night’ and ‘To John Keats’ whom she hails as a ‘Great Master! Boyish, sympathetic man.’ I greatly enjoyed her blank verse but found her rhyming rhythms dull and tedious. I failed to see the affection that most lovers of poetry have for her but there were some great lines that rose above the waves of dreariness. In a rage of curiosity I persisted in the quest to discover what makes Lowell dear to many a poet’s heart and I then turned to her second collection published in 1914, ‘Swords Blades and Poppy Seed’ and still I was unmoved. I realise I am treading upon sacred ground for some, but there was nothing to hold me and I found it even more dull and tiring than her first collection! And so in desperation I turned to her third collection of 1916, ‘Men, Women and Ghosts’ which has many works written in her ‘polyphonic prose’ style and proved to be quite inventive,: ‘Figurines in Old Saxe’, ‘The Cremona Violin’, The Cross-Roads’, ‘The Roxbury Garden’, ‘Bronze Tablets’, ‘War Pictures’ which I certainly quite enjoyed; ‘The Overgrown Pasture’ and ‘Clocks Tick a Century’. By this time I was clutching at straws and I almost felt as if I could stomach Wordsworth! Terrible! In utter contempt and disappointment I shuffled slowly towards her fourth collection, ‘Can Grande’s Castle’ of 1918 with its ‘Sea-Blue and Blood-Red’, ‘Guns as Keys: And the Great Gate Swings’, ‘Hedge Island’ and ‘The Bronze Horses’ and I felt completely abandoned and dejected with disgust and frustration! Imagine a man crawling through the desert, dying of thirst who then sees a beautiful maiden carrying large vessels full of the promise of cool water, only to be offered mouldy cheese! But still I persisted like a wounded beast returning to the fight and moved to her fifth collection, ‘Pictures of the Floating World’ from 1919 and my persistence paid off for it was a delightful and even tremendous collection! The book is again divided into sections: ‘Lacquer Prints’, ‘Chinoiseries’, ‘Planes of Personality’ (‘Two Speak Together’), ‘Eyes, and Ears, and Walking’, ‘As Towards One’s Sleep’, ‘Plummets to Circumstance’, ‘As Toward War’ and ‘As Toward Immortality’. Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was a follower of ‘Imaginism’ and came to England in 1913 and 1914 where she met fellow writers Pound, D H Lawrence and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). This is definitely her best collection with its flower imagery and it seems that the cigar smoking old oddity has a heart after all and there is an outpouring of love and romance! And so moved by the fire breathed into my soul by Lowell I skipped like a child towards her sixth collection ‘Legends’ (Poems translated from the Chinese by Florence Ayscough and English versions by Lowell) of 1921 which contains some quite lengthy prose poems which were so-so and a bit of a letdown really. As you can imagine by now I did not crawl towards her seventh collection ‘Fir-Flower Tablets’ also of 1921 and walked away with my soul intact and what little dignity I could muster!

The Farmer’s Bride – by Charlotte Mew.

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was an English poet and short story writer who appeared in the Yellow Book in 1894. This first collection ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ published in 1915 and known by the title ‘Saturday Market’ in the United States (originally seventeen poems, I read a 1921 edition with eleven new poems) brought Mew recognition as a poet and the collection swirls with restrained expression which is both powerful and passionate – it made her a cut above the other Georgian poets before she took her own life in 1928. The collection has an almost ethereal, spectral feel to it (I read the book with the scent of bittersweet nightshade upon my fingers, the strange tomato-like scent lingered in my nostrils for days afterwards) and it was an intoxicating read! There are some wonderful images such as this from the title poem ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ – ‘Shy as a leveret, swift as he, / Straight and slight as a young larch tree,’ and again ‘The soft young down of her, the brown, / The brown of her – her eyes, her hair, her hair!’ Marvellous indeed and we go on to the ‘new-born lamb’ that is dead in the field whom she describes as ‘The moon’s dropped child’ in ‘Fame’.
‘There is something horrible’ begins the poem ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’, ‘about a flower; / This, broken in my hand, is one of those / He threw in just now: it will not live another hour; / There are thousands more: you do not miss a rose.’ And it goes on: ‘There is something terrible about a child.’ Indeed there is! Still she continues like some pagan enchantress – ‘Now I will burn you back, I will burn you through, / Though I am damned for it we two will lie / And burn, here where the starlings fly / To these white stones from the wet sky -;’ Other excellent poems are: ‘The Fete’, ‘On the Asylum Road’, ‘The Forest Road’, ‘Madeleine in Church’, ‘On the Road to the Sea’ and ‘Arracombe Wood’. There was always the threat of madness with Mew (she made a pact with her sister never to marry in case she passed the bad genes on) and it rampaged along with death through her siblings. Prophetically, ‘The Quiet House’ ends ‘No one for me – / I think it is myself I go to meet: / I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be!’ Splendid and anyone who can write like that and downs disinfectant to end their life has to be either absolutely mad or a complete genius, I know which I believe! Outstanding!

Earlham – by Percy Lubbock.

Published in 1922 (I read a 1927 reprint), ‘Earlham’ is the story of a house, Earlham Hall in Norwich, Norfolk, built in 1642 by Robert Houghton where the author, Percy Lubbock (1879-1965), a very powerful writer and critic, grew up as a child. Throughout the volume’s three parts: ‘Indoors’, ‘In the Garden’ and ‘Outside and Beyond’ it is the house, whether glimpsed from afar from some bosky dell near a stream or from within its rooms, which takes the centre stage and Lubbock, like some love-sick young romantic, praises every detail which he can recall to his mind such as the eleven-sided room where he slept and the nursery with its five doors; he swoons from one room to another summoning the odours and colours, the fabrics and the portraits and the ghostly personalities which inhabited and haunt the old hall in a wonderfully evocative eloquence which transports the reader into the past among the dusty heirlooms and shadows of the slightly sinister Great Room and the Blue Room before tripping along the hallway to the East Room near the nursery and the Ante-room Chamber before peering into the Chintz Room and the Green Room; we are drawn out into the garden along the Wilberforce Walk to view the Dutch Garden, the paddock and the Kitchen Garden before resting near the old ice house and moving on to the hot houses and the orchid houses. And of course a hall is not a home without its people and here we are introduced to the Gurneys, a Quaker family who lived there and thus the reader steps through worlds to peek through the windows at the strange assembly: the Gurneys were known and respected for Gurney’s Bank established 1770 and when John Gurney (1749-1809) married Catherine Bell (1755-1794) a member of the Barclay family, in 1775, Gurney’s Bank would become Barclay’s Bank in 1896. John and Catherine had thirteen children including Richenda Gurney who lovingly drew and painted numerous portraits of the house and Samuel Gurney (1786-1856) the present author, Percy Lubbock’s Great Grandfather who married Elizabeth Sheppard; their son John Gurney (1809-1856), Rector of St Mary’s Church married Laura Elizabeth Pearse in 1842 and they took over Earlham Hall when Joseph John Gurney died in the 1840’s. John and Laura had a daughter named Catherine Gurney (1850-1934) the author’s mother, who married Frederick Lubbock (1844-1927) a merchant banker in 1869, the son of Sir William Lubbock and Harriet Hotham and so the author is woven into the tapestry of Earlham just as the history is attached to the fabric of the building. This really is an affectionate and beautifully drawn portrait of a country house and Lubbock’s great love for the merest of details such as an old door knob and how it feels in one’s hand or the magical experience of exploring the gardens really allows the reader to immerse fully into this most intriguing and charming of volumes by a great writer whose ‘intimate nostalgia’ re-creates an increasingly disappearing vision of the past and its ancestral homes. Wonderful!


Roman Pictures – by Percy Lubbock.

Published in 1923, ‘Roman Pictures’ is Percy Lubbock’s only novel and its fifteen chapters begins with the narrator meeting an old school friend in Rome, at the Fontana Delle Tartarughe; the narrator’s friend, a man named Deering, a preening, pompous dandy who believes he has found the real Rome, not through its ruins and other tourist-haunted sites, but through its people and he advises the narrator to do the same, to forget about all one has learnt in books, in Hawthorne and Henry James, and one’s preconceptions about Rome. And so the narrator begins his journey like a pilgrim, discovering Rome through its English-speaking Catholic converts, its ascetic priests and Italian visitors whom Lubbock draws like crafted caricatures. Deering introduces our pilgrim to a young antiquarian priest named Maundy with the scent of the ecclesiastical archives about him who wrote a great deal of poetry at Oxford where he kept an ‘old silver oil-lamp burning night and day before a Greek statuette.’ Lubbock paints a satisfying picture of the young fin-de-siecle aesthete with his fondness for the poetry of Lionel Johnson and his favourite books ‘bound in apricot linen’ proudly displaying his collection of thirty-five different scented soaps. Maundy was introduced to the artist and aesthete Aubrey Beardsley in some eating-house in Soho and written a ‘sonnet of strange perfumes and fantastic gems’ dedicated to him, but later had ‘gone out into the dawn, and had wandered through Leicester Square to Covent Garden, and had bought a bunch of mauve carnations; and he had thought of sending them, with the sonnet, to the master who had inspired him – but then he had returned to his lodging and had burnt the sonnet, heaping the carnations for a pyre, having resolved to guard the experience, whole and rounded and complete, in the secrecy of a faithful memory.’ Next our pilgrim is introduced to an English dancer named Mr Jaffrey whom he meets at the Via Nazionale and a man who works at the Vatican named Cooksey and a scholar from the Vatican library named Mr Fitch. From each of these fastidious acolytes he winds his way through the Villa Borghese and is introduced to Teresa and her niece Berta who simply loves all things English, and Berta’s brother Luigi who is an oily character looking for a rich patron to help him up the social ladder and get to London; we find ourselves in the company of Madame Olga de Shuvaloff, a Russian in the Albano with her child Mimi and a German spinster from Dresden named Minna Dahl whom the narrator refers to as ‘Erda, the earth mother’. Then there is the gathering of English patriots abroad, Miss Nora Gilpin, an author who speaks perfect Italian and her friends at the Via Sistinia; and of course a real picture of Rome would not be complete without other English-speaking tourists to bring a piece of dear old England to Rome, such as Mr Bashford, Miss Gainsborough, Lady Mullinger, Mr Platt and Miss Gadge. But the narrator’s vision of Rome as a place of bohemian splendour is fulfilled when he is invited to the studio of the artist Mr Vickery, who has all the qualities of the old masters and the true artist; a man who it is said once kept company with the Browning’s, poets close to the heart of our narrator, yet he is too shy to ask the old painter about them but he is satisfied that he has seen something of the real Rome and discovered a real artist, disproving Deering’s comment that there are no real artists left in Rome anymore.
Lubbock, who sadly went blind in his old age, has written a brilliant and unusual travel novel about Rome and it was an absolute delight to read and I cannot recommend it enough!

In His Own Image – by Frederick Rolfe.

This is Frederick William Rolfe’s second book published in 1901 and it is a collection of thirty-two stories told within the framework of a novel by a young sixteen year old acolyte named Toto, a servant boy who is in charge of a small group of boys who attend upon the wants and needs of the priest Don Friderico who eagerly listens to the tales told by Toto. The book is dedicated to ‘Divi Amico Desideratissimo’, the Divine Friend much desired (who by the way was Rolfe’s friend Trevor Haddon) and that relationship is represented by the strong bond of friendship between Toto and his ecclesiastical master; a deep attachment we also find in Rolfe’s later novel ‘The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole’ written in 1908 and published in 1934. Within the collection of stories are six tales originally published in the Yellow Book in 1895-6 and published in book form as ‘Stories Toto Told Me’ in 1892, specifically: ‘About San Pietro and San Paolo’, ‘About the Lilies of San Luigi’, ‘A Caprice of some Cherubim’, ‘About Beata Beatrice and the Mamma of San Pietro’, ‘About the Heresy of Fra Serafico’ and ‘About one way in which Christians Love one another’, these stories have been collected with an additional twenty-six fables, all of which have Catholic, religious themes told with piety and humour, narrated by the young Toto through the Spring and the Summer (the six original tales were related before the Spring and Summer sections), stories such as: ‘About the Miraculous Fritter of Frat Agostino of the Cappuccini’, ‘Why the Rose is Red’, ‘About the Witch’s Head and Santignazio of Loyola’, ‘About the Love which is Desire and the Love which is Divine’, ‘Why Cats and Dogs always Litigate’, ‘About Divinamore and the Maiden Anima’ (Spring), ‘About doing Little, Lavishly’ and ‘About our Lady of Dreams’ (Summer). At 421 pages the reader will be richly rewarded in these tales by Frederick Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo, one of the strangest and most intriguing writers you will encounter. I have found him a delightful author of exquisite works although I might add that having read his last novel ‘The Weird of the Wanderer’ (1912), being the Papyrus records (thirty-four, in fact) of some incidents in one of the previous lives of Mr. Nicholas Crabbe, of Crabs Herborough, Kent; a man who has utilised magical incantations of ancient Egypt and travelled back in time to a previous incarnation to find himself as none other than Odysseus, one would have to be a real enthusiast of the Baron to endure much of the tedious and dreary Egyptian cum occult drivel, but even at his worst there are few authors who can evoke such bitter paranoia and hatred so beautifully.

Red Wine of Youth: A Life of Rupert Brooke – by Arthur Stringer.

I came across this 1972 reprint of the 1948 publication by the Canadian novelist and poet, Arthur John Arbuthnott Stringer (1874-1950) which achieves in a little under three-hundred pages and twenty-four chapters, a really well-rounded observation of the beautifully doomed English poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915). Stringer tells us that the original biography was to be completed by the American author and adventurer Richard Halliburton (1900-1939) a man who had swam the length of the Panama Canal and who had made copious notes on Brookes before Halliburton unfortunately died at sea and the notes were passed to Stringer who took up the pen to complete the Life of the poet. The author uses much of the correspondence between Brookes and Edward Marsh (1872-1953), a man who recognised Brooke’s early poetic talent and like many others fell for his charm and good looks and introduced the young poet to many notable literary men of the time who became friends, such as G B Shaw, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, W B Yeats, Walter de la Mare, John Drinkwater, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Edmund Gosse; and of course he was praised by many who took an interest in him and became his friends: John Masefield, Harold Munro, even Winston Churchill to name a few, the list goes on. But we can look at Brookes the poet as travelling through three stages of his short life – the scholar, the wandering adventurer, and the soldier, and Stringer captures these various stages if with a somewhat cold hand which lacks passion in chapters which take us from the ‘Unwritten Odyssey’, and his days at Hillbrow Preparatory School where he makes the acquaintance and lasting friendship with the composer and pianist who lost his life at Gallipoli, William Charles Denis Brown (1888-1915); ‘Cambridge and Change’; at King’s College, Cambridge he met fellow poet St. John Welles Lucas-Lucas, known as St. John Lucas (1879-1934) whom Brooke met in 1905 and of course Edward Marsh who became his literary agent and promoted him whenever he could; ‘Grantchester and Growth’ through ‘Sickness and Soul Searching’, ‘London Life and the Georgians’, ‘America and the Widening Scene’, ‘Samoa and the South Seas’ to ‘Sunny Days and Darkening Clouds’, ‘The Antwerp Expedition’, ‘Shadowed Days and Premonitions’ and ‘Journey’s End’. We learn about Brooke’s great love of the theatre and Elizabethan poetry and his infectious love of life, yet all too consuming thoughts on mortality. Having read Brooke’s poems many years ago and recognising their greatness I always felt a reservation for the man who wrote them and found it difficult to connect the two, the bright and beautiful man who is surrounded by influential people all bowing before him, where was the tragedy, yet after reading ‘Red Wine of Youth’ I am beginning to re-evaluate my thoughts on Brooke and see him as a man who did suffer torments and a man who transformed the lives of those he touched by his simple, boyish wonder and enthusiasm for poetry. In his final hour, it was his dear friend Denis Browne who saw him from this world and had the poet buried on Scyros, in a grove of the Gods where he surely belonged for he has achieved immortality – Keats, Shelley, Byron and Brooke!

Poems – by St. John Lucas.

I merely read this 1904 publication out of curiosity due to the fact that Lucas was a friend of Rupert Brookes and I am glad I did! St. John Lucas, or to give him his full if somewhat preposterous name St. John Welles Lucas-Lucas (1879-1934) was born in Rugby and educated at University College, Oxford and became Brooke’s friend in 1905; he wrote short stories and poetry and his work includes: ‘The Lost Arcadian, and Other Papers’ (1899), ‘The Absurd Repentance’ (1903), ‘The Oxford Book of French Verse’ (1907), ‘The Rose-Winged Hours: English Love Lyrics’ (1908), ‘The Oxford Book of Italian Verse xii-xix Cent’ (1910) and ‘Saints, Sinners, and the Usual People’ (1911) etc. ‘Poems’, a 127 page volume is divided up into three parts: the First Part (29 poems), the Second Part (13 poems) and the Third Part (10 poems) and Lucas, who does not wish to believe in an absurd God, trusts his soul unto nature and its dark pagan worship where ancient deities flourish in forests and mounds; in the first part we find Lucas in almost Browning-like ecstasy over the tremulous sweep of nature in ‘The Woodland God’, ‘The Dream of Youth’ and ‘The Modern Parnassus’; there is a dark sense of decay and loss, something he captures in his poem ‘Dirge of Summer’:

‘Summer is dead to-day.
The night was full of moaning and sad sound,
Querulous voices, immelodious chants;
The leaves, like tiny ghosts, tap-tapped the panes
Until the tardy dawn.’

And he continues in this forlorn vein to the end where we find: ‘What comfort can we find/ In autumn’s shrivelled woods, who loved you so? / In winter’s dusky shrine, - who loved you so?’ Quite marvellous of course! In fact, summer makes a joyous return in ‘Variations Upon Oxford’ where ‘Summer and youth go hand in hand/ Beneath the burdened boughs of May!’ and in ‘The Warning’ we find Lucas questioning his own spiritual perception, saying ‘Never ask me to unbind/ Bonds that are my spirit’s sheath,/ Lest perchance, O love, you find/ Nothing fair beneath.’ before the solemn entrance of Death in the poem ‘May Morning’: ‘O speak once more, most peaceful lips!/ Smile once again, O flower-like face!/ It is my blood, not yours, that drips/ Upon Death’s dreadful altar-place.’ Other fine poems in the first part include ‘In Memoriam W. B. L. A.’ and ‘Epitaph for the Author’s Tombstone’. The introspection continues in the second part with ‘De Profundis’ and the poet dreams and finds in his ‘Nocturne’ that ‘Loud is the noise of the night,/ Heavy the scent of the tuberoses,/ Yet the tired boy still dozes/ Uneasily, ‘neath the light.’ Ahh, those infamous tuberoses that have crowded many a radiant poet’s volume of verse! Flowers also appear in ‘Roses and Masks’ where the grey petals are ‘sad phantoms of the wonders that they were’ and again the summer fades swiftly in ‘The Death of Summer’ which informs us that ‘we met; we spoke. Alas! our words, our smiles,/ Were wastes of unimaginable miles/ Set betwixt heart and heart.’ And we are safe in Hardy territory here with that enormous ‘waste’ reminding us of Hardy’s great yet simple poem ‘We sat at the window’ where ‘great was the waste’… but the mood continues, re-echoing Hardy’s haunting and shrill notion of time and its waste and the absence of love, in ‘The Ghost’: ‘Tread down the earth; strew dust. Alas! no more/ This path shall be unhaunted; turn and fly;/ The phantom shall pursue thee till thou die/ Lost in a sallow wilderness where gleams/ No waveless water of Lethean streams, /No lamp from any sleep-enshrouded shore.’ And so we depart this chilling scene and open onto the third part which strives towards lighter moods with its ‘The Clerk and the Princess’, ‘Lullaby’ and the ‘Song of the Moon’, but it is inevitable that death should once again creep apace and draw the author into its cold embrace as Lucas confronts his own mortal clay and its end in ‘Last Words’:

‘He loved his Art, but lacked its finer grace;
Sought God, but found him amid trees and birds

More near than by the priestly altar-place;

Now he beholds, aloof from grief that girds,
God, Nature, Art, unsundered, face to face.’

A surprisingly good volume of verse by a little known poet!

Rupert Brooke: A Memoir – by Edward Marsh.

Marsh wrote this memoir of his friend Rupert Brooke in August 1915, just a few months after the poet’s death in April which struck Marsh enormously as they had met after the end of the May Term at Cambridge in 1907 and by the summer of 1909 they were firm friends, knowing each other pretty well, yet it was not published until 1918; it is known that Brooke’s mother was not too fond of the memoir thinking it dwelt a little too heavily upon emotional and perhaps unmanly matters throughout its eight parts but there are moments of tender feeling from Marsh for the young poet. Edward Howard Marsh (1872-1953), [we shall throw in the ‘Sir’ because of his work in literature] was a classicist and a scholar who knew numerous literary figures and who edited the influential ‘Georgian Poetry’ between 1912 and 1922 and edited Brooke’s ‘Collected Poems’ in 1918. There is no need to affix episodes of Brooke’s life here as it is well documented elsewhere but Marsh writes as one who knew the handsome poet intimately (Brooke could come and go as he pleased at Marsh’s flat in Gray’s Inn) and we hear of Rupert’s move to Rugby from Prep School at Hillbrow in 1901 and the Scholarship the following year and the Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge in the spring of 1913 etc. but it is the picture of the young poet which persists from letters and remembered talk – ‘…Theocritus almost compensates me for all the interminable dullness of Demosthenes and the grammars on other days. I never read him before. I am wildly, madly enchanted by him.’ (I. p.18) We hear of his interest in the decadent authors of the eighteen-nineties such as Pater, Wilde and Dowson which occupied him from 1905 to his second year at Cambridge and a charming picture of the young man is sketched: ‘His first year at King’s (1906-7) was rather unsatisfactory. He regretted Rugby; and he was (as always) rather shy, and (for the first and only time) a little on the defensive with the strange people. This “decadent” pose lingered; he had Aubrey Beardsleys in his room, sat up very late, and didn’t get up in the morning. He thought it right to live entirely for the things of the mind; his passion for the country had not yet begun, and it seemed to him a wicked waste of time to walk or swim.’ (II. p. 25) Following the memoir the Appendix includes fragments and poems found in Brooke’s last notebook: ‘The Dance’, ‘Sometimes even now…’, ‘Sonnet: In Time of Revolt’, ‘A Letter to a Live Poet’, ‘The True Beatitude’ and ‘A Sonnet Reversed’. Marsh confirms that Rupert had some strange preoccupation with Death as if Brooke knew his life would be short and time was of the essence; he had been quite frail in childhood from illnesses which sometimes reoccurred in adulthood and there was a joyous desire to wander through foreign climes yet a deep longing for home persisted and perhaps it is no coincidence that Brooke should fall in death and be buried upon the same day associated with Shakespeare and St George for it was Friday 23^rd April 1915.

Songs of the Field – by Francis Ledwidge.

This first collection of poetry by the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge (1891-1917) was published in 1916 with an Introduction by Lord Dunsany and it is really quite a fine collection. There are fifty poems over 122 pages and the author evokes the ‘Celtic twilight’ world of fairies and shades of the dead in the manner of Yeats in such poems as ‘The Death of Ailill’ but Ledwidge is also drawn to nature where blackbirds and woodbine and the spirit of the poet are equal manifestations in the wilderness, as we find in Wordsworth and particularly in Claire, but there is something odd in the associations the author makes as in ‘you brought me facefuls of your smiles to share’ in ‘Inamorata’ or the ‘farmer’s boy,/ who sleeps, like drunken Noah, in the shade.’ And in the same poem, ‘June’ we find the sensuous line ‘even the roses spilt on youth’s red mouth / will soon blow down the road all roses go.’ Ledwidge captures the essence of nature as something mystical and connects it with the spiritual being of man and his observations – ‘And the soul patient by the heart’s loud clock, / Watches the time, and thinks it wondrous slow.’ (‘Music on Water’) There is some romantic longing in the poem ‘In the Dusk’ where the poet declares that ‘Day hangs its light between two dusks, my heart, / Always beyond the dark there is the blue. / Sometime we’ll leave the dark, myself and you, / And revel in the light for evermore.’ In ‘The Visitation of Peace’ the poet invokes the spirit of the immortal Keats as he asks – ‘Shall I meet Keats in some wild isle of balm, / Dreaming beside a tarn where green and wide / Boughs of sweet cinnamon protect the calm / Of the dark water?’ Other poems of worth are: ‘All-Hallows Eve’, ‘A Memory’, ‘A Song’, ‘Growing Old’ and ‘An Old Pain’ in which the author, who was sadly killed in action in Flanders’ reminisces upon love and its passion of youth:

‘My heart has grown as dry as an old crust,
Deep in book lumber and moth-eaten wood,
So long it has forgot the old love lust,
So long forgot the thing that made youth dear,
Two blue love lamps, a heart exceeding good.’

Songs of Peace – Francis Ledwidge.

This is the second of three collections of poetry by Francis Ledwidge published in 1917 with thirty-nine poems over 110 pages and the same old drivel from that great bore Lord Dunsany for an Introduction which really isn’t necessary as the poetry can stand alone without his name. Ledwidge divides the book into sections: At Home – In Barracks – In Camp – At Sea – In Serbia – In Greece – In Hospital in Egypt – and In Barracks. Once again the author takes his inspiration from the Irish Celtic legends and Classical Greek mythology; perhaps not as good as his first collection although there are some very good poems such as ‘A Little Boy in the Morning’, ‘The Shadow People’, ‘An Old Desire’, ‘Thomas McDonagh’, ‘The Lure’, ‘Song’ and this fine piece which is the first poem in the collection, ‘Dream of Artemis’, where the blackbird’s ‘song bouquets of small tunes that bid me turn / from twilight wanderings thro’ some old delight’ and later in the same poem:

‘Oh, Artemis, to tend you in your needs.
At mornings I will bring you bells of dew
From honey places, and wild fish from streams
Flowing in secret places. I will brew
Sweet wine of alder for your evening dreams,
And pipe you music in the dusky reeds
When the four distances give up their blue.’

Last Songs – by Francis Ledwidge.

The final collection, ‘Last Songs’ by Francis Ledwidge was published in 1918 after his death the previous year and there are thirty-three poems over 80 pages and an Introduction once again from Lord Dunsany (but don’t let that put you off). There are some lovely poems here or should I say rural songs for his poems have a lyric quality. Many of the poems were written between 1916 and 1917 in Londonderry, France and Belgium and some fine examples are ‘At the Poet’s Grave’, ‘After Court Martial’ and ‘Spring Love’ of 1916 with its ‘I left my love upon the hill, alone, / My last kiss burning on her lovely mouth.’ And the poet dreams of a fairy-girl in the poem ‘The Rushes’ written on 6^th January 1917, in France – ‘And a fairy-girl out of Leinster / In a long dance I should meet, / My heart to her heart beating, / My feet in rhyme with her feet.’ Other songs include: ‘Soliloquy’, ‘The Dead kings’, ‘A Fairy Hunt’, ‘The Sylph’, ‘The Lanawn Shee’ and in ‘Pan’ written on 11^th March 1917 in France Ledwidge shows us a simple and seemingly harmless goat-god tending his flock, who ‘counts them over one by one, / And leads them back by cliff and steep, / To grassy hills where dawn is wide, / And they may run and skip and leap.’

Forgotten Places – by Ian Mackenzie.

I have known the name Ian Mackenzie, or to give him his full name Ian Hume Townsend Mackenzie (1898-1918) for quite some time through his connection with the translator of Proust, Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff and this is his only collection of poetry published posthumously in 1919. The 67 page volume contains twenty-five poems throughout its two parts and there is a very worthy and beautiful tribute by Arthur Waugh, father of the writer Alec Waugh (1898-1981), whom Ian befriended at Sandhurst Royal Military College in the winter of 1916-17. Arthur sketches a portrait of the young poet, a man who ‘had all the outward evidences of the poet’s heart, and all its inward spirituality. Born of a family of tall and handsome men, with a wealth of locks, and beautiful, sensitive features, he possessed many of the physical attributes of a young pagan divinity.’ (p. 8) Mackenzie’s poetic inspiration comes from Shelley and Swinburne, with a tender devotion to Tennyson and Bridges, he was, as Arthur claims, a man with ‘the heart of the hunter of the soul, perpetually seeking rest and finding none.’ (p. 8) We are told that he was a great enthusiast for cricket and played in his School team and in several matches at Sandhurst, in fact, he ‘loved cricket only less than he loved poetry.’ (p. 9) Poetry was often the topic of conversation in the evenings at Sandhurst, ‘when the day’s military work was done’ and he could ‘forget the red-books for an hour or two in the dreams of “Hyperion” and “Adonais”.’ (p. 9) Arthur, who often entertained the young poet at his home in Hampstead with his son Alec, found Ian to be ‘the very spirit of irresponsible joy’ (p. 11) with a love of the theatre and a passion for Gilbert and Sullivan; a beautiful youth with ‘the tenderness of a child and the strength of a man.’ (p. 12)
The poetry of Ian Mackenzie is in a modern metaphysical style which looks at the imprint the material body makes; the shape one makes and leaves in life – ‘the flesh will loosen every day / from that skeleton thing / that once was me.’ (I) One of the themes through the poems is of something hidden or obscured as in a doorway or barrier through which he is unable to pass beyond the threshold, and in the poem ‘The Darkened Ways’ the poet sense the nearness of Death and stares through the keyhole of the door that divides him from the spectre, ‘kneeling on the floor, / searching for something in the dark, behind.’ Later in the same poem the barrier appears to be ‘a dim unending wall of glass / through which I could not pass. /yet I could see the days behind, / standing there without a sound.’ And there is the childish sense at the culmination of death’s acceptance – ‘One day I wandered in a wood / And found my body lying on the ground.’ The poet utilises the imagery of the bolting and unbolting of doors to signify perhaps the impression of the mind over the body; the senses and the flesh – in the poem ‘Dust’ there is a desperate longing to equate the inevitable end of the material body with the history and story of life contained within the dust we shall become –‘a pebble glittering in the sun / whispers a tale, but you will not hear; / it is so tiny and so still, / of love that was known, / and anger and fear / one time, near some forgotten hill.’ And the ultimate conclusion remains: ‘Dust cleaves to dust, / And life desires life.’ In ‘The Secret World’ the poet dismantles his body, saying ‘take these eyes. I yet shall see: / let them blossom silently.’ And then turns to his ears – ‘take these ears, let them bring / flowers for the butterfly: / I still shall hear the wild bird sing….’ There is a real wealth of beauty in these wonderful verse and Mackenzie seems to speak to me directly, I find, like no other poet I have come across for some time, and I found myself reading the volume several times; there is a personal affiliation which resonates within –

‘I remember the sliding lawn – the scent of heavy foliage,
The lilac, the tall trees at the end,
And the moonlight
Twisting itself into wisps,
And pushing through the leaves,
Like fine white feathers of grass.’ (Eyes. III)

In the poem ‘Self’ the poet climbs ‘Time’s futile stair’ and dreads the emptiness of the last step. Other notable poems include (from section one) ‘The Mind’, ‘Revelation’ and ‘The Telephone’; and from section two ‘Friends’: ‘Ordinary Things’ (a four part poem written at Malleny Camp, Scotland, in 1917), ‘The River’, ‘The Hour’, ‘Night 1918’ (written in Edinburgh, Dec 1917), ‘Beauty’, ‘Reckoning’, ‘Song’, ‘Memories’, ‘Peace’, ‘Desire’, ‘Lines from Royal Military College, Sandhurst’ (August, 1916), and ‘A Vision’.

He found that the ‘ugliness of the material life distresses him, but it never overwhelms’ (Introduction. p. 14) and Waugh concludes his touching tribute, saying that ‘the laughter and the love of Ian Mackenzie were of eternal stuff. They were born of the sunlight, and return with it again. For they are “memory when we die.”’ (Introduction. p. 15) In the autumn of 1918, Ian was taken to hospital in Cambridge, gravely ill with pneumonia. He was told that the war was over on Armistice Day, 11^th November and he died later on 12^th November. The final word must be Ian’s, from the first section of the book, (p. 37) his poem ‘The Room’ (part IV) written at Sandwich in 1918 where Mackenzie recalls his time of thought in a room ‘closed by clean whitewashed walls’ by the light of day and later where ‘the dark shadows crept, / Leaving it slowly colourless, submissive to the night.’ His thoughts ‘stretch out beyond it and away, / Reaching to something memory cannot find’ –

‘O you who enter here, when I have gone,
You will not know the hidden lips that cry
To you “safety,” as the night comes down.
You will not understand the fear
In the grey waste of grass and sands
That lie
Past the shutters closed against the wind,
(Ceremoniously closed, by your vain, foreign hands)…
And you will take the security of those walls,
Not thinking of the compact strength in them.
And when moon unfolds between the curtains
And the shadows creep; there will be beauty, then, that calls.
You will not hear.’

The Poetical Works of Robert Bridges.

With some wild masochistic desire I decided to read the six volumes of ‘The Poetical Works of Robert Bridges’ which is no small undertaking, purely based on his friendships with Dolben and Hopkins tow poets I happen to admire and who in my humble opinion are much greater poets. To prepare myself for the arduous task ahead I chose to read a biographical volume published in 1944: ‘Robert Bridges 1844-1930’ by a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford named Edward Thompson. At just over a hundred-and-thirty pages Thompson (a scholar, novelist, translator and a historian), a man who knew Bridges personally, seems to praise the poet’s earlier works such as his Shorter Poems and narrative poems while dismissing much of his later dramatic works, although he does have some interesting points on Bridges’ classical themes. A somewhat harsh critic but undoubtedly right, and even though Bridges wished that no biography should be published Thompson could not help himself from prodding the corpse with a big stick, but honour was satisfied when Thompson expired two years after its publication so time has allowed us to forgive his indiscretions. Having stomached the old scholar’s ravings I turned to volume one of the Poetic Works, originally published in 1898 at almost three-hundred pages (in fact they all stretch to this). The volume contains: Prometheus the Firegiver: A Mask in the Greek Manner (in two parts) in which we find there is some exceptional and lengthy dialogue in the ‘mask’ and many beautiful lines of verse, as here where Prometheus speaks in part one:

                                    ‘And now this day

Behold I come bearing the seal of all

Which hope had promised; for within this reed

A prisoner I bring them stolen from heaven,

The flash of mastering fire, and it have borne

So swift to earth, that when yon noontide sun

Rose from the sea at morning I was by,

And unperceived by Helios plunged the point

I’ the burning axle, and withdrew a tongue

Of breathing flame, which lives to leap on earth

For man the father of all fire to come.’

And as if invoking the spirit of Browning, the author has the Servant speak to Prometheus thus:

                                    ‘Speaketh of fire;

And fire he saith is good for gods and men;

And the gods have it and men have it not’

In fact, Bridges excels in his lyrical measure and like Keats he is rich and precise in his diction as in these beautiful lines in part two when Prometheus utters these words:

‘When her wild cries arouse the house at night,

And running to her bed, ye see her set

Upright in tranced sleep, her starting hair

With deathly sweat bedewed, in horror shaking,

Her eyeballs fixed upon the embodied dark,

Through which a draping mist of luminous gloom

Drifts from her couch away, - when, if asleep,

She walks as if awake, and if awake

Dreams, and as one who nothing hears or sees,

Lives in a sick and frantic mood, whose cause

She understands not or is loth to tell –‘

The next work in the volume is Eros and Psyche: A Narrative Poem (the story done into English from the Latin Apuleius) in twelve measures which represent the months of the year throughout the four quarters of spring, summer, autumn and winter, each with their corresponding length of days. In the first quarter, ‘March’ stanza 11 we are shown a powerful image of the goddess Aphrodite who is slowly falling out of favour:

‘Which when in heaven great Aphrodite saw,

Who is the breather of the year’s bright moon,

Fount of desire and beauty without flaw,

Herself the life that doth the world adorn;

Seeing that without her generative might

Nothing can spring upon the shores of light,

Nor any bud of joy or love be born;’

And later on in stanza 22 in her jealousy and rage at Psyche’s beauty we find:

‘Make her to love the loathliest, basest wretch,

Deform’d in body, and of moonstruck mind,

A hideous brute and vicious, born to fetch

Anger from dogs and cursing from the blind.’

But it was no monster set to love Psyche for it was Eros, child of Aphrodite who came by the cover of night:

                                    ‘for every night

He came, and though his name she never learn’d,

Nor was his image yielded to her sight

At morn or eve, she neither looked nor yearn’d

Beyond her happiness…’ [May: stanza 24]

In the second quarter, in the 17^th stanza of July, Psyche discovers the identity of her lover:

‘She had some fear she might not well discern

By that small flame a monster in the gloom;

But she sees ‘O fair to see!

Eros, ‘twas Eros’ self, her lover, he,

The God of Love reveal’d in deathless bloom.’

This is all very beautiful and through the third quarter we find Psyche wandering and in the fourth (winter) she has her trials and reception into Heaven:

‘So thus was Eros unto Psyche wed,

The heavenly bridegroom to his earthly bride,

Who won his love, in simple maidenhead’ [February: 24]

And so Aphrodite has reconciled her differences ‘since her full defeat / Is kinder and less jealous than before.’ [25]

The Growth of Love also in the first volume is a sequence of sixty-nine sonnets ending in a paraphrase of The Lord’s Prayer, which were published without the poet’s permission in America and so he ‘came to their rescue’ and published them here. The sonnet form in other more skilful hands is the highest medium of the love lyric but in Bridges’ hands they seem restrained of emotion; much of the passion we expect to find in lyrics of love have been stifled, it is limited with no sudden bursts; there is a serious, solemn and even sacramental feel to the sonnets which sees a vision of love as religion in the manner of Keats; there is a spiritual isolation of regret yet although austere and fastidious, they have an unusual quality which accepts the spiritual sympathy within the sorrow of love.

‘Now doth my drop of time transcend the whole:

I see no fame in Khufu’s pyramid,

No history where loveless Nile doth roll.

- This is eternal life, which doth forbid

Mortal detection to the exalted soul,

And from her inward eye all fate hath hid.’ [29]

There is a sense of the Renaissance devoid of exulted rapture and echoes of Dante:

‘I heard great Hector sounding war’s alarms,

Where thro’ the listless ghosts chiding he strode,

As tho’ the Greeks besieged his last abode,

And he his Troy’s hope still, her king-at-arms.’ [53]

The Growth of Love has been highly praised in many quarters and damned as insignificant in others but there is no denying the author’s poetic ability, his sense of stress and metre which cascades like waves upon silky sand with simple astonishment and leaves the reader either perplexed or stirred by inspiration. Volume Two of The Poetical Works was published in 1899 and contains the poet’s Shorter Poems such as his wonderful ‘Elegy among the Tombs (Book II, 10) where we are told to ‘read the worn names of the forgotten dead,’ to find that ‘their pompous legends will no smile awake;’ and ‘Dejection’ (Book II, 11), ‘On a Dead Body’ (Book III, 4) where the corpse is a ‘freak of beauty.’ Bridges’ wrote such tender yet simple nature verse idylls in original expression which capture the English landscape and the fragrance of the field:

‘The summer trees are tempest-torn,

The hills are wrapped in a mantle wide

Of folding rain by the mad wind borne

Across the country side.’ [Book IV, 20]

Bridges explored new rhythms and the shorter poems reveal these expressive techniques but they lack physical passion and tenderness; there is no real human drama as we would find in such poets as Browning, Tennyson and Swinburne for example. The elegiac mood of the poems are subtle affairs which reflect Elizabethan more than the Romantic sentiments; restrained by their suppressed feelings, love seems a trivial matter with no ecstasy except a retrospective solemn joy which almost climbs to the mystical, but falls short. Also in the volume are Bridges’ New Poems such as his ‘Elegy’ and the excellent ‘The Summer House on the Mound’ where the poet would sit and watch some ‘fast-sailing frigate to the Channel come’ and also ‘The Isle of Achilles’ (from the Greek).

The Poetical Works volume three published in 1901 contains the First Part of the History of Nero, a historical tragedy in five acts which seems to fail through derivative and unconvincing scenes but we are spared disgrace by the inclusion of Achilles in Scyros which I found to be a tremendous drama where we find the young Achilles hiding on the Island of Scyros at the palace of Lycomedes, King of Scyros, ‘disguised among the maidens like a maiden’ named Purrha, he serves the daughter of the King of Scyros. Ulysses and his companion, Diomede seek out Achilles to lead their army and Ulysses suspecting the truth says to Diomede:

‘Whom the high gods name champion of the Greeks,

Lurks in the habit of a girl disguised

Amid the maidens of this island court.’

Bridges was a competent scholar of Latin and Greek and although he is not always faithful to the classics Achilles in Scyros is a worthy mask with many great moments. Volume four published in 1902 has Palicio, an Elizabethan Romantic drama in five acts which I found rather dull and The Return of Ulysses, also in five acts and frankly imitative much in the manner of Byron, Tennyson and Browning, who do it so much better. A lot of Bridges’ dramas tend to lean towards the classics rather than the Romantics and he uses Miltonic blank verse to good use but there is a ponderous sense that the author just sometimes is not up to the effort and the lack of passion shows. Volume five published in 1902 contains The Christian Captives in five acts which has some good characterisation but on the whole is another let down and Humours of the Court, a Shakespearean style comedy in three acts which is mildly amusing. In Volume six published in 1903 we find The Feast of Bacchus: A Comedy in the Latin Manner and partly translated from Terence, in five acts which is an improvement upon many of his other dramatic works and even reaches heights of sublime beauty with its fine metre and there are some superb exchanges between the characters and the Second Part of the History of Nero in five acts which only marginally shines above part one yet sinks dreadfully.

It’s easy to dismiss much of Bridges’ works as being the result of a cold-hearted poet living in a Victorian regime of high moral attitudes to passion and sex but at the bottom of all the quite remarkable yet somewhat undistinguishable narrative lines there was a man of flesh and blood who lived for the word as a poet, perhaps not a very popular poet today but a much respected link to the classical poets of his time. In reading the Poetical Works few if any real insights have been exposed and if I were to read him purely on a non-academic basis I would certainly avoid much of the dramatic pieces and concentrate on his greater achievements in my opinion: ‘Prometheus the Firegiver’, ‘Eros and Psyche’, ‘The Growth of Love’, ‘Shorter Poems’, ‘Achilles in Scyros’ and ‘The Feast of Bacchus’.

Myrtle, Rue and Cypress: A Book of Poems, Songs and Sonnets – by Eric Stanislaus Stenbock.

Eric Stanislaus Stenbock’ (1860-1895) was a little known, flamboyant poet and this is his second of three exceedingly rare volumes of poetry published in 1883. Stenbock was born in Cheltenham of Swedish ancestry and he went up to Balliol College, Oxford in 1879 and left without his degree two years later; at Oxford he became a Roman Catholic and published his first collection of poems: ‘Love, Sleep and Death’ in 1881. In 1885 he inherited the title Count and lived in Estonia until returning to England in 1887; he became dependant on alcohol and opium and the eccentric author who kept a menagerie of animals such as snakes and a monkey and not to mention his life-size doll which he took everywhere with him could be the essence of Huysman’s aesthete Jean des Esseintes in his novel of 1884 ‘A Rebours’. The volume is well composed with songs such as ‘The Song of Love’ to the memory of Adolf Henselt – ‘we tire of speech, of thought, and frequent moving, / our memories are embittered with shatterings of faith; / love conquers all we can never tire of loving, / for love is as strong as Death.’ And sonnets such as his first sonnet written in St. Isaac’s Cathedral, St Petersburg, which begins: ‘On waves of music borne it seems to float / so tender sweet, so fraught with inner pain,’ and ends: ‘reviving for a time joys long since dead, / and granting to the fettered soul release.’ The book is dedicated to three individuals, respectively, the artist Simeon Solomon (1840-1905), his cousin with whom he is said to have had a ‘close’ relationship and a young boy he became infatuated with, probably as an undergraduate, the son of an Oxfordshire clergyman; the boy died of consumption in 1880: ‘In this book I dedicate the Myrtle thereof to Simeon Solomon, the Rue thereof to Arvid Stenbock and the Cypress thereof to the memory of Charles Bertram Fowler.’ Stenbock is certainly not a first-rate poet but the volume drips with the obsessive compulsion of love and death with a flavour of the macabre reminiscent of Poe:

‘I DECKED mine altar with faded flowers,

Because I was sad at heart you see,

And cared no more what the passing hours

In going and coming might bring to me –

I said, ‘Alas, for the lingering hours

Shall not bring ought of delight to me.’ [Song I. Preludium]

And again later in the same poem he is ‘sick unto death of the desolate hours / which came and went so wearily.’ In Song II he asks ‘Love, is thine heart so hardened / when one tear from thine eyes / might pour on sin unpardoned / a rainbow from Paradise?’ Many of the poems, although competent seem quite juvenile in their decadent posturing –

‘I have longed for thy beautiful garden,

And thy nuptial winding-sheet,

For thy face, ah! tender lover,

Is gentle and wellnigh sweet.’ [Song III]

In the rather charming poem ‘The Nightingale’ Stenbock asks:

What passion of music that moves to madness,

What secret thing doth thy song express,

What excess of joy, that is wellnigh sadness,

What agony bitter beyond redress? –

What lights of love and what pangs of passion

Through the thrilling throbs of thy wild notes well,

What words too wondrous for tongue to fashion

Would suit to thy sweet song, tell, ah tell!’

But wherever beauty clings we find that death is never far behind in Stenbock’s world and it is evident in the poem ‘A Dream’ where we encounter a man, wearing a ‘long white sheet’ whom the poet beckons – ‘come hither, darling, and I will fold / thee to mine heart, for thy hands are cold;’ / ‘no wonder my hands are cold, ‘ he said, / ‘for very cold are the hands of the dead.’ Some good poems pepper the volume such as ‘The Aeolian Harp’ which wails ‘for the world’s wrong,’ and weeps ‘for the world’s woe.’ and ‘The White Rose’ at the mercy of the ‘wild withering wind’ which ‘shall rive it ruthlessly’. Stenbock is at his best when he writes of the fantastic and the macabre as in ‘The Lunatic Lover’ where the ‘moon with silver feet / crept to thy bed, close to thy head, / and kissed thy forehead, sweet, / giving thy lips strange wine to drink, / and alien flesh to eat,’ and in ‘Reconciliation’ he implores that ‘all slain things lie slain /in the short spell of sunshine after rain.’

The sensual arousal of passion is found in ‘Song XI’ which begins ‘entwine thy limbs around me, love, and let / thy sweet soft face lean closer kissing me’ and the sexual imagery is obvious in ‘The Vampyre’ where the poet feasts upon a young boy, and drinks ‘from thy veins like wine / thy blood delicious and warm.’ He eagerly drinks ‘the bloom of thy boyhood away.’ as the sex and supernatural theme continues:

‘I would breathe with the breath of thy mouth

And pang thee with perfect pain;

And the vital flame of thy youth

Should live in my limbs again.

Till the vital elastic form

Should gradually fade and fail,

And thy blood in my veins flow warm,

And glow in my face, that was pale.’

Sonnet IX in simple confession notes that ‘a spirit’s lips were pressed upon my own, - / - then I arose to curse the wan daylight.’ and in the next Sonnet (XII) we could almost be reading Housman:

‘But my true love had not left me,

And stood by my grave in pain,

And his tears fell softly on me,

But I shall not wake again.’

Stenbock is certainly a curious and intriguing individual and for all his assumed decadence the poetry is decidedly non-decadent, there are no flowery flourishes one would expect and his style is more like Balzac than Baudelaire. He made a sort of quasi-religion of eclectic spiritual practices which coalesced into a Catholic, Buddhist and occult nature and although his poems do not reach the heights of more established poets he is certainly a man to be sought out and devoured at leisure!

The Shadow of Death: A Collection of Poems, Songs, and Sonnets – by Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock.

This is Stenbock’s third and final volume of poetry published in 1893 and again the curtain parts to reveal his sombre verse, dark and morose, lit by a single flame in the darkened tomb of his macabre mind. The poems feature the subject of love and death and there is something foreboding and uncanny in his verse which seems to groan in the darkness – ‘A shadow crept thro’ the doorway / and kissed the pale boy on the lips.’ (Viol D’ Amor) and love seems to have other-worldly attachments:

‘Did you know dear, that I loved you?

One day your look was kind,

And one day – oh, so sad, love

Were I dead, dear, would you mind?’ (The Death-Watch)

Stenbock also makes good use of alliteration as in the poem ‘Gabriel’ where we find the lines: ‘The sweet, slow, sleepy, solemn sounds that seem / Like incantations half heard in a dream, / Or sad-eyed Syrian singing some strange sea spell, / Gabriel.’ In the ballade, ‘A Passion of Sleep’ the author seems to long for sleep, or is sleeping just a metaphor for death?

‘World of wormwood and gall

Whose myrtle is only rue,

Give me the cypress tall,

And moon-thrown shadows of yew.

Let weeping winters strew

Snow on my bed for a pall –

- This thing alone is true –

Sleep is the best of all.’

Other noteworthy poems include: ‘The Red Hawthorn’, ‘To Saint Teresa’, ‘Chanson Solaire’, ‘Autumn Song’, ‘Requiem’, ‘Birthday Song’, ‘Nocturne’, ‘May Blossom: A Vision’ and ‘Sonnet VI’ where the poet says that he ‘will not slay thee utterly - / Nay, thou shalt live – I will implant in thee / Strange lusts and dark desires, lest any should, / In passing, look on thee in piteous mood, / For from the first I have my mark on thee.’

With a few translations – a paraphrase from Sappho and from Meleager, the volume falls away and we are left wondering who indeed was this strange and enigmatic man; there is much to be unearthed for the curious amongst you and two very good books to search out are: ‘Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties’ (1969) by John Adlard, and ‘Of Kings and Things: Strange Tales and Decadent Poems’ (2018) edited with an Introduction by David Tibet. But there are two apocryphal stories of Stenbock which I hope are indeed true, and one is that he carried with him a wooden doll known as ‘le petit Comte’ (the little Count) which he described as his son and heir and the other concerns the great Oscar Wilde, who it is said, one day went to see Stenbock at his rooms in Sloan Terrace and he ventured upstairs to Stenbock’s inner sanctum where burned a sacred lamp between a bust of the poet Shelley and a little ebony image of Buddha. Oscar, perhaps not realising the significance of such an altar, casually lit his cigarette from the sacred flame only to find Stenbock shocked and furious, fall to the ground, while a perplexed Oscar made a swift exit. How beautifully and terribly decadent!

Studies of Death: Romantic Tales – by Count Eric Stenbock.

This collection of strange and supernaturally inspired tales was published in 1894, just a year before the author’s death and there really are some charming little stories here, such as ‘Hylas’ in which an artist named Gabriel Glynde meets a fifteen year old boy named Lionel Langton, sketching by the river. The boy sits for Gabriel as his model in his studio for a portrait of ‘David’. Lionel, the son of Professor Langton, becomes Gabriel’s pupil but the boy falls hopelessly in love with a woman, a woman which Gabriel marries in some heroic deed to save the boy from her womanly ways and means but Lionel is overcome with sadness and drowns himself in the river but not before sending Gabriel a picture he painted of Hylas lying at the bottom of the river. It is beautifully told and Stenbock has a delightful manner in his simple tales. The next story ‘Narcissus’ is centred upon a handsome boy who through some misunderstanding is to marry a girl named Enriqueta, the girl’s father questions him and the beautiful boy declares that no such arrangement was entered into; Enriquetta, scorned, flings a vial of liquid into the angelic face of the boy which corrodes his skin. The boy, hideous to look at takes to nocturnal walking through the park when the gates are locked shut and one night he encounters a young blind child named Tobit who is also locked in the park and we are told that his mother left him there to be rid of him. The once handsome boy takes Tobit as his companion and over time they grow close. The boy, no longer of fair complexion, struggles with the idea of an operation being performed on Tobit to make him see but decides to go ahead with it and pays for the surgery which is successful. Tobit, now able to see, looks upon the features of the once handsome boy and says: ‘and you are the most beautiful person in all the world!’

‘The Death of Vocation’ is a tale in which a young girl wishes to be a nun and ‘Viol D’ Amor’ is a story of astrology, magic and superstition which is almost as worthy as Le Fanu in its telling. ‘The Egg and the Albatross’ is another magical, fairy tale which involves a young water sprite named Marina and perhaps Stenbock’s best known story is ‘The True Story of a Vampire’ which is utterly mesmerising and there is a tale of gypsies and a boy who plays the fiddle and takes an owl’s egg and buries it under a hazel tree for seven years in ‘The Worm of Luck’. This really is some breathtakingly beautiful writing and it is a pity that Stenbock did not live long enough to write more!

Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties – by John Adlard.

John Adlard (1929-1993), of Merton College, Oxford has written a brilliant account of the life of the decadent poet Eric Stanislaus Stenbock (1860-1895) in this 113 page (six chapters with illustrations) volume published in 1969 (750 copies) with a hitherto unpublished essay on Stenbock – ‘A Study in the Fantastic’ by Arthur Symons and a bibliography by Timothy d’Arch Smith. Upon reading the volume one cannot help but be reminded of A J A Symons’1934  landmark book of biography ‘The Quest for Corvo’ which the author must surely have read for he tells us that he began his research in 1960 and travelled far collecting it and so it reads almost like a quest with Adlard’s delightful tone throughout – if you were hoping for a large slice of Yeats in the book you will be sadly unsatisfied for this is definitely a book about Stenbock, whom we are told upon the first page was a ‘sick man, a pervert, and his life was short.’ Yeats, who knew Stenbock, reiterates this view in his ‘Autobiographies’ (1961) saying that Stenbock was a ‘scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men.’ (p. 2) so what strange magic did Stenbock wield over those that knew him? He was born on 12^th March 1860 at Thirlestaine Hall in Cheltenham to parents Erich Friedrich Diederich Magnus Stenbock and Lucy Sophia Frerichs who were married on 1^st March 1859 (after Erich’s death Lucy, Countess Stenbock, re-married in 1864 to Mr. F Mowatt, and the young Eric grew to hate his stepfather). Lucy’s family home, Thirlstaine Hall was sold in 1874 and the family moved to Withdeane Hall, near Brighton. Eric entered Wiesbaden school from 1875-77 and then took private education before going up to Balliol College, Oxford in April 1879, staying only four terms. Little is known of his time at Oxford but we do know he made two close friends at Oxford: Terence Woulfe Flanagan, the son of an Irish judge and landowner, and Benjamin Francis Conn Costelloe, the son of an Irish foreman ship-builder in Glasgow; Benjamin became Eric’s manager and both Flanagan and Costelloe knew the immortal poet Gerard Manly Hopkins, with whom they were members of the Oxford Catholic Club. In 1881 Eric’s slim 44 page volume of verse ‘Love, Sleep and Dreams’ was published, its poems speaking of a ‘beloved’ and a tortured soul under romantic infatuation… the beloved is revealed to be a boy – perhaps the young boy he became romantically enflamed by was Charles Bertram Fowler (1864-1881) to whom appears a dedication in Eric’s second book of poetry ‘Rue, Myrtle and Cypress’ (1883). Adlard says that ‘he [Stenbock] was in Oxford on the 23^rd May [1881], having his photograph taken. Twenty days later, in the village of Compton Beauchamp (some twenty-two miles from Oxford) a consumptive boy of sixteen died at the Rectory. He was Charles Bertram Fowler, son of the Reverend Alfred Fowler, who had died the year before. He concerns us now because it was to his memory that Eric was to dedicate a book; other than this I have been unable to discover anything about him.’ (p. 16) It would be interesting to know the nature of this relationship and Eric’s reactions to the young boy’s death but all we know is that Eric (aged 21) was in London on 20^th June before travelling to Germany in July and then on to Russia and Estonia at the beginning of August. He wrote thirty poems between May and November 1881 so perhaps this was his outpouring of grief for Charles. Eric’s father, old Count Magnus died in February 1885 and Eric arrived in Estonia in April as heir to the title, family fortune and the estates at Kolk, Konda and Neuenhof; at Kolk Eric became closely attached to his thirteen year old cousin Karin Stenbock who was ill in bed and she seemed to fall in love with him and wanted to marry him, despite the twelve years difference in age. But Eric was not inclined to marriage, yet his time at Kolk was idyllic, though not to last. There is a nice description of the poet during this time on page 36 which says ‘he liked to wear a loose tie of fiery red, a silk shirt of some dazzling colour, and soft red morocco slippers,’ and it goes on to say that ‘he used a powerful exotic perfume and had in his wardrobe a great number of fine silk dressing gowns and a notable collection of Oriental costumes.’ (p. 36) We learn of his fondness for animals and how they were allowed to roam free among his rooms: ‘tortoises crawled across the floor, a monkey hopped this way and that, and a snake, not always kept in its cage, coiled itself around the plants. There was also an aquarium with toads, lizards and salamanders. To all these creatures he was devoted, though he had an intense dislike of pigs and could not even bear the sight of them.’ (p. 36-37) the monkey was named ‘Troshka’ and he also had a dachshund named ‘Trixie’. His bedroom was ‘painted peacock-blue. Over the marble chimney-piece a great alter had been erected, tricked out with Oriental shawls, peacock feathers, lamps and rosaries. In the middle stood a green bronze statue of Eros. There was a little flame that burned unceasingly, and resin in a copper bowl that scented the air. The floor was covered with thick Smyrna carpets, and over his bed was a big pentagram to keep the evil spirits at bay.’ (p. 37) It was on this bed that Eric would smoke opium with his beloved animals gathered around him. Eric returned to London on 1^st July 1887 and took rooms at 11 Sloane Terrace; he was back among literary society and met old friends such as the eccentric artist and idle drunk, Simeon Solomon, Aubrey Beardsley, Wilde’s friends Robert Ross and More Adey, Aymer Vallance the art critic and disciple of William Morris; John Lane the publisher, Herbert Horne, art historian and poet (who in turn introduced Eric to the poet Lionel Johnson, who probably then arranged a meeting between Eric and W B Yeats), Father Edward Ignatius Purbrick, Rector of Stonyhurst and friend of G M Hopkins, and the young sixteen year old composer Norman O’Neill whom Eric met in Piccadilly on top of a horse-bus in May 1891. A young poet named Ernest Rhys met Stenbock at the house of William Bell Scott, the poet and painter, at Beaufort House, Cheyne Walk in the winter of 1887 and had this to say of his first meeting with Eric: ‘his entry was a delicious piece of comedy. He was short, very fair, small flaxen curls fringing a round smooth visage, with china-blue eyes. At the door he paused, drew out a little gold vial of scent from his pocket, scented his finger-tips and passed them through his hair before greeting his hostess.’ (p. 61) They became immediate friends and Rhys visited Eric at his rooms in Sloane Terrace and recorded that ‘in a recess a red lamp burned continually, between a Buddha and a bust of Shelley. The air was heavy with incense and various perfumes. Throughout dinner Fatima, his familiar – an enormous toad – sat on Eric’s shoulder, apparently asleep.’ (p. 63) Rhys also insisted that Wilde paid a visit to Eric’s rooms and offended him by lighting his cigarette from the sacred flame that burned continuously to Eric’s utter horror. In 1890 Eric moved from Sloane Terrace to 21 Gloucester Walk and Adlard recounts that ‘on his travels he had to be escorted and with him went a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll. He was convinced that the doll was his son and referred to it as ‘le petit comte’. Everyday it had to be brought to him; when it was not there he would ask for news of its health’. (p. 78) Stenbock had been ill for some time and in the winter of 1894-5 he was diagnosed with Cirrhosis of the liver and his strength was failing. On 26^th April 1895, a day in which Oscar Wilde faced the first day of his first trial) Eric died at his mother’s home, Withdeane Hall near Brighton and he was buried at Brighton’s Catholic Cemetery on 1^st May. Before the burial his ‘heart was extracted and sent to Estonia, where it was placed among the Stenbock monuments in the church at Kusal. It was preserved in some fluid in a glass urn in a cupboard built into the wall of the church.’ (p. 85) It is said that on the day of his death, Eric, ‘drunk and furious, had tried to strike someone with a poker and toppled into the grate’. (p. 85) His mother died at the Hall the following year on 14^th October.

John Adlard has written a very charming and interesting book on the strange and perplexing poet Eric Stenbock, despite a lack of source materials available to him at the time and his unwearying research has yielded a thing of beauty which is a lasting tribute to Stenbock and a fine point of entrance to future aficionados to continue the adventure and further the quest! Magical!

Of Kings and Things: Strange Tales and Decadent Poems by Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock – Edited and Introduced by David Tibet.

Published by Strange Attractor Press in 2018, this beautiful volume at 320 pages contains all of Stenbock’s stories from his 1894 collection ‘Studies of Death’ and various other tales such as the marvelous story and one of the best lycanthrope tales ‘The Other Side’; ‘Faust’, ‘La Girandola: a study of morbid pathology’, ‘The Child of the Soul’ and a six part drama, ‘La Mazurka Des Revenants’. There is an excellent Introduction ‘A Catch of a Ghost’ by the poet, artist and musician, David Tibet who has pushed many boundaries in those forms and is a fascinating man himself with his interests in mysticism, Buddhism, Aleister Crowley and Stenbock. Included in the volume is a selection of nearly forty poems taken from Stenbock’s collections: ‘Love, Sleep and Dreams’ (1881), ‘Myrtle, Rue and Cypress’ (1883) and ‘The Shadow of Death’ (1893) along with various typescripts. Much of Stenbock’s poetry is influenced by supernatural agencies, desolate and riddled with death and a desire for young men. Stenbock, born in 1860, became a Roman Catholic while at Oxford University, something his stepfather thought of as a ‘ridiculous religion’ and he was not to complete his Oxford education at Balliol College, possibly because of this and he was sent to Kolk in Estonia, the home of the Stenbocks’. He enjoyed his time at Kolk and had many happy times with his cousins who were amused by his eccentricities; he took to drink and opium and he later went about with a life-size wooden doll, ‘le petit comte’ whom he believed to be his son! He died aged just thirty-five in 1895 of Cirrhosis.

David Tibet has remained faithful to Stenbock’s original texts and punctuation, correcting typographical errors and textual mistakes (Stenbock inserts various languages into his writing) and Timothy d’Arch Smith, the author of the uranian classic ‘Love in Earnest’ (1970), a book which caught Tibet’s imagination and stirred his enthusiasm for Stenbock, provides an afterword and there is a comprehensive bibliography by David Tibet, Ray Russell and Mark Valentine. Tibet really has done excellent work in researching this little known poet and enigmatic oddity and bringing his spirit from the darkness to the light for all to see and love and his passion and enthusiasm is more than evident; so if you wish to know who died in the same bed shared by Stenbock and what strange connection links him to Jack the Ripper, then you really must read this book!

A Dream of Daffodils: Last Poems – by H. D. Lowry.

This charming 65 page volume of verse by Henry Dawson Lowry (1869-1906) published in 1912 and arranged for the press by G E Matheson and Lowry’s cousin, the author and spiritualist Catherine Amy Dawson Scott (1865-1934) contains a rather affectionate Memoir by Edgar A Preston along with thirty-two poems, seventeen of which come under the category of ‘love songs’. Henry Dawson Lowry was born in Truro, Cornwall on 22^nd February 1869 and his father Thomas Shaw Lowry was a bank clerk in the town and later bank manager in Camborne; Henry went to the Wesleyan School in Taunton and became interested in literature rather than ministerial work. He edited the school magazine and his interest in chemistry won him a scholarship to Oxford, matriculating on 14^th January 1888 aged 18 (BA 1891 and Honours – 3 Chemistry in 1891). Following University he lived in London in 1893 and seemed to forget chemistry in favour of literature and attempted to earn his living by the pen. He had work accepted in the ‘National Observer’ and the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’; ‘Black and White’, ‘The Speaker’ and ‘English Illustrated’ and edited the ‘Ludgate Magazine’ in 1897 and later that year the  ‘Morning Post’ printed his contributions, some of which were published in his first volume ‘Wreckers and Methodists’ (1893) followed by a volume of short stories ‘Women’s Tragedies’ in 1895; his only novel ‘A Man of Moods’ appeared in 1896; a volume of children’s tales ‘Make Believe’ in 1896 and a series of studies ‘The Happy Exile’ in 1898. He published just two volumes of verse: ‘The Hundred Windows’ (1904) and his Last Poems written before his death aged thirty-seven in 1906 at Herne Hill (and published here in ‘A Dream of Daffodils’ in 1912).

Preston tells us in his memoir that Lowry ‘had not fulfilled the promise of his youth’ (p. 7) and that he had ‘lots of friendships’, and ‘one passion’, he was ‘in Love with Love – with an ideal, in fact, which the Fates did not permit to materialize as he would have wished. Always longing for that unattainable, Lowry from his early boyhood was unhappy, as is so often the lot of poets; and there can be no doubt his song was strengthened by suffering.’ (p. 9) As a boy he ‘filled his head with fairy tales and Old Testament Scriptures’ (p. 11) and loved collecting possessions such as family China and silverware and Japanese colour prints. ‘Once there was a dog. He loved the very ordinary little animal, and thought it loved him, till the day when, taken out for exercise, the beast – as other “friends” had done – ran away and left him, angry and puzzled. Later there was a pet canary, which survived him. And always there were flowers, which neither flatter nor deceive.’ (p. 16)

Lowry has an almost feminine appreciation in his verse and there seems to be a continual theme of roses, loss and death –

                                                ‘So ebbed away

Slowly to sleep, and thence through dim-lit ways

Of shadowy dreams, passed out beyond the verge

Of our sad earth into a world more fair –

A land of dreams and dreamy blessedness.’

This is taken from his early poem ‘A Dream of Daffodils’ which goes on to conjure an image of feminine slender beauty:

‘In a long vale I stood; a tiny stream

Fled glistening through a smooth-spread grassy plain,

Embrowned with tufted mosses, and my heart

Went dreaming through the vale till fantasies

Born of its loveliness arose in me –‘

And a young golden-haired maiden enters his mind wearing golden flowers in her hair, robed in a sensuous ‘filmy’ dress, which showed ‘nebulous/ shadow of soft, round limbs.’ Her form was the fairer for the robe which ‘could not hide its perfect comeliness’. The maiden we learn is Echo who searches for Narcissus whom she saw and loved, ‘but in vain!’ In ‘Love Lying Dead’ we find the poet at the end of life’s thread, accepting death – ‘Then was I enamoured of sweet Death, / And turned my back on Life, as on the fool / That set a riddle where no answer is.’ Lowry searches for that unattainable love which renders his heart asunder in the poem ‘In the Street’ where we find a man walking in the rain dreaming of a ‘lost delight / And a goal that he could not gain.’ He finds ‘the wraith of a girl was behind, / Following, following him. Her hair was blown by the wind, / Her beautiful eyes were dim.’ Other worthy poems include: ‘A Prayer at Death’, ‘The Song-Seller’, ‘Dead Leaves’, ‘Death and Love’ (sonnet), ‘The June Rose’, ‘Let no man living dream of pitying me’ and ‘Love is Dead’ with its appalling conclusion that ‘Love is dead, and for the dead, / Waits no refuse but a grave,’ But the inner torment of the poet seeks some ‘transformation’ as can be seen in the poem of that name:

‘And would you know the man I was

A year ago, or half a year?

Go! bid the Spring be Spring no more,

And teach her how to be less dear.

Bid her withhold, when April’s here,

Green smock and gold of daffodil;

Then search the woodland far and wide,

Spring rapture of the thrush to kill.

And steal the stars, and veil the sun,

And make my lady grow unkind.

The man I was a year ago

You still may seek, but shall not find.’

Lowry’s health failed and he took to his bed and a week later on 22^nd October 1906 he was dead. His poetry is tragic yet beautiful and Preston’s memoir only hints at a man who died too soon before his time with the promise of some rather tender and passionate works which alas remained unwritten.

The Hundred Windows – by H. D. Lowry.

This is Lowry’s first volume of poetry published in 1904 containing 64 poems over a hundred pages. Most of the poems are taken from the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’, the ‘Morning Post’, ‘Black and White’, the ‘Pall Mall Magazine’ and the ‘Londoner’. In the dedicatory poem ‘To Beatrice’ we are told to ‘have pity on the man who long ago - / Dead Yesterday is dead as Babylon - / Waited, a dreamer, with no dream to dream.’ Lowry writes with an assured sense of romantic yearning and invokes sensual imagery into reality –

‘I will not move my hand to where

I dream you sit with silken hair

That waits for my caress. Mine eyes

Are hungry for the sight of you;

Yet are they closed, for still ‘tis true,

Only the man who dreams is wise.’ (XIV)

And in XV the tension increases as the passion ascends new heights of fancy:

‘I watch you from across the room

And still my wonder is

If, as you give me glance for glance,

You’d give me kiss for kiss.’

And the flame of lust concludes:

‘Till now we’ve played an idle game,

To while the time away:

Sweet, if I chose to stake my all,

Would you refuse to play?’

Lowry sings soft upon the delights of love for young maidens, his dream and his eternal fantasy – ‘I dared to dream you dreamt of me, / And O, my love, my heart was light.’ (XX) and he pours his soul upon the beautiful heart of his desire, saying ‘now that my love lies sleeping’ in XXIV, and ending quite pathetically, ‘I gave into her keeping / Everything I had.’ This is a really beautiful collection of verse with a staggering sense of loneliness and dejection by a rather troubled young poet who wrote much of the verse in his chambers in Middle Temple. He has lain in obscurity for too long and should be reappraised and more widely read!

Women’s Tragedies – by H. D. Lowry.

As the Cornish author Henry Dawson Lowry had the misfortune (or good sense) to expire at the young age of thirty-seven I thought it only right to get my hands on as much of his work as I could and pay him the tribute of reading his literary works! ‘Women’s tragedies’ is his second published book from 1895 and it is a collection of fifteen short stories all with a Cornish setting. Lowry’s female characters are all strong creations and he delights in the mental description of his heroines who succumb to motherhood as in the supernatural tale ‘The Torque’ or are unfaithful following the death of a child and fall to murder as in ‘The Man in the Room’. In ‘The Widow’s History’ Mark promises Marina that he will not drink but when he is found drunk she calls off the engagement, yet love is strong and Marina agrees to marry him still after he promises once more… Another theme of Lowry’s is the mistaken belief that death has occurred when a person goes missing as in ‘The Christening’ which sees a young wife, believing her husband is lost at sea, re-marry and now there is a child to be Christened when who should suddenly return but the first husband! A similar theme occurs in ‘The Good-for-Naught’ and in ‘The Sisters’ we find two sisters who love one man; a tale which ends in witchcraft and suicide. Another suicide story is ‘The Coward’ which tells of a man who opts-out of a suicide pact with the woman he loves. Throughout the volume there is a sense of pagan rites among simple folk and love, deviated and cursed. Lowry writes well and there are some very memorable little tales here to enjoy!

A Man of Moods – by H. D. Lowry.

Lowry’s only novel published in 1896 tells the story through twenty-one chapters of a man named Guy Holden, the son of a clergyman and an Oxford graduate who became a writer of reviews with a published novel behind him and some hack-work in journalism to keep up appearances living in London; he is twenty-eight years old and after having a second novel published he is working on his third. He is tired of London and its pretensions and decides to go to Scilly after meeting a flower-man named John Cunnack at Covent Garden Market who extolled the beauty of the Island to him. Possessions are of no consequence to him and he ‘sacrifices’ many of his things before taking the train to Plymouth and to Penzance and the steamer to the Isle of Scilly. On Scilly he searches out John Cunnack the flower-grower and meets his young twenty-year old niece named Elsie whom he takes to be around seventeen from her child-like appearance. Elsie’s father is dead and her mother ran off when she was young and so her Uncle John takes care of her with his sister, Elsie’s widowed Aunt, Mrs Chegwidden. Holden lodges at their charming house and Guy and Elsie grow close to each other. Guy works on his novel and helps Mr Cunnack with his flowers and eventually Guy asks Elsie to marry him; she needs time to think about it and leaves him waiting until the end of the day. Suddenly, Elsie finds her Uncle John dead amongst his beloved plants in the tomato house and although distraught, she agrees to marry Guy. After they are married they take a steamer to the mainland and stay the night in Penzance before honeymooning in London, a place Elsie yearns to be as she was born there and is bored by Scilly. Guy finishes his novel and it is a success but Elsie remains dissatisfied with life on the island and wants the lights and crowds and streets of London to feel alive; Guy is torn as he is happy for the first time in his life on Scilly, not having to work to demand and feeling spiritually free amongst nature. After being on Scilly a year, Guy receives a letter from an old work colleague named Martin, he decides to meet him in Penzance and leave Elsie for a few days, but feeling that he has ruined Elsie Guy decides to go to London and hide him self there and sever the past. He writes to Elsie telling her he is in London but does not give an address; he sees a lawyer and signs his private income over to her and writes to her a final time telling her to forget him. He lodges off the Strand and writes about his experiences on Scilly for an evening paper. Elsie is distraught and months pass by until she has her baby delivered. She becomes weak and the Doctor says she will die without her husband whom she loves and misses more than ever. With the idea of going to London and searching for Guy, Elsie makes a great effort to get well and strong again and after a month recuperating she is well enough to go and so she travels with the baby and Mrs Chegwidden to London. Guy comes to the realisation that he must return to Scilly and ask his wife’s forgiveness, but on the day before he leaves he goes to Covent Garden Market and sees Elsie looking for him among the bunches of flowers he loved and they embrace and kiss and their future together on Scilly with the new baby and Mrs Chegwidden unfolds towards a beautiful future sustained by love. This is a delightfully rewarding story and Lowry seems to draw on autobiographical material for his protagonist, Guy Holden, who like Lowry was Oxford educated and a slave to the pen for his living, while creating an image of purity and truth in the character of Elsie, a young child-like maiden whom Lowry would surely have desired greatly. Some parts of the plot seemed a little naïve such as Guy leaving Elsie, never to return and Elsie remaining tenderly and rigidly in love with him throughout the pain he caused by his leaving her with a child to raise, but for a first novel this is a wonderful promise of things to come, which sadly never did in the novel form. Superb!

Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up – by Lord Alfred Douglas.

Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945) published this, his final book in 1940, five years before he died and much of his earlier maniacal ferocity and denial in his associations with Wilde has dwindled to an almost humane acceptance of his part in the sensational aspects of the tribulations. I read the 1950 re-issue (12 chapters over 142 pages) with an Introduction by Derek Hudson who was born in 1911 and still graces the land of the living at the time of writing this review (2018); Hudson sides with ‘Bosie’ on much that he has to say about his relationship with Wilde which was close between 1892-95 (they met in 1891 when Bosie’s cousin, the poet Lionel Johnson introduced them; Wilde was 36, married with two children and Douglas was 20 and an Oxford undergraduate, Magdalen College, 1889-1893, he left without a degree). Perhaps for the first time Douglas explains his role in the downfall of Wilde, (if Douglas had not been so careless as to leave incriminating letters in a suit he gave to one of his ‘male associates’ then Wilde would not have been subjected to blackmail attempts), afterall, he is coming to the end of his life and he has come under the spell and lure of Roman Catholicism which he embraced in 1911 as so many whose sexuality remained either hidden or in denial had done and as we all know confirmation in Catholicism ensures that no lie is spoken and truth and honesty are the bywords of spiritual integrity, anyway, Douglas remains unmoved in his attitude that homosexuality is a ‘sin of the flesh’ (p. 14) but not a ‘crime’ and he is determined to hack away at the confusing statements and downright sordid untruths of others to reveal some semblance of accuracy; he calls to the box George Bernard Shaw whom he maintains was cruel in his judgement of Oscar and Mr. Robert Sherard who upheld Oscar’s honour and at the same time deified the great Irish author and defended him by insisting his homosexuality was some sort of sickness or a form of madness, something Douglas strongly denies and rightly so. Wilde, Bosie tells us was not beyond instigating such affairs with young men, male prostitutes who were experienced in such arts and therefore not corrupted by the older man; his part in satisfying his tastes were perhaps not as innocent as we have been led to believe, it seems he was a prominent and promiscuous user of street boys and lower class men in service whom he treated lavishly to gifts (usually silver cigarette cases), dinners and money. If we are to believe Mr. Douglas he stood by Oscar unto the end and that he was not aware of the document known as ‘De Profundis’ which Wilde wrote at Reading gaol and was meant to be despatched to Douglas by Robert Ross who Douglas claims withheld the letter and he did not see the letter until 1912, twelve years after Wilde’s death. In a letter to his mother in 1897, Douglas stands by Wilde saying ‘don’t think that I have changed about him or that I have changed my views about morals. I still love and admire him, and I think he has been infamously treated by ignorant and cruel brutes. I look upon him as a martyr to progress. I associate myself with him in everything.’ In reference to those ‘ignorant and cruel brutes’ we can assume he has his adulterous and fiery father the Marquess of Queensberry firmly in the front of his mind whom he detested for the attacks upon Wilde and for the ill treatment of his family and himself. Bosie goes on to say ‘I have, as I hope is well known, nothing but abhorrence for homosexuality, but I have not changed the views I expressed to my mother in the letter I wrote to her in 1897’ (p. 17). Douglas summons up old hatreds and opens old wounds concerning Arthur Ransome and the case of 1913 and Frank Harris who declared he did not know Wilde was less than truthful when he denied the accusations during the trial until Wilde stated it plainly to him during a conversation and of course Robert Ross who probably initiated Oscar into homosexuality and who betrayed Oscar’s wishes concerning ‘De Profundis’. There were many missed opportunities of escape for Oscar and behind it all one can’t help feeling Bosie pushed him towards the inevitable end originally through his selfishness in wanting to punish his father and see him imprisoned but the Marquess found more than a hint of truth in the rumours of the poet and the playwright and further incriminating evidence in the form of the sworn testimonies from young male associates of Wilde had been discovered and so the history of one of the greatest literary figures to walk the earth was all but written and Douglas walked away, a ghost of only half-truths condemned to infamy. A noble endeavour!

Make Believe – by H. D. Lowry.

Published in 1896 and illustrated by Charles Robinson (1870-1937), ‘Make Believe’ is a collection of ten stories which feature a young girl named Doris who has many adventures with her ‘real treasures’ which are ordinary things, in her garden and her imaginary world with an adult visitor who treats Doris as an equal and in so doing encourages her to talk about her childish and charming adventures. The stories are: ‘The Meeting’, ‘The Magic Painter’, ‘The Lady and the Treasure’, ‘Green Grapes’, ‘The Doll’s Funeral’, ‘When Doris was a Mermaid’, ‘Dreams about a Star’, ‘A March of Heroes’, ‘A London Picnic’ and ‘A Long Journey’. This type of thing which features a young girl discovering the joys of life along with the sorrows and pains associated with it was hugely popular in Victorian times and ‘Make Believe’ is published thirty-one years after Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) and not long after his ‘Sylvie and Bruno’ (1889 and volume 2 1893); it also appears just three years after ‘A Naughty Girl’ (1893) by the author Joseph Ashby-Sterry whose ‘Boudoir Ballads’ of 1876 was very popular. Throughout all of his writings Lowry seems to understand and appreciate women, from the little girl to the mother and the old woman and although he is not on everybody’s ‘to read’ list his timeless love of childhood will endure. Delightful!

The Happy Exile – by H. D. Lowry.

Most of these sketches and studies, published in 1898, first appeared in ‘The National Observer’, the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’, ‘Black and White’, ‘The Speaker’ and ‘Chambers’. There are six etchings by E. Philip Pimlott (which I thought a little below standard) and Lowry writes well enough conjuring a world of Cornish beauty in such pieces as: ‘The Idyll of the Daffodils’, ‘The New Contentment’, ‘A Scandal in Arcady’, ‘The Wedding Morning’, ‘A Romantic Confession’, ‘On Sunday Morning’, ‘In the Marshes’, ‘Interludes: 1. The Offering, 2. The Hammock, 3. Western Winter, 4. The Blessing of the Rain, 5. The Unseen Singer’, ‘Midsummer Moonlight’, ‘A Wayside Evangelist’, ‘Pilchards in the Bay’, ‘Payment by Results’, ‘The Spell of the Sea’, ‘The Bible Reader’, ‘Marguerite in London’ (I and II), ‘The Smell of the Good Earth’ and ‘New Year’s Eve’. Of course not all of these sketches have stood the test of time and some appear a little tired but Lowry has a charming turn of phrase which recalls some of the master short story tellers such as Poe, Kipling and Hardy. Quite beautiful!

The Trials of Oscar Wilde – by H. Montgomery Hyde.

Harford Montgomery Hyde (1907-1989) was an Irish born barrister, politician and biographer who studied History (first class) at Queen’s University, Belfast and Law (second class) at Magdalen College, Oxford. He has written a fine and thorough Introduction to the ‘Trials of Oscar Wilde’ edited and published by him in 1948 with a Foreword by the Right Hon. Sir Travers Humphreys who was the only living participant in the trials; the editor looks at Wilde’s background and associations before revealing in-depth the lead up to the trials and their aftermath. The story, or perhaps tragedy of the libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry has become the stuff of legend and is well-known, from the instance that the Marquess, John Sholto Douglas (1844-1900) left that infamous card with the Hall Porter at the Albemarle Club in London for Oscar, who was a member, on 18^th February 1895 (Wilde received the card a fortnight later on the 28^th of February); and we are familiar that a warrant was issued for Queensberry’s arrest on Friday 1^st March and the next day he was arrested at Carter’s Hotel, Albemarle Street. And of course the first trial lasting three days began on Wednesday 3^rd April 1895 at the Central Criminal Courts in London where the Jury were in disagreement; Queensberry’s detectives unearthed new evidence in the form of young men willing to testify against Oscar as to improper conduct and Oscar’s arrest on Friday 5^th April around 6.30 p.m. in room 53 of the Cadogan Hotel in the presence of his good friends Robert Ross and Reginald Turner; he had been waiting for the knock on the door and let the precious hours pass where he could have got away to safety abroad. There was some stubborn instinct which was leading him to destruction and he seemed to walk towards it like a man to the gallows. What was it that made him stay and face his judgement? Oscar was taken to Scotland Yard and then Bow Street Police Station the next day. The second trial in which a parade of young men such as Alfred Wood, the brothers Charles and William Parker, Frederick Atkins, Sidney Arthur Mavor, Edward Shelley and Alfred Taylor and a host of servants from the Savoy reporting on seeing Wilde in bed with a boy (the chambermaid was short-sighted and wasn’t wearing glasses at the time and Wilde swore she had mistook Lord Alfred for him but did not want to reveal this and bring Bosie into the courtroom) and of course the dirty sheets became crucial evidence as well – all in all everyone scented blood and were eager to crucify Oscar; the trial began on Friday 26^th April and lasted five days; Wilde of course gives his famous explanation and defence of the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ after two poems, ‘In Praise of Shame’ and ‘Two Loves’ by Lord Alfred Douglas are read in court which stirs the supporters and onlookers into shouts of sympathy and applause, but it is a momentary weakness in the grinding system of the law and the third trial took place on Monday 20^th May over six days and the sentence of two years hard labour was given. Montgomery Hyde brings all the drama of the case to the reader and the prejudice of those who had already disliked and were jealous of Oscar’s enormous fame and artistic talent; he was condemned and ostracised among society before the verdict was reached and after the sentence prostitutes were dancing in the streets outside the courts. ‘The truth is that Oscar Wilde was amoral rather than immoral; and, in looking back upon the scandal of the trials in which he was involved, the English public has an uneasy conscience about him. For a good deal of the mud thrown at the time has stuck. It is still thought in some quarters that Wilde was a debaucher of youth.’ (p. 100) It is quite obvious to anyone who has studied their Wilde that Bosie was the instigator of all that was rotten in the relationship and he remained a tortured, arrogant monster for the rest of his life, despite falling under the protective umbrella of Roman Catholicism; the trial had produced a wave of panic throughout England and those who were committing the same so-called ‘crime’ or vice as Wilde were in preparation for a mass exodus across the Channel where the air was a little more tolerant of such notions. The Appendix has several interesting documents reproduced such as a) ‘A Plea of Justification’ filed by the Defendant in Regina (Wilde) v. Queensberry, from the Central Criminal Courts, London; b) Lord Alfred Douglas and Sir Edward Clarke; c) Bankruptcy Proceedings; d) Lord Alfred Douglas and the aftermath of the Wilde Trials; e) The Problem of Wilde’s Inversion and f) the Prevalence of Male Homosexuality in England. A monumental work!

Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (Volume I) – by Frank Harris.

In reading Mr. Frank Harris’s ‘Oscar Wilde’ one must first remember that the author is an enormous egoist and an unreliable reporter of facts which of course one will know if one has already read his autobiography, ‘My Life and Loves’. Volume one of his Wilde biography was published in 1916 with sixteen chapters over 320 pages and it opens with the court case of Wilde’s father Dr. Sir William Wilde who had a civil action brought against him for libel by Miss Travers following her accusation that he had sexually assaulted her under chloroform. Wilde was vindicated but it made a lasting impression on the young poet Oscar. We see the youthful Oscar at Portora School in Ireland and Harris recounts a story by Wilde that a young boy there had become enamoured of him and how it was a great revelation to him to realise the significance of that infatuation and those first passionate flames – ‘I was very childish, Frank; a mere boy till I was over sixteen. Of course I was sensual and curious, as boys are, and had the usual boy imaginings; but I did not indulge in them excessively.’ (p. 31) At Magdalen College, Oxford Wilde came under the influence of Ruskin and Pater and we are told that Pater knelt and kissed Wilde’s hand – ‘you must not, you really must not. What would people think if they saw you?’ (p. 49) Whistler was another aesthetic influence upon Oscar but they later fell out in April 1883 when Wilde returned to England from his United States lecture tour and Whistler accused him of plagiarism. The next year in 1884 Harris met Oscar and they became life-long friends meeting in theatres and drawing rooms and Harris tells us that at first he was repulsed by Oscar’s flabby and oily appearance which is strange coming from a man who was no oil painting himself but he was impressed with Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ (Harris is a great Shakespeare enthusiast, I refrain from using the word expert) and he delighted in Wilde’s novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ which came to irrevocably damage his reputation. Lord Alfred Douglas is introduced and he becomes the great temptation in Wilde’s life, bringing him to destruction and bankruptcy; it is no wonder that Douglas, having wiped the froth from his mouth, had nothing but harsh words about this book and its author for he surely was the damaged seed of his father and bore the same transgressions and vile, mean and insane vitriol his father held towards Wilde and towards anyone who disagreed with him; Bosie even threatened to shoot his father the Marquess. Rumours begin about the relationship between Oscar and Bosie and Harris brings in ‘The Green Carnation’ as an example of how society was beginning to view and ridicule Oscar. Harris offers his advice before the trial begins to drop it and go abroad but we know that behind the scenes, Bosie, like some rabid dog was pulling the strings, determined to see his father in the dock and if he had his way at the end of a rope. He did not seem to care that Oscar’s reputation was at stake and Oscar walked with the hand of destiny to his fate. The outcome was surely inevitable, even to him, for the ‘uneducated middle class’ and the ‘barbarian aristocracy’ of England were prejudiced against writers. Frank takes no end in telling us that he had a steam yacht on the Thames at Erith, waiting to whisk Oscar off at a moments notice but Wilde was determined to see the trial out to the end; he is staying with his brother Willie on bail and confesses to Harris that even his own brother would turn him in if discovered that he had left! Harris exaggerates no doubt his own importance in the Wilde affair and unfortunately we cannot have Wilde’s opinion of the conversations that allegedly took place between them but nevertheless, with this in mind, it is still a fascinating read and yet another facet to the great tragedy and comedy of Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (Volume II) – by Frank Harris.

In the continuation of Frank Harris’s Wilde biography of 1916, the author offers a further eleven chapters in this second volume at over three-hundred pages and we are treated to the workings of the prison system and the effects of punishment and Frank meets Oscar in Reading prison having secured permission to assess the effects of prison life upon him and he listens to his complaints and assures him that changes will be made such as books for him and writing materials. As good as his word changes do occur after the prison Governor is dismissed and a new one established. Frank even goes on to draw up a petition for Oscar to be released early on remission on account of his ill health; the writer Meredith refuses just as most notable authors and men of letters decline and so the petition comes to nothing and Harris fails but at least Oscar now has some comfort in his incarceration. Following prison Oscar leaves for France and stays at the Hotel de la Plage in the village of Berneval. Frank notices the change in Oscar, the great compassion and pity which is at odds with De Profundis which seems bitter and merciless in its attack upon the shallow and selfish Douglas. Harris draws upon the Ballad of Reading Gaol and reveals the influence of A E Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’ which according to Harris Wilde had read and enjoyed but it is the second fall in Oscar’s life which now occurs following incessant pleadings from Douglas to join him in Naples and Oscar falling for the temptation goes, forfeiting his annual financial assistance from his wife who strictly forbad him to see Douglas again (she does however help with regular funds). In Naples the leach Douglas behaved deplorably and selfishly, urging Oscar to write so that he could make money for Douglas to gamble with and enjoy fine dinners and wines, even showing his violent and nasty side to the man who still loved him, calling Wilde an ‘old fat prostitute’. Harris also urges Oscar on to work but not for financial reasons, because he knows he is capable of creating beautiful things and writing will heal his soul but Oscar comes across as stubborn and lazy, there are many instances where Wilde refuses to walk, he takes a cab everywhere; he acts just like a petulant child and refuses to write. Harris moves on to Oscar’s death and how he himself was ill and could not be there and the volume ends with Bernard Shaw’s ‘Memories of Oscar Wilde’ which is quite interesting. The appendix reproduces the two poems by Alfred Douglas: ‘Two Loves’ (Sept 1892) and ‘In Praise of Shame’ and the un-published portions of ‘De Profundis’. Both volumes have been an enjoyable read and it is always wise to read several versions of the facts from different sources who each seem to tell different accounts of the story; Frank Harris was counted as a friend of Wilde’s and he paints himself in a wondrous and saintly light in terms of this friendship, offering sensible advice and plentiful financial assistance to the unfortunate Wilde, no doubt there is some semblance of truth in the matter and after his death, Wilde becomes an easy target for egotistical second-rate writers to attach themselves to him and gain some notoriety, but read the volumes and make up your own mind as to the veracity of Mr. Harris. 

Spirit Intercourse: Its Theory and Practice – by J. Hewat McKenzie.

James Hewat McKenzie (1869-1929) was the Scottish born founder of the British College of Psychic Science who became interested in the paranormal in 1900. Following a series of lectures in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow during 1915, he published ‘Spirit Intercourse’ in 1917. One can understand the need for this book when one considers the awful loss of life on the battlefields of France and Belgium and the need to console grieving parents and loved ones; an interest in spiritualism exploded and filled the gaping chasm left by the church.  The book is divided into nine chapters over 295 pages which looks at the various evidence such as materialization and techniques of mediumship through objective and subjective phenomena. McKenzie, who was a member of the Christian Church for thirty years came to the conclusion through Christian worship that there was no evidence to confirm that man had a soul or that even a spirit world existed; following his departure from the church he underwent years of personal study in the science of ‘life after death’ and his own belief in spirit communication was established: ‘The records of the Society for Psychical Research have actually proved to my mind, first, survival pure and simple, the persistence of the spirit’s life, as a structural law of the universe; second, that between the spiritual and the material worlds an avenue of communication does in fact exist; third, that the surviving spirit retains, at least in some measure, the memories and loves of the earth.’ (F. W. H. Myers. Quoted on page 35) He goes into great depth as to the science and culture of the soul and the first steps in spirit intercourse, mapping the spirit spheres and describing the laws that one may find there. Psychic science, he says, proves that at the death of the body a person still functions as a conscious being; that being is a refined spirit body or a soul which has substance and weight. The soul existed with a physical body during life and can communicate with persons on earth before and after death. McKenzie states that the world of the spirit or the soul lies immediately around the physical earth and that while alive, a person can leave the physical body and explore the spheres of refined physical states – the spirit world for we are triune beings: body, soul and spirit (ego, thought). The soul has a similar organic structure to that of the physical, its own organs etc. This is all very interesting and then McKenzie suddenly feels the need to question his readers’ moral behaviour and physical virtues and that old Christian devil rears its ugly head in his chapter on the culture of the soul which he declares needs four components to become aware of spiritual contact, firstly, aspiration (or prayer), secondly, right diet (apparently cooked flesh is disagreeable with the spirits!), thirdly, exercise and fourth is self-control; to this he adds rhythmic-breathing, concentration and meditation. A lot of this I can swallow but when it comes to ‘planetary spirit intercourse’ whereby the Earth spirits of the seventh sphere can communicate with the Martian spirits of the seventh sphere for example seems ridiculous to me and why when we enter the spirit world are our souls clothed in human shape and why do we need to live in brick (not actual material brick but an ethereal substance-like brick) buildings? Why is not the soul condensed into a circular ball of energy? Although I cannot agree with much that McKenzie has to say on the spirit world (the seven spheres that surrounds the earth and the other planets in our Solar System) and his belief that there is no danger in such communications as in possession and negative influences etc. seems naïve, but the book does have some interesting things to say and it is a good, understandable book for most of it.

Death: Its Causes and Phenomena – by Hereward Carrington and John R Meader.

This massive tome at nearly six-hundred pages with ‘special reference to immortality’ was published in 1912 and the authors, Carrington and Meader, make a thorough examination of the scientific aspects of life and death, the assimilation and disintegration (attraction and repulsion) of the body and the inevitability of death – ‘dead matter is cast aside, just as one would discard a worn-out garment, and new matter is created to take its place. When this faculty ceases to perform its functions, death follows speedily.’ (p. 4) We are led through the signs of death in the physical which are quite obvious and mention is made of the etheric or the aura and the ‘odor mortis’ (smell of death) and ‘rigor mortis’; putrefaction (decomposition) is quite fascinating and we are told that it is twice as rapid in air as in water. Chapter three (part one) looks at ‘Trance, Catalepsy and Suspended Animation’ and goes into some depth on premature burial and its preventions which I found absolutely fascinating, offering many examples of such cases before presenting us with the delights in the facts of burials, cremation, mummification and embalming. Nine examples of the causes of death are examined from ‘sudden death’, ‘death by poisoning’ and even ‘death by spontaneous combustion’ in chapter six before entering upon a scientific study of old age. Carrington and Meader give their own theories upon death and their conclusions before opening part two, the ‘Historical’ aspect of death with theories concerningt immortality, (cannibalism, Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome) which frankly I found a little less interesting, touching on the philosophical aspects (Schopenhauer and Fichte) and then the theological aspects which acted like a sedative upon me until I awoke to the final part which delves into the ‘Psychological’ aspect with the basic premise that ‘all things perish except energy’. There are some interesting notions on the subject of the moment of death and is there a sensation of pain ? etc. ‘so long as there is pain, some attempt is being made to repair the vital damages; but when pain ceases, then nature has given up the fight.’ (p. 301) The following chapters are quite insightful – ‘Visions of the Dying’, ‘Death described from beyond the Veil’ (Clairvoyant descriptions of death: the separation of the soul and the body and the process of dying as described by spirits), ‘Experiments in Photography and Weighing the Soul’, ‘Death Coincidences’ (apparitions of the dying and olfactory phenomena), ‘The Testimony of Science – Psychical Research’ (physical phenomena and independent voices, raps, the case of D. D. Home etc.), ‘The Mental Phenomena’ (Clairvoyance, phantasms of the dead, haunted houses, planchette writing, mediums: Mrs Piper, Mrs Smead and Mrs Thompson) and ‘On the Intra-Cosmic Difficulties of Communication’ before the authors conclude that ‘the nature of death is likely to remain unsolved for many years to come – so long as we are ignorant of the nature of life.’ (p. 518) The Appendices have some interesting topics such as ‘On Vampires’, ‘Life and Vitality’ and ‘Eusapia Palladino’s Phenomena and Fraud’. Anyone reading this huge volume cannot fail to recognise the scale and wealth of research that has gone into it by Messrs Carrington and Meader who draw from many published works and although some chapters may not interest every enquiring mind there will be some chapters that do and instigate further research in that direction perhaps. If like me you are of a macabre twist and find death in all of its many aspects thoroughly fascinating, even a little romantic in the gothic sense, then I am sure you will find something to delight and tickle your strange sense of philosophy in this monster work on the subject.

Pastors and Masters – by I. Compton-Burnett.

This short novel (126 pages) published in 1925 is the second novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) and the action takes place at a Boys’ Prep School where we meet pupils and staff under the seventy-year old Headmaster and owner of the school Nicholas Herrick who lives with his un-married half-sister, Emily Herrick, twenty years his junior, aged fifty. The Herricks are friends with the Fletchers, the Reverend Peter Fletcher, Teresa his wife, the un-married sister Lydia and nephew Reverend Francis Fletcher. Mr. Charles Merry the senior Master runs the school and his wife Emily, known as ‘Mother’ assists him. Other teachers are Miss Basden, the middle-aged, un-married school mistress teaching French and music; Mr. Burgess the young and inexperienced graduate and William Masson and Richard Bumpus, two un-married fellows who have been close friends for thirty years. The story centres on the writing of a novel – Mr. Herrick regrets not writing a novel and Mr. Bumpus wrote one in his youth but believed it was quite worthless and had the manuscript buried in the grave of a friend. Mr. Herrick found a typescript novel in the room of Mr. Crabbe, an elderly don, upon his death so Herrick stole it and passed the work off as his own. Mr. Bumpus also intends to re-write his earlier novel and it turns out both men are writing or have written the same novel! Towards the end there is a dinner party consisting of the Herricks, the Fletchers and the staff with the Reverend Henry Bentley who has his two sons, Harry aged thirteen and John aged twelve at the school. We also meet Henry’s thirty year old daughter Miss Delia Bentley and there is plenty of interest in the dialogue which is tight and condensed and we get a real sense of the tyranny and hierarchy that exists in such institutions, something which Compton-Burnett excels in capturing, particularly among situations that exist between family and domestics within a household; the inward-looking world of Edwardian society that conceals its secrets and failures and reveals its wealth and triumphs. Very good indeed!

Manservant and Maidservant – by I. Compton-Burnett.

Published in 1947, this is Compton-Burnett’s eleventh and greatest novel which features the tyrannical, penny-pinching father, Horace Lamb who is detested by his five children and even his wife Charlotte, who holds the purse strings and who is contemplating eloping with Horace’s cousin Mortimer Lamb. Horace discovers the affair. We are also introduced to the servants below stairs: Bullivant (the manservant) and the cook, Mrs Seldon (the maidservant); George the young and know-it-all footman from the workhouse who likes to help himself to things he does not own and Miriam, the sensible young maid from the orphanage. The next players on the stage are the Doubleday’s – Gideon Doubleday is the young tutor to the Lamb children and through him we meet his mother, Gertrude a wise old woman who likes to know everything that is occurring and Gideon’s un-married sister, Magdalen who later gets engaged to Mortimer. The next character to engage the reader is Miss Buchanon, the local owner of the general store who takes in private letters for collection by the recipients and we discover her secret to be that she is illiterate. The interplay between the characters is simply wonderful and the dialogue has a fast pace to it which reveals essential information quite matter of fact; the switch between people and groups of people in the narrative is very casually done and almost unnoticed and there are some nice touches of humour and observations. The children and their logic hold especial appeal to the reader and their interaction with the adults is simple and skilful. I do not wish to give too much away but there are Christmas disappointments and even murderous intentions in this quite extraordinary novel which sets Compton-Burnett high among the great writers of the twentieth century. Fantastic!

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered – by Samuel Butler.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) published his ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered’ (328 pages) with introductory chapters, notes and a reprint of the original 1609 edition in 1899 and Butler feels confident enough to rearrange some of Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ into the order he believes they were written. The original 1609 publication printed by Thomas Thorpe contained misprints and carried the infamous and mysterious Preface: ‘To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W H all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T.’ He looks at the history of the sonnets through the various publications such as Benson’s partial republication of 1640 and the critical analysis that followed – the reprint contained omissions and was disordered; the genders in the sonnets was changed substituting ‘she’ and ‘her’ for ‘he’ and ‘his’; and ‘Shakespeare’s Poems’ by Lintott in 1790. Benson goes on to look at the various Shakespearean scholars who made textual emendations such as Charles Gildon (1665-1724), Lewis Theobald (1688-1744) who published ‘The Works of Shakespeare’ in 7 volumes in 1733; Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730-1786), George Steevens (1736-1800) who published the sonnets in 1766; Edward Capell (1713-1781), Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) who published the plays in 12 volumes in 1771 with an extra volume of Shakespeare’s poems and J. Bell: ‘If Shakespeare’s merit as a poet, a philosopher, or a man, was to be estimated from his Poems, though they possess many instances of powerful genius, he would, in every point of view, sink beneath himself in these characters. Many of his subjects are trifling, his versification mostly laboured and quibbling, with too great a degree of licentiousness.’ (Anonymous Preface in the supplement volume of Shakespeare’s Plays in 8 volumes by J. Bell and C. Etherington. 1774). Butler states that it was the Reverend Edmond Malone (1741-1812) who made the first serious attempt at textual emendation with intelligent critical notes on the 154 sonnets (chapter III); Malone agrees with Tyrwhitt that the identity of W H of the preface is William Hughes, believing the word ‘Hews’ appearing in sonnet 20 is a play on the young man’s surname and Butler seems to go along with this also. George Chalmers (1742-1825) made an in-depth interpretation of the word ‘Begetter’ in Thorpe’s Preface (chapter IV) publishing ‘An Apology for Believers in the Shakespeare Papers (1797) and ‘A Supplement Apology for Believers in the Shakespeare Papers’ (1799); Butler calls both books absurd and touches upon the Ireland forgeries (William Henry Ireland 1777-1835) of December 1795 (dated 1796) – ‘Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare’. It was Malone who debunked the forgery of the letter from Queen Elizabeth which was found in the volume and then in chapter five we are introduced to Dr Nathan Drake M.D. who put forward the ‘Lord Southampton Theory’ in his book ‘Shakespeare and his Times’ (1817) which he worked on for several years – ‘during which if he treated his patients with the recklessness with which he treated the Sonnets,’ says Butler, ‘he must have sent many a soul hurrying down to Hades’. (p. 32) Drake believed the ‘Lord of my love,…’ (sonnet 26) is addressed to Lord Southampton (Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, born October 1573, the ‘W H’ is reversed) whose ‘love for him is without end’ (‘Shakespeare and his Times’. Volume II. 1817. p. 63-64) The Earl was the only patron to Shakespeare known and Butler of course disagrees, and rightly so saying the Earl was only twelve years old when the sonnets were written before he also disagrees with another theory put forward by Mr Sidney Lee in his volume ‘Life of William Shakespeare’ (1898), the ‘Lord Pembroke Theory’ (William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke born April 1580) saying that the recipient of the sonnets, the ‘begetter’ was not titled so it could not be Southampton or Pembroke and was probably equal to or beneath Shakespeare in status and not a man of rank. In ‘The Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Unfolded’ (1872) by Gerald Massey, the author suggests that the sonnets were addressed to Queen Elizabeth which is absolute rubbish and went to supporting the Ireland forgeries but what do we actually know? We know that the sonnets are probably autobiographical and published under mysterious circumstances in 1609 when Shakespeare was 45 years old, written probably ten years earlier; two of the sonnets were published in ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, a collection of mostly inferior poems attributed to Shakespeare. We know that the first 126 sonnets (which in all likelihood are private letters) are addressed to the young man W H whom the poet is in love with (the first 17 are designed to persuade Mr W H the handsome, feminine young man to marry and pass his beauty on to future generations, to defeat time and its ravages. The poet abandons the idea of marriage and proclaims that his verse will be the medium to defeat time and preserve Mr W H’s beauty); something disastrous happens when Mr W H plays some trick on the poet (Shakespeare) and is then forgiven before the poet brings his mistress and Mr W H together; Shakespeare becomes jealous of a rival poet (Butler suggests the poet was possibly Thomas Watson) and that the remaining sonnets (127-154) are addressed to the black-haired, black-eyed woman – the Dark Lady. Butler hypothesises that the sonnets were begun around April 1585 before any of the plays were written when Shakespeare was 21 years old and infatuated with Mr W H. The author bases his argument on sonnet 127 (107 in the Quarto) which Butler states refers to the defeat of the Armada and can therefore be dated 8^th August 1588 or thereabouts and he concludes that Mr W H was probably born around 1567 or 68 and attained a bad reputation; he was vain, heartless, uncaring of Shakespeare who loved him devotedly and liked to be flattered. Butler goes on to suggest that W H probably gave Thomas Thorpe the sonnets along with ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ which he had in his possession for some twenty years or so because he was in urgent need of money and was probably reluctant and wished to remain anonymous. Butler goes a long way to push his own theories as to the sonnets and the story they reveal and the social status of Mr W H which are really quite fascinating and makes more sense than some of the previous scholars on the subject but I am not completely convinced, it is well known that Shakespeare was fond of word play but the ‘hews’ connection in sonnet 20 is very tentative. A more substantial possibility (which Butler and previous scholars were unaware) of more recent times (2015) is put forward by the American researcher Geoffrey Caveney who connects a ‘W H’ to Thomas Thorpe who published the sonnets; the candidate in question is William Holme, who like Thorpe was born in Chester and also became a publishing apprentice in 1580’s London and had his own London bookshop. Caveney suggests Thorpe may have found the manuscript after Holme’s death in 1607 and the interesting preface in which Mr W H is the ‘begetter’ is more akin to a funereal inscription. Absolutely fascinating but while it is interesting to speculate the mystery of the sonnets like the curse attached to the great man’s bones shall endure. Marvelous!

Severn and Somme – by Ivor Gurney.

The English poet and composer and private of the Gloucestershire’s, Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) published two volumes of verse, ‘Severn and Somme’ in 1917 and ‘War’s Embers’ in 1919; the former was written in France, many of the forty-six poems, five of which are sonnets, were actually composed in the trenches and there is a nostalgic yearning for his native Gloucestershire throughout the volume, as in ‘The Fire Kindled’:

‘The stars of afterglow,

Venus, on western hills;

Dymock in spring: O spring

Of home! O daffodils!

…………………………….

Here we go sore of shoulder,

Sore of foot, by quiet stream;

But these are not my rivers….

And these are useless dreams.’

Gurney served on the Western Front where he was wounded and gassed and the poems are a gentle evocation of home, the Gloucestershire countryside summoned to him among the ‘dull sense of No Man’s Land again’ (‘Bach and the Sentry’) and the awful conditions on the Somme, ‘not fit for cold/ and coward like-to passions Time assuages.’ (‘To an Unknown Lady’). It is not surprising to learn that Gurney had several mental breakdowns and in 1922 he was committed to a mental institution where he remained for the rest of his life. There are many fine poems throughout this seventy page volume such as: ‘Maisemore’, ‘Acquiescence’, ‘The Strong Thing’, ‘Influences’, ‘Winter Beauty’, ‘Song of Pain and Beauty’ and ‘Trees’. Unlike his fellow contemporary war poets Owen and Sassoon, there is no real sense of the horror and loss of war in Gurney, it is as if he has shut himself off to the affects of the suffering around him and one only glimpses the ghosts of the dead, as in this from ‘Communion’ –

‘Mist wraiths haunt the path

As daylight lessens,

The stars grow clearer, and

My dead friend’s presence.’

The savage futility which Sassoon condemns, ridding the war of its romantic attitude, and Owen’s attack upon patriotism which sanctioned the atrocities of the Great War are absent from ‘Severn and Somme’ and there is not even a sense of Brooke’s idealistic and heroic view of warfare, instead we get this flickering mind meandering through the trenches dreaming of girls and Bach and Gloucestershire which is not a bad distraction from the hell that surrounds private Gurney!

The Kingdom of Twilight – by Forrest Reid.

The Irish novelist Forrest Reid (1875-1947) published ‘The Kingdom of Twilight’, his first novel in 1904 and it is written in seven books, each telling a stage in the life of its protagonist, Willie Trevellyan. Willie, a peculiar boy, is the sixteen year old youngest son of the Reverend Arthur Trevellyan and his wife Honoria, who have seven children, three boys and four girls. Willie is clever yet does not do well at school, he is a dreamy boy and his father is concerned for him; the young boy shows no inclination to do well in his studies and spends most of his time with his cousin, Eva Gower whom he declares his love for and who is seven years older than Willie and lives with her widowed Aunt Clara Gower (Eva’s parents died and her Uncle Anthony Gower died three years ago). Willie’s best friend whom he adores is a boy named Nick Grayson who takes him to an evangelical meeting but Willie finds it all dreadfully vulgar. There is some unspoken tragedy which caused Willie’s expulsion from his previous school and the reader can guess as to what Reid is alluding to and Willie becomes friends with a boy named John Delomne, an artistic child who seems to ridicule Willie and make fun of him and so the friendship is strained until they fall out and fight, Delomne winning the schoolboy battle. In book two we find Willie as an apprentice, unhappy in his work harbouring morbid thoughts on suicide. He meets Delomne again who is doing well as an artist, studying in Paris and Italy; after getting drunk with Delomne Willie enters a church and succumbs to his religious feelings which are pagan in origin, and even considers a life within the church. He is dismissed from work and spends the summer weeks with his Uncle, Major Redmond, his mother’s brother in the country and it is here that Willie discovers the beautiful young widow, Hester Urquhart whose husband died in a yachting accident although some say it was suicide. Hester, who is several years older than Willie, falls in love with the young boy and after a night of passion Hester becomes pregnant; Willie learns this when he has returned home and he contemplates ending his life. He knows he must tell his father about the child but speaks to his great friend Nick first on the subject. In book five we find Willie, divorced from Hester after just a year, caring for his son, Prosper and making money from translating French novels. He has already published a volume of verse and a collection of essays while living in London and then he returns back to Ireland. On meeting his old friend (and foe) Delomne he discovers the artist has painted a portrait of Hester but does not wish to see her, however he does meet her again for the last time after Hester visits Prosper behind Willie’s back. Book six shows Willie as the dutiful father with another book of verse, ‘Wind Songs’ published; he visits the Gowers and sees Eva who is still as beautiful as he remembered her and there is still great love between them. On his return home he finds Prosper sick with fever and there is no hope for him. Following the child’s death, Willie is torn and resolves to spend his life alone. Reid, whom I discovered quite by accident, has written a rather wonderful novel at just over three-hundred pages and the lyrical portrayal of boyhood and friendship is quite charming; the author creates a sense of the magical with references to the mythical, numinous in nature, a supernatural element which contrasts with the everyday nature of reality, somewhat similar to the great writer Arthur Machen or perhaps more appropriately, Algernon Blackwood, with the strong sense of the macabre, other-worldly presences about us. Amazing!

The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys – by Forrest Reid.

This is Forrest Reid’s second published work from 1905, a novella in thirteen chapters at just over one-hundred pages and dedicated to his friend, the author Henry James; unfortunately James found the subject matter disagreeable or perhaps too close for comfort and never spoke to Reid again. The book begins with an Oxford educated man named Graham Iddesleigh writing an unfinished letter to a fellow Oxford friend named Allingham. Graham falls into reverie concerning his life and we learn that his mother died giving birth to him and so he was brought up by his father and taught to read Greek. The boy is a dreamer, a sensuous and gentle boy who has an imaginary friend, a playmate who is a fair boy, beautiful in the sense of young boys depicted in Ancient Greece as a young faun or cup-bearer of the Gods. Then it is time for Graham to enter public school where strangely he becomes popular and immerses himself in school life and so his imaginary friend ceases to visit. But it is at school where Graham suddenly finds the image of his young, handsome imaginary boy in the form of a school boy, beautiful as an angel, a ‘son of the morning’, named Harold, the youngest son of Aubrey Stewart Brocklehurst, Esquire. The friendship flourishes and love blossoms between the two boys which is both passionate and tender. The beautiful adolescent, Brocklehurst is not liked by his fellow pupils as there are rumours as to why he was sent home from school; Brocklehurst tells Graham that it was for leaving the dormitory at night to walk and ‘run in the moonlight; to run over the meadows; to bathe in the river; to be free’ like some pagan nocturnal being, but we are never sure that there is not more to the reason he was sent home. Graham falls deeply under Brocklehurst’s spell and accepts him as the physical incarnation of his imaginary playmate of old and surrenders to his beauty and astonishing presence. Brocklehurst stays with Graham and his father during the summer holiday and the two boys find an idyllic enchantment in the quiet splendour of nature around them and the feeling of being alone together; they row a boat and bathe and make an offering upon an altar to an unknown God but tragedy ensues when Brocklehurst, helping Graham to avoid some horses that have broken free on the lane as they walk back home, gets crushed by them and dies. Graham is distraught and attends the grave daily offering his tears and love, but that was all thirty years ago and Graham, still deeply affected by the tragedy, sits with his unfinished letter to Allingham. Reid evokes a tender portrayal of homo-sensual friendship and desire and we are never far away from the supernatural imaginings of youth with its loneliness and fondness for romantic attachments, whether real or found in dreams. This is a wonderful and beautiful portrait of young love written at a time when authors had to be careful in how it was depicted and the fact that Henry James found it distasteful says more about his own psychological peculiarities and insecurities than it does for his literary appreciation. Excellent!

Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons – by George Pendle.

To anyone interested in the occult, particularly Aleister Crowley and Thelema, the name Jack Parsons will be a familiar one. The British author George Pendle (born 1976) of St Peter’s College, Oxford has written a fascinating biography of Parsons and ‘Strange Angel’, published in 2005, tells that adventurous tale through twelve chapters which capture the exciting and dangerous times of early rocketry and jet propulsion and the dark occult obsession at the heart of Parsons. Jack was born Marvel Whiteside Parsons on 2^nd October 1914 in Los Angeles to parents Ruth Virginia Whiteside and Marvel H. Parsons who were married in 1912 in Massachusetts. Unfortunately Marvel was less than faithful to Ruth and she forced him to move out in January 1915 and they split. Marvel tried to seek forgiveness but Ruth is adamant and they divorce (he later attempted suicide and spent the rest of his life in hospital, dying in 1947). Young Marvel became John (also Jack) and mother and child with Ruth’s wealthy parents moved to Pasadena in 1916. Little Jack was spoilt and solitary and an avid reader of science fiction pulp magazines. He attended Washington Junior High School aged 12 where he was bullied but soon made friends with a boy named Edward Forman who had similar interests; Jack even tried to invoke the devil in his bedroom and some success scared him witless! The occult fascinated him – ‘magic suggested there were unseen metaphysical worlds that existed and could be explored with the right knowledge. Both rocketry and magic were rebellious against the very limits of human existence; in striving for one challenge he could not help but strive for the other.’ (p. 11) He then went to John Muir High School (1929-31) and a short stay at Brown Military Academy for Boys in San Diego where he was also bullied – he hated it there and blew-up the toilets! He was expelled and returned to Pasadena to the University School in 1931 and graduated two years later. He enrolled at the Pasadena Junior College for just one term before finding work at the Hercules Powder Company in Los Angeles where he learnt to handle nitroglycerine and gained knowledge of chemicals and explosives. In July 1934, nineteen year old Parsons proposed to Helen Northrup and they were married the following year on 26^th April, he was 20, Helen (who had been abused by her step-father) was 24. Jack went with his friend Forman to Caltech in 1935 and spoke to the graduate in aeronautics, William Bollay, who referred them to the twenty-two year old Frank Malina who also had interests in rockets and space travel. Although Caltech did not fund them they let them use the laboratories. This new rocket research group became known as the Suicide Squad! Through Parsons interest in the occult he came across the English occultist Aleister Crowley and was instantly fascinated; ‘both magic and rocketry had a basis in the imagination and in scientific method.’ (p. 85) In 1939 he attended the Church of Thelema (established 1934) at 1746 North Winona Boulevard, Hollywood, where the Agape Lodge of the OTO celebrated a weekly Thelemic Gnostic Mass in the attic room. He now became acquainted with the likes of 64 year old Jane Wolfe who had been with Crowley at Cefalu and an English Thelemite, 53 year old Wilfred T. Smith who acted as Priest during the Mass. Jack and Helen Parsons were initiated into the Agape Lodge of OTO on 15^th February 1941 and Jack’s motto was: ‘Thelema Obtentum Procedero Amoris Nuptiae’ which roughly means the Establishment of Thelema through Rituals of Love. Jack persuaded his friend Grady McMurtry to join and became a sort of mentor to him; he also became friends with Paul and Phyllis Seckler and met Karl Germer in New York, but all was not well in the Parson household. When Helen went on vacation with her mother in June 1941, Jack had an affair with her young half-sister, Sara known as Betty who was seventeen years old. Helen found out on her return but stuck with Jack until she fell into the arms of Wilfred T. Smith, Head of the Agape Lodge and became the Priestess in the Mass and eventually became pregnant by Smith, having a son named Kwen. The Lodge moved to 1003 Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena and in January 1943 Crowley, hearing rumours of Smith’s behaviour as Head, asked him to step down; Smith had been banished and he took Helen with him to live on a turkey farm and Parson’s became temporary Head of the OTO at Agape Lodge. It is at this time that a charismatic creep with a bag-full of tall-tales enters the Lodge, the fantasy writer – Lieutenant L. Ron Hubbard, (born 1911). Parsons fell under the spell of the phoney Hubbard who took Betty from Jack and charmed his way through most of the women at the Lodge. Parsons had always been drawn to dark magic and the inhabitants of 1003 became concerned by the negative and hostile vibrations at the Lodge. Jack performed a series of Enochian magic rituals (an operation using sympathetic magic through solitary sex) to conjure a magical being to replace Betty, an Elemental! Phenomena is reported at 1003 before Hubbard and Parsons travelled to the Mojave Desert and at sunset Parsons declares that it is done – on their return home that 18^th January 1946 to the Lodge Parsons finds the twenty-three year old Marjorie Cameron, known as ‘Candy’ waiting for him – Jack writes to Crowley saying his Elemental manifested and before long they are performing sex magic together in an attempt to invoke the incarnation of the Goddess Babalon. When Marjorie went to New York Jack went into the Mojave Desert and heard the voice dictating ‘The Book of Babalon’ which was intended as a fourth chapter to Crowley’s Liber Al. Later in the Desert he performs the rituals given in the Book of Babalon and Hubbard sees vision – Jack believed that Babalon would be born in the world nine months later! Jack sold 1003 Orange Grove Avenue and he, Hubbard and Betty went into business together as ‘Allied Enterprises’, Parsons putting his entire savings into the enterprise, over $20,000. Hubbard and Betty went to Miami to buy three yachts and sell them at a profit; the gullible Parsons sat waiting for news and when it did not come he went to Miami where the cheating Hubbard and Betty were but wind of this got to them and they sailed off! Parsons performed an Invocation Ritual in his Hotel room, the Invocation of Bartzabel, the Spirit of Mars; Hubbard’s yacht hit a storm which brought the charlatan and his whore Betty back to Miami. During the court case ‘Allied Enterprises’ was dissolved and Hubbard was to pay Parsons $2,900, a mere fraction of what the swindling Hubbard had stolen; Betty and Hubbard married a month later and the criminal Hubbard went on to form a pseudo-religious cult called Scientology which unfortunately still brain-washes dullards drawn to its nonsense today!  Parsons resigned from the OTO and Crowley gladly accepted and he moved to Manhattan Beach and married Marjorie Cameron on 19^th October 1946 (she later left him and Parsons was reduced to practicing sex magic with prostitutes); he performed a Ritual of ‘madness and horror’ which lasted forty days, believing he was a Master of the Temple, telling Wilfred Smith he was the Antichrist and was to open the way for Babalon! The FBI investigate him and Marjorie eventually returns to his side before he died in a horrible accident on Tuesday 17^th June 1952 in his laboratory at home at Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena; a huge explosion from the chemicals he was handling swept his right arm and the right side of his face away before he died in hospital; he was thirty-seven years old. When his mother Ruth heard the news, she took a lethal dose of pills and just four hours after her son’s death she was dead too! Jack was cremated and his ashes were fittingly scattered in the Mojave Desert. This is an exceptionally interesting work by Pendle and the author really gets to grips with the early stages of rocketry and jet technology; Parsons was instrumental in the developments of jet propulsion and space travel yet he has been neglected through his other ‘embarrassing’ interests in the occult which sadly has overshadowed his life; those pioneering beginnings of the OTO Agape Lodge in California which so frustrated Crowley are equally fascinating and although many of its members do seem to be playing at devil-worship and over-indulging in sex and drugs, losing their perspective on Crowley’s vision for the Lodge and the true Light of Thelema (the serious and faithful Jane Wolfe of course is the exception), Crowley even had Grady McMurtry who had been with Crowley in England learning magical techniques, go to Agape Lodge and write a report on the Lodge and its members, underlying its quite farcical dramas, there was a serious attempt at spiritual attainment and the manifestation of the Aeon of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, as given in Crowley’s Book of the Law, Liber Al vel Legis. There will be many tales told in the future of the history of mankind’s will to explore outer space and inner space and the author has produced an excellent biography of a man whose passion helped us to achieve even to dream of such things! Very good!

On a Grey Thread – by Elsa Gidlow.

Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986) was born in Hull, England and lived her life in Canada and America. Since reading her autobiography ‘Elsa, I come with my Songs’ (1986) I fell somewhat in love with her life and work and I have sought out ‘On a Grey Thread’ (1923), her first published collection of poems and the first openly lesbian book of poems in North America, for some years and on reading it I was not disappointed: ‘My life is a grey thread/ Stretching through Time’s day;/ But I have slipped gay beads on it/ To hide the grey.’ (The Grey Thread) There is a strong flavour of the modern woman unwilling to accept the old order of things: ‘Gods! I want none of your gods. / Look to yourself – Man.’ (World Cry) and a sense of loneliness: ‘for life’s skeleton / I shall make flesh from desires!’ (Despair) but there is also the supreme adoration of love: ‘the candles of desire are lighted, / I bow my head, afraid before you,’ (Love’s Acolyte). In ‘I, Lover’ she declares ‘I have loved too terribly and too much / ever to have any fear of love.’

The love poems were mostly written for her lover, the Canadian Muriel Symington whom she met in New York in 1922. The collection contains fifty-one poems which range through the various emotions of love, as in the poem ‘Sudden Friendship’ which ends –

‘Yesterday, with lighter joys,

We wantoned at the outer portal.

Now, with love’s old alchemy,

We have made ourselves immortal.’

In the poem ‘Youth’, we feel the sense of movement where she ‘must go down, / down, down, / below the crusts of things, / under the shadows, / into thought-haunted places/ where few go’, Gidlow attempts to get at the heart of being, ‘below the good of things, / below the evil of things, / where the calm roots of wisdom creep’ and she must tunnel, ‘under the bloom of dreams, / under the framework of fancies’ and the poem ends in typical passionate desire:

‘Living is crusted with lies.

I want life naked,

Laughing and young.

Not fettered, not tames,

But life unashamed,

With the cry of Desire on her tongue.’

And again in ‘Come and lie with me’ she requests ‘Bitterness’ to ‘touch me with your hands a little, /kiss me as you lean above me, /with your cold sadistic kisses; /wind your hair close, close wound me, / pain might dissipate this blankness. / Hurt me even, even wound me, /I have need of love that stings. /Come and lie with one and love me, /bitterness, / so that I may laugh at things.’ In ‘Ecstasy’ there is a cosmic understanding:

‘I know a new joy, stars,

A joy of the still peak,

The wonder of airs knife-sharp;

Stars, I have learned to know them,

I have learned the tongue they speak.’

The poem ends with ‘I am strong with a new loneliness/ That no one understands.’

This is a truly beautiful collection of poems and a very important one and I shall be returning to it time and time again in a passion of pilgrimage throughout my life’s passage but I feel the need to end with one of her poems which can say more than I ever can on how special a poet Gidlow is, the poem is called ‘Episode’:

I have robbed the garrulous streets,

Thieved a fair girl from their blight,

I have stolen her for a sacrifice

That I shall make to this mysteried night.

I have brought her, laughing,

To my quietly sinister garden.

For what will be done there

I ask no man’s pardon.

I brush the rouge from her cheeks,

Clean the black kohl from the rims

Of her eyes; loose her hair;

Uncover the glimmering, shy limbs.

I break wild roses, scatter them over her.

The thorns between us sting like love’s pain.

Her flesh, bitter and salt to my tongue,

I taste with endless kisses and taste again.

At dawn I leave her

Asleep in my weakening garden.

(For what was done there

I ask no man’s pardon.)’

The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O. – by Francis King.

This controversial tome published in 1973 by the British occult writer Francis X. King (1934-1994) really caused quite a furore among members of the Ordo Templi Orientis (‘Order of Oriental Templars’, O.T.O.) as it was revealing their long-held ‘secrets’ which are acquired through steps or degrees of magical and spiritual attainment. ‘Our Order possesses the KEY which opens up all Masonic and Hermetic secrets, namely, the teaching of sexual magic, and this teaching explains, without exception, all the Secrets of Freemasonry and all systems of religion.’ (‘Oriflamme’. 1912.) As someone who has never been drawn to the O.T.O. or other Freemasonic twaddle I found much of this volume a complete waste of my time, much like being a member of the aforementioned organisations.

In part one, King, the author of over twenty published works which include: ‘Ritual Magic in England’ (1970), ‘Sexuality, Magic and Perversion’ (1972) and ‘Witchcraft and Demonology’ (1991), presents us with a history of the order from its birth and development, including the Manifesto of 1917, through to the structure of the degree system and the great men who helped shape the order such as Theodore Reuss ‘Frater Merlin’, Franz Hartmann with his Theosophical background in India and of course Aleister Crowley who became the successor to the Outer Head of the Order following the resignation of Reuss in 1922 and who revised the rituals to conform with Liber Al vel Legis and devised a Gnostic Mass. Following Crowley’s death in 1947 Karl Kelner ‘Frater Saturnus’ became the Head of the Order until his death in 1962.

It is all really quite laughable nonsense of course and any true adept will see through the worthless Masonic-style rituals King has thrown together in part two of the book from Minerval to the Sixth Degree; some would even suggest it is all about as useless as the English Royal Family but thankfully I would never suggest such a thing. Part three provides a little more interest and a little less laughter as we get to the Secret Instructions of the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Degrees: De Natura Deorum [Of the Nature of Gods] (7^th Degree), De Nuptiis Secretis Deorum cum Hominibus [Of the Secret Marriage of Gods and Men] (8^th Degree), Agape vel Liber C vel Azoth [The Book of the Unveiling of the Sangraal] and De Homunculo Epistola [Of the Homunculus] (9^th Degree) which over time have all been plundered before and sought out by the genuine adept upon the path. Although King’s intention to publish the rituals was honourable this is incomplete trash which has acquired some sort of mystique over the decades due to the notion that so-called ‘secrets’ of sex magic are being revealed, ‘secrets’ which any decent enthusiast of Crowley and ritual magic already knows or is able to perceive from the written works. The rituals are dreary and any young neophyte with an ounce of dramatic creativity and a flair for romance can do a much better job and I would advise this as being much more effective and relative. This may have caused a few ripples at one time and even now copies are selling for outrageous prices, but the lake has dried up, long ago. Don’t bother!

Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God – by Kenneth Grant.

This wonderful gem from the treasure store of magical publications appeared in 1973 (the same year that King’s dire ‘Secret Rituals of the OTO’ disgraced the shelves) and its eleven chapters (233 pages) is the second book in Grant’s Typhonian Trilogy; eleven of course is the number of magick and chapter one: ‘The One Beyond Ten’ (which is eleven) explains the psycho-sexual energies involved in Crowley’s reception of Liber AL vel Legis in 1904 and the similarities to the Tantras. Eleven is also the number of the Qliphoth which must be evoked by formulating the averse pentagram (the Star of Set) after balancing the five elements within the self, represented by the upright pentagram (the Star of Nuit); eleven is also the path of Aleph on the Tree of Life (Wisdom and Folly). Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) who met Crowley in the autumn of 1944 at Netherwood in Sussex, became the Great Beast’s personal secretary until June the following year and learnt ceremonial magick with him before being initiated into the O.T.O.; in fact, Crowley saw him as his successor (Grant was expelled from the O.T.O. in 1955 by Karl Germer, the Outer Head of the Order because of Grant’s conflicting ideas and influences concerning Thelema). In 1954 Grant founded the New Isis Lodge until 1962 and we can see from this book that he is very knowledgeable concerning the Qabalah and mythology, especially eastern tantric systems which are expressed in the form of the Scarlet Woman, whose number is 156, in chapter two. She is Babalon in respect of the Vama Marg, the esoteric aspect of Tantra, the exoteric being the Dakshina Marg; the number 156 conceals the functions of the Scarlet Woman, Binah, the City of the Pyramids beneath the Night of Pan. The Magic Power of Kundalini is raised which energises the Chakras, generating vibrations, influencing the chemical compositions of the woman’s glandular secretions. After appropriating the amrit (‘nectar’) precipitated at any given chakra, these vibrations inform the fluids which flow from the genital outlet, utilised by the Priest: ‘the Secret Seed of the Star is absorbed orally by the Magician after it has been evoked into the Chakra: Masculine – ‘Blood of the Lion’, Feminine – ‘Gluten of the Eagle’. This Kundalini is described in the third chapter ‘Zone of the Fire Snake’ and Grant draws the distinction between the cosmic forces associated with Crowley, H P Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. Further associations are made in chapter four ‘The Angel and the Aeon’ which brings into focus the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel in the aeon of Horus the Crowned and Conquering Child whose menstruum is semen as opposed to blood which was the menstruum in the previous Aeon of Osiris; Horus incorporates both aspects in the blending of the sexes (bisexual) as in Baphomet. Chapter five looks at the ‘Tantric Element of the O.T.O.’ and the Advent of the Aeon of Horus (Crowley’s enlightenment through his encounter with Theodore Reuss in reference to Crowley’s ‘Book of Lies’), Crowley’s experiments with the ‘secret wisdom’ in the Paris Working of 1914 and the Law of Thelema Solar-Phallic consciousness which superseded Christianity; this manifests in the active form of the current of Heru-ra-ha (Horus) as Ra-Hoor-Khuit (IX Degree) and in the passive as Set or Shaitan as Hoor-paar-kraat (XI Degree), the dual modes of the operation of Baphomet. ‘Dream Control by Sexual Magick’ takes us into chapter six and explains the mental and astral activity of dream control and the sexual polarity induced by sexual arousal, the bodily ‘pranas’, saturating the kundalini energy stored in the chakras of the Scarlet Woman who is the ‘Gate of Vision’ and manipulated by ‘mudras’ to produce ‘kalas’, vaginal fluids; this energy is either absorbed by the magician or allowed to rise through the chakras enabling the magician to explore the Aethyrs. Grant also touches upon Crowley’s method of annihilating the moral prejudice and conformity, such as the absorption of repellent substances, as given in Liber Aleph (chapters 22 and 23) and the formula of N.O.X. Other formulas are dealt with in the seventh chapter ‘The Sabbath Wine and the Devil’s Graal’, such as IAO: Isis-Apothis-Osiris. The Yod (Hand in Hebrew) is the Hermit of the Tarot, the solitary seed (Virgo); A is Apophis, the ‘evil’ serpent represented by the whore; O is the true ‘eye’, Ayin (Yoni) attributed to the Scarlet Woman. Crowley developed this further into FIAOF whereby F (Vau) is the child, the Son – Love under Will (see Magick). Grant goes on to say that Crowley misinterprets the essence of the ‘unmentionable vessel’ in the eleventh degree which should not be an act of sodomy as Crowley practiced it but the Lunar Current as expressed in the ‘Elixir Rubeus’. Passing through chapter eight’s ‘Moon-Power: Its Names, Numbers and Reverberant Atavisms’ which describes the full moon lunar current together with certain symbols and sigils and ways of utilising them in ritual form, we come to chapter nine, ‘The Witches’ Sabbath and the Reincarnation of Primal Obsessions’ which incorporates the assumption of God-forms and the nature of obsession – the birth of an entity, the subconscious thought-entity which as it becomes stronger can enter the material plane; the author also touches upon Crowley’s ‘Eroto-Comatose Lucidity’ (De Arte Magica. 1914). Coming to the Cosmic Climax, Grant brings in his own interpretations of the formula of Horus (Hoor-par-kraat and Ra-Hoor-Khuit) and the lunar-cosmic principles involved in certain extra-terrestrial intelligences in chapter ten ‘Nu-Isis and the Radiance Beyond Space’. He expresses the threefold formula of woman, the earthly vehicle of Nuit as: (a) the lower Isis (unwedded and all pleasure), Lilith/Babalon – Luna; (b) the middle Isis (procreatrix, Mother of Earth), Eve/Venus – Venus, and (c) the Heavenly Isis (the Bride of Hadit [Set]: Nuit) – Nu-Isis, the transplutonic Isis (Grant operated the New Isis Lodge of the O.T.O. for seven years from 1955-1962 to transmit the knowledge of Nu-Isis, before the great eruption of the final chapter, eleven, ‘Living Beyond Time’ brings us the formula of Tetragrammaton (YHVH) and other aeonic formulas before delivering the Elixir of Life and the 93 current. This is an invaluable volume to any aspiring magician in the Thelemic System of Magick and Kenneth Grant is a true visionary, as yet not fully appreciated.

Oscar Wilde: Fragments and Memories – by Martin Birnbaum.

The Hungarian art dealer Martin Birnbaum (1878-1970) has written what at first hand seems an intriguing account of Wilde in this 1920 publication but one soon finds through tedious passages that it is a slim book built upon general gossip and hearsay about the great man. He tells us about Wilde’s friendship with a man named Clyde Fitch who upon entering Wilde’s cab persisted in haranguing Wilde as to the scandalous rumours circulating London about him and if there were any truth in them; Wilde ended the friendship there and then, putting him out of the cab and saying that he was not a gentleman. We hear about the meeting between the actor Colquelin and Wilde, the former was disappointingly unimpressed with the Irish wit and we are regaled with remarks concerning the poet Maurice Rollinat, who ‘tried to rival Baudelaire on his own ground, and was going to pieces mentally and physically when Wilde and Sherard knew him. “It was drugs,” writes Sherard – “drugs with him morning and night, drugs for food and drugs for sleep; cerebral excitement all the time.’ (p.15) There is tittle-tattle from the American lecture tour and mention of the sculptor, John Donoghue whose work Wilde praised and who unfortunately committed suicide; in fact, this is all rather tiresome and the author paints a squalid picture of Wilde in Paris. I’m sure Mr. Birnbaum has written some marginally interesting books, but sadly, this is not one of them and if I were anything less than a gentleman myself, I would suggest that one would have to travel quite some distance in our solar system to find a greater consummate bore than Mr. Birnbaum but that would be doing the galaxy an injustice and I could never be so ill mannered!

The Poems of Lascelles Abercrombie.

This collection of the poems and plays of Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938) published in 1930 begins with his first volume, ‘Interludes and Poems’, originally published in 1908 which I have read and enjoyed before, and on that basis I presumed I might in fact enjoy his other collections – I was wrong. The ‘Interludes and Poems’ shows great mastery of poetic form expressed in romantic, metaphysical verse, delighting in the spirit, the soul and its ecstasy, and then the rot sets in… ‘The Sale of Saint Thomas’ (1911) in six acts and dedicated to his friend Arthur Ransome, is dreadfully disappointing, and so too is ‘Emblems of Love’ (1912) in three parts. The pitch rises a little with ‘Twelve Idylls’ (1928) dedicated to Elizabeth and Robert Trevelyan, containing such poems as ‘Mary and the Bramble’, ‘Witchcraft: New Style’, ‘Asmodeus in Egypt’ and ‘Ryton Firs’ reminiscent of G. M. Hopkins’ ‘Binsey Poplars’. ‘Four Short Plays’ (1922) dedicated to Edward Marsh slides back into the dreary slime with its: ‘The Adder’, ‘The Staircase’, ‘The Deserter’ and ‘The End of the World’ in two acts; ‘Deborah’ (1913) a play in three acts and ‘Phoenix’ (1923), also a play in three acts dedicated to John Drinkwater fair no better. No doubt these poems and plays must have given the author a great deal of pleasure to write but the sad fact is the pleasure was all his and it is all very tedious and trite. As much as I wanted to like old Abercrombie and provide excuses for his seemingly endless and monotonous blank verse I heard myself shovelling the sods over this deceased volume and muttering words of forgiveness for each of its five-hundred-and-fifty pages. May it rest in peace!

The Journal of a Disappointed Man – by W. N. P. Barbellion.

First of all W. N. P. Barbellion (the W. N. P. stands for Wilhelm Nero Pilate) is a pseudonym of Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889-1919) whose diaries from 1903-1917 are here produced. The ‘Journal’ published in 1919 with the real identity of its author and those he writes about undisclosed has an Introduction by H. G. Wells who highlights Barbellion’s path between egoist and altruist. Born in Barnstaple on 7^th September 1889, Cummings was the son of a newspaper reporter; a boy with great interest in natural sciences who began keeping a diary at thirteen years of age. In part one (1903) we find a typical young boy, rambling in the countryside, making dens and smoking cigarettes, hiding the packets under tree roots and reading the ‘Origin of Species’. On 14^th December 1906 he writes: ‘Signed my Death Warrant, i.e., my articles apprenticing me to journalism for five years. By Jove!’ He grew to dislike journalism and at home he reads volumes on natural science and dissects endless insects; he is ambitious and wants to make his mark in the world of science but doubts begin to gather, he worries about his health, particularly his lungs; he becomes introspective and melancholy with periods of self-loathing, doubting his abilities, in fact, considering himself a failure. But he writes with tremendous strength and honesty about his life and observations. ‘An Oak Sapling should make an elderly man avuncular. There are so many tremendous possibilities about a well-behaved young oak that it is tempting to put a hand upon its shoulder and give some seasoned, timberly advice.’ (9^th May 1908) On 1^st June 1908 he writes with all the comic cruelty of a Victorian collector upon the Red Viper he discovered and placed his boot upon it to prevent it escaping; a passing baker in his cart gave him some string and the boy tied it to the snake’s tail – ‘it already appeared moribund, but I squashed its head on the grass with my heel to make certain. After parting with the baker, to whom all thanks be given, I remember that Adders are tenacious of life and so I continue to carry him at string’s length and occasionally wallop him against a stone. As he was lifeless I wrapped him in paper and put him in my pocket. So home by a two hours’ railway journey with the adder in the pocket of my overcoat and the overcoat on the rack over my head. Settled down to the reading of a book on Spinoza’s Ethics. At home it proved to be quite alive, and, on being pulled out by the string, coiled up on the drawing-room floor and hissed in a fury, to my infinite surprise. Finished him off with the poker and so spoilt the skin.’ Cumming’s self-absorption and hypersensitive, morbid nature flashes through these fascinating entries where he is disgusted at his own weak body – ‘Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face – even my own – become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism even, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated – a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.’ (9^th December 1910) His father dies on 14^th September 1911 following a stroke and in part two ‘In London’, (1912) we discover the sexually frustrated young man who has an assistant’s position at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, falling in love and writing about his awkward love life with a beautiful yet slightly standoffish ‘E___’. In 1913 he succumbs to partial paralysis of his right side and his speech is affected which brings about thoughts of suicide. His mother dies on 20^th August 1913 and our young diarist worries about going blind before noting on 1^st August 1914 that ‘All Europe is mobilising.’ The war, in fact, gets little mention; neither do other major events of the time for he is too immersed in his own inner world and his own imagined importance, something very familiar to egotistical types of characters, of whom I count myself. He asks the woman in question, E___ to marry him on 9^th November 1914 and she refuses him which causes severe depression and more thoughts on suicide, (he revels in Nietzsche and the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff) but on 29^th November she has a turn of heart and accepts his proposal and they become engaged. E___ is actually Winifred Eleanor Benger, a quite remarkable woman who found out about the severity of Cumming’s terminal illness from his Doctor and did not let on to her intended husband; he in turn did not report to her the serious nature of his decline in health and supposed she were unaware of it. The wedding takes place in September 1915 at a Registry Office following his 26^th birthday. In part three, ‘Marriage’, Cummings attends the recruiting office medical on 27^th November 1915 and is dismissed as unfit after a brief examination, (he opens the letter from his Doctor addressed to the medical examiner to find he has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, what we now know as Multiple Sclerosis). This clarification of his own futility, something he had always suspected but not known definitely, strikes Cummings and he sets about enjoying what time he has left; there is even some romantic fascination for death and his own doomed existence. On 20^th December 1916 he writes: ‘The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin.’ The marriage brings him the contentment and love he always craved, and a daughter named Penelope, is born in October 1916, but this does not soothe his disappointment at not becoming a success; he hopes the diary manuscripts will survive to tell his tale, which of course they do, and what a wondrous tale it all is. His last entries are suitably harrowing and poignant – ‘I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have wept and enjoyed, struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I shall be content to die.’ (12^th October 1917) Following this he merely writes: ‘Oct 14-20. Miserable’ and ’31 Oct [1917]: Self-disgust.’ The volume records that Barbellion died on 31st December 1917 aged twenty-eight, but in actual fact he lived for two more years, dying in Gerard’s Cross, Buckinghamshire on 22^nd October 1919. Those wishing to read more about dear Barbellion have the delight of two more volumes to discover: ‘Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains’ (1919) and ‘A Last Diary’ (1920).

Marlborough and Other Poems – by Charles Hamilton Sorley.

Charles Hamilton Sorley was born in Aberdeen in 1895, the son of a Professor at the Aberdeen University, he attended Marlborough College from 1908-1913 and won a scholarship to University College, Oxford. Unfortunately he could not take up his studies due to the outbreak of war (he was spending six months in Germany at the time). He became a Second Lieutenant in the Seventh (Service) Battalion, Suffolk Regiment and eventually a Captain. Sorley went to France on 30^th May 1915 and fell at the Battle of Loos on 13^th October the same year. This posthumous collection of his poem published in 1916 (I read the fourth edition of 1919) contains the thirty-seven completed poems Sorley wrote and the volume is presented in four parts: Of the Downs, Of School, Of Life and Thoughts, and Of War and Death.  I particularly enjoyed the first part of the book, Of the Downs, with its vivid depiction of the English countryside and his almost religious fanaticism for the beauty and surging life confirming power of rain – ‘we held communion with the rain/ That lashed us into manhood with its thong,/ Cleansing through pain.’ (Barbury Camp. 24 March 1913) and in other poems such as: ‘Rain’ (October 1012), ‘The Song of the Ungirt Runners’ and ‘German Rain’. There is that immovable devotion to the awe-inspiring magnificence of nature, the permeable essence of existence, as can be seen in the last verse of ‘Stone’: ‘Souls like the dry earth, hearts like stone,/ Brains like that barren bramble-tree:/ Stern, sterile, senseless, mute, unknown - /But bold, O, bolder far than we!’ (14 July 1913). In ‘Marlborough’, a poem in three parts written on 1^st March 1914, Sorley invokes some magical incantation in the simplicity of ‘The brook was silent and the night was wan’ before conjuring ‘The sinew of the hollow of his thigh’; indeed, there are some very fine poems such as: ‘East Kennet Church at Evening’ (24 July 1913), ‘Autumn Dawn’, ‘Richard Jefferies’, ‘Le Revenant’, ‘Lost’, ‘The River’ (February 1913), ‘Rooks’ (21 June 1913), ‘Rooks II’ (July 1013), ‘To Poets’ (September 1914), ‘Peer Gynt’, ‘Deus Loquitur’ and ‘Expectans Expectavi’ (May 1915), but it is perhaps with his war poetry that many will associate Sorley, which I think is a little unfair as he is a strong writer of verse, but nevertheless, a reading of ‘A hundred thousand million mites we go’ (September 1914), ‘Two Sonnets’ (12 June 1915) and ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead/ Across your dreams in pale battalions go,’ will confirm Sorley’s status as a great poet who stands alongside Sassoon and Owen. The volume then goes on to produce his ‘Illustrations in Prose’ where the author writes knowledgably upon Richard Jefferies, Ibsen, The Odyssey, Germany, Tennyson, Browning and John Masefield. Definitely a sad loss to literature but the loss would have been greater without this beautiful volume of poetry!

Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains of W. N. P. Barbellion.

This collection of essays contributed to various periodicals by W. N. P. Barbellion (Bruce Frederick Cummings 1889-1919) was published in 1919 and contains his written work on natural history and literature from 1905 when he was sixteen years old until 1917. Barbellion shows his learning and his wide reading on such subjects as the Russian novel and such authors as Hardy, Samuel Butler, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Lamb and Nietzsche and he writes well in the form of his journal essays – ‘Crying for the Moon’ and ‘Insulation of the Ego’ before plunging into the scientific respectability of the essay: ‘On Journal Writers’ which is quite fascinating, ‘The Passion for Perpetuation’ written in 1916 and ‘An Autumn Stroll’, 1905 (published in 1906). Less interesting I thought were his two short stories: ‘A fool and a maid on Lundy Island’ and ‘How Tom snored on his bridal night’ but the pace quickens again when Barbellion is in the arena of natural history and his essays: ’Spallanzani’ (1915), ‘Colonel Montagu’ (1915), ‘Rousseau as Botanist’ (1916), ‘The Scarabee Monographed’ (1918), ‘New Method in Natural History’ (1912) and other, one would expect, gloriously boring, ‘Distribution of British Newts’ (1909), ‘Bird Roosts and Routes’ (1908) and ‘Animated Nature’ (1906) are well worth giving precious time to!

A Last Diary – by W. N. P. Barbellion.

This 1920 publication, as the title suggests, is the last diary of Barbellion which begins on 21^st March 1918 and ends on 3^rd June 1919. Unlike his first publication of 1919, ‘The Journal of a Disappointed Man’ taken from his journals which ran to twenty volumes, ‘A Last Diary’ is less raw and seemingly less spontaneous; there is a polished finish to the entries and the disappointment of the first book seems to have decreased to a delightful acceptance of death and even a welcome of it. The preface is written by his brother, Arthur J. Cummings (with a little help from another brother H. R. Cummings) and good old Arthur really gets into his stride, picking at his brother’s veneer, gushing and blushing over his brother’s corpse, extolling his virtue and his visionary genius; praising and flattering in equal measure as he paints a study of the frail and shy brother with an insatiable appetite for reading and knowledge – Barbellion’s identity as Bruce Frederick Cummings has been revealed and it is disclosed to a general public wishing to know more about his life and character, but Arthur can do no better than give a few brief instances of his brother’s short existence and his water colour portrait becomes less opaque until it runs as clear water. Better to read the entries and wonder… ‘I haven’t talked of being in love with one’s own ruin, Bashkirtseff of liking to suffer, to be in despair. Light, frivolous talk. At the most, such moods are only short lulls between the spasm of agony of suffering; one longs to be free of them as of acute physical pain, to be unconscious. I look forward to night, to darkness, rest and sleep.’ (4^th January 1919) Cummings revisits his youth and his first loves and reminisces over birds and beasts he has encountered as well as reading James Joyce and his concerns over the publication of his first book, ‘The Journal of a Disappointed Man’. Throughout it all there is the overwhelming sense of love from his wife E___ (Winnifred Eleanor Cummings) whom one dearly wishes to hear more of and more from (her account would prove just as beautiful). Cummings entered a nursing home in Eastbourne on 16^th May 1919 and the last entry of 3^rd June reads: ‘Tomorrow I go to another nursing home.’ The end of the volume ends as Cummings wished it, simply ‘the rest is silence’. He died on 22^nd October 1919.

The Story of Mary MacLane – by Herself.

Mary MacLane (1881-1929) is the Canadian born American writer who published this, her first volume of her ‘self portrait’ in 1902, beginning in 1901 when she was nineteen years old, Mary calls herself a broad-minded genius with a marvellous capacity for misery and happiness and she writes in poetic prose over 322 pages with an ease of revelation, her mind leaping from one set of ideas to another or one observation to the next, only to serve it up later to re-chew and taste like the wonderful sensualist she is. She admires Byron and compares herself to the writer Marie Bashkirtseff and falls in love with Napoleon, she desperately desires the strong forceful man and throughout the volume Mary has conversations with the Devil and is awaiting his coming (the book was originally titled ‘I await the Devil’s coming’) and we learn that she wants to marry the Devil and would give all to him for happiness; she writes about her dissatisfaction with her home life – there is no love lost between her parents and siblings, and most of the time she is wandering alone deep in thought in her hometown of Butte, a mining city and a ‘place of sand and barrenness’ in Montana – ‘I have the personality, the nature, of a Napoleon, albeit a feminine translation. And therefore I do not conquer; I do not even fight. I manage only to exist.’ (14^th January 1901) Mary delights in her own sensuality and the curves of her young body of just nineteen summers and she is in love with the only friend she has, a woman ten or twelve years her senior named Fannie Corbin, the ‘anemone lady’ (MacLane was bisexual and had many relationships with women). In fact, very few people get mentioned in the volume and all her love and admiration is poured upon the ‘anemone lady’ and the Devil: ‘The Devil has not yet come. But I know that he usually comes, and I await him eagerly.’ (17^th January 1901) But throughout the whole book there is the overwhelming sense of loneliness, as she says on 1^st February 1901: ‘Oh, the wretched bitter loneliness of me! In all the deep darkness, and the silence, there is never a faint human light, never a voice! How can I bear it – how can I bear it!’

Still she awaits the Devil’s coming, she says on 13^th April 1901 before we leap to October’s ‘L’Envoi’ on the 28^th where she writes finally: ‘Will the wise wide world itself give me in my outstretched hand a stone?’ Lovely confessional sparks of womanhood that reveals much about the female psyche of the period and also speaks to us today with confidence about women’s concerns that have changed very little.

My Friend Annabel Lee – by Mary MacLane.

Published in 1903, this is MacLane’s second book and its twenty-five chapters (262 pages) are dedicated to Lucy Gray of Chicago. MacLane is twenty-one years old and she is living in Boston discussing various matters with Annabel Lee, a porcelain figurine doll of a Japanese woman, apparently fourteen years old and bought in a shop (at least that is what I presumed it was for MacLane endows it with such life as it is difficult to determine). The conversations drift over many topics such as Maclane’s deep admiration for the writer J. T. Trowbridge whom she first read when she was fourteen years old in Great Falls, Montana to reminiscences about her time at Butte High School. She constantly proclaims her genius and between herself and her friend Annabel Lee, a very practical literary device for interjecting within an almost stream of consciousness monologue, there are some delightful and interesting thoughts which would ordinarily burst like soap bubbles but are here set in permanence as if to prove to the world, yes, Mary MacLane is a genius, and you will probably come to believe it too!

I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days – by Mary MacLane.

Throughout the volumes of MacLane’s writings one gets to know Mary and understand her extraordinary way of thinking and this final volume, 317 pages of beautiful madness, ‘a crucible of my own making’, published in 1917, finds her aged thirty-one, single and living in Butte, Montana, making observations and manifesting her thoughts; her life is very ordinary and filled by routine – ‘I live an immoral life’ she says, ‘it is immoral because it is deadly futile.’ (p. 10) Mary is an exceptional and sensuous writer as she describes her every, intimate, feminine details, from her silk and lace underwear to her own imagined self-importance, even writing a letter to God, care of the ‘Whistling Winds’; the confessional quality of her writing suggests a woman reaching out towards the present, for there is an almost timeless element to her moments of discovery:  ‘I am rare – I am in some ways exquisite’ she says about herself, before continuing, ‘I am pagan within and without. I am vain and shallow and false. I am a specialized being, deeply myself. I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other pointes. I am dynamic but devastated, laid waste in spirit. I am like a leopard and I’m like a poet…’ (p. 1) She goes on to say she’s like a ‘religieuse’, an outlaw, and that she has a ‘weird sense of humour’, a fine brain; she is old-fashioned and ultra-modern, wistful, infamous, brave, a fool, a liar, a spiritual vagabond… She writes brilliantly on subjects such as: Lot;s Wife, Judgement Day and the Sleep of the Dead and the smell of Turpentine, which she says is ‘a goblin virulence’ whom ‘God has no power over’; a virulence which ‘half-calls for a different Turpentine God.’ (p. 157) She also has much to say on ‘cold boiled potatoes’, Carmen, her two black dresses, her love of John Keats, her cleverness and of course her lesbianism. All in all she is a fine woman indeed, perfect in body and perfectly strange in mind and she has given me immense pleasure in the unfolding enigma of Mary MacLane – wonderful!

A Number of People: A Book of Reminiscences – by Edward Marsh.

Dedicated to his friend, the writer and poet, Christopher Hassall and published in 1939, Edward Marsh (1872-1953), who was educated at Westminster as a day-boy aged ten and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge and best known for his ‘Georgian Poetry’ a series of five publications which he edited between 1912 and 1922 and his editing of Rupert Brooke’s Collected Poems in 1918, tells us over eighteen chapters (420 pages) that this is not an autobiography but a volume of reminiscences and anecdotes concerning the people he has known and what a fine autobiography, I mean book of reminiscences this is! He writes exceptionally well on his mother and his home influences and I particularly enjoyed the chapter on his undergraduate days at Cambridge and his insights into the distinguished lecturer Dr. A. W. Verrall and fellow undergraduates: Bertrand Russell, the poet R. C. Trevelyan, Oswald and Walter Sickert, G. E. Moore, Desmond MacCarthy and Reginald Balfour. What a rich and varied group of associates and ‘personalities’ Marsh has in his sphere and he has much to say on the likes of: Maurice Baring, Hillaire Belloc, the poet Vernon Lee, Edmund Gosse, A. C. Benson, the poets Lionel Johnson, Austin Dobson and Robert Bridges; poet and scholar Canon Beeching, Henry James and Rupert Brooke of course on whom Edward writes exceptionally well in chapter XIII – Rupert died on 23^rd April, the same day as that lesser poet and overblown versifier, William Wordsworth, but also the day associated with Shakespeare and St George! Edward enters the civil service in autumn 1896 in the Colonial Office, Australian Department and in 1905 he is promoted to First Class Clerk in the West African Department. He later becomes Private Secretary to Winston Churchill and we hear of the various social intrigues concerning Lady Randolph Churchill and Count and Countess Beckendorff and other opulently-stuffed dignitaries and he writes well on the Edwardian Society and its illuminated butterflies: Sir John and Lady Horner, Mrs. Asquith (Margot Tennant/Lady Oxford), Patrick Shaw-Stewart, the poet Julian Grenfell and Lady Wemyss before tickling the reader’s notions of literary snobbery with G. B. Shaw, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton and A. E. Housman and then spoiling the soup with Ivor Novello, Francis and Alice Meynel (the latter I greatly admire as a poet), Walter De La Mare, Ezra Pound, John Galsworthy, Horatio Bottomley, Lady Cunard, D. H. and T. E. Lawrence; even that old devil Aleister Crowley gets a mention in chapter XIV ‘Literary Diversions’, Edward is reporting on Harold Munro who ‘imported a strange and baleful apparition, in conjuror’s evening-dress, and sporting in the middle of his shirt-front a large diamond which perhaps looked bogus only because of the frayed and gaping stud-hole in which it wobbled – a singular contrast with the wholesome and innocent and tweed-clad personalities of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Gibson and the others. He talked wittily, cruelly, diabolically, and we quaked and cowered like Tweedledum and Tweedledee under the shadow of the monstrous Crow. It was the Satanist Alistair [sic] Crowley; and for once in my life I felt I had been in the presence of Evil with a capitol E.’ (p. 328) In fact, the book reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of literary and political figures and Marsh struggles towards the end of the volume telling us of his great appreciation for art and his picture collecting from the likes of artists: Duncan Grant, Stanley Spencer, Paul and John Nash and Mark Gertler before stressing his love of the theatre and ending on some curious anecdotes and witticisms, his retirement and award of the K. C. V. O. by the King at Buckingham Palace. To say I enjoyed this book would be an understatement; I absolutely enjoyed it and found the life and atmosphere of the late Victorian and Edwardian world around the author immensely fascinating.

The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker – Edited with an Introduction by J. C. Squire.

I came across the name of James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) In Edward Marsh’s ‘A Number of People’ (1939) and found him quite intriguing. Previous to reading the Collected Poems I read Flecker’s volumes of poetry to get a ‘feel for the man’: ‘The Bridge of Fire’ (1907) the volume I enjoyed the most which contains 34 poems (64 pages): ‘We’re of the people, you and I, / We do what others do, / Linger and toil, and laugh and die, / And love the whole night through.’ (‘The Ballad of the Student of the South’) and in ‘I have sung all Love’s great songs’ he praises ‘the arms of my Love, / and her tender body’s swing, / and her eyes, and her lips and breath’. And he declares in ‘The Old Poet’ that ‘not another poem will I write. / I will forget the books that I have read.’

‘Thirty Six Poems’ (1910) which contains many poems from ‘The Bridge of Fire’; ‘Forty-Two Poems’ (1911) which is basically ‘Thirty Six Poems’ plus six more poems over 86 pages, and ‘The Old Ships’ (1915) containing most of the poems (17 in total over 31 pages) written during the last two years of his life, mostly patriotic and a little restrained as they were not revised, a process he was continually perfecting. Now, in coming to the Collected Poems (250 pages, published 1916 – I read the tenth impression of Oct 1922) I knew I would be re-discovering many poems I had read before and the Introduction by J. C. Squire, although scholarly seemed most irreverent; he describes Flecker’s interest in the French Parnassians and his liking for strong imagery, his clarity and compactness; his fondness for the romantic (exotic) and the classic forms – he was a ‘poet of the sun, not of the moon’ whose early influence can be found amongst Francis Thompson, Baudelaire and Swinburne. There are twenty poems never published before and dated and the ‘Juvenilia’ including his ‘Four Translations and Adaptations from Catullus’ (1900-1901) written between the ages of 16 and 20 shows his progression, of particular value is his early poem ‘Fragment of an Ode to Shelley’ – ‘He was too beautiful; he died too young,/ Before the mellow season of his prime’. Of the Later Poems many had become familiar to me for their lyrical and romantic content, especially: ‘The Ballad of Hampstead Heath’ where we find young Bacchus on the Heath, where there are ‘busmen, snobs, and Earls, / and ugly men in bowler hats / with charming little girls.’ And of course the title poem, ‘The Bridge of Fire’ which roars in ‘the dull profound of Hell / spits reeling Typhon forth that in the dark did dwell.’ And later we encounter the ‘ghouls of the revengeful dead, / Larvae and Lemures that clamour to be fed.’ Flecker attended Trinity College, Oxford from 1902-07 and he has a particular fondness for Oxford as can be seen in his poem ‘Oxford Canal’ where he says it is ‘half town and half country – the lovely land of the Canal’; upon love it seems the author is most perceptive: ‘when love became a loathing, as it must’ (‘My Friend’) and how delightful that Flecker invokes the spirit of Ancient Greece in many of his poems – ‘In English glades they watch the Cyprian glow, / and all the Maenad melodies they know.’ (‘A Ballad of Camden Town’) and the endeavours of the romantic poets – ‘O honeyed Poet, will you praise no more / the moonlit garden and the midnight shore?’ (‘Invitation’), and again in ‘A Western Voyage’: ‘And I’ll go seek through moor and dale / a flower that wastrel winds caress; / the bud is red and the leaves pale, / the name of it Forgetfulness’. Other rather splendid poems are: ‘The Welsh Sea’, ‘We that were friends’, ‘I rose from dreamless hours’ and the passionate longing of ‘Gravis Dulcis Immutabilis’ –

‘Come, let me kiss your wistful face

Where Sorrow curves her bow of pain,

And live sweet days and bitter days

With you, or wanting you again.’

I thought many of Flecker’s works important poems that should be recognised and he should be honoured more than he is, sadly, but if he should be remembered at all I feel it should be for the poem ‘To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence’ which has a peculiar magic:

I who am dead a thousand years,

And wrote this sweet archaic song,

Send you my words for messengers

The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,

Or ride secure the cruel sky,

Or build consummate palaces

Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,

And statues and a bright-eyed love,

And foolish thoughts of good and ill,

And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind

That falls at eve our fancies blow,

And old Moeonides the blind

Said it three thousand years ago.

Our friend unseen, unborn, unknown,

Student of our sweet English tongue,

Read out my words at night, alone:

I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,

And never shake you by the hand,

I send my soul through time and space

To greet you. You will understand.

I must admit that I did not much care for the poems from his collection ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’ (1913) which some will proclaim an outrageous statement to make and some of his later works had very little interest for me.

 He declared that he would ‘rather be / a living mouse than dead as a man dies’ (‘No Coward’s Song’) – Flecker died of Tuberculosis in Davos, Switzerland in 1915 aged just thirty – ‘he loved and sang and sinned / with roses on his brow.’ (The Young Poet)

James Elroy Flecker: An Appreciation with some Biographical Notes – by Douglas Goldring.

Douglas Goldring (1887-1960) has written a splendid volume concerning the life of the poet James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) which was published in 1922 and in seven chapters (200 pages) the author resurrects the memory of his friend whom he met in the summer of 1907 at Flecker’s lodgings in Bloomsbury Square (they had met briefly prior to this) and finds a young man far from the ‘lean and swarthy poet of despair’ found in his poem ‘Envoy’. In drawing a sketch of the lone poet, Goldring looks back upon the ‘absinthe-sodden gloom of the nineties’, to Oxford and the decadent pre-war ideas of beauty and the reputations of artists and writers. In October 1908 Flecker entered Caias College, Cambridge to study oriental languages for a career in the consular service; he went to Constantinople in June 1910 and was taken ill in August and returned back to England in September where he entered a Sanatorium in the Cotswolds. Recovering, he returned to Constantinople in March 1911 and two months later in Athens he married Miss Helle Skiadaressi. Flecker was a continual reviser of his poems yet I had to disagree with Goldring who says Flecker found his ‘voice’ with the oriental poems of ‘Samarkand’ (1913); they do have a mature sense of being worked but I much prefer the earlier ‘Bridge of Fire’ (1907) poems which are less didactic with their sentimental and subjective elements, something he tried to repress. Goldring stresses the influence of Parnassian theory on Flecker, which was ‘a classical reaction against the perfervid sentimentality and extravagance of some French romantics.’ (Preface to the ‘Golden Journey to Samarkand’); the French Parnassians used traditional forms and classical subjects in which the object was to portray beauty. But he did know his limitations and although some of his poems fail to capture what he wished to express, when he reaches the heights of beauty it far supersedes many of his contemporary poets, such as the last line of his poem ‘Stillness’ – ‘And only know I should drown if you laid not your hand on me.’

In chapter seven, Mr. John Mavrogordato, writing from Florence on 14^th January 1915, says that Flecker was ‘a clear soul burning with many flames, loving physical beauty in many forms, and longing always to immortalise it in words. He will not be forgotten.’ (p. 188) He was in Beirut in January 1913 ‘dreaming of Oxford’ when he was taken ill again in March – he went to Switzerland to recuperate and remained there until his death in 1915. Most enjoyable!

Patrick Shaw-Stewart – by Ronald Knox.

Published in 1920, Reverend Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957) has produced a fascinating memoir of his friend, Patrick Houston Shaw-Stewart who was born in Wales in 1888. Through nine chapters and a little over two-hundred pages, Knox pays an admirable tribute to his friend and fellow Balliol man who attended Eton (Patrick’s autobiographical fragment of his early days at Eton is quite charming). At Oxford we learn that Patrick studied Homer and preferred Greek to Latin and was always late for lectures – many of his Balliol friends were to die in the war: Charles Alfred Lister (1887-1915), Julian Grenfell (1888-1915), Edward William Horner (1888-1917) and Victor Barrington-Kennett; Patrick’s father died in July 1908 and his mother in December 1909. The good Reverend Knox has drawn upon a fascinating correspondence from the years 1907-1910 where much of Patrick’s thoughts are on Balliol and study, exams, scholarships, social events and golf – on Bonfire Night (5^th November) 1907, fireworks not being allowed in college, a black pig was bought and taken to Balliol where it ran through college, through the Senior Common Room among the dons – ‘Julian [Grenfell] wrapped him up in his best dressing gown!’ – ‘we shall have a pig supper soon.’ (p. 53) We hear of a trip to Florence in April 1908 where he stayed ten days and of King Edward’s funeral in May 1910, of Patrick attaining his First in Greats and working for Barings in Bishopsgate and of a visit to Italy in April 1913 and the United States the following year before Monsignor Knox delights us with Patrick’s Navy exploits on board the Grantully Castle in the Hood Battalion (he shared a cabin with the musician William Denis Browne). Also on board was the poet Rupert Brooke whom Patrick befriended and who sadly died on 23^rd April 1915 – Patrick was a member of the shore party on Scyros for Rupert’s burial: Charles Lister commanded the burial party and Patrick the firing party – ‘Rupert Brooke suddenly sickened and died in thirty-six hours of virulent blood-poisoning. He had never got quite well, like I did, from illness at Port Said, and so he was in a weak state for resistance. He died the day we left the island, and that same night we took him ashore, and the eight Petty Officers of the Company performed the considerable feat of carrying the coffin a mile inland, in the dark, up-hill, along the most fearfully stony track. I had to command the firing-party, which was anxious work, as I am not strong on ceremonial drill, but all went well.’ (April 25 1915. p. 126) [William Denis Browne (1888-1915) also writes a worthy account of Brooke’s last days] Patrick says of Brooke that ‘he was a delicious companion, full of good jokes and perfect at other people’s.’ He goes on to say that he ‘will be a great legend now and have a great fame: it is encouraging to know that his poetry is good enough to stand on its own merits: a soldier-poet’s death casting a lustre over fairly but not very good poetry would have been awful, wouldn’t it?’ (June 2 1915. p. 135) As a poet, Patrick is remembered for one poem of seven, four-line verses which features Achilles in the trenches and is a perfect example of condensed poetic brilliance and I make no excuse for inserting it here, the poem was found written by Patrick in his copy of Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’:

‘I saw a man this morning

Who did not wish to die:

I ask, and cannot answer,

If otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning

Against the Dardanelles;

The breeze blew soft, the morn’s cheeks

Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting

Across the Aegean Sea,

Shrapnel and high explosive,

Shells and hells for me.

O hell of ships and cities,

Hell of men like me,

Fatal second Helen,

Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland

And I to Chersonese:

He turned from wrath to battle,

And I from three day’s peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,

So very hard to die?

Thou knowest and I know not –

So much the happier I.

I will go back this morning

From Imbros over the sea;

Stand in the trench, Achilles,

Flame-capped, and shout for me.’

How marvellous is that ‘hell of ships’, the ‘hell of men’ and that ‘fatal second Helen’ before the finality of ‘stand in the trench, Achilles, / flame-capped, and shout for me.’ Patrick died on 30^th December 1917, aged twenty-nine when after being hit by shrapnel he refused to have his wound dressed and was hit by a bursting shell on the parapet which entered his mouth, killing him instantly. Knox has written a beautiful memorial to Patrick Shaw-Stewart who was only one of the many fine men of brilliant mind who were tragically lost to a senseless war.

A Spiritual Aeneid – by R. A. Knox.

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957) published this religious autobiography or ‘autobiology as he terms it in 1918 and through its fourteen chapters plus epilogue and prologue (263 pages) he describes his spiritual journey towards Catholicism, a journey as if coming home following an Odyssey, perhaps an unfamiliar home in an unknown place, hence ‘Aeneid’. Knox was born on 17^th February 1888, the youngest of six children and up until the age of fifteen he believed in the Blessed Trinity, the Incarnation, the Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ; of Heaven and Hell and the notion of forgiveness of sins etc. in fact he felt he was ‘continually under the eye of a watchful God, just in exacting punishment.’ (p. 7) Like most young, spiritually sensitive boys he began writing hymns and poetry from the age of six and at the age of twelve left his private school to enter Eton in autumn 1900. He was Confirmed, preliminary to First Communion in the Anglican Church, at Birmingham by his father, the Suffragan Bishop of Coventry in 1903 and his mind turned towards the Tractarians and the Oxford Movement before he became a Ritualist in the summer of 1904. For two years he read the classics of literature and became interested in the Gothic style of architecture and the Pre-Raphaelites. Fond of attending Evening Prayers during his last year at Eton, his enthusiasm was ignited by exercises of mortification, abstinence and self-denial and the idea of asceticism – ‘I think I can still point to the precise place on “Chamber Stairs” where I knelt down at the age of seventeen one evening and bound myself by a vow of celibacy.’ (p. 48) Knox went to Balliol College, Oxford, renowned for its tradition, its ‘rowing, hard drinking, plain dressing, occasional gambling, and unexpected because apparently unmerited academic triumphs.’ (p. 53) He joined the Fabian Society, urged by his friend Charles Lister and with his joy for debating, he became known as a good speaker. He never failed to hear Mass on Sundays and went to visit Rome in the spring of 1907 with two brothers and after 1909 he became devoted to the Blessed Sacrament when he visited the island community of Caldey, and began using a Rosary in the summer of 1910 but he still could not believe in the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption. A visit to Belgium following a trip to Munich impressed him before he left Balliol in 1910 and that summer he attended his first Catholic service in England for the Feast of the Assumption. During this time he can best be described as an Anglican-Catholic for he was staying at the Anglican Church at Lyme Regis and visiting the Catholic chapel across the valley; he lived at Pusey House for the latter part of Michaelmas term and became a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford where he lectured on Homer and Virgil. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1912 at St Giles’ Church, Reading and spent seven weeks at Caldey Monastery. ‘Foundations’ and ‘Some Loose Stones’ were published 1912 and 1913 respectively – ‘Ever since I can remember at least since the age of seven, I have been possessed with the devil of lampooning.’ (p. 112)

In 1915 doubts began to appear in his Anglican faith and there was much introspection and searching – ‘once anybody goes down with “Roman fever”, the infection rarely fails to spread itself; proximus ardet Ucalegon, and the blaze once kindled is not easily extinguished.’ (p. 193) but more was needed than doubts in the Anglican Church, there must be ‘positive faith’. He had lost friends to the war and during his two years of ‘spiritual exile’ where he was numb, in 1915 he entered Shrewsbury School as a form master and laid ‘fallow’ – ‘I could not pray in chapel, I could only watch people pray and rejoice that they were doing it.’ (p. 218) Knox loved his time at Shrewsbury and was sad to leave its charming and friendly atmosphere but he was destined to move on and did work for the War Office in London before the great awakening in 1918 when he took a holiday, in fact a ‘retreat’ from 8-24 September at Farnborough Abbey, with its French air of Benedictine contemplation – he was Received as a Roman Catholic (he began writing this spiritual journey a week after his reception) and later Ordained as a Roman Catholic priest (he was made Monsignor in 1936). This has been a thoroughly enjoyable and moving account of the deep struggle between the Anglo-Catholic spirit within R. A. Knox and I would recommend it for its immense strength of faith determined through doubts of belief and convictions, whether of a Christian faith or not, the spiritual journey of a soul is encouraging and enlightening and anyone who has been on that journey will understand the hardships, mentally, physically and spiritually involved during the illuminating ‘pilgrimage’ to achieve one’s journey home, one’s spiritual Aeneid. Wonderful!

Nothing of Importance – by Bernard Adams.

John Bernard Pye Adams was born in Beckenham, Kent on 15^th November 1890; he attended Clare House School in Beckenham where he won an entrance scholarship to Malvern (1904-09) where he won many classical and English prizes before winning an open classical scholarship in December 1908. He went up to St John’s College, Cambridge in October 1909 and in 1911 was awarded the Sir William Browne’s Gold Medals for Greek epigrams and a Latin ode; he won the medal again in 1912 for his Greek epigram and graduated with a First Class in Classical Tripos. In his fourth year he read Economics and following Cambridge he was appointed Warden and Assistant Educational Adviser at a Hostel for Indian Students at 21 Cromwell Road, South Kensington. In November 1914 he joined up as a Lieutenant in the 1^st Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers and obtained a temporary Captaincy in the following spring; he was at the Front in October 1915 and wounded in the arm in June 1916 and sent back to England to recover. He was back at the Front on 31^st January 1917 and wounded during an attack at Serre on 26^th February; he died the following day at a field hospital. He was twenty-seven years old and he is buried at Couin New British Cemetery, France. ‘Nothing of Importance’, subtitled ‘Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion’ is Adam’s fascinating account of trench warfare and his time in the Line. Over seventeen chapters (334 pages) which go into great detail concerning the author’s impressions of life at the Front – Cuinchy and Givenchy, working parties (trench repairs and laying of barbed wire), the Bois Francais Trenches, sniping and patrols; he is particularly good at explaining his feelings under fire which seem quite jubilant and heroic, even a sort of ecstasy until the reality of death strikes him when a handsome young boy-soldier is hit by shell-fire and his handsome face is torn from him like a mask nearby, the image seems to haunt Adams –  ‘As I write I feel inclined to throw the whole book in the fire. It seems a desecration to tell of these things. Do I not seem to be exulting in the tragedy? Should not he who feels deeply keep silent. Sometimes I think so. And yet it is the truth, word for word the truth; so I must write it.’ (p. 192). Certain places are not named of course and he uses pseudonyms for names of actual personnel. Moving and poetic!

Cambridge Poets, 1900-1913: An Anthology Chosen by Aelfrida Tillyard.

Published in 1913, this collection of over one-hundred and thirty poems (226) by thirty-eight contributors is dedicated to ‘the memory of Dr. Verrall; to Mrs. Verrall; and to all my Cambridge friends.’ The introduction by Arthur Quiller-Couch drags up Dryden and Boccaccio to explain the lyric form and the poetic impulse which is all standard fare before the delight of the poems from the likes of John Alford (King’s), Rupert Brooke (King’s) – ‘In Examination’, ‘Day that I have loved’, ‘Kindliness’ and of course ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. There are some unexpected examples such as ‘Autumn Thoughts’ by Richard Buxton (Trinity): ‘Long life lies before us, years of living together; / Reason is not enough. Kiss me, beloved, again.’ Of course that old devil Aleister Crowley (Trinity), whom I happen to consider quite a fine poet, is included with ten of his works: ‘In Neville’s Court, Trinity College, Cambridge’ beginning ‘I THINK the souls of many men are here / Among these cloisters, underneath the spire / That the moon silvers with magnetic fire;’ and goes on to say ‘O soul contemplative of distant things, who hast a poet’s heart.’ – ‘On Garret Hostel Bridge’, ‘The Goad’, ‘The Rosicrucian’, ‘Song’, ‘In Memoriam A. J. B.’, ‘The Challenge’, ‘Two Hymns on the Feast of the Nativity’, ‘The Palace of the World’ and ‘Perdurabo’. With Crowley of course comes fellow poet and magical assistant to the Great Beast, Victor B. Neuburg (Trinity): ‘Under Magdalen Bridge’ with its picturesque ‘lapping, lapping, lapping of the stream / Makes songs around my lazy-light canoe;’ and its ‘sleepy river ripples, ripples ever / Betwixt the old brown wall and meadow trim;’ – ‘The Creation of Eve’, ‘A Lost Spirit’, ‘A Music Picture’, ‘Seascape’ (unpublished), ‘Epilogue’ (To The Triumph of Pan), ‘Serpens Noctis Regina Mundi’ (unpublished. Invocation a la Lune. Ballade Argentee.) Also included are Gerald H. S. Pinsent (King’s), Harold Monro (Gonville and Caius), J. C. Squire (St John’s) and I was glad to see James Elroy Flecker’s (Gonville and Caius) wonderful poem ‘To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence’.

There are fine works from women authors such as Amy K. Clarke (Newnham), Frances Cornford (nee Darwin), Margery Mines (Newnham) and Aelfrida Catherine Wetenhall Tillyard (Mrs. C. Graham) throws eleven of her unpublished poems into the poet – I can’t help wondering if a man had chosen the poems there would be less examples from women, probably.

Cambridge Poets, 1914-1920: An Anthology Compiled by Edward Davidson.

Published in 1920, this second Cambridge anthology has forty-seven contributors (216 pages) where we find six more poems from Rupert Brooke (King’s), J. C. Squire (St John’s), R. C. Trevelyan (Trinity), Harold Monro and James Elroy Flecker (both Gonville and Caius) and works from Frank H. Kendon (St John’s), S. Bellhouse (Emmanuel), J. R. Ackerley (Magdalene) and Siegfried Sassoon (Clare): ‘Morning Express’, ‘When I’m among a blaze of lights…’, ‘Villon’, ‘Before the Battle’, ‘How to Die’ and ‘Death’s Brotherhood’; but I think I was most impressed by C. Colleer Abbott (Gonville and Caius) whose two poems ‘Honeysuckle’ and ‘Berries’ resonated strongly with me –

Berries

Would that your lips desirable,

And elvish mood that with them plays,

Were necromancing here with me

Along the dark woodways.

The wild wood strawberries do swing

Where silence spills and moonlight drips,

Waiting their ghostly visitor

And her immortal lips.

They fold their jewelled fruit in leaves,

Reluctant to be mortal prize:

No matter for the woods wild things

And all its watching eyes,

I would find wild berries for you,

All through the wood, for your wild lips,

And I would gather them to feed

With wood love, those your lips.

And dip each crimson berry in

Moon’s silver light, as this and this

Do swing, and covenant for each

Wild strawberry, a kiss.

There are also some fine examples from women: Olwen W. Campbell, Fredegond Shove and Kathleen Montgomery Wallace (all Newnham College). Although the tragedy of war has permeated through most of these poems with some sense of the loss, the surrendered acceptance that the awful waste of life has not been in vain, there is a marked change in the lyrical form of the verse which is perceivable with every touch of rural devotion and spiritual evocation.

Songs of a Sussex Tramp – by Rupert Croft-Cooke.

Published in 1922 by the outstanding Vine Press of Steyning (600 copies printed and 20 on hand-made paper) under the sensitive hand of poet and magician, Victor Benjamin Neuburg, this 32 page collection of ‘reveries of the road’ by the Kent born author Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-1979) has some beautiful lines, cast from ‘mermaid-haunted shallows’ where he says that in the ‘Spring’s appealing weather / We sailed away together, / Into lands that lay and beckoned you and me!’ (Dedication). Croft-Cooke, who declares in the Preface ‘I am a tramp’, went to Tonbridge School and Wellington College, Shropshire before writing as a journalist and these poems such as ‘Old Hastings’ (sonnet), ‘The Downs’ and ‘Birling Gap’ where he says ‘I feel a man! wild for heroic deeds - / I feel outside the world’s desires and creeds!’ shows us a man immersed in nature in a setting he adores where the conviction of strength and the history of our heroic coastline seems overpowering to him. In ‘Sorrow’, inspired by epitaphs in the churchyard at Hollington, Rupert could almost be writing about his sexuality with the sad refrain: ‘Sorrow! oh sorrow! oh sorrow of earth!’ (later in 1953 he spent six months at Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton Prison for acts of indecency). In ‘Littlehampton Beach’ he is ‘tired – ‘tired of the world, the weakest of weariness’ and he goes on to suggest the ‘real things of life’ – ‘Stomachs, the pain of the mother; / Bodies and hair and love, food and muscle and stone.’ And he continues like some little god making a list:

‘Eyes and wind and yawns, lust and slaughter and seas,

Bowels and sleep and worms, women and suns and scars,

Bellies and death and sunrise, fear and teeth and disease,

Hunger and water and legs, birth and valleys and stars.’

Not including the dedicatory poem, there are fifteen poems in this superb little collection and I enjoyed the warmth and emotion Croft-Cooke conjures in works such as: ‘The Lover’s Seat’, ‘Winchelsea’s Thought’, ‘The Quest’, ‘Lewes Gaol’, ‘Chichester Cathedral’ and ‘Sussex’. Outstanding!

Poems – by Claude Colleer Abbott.

I came across the name of Claude Colleer Abbott (1889-1971) in the anthology ‘Cambridge Poets, 1914-1920’ compiled by Edward Davidson and was most impressed with his two contributions. Claude Colleer Abbott was born on 17^th April 1889 in Broomfield, Essex, the son of a pork butcher, George H Abbott and mother Mary Neal. Claude went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and in 1911 he became a School Master at the Grammar School in Streatham. In 1918 he joined the Artist’s Rifles as a Private and following the war he taught English at a Secondary School in Middlesbrough and later (circa 1928) became Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen before becoming Professor of English and Literature at the University of Durham from 1932-1954 (he edited the ‘Durham University Journal’ from 1939-1952).

‘Poems’ published in 1921 is a collection of twenty-eight poems over eighty pages mostly dedicated to friends and colleagues, opening with a long poem: ‘My Lady of the Spring’ (for Ralph Hodgson) where ‘elfin her face was in its sweet impress - / the first shy wind-flower touched with faintest rose.’ The author summons the beautiful impression of nature as in ‘Within the Wood’ (for C. Lovat Fraser) where the ‘wood of virgin leaves; / sweet silences, / banks where a dryad weaves / Anemones, / banks where the moss limns green / cool tapestries, / there flows a brook between / that happy is.’ There is the sensual urge of love in ‘Wantons’ (for C. O. Harrey) where ‘he crushes her warmth to his face / and joys, till her petals fold.’ And the scene continues:

‘She flames her body’s pride to the censuring sun

While her lovers drink her up.

Her beauty withers and dies, her petals fall;

They have emptied the cup.’

To a fellow poet he implores upon him the song of the poet: ‘Though men are dying, men are dust, / glad poet, sing because you must.’ [‘To James Stephens. June, 1918’] and in the poem ‘Breakfast at Grantchester, May Day, 1916’ the ghost of Rupert Brooke seems to move mysteriously through the stanzas. Also of interest are Colleer Abbott’s ‘Four Sonnets From A Sequence’ – ‘I HAVE heard tell of such a love a love that knows, / swift from its birth, high certainty and bliss’ (I), ‘Beautiful tales are these, and ever sweet, / to ponder quietly in candlelight’ (II), ‘My testament of love reveals a land / where pleasant vales invite my truant tread’ (VII) and ‘There is a love, that goes arrayed in grey, / wherein no tiger body burns for night’ (XI).

Other works by Claude Abbott include: ‘Youth and Age’ (poems. 1918), ‘Nine Songs from the 12^th Century French’ (with decorations by C. Lovat Fraser. 1920), ‘Miss Bedell and Other Poems’ (1924), ‘The Life and Letters of George Darley: Poet and Critic’ (1928), ‘Ploughed Earth’ (poems. 1930), ‘Early Medieval French Lyrics’ (1932), ‘The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon’ (1935), ‘The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges’ (1935), ‘A Catalogue of Papers relating to Boswell, Johnson and Sir William Forbes found at Fettercairn House, a residence of the Rt. Hon. Lord Clinton, 1930-31’ (1936), ‘Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins including his Correspondence with Coventry Patmore’ (1938), ‘The Sand Castle and Other Poems ‘ (1946), ‘Boswell: A Lecture’ (1946), ‘Poet and Painter, being the Correspondence between Gordon Bottomley and Paul Nash 1910-1946’ (with Anthony Bertram. 1955), ‘Summer Love’ (poems. 1958) and his ‘Collected Poems 1918-1958’ appeared in 1963. He collected 19^th and 20^th Century British art, manuscripts and old books and he died on 17^th September 1971. Delightful!

The Letters of Charles Sorley.

Published in 1919 with a preface written by the poet’s father, William Ritchie Sorley of Cambridge and letters selected in collaboration with his wife, who incidentally wrote the first ‘biographical’ chapter, these letters are a touching tribute to their son, Charles Hamilton Sorley. Born on 19^th May 1895 in Old Aberdeen, the young Charles moved with his family to Cambridge at the age of five in 1900 when his father was appointed Knightsbridge Professor in the University. Charles became a day-boy at King’s College Choir School and gained an open scholarship to Marlborough College in the autumn of 1908, aged thirteen. He gained another scholarship in December 1913 to University College, Oxford. In 1914 he went to Schwerin (January) in Mecklenburg and Jenna (April) as a student of the University and returned in July. On Sunday 2^nd August he and a friend were arrested at Trier ‘and kept in separate cells for the rest of the day. One damning circumstance was that they had no hats, though Charles gravely assured the officers who examined them that such was the habit of “the best people” in England.’ (p. 10) They were released that night ‘with permission and orders to leave the country’ and reached home in England on 6^th August. The next day they applied to the University Board of Military Studies for a commission in the Army. Charles became a Second Lieutenant in the 7^th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment and sent to a training camp on the Berkshire Downs. At the end of May the Battalion was sent to France and in August Lieutenant Sorley became Captain Sorley. He was stationed in the trenches around Ploegsteert and fell in the afternoon of 13^th October 1915, ‘shot in the head by a sniper as he led his company at the “hair-pin” trench near Hulluch.’ (p. 12) Sorley’s volume of verse ‘Marlborough and Other Poems’ was published posthumously in 1916 and the author E. B. Osborn describes him as a modern and sincere poet expressing truth and beauty – ‘from the very first he was a major poet; his matter life, his manner formed from within, and the two woven together, as woof and warp, in a loom of his own invention.’ (The New Elizabethans. 1919. p. 61)

‘The Letters of Charles Sorley’, which covers 322 pages, is divided into six chapters: ‘Biographical’, ‘Marlborough’, ‘Schwerin in Mecklenburg’, ‘The University of Jenna’, ‘The Army: In Training’, and ‘The Army: At the Front.’ The letters contained in the volume are fascinating reading and Sorley has much to say on literary subjects such as the poet John Masefield whom he adores and Goethe, Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jeffries. There is the letter to his mother from Aldershot, dated 28^th April 1915 in which he mentions about hearing of the death of Rupert Brooke in the Morning Post and the ‘sacrificial’ aspect of war. Of special interest I found was Sorley’s papers on ‘John Masefield and the XXth Century Renaissance’ read to the Literary Society at Marlborough on Sunday 3^rd November 1912 and ‘A Shropshire Lad’ read on Thursday 15^th May 1913. There is also a glowing impression of Sorley from the Dean of Bristol and formerly Master of Marlborough College, Dr. Wynne Wilson, and his House Master, Mr. A. R. Gidney. Sorley’s last letter to his father dated 5^th October 1915, a week before his death says it all – ‘rain and dirt and damp cold. O for a bath! Much love to all.’

The New Elizabethans- by E. B. Osborn.

‘The New Elizabethans: a first selection of the lives of young men who have fallen in the Great War’ was published in 1919 by the journalist and author Edward Bolland Osborn (1867-1938). Edward was the brother of the little known poet Percy Lancelot Osborn (1870-1951) of Magdalen College, Oxford, known for his volumes of translations ‘Rose Leaves from Philostratus’ (1901) and 'The Poems of Sappho' (1909). E. B. presents this book of memoirs celebrating the lives of twenty-five, known and unknown soldiers who were ‘scholars, and sportsmen and poets’ with quiet heroic solemnity. The title reflects Osborn’s collective associations of the men with Elizabethan exuberance and war seemed to create an instinct of brotherliness and a love of the land and the country; there is brevity in their sacrificial devotion. Here you will find the likes of Harold Chapin (1886-1915) the dramatist and playwright who left 16 plays (10 of them in one act) and was killed at the Battle of Loos; Richard Molesworth Dennys (1884-1916) the poet who died from wounds on the Somme; the athlete Anthony Frederick Wilding (1883-1915); actor Basil Hallam (1889-1916); poets Alan Seeger (1888-1916), Ivar Campbell (1890-1916) and Thomas Kettle (1880-1916) and of course William Noel Hodgson (1893-1916) the third youngest son of the Bishop of St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich who won the Military Cross and fell in the Somme offensive. Osborn has devoted much love into the writing of this beautiful tribute to those outstanding men who gave their lives for which he should be highly commended!

The Poems of Robert W. Sterling.

This short volume (89 pages) published in 1916 contains the published and unpublished works by the poet. Sterling, a poet who ‘sped down Parnassus with a warrior’s pride / to meet thy death in dark Thermopylae’ (‘Sonnet in Memory of R. W. Sterling’ by Roger Quin) who was born on 9^th November 1893 attended Glasgow Academy and was a Sedbergh Scholar; he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford in 1912 as a King Charles’ Scholar (he won the Newdigate Prize Poem in 1914 with ‘The Burial of Sophocles’, included in the volume) before becoming a Lieutenant in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He was killed in action on St. George’s Day 1915. Following the fourteen verses of ‘The Burial of Sophocles’ the book divides into Early Poems and Poems 1913-1915. The former has published poems written between 1909 and 1912 such as ‘The River Bathe’ of November 1910 – ‘dear will the memory always be / of the glorious pools of Lune’ which are unremarkable yet show a lyrical talent; the latter ‘unpublished works’ hold much promise of future greatness with their memorable lines mostly dedicated to Oxford, ‘bow’d by Time’s relentless hand’ and we close the book upon an unfinished fragment called ‘Maran’ which begins, as if reading Dylan Thomas: ‘the wind was wailing over the land wildly / song-sighing, and the moon / languishing, a love-lorn maiden / pale-peering from a shroud.’ It goes on in similar lyrical form – ‘O garden of years, golden and glad, / bright with the blossom Love’ and ‘lovelier than the light of lonely skies / o’er snow-white wastes.’ ‘The Burial of Sophocles’ seems quite prophetic and could be sung over the graves of all those who gave their lives in the Great War – ‘and so we laid him: even so he lies / to be for aye the Muse’s pensioner: / poets unborn shall sing him, centuries / untold tell of his fealty to her.’

The Muse in Arms – by E. B. Osborn.

This 340 page anthology published in 1918 is a ‘collection of war poems, for the most part written in the field of action, by seamen, soldiers, and flying men who are serving, or have served, in the Great War’. Osborn provides a long-winded introduction to the book but once through his dribble the glorious poetry begins – there are 131 poems written by 52 poets, 18 of which were killed in action. The volume is divided into fourteen parts and you will find all the usual examples of great poetry from Rupert Brooke’s ‘If I should die’, Julien Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’ – ‘all the bright company of Heaven hold him in their high comradeship / the Dog-Star, and the Sisters Seven, / Orion’s Belt and sworded hip’ which ends: ‘but Day shall clasp him with strong hands, / and Night shall fold him in soft wings’ and William Noel Hodgson (‘Before Action’). Other authors included are: Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Osbert Sitwell, Charles Scott-Moncrieff and Dynely Hussey whose ‘Ode to a Young Man’ sings of ‘lovely youth, slaughtered at manhood’s dawn’ who in ‘virgin purity’ – ‘liest dead.’ Osborn has made a fine selection but most of the poems hardly deserve a place as they seem flat and lifeless yet we must forgive their failings as their authors had gone through hell, but the great ones shine among them and will shine for all eternity!

Poems – by Alan Seeger.

This collection of poems published in 1916 (I read the 1920 edition) with an introduction by William Archer presents the reader with twelve poems designated as ‘juvenilia’, thirty sonnets, translations and last poems. Seeger had a real passion for beauty and he lived for the adventure and romance of life. He was born in New York in 1888 and in 1900 the family moved to Mexico where they stayed for two years before returning to the United States. He entered Harvard College in 1906 and was a frequent visitor of Boston Library. In 1912 he went to Paris, taking a room near the Musee de Cluny, and soaking up the atmosphere of the Latin Quarter. It was here in Paris where Alan produced most of his ‘juvenilia’ poems. In 1914 he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, enthusiastic about the drama of war; he trained at Rouen and was sent to Toulouse. He had attempted to publish his volume of poetry before the war but was unable to. His poetry is sincere without affectation and like all true poets he observes, evokes passion and reflects. Archer writes a worthy introduction to the poet – ‘Alan Seeger had barely passed his twenty-eighth birthday, when, charging up to the German trenches on the field of Belloy-en-Santerre, his “escavade” of the Foreign Legion was caught in a deadly flurry of machine-gun fire, and he fell, with most of his comrades, on the blood-stained but reconquered soil.’ (introduction. p. xi)

His longest poem is ‘The Deserted Garden’ which was inspired by his time in Mexico; there are fifty verses with the flavour of Tennyson and the rhyming scheme: abababcc:

‘Close by upon a beryl column, clad

In the fresh flower of adolescent grace,

They set the dear Bithynian Shepherd lad,

The nude Antinous. That gentle face,

Forever beautiful, forever sad,

Shows but one aspect, moon-like, to our gaze,

Yet Fancy pictures how those lips could smile

At revelries in Rome, and banquets on the Nile.’

The shade of Keats haunts the poem ‘Ode to Natural Beauty’ which ends quite splendidly ‘cheered yet to think how steadfastly / I have been loyal to the love of Love!’ Seeger seems to drift towards Swinburne in ‘The Sultan’s Palace’ and his sonnets are fair and well composed. There is the flicker of sensual exoticism in his poem ‘An Ode to Antares’ and his translations include: Dante’s ‘Inferno, canto xxvi’ and Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso, canto x, 91-99. The Last Poems have some fine work from 1914-15 such as ‘The Aisne’ with its victorious ending: ‘hearts worthy of the honour and the trial, / we helped to hold the lines along the Aisne.’ Other poems, ‘I have a rendezvous with Death’ and ‘A Message to America’, the latter echoing the patriotic beauty from Whitman and Longfellow are examples of Seeger’s skills as a poet and the twelve sonnets show an artist mastering his craft. In conjunction with this I also read the 'Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger' published in 1917 which has some interesting details about life in the trenches (entries from September 1914-June 1916) with letters written to his mother, father and sister. That he died honourably in battle is both heroic and tragic for a promising literary career was cut short, yet he encompassed the spirit of romance and looked towards the greater poets, Keats, who died ‘coughing out his soul by the Spanish Steps’ and Shelley, whose ‘flame snuffed out by a chance capful of wind from the hills of Carrara’ and Byron, who was ‘stung by a fever-gnat on the very threshold of his great adventure.’ (p. xi-xii)

There is No Death: Poems – by Richard Dennys.

This 110 page volume of poetry was published in 1917 with a Foreword by author and collector, Captain Francis Desmond Talbot Coke (1879-1931) of the Loyal North Lancs Regiment, who presents a tender and devotional impression of Dennys – ‘he was not in the dogmatic sense religious, but this gratitude to God for all the fair things round him – the sea, the wind, the woods – was stronger in him than in any man that I have ever met, and he was almost pagan in his reverence for Nature.’ (p. 15)

Richard Molesworth Dennys was a reluctant and shy poet born in Bengal, India on 17^th December 1884. Dennys was a very talented young man who enjoyed painting, playing the piano, writing poetry and prose and acting; he was also quite melancholic in his outlook: ‘the shelter of the shady woods, / where I may spend my lonely moods’ (‘A Boy’s Thanksgiving’. Bexley. 1896) He went to Winchester College before studying at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital for his final degrees (M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P.) in 1909 but he never practiced in medicine. He worked in Florence returning to England at the outbreak of war and joined the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment where he became a Captain. He went to France on 31^st July 1915; he was wounded in the Somme advance at Contalmaison on 12^th July 1916 and he died twelve days later in the British General Hospital at Rouen on 24^th July, aged 32.

Many of the poems are elegiac and have a mournful theme – ‘The world grows old; but this thing I do know / the grave is nought, for Love hath conquered Death.’ (‘There is no Death’) and the spirit of brotherhood is evident, where a ‘changeless memory, / the truest and best of companions’ (‘To a Dear Friend’) suggests the unbreakable bond of friendship continues beyond the grave. In section II, ‘Songs of Youth 1896-1898’, poems written at Bexley, Dennys burns with an adolescent perspective of love – ‘weep not that the blooms of Youth are dying. / Love, true Love, lives on for evermore.’ (‘Song: Carpe Diem’. 1897) and in section III, ‘Songs of Manhood 1910-1914’ the inevitable concern of approaching age consumes him – ‘be sure the poet’s heart is never old, / nor dulled his sight, nor fully passed his joy’ (‘The Hill of Youth’) and he continues in similar melancholy strains in ‘I do not understand’ written in Florence in May 1914:

‘I do not understand the eyes of the dead,

Nor the message of stillness

From lips that have loved

And hands that have given caresses.’

The final section, ‘Songs of War 1914-1916’ has several interesting poems such as ‘The Question’ – ‘soldier-boy, it’s a grim old world / (Deny it, he who can), / who knows that your life would have happier been, / had you lived to be a man?’ but quite unsurpassable is the final poem ‘Better far to pass away’ which begins:

‘Better far to pass away

While the limbs are strong and young,

Ere the ending of the day,

Ere Youth’s lusty song be sung.

Hot blood pulsing through the veins,

Youth’s high hope a burning fire,

Young men needs must break the chains

That hold them from their hearts desire.’

Captain Coke, a friend of Dennys says that ‘it did not seem possible beforehand that a dreamy nature, so full of love and beauty, should make anything except a grudging patchwork job of the rough, practical, ugly business of war.’ (p. 10-11) I enjoyed the poems of Dennys immensely and perhaps the final lines of ‘Better far to pass away’ are a fitting farewell – ‘my day was happy – and perchance / the coming night is full of stars.’

Literature and Life: Things Seen, Heard and Read – by E. B. Osborn.

This 1921 volume of thirty essays by Edward Bolland Osborn (1867-1938) of Magdalen College, Oxford, has some quite interesting pieces such as ‘King Lear’s Chaplet’ which examines the muse of madness, (Osborn had an idea to present a volume of poetic insights from the English asylums but had to decline due to the ‘slackness of the British lunatic’). Osborn looks at the difference between the French literary lunatic who is willing to write poetry as opposed to the inhabitants of the English asylums who produce no real poetry. In ‘Blue Funk’ he makes an analysis of fear and in ‘The Scarlet Swallow’ he condemns the poets for not producing ballads on sporting themes! In ‘Epic Liars’ Osborn summons Sir John Falstaff to the stage and along the way we meet Baron Munchausen, Tartarin of Tarascon and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s character Pan Zagloba. ‘Accidie’ delves into the ‘sickness of the soul’ and the ‘sorrow of the world’; the pessimistic mood of melancholia or moroseness, while ‘The Greatest Poetry’ analyses the ‘language of the spirit of man, the quintessence of all human experience’ (p. 71). Also of interest is ‘The Spook’s Progress’ with its investigation of phantasms and manifestations and ‘The Unknown Muse’ of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, D. G. Rossetti and W. B. Yeats. From English mechanical Carillons (‘Concerts in the Sky’) and mermaids (‘Sea Ladies’) to the Bolshevistic mystery of love attraction (‘Love or Eugenics’), ‘Literature and Life’ is a rewarding read.

Poems by Ivar Campbell.

Published in 1917 with a memoir by the English barrister and author Guy Ridley (1885-1947), ‘Poems’ by Ivar Campbell is a small collection of 31 poems and 15 sonnets which were begun in 1908 and continued in 1910 and shows a remarkable development in lyric poetry which was sadly cut short by war. Ivar Campbell was born in 1890, the son of Lord George Granville Campbell and Sybil Lascelles Alexander, (his grandfather was the Duke of Argyll) he attended Eton where he studied Elizabethan literature and Christ Church 1908-09 before travelling to Hanover, Venice, Paris and America as honorary attaché to the British Embassy (1912-14). Ridley’s glowing memoir of the poet presents us with a picture of a man who loved to tramp through nature – ‘to Ivar Campbell, as I knew him, all things were living. Nothing was ever dull. He was always amused, and his enthusiasm, naturally intermittent, was unbounded and above all things, sincere.’ (p. 7)

Ridley says of him in his memoir that he had a ‘quickness of mind and sincerity of purpose’ and that his ‘face was of great beauty, with finely-drawn features’ (p. 8). Campbell had an overwhelming desire to open a book shop in Chelsea under the name of Mr. John Cowslip where he would sell drawings by modern artists and make holly walking-sticks! At the outbreak of war Campbell failed the medical examination due to weak eyesight but became an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. On his return to England following another rejection for the Army he was accepted in February 1915 and given a commission in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He went to France in May of that year and was attached to the 1^st Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders in the trenches before being drafted to Mesopotamia. An attack was launched against a Turkish position and Captain Ivar Campbell was shot leading his men and with fatal wounds he died the next day on 8^th January 1916, aged 26; he was buried that evening on the banks of the River Tigris.

There are some fine poems in the collection, none of which speak of the horrors of war for they were all written before the conflict: ‘The Ballad of a Dead Town’, ‘St. Ursula’ and the rather lengthy ‘The Marriage of Earth and Spring’, and the particularly sombre ‘The Ballad of the Wood Baroleth’ which chimes with menace – ‘the wood was all enchanted, / I stayed not to see. / Baroleth is haunted - / the leaves were following me.’ Definitely worth seeking out!

Sonnets, Songs and Ballads – by Rev. E. E. Bradford.

Having previously read the good Reverend’s volume of poetry ‘The Romance of Youth’ (1920) and found it tediously disappointing I swore I would not pursue a further dose of Bradford yet here I am, rushing towards the old devil to worship once more at the fount, (or should that be font?) of his sins! In fact, I was pleasantly surprised with ‘Sonnets, Songs and Ballads’ which was published in 1908 and it is divided into six sections: Sonnets, Songs, Ballads, Notes and Sketches, Religious Verse and Verse for Children. Edwin Emmanuel Bradford (1860-1944) of Exeter College, Oxford, sets out his uranian stall from the first with his poem ‘Passing the Love of Women’ in which he states when the ‘years have cooled the fever in the blood, / the friend is all in all!’ and goes on to say about the ‘one man in a thousand’ with ‘his firm, strong love’ that he fears ‘not our deepest stains to scan / beneath the sinner sees and loves the man!’ And he goes further in ‘The Child Divine’ which is ‘concealed in mortal guise’; a child ‘with more than human love.’ Poor old Bradford gets lost in his all too human-heavenly ecstasies, declaring that ‘since then I seek Him. Here and there, I find / In one His smile, in one His tone of voice, / And in a third signs of His mighty mind’. His desire intensifies in ‘Sundered’ where the ‘aching pain of that long, long night / will last till my life is o’er!’ and in ‘Side to Side’ the reality of his cruel desire attains the conclusion that ‘dark suspicion marked us out / as guilty of a ruthless crime, / and worthy but to die!’ All marvellous stuff and there it ends for the ballads I found rather poor and the rest of the volume tapers off into uninspired versification.

In Quest of Love and Other Poems – by Rev. E. E. Bradford.

Once again the Vicar of Nordelph lets his insatiable lusts rule his heart in this 1914 publication which begins with the Tennysonian ‘In Quest of Love’ which runs to 166 four-line stanzas in 17 parts and sees the romping Reverend enjoying the platonic charms of boyhood love of all variations in different nations – ‘that Love has lightened, first and last / Love of any boyhood, he has passed / beyond the reach of change or wrong’. In the poem ‘Free Love’ the man of God calmly confesses that he ‘kissed young boys in dozens’ and other poems have similar sentimental flourishes – ‘Shy Love’, ‘Childhood and Age’ – ‘and when our lips meet at a time like this / it is our souls and not our mouths that kiss!’, ‘The Heat of Love’, ‘Pure Love’ and ‘Love along the Ages’. At 112 pages this is quite a delightful little book for anyone interested in uranian verse.

Lays of Love and Life – by Rev. E. E. Bradford.

Feeling decidedly pleased with myself for enduring and even enjoying the old goat of Nordelph, I went on to read Bradford’s other collection ‘Lays of Love and Life’ of 1916 which has 53 poems in part one: Lays of Love, and 20 poems in part two: Lays of Life, all of which has some contradictory poems concerning the Reverend’s attraction to at one moment the spirit of youth – ‘No love is carnal’ in which Bradford asks ‘who loves the body only? Grind it small, / bring him the bloody mass – give him the whole. / Is he content? Nay, when he has it all, / all is but nought without the informing soul.’ and again in ‘In the dark’, and then the physical beauty of the body in ‘When I went a-walking’ for instance, where he says that ‘I thought of him all day, / and I dreamed of him all night.’ In ‘Take it, lad, or leave it’ we get a sense of Housman with its playfulness and melancholy repetition. A few good pieces: ‘Hadrian’s Soliloquy’, ‘The Forest Boy’, ‘Joe and Jim’, ‘The Younger Eros’ – ‘let lover seek his mate, then side by side / let them beget fair dreams – an offering glorified!’ and ‘The Woodman’s Boy’; Bradford writes quite well upon nature too as can be seen in ‘Nature’, ‘The Woods in Winter’, ‘Autumn’ and ‘Sunset’.

Itamos: A Volume of Poems – by Arthur Lyon Raile.

Arthur Lyon Raile is the pen-name of the American art collector Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928) and this 120 page volume of verse was published in 1903 and most of the 44 poems are printed in the order in which they were written. The author shows great skill as a poet but initially seems to lack conviction in his attempts at passionate poetry – ‘my soul is famine-fed, my sense / aches, and a smothered fire / feeds on my heart. Ah! wither tends / the unsubdued magnificence / of limitless desire’ (‘Desires’). Treading poetical water through ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, ‘Memoria Amorum’, ‘Still Waters’, and ‘Across my path a shadow lies’ the stream widens and intensifies in its integrity and urgency towards what looks like real songs of love – ‘where cottage by night / enclose all lovers in the same surrender.’ (‘Winter Twilight’), ‘Death heathen god, that fillest all my brain, / whose perfect counsel maketh sorrow plain, / whose sovereign word alone hath power / to save each hour.’ (Hymn to Love’), ‘’Twas justice blind. / We feel in youth what we confirm in age. / The blood informs the mind, / and claims its due in midmost pupilage.’ (‘Lad’s Love’) and ‘Ah, could I bind him to my soul, / if I could have his being whole, / I should not fear; I should not tire / with pent desire.’ Which continues: ‘I fly to him, and find him cold, / for “he is young, and I am old;” / I come in love, and meet a rough / and hard rebuff.’ (‘The Loss’). In fact, I enjoyed the author’s blossoming and can confirm that Mr. Edward Perry Warren did indeed have a heart to write such beautiful lines as:

‘Enough, if once, once only I had lain

With thee, and loved thee once, and never again!

I knew not, trained indeed to miss

The half of love, the whole could be like this.’

[‘Adagio’]

and again in ‘Noontide’:

‘His human love intense,

Burning at height suspense,

From fiery wastes of vaporous youth

Gathers the sullen angers of the truth.'

All quite beautiful, and whirling from this charming encounter from Mr. Edward Perry Warren I thought to intensify the experience with a couple of volumes from Edward Cracroft Lefroy (1855-1891) of Keble College, Oxford, whose collection ‘Echoes from Theocritus’ had made such an impression on me, many years ago, and so I had the misfortune to read ‘Windows of the Church and Other Sonnets’ (32 to be precise) and ‘Cytisus and Galingale: A Series of Sonnets’ (another 32) both published in 1883 and thoroughly disappointed with these dire and dreadful works I resigned myself to heavy scourging and a hair-shirt for my foolish endeavour!

Itchen Memories – by G E M Skues.

George Edward Mackenzie Skues (1858-1949) attended Winchester College (1872-77) and was a solicitor and notable fly fisherman who developed the technique of modern nymph fishing and his reminiscences of fishing the River Itchen, ‘Itchen Memories’ was published posthumously in 1951 (I read a 1984 reprint for the ‘Modern Fishing Classics’ series, edited with an introduction by Antony Atha). Skues’ brother, C A M Skues writes the Foreword saying that his brother retired as a solicitor in 1940 aged 82 and he stresses the importance he placed upon observation as in the feeding habits of the fish, (Skues, with his one good eye seemed to be a natural at interpreting his surroundings to apply his techniques). We also get an Artist’s Foreword by the wonderful British illustrator and fisherman Alex Jardine (born 1913) who studied at St. Martin’s School of Art – there are nine full-page ink illustrations in the book which are worth the price of the book alone! This is Skues’ final book and it contains numerous papers and articles from various angling periodicals relating to incidents that occurred on the Abbot’s Barton water of the River Itchen above Winchester where the great man fished for over fifty years; this is quite beautiful writing and it interests me because I find some (not all) books on fishing, particularly fly-fishing have a poetic quality to them and there are some humorous moments as in his escapades with angry swans and bulls!  There is his ‘Diary of an Itchen Week’ from the fishing Gazette, beginning Saturday 15^th July 1911 and ending Saturday 23^rd July which is superb – it is as if old Skues had some magical ability to charm the trout out of the river! I shall certainly read Skues’ other classic works such as his ‘Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream’ (1910) and ‘The Way of a Trout with a Fly’ (1921). Magnificent!

Verses – by Robinson Kay Leather.

This dreary abomination was published in 1891 by the Liverpool born chess player and university professor Robinson Kay Leather (1865-1895). The book is divided into four sections of poems and unrhymed lyrics and has something like 55 poems over 98 pages. This really is quite abysmal stuff and many of the so-called ‘poems’ seem unfinished and several run to only a few lines amid the enormity of the white page; a real poet would have designated these verses as ‘juvenilia’ and consigned them accordingly to their awful fate – trial by fire! One poem only begins to touch the heights of amateur and shows some promise of possibility in part I – ‘The Bridal of the Night’:

‘The moon is dancing with the Night;

She floats through his ebon hall,

Leaned back on his shoulder in delight;

On her lovely face all ivory-bright

                                    Dark kisses fall.

The moonbeams and the shades of Night

To each other sing and call;

And they follow the Moon in her noiseless flight

To her cloudy bed with the kingly Night

                                    Thro’ the dark west wall.’

But alas, there is no more. We can thank the stars that Mr. Leather only produced one volume of tawdry verse to insult the sensibilities of a literary readership and I hope dearly that he was a better chess player than he was a poet!

Fishing’s Strangest Days – by Tom Quinn.

This 2002 publication by the journalist Tom Quinn compiles the extraordinary but true tales from over two-hundred years of angling history, relating 126 stories of bizarre fishing facts from strange baits such as ‘manfat’, ferocious pike, ghostly apparitions, poaching, gillies and epic battles of the river from 1800 to 1986. Easy to read and dip into and fascinating for all fishing lovers!

Thysia: An Elegy – by Morton Luce.

Published anonymously in 1908, this collection of sonnets (45 in the 3^rd edition which I read) is truly a work of art. In two parts: I – ‘Death and Love’ and II – ‘Rosemary’, Luce, a dedicated Shakespearean scholar and literary critic, recounts the sorrow felt at the loss of his wife, his ‘sweet love mingled with that cold mound’ (‘The Funeral’. 30^th November 1907) and I can say without doubt that these are some of the finest and most beautiful songs of love and loss that I have ever read. Morton Luce was born in Buckinghamshire in 1849 and married Marriane Masters (born in Bristol) in Somerset in 1879. Luce does not name his wife in the volume but she died a year prior to publication in the autumn of 1907, aged 65. The deep devotion he felt for her is more than evident and overwhelms the reader with emotion –

‘A WITHERED life, and weary of the sun;

Dead weight of palsied limbs, or limbs that tire;

Parched lips that open but to close upon

Their broken, their monotonous desire – ‘

                                                [‘Ave’. 15^th April 1907]

‘Sweet wife, I come to your new world ere long,

This lily – keep it till our next embrace.’

                                                [‘Vale’. 27^th November 1907]

‘And he that lives for love lives evermore;

Only in love can life’s true path be trod;

Love in self-giving; therefore love is God.’

                                                [‘Love’]

There are some beautiful moments captured which anyone who has suffered grief at the loss of a loved one will recognise, as in ‘Seven weeks later’ when he has not moved her belongings which remain like a shrine, the ‘riven / comb, when you fell, and were too brave to weep’ and the ‘folded pile of daily clothes’; the ‘faded flowers’ kept from the funeral, and ‘there upon the floor the desolate glove, / and there the little shoes, dearest of all.’ The author also writes with great force upon the wonders of nature, the rustic simplicity of the rural idyll with botanic precision as one would find in Crabbe or Clare and his authority on Shakespeare and Tennyson (he wrote two splendid books: ‘New Studies in Tennyson’ 1893 and ‘Shakespeare, the Man and His Work’, seven essays, 1893) shines with confidence. It is a pity that Luce who died in 1943 was not recognised in his lifetime as a great poet and scholar and he seems to have become all but forgotten except by a handful of appreciative literary scholars. Exceptional!

Threnodies, Sketches and Other Poems – by Morton Luce.

Published anonymously by ‘the author of Thysia’ in 1910, this volume is divided into three parts: ‘Threnedies’ (ten poems of Sorrow and six of Hope), ‘Sketches’ (12 poems) and ‘Other Poems’ as the title suggests and Morton Luce writes with a sense of deep conviction on his love of nature in poems such as ‘Autumn’, ‘Trengwainton Carn’ and ‘The River Nene’ and with a romantic, sensual touch in ‘To a Friend’ (a broken and contrite heart), ‘Memories’ and ‘Earth and Love’. A mournful shadow seems cast over the whole volume yet there is some sense of perfection about it and the fact that the author has entered his sixtieth year is hard to believe for there is the notion of youth about it, a boldness which comes from the joy of learning and a wisdom that comes of age. I can do no better than to recommend this volume along with his previous ‘Thysia’ to any enthusiast of poetry!

Idyllia – by Morton Luce.

Again published anonymously, this volume of poetry ‘Idyllia’ of 1911 by the ‘author of Thysia’ – Morton Luce (1849-1943) is an outstanding paean to nature with such crystalline works as ‘Clevedon’, ‘A Wood in Somerset’, ‘Blackdown’, ‘A Scene on the Wye’, ‘A Garden’ and ‘A Windmill’:

                                    ‘like a pensive ghost

The old mill glimmers; while over it there hang

Dusk, and a sunless pall of mist. And now

Floats from the lonely moor the lapwings cry,

The lean bat flutters, and, rising chill, the wind

Sweeps from the naked frame-work of the sails

A dirge, a sad mysterious monotone,

A wail of night, autumn, decay, and death.’

 Luce has the finesse of a true poet and these twenty-five poems only confirm what a great yet unrecognised poet he was. Delightful!

New Idyllia: Sketches of a Stream – by Morton Luce.

Morton Luce reveals himself from the cover of anonymity and puts his name to a beautiful volume of poetry published in 1923. In three parts – ‘The Stream in Spring’, ‘The Stream in Summer’ and ‘The Stream in Autumn’, Luce far surpasses that over-rated versifier, Wordsworth, in my opinion and reading Luce’s mesmerising blank verse is like a magical incantation; he sings as a lover unto the joyous rapture of nature in the embers of his long life as we can see from the end of the volume where we are delivered into the arms of the divine –

‘O sunset sky and lonely gleaming star,

Your beauty beacons from the vast of space,

Where myriad heavens the doors of Hope unbar,

And Love lies in eternity’s embrace’.

The Youth of Beauty and Other Poems – by Cecil Roberts.

Cecil Roberts, or to give him his full name, Edric Cecil Mornington Roberts (1892-1976) was an English journalist, dramatist, novelist and poet and this eighteen poem collection was published in 1915 with a Foreword by Professor D. Macmillan, Lit. D. There are some fine poems here such as ‘She moves, the lady of my love’, ‘Love’s Silence’, ‘Love that waited’, ‘To Marjory: In Springtime’ and ‘After Vacation’ and Roberts expresses his feelings with true delicate un-restrained passion as in this ode to transient beauty – ‘and now I make lament – the old lament, / your loveliness will fade, your youth will die, / and so I shudder, knowing days that went / swiftly and gloriously, like all things by;’ and he goes on in almost Housman-like mournful tones: ‘knowing that you will laugh, and live content, / while all my days are passed in dreary banishment.’ [‘Appassionata’] He ends in almost euphoric rapture at the memory:

‘Therefore my joy is somewhat fraught with pain

Distilled from happy days recalled in vain;

We met, we spoke, we parted, now with me

The vision of your face is dwelling constantly.’

In ‘To a Lady who painted my Portrait’ he is overcome by the supernatural manner in which something deep within his soul has been exposed – ‘art, with its deeper sight, has seen / something to which the world is blind.’ There is a musical quality to ‘On the Severn’ where he is in a boat and drifting ‘to dreaming Arley / climbing high beyond the bend.’ In the long poem ‘Andromache’ Roberts writes sensually upon the Trojan princess:

‘Slowly along the step ravine she clomb

As one deep-stricken to the heart with woe,

And all her robes hung fold on fold about

Her grief-expressive figure, dark, enswathed

Save where the ivory brow gleamed forth above

Two eyes that were as wells of sorrow where

No sunlight ever glanced.’

In another long poem ‘A Child’e Eyes’ he echoes Tennyson’s ‘ringing grooves of change’ – ‘on lettered shelves the great, undying dead, / whose singing souls, in pilgrimage elect, / still wing them down the ringing ways of Time, / with Fame’s immortal banner o’er them furled.’ Other volumes by Roberts include: ‘Twenty-Six Poems’ (1917), ‘Charing Cross’ (1919) and ‘Poems’ (1920). A minor masterpiece!

Love in a Mist – by Francis Bourdillon.

At first glance I wasn’t too impressed with this hundred-page volume of poetry published in 1892 and I had come across the name of Bourdillon several times over the years with the full intention of reading his works and so I braced myself. Francis William Bourdillon (1852-1921) was a notable English scholar, poet, and writer of Christian essays and translator who was educated at Worcester College, Oxford. His poems are rather short affairs with some whimsical turn about them – ‘and then I crept / where love lay sleeping, / and wept, and wept, / and still am weeping.’ [‘The Happy Spring’] He is not above delivering some tragic lines that capture the full intensity of love and desperation as in ‘The Poet’s Love’ where he notes that ‘languorous lashes make a thousand hearts despair, / but he chooses the Divine.’ In ‘Vae Victrici!’ he confesses with a terrible ache that ‘of all men who have loved me I have loved only one.’ And he seems stricken by desire and admiration for the beauty of a ‘fair boy, of all hearts master, / who makes the world your plaything,’ but is at a loss at the end of the stanza as to an inevitable outcome: ‘but we – what shall we do?’ Other poems of note are ‘Hellenica’, the ten ‘Love Sonnets’ and ‘Lucid Intervals’. Not a bad collection though I thought it fell short of perfection as so many seem to do, yet I persevered and read several more of his volumes: ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ (1891), ‘Chryseis’ (1894), ‘Moth-Wings’ [Ailes D’Alouette] (1913) and ‘Easter Lilies for Nineteen Hundred and Fifteen’ (1915) and was confirmed in my assumptions that he is a fair poet and ‘Love in a Mist’ is probably his best work.

Twenty-Six Poems – by Cecil Roberts.

This is a very worthy collection of poems by Cecil Roberts published in 1917 which he divides into three sections: ‘Of Ships and Sailors’, ‘At Peace’ and ‘Inscriptions. Roberts writes with great clarity on the notion of love and is philosophical when he says – ‘who knows, dear heart, perchance you move / nearer in love than I in thought, / and with these premonitions prove / love is not far and comes unsought.’ [‘In the Wood’] and his lines to a fellow poet, James Elroy Flecker seem suitably uplifting and praiseworthy, where lips are ‘locked in silence ‘neath the alien skies, / and all the tales are told that he shall tell.’ He goes on in equal measure of admiration, calling Flecker a – ‘moon-led pilgrim seeking for the Thing / which dreams spake in the days long gone,’ […] ‘he holds a wider converse with the stars, / and roams unfettered through the jewelled night, / his song flows in the wind ‘mid nenuphars / swaying and rustling in the dawning light.’ [‘A Dead Poet’] ah, those ‘nenuphars’! Other instances of Roberts finery are: ‘The Moon a Lovely Maiden is’, ‘A Garden at Rydal’, ‘To Richard Le Gallienne’ and ‘The Portrait’. Superb!

Poems – by Cecil Roberts.

This large volume (244 pages) of Cecil Roberts published in 1920 has a Preface by none other than John Masefield whom we can assume with his love of the sea and sea-faring found old Cecil an intriguing poet, (Roberts dedicates his poem ‘The Great Ships’ to Masefield) yet he points out that Roberts is quite unknown as a poet and mysterious as a man before he sets to harking on about the war and poetical posterity, ‘what will they care ten years hence for your name, / who cares a damn who died at Salamis?’ [‘Futility’] but he is hopeful and looks forward to the future. The book is in two parts: ‘The Dark Years’ (23 poems) and ‘Other Poems’ (22 poems) and Roberts writes starkly upon the horror of war with its ‘slow processional of pain’ as soldiers return from the Front – ‘human refuse / - left by extravagant war – borne away in the night.’ [‘The Dark Years’]

Many of the poems we have encountered in previous volumes of course so there is a tender familiarity in such verse as ‘Springtime in Cookham Dean’, ‘The Enchanted Wood’, ‘To a Lady’, ‘Memories’ and ‘Habberley Valley’; here we find a Hylas and there we encounter Andromache and my favourite of Roberts’ poems ‘In a Wood’ is there.

The war is an ever present shadow and in the poem ‘Eclipse’ he says ‘there is a question to be asked, / there is an answer to be given, / and traitors who shall stand unmasked,’ before ending with a positive turn – ‘and new worlds made from old worlds riven.’ Other brilliant poems in the first section include: ‘Lusitania’, ‘Watchmen of the Night’ and ‘The Dover Patrol’ while the second section has many of his memorable works such as ‘Helen of Troy’, ‘The Youth of Beauty’, ‘Habberley Valley Revisited’ and ‘A Boy’s Laughter’ – a fine collection indeed!

Andrea and Other Poems – by Gascoigne Mackie.

Edmund St. Gascoigne Mackie (1867-1952) was born in Gloucestershire and attended Sedbergh Grammar School and Keble College, Oxford, matriculating on 19^th October 1886 aged 19 (B.A. 1889); he was also a chorister at Magdalen College from 1876-81. This slim volume at 63 pages containing just eleven poems was published in 1908 and the title poem ‘Andrea’ is in the manner of English rural, peasant poems and for my liking went on much too long seeming to drift into a third-rate Browning but once that catastrophe was over with Mackie finds his footing and had my full attention; he writes quite elegantly upon the senses and the essence of desirability, saying that man has – ‘deep within his memory are stored / layers of life extinct, monsters abhorred, / chimaeras, lawless kingdoms of dead lust, / now a mere charnel of chaotic dust.’ (‘Nature and Human Nature’) how true! He reveals his romantic colours by calling Shelley the ‘imperishable soul of passionate song’ (‘The Shelley Memorial’ at University College, Oxford) and he lets his classical mask slip in ‘At Clapham Junction’ (November 13^th 1895) as he invokes the ghost of Oscar Wilde, feeling that he is hunted like the ‘Cretan stag’ by a jeering rabble of ‘hounds’; he wistfully looks to Oxford for release and to the daffodils, crocuses and fritillaries of Magdalen meadow; he stands ‘bowed with bitter shame / and handcuffed in the pillory.’ –

‘I shall survive the mob’s malign

 Mean “digito monstrori”:

One must be damned to be divine –

Hurl me to hell – what care I?

Though Time’s dark banks, as Time runs by

To-morrow and To-morrow,

Re-echo “Oscar” to the cry

Of outraged love and sorrow –

Out of the ashes of my lust

A Phoenix re-arisen

I shall emerge, spurning the dust

And infamy of prison.

The poets will be on my side

And they shall tell my story –

The legend of my sin and pride

Shall last till Time be hoary.’

Mackie is consumed by the thought that life will inevitably end – ‘till I forgot that you, like me, / a pinch of breathing dust, will die’ (‘A Butterfly’) and looks to greater things of spiritual significance, in ‘A Sign’: ‘wide Thy cords of mercy reach / to bind mankind in one great whole.’ But he becomes almost hallucinatory with vision in the poem ‘The Straw’ where he sees a straw on the platform of the train station at Christmas Eve and descends into visions of ancient Egypt and Bethlehem; to Naomi, Mahlon, Chilion, Elimelech, Ruth, Moab and Christ, who perhaps first looked upon the husk of straw! The author closes with a paean to poesy in ‘After Twenty Years’ –

‘I have, and faint not yet, for I have learnt

How few are born to serve the Spirit of Song

Or bear the burning torch of Beauty strange,

To breathe her secrets with a mortal tongue

And haunt the lonely heights her lovers range.’

Short Poems – by Gascoigne Mackie.

This collection of thirty-three poems by Mackie was published in 1907 and there are some wonderful poems such as ‘How fair thou art’, ‘The humming Hawk-Moth’, ‘Why hast thou whispered’ and ‘Autumn in Wadham Garden’ where ‘stooping from heaven with a smile / shall he behold her, and obey: - / some Aidan of a sunnier isle, / some Francis of the fuller day.’ In ‘Home from France’ we find that ‘the steadfast evening star / shines down on the hills of Sare, / I shall wish that I too had wings; / and remembering happy things, / I shall remember you!’ He invokes an antique energy in ‘Clevedon’ where we learn that:

‘The wizard once beneath these skies

Sang his weird legend of the sea:

The dust of him who yonder lies

Is praised to all posterity.’

Other excellent poems are: ‘Her spirit walks these starry fields’, ‘By a Roman well’, ‘Oh, may no dungeon-cloud of sin’, ‘Look down, O love’ and ‘O for a humble life’ which ends bitterly: ‘what thou the soul of youth be like the rose / eager to open to the sun and rain, / love’s deepest petals never quite unclose, / the heart is hidden in a world of pain.’

Mackie published several volumes of poetry including: ‘Poems Dramatic and Democratic’ (1893) and ‘Charmides and Other Poems’ (1912).

Charmides and Other Poems Chiefly Relating to Oxford – by Gascoigne Mackie.

Originally published in 1898, I read the revised 1912 edition with over sixty poems at just over one-hundred pages – the section on ‘Oxford’ was originally published in The Spectator 1897. In the Preface we are told that ‘Charmides owes its existence to the late John Addington Symonds’ who encouraged Mackie, who then tells us that ‘there is not a word in this book about my college friends or my college days. I have almost forgotten my college days, and my friends have forgotten me.’ The volume contains the usual Oxford debaucheries that pass for love and have been the ruin of many a minor poet; ‘Charmides’ is the name Mackie gives to his unidentified youthful lover. In part one we get a sense of those far off Oxford days in ‘Old Magdalen Bridge’ where ‘within the shadow of her antique walls / youth passes like an unabiding stream.’ In ‘Life’s Oxymoron’ we are told that ‘the path is not the prize of life / is ours who, striving, never quite achieve.’ The gentle life before the upheaval of war is invoked in ‘Arcades Ambo’:

‘And Charmides, who gave me the narcissus.

Where Isis flows, beneath a white syringa

Sleeps by the Norman Tower on Ilffley Hill:

And o’er them both burns the same morning-star

Of beauty, like a tear.’

Other poems in the section are equally superb – ‘Magdalen Mill’, ‘Marston Copse’ and ‘Intermezzo’. Part two opens with ‘Invocation’ where the poet waves his ‘willow-wand’ to ‘call thee from the lake’… ‘Awake, and look upon thine earthly friend / who loves thee yet, and would again behold / the phantom of the first he ever loved.’ The poet and Charmides have a picnic and watch the butterflies in ‘Wytham Wood’ and bathe at ‘Parson’s Pleasure’, that notorious peeping hole and in ‘Godstow’ they row to that fair place, where ‘at that moment / the mighty mother touched me, and I felt / the first strong throb of that which rules me still.’ Other ‘strong throbs’ in part two are: ‘Magdalen Chapel’, ‘A Garden at Donnington’, ‘May Morning’, ‘Madrigals’ and ‘Gloria in Excelsis’. The beautiful flow of sentimental passion continues in part three with the optimistic ‘still shall love triumph, still shall love redeem us, / dear Charmides, - for Love is Lord of all.’ [‘Alpha and Omega’] In fact, there is not a bad poem in the whole collection in my opinion and I was pleasantly surprised with such wonders in part three as: ‘New Magdalen Bridge’, ‘The Wells of Sleep’, ‘The Fellow’s Bridge’, ‘Dante and Browning’, ‘Sunset at Sare’, ‘Six Sonnets’, ‘The Shelley Memorial’, ‘An Oak near Oxford’ and ‘In the Botanic Garden’ (after the Oxford Pageant, July 2^nd 1907)… Several of the poems from 'Charmides' also appears in 'The Glamour of Oxford: Descriptive Passages in Verse and Prose by Various Writers' edited by William Knight (1911) which is also very interesting. 'Charmides': Utter perfection!

Eight Harvard Poets.

This 1917 publication features poems by eight Harvard men: E E Cummings, S Foster Damon, J R Dos Passos, Robert Hillyer, R S Mitchell, William A Norris, Dudley Poore and Cuthbert Wright. This is a fine collection and all the poets have something of the budding greatness about them, some more than others; Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) went on to be quite prolific and here he has been given space for eight poems – ‘will I complete the mystery / of my flesh / I will rise / after a thousand years / lipping/ flowers / and set my teeth in the silver of the moon.’ [‘Crepuscule’] From the nine poems by Samuel Foster Damon (1893-1971) I enjoyed his ‘The New Macaber’ and  ‘Incessu Patuit Deus’ – ‘she is a goddess left for us, / veiled with the softening veils of time; / her blue-veined breasts are now sublime, / her moulded torso glorious.’ [‘Venice’] John Roderigo Doss Passos (1896-1970) offers seven interesting pieces like ‘Saturnalia’ where ‘men mutter runes in language dead, / by night; with rumbling drum, / in quaking groves where the woodland spirits are hailed.’ But one of the poets I enjoyed the most was Robert Hillyer (1895-1961), a prolific poet who has eight pieces here; I especially liked his ‘Four Sonnets from a Sonnet Sequence’, here is the end of the first:

‘Fair child of loveliness, these endless fears

Are nought to us; let us be gods of stone,

And set our images beyond the years

On some high mount where we can be alone.

And thou shalt ever be as now thou art,

And I shall watch thee with untroubled heart.’

And here is the fourth in full:

‘Long after both of us are scattered dust

And some strange souls perchance shall read of thee,

Finding the yearnings that have crushed from me

These poor confessions of my love and trust,

I know how misinterpreted will be

These lines, for men will laugh, or more unjust,

Thinking not once of love, but only lust,

Will stain the vesture of our memory.

And yet a few there may be who will feel

My deep devotion and my true desires,

And know that these unhappy words reveal

Only new images in changeless fires;

And they perchance will linger with a sigh

To think that beauty such as thine must die.’

Also of value is ‘Domesday’, ‘My peace I leave with you’, ‘Elegy for Antinous’ in which ‘Antinous is dead, we kneel before / the portals of our past in vain,’ and ‘The Recompense’ where Hillyer predicts that ‘in some future far beyond surmise / you will dream here with half-remembering eyes, / and I shall write these words, content awhile / in the slow round of time to see you smile.’

Robert Stewart Mitchell (1892-1957) is represented by the most poems, eleven in fact, ‘Love Dream’, ‘Threnody’, ‘Helen’ and ‘Lazarus’ of which are pretty fair. William A Norris strikes no heights with his nine works but ‘Qui Sub Luna Errant’ comes close to passable and Dudley Poore (1893-1982) sacrifices six of his works here of which ‘The Philosophical Garden’, ‘After Rain’ and ‘Cor Cordium’ show a touch of maturity, but Cuthbert Wright (1899-1948) like Hillyer, stood out for me. Wright, a poet, critic and Professor published his first collection, ‘One Way of Love’ in 1915 and a book, ‘The Story of the Catholic Church’ in 1926. He has six poems representing him in the volume: ‘The End of It’, ‘The New Platonist’ (circa 1640) where ‘the painted windows burn and flame / up through the music-haunted air; / these were my gods – and then you came / with flowers crowned and sun-kissed hair, / making this northern river seem / some laughter-girdled Grecian stream.’ – ‘The Fiddler’, ‘Falstaff’s Page’ (to Reginald Sheffield), ‘A Dull Sunday’ (after Debussy) and ‘The Room over the River’ where Wright whispers ‘GOOD NIGHT, my love, good night; / the wan moon holds her lantern high,’ and he goes on in similar passionate vein – ‘flower of my soul! Let us be true / to youth and love and all delight’. Yes, lets! Tremendous!

The Quest of Truth and Other Poems – by Hugh R Freston.

Hugh Reginald (Rex) Freston (1891-1916) was born in Surrey, attended Dulwich College (1904-06) and in October 1912 went up to Exeter College, Oxford with the intention of taking Holy Orders, yet his interest in literature overwhelms his honourable spiritual intentions and poetry consumes him. At the outbreak of war, this most unlikeliest of soldiers becomes a 2^nd Lieutenant in the 3^rd Royal Berkshire Regiment and in December 1915 is sent to the Front – ten days later in the trenches he is killed in action on 24^th January 1916, aged just twenty-four (he is buried next evening). Freston published his book of poems ‘The Quest of Beauty’ in 1915 and this second volume, published posthumously in 1916 at just under one-hundred pages is a fitting memorial to a fine young man who was at the beginning of his poetic journey before the senseless slaughter of war took him from us, as he says himself in his poem ‘The Quest of Truth’: ‘The new Christ must wear a helmet, / in His hand a gun.’ But Rex seems to accept death as a measure of fate and somehow knew he would not come through it – the same poem ends: ‘better die a faithful failure, / than not to have dared at all.’ Throughout much of this book there is a sense that Rex loved his mother Elizabeth dearly; there was a strong bond between mother and son and there is the ever-present notion that he is foretelling his own death (‘When I am Dead’, ‘Death’). In ‘The Sinner’ he confronts Christ but not in heaven – ‘and there among them as of old / walked One, whom I knew well, / who opened wide His arms to me: / I found my Christ in hell.’ A simple little poem ‘Love’s Shadow’ is almost reminiscent of Alfred Douglas –

‘There was sunshine that day in the garden,

And all the world was fair;

When one passed by singing,

And left a shadow there.

O he passed by singing,

And he was very fair;

And he went on his way singing;

But he left a shadow there.

There is sunshine still in the garden,

And still the world is fair:

But for one, who holds his secret,

The shadow is ever there.’

Freston like all young Oxford poets opening their souls to the world says something of his tender love which has a melancholy air in the poem ‘Despair’, like an awkward adolescent deep in admiration he says: ‘I loved you shyly first and half ashamed, / as young things always love: a quietness, / a patient dignity lay in your eyes; / and round your mouth a curious tenderness.’ The poem goes on to reveal –

‘So did I love your soul: but after years

Of loving that strange sweetness, that I knew

Was your true self, I longed to kiss your lips,

Your hands, your hair: I loved your body too.

But since you never loved me; nor would lend

Or soul or body, I watch the world of men

Carelessly – this man’s eyelids sometimes twitch;

And that man coughs a little now and then…’

This sense of the unrequited continues and he says with almost masochistic tones in the poem ‘Reproof’ – ‘your frown I welcome, having not your smile. / I love you so, your very hate would be / a paradise, your loathing a caress.’ Most enjoyable and not the standard poetry of war one comes to expect from the legions of doomed youth!

Carmina: A Volume of Verse – by James Henry Hallard.

Who is James Henry Hallard? Little seems to be known but we do know that he was born in Edinburgh on 4^th April 1861, went up to Balliol College, Oxford in October 1881 (B.A. 1884) and died in Surrey aged 81 in 1942. So what of his poetry? This volume published in 1899 holds 24 poems, 4 of which are translations. There are some fine pieces such as ‘The Promise of Love’, ‘Broken Heartedness’, ‘To Maud’ and ‘A Boy’s Love’: ‘a Boy, but passionate as man may be, / with less of man’s control, / with hell and heaven flaming in my soul, / despair and ecstasy.’ And so we get a taste of his proclivities which are echoed in ‘An Interlude’: ‘alas for youthful love! Its tender flushing / blurred by a sudden scornful hurricane, / that o’er the spirit’s rosy cloudland rushing / makes Life’s new-risen sun a lurid stain!’ ah that sweet ‘tender flushing’ and that ‘lurid stain’! And as if that wasn’t enough he opens the door wider that his lusts should be exposed further in ‘Passing the Love of Women’ – ‘still glows my heart remembering thy face, / still lives the memory of my bygone joy, / still do I feel thy sweetness and thy grace, / still beats my heart as when I was a boy’. But it is to dignified matters he turns next with ‘The Thames: A Rhapsody’ that ‘River of England! old, heroic stream’ and he writes with enthusiastic passion and a sense of doom upon the notion of continuity as here at the end – ‘unheeding thou shalt flow beneath this span / of heaven’s blue, till this outwearied world / flash from its orb, terrifically hurled / to utter nothingness, and Time shall lie / upon the threshold of Eternity.’ But the tranquillity must return and we find it in the form of Ganymede in ‘Ganymede’s Redivivus’ – ‘yes Ganymede is here among us now, / the gods have lent him for a summer’s day.’ How kind of the gods! And so Hallard drifts into ‘Poems in French and Latin’ before falling exhausted from the ‘Translations from Catullus and Horace’. Some remarkable work with that expectant Oxford flair for the sensual, ‘Carmina’ is a most enjoyable volume and Hallard published several more books which may interest the general voyeur such as: ‘The Idylls of Theocritus’ (translated into English. 1894), ‘Gallica, and Other Essays’ (1895), ‘Gold and Silver: an elementary treatise on bimetalism’ (1897), a translation of ‘Omar Khayyam’ (1912) and ‘Idylls of the Tweed’ (1935).

The Cult of the Purple Rose: A Phase of Harvard Life – by Shirley Everton Johnson.

This volume at nearly two-hundred pages was published in 1902 and the author divides it into five sections: ‘Denholm’s Purple Tea’, ‘The Cult of the Purple Rose’, ‘The Cult Adopts Rules’, ‘Literary Efforts’ and ‘The Cult’s Publication’. The novel is set in 1894 where the air is thoroughly decadent and undergraduates adopt a bohemian attitude to life in the manner of Wilde and Beardsley, and it is here where we find the delicate and somewhat shy young Lucian Denholm, studying English at Harvard who wishes to be popular in College; a nice enough chap but is he suitable material for college societies? well not after he says that he ‘doesn’t care much for societies’. But through certain psychological manipulations, as in giving a ‘Purple Tea’ and entertaining his aesthete friends etc. he is induced to join. All very likeable froth of course and the ‘Green Carnation’ is mentioned by pleasure-loving students spouting epigrams at the drop of a hat and attempting to be brilliant. We learn how the Cult of the Purple Rose is formed and how their periodical, ‘The Pink Mule’ a caricature of ‘The Yellow Book’ is published and the stories and verse it contains, which are given at the end of the book. A ponderous parody? Yes! Pretentious preenings? Yes again! But a harmless distraction!

The Taking of Alba and Other Poems and Translations – by Lord Francis Hervey.

Lord Francis Hervey (1846-1931), we shall not hold his title against him, attended Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford (B.A. 1869), published this volume of verse in 1873 and dedicates it to the Rev. Edmond Warre, his friend and tutor before he gets down to the order of the day: translations into English of Lucretius, Horace, Sappho, Plato and Aeschylus before displaying further dexterity in translating into Latin: Byron, Cowper, Shelley, Longfellow, Sophocles, Henry Vaughan and Berkeley. The strait-laced Hervey delivers a starched tongue translating sacred hymns in Latin and English before enjoying himself as much as a stiff-necked aristocrat with a mind full of Latin text can do with miscellaneous Latin verse and miscellaneous English verse and here his Lordship throws caution to the wind, loosens his collar and tie, unbuttons his shirt and casts his trousers to the wind and all but dances naked under moonlight in a primitive love-dance, for we find old Hervey has a soul and not dust where a heart should be; poems such as 'Haec olim meminisse juvabit’, ‘Song’, ‘How can Love’s eye be true?’, ‘A Question’, ‘Amarum non Amari’ and some rather passable sonnets seem to confirm this although I would not wish the endeavour upon anyone less than an enemy!

The Temple of Friendship – by Vincent Benson.

This volume of poems was published in 1903 and I found it very difficult to be enthusiastic about it. Benson is a competent poet of sorts but a very gloomy one at that and a few pieces stood out from the rest as having some poetic quality on the fringe of being mediocre, such as: the sonnet sequence ‘The Temple of Friendship’, ‘The Thought of Man’, ‘Mnemosyne’, ‘The Heart Knoweth’, ‘O Wind, softer than breath’ but all in all it was a quite dreadful experience. Benson translated Henri Bergson’s ‘A New Philosophy’ in 1913 which I hope was a greater success!

Love-Sonnets – by Evelyn Douglas.

Evelyn Douglas is the pseudonym of John Evelyn Barlas (1860-1914) of New College, Oxford (matriculating in 1879 aged 19 – B.A. 1884) and he was a friend of Oscar Wilde which is worthy of my utmost attention in my book! Also notable on the scale if interesting is the fact that he went out of his mind and spent the end of his days in an asylum which is always a fascinating talking point and essential in the claim of poetic genius. Anyway, ‘Love-Sonnets’ was published in 1889 and through eighty pages (and 64 sonnets) Barlas proves himself a master of the sonnet form and there is a real sense of passion – ‘why are we thus divided having kisses? / why are we yet two bodies and not one?’ (XI). He is technically quite brilliant and much of the sonnets show an influence of Swinburne and Tennyson with that mood of melancholy one finds in Hardy – ‘yes you must die: I can but borrow thee. / Nettles are flowering on some destined grave.’ (XXX) And in the same sonnet we find a ‘black-blue cedar tree’ as if nature herself has absorbed the sadness within – ‘…yes thou must die – die?’ the foreboding continues: ‘dead, dead – why must I love thee? – dead and gone.’ In the next sonnet the theme of death seems overwhelming and the sonnet ends: ‘the bitterness of our funeral love / where each kiss is a lingering farewell.’ Truly beautiful indeed! It is easy to rush through these sonnets thinking them quite insignificant, oh it’s just another dull Victorian baring his soul in poetry, but it is essential to read them slowly and carefully to appreciate them fully.

Poems Lyrical and Dramatic – by Evelyn Douglas.

Barlas again under his pseudonym Evelyn Douglas with his first volume of poetry published in 1884 with 62 poems. There are some lengthy pieces in the volume such as ‘Eucharista Mystica’ – ‘Poet, I warm, I glow / through all my sickening flood; / I faint, I melt, I flow, / I throb throughout thy blood; / I circle round thy brow, / and o’er thy bosom run; / not twain be I and thou, / nay, but one.’ And some fine traditional works in the manner of Greek mythology – ‘HAIL, Queen Artemis, the terror of the deep Arcadian valleys’ (‘Hymn to Artemis’), in fact, Barlas takes much of his inspiration from the Greek classics and is more than familiar with them in poems such as: ‘Hymn to Eros’, ‘Heloise and Abelard’, ‘Alcaeus’, ‘Ode to Euterpe’, ‘Cupid and Psyche’ and ‘The Loved of Apollo’. Recommended!

A Mathematician’s Apology – by G H Hardy.

Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877-1947) of Winchester College, and Trinity College, Cambridge felt the need to write this ‘apology’ which is not an apology as in the seeking of forgiveness but a defence or justification for his subject: mathematics. Hardy specialised in number theory and was a ‘pure mathematician’ and he published this short volume (29 chapters over 56 pages) in 1940 when he was in his sixties and at the end of his mathematical career; it is no wonder that the tone is that of a disappointed man despite his early achievements for he begins the work as he means to continue: ‘it is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.’ (p. 1) He points out that mathematics is a ‘young man’s game’ for one must be ambitious and says by way of an excuse for mathematical apathy that Newton did little after the age of forty and gave it up at fifty. After insulting his reader by saying that ‘most people can do nothing well’ he calls mathematics a ‘perfectly harmless and innocent occupation’ before going on to talk of ‘ambition’ in mathematics in chapter seven, saying that essentially one needs an ‘intellectual curiosity’, a sense of ‘professional pride’ and an egotistical desire for ‘reputation’ and mathematical fame – ‘mathematical fame, if you have the cash to pay for it, is one of the soundest and steadiest of investments.’ (Chapter 8. p. 12) He says that ‘chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics’ (p. 15) and then degrades chess as worthless on a mathematical level – ‘very little of mathematics is useful practically, and that that little is comparatively dull.’ (p. 16) He rightly says that the Greeks were the first real mathematicians which are still ‘real’ to us today with their essential permanence and gives examples with Pythagoras, Euclid’s Theorem of Infinity, and also Fermat’s Two-Square Theorem; just as some whom the gods look down upon are blessed with the capacity to appreciate a score by Bach and see and hear the beauty of the work, equally there are those who truly appreciate the aesthetic quality of a beautiful theorem – Hardy sees mathematics as a creative art form like painting and poetry and states that if the beauty of a theorem as in those examples given are not perceptible then one has no aptitude for mathematics, which is a fair comment, and he then trots off in a mathematical huff to draw the distinction between pure mathematics, a far superior and more beautiful form of the art which has no practical application in the outside ‘real’ world, and applied mathematics, such as geometry, which is inferior, dull and ugly by comparison. Hardy, if one looks into his career had a notable competitive nature and his defence of mathematics is a defence of the self, which although very interesting, can leave one with a sense that he was a very bitter old man indeed!

Prelude: A Novel – by Beverley Nichols.

This is the first novel published by the English writer Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) in 1920 and it is presented in four books: The Prelude (6 chapters), Modulations (7 chapters), Resolutions (7 chapters) and The Last Movement (3 chapters); the book ends upon a Coda. Nichols declares that personages and events are not drawn from reality but we are safe to assume that some of the adventures are autobiographical from the author’s own time at Marlborough College and Balliol College, Oxford, which he entered in 1917. And so the book begins, unveiling its major character, the young Paul Trevelyan in September 1912 on the threshold of entering Martinsell public school; Paul’s father died when he was very young and as an only child he stayed with his mother whom he adores and did not go to private school so he was allowed to develop in imaginative ways, becoming dreamy and effeminate – ‘the boy will grow into a monstrosity if you don’t look out,’ said his Uncle. And so his tranquil life with his mother and his kitten Pasht is to be disrupted by the vulgar necessity of school. Parallels can be drawn between Alec Waugh’s first novel ‘The Loom of Youth’ published three years previously in 1917 which Nichols obviously read and doesn’t mind even boldly mentioning the book in the text as being read by some of the protagonists. And so Paul enters Martinsell School and as we should suspect, not being good at sport, the ‘touchstone of intelligence’, he quickly becomes unpopular and lonely. He tentatively makes one friend after another who seems to drop him, such as Jack Temperley and a boy named Rice who shows signs of excelling in rugby and so the friendship ends at the end of the first term. Alone and wandering through the Forrest one day Paul comes upon a house and decides to ask for tea, the maid shows him in and we meet the mysterious parson, the Vicar of Hadley (two miles from Martinsell). The Vicar, Mr. Carstairs we are informed is a man in his thirties who also attended Martinsell fifteen years ago and like Paul was in ‘A House’ and  terribly lonely, so much so that he ran away. His advice to young Paul over tea is to make friends for they will get him through his time at school. A little later in the book there is the scent of a scandal as the Vicar of Hadley is referred to as ‘rather a notorious blighter’ for he was ‘bunked’ from Martinsell but Paul is not told what for; the reader of course does not have to have read the ‘Memoirs of a Voluptuary’ (1908) to understand what the author is inferring. In April 1913 Paul enters Down House or ‘D House’ as it is known under the Housemaster Dr. Peregrine Storey and Paul’s next friend is a boy named Harrington who is good at game and a scholar; both sing in the choir.  One of the Masters, a Balliol man named O’Rane known as ‘Padsy’ is running a Prize on Erasmus; Paul enters and wins with his essay, being the only competitor. In the Army Training Corps Paul meets a young dilettante named Cecil and the two join the Signallers and become friends (Jack Temperley is in the Corps too whom Paul still secretly likes). After discovering Paul is a good runner, the School Captain, a handsome ‘blood’ named David Rufus invites Paul to tea, a great honour, Paul being younger. Rufus is looked upon as a sporting hero at the school and greatly admired. Paul, taking Rufus as an example of how to be popular, enters the school races and wins two outright before coming second in the hurdles and third in the ‘hundred yards’; Paul collapses with a bad heart and Rufus tends to him with great tenderness in his study, and one might say, falls in love with the younger boy. Paul is sent from school to recover at home. When Paul returns to school Paul wants to break their friendship as he does not want the young chap to get hurt by rumours; there has been talk about Rufus indulging in peculiar friendships at the school. The outbreak of war ends the second book.

Book three sees Rufus gain a commission in the Guards and Paul gets his own study which he chooses to share with Harrington and they decorate it to their tastes and give fantastic teas – Paul wanted to share his study with Jack Temperley and to get Harrington out of the way Paul puts ipecacuanha in his soup which makes him sick and from then on Paul interferes with all his food and drink; eventually, Harrington decides to move out and share with another next term. There is a wonderful little passage at the end of book three between Paul and Mr. Carstairs, the Vicar of Hadley when they are in his garden picking violets which the older man gives to Paul – ‘as they went in Paul paused. “I feel that with all lovely things you want to be able to touch them as well as see them.” Carstairs looked at him curiously. “How do you mean?”

“Well, flowers and things; I feel I simply want to squash those violets.” They paused on the steps.

“I know you do – I saw that as soon as I ever met you. But Paul, you’re making the greatest mistake of your life. For instance, the violets, what happens if you crush them?”

“They smell all the sweeter.”

“Yes – and for how long?” Paul laughed. “You always go one step further than I do.”

“And what has become of the beauty of your violet when you’ve crushed it?” He looked beyond Paul into the darkening Forest. “What’s become of its beauty?” He pointed to the Forest. “Look out there.”

Paul looked. “Yes?”

“Well, that’s the vision – a perfectly lovely thing – almost dark now. And what is it really? Something that’s got its roots in clay and dung. You can’t do it – you can’t crush your violets – I’ve tried to.” He spoke bitterly.

Paul took his arm. “But look here, to go on with the metaphor – aren’t there enough flowers in the world to go on crushing them and crushing them, and they’ll still smell sweet?”

Carstairs looked at him sadly. “There may be”, he said, “there may be. But it’s usually only one flower that matters.” (p. 184-185)

And so during the next term of Lent, Paul shares a study with Jack Temperley. Paul becomes a specialist in History and his essay on the Art of the French Impressionists shows great promise but all is not well as Jack becomes attached to a younger boy named Northcote who does splendid mimicry and makes him laugh; Paul obviously becomes jealous – the astute Cecil realises the truth of Paul not being himself – the ‘green-eyed monster’ before it all erupts into a tirade of tears (‘Broken Melodies’) and confessions when Paul says to Jack: ‘Oh, there are times when I should like to kill you, by God, you brute. You’ve been the cause of everything that’s spoiled things here for me. You’ve led me on and on and then turned away. My God, I’d like to kill you and torture you and beat you. You’ve been cruel to me – I don’t see why I shouldn’t be cruel to you.” He pushed open a little drawer and took out a bottle. “D’you see that? – that’s chloroform. I’ve taken a pretty strong dose of that before now because of you, and it’s been pretty nearly you many of these days. Very melodramatic, isn’t it? No? oh, sorry, I forgot – I’m never melodramatic – merely boring.” (p. 213-214) Apologies and forgiveness follows all round and the friendship is strong again.

During the vacation Paul is bored of church and goes to the Brompton Oratory where he is overwhelmed by rapture with Catholicism. When Summer term begins, Cecil, who is concerned for Paul, informs his friend and Master, Mr. Sargeant about Paul’s thoughts towards Roman Catholicism – ‘he’s reading nothing but Francis Thompson now, his room stinks of incense, and he carries a crucifix about with him and goes to Mass and all that sort of thing.’ (p. 227) Cecil, a confirmed atheist confronts Paul and accuses him of being taken in by the glamour of the Catholic Church, the aesthetic elements that ensnare the romantically minded; Cecil’s cynicism makes Paul realise his mistake and at the end of book three – ‘after chapel he went slowly down to the wilderness and sat down by the bathing-pool. By and by he drew from his pocket the little crucifix that had started all the trouble. He dropped it rather wistfully into the water and watched it dive with a little flash of silver into the deep black weeds below.’ (p. 236-7)

In book four, Paul and Cecil go to Oxford in 1915 for examinations and Paul is awarded the Exhibition Scholarship for Modern History at the University of Oxford; we learn that Rufus has become a Captain and still writes to Paul from the Front and then we find Paul staying with Cecil and his father and the two boys go to the Café Royal to soak up some of its bohemian atmosphere; Paul seems decidedly unimpressed, and then a little later Cecil takes Paul up in a plane. All very jolly of course but then in the Coda we are told the tragedy that Rufus is dead and now Paul Beaumont Trevelyan, that young effeminate boy who developed into a young gentleman at Martinsell, has fallen in battle in December 1916; the young officer died of wounds after being in France only six weeks before going missing at the Ypres Salient. At just shy of three-hundred pages, ‘Prelude’ has been a marvellous read with some excellent character development and evolution and all from a young prolific author who went on to write over sixty books. This is not just a story about Paul Trevelyan, but hundreds of young men like him who sprung from their childhood at public schools and were shaped by education and men of rigorous ideals only to be trampled into the trenches as bricks of flesh against mortar shells – a disgusting and shameful waste of life which shows how the intricacies of life which becomes infused with many other lives around become insignificant by war. Genuinely beautifully written and an essential classic!

The Idylls of Theocritus, translated into English Verse – by James Henry Hallard.

Published in 1901, Hallard does a pretty good job of translating these ‘idylls’ by Theocritus of Syracuse and says with pride in the preface that it was a ‘labour of love, and therefore a delight’; the love and the delight are more than obvious as one reads this volume and the author confesses that he has had to take some liberties to give these thirty songs the same sense of spirit in English as one gets from the original Greek, for instance as a general rule he uses blank verse for dialogue and description, anapaestic hexameters for lyric passages and dactylic hexameters for narrative. Among some of the idylls are: ‘The Song of the Death of Daphnis’, ‘The Incantation’ (‘ah, me, for I am all aflame for him / that left me not a wife nor yet a maid’), ‘The Desperate Lover’, ‘The Triumph of Daphnis’, ‘Polyphemus’s Complaint’, ‘The Passionate Friend’, ‘The Rape of Hylas’, ‘The Vengeance of Love’, ‘The Lover’s Complaint’ and ‘The Lover’s Lament’ – Hallard has great fun in these saucy, bawdy and bucolic tales of singing contests and course and vulgar herdsmen and no doubt many scholars and classicists will be divided over Hallard’s rendition of the idylls and pick holes in the textual authenticity of the translations which are easily over-emphasised in its aspects of the sensual or thoroughly stilted and dull; Hallard manages to walk both lines at the same time and I almost enjoyed it as much as the author, but not quite!

Sexuality, Magic and Perversion – by Francis King.

Published in 1971 (I read a 1974 paperback edition), Francis King, who certainly has a way with titles, completely redeems himself in my eyes after I forced myself to read his dreadful ‘Secret Rituals of the OTO’. In over two-hundred pages and three parts: ‘A Witch, a Pornographer and Oriental Sex Magic’, ‘The Occidental Background’ and ‘Sexuality and Magic in the Modern World’, King goes into great depth and is quite bold (chapter one is titled ‘A Dildo for a Witch’) in his investigations and in part one we find an enigmatic fellow by the name of Edward Sellon (1818-1866), a Captain in the army, a coach-driver, fencing-master and a pornographer, in fact he is ‘the man whose writings had first brought Tantricism to the attention of occidental occultists.’ (p. 9) Sellon published his influential ‘Annotations upon the Sacred Writings of the Hindus’ in 1865 and King quotes freely from his autobiography ‘The Ups and Downs of Life’ (1867) which has some fascinating points, but on the whole King says that ‘Sellon’s failure to arrive at any faint conception of the inner philosophy of Tantricism completely invalidated his interpretation of the cult.’ (p. 29) After a life of sexual indulgence and adventure Sellon shot himself and thus fades from history another forward-thinking man! And so King saunters through Buddhist and Hindu tantric practices and Chinese Sexual Alchemy (the Tao, Yin and Yang) before arriving at part two at ‘Primitive Fertility Cults’. Chapter six ‘The Great Mother Falls on Evil Days’ grabbed my attention as it speaks of ‘The Sacred Magic of Abra Melin the Mage’, something I am particularly fond of; ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ and the Devil in Witchcraft – the Blood Sacrifice; and with the door of darkness fully open we step inside the temple to find the next chapter discussing ‘Masses – Black, White and Amatory’ and meeting such gentle souls of debauchery as the Abbe Guilbourg and Madame de Montespan, before rising to the occasion with ‘Priapus Rediscovered’ and authors such as Richard Payne Knight and his ‘Essay on the Worship of Priapus’ (1786) and the sexual symbolism of Hargrave Jennings. Part three opens with ‘Templarism and Sex Magic’ which most occultists and ceremonial magicians will be familiar with – the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) with its alchemical symbolism which was founded by the German Karl Kellner; in 1905 when Kellner died Theodore Reuss assumed the Headship of the OTO, and so we reach the zenith of chapter ten – ‘Enter Baphomet’:  The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley. King includes the ‘Supreme Ritual’ and mentions The Paris Working which Crowley undertook with Victor Neuburg (Crowley became Head of the OTO when Reuss died in 1922). Chapter eleven introduces us to sigils, Karl Germer and astrological sex magic – ‘Saturn-Gnosis, Sex Magic, and Planetary Aspects’ and chapter twelve brings some light relief with the curious ‘Bishop and the Boy’ and anyone who has studied Theosophy will no doubt be familiar with the identity of the ‘Bishop’ for it is none other than that old ex-Anglican curate and influential Theosophist, Charles Webster Leadbetter (1847-1934) who had some unsavoury ways with teaching young boys to masturbate. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1879 and had a curacy in Hampshire before meeting the seemingly mesmerising figure of Madame Blavatsky in 1885 and so the spell was woven. Leadbetter spent several years in India and Ceylon but had to resign from the Theosophical Society due to his masturbatory habits with boys and a subsequent trial, but the old devil was not down! After the death of the Theosophical big-wig, Colonel Olcott, Leadbetter saw his chance to once again grease his palms so to speak and climb his way back into favour with the Society (he was instrumental in the rise of Krishnamurti and all that old tosh) and so in 1909 he was back in and no doubt up to his old tricks. In 1913 he went to Australia, probably to escape more rumours and a possible scandal and safe down-under he was made a Bishop! But there is no evidence to suggest that Leadbetter was utilising dark, occult techniques – ‘however odd his sexual beliefs, whatever his relationships with some of his pupils may have been, he was not “a Black Magician using homosexual activities to create a reservoir of astral power” – there is not a shadow of proof for the allegations made by Dion Fortune and accepted unthinkingly by so many occultists’ (p. 141), no but it is an interesting concept nonetheless and wouldn’t he have made a charming dinner guest! Let us pass quickly through the next chapter – ‘Sexual Magic in the United States’ for it is all now too familiar: Charles S. Jones, Jack Parsons and Agape Lodge, Kenneth Anger, Pierre Bernard, Anton La Vey and the Church of Satan etc. and chapter fourteen: ‘Magicians, the Orgasm and the Works of Wilhelm Reich’ and fifteen, ‘A Whip for Aradia’ which takes a dip into Sado-Masochism, and sixteen, ‘The Future of Sexual Magic’ to arrive at the Appendices to which there are six: Appendix A – ‘The Dildo in History’ is an eye-wateringly frank, yet brief account of the penis-shaped pleasure aid through history – B ‘Robert Graves, Witches and Islamic Mysticism’ – C ‘Copulating with Cleopatra’ (the Prophet Vintras, Abbe Boullan and the Church of Carmel) – D ‘Another Sex Magic Ritual’, in fact, Crowley’s ‘Ritual to Invoke Hice [Isis] or any other Divine One’ – E ‘Ralph Chubb, Boy Love, and William Blake’, anyone who is enthusiastic about the uranians will come across the name of Ralph Chubb at some point and this is a fascinating glimpse into the world of Ralph Nicholas Chubb (1892-1960) who was born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire and moved to St. Albans. He won a scholarship to Selwyn College, Cambridge in 1910, was a great chess player and artist and attained his BA in 1913. He enlisted in the Army in 1914 (Loos 1915) and was mentioned in dispatches; as a Captain he was invalided out in 1918 and studied at the Slade School of Art; he built his own printing press with his brother in Berkshire and began printing his illuminated works in the manner of William Blake. Chubb is an absolutely fascinating though rather neglected figure in literature and his quasi-occult, erotic works are rare – ‘Manhood’ (1924), ‘The Sacrifice of Youth’ (1924), ‘Fable of Love and War’ (1925), ‘The Book of God’s Madness’ (1928), ‘Songs of Mankind’ (1930) and several more equally marvellous publications. King rounds the book off with Appendix F ‘Crowleyanity in Switzerland’ – yes it is one of those books that have attained cult-like status among a certain readership; yes it is cited frequently and listed in many distinguished books on the subject and yes it has become highly sought after and no matter what one thinks about the author and his sensational title tactics (ahead of his time perhaps) this is a well-written, well-illustrated (thirteen illustrations) volume that delivers just what the title says it does – Sexuality, Magic and Perversion!

Songs of Adieu – by Lord Henry Somerset.

First of all who is this scoundrel Lord Somerset? He is Lord Henry Richard Charles Somerset (1849-1932) 2nd son of the 8th Duke of Beufort and he was a politician and a composer of harmless ditties. This volume of poetry came to fruition after his wife, Lady Isabella (they were married in 1872) discovered he had been carrying on with a seventeen year old common boy named Henry Smith, in fact, he had known the youth since the age of seven and was completely infatuated by him and lost his head (and his heart) to the young fellow – the marriage collapsed and Lady Henry sued Lord Henry for custody of their only child, Henry Charles Somers Augustus which she won in 1878 and his Lordship went to live in exile in France and Italy to avoid the scandal and probably prison. The romance with the youth severed, Somerset, aged forty, published this volume of poems, fifty-four in fact, in 1889, a volume which morbidly rakes through the embers of the relationship – he writes as if the boy has died physically although I am not sure if this is just a literary device, as the poet stoops beside a grave to pick a flower – ‘for from that flower to me / there came a lingering, long-forgotten scent, / and straightway a strange throb of memory / through my heart went.’ [‘Buried Memories’] and he continues in the same poem, to dig down and ‘there at rest they lay, / the dear, dead bones of memories still sweet.’ This is getting into some dark obsessive territory here for we reach the end of the poem to find ‘then my hard heart I hurled / into that grave, and laid it low beside / those bones beloved – then to the outer world / in them it died.’ The grieving lover continues in the next poem, ‘Come Back!’ saying ‘I CANNOT live without thee – oh, come back! / come back to him that, weeping, waits for thee’. Somerset travels over some familiar ground as he re-traces his steps where he and his young lover dallied – ‘and let me see sometimes a moment’s peace / in listening to your songs that are so fair: / perchance in them my heart awhile shall cease / from dull despair’ [‘The Birds in Dean’s Court, St Pauls’]. In the poem ‘Finished’ he reaches out to God, implores Him bitterly – ‘Thou beauteous god! imperial monarch! Love! / that holdest in thy hand the lives of men, / why dost thou show thy fair face from above, / and, having toyed with us, draw back again?’ The poet goes on to say finally: ‘Finished! finished! the love, the life, the day!’ the melancholy devotion does not cease and we find him writing in ‘The Exile’ – ‘yea, dear one, morning, noon, and night, / I think, and weep, and pray for thee, / and through my tears my one delight / is born of thy dear memory. / My life with thine is past o’er, / we can but weep for evermore!’ Of course there are some fine poems of heartbreak here: ‘Ten Years Ago’, ‘Two Roses and a Lily’, ‘Have You No Word?’, ‘Forget You?’, ‘O My Dear One!’, ‘I Love You!’ and ‘Remember Me!’ well he is hardly likely to forget you after the continuous pestering and adulation you throw upon the poor lad in the grave, if indeed he does rest in the grave? And so we come to the end of the book after just over one-hundred wrist-cutting pages of love’s bleak torment and the final poem ‘Forsaken’ in which Somerset must accept the stark reality of death and the final parting: ‘Ah! now, a blight on all the roses, / Death to the dream of a life divine! - / so must it be, since thus you wish it, / so must it be, I know, for aye - / and this my answer – O God bless you! - / love, loved so dearly, Good-bye! Good-bye!’ When Oscar Wilde reviewed the book he said that it 'has nothing to say and he says it', which is a fine observation but perhaps a little harsh, Lord Somerset is no poet but for sheer audacity he rightly deserves some applause.

Desiderium MCMXV-MCMXVIII – by Norman Davey.

Norman Davey (1888-1948) was an engineer who attended Clare College, Cambridge from 1907-10 and served as a soldier in the Great War with the Royal Engineers; he wrote several novels, his most popular being ‘The Pilgrim of Smile’ (1921). This volume of poems was published in 1920 and it is divided into three books. Davey proves himself a fine poet and in Book One (my particular favourite book of the three) we find the poem ‘A Word in Fealty’ in which the author writes with almost Betjeman-like clarity and humour – ‘when first I had seen you and claimed you / for worship under the sun, / Wendy and Peter I named you; / boy and girl in one’ and later on we find: ‘dearest in dual gender, / Wendy and Peter Pan’. In the poem ‘The House’ there is an almost menacing foreboding – ‘safe in its wattled home, the timorous hare / quaking at unknown sounds and sudden sway / of grasses in the still, untroubled air, / not at your footsteps rose and ran away’, and again in the same poem: ‘sometimes on summer nights you stole away / into the quiet dark, gracious and cool, / and on the cliff-edge, gazing downward, lay / counting the stars drowned in St. Swithin’s Pool’. Davey can be sharp and cruel as we find here in the poem ‘A Quarrel’ when he refers to a girl as ‘still in her teens: a black-haired chit; / what is it that you see in it? / I met her once; a prig, a scold; / in years too young: in mind too old’ and the insults fly thick and fast when he goes on to say that ‘her mouth is large: her hair is thin: / she has no colour in her skin.’ and ends with the simple plea: ‘take me and kiss me, face to face; / so that to show our troth is riven / I can return your kisses given.’ His poems can be whimsical and even harsh in their observations and in Book Two he relates in poetic form his travelling in Tuscany with his friend Jack and Book Three concludes with his six ‘Sonnets out of Sequence’ which are satisfactory as sonnets go but not stupendously brilliant. An enjoyable read indeed – ‘I yet remained disdainful of your spell - / inept, incurious, and infidel.’ [‘A Word of Farewell’]

Oxford Verses – Edited by Rosslyn Bruce.

Rosslyn Bruce (1871-1956), a clergyman of Worcester College has sought to perform a miracle and attempted the impossible in turning this sow’s ear into a silk purse; he fails miserably and slips one of his own poetic attempts in for good measure, as if it could inflate this sinking ship. Not that I would wish to discredit Mr. Bruce’s ambitious editing of this volume published in 1894 for it does have the odd glimmer of salvation among the twenty-one poets it displays with their forty-four poems – there’s that old rascal Lawrence Binyon (1869-1943) of Trinity College, Oxford whose memorable poem ‘For the Fallen’ has kept bread on his table (and wine in his cellar); M. T. Pigott (1865-1948), A. Godley (1856-1925), Stanley Addleshaw and Morley Richards… but like a diamond atop of mud there lay the good Reverend George Gabriel Scott Gillett (1873-1948) of Westminster School and Keble College, Oxford to lift the proceedings with his ‘Love Songs’ (he published a volume of verse, ‘A Garden of Song’ in 1923 which must be worth hunting out!). On the whole a hundred pages of third-rate disappointment which attempted to prove that ‘poets never die, but live sublime / in the sweet measure of their deathless rhyme’ (‘Poetic Immortality’, Lord Rosslyn) but with a few minor exceptions: poor!

Flowers of Passion – by George Moore.

An air of mystery surrounds this first volume of verse by the Irish novelist and poet George Moore (1852-1933) published in 1878 for like all young poets he wished to throw bile and phlegm upon the waters of his macabre seductions and swagger in sin like the notorious Baudelaire and Swinburne, well, the thirty poems, twelve of which are sonnets, and each one like ‘roses that have grown / bitter as frothing of blood’ (‘Dedication: To L__’) certainly got him noticed! It was brandished a depraved book for depicting quaint old scenes of rural England and other sweet pastimes – lesbianism, homosexuality, incest, suicide and necrophilia, challenging the notion of masculinity and sexuality at a time when such things only went on at the local vicarage – ‘a darkling void cloaked in a clinging night / unstirred by any light?’ (‘Ode to a Dead Body’); the same poem goes on ‘poor breasts! whose nipples sins alone have fed. / Poor desecrated head!’ and further still: ‘I gaze upon thy face now changed in death / in fear and awe-held breath, / and ponder if this clay-built tenement / be of divine intent’. In one of the twelve sonnets, ‘The Corpse’, the romance of death continues and one finds the beautiful ‘bosom rent / is opening rose-like ‘neath the sun’s warm ray’. Of course all this sexual surrendering plays havoc with one’s constitution and so we have some light relief in the form of a lovely little poem in four scenes – ‘Ginevra’ which is set like all great love tragedies in Verona; here we find Antonio telling his friend Orisino about Antonio’s ‘unholy passion’, his sexual desire for his own sister, Ginevra for they have been lovers for a long time as brother and sister until their father took Ginevra to the convent. The siblings have arranged an assignation in the cemetery (scene II) so that they may run away together. Secretly Orisino is disgusted by this for he loves Ginevra too and intends to kill his friend Antonio. It all gets very messy and as the siblings are kissing in Antonio’s chamber, Orisino is outside the door listening; Ginevra vanishes into thin air for she is the departed spirit of Antonio’s sister and Orisino rushes in and kills Antonio! And so in a fever of erotic un-sustainability we are dispelled, or is that discharged? As readers and go like the lost soul ‘thro’ pathless wastes of heaven unknown / my soul did wander thus in fear, / seeking the yet unrisen sun, / not knowing whither side to steer’ [‘Ballad of a Lost Soul’]. It will come as no surprise that impressed with Mr. Moore’s elegant and disturbing images I went on to read his next collection ‘Pagan Poems’ of 1881 and found another twenty-six poems (some from ‘Flowers of Passion’) to titillate and stimulate any novice just as the corpses in his ‘Ode to a Beggar Girl’ – ‘amused me for a while’; yes there is the same lascivious intentions and one might even say the poems have a shadow of Hardy to them, but a young and virile Hardy with lust ever-present in his mind. Definitely worth reading!

Monographs – by William Frederick Allen.

The forty-nine poems produced in this volume from 1919 have an ultra-modern quality about them (I find many of the American poets from Whitman onwards have this same notion of progress and looking towards the future) and there are certainly some good, expressive lines here – ‘on when the pensive daylight dies / he dreams on thee’ (‘Hyacinthus’), ‘we gather up dead dreams as diamond dust / and shape new dreams, the better for their death!’ (‘Seers of Vision’), ‘his look fends thought from my speech, / why show him pomegranates he never can reach?’ (‘The Stoker’). The initial admiration (he could almost be a ‘New Elizabethan’) turned much to frustration with Mr. Allen for although there are some quite mesmerising stanzas – ‘my veins time sluggish to the cast-off dead / who “rest eternal – light perpetual keep” - / mere deadwood, hush of summer fire and green?’ (‘Bewilderment’) he does insist on littering his verse with ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ and by the end of the book I was as sick of ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ as it is possible to be! However, the author did publish a book of sonnets in 1911 ‘In Sonnet Wise’ under the name Fred Raphael Allen which may be worth a look as soon as I get the foul taste of the God-Christ from my mouth!

A Portrait of a Generation – by Robert McAlmon.

This 1926 publication at around one-hundred pages contains the author’s piece ‘The Revolving Mirror’ and sections of the book are divided into ‘Fragments and Miscellany’, ‘Jewels, Vegetables and Fish’ and ‘Contemporary Irritations and Didactics’. I know very little about the American author Robert McAlmon (1896-1956) but the book has some rather lovely and witty works which seem conversational and gossipy yet abstract. In ‘Romance I’ we find an Italian labourer working in a quarry who is hit by a stone and injured. He is taken to hospital where the ‘nurses undressed that gorilla of a man. / They got a shock. / His body was shaved. / He had on women’s chemise / with ribbons at his breast. / He had on lady’s silk stockings. / A surprise that to the nurses, / and they get used to a good deal.’ He unfortunately died two days later! In ‘Romance IV’ we learn that the author ‘aint had so much fun / since the day ma caught her tit in the wringer.’ The book is also interspersed with ‘Historical Reminiscence’ – here is part of one: ‘those great days of blood and lust / when father raped daughter / and son raped brother, / while all men rushed without breeches / into battle, / committing buggery and fornication / with great gusto / all whilst on horseback’, which is almost a perfect description of the English monarchy! pre-Victoria of course, we’re not savages! Anyway, I went on to read McAlmon’s earlier volume, ‘Explorations’ from 1921 with its four parts: ‘Surf of the Dead Sea’ (‘White Males’), ‘Air Rhythms’, ‘Prose Sketches’ and ‘From Adolescence to Intelligence’ and came away most perplexed! Quite good!

Witchcraft Today – by Gerald Gardner.

This is a classic on the subject from witch and author Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884-1964) published in 1954 shortly after the witchcraft laws were repealed in England in 1951. Most people were unaware that witches still existed let alone practiced the ‘old tradition’ due to the fact that they had to remain secret for fear of persecution which history shows became a sort of mania in society. Gardner strikes the right tone in dispelling wrongly accumulated myths and tunes into that interest and curiosity from a mostly ignorant population who have been force-fed stereotypical imagery of the old evil hag on the broomstick casting spells and consorting with demonic spirits. The book with its thirteen chapters (of course there would be thirteen) goes into great detail on the origins of witchcraft from the earliest theories from the stone age through to the murderous hatred of the Church of England and the Puritans. Dr. Gardner (actually a self-assumed ‘Doctor’) delights in telling us that witches were not involved in the Black Mass with the ‘unfrocked priest’, or at least not to his knowledge which sometimes falls short of perfect as he does not always seem confident of his theories but on other matters he is reliably rigid; he states correctly concerning the difference between the circle in witchcraft and from a ceremonial ‘ritual’ magic point of view for in witchcraft within the circle the witch is ‘between worlds’ and the circle keeps the power inside the circle, preventing dissipation; from the ceremonial or ‘diabolic’ aspect, the circle, with its names of protection, keeps the harmful spirits outside and the magician cannot leave the circle’s circumference as opposed to witchcraft where the witch can move freely in and out of the circle. Gardner drools over the fact that witches perform their craft naked, for ‘being realists’ they ‘have few inhibitions and if they want to produce certain effects they do so in the most simple way.’ (Chapter 1: ‘Living Witchcraft’). The great-wanded one goes on to describe the ‘Myth of the Great Mother’ and the ‘Horned God of hunting’ stressing that the woman (not the old hag of fiction and misrepresentation, but a beautiful maiden) as a representative of the Goddess is always dominant in the cult. That old murdering tyrant in cahoots with the Church of England, Mathew Hopkins, certainly got his pound of flesh from witch-mania – he was paid a ‘pound a head for all convictions’, the fact that most if not all of his victims did not practice witchcraft seemed neither here nor there, under torture, the most ardent believer in Christ will admit to salacious activities from cavorting with the Devil to murdering children – such persecution has sadly gone on within the Church and amongst other faiths for centuries and even in modern day culture it continues. The ‘mysterious’ Druids and the fact that witches believe in reincarnation are all very interesting and even his mention of the ‘Little People’ gets past one’s sentry of credibility but then in Chapter four, ‘Witch Practices’ he says that ‘the only man I can think of who could have invented the rites was the late Aleister Crowley’. They had met in 1947. Gardner goes on: ‘When I met him he was most interested to hear that I was a member, and said he had been inside when he was very young, but would not say whether he had rewritten anything or not.’ Here Gardner is suggesting that Crowley was a) a member of a witch coven, possibly under Old George Pickingill (as Doreen Valiente suggested in her book ‘Witchcraft for Tomorrow’ in 1978) and that b) Crowley was responsible for writing all or some of the Rites. Nowhere does Crowley mention being involved in Witchcraft but it is possible that Gardner ‘borrowed’ or had Crowley assist him with certain aspects of the rites, rites of which Gardner is only too familiar to tell us that he is forbidden to mention – ‘now I have seen things I’m forbidden to talk about, and quite admittedly I’m superstitious because of what I have seen of witches’ powers’. Well, perhaps he has good reason to be cautious for anyone working within occult circles will know that the power of the craft is very real and although most witches are forbidden to do harm (although it is well within their power to do so) there is always the possibility of being drawn to darker aspects, as in any spiritual or religious society or ‘cult’; I think that old Gardner would be surprised at the growth of witchcraft and its popularity within the media and film, its acceptance (almost) with today’s multi-beliefs and practices and that is why Witchcraft Today is still relevant today and tomorrow! Excellent!

The Happy Wanderer and Other Poems – by Percy Hemingway.

Percy Hemingway is the pseudonym of that well-travelled barrister and writer of Christ Church, Oxford, William Percy Addleshaw (1866-1916) who published a book of short stories ‘Out of Egypt’ in 1894 and not to mention a biography of Sir Philip Sidney. There are some fine pieces in the volume like his ‘In Memoriam Roden Noel (obit May 26^th 1894)’ – ‘the doors are shut, the locks are sealed, / and many weep above your grave, / some for the secrets unrevealed, / and all remembering what you gave.’ Addleshaw was a friend of the poet Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel (1834-1894) the 3^rd son of the Earl of Gainsborough who attended Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge – Noel abandoned Holy Orders and became a poet, some would say he made a wrong decision, but nevertheless a poet he became and Addleshaw wrote the biographical and critical preface to Noel’s ‘Selected Poems’ of 1897 which I though wise to read before plunging into ‘The Happy Wanderer’ – Addleshaw takes thirty-two and a half pages to lament over his friend and what he says is actually infinitely better than the thirty-nine dire poems of Noel within the book!  Anyway, ‘The Happy Wanderer’, (what makes him happy?) has over forty poems and twenty-three quatrains to contend with which are like drinking a cheap burgundy and feeling a little cheated, but we can forgive Addleshaw and sip freely as when he heard about his friend John Addington Symonds’ death he was startled ‘when a harsh voice proclaimed that you were dead’; it seems his friends are dropping like flies upon a windowsill! Another good poem is ‘This Summer Night’ and ‘The Tyrant’ – ‘madman am I, who give my vote for death, / yet heed not the grim hand that beckoneth.’ And of course what self-respecting volume of poetry would not be complete without a sweet dish of ‘Eros and Psyche’? – ‘LOVE did not leave his bride long destitute, / but hastened back to kiss away her pain; / and yet man’s soul knows no such happy fate, / whose joys once fled will not return again.’ How true!

Interflow: Poems, Chiefly Lyrical – by Geoffrey Faber.

Geoffrey Cust Faber (1889-1961) is of course a founding editor of the renowned ‘Faber and Faber’ publishing company who was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford and this 1915 publication contains 78 of his poems. There are some fine, if rather unmemorable pieces here, songs of love and war poems all very lyrical and sensual and a rather nice poem on the death of Rupert Brooke which ends with the bitterness of finality – ‘how Glory might have winged his name / with now unspoken words, words ever unspoken!’ Faber is also the author of ‘Oxford Apostles’ (1933) which surely must be added to one’s reading list! Very good!

The Green Window – by Vincent O’Sullivan.

Vincent O’Sullivan (1868-1940) was an American writer of short stories, poetry and criticisms in the decadent style; a friend of Oscar Wilde and he calls this volume ‘The Green Window’ published in 1899 a ‘book of monologues’ which reveals his intention for them to be read aloud. The book is divided into 25 prose sketches which are observational and philosophical in turn and somewhat strangely titled, such as ‘Sob’, ‘White’, ‘Crave’ and ‘Rush’; the latter has this to say: ‘it is a good point of wisdom to arrange your plans in tranquillity so that when the time comes for quick action you may appear to your opponents indolent and trifling.’ (p. 55-56) In ‘Owe’ O’Sullivan delivers a logical examination of the parent’s expectations of the child, and in ‘Was’ there is a look at ‘death and sleep’. I felt there was a feminine quality to the author’s style of writing which for me seemed to drift between the macabre nature of Algernon Blackwood and the intensely claustrophobic interior monologues of Katherine Mansfield. Quite delightful!

The Rebirth of Witchcraft – by Doreen Valiente.

I absolutely love Valiente’s style of writing since first reading her book ‘Witchcraft for Tomorrow’ (1978) and ‘The Rebirth of Witchcraft’ published in 1989 ( I read a 2007 edition) is a perfect introduction to the ‘old craft of the wise’ – witchcraft. Before my own interest and involvement in ceremonial magic I felt a natural inclination towards witchcraft and to this day it seems a perfectly sensible expression of one’s spiritual essence and unlike the passive devotional sublimation of Christianity, witchcraft actually works! In thirteen chapters Doreen Valiente (1922-1999) pieces together the facts that we already know of traditional witchcraft and seeks historical confirmation, beginning at the trial of Helen Duncan in 1944, the last witch trial in England, looking at the reform of the witchcraft act of 1735 in 1951, stressing that the same year saw the publication of John Symonds’ biography of Aleister Crowley, ‘The Great Beast’; these two factors, along with a third: the opening of the Witches’ Mill at Castletown on the Isle of Man, instigated the ‘Rebirth of Witchcraft’. She briefly outlines the literary forerunners which helped create interest in the old religion, such as the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) whose ‘Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches’ (1899) is still influential; and Margaret Alice Murray’s ‘The Witch-Cult in Western Europe’ (1921) and ‘The God of the Witches’ (1931) along with Robert Graves’ 1946 masterpiece, ‘The White Goddess’. And so we come to the enigmatic figure of Gerald Gardner and Valiente’s introduction to the craft in 1952 through an article in a weekly called ‘Illustrated’, titled – ‘Witchcraft in Britain’ by Allen Andrews which mentioned the New Forest witch coven and Mr. Cecil Williamson’s Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on the Isle of Man. Valiente, who was living in Bournemouth with her husband, had been on a quest for occult knowledge finding Dion Fortune’s ‘The Mystical Qabalah’ which led to Symonds’s ‘The Great Beast’ and thus to Crowley’s ‘Magick in Theory and Practice’ which she found in the library, how scandalous! She wrote to Cecil who forwarded her letter to Gerald and the rest is history as they say and they met in the autumn of 1952 at Christchurch; Gerald had been initiated by Old Dorothy Clutterbuck in the New Forest and he in turn initiated Doreen Valiente in 1953. In chapter four she explores the techniques of working with Gerald and the concept and origin of the Book of Shadows which he devised before informing us that Gerald had told her that he met Crowley in 1946 and the Great Beast made Gerald a member of the O.T.O. – sex plays an important part in most occult societies, as in witchcraft through ritual flagellation and of course the Great Rite or the ‘Sacred Marriage’. Valiente found the influence of Crowley in Gardner’s Book of Shadows too overwhelming and offered to re-write it herself which she did. She looks at the origins of the Watchtowers at the cardinal points of the circle, the four angelic guardians and Gerald’s indiscretions with Fleet Street as he sought (somewhat naively) publicity through sensational statements (and absurd lies); eventually following the press attacks the coven split in the summer of 1957 and a deep trust in Gerald was also broken. Also of interest is Doreen’s own account from August 1964-May 1966 in chapter 7 ‘A Voice from the Past’ of her communications with a discarnate spirit of a traditional witch named John Brakespeare before we become consumed by several figures known within witchcraft circles such as the powerful witch Robert Cochrane who attacked the ‘Gardnerian’ witches; a man who was ‘obsessed with the question of the ritual use of herbal psychedelic drugs.’ (p. 133) Cochrane was definitely mentally unbalanced and following a suicide threat he eventually carried out his own destruction. And then there is the paranormal investigator, Leslie Roberts (1905-1966) who wrote the novels ‘Feathers in the Bed’ and ‘Shepherd Market’; during a lecture he spoke of a baby sacrifice in Rottingdean and caused a furore with a Police probe etc. and so we enter the mysterious world of Alex Sanders whom Valiente never met; he was a publicist and a fantasist and the man holds no interest for me personally. Before we descend into the ‘Age of Aquarius’ in chapter 13 there is time to look at feminist witchcraft and material relating to old George Pickingill of Canewdon who died in 1909 and the possible connection to Crowley being a short-term member of his coven (along with Crowley’s friend and fellow magician Allan Bennett); but we are told in various books on Crowley and from the great man himself that he met Bennett sometime after his initiation into the Golden Dawn on 18^th November 1898 so why would a man learning the techniques of ceremonial magic suddenly wish to become a witch? I believe that it was Bennett who had been drawn to witchcraft either before or during his time in the Golden Dawn and Crowley, in awe of Bennett’s personality (they later shared a flat and Bennett taught Crowley certain elements of magic) wished just to be near this great and powerful magician, a man who impressed Crowley more than any other man! Whatever the truth is it is entertaining to assume Crowley entered a coven and was possibly thrown out as ‘undesirable’. We are told of this infamous ‘photograph’ that is said to exist depicting old George with Allan Bennett and a young man who looks terribly like Crowley, if so where is it and why are there no reproductions of it anywhere? Unless Jimmy Page has it stashed away somewhere in his vast Crowley collection we are unlikely to know the truth! Doreen Valiente has produced an absolutely fascinating and well-researched volume on the rebirth of witchcraft which no doubt has helped many on their journey along the way and will continue to do so. A marvellous book indeed!

Pyramid – by Lionel Birch.

A delightful novel seemingly influenced by Alec Waugh’s ‘The Loom of Youth’ from 1917 so the reader can anticipate the usual school story scenarios. The author, Jack Ernest Lionel Birch (1910-1982) draws upon his own school experiences at Shrewsbury where he was a skilled cricketer and prefect and later at Clare College, Cambridge where he attained a First in English. The novel, Birch’s first of two novels, was published in 1931 and centres upon young Anthony Roreton whom we meet in the first of its twenty-three chapters, a thirteen year old at Meston House Preparatory School in High Merringham on the day before his confirmation. The school is run on a joint Headmastership, Mr. Lanbury and Mr. Strethens and Tony is called to see the latter on a matter of his intimate relations with a boy named Philip How, in fact, they are in the habit of kissing each other. The offence is resolved and promises are made not to do it again, in fact, following this the boys are separated as Philip will go to school in Hatton and Tony will go to Tower Hill. Tony is confirmed and a week later goes to the family home, Burnans Manor, to his mother and father, Francis Roreton, an English gentleman (later Tony’s Uncle Sir Anthony Roreton dies and Francis inherits the baronetcy).  At the new school, Tower Hill, where fagging and flogging are the order of the day for and by the ‘bloods’ and the prefects, missing Philip, Tony goes in search of the ‘one perfect friend’, and so in his search he encounters several handsome young boys who may fit the bill, such as Roy Merrivale, Ronny Banton and Peter Sladen, the latter of whom Tony is lost in unrequited love and stalks his every move, when they finally exchange a few words Tony is in rapture; looking back with the wisdom of years behind one it all seems rather pathetic but in the immortal yet alarmingly naïve state of youth it is the very essence of life and death.  He joins the Corps and attends camp in Yorkshire and befriends a boy named Dick Canning who is infatuated with Merrivale; Tony secretly writes to Peter Sladen and Sladen’s mother discovers the letter and there is a fearful wait as to the outcome of this – Sladen’s father, the Major, writes to the school forwarding the letter which contains a filthy limerick; Tony denies any untoward behaviour and escapes expulsion. Peter and Tony become drawn together but is later bored by Tony mooning after him all the time and breaks the friendship – Tony had worshipped him for two years! Now Tony and Roy Merrivale become close through their involvement in the theatre, a play for speech day – Tony arranges a meeting following the play between Roy and Canning who secretly adores the boy; and so in chapter twenty-seven Dick Canning waits for Roy Merrivale with Tony watching from afar. Roy appears with a boy named Congreve and mocks Canning, cruelly laughing and sneering at him – distraught, Canning falls to pieces with the shame and is not at School next term! The author handles the romantic entanglements and secret desires of the boys well and Canning is almost a sacrificial Christ-like figure tortured by mental flagellation. Tony becomes Captain of the House and falls in love with his friend, Ronny Banton’s sister, Helen, they dance and kiss and Tony makes more of it than he should and she writes to him saying she doesn’t feel that way about him.

In chapter seven Tony stays with his Aunt Helen in London and is introduced at cocktail party’s and meets Comte Reni de Maulois, an interesting decadent character whom Tony later agrees to stay with in Paris (chapter 15) where they enjoy the theatre, dinner and luncheon party’s and an air of artificial wickedness in the Bastille Quarter where men dance with men and girls with girls. 

After spending time with a clergyman name Toppin to whom he swears he will not hunt, on the last day of the hunting season, Tony’s father gives him a new horse and so in a dilemma, Tony keeps his word and does not hunt, much to his father’s annoyance. His father goes on the hunt and is thrown from his horse and killed – Tony is now Sir Anthony Roreton! Tony becomes the ward of his Uncle, Herbert Roreton and Tony sums up his relationships: Philip How (perfect), Peter Sladen (pain), Ronny Banton (inadequate companionship), Helen Banton (a brief mishap) and Roy Merrivale (most suitable). In the last chapter Tony is at camp and meets Philip How, his first love and they have a ‘melon-party’ with Roy, Ronny and Peter; on the last night of camp Tony expects Roy Merrivale to join him in his tent but Roy with the same cruel satisfaction that destroyed Dick Canning says when asked – ‘probably not at all’ and shatters Tony’s heart in two. The next day Tony says goodbye to Roy and a ‘considerable part of his being had died in the night; and for that part there would be no resurrection.’ (p. 306) Another interesting character in the book is Tony’s tutor, Mr. George Kitson who in chapter four sets the class an essay and Tony’s choice is ‘friendship’. Kitson invites Tony to tea to discuss his essay and we find they are of the same mind. We later find that Kitson and Helen Banton become close and it is assumed he will ask her to marry him but he cannot go through with it, as he says in chapter 21 – ‘you see I could never have really surrendered myself.’ In the following chapter Kitson says to Tony: ‘think of your experience as being the four sides of a pyramid. You have scaled the pyramid from each of the four sides. Each ascent has led you to the same place – the apex.’ (p. 289) Yes the book is a little rambling in places and there are some tedious, long-winded passages concerning cricket and other such sports but Birch gets deeply below the surface of his characters to reveal their failings and their passions and no matter what the form of love which flows from us the awkward moments are the same and linger in the memory, the ghastly torments of unrequited love to which we all have suffered at some time are the wounds that never truly heal and accumulate into the sum of what we are – searching for the ‘one true and perfect friend’. Birch went on to write his next novel ‘The System’ published in 1932 before becoming active in politics and served in the Royal Artillery during the war. Worth searching out is his slim volume of poems published in 1929 while a student at Cambridge, ‘Between Sunset and Dawn’.

Nocturnes and Pastorals: A Book of Verse – by A. Bernard Miall.

Arthur Bernard Miall (1876-1953) was a British translator and a seen as a decadent and this, his first book of poetry published in 1896 is divided into four sections: Nocturnes (13 poems), Pastorals (11 poems), A Ballad and Other Poems (15 poems) and Sonnets (17 poems). The volume is gorged upon romantic pastorals and Miall writes well but I found it all quite tedious and dull, I mean, all those limp and pale swooning young Burne-Jones and Rossetti women like flower stems in vases without water, wilting everywhere… when he is not obsessed by unapproachable maidens he writes quite well or at least passably so – ‘but he, the sun – ah, too bold lover, / who kisses her all over / and never prays for kisses, / he knows not what he misses!’ Ah, we cannot escape his kisses I fear nor his fascination or fixation upon sensual body parts which coyly touch. I suppose if he had a fetish upon cabbages his verse would be filled with brassicas? His sonnets are fair and three years later appeared another book of poems called, er, ‘Poems’ which no doubt has the same subdued virginal content.

Firechild: The Life and Magic of Maxine Sanders ‘Witch Queen’.

This fascinating autobiography published in 2008 is masterfully written and there is a real sense of honest revelation from Maxine, who was conceived on Bournemouth Beach ‘under a full moon’ in 1946 and we learn that her life had the most unfortunate of beginnings suffering at the hands of her violent, atheist father Victor – ‘from the age of six, I was beaten, tied up, sexually abused and locked in dark places.’ (p. 18) She kept silent of course as she did not wish to hurt her Catholic mother Doris and escaped reality by conversing with the ‘fire mice’ as she called the salamanders in the flames and taking refuge in ‘out-of-body’ experiences. Maxine Morris was born 30^th December1946 in Cheshire and has a deep fascination for fire, even crawling into the flames as if transfixed by them and suffering burns. Her mother is interested in the psychic world, especially astrology (she befriends Alex Sanders, a spiritual healer in the local Spiritualist Church little knowing Maxine would marry him twenty years later) and Maxine who dislikes people and has an affinity with the natural world develops her own psychic awareness before she is sent to a Roman Catholic Convent School where she is absorbed by ritual and astral projection; in fact, Maxine is so good at ‘leaving her body’ that her mother asks her to spy on her father, in fact, aged ten Maxine sees her father’s workplace on fire – ‘several people died in those flames; I was disappointed that he had not been one of them.’ (p. 21) She develops her occult ability and is ‘opened’ when she is thirteen as a member of a Subud spiritual group, undertaking two years spiritual training in 1960 by a man named John Bennett at Coomb Springs, Kingston-Upon-Thames – ‘there were a few odd characters who were permanent residents. One chap would go mad at the full moon. He would take an axe and chop at anything in front of him. I learned to avoid him. Then there were the ‘full moon nudies’ who insisted on walking the grounds stark naked even in the middle of winter.’ (p. 26) Bennett teaches her about Gurdjieff’s movements and meditation. When she is fifteen she becomes enthralled by ancient Egyptian mysteries through a woman named Pat, a distant relative of Howard Carter of ‘King Tut’ fame and is driven to a cave in the Cheshire countryside for a frightening initiation ceremony which she completes; spiritually we see Maxine as a very strong adolescent yet at this time she also contemplates suicide quite often and the fear of being left in an asylum if she exposes her father’s abuse keeps her silent on this. At fourteen she leaves school and becomes a sales assistant and one day her father is particularly abusive to her and she stands her ground against him and wishes him dead; they are the last words she says to him for ‘he dropped dead in the elevator of the Grand Hotel the next day.’ (p. 38) And so the middle aged Alex Sanders comes back into their lives once more and Maxine, finding him quite ordinary and not the ‘witch’ she assumed he would be begins to fall in love with him and becomes involved in witchcraft – she takes part first of all in a ‘hair-restoring spell’ in the garden and there is the funny escapade of the King Edward potato being buried in a spell to gain finances (they have to retrieve it quick so that Maxine’s mother doesn’t die and Maxine in turn receive £3000 life insurance payment) – it turns out ‘bald Susan’ who took part in the hair-restoring ritual did indeed grow hair again!

Maxine leaves Manchester and moves to London to work as a nanny but soon quits and then is initiated by Alex and has to undertake 28 days of preparation including fasting and purification. In the ceremony she is naked, bound and blindfolded and Alex as High Priest scourges her forty times and she receives her witch name Veda; in turn she scourges Alex one-hundred and twenty times, three times her allotted strokes. Maxine develops her psychic self-protection and strengthens her evocational skills before suddenly being elevated into the public’s attention through the press which during the summer solstice ritual of 1965 photographed Maxine and the coven members nude at Alderley Edge in Cheshire; in headlines such as ‘Ex- Convent Girl in Witchcraft Rites!’ she soon became hounded by the press and public alike: she is evicted and has to return home; her mother had a Catholic priest and two large ‘altar boys’ exorcise her against her will and she is also interrogated by the Police one of whom later tries to rape her in his car, returning home torn and bleeding her mother on seeing her just went to bed, saying goodnight – it was the end of the mother/daughter relationship. After her mother’s death Maxine is shunned at the funeral by relatives and living in her mother’s house the neighbours become very aggressive, throwing stones at her in the street and trying to burn her out of the house – the front and back door have bonfires lit against them, luckily the French windows were not alight and she escaped – the next night they burnt the garden shed down! She sells the house and moves into an old Victorian property with mice for company and it is here that she creates an Elemental humorously in the form of the Home Pride flour man, which duly appeared but quickly multiplied; Alex was angry and told her to banish them which was difficult and near impossible! Alex had to step in to get rid of them. He also later banished all the mice! Through the coven’s notoriety and Alex’s shameless seeking of publicity they work on a film for MGM Studios in 1965, ‘Eye of the Devil’ starring Sharon Tate and David Niven, (Alex apparently initiated Tate into the Craft on set) and having exhausted Alderley Edge for ritual work due to prying eyes wanting to see the witches, they re-locate their ceremonies to Saddleworth Moor which is unfortunate as Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have been using it for quite a different purpose and are arrested for the abduction and murder of children – of course Alex and Maxine get roped in by the Police and are questioned (they were forced to listed to the recordings the murderers’ made while torturing a child!) But there is a happy ending as Maxine and Alex are joined together in the witch way of a ‘handfasting’ before Alex becomes the ‘chosen one’ of the Council of Elders who require him to be the ‘King of the Witches’ something Alex initially refuses, three times in fact, before accepting and being crowned. We also learn that Alex is in fact bisexual and has a lover named Paul and there is some debacle concerning a ‘moon child’, a baby born influenced by the moon – Maxine becomes pregnant and takes a ‘potion’ to be rid of it, however she has a baby girl named Maya and four months later Maxine and Alex marry on 1^st May 1968 at Kensington Registry Office – the Kray twins turn up at their home and a gun is found! It all sounds like some sensational novel, but Ronnie Kray sends flowers by way of an apology! Next we hear about the ‘Process Movement’ who have interests in Aleister Crowley and want to borrow one of Alex’s Crowley manuscripts; Alex agrees and fires-off the manuscript to the States. At a lecture Maxine is giving in Alex’s stead, she meets the young magician and writer Gerald Suster, a great Crowley enthusiast and they become firm friends. The Crowley manuscript is returned from California defaced with scrawls of ‘kill the pigs’ – in August 1969 Sharon Tate and her three house guests were murdered and ‘kill the pigs’ was daubed on the walls in Tate’s blood and so there is a tentative link to the ‘Manson Murders’ as well as the ‘Moor’s Murders’! There follows ritual performances, she meets the writer Denis Wheatley and is ‘kidnapped’ in Ireland and taken to woodland where she must prove her right to be the ‘Witch Queen’ (she retires from this role in 1972 when she is twenty-six and no longer nubile enough for the position). In the same year Alex and Maxine separate when Maxine refuses to let Alex’s lover John live with them. And so we come to the latter years and the ‘Temple of the Mother’ and Alex’s ill-health in 1980 – by 1986 he was fully aware of the cancer and died on the witchcraft festival of Beltane, 30^th April 1988. Three years previous to this Maxine herself was diagnosed with breast cancer and has some bizarre treatments but all in all the book has revealed an exceptionally brave and steadfast soul whose endurances and sufferings have been overcome by her balanced spiritual progress; her subtle manner in which she works as opposed to Alex’s brash and loud flourishes of magic is one that has appealed to many now involved in the craft who have come to its ways through Maxine for as she says and closes the book: ‘I am a witch learning to listen, once again to my inner voice, waiting in joyful anticipation for the next adventure, and trusting in the magic as the child who once communed with fire mice.’ (p. 303) With 33 illustrations over its 24 chapters, ‘Firechild’ has been a splendid journey and no doubt shall become a classic literary monument in the witchcraft oeuvre. Beautiful!

A Chaplet of Love Poems – by Ethel Maud De Fonblanque.

Ethel Maud De Grenier Fonblanque was born in Brighton in 1858; she was a friend of those genteel gargoyles, the Sitwells and she married Arthur Cornwell Chester-Master and later married Arthur Harter before gracefully dying in Sunnydale in 1942. A Chaplet of Love Poems was published in 1899 (I read the second edition from 1903) and there are some fine verses here – ‘Lent Love’, ‘Now you are mine’ and ‘Fidelity’ which has a bitter taste about it:

I long have ceased to love you. – yet I feel

In your mere presence shaken to the soul

With all the torments of uncertainty,

Fearing my heart still held in your control.

To prove I do not love you, I have taught

My lips to frame for you a careless speech;

My eyes can calmly meet your calm regard,

And I have learnt what lessons pride can teach.

All that I can do, to brave the thrall

In which you captive held my heart and will;

When you are far I dream that I am free,

But when anear I know I love you still!

There are also some rather good translations, thirteen in fact, from the Italian, German and French and poems of tragic sensuality which Fonblanque (Mrs. Harter) pours upon both sexes and her children alike – ‘My heart has slept’, ‘Beyond Recall’, ‘I wish that you were Dead’ and ‘Come Near’: ‘I thirst for thee, as thirst the severed lips / of some poor soul who faints in life’s eclipse; / come near, and lay thy sweetest mouth on mine / and straightway thirst is quenched by love like wine.’ Early poems are more than satisfactory – ‘An Altered Heart’, ‘Her Grave’ and ‘Oblivion’ abound with the light feminine touch of a true poet which often goes unrecognised and the volume is definitely worth more than a casual glance. Good! 

Out of Egypt: Stories from the Threshold of the East – by Percy Hemingway.

Percy Hemingway is the pen-name of William Percy Addleshaw (1866-1916) and this rewarding collection of stories was published in 1895. Part I, ‘Gregorio’ is the tale of a Greek man named Gregorio Livadas living in a street full of prostitutes in Alexandria with his wife Xantippe and young son. Gregorio is very poor and owes money to a Jewish money-lender named Amos who suggests he put his beautiful wife on the street. Gregorio is furious at this and goes in search of work without any luck. They all suffer from lack of food and come to the grim conclusion that Xantippe must sell her body which she reluctantly does. Wanting his money, Amos takes their furniture away and tells Gregorio he will forget the debt owing him if he is given Gregorio’s son to bring up as his own. Gregorio refuses and Xantippe, realising that her husband has fallen short in his duties as a husband and a father begins to hate him; Gregorio sits in café’s all day talking to Madam Marx and kissing her while Xantippe is degrading herself on the street. One day Gregorio returns home to find his son is missing and he has a stroke (Madam Marx who is strangely in love with him takes care of him). Gregorio plots to confront Amos and ask for his son back and so with his friend Ahmed and two companions they go to the house of the Jew. When Amos denies that he has the boy Gregorio stabs him to death and Ahmed and his companions rampage through the house killing every man and woman servant in the house. When he returns home he finds his wife packing to leave him; she has fallen in love with a wealthy English client and tells Gregorio she has put the boy in a safe place – Gregorio stabs her in the heart and with the police after him hides out in the desert to grow a beard. Without water he dies in the desert and Madam Marx finding his body buries it – the tale paints a sordid picture of the poor in Alexandria and the only winner is the boy who will be brought up a wealthy son to the rich English man returning to England. In Part II, ‘The Egyptians’, dedicated to the memory of John Addington Symonds, the author writes well, giving his observations upon the Arab world and its people and customs; the travelling protagonist eventually returns home years later to England only to find his wife changed by age and not what he expected; he rides off in his fury and astonishment but does return and ‘with eager feet he strode up the path.

The lights in the cottage were extinguished.

But the stars still shone.’

The Word of Teregor – by Guy Ridley.

Cecil Guy Ridley (1885-1947), an English barrister who attended Harrow and New College, Oxford published this early British fantasy novel in 1914. The nine chapters reveal the history of the Forest where the great oak King Teregor once reigned over all things and now the place of his death is still known as the Mound of Teregor. The trees in the Forest who are sentient become distrustful of man after he hurls a stone at the leveret; man rebels against the Forest and plants pine-trees from the Northern Land. In the first chapter we discover how sound came to the Forest when the birds began to sing and the songs of the blackbird, nightingale and the skylark all fought for supremacy; we also hear how Anith the young Ash tree enticed the Fair Ivy upon her to wear its beauty all winter only to find it destroys the tree and how Mit the Terrible ruled after Teregor in the days when the Pine trees were introduced and how Forgar rules the Forest now. I love stories about trees ever since I was spellbound by Algernon Blackwood’s tale ‘The Man whom the Trees Loved’ and if you like Tolkien you will probably find something of interest here too!

The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life – by Xavier Mayne.

Xavier Mayne is of course the pseudonym for the strangely named American writer and journalist Edward Iranaeous Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942) and this massive tome at over 600 pages published in 1910 explores through thirteen chapters the psychological facts concerning the ‘Intersexes’, the social, moral and legal standpoints. The author looks at the theory and reality of male and female human nature in comparison with the intersexes arriving at a ‘normal’ male type and notions of masculinity; the effeminate male is non-virile; the predisposition of sexual unity and the masculine female – Mayne gives examples of strong women in history, mental and physical before outlining the same principles in nature. In this third sex, the intersex, the male is generally termed the ‘urning’ or ‘uranian’ while the female is the ‘uraniad’, the feminine sexually masculinised. Chapter three ‘Alterosexual Love and Friendship: Similisexual love and Friendship’ explains the possession and surrender of the physical and the psychical (love); the physical is friendship (platonic) and the duality is Love (also Desire) which is all very interesting and then we delve into the world of intolerance to such love, the religious standpoint and the Christian question of ethics – what is the male uranian attitude to women and how has this evolved through various ancient cultures such as Greece? We look at various historical personages (Shakespeare, Byron, Marlowe, Milton, Smollett, Walpole, Pope, Wilde, Tennyson, Richard Burton and Walt Whitman etc.) and their characteristics (and the need for concealment) before we are given dozens of examples of biographical cases to study (uranian and uraniad); the perception of the intersexes as degenerates and criminals and the relation to ‘marriage’ etc. but for me I found the most fascinating part of the book chapter thirteen which sheds light upon August von Platen (1796-1835) – the ‘Life and Diary of a Uranian Poet’ which gives exerts from his diary showing the depth of his youthful adorations and suicidal thoughts; his depression, lust and sexual desire. Published just over a century ago it is hard to believe that such individuals were persecuted for their beliefs and their sexuality, we have come a long way in accepting what essentially is a natural state for the human sex instinct – the freedom to love and express that love in accordance with our sexual belief; there will always exist moral and ethical restrictions in some form or another and the future notions of ‘gender’ seem difficult to grasp for now. Humanity is moving in unfathomable directions! With four Appendixes this really is a comprehensive early study of ‘similisexuality’ and the author proves himself to be a worthy writer on the subject. Good!

The God of the Witches – by Margaret Alice Murray.

Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963) the Egyptologist, anthropologist, historian and fellow of University College, London published this hotch-potch of mumbo-jumbo in 1931 and feigning some sort of authority on the subject delights on informing us of the Horned God and how it came into being; the horned deity can be found throughout ancient civilisations such as Egypt. The transformation of the ‘Horned God’ evolves into the concept of the Devil – ‘in the thirteenth century the Church opened its long drawn-out conflict with Paganism in Europe by declaring “witchcraft” to be a “sect” and heretical.’ (Introduction. p. 11); and just what is the significance of the sacred dance? Now I am no defender of the Church and have always opposed the propaganda it spreads in the name of Christian love while behind closed doors it is the most corrupt and vile of organisations practising the most evil things imaginable; hypocritical and complicit in war and its atrocities – the Church is merely a “sect” and heretical so the author is not far from the truth there and she picks fairly discriminately through various 16^th and 17^th century witch trials to bolster some of her theories before moving on to the connection between witches and fairies, or the Little People. Murray really gets into her stride with explaining the roles of worshippers – ‘the number in a coven never varied, there were always thirteen, i.e. twelve members and the god.’ (p. 64) and the Priesthood; the Esbat and the importance of the ‘garter’; the feeding of the familiar spirits, the broom and flying ointment… for some reason Murray seems to assume that all witches are connected to devil worship and thus all the ceremonies and rites are dark and distasteful – ‘the Devils do not make express paction with the children vowed to them until they reach the age of puberty.’ (p. 99) In fact, she is but a short breath away from saying that all witchcraft is nothing but sodomy, Satan and sacrifice, which is surely what she believes. She falls prey to the evidence given in the witch trials which we must remember was given under extreme torture and is therefore unreliable; she brings forth the sacrifice as if it is an everyday occurrence and all those orgies which one simply had to attend. All in all Murray jumps to conclusions concerning witchcraft and its association with devil worship without fully integrating the evidence from the witch trials; she assumes witchcraft to have been more established, organised and prolific during the early Christian period than it actually was. Readers will notice how she draws upon J. G. Fraser’s ‘The Golden Bough’, another fascinating if not altogether accurate volume, even adopting his tone, which like ‘The God of the Witches’ has been discredited and is unreliable. Having said that, this is a perfectly enjoyable read and those in search of further comedy can read her 1921 publication, ‘The Witch Cult in Western Europe’.

Gallica and Other Essays – by James Henry Hallard.

James Henry Hallard, a lecturer on French in the University of Liverpool is mostly known for his excellent translation – ‘The Idylls of Theocritus’ published in 1894 and he proudly displays himself , no doubt after some success, as the ‘translator of Theocritus’ on this, his next book ‘Gallica and Other Essays’ the following year (1895). This 160 page volume is dedicated to the poet Matthew Arnold whom Hallard respects highly and a large proportion of the essays concern French literature. In ‘Gallica’ Hallard puts forward his theories and preferences for learning French, stating that the study of Greek is fading from University education and should be replaced by French! He eloquently puts forth his argument for French language through its literature, science, psychology and its poetry which unlike English is not as easily adaptable and needs an intimate knowledge to understand. Hallard prefers the intricacies of the French tongue over the English to replace Greek as it is an intellectual and logical language; in fact, one begins to believe this has become somewhat of a minor obsession, even a mania for Hallard and in private he secretly assumes a French persona and delights himself thoroughly with his clever French linguistic skills perhaps while performing some sacred sexual rite to the complexities of the garlic bulb! And so he dribbles his way through the world of literature and the stage to make comparisons and bolster his ridiculous theory – ‘the French mind is in some ways a more serious mind than ours.’ (p. 12) He dashes through some of the French literary lights such as the dramatist Pierre Corneille born 1606, Racine and the fall of his popularity (Hallard saunters through Racine’s drama and looks at the influence of Greek classical drama), the poet Alfred De Musset and Paul Bourget. Yes French is a beautiful and romantic language but can it really replace Greek? That is surely for the reader to decide but Mr. Hallard has already made up his mind. And so we turn away from the French and to his ‘other essays’ which for me holds the jewel in the rather shoddy crown – ‘The Poetry of Keats’. Rarely does a poet, especially of the English variety, have a bad word to say about Keats and Hallard is no exception for he gushes with great satisfaction over the beautiful poet and everything is ‘lovely’ with lots of ‘loveliness’ about it – ‘he penetrates deeper into the mysterious loveliness of flowers than any poet either before or since. He seems to live with their life and rejoice in it.’ (p. 120) Well, who can argue with that? He seems to suggest an almost ‘spiritual projection’ into the world around him, into the ‘portion of the loveliness of nature, and, rose-like, mingled with the roses.’ Keats had a natural sympathy with nature (many poets do) but not nature in relation to man as one finds in that old duffer Wordsworth, but as Hallard puts it ‘simply and solely in the light of its own loveliness.’ Hallard quotes extensively from the ‘Hymn to Pan’ (Endymion), shows the celtic influence of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and looks at the criticism of the day before calling ‘Lamia’ – ‘perfect’ and ‘Hyperion’ the ‘greatest’ and ‘grandest’ of his works, saying that only Aeschylus can match him in lyricism. Hallard next looks at the ‘Poetry of Swinburne’ to which we all know produced a provocative and fiery output in his youth (‘Poems and Ballads’) before descending into the dull dreamy drivel of political and social nonsense – Swinburne ‘loved the sea’ the author tells us, unlike Keats who ‘loved land and was alien to the sea.’ (p. 140) Hallard ends his volume with ‘The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon’ an 18^th century Polish Jew and so we say ‘au revoir’ to Mr. Hallard and leave him with his French fantasies and Gallic dreams!

A Hasty Bunch – by Robert McAlmon.

This is an outstanding collection of around two dozen short stories by the American author Robert McAlmon (1896-1956) which was privately published in Paris in 1922. The stories are handled with superb skill and are modern, frank episodes from life in the manner of James Joyce; the characters are intense and sometimes brooding manifestations; outsiders, passionate, with frustrated tensions and sexual desire. In ‘Obsequies for the Dead’ a macabre fit of the giggles breaks out at a funeral; in ‘Elsie’ we find an orphan girl who fakes a burglary and hides the silverware, tying herself up only to look good in the eyes of the Wilsons to whom she has been placed. In ‘Filling the Pulpit’ there is gossip and snobbery concerning the Rev. Woolan and his wife as social inferiors. There are stories about an artist interested in spiritualism (‘From Maine’), a young woman in Montparnasse named Dania who is flirtatious yet afraid of life and experience (‘The Psychoanalyzed Girl’), two sisters frozen in death (‘Snow’), the plain-speaking ‘Abrupt Decision’ which slips in a reference to masturbation and the ‘dangers of jacking-off’ before ascending quite beautifully to the story of a loveless marriage in which the husband goes off with other women and the wife, a mother of two, comes to her senses; the wife (Mrs. Stoddard) is found upstairs having taken her own life with a razor. In the delightful ‘A Boy’s Discovery’ all that sexual tension and mystery rears its head and we find Harry Wright, a delicate boy of nine befriending another delicate boy named Harold Morris; Harold can handle himself and protects young Harry who is infatuated by his protector. The two boys discover horses one day, ‘breeding’ and Harold tells the naive Harry that ‘men and women do that same thing, - only a man’s thing isn’t quite as big as a stallion’s’. This of course leads them on to girls showing them their parts and attempts at ‘breeding’ with them in the hay barn before young Harry tragically dies six months later of lockjaw. The volume also contains ‘Momentary Essays’ and ‘Creation: A Protoplasmic Farce’ in four acts. An absolute delight to read!

New and Old: A Volume of Verse – by John Addington Symonds.

Published in 1880, ‘New and Old’ is a fine collection of poetry from John Addington Symonds (1840-93), a writer who is drawn to the Hellenism of the Renaissance and whose every work is coloured by his admiration for male beauty and intense devotion to the idea of Platonic love – ‘Into my room he seemed to glide;…/ He kissed my lips, he kissed my cheek; / I could not kiss him back nor speak: / I feared the blissful sleep to break.’ (‘Ich Hor Es Sogar Im Traum’) Love transcends beyond the physical into the spiritual realm – ‘A pilgrim to your shrine I came; / I sprinkled myrrh upon the flame - / Myrrh of my spirit, tears and sighs, / With eloquence of earnest eyes.’ (‘The Rejected Suppliant’) The collection is divided into sections: ‘Lyrics of Life and Art – part I’, ‘Poems on Greek Themes’ (‘Hesperus and Hymenaeus’, ‘To Rhodocleia’, ‘At Diocles’ Tomb at Megara’), ‘The Love-Tale of Odatis and Prince Zariadres’, ‘Sonnets’, ‘Among the Mountains’, ‘In Italy’, ‘Lyrics of Life and Art – part II’ and ‘The Valley of Vain Desires’. There are some beautiful lines, especially among the sonnets such as these from the second sonnet of ‘A Dream’ which ends: ‘Might I not plod along the road and keep / My recent thoughts from banished Paradise? / Might I not glue my face to books, or fast? / Till long oblivion sealed the erring past? / Oh, it is hard! Prayer, penance, sacrifice / Must slowly wipe away short sleep’s delight, / And years repair the ruin of a night.’ When one looks beyond the surface one finds elements of the erotic and the sensual, something which appeared in his previous collection of 1878, ‘Many Moods’ which he dedicated to his friend and fellow poet the Hon. Roden Noel and which is also worth immersing oneself in for he writes like an intoxicated Browning, delighting and enjoying himself immensely in such poems as ‘The Lotus-Garland of Antinous’, ‘Sonnets on the Thoughts of Death’ and ‘The Meeting of David and Jonathon’. I was impressed with both collections which came in at around 250 pages each and found the lyrical beauty of John Addington Symonds rather superb!

Magpies in Picardy – T. P. Cameron Wilson.

Published by the Poetry Bookshop in 1919, this astonishing book of poems by the English schoolmaster and soldier, Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson (1888-1918) shows considerable promise of greatness to come, yet he was so tragically wasted in war. There is a touching introduction by Harold Munro in which we learn that T. P. was born in Devon, the son of the Vicar of Little Eaton in Derbyshire, attended Oxford but gained no degree, became a teacher at Mount Arlington Preparatory School, Hindhead, Surrey; published his first novel ‘The Friendly Enemy’ in 1913 (a second novel ‘Bolts from the Blue’ was published posthumously in 1929) and joined the Grenadier Guards in August 1914 before being commissioned in the Sherwood Foresters – Captain T. P. Cameron Wilson was killed in France just a month short of his thirtieth birthday on 23^rd March 1918; Munro also tells us that he was shy and not boastful over his verse, in fact, a fine man indeed. The book is really in two parts, the war poems of which there are 28 and The Sentimental Schoolmaster, a further 8 poems. But the poems speak for themselves about the harsh realities of war and the author’s attitude to war which was sometimes disgust and sometimes a brave humour; here is the first verse from the opening poem ‘Magpies in Picardy’ – ‘The magpies in Picardy / are more than I can tell. / They flicker down the dusty roads / and cast a magic spell / on the men who march through Picardy, / through Picardy to hell.’ The poem continues and the magpie tells the author ‘secret things’ and we learn that the ‘hawk is cruel and rigid…’ and that the ‘rook is slow and sombre, / the robin loves to fight.’ A sense of the hell he witnessed runs through the poems – ‘in Delville Wood / the splintered trees saw hell below’ (‘Song of Amiens’) and here in ‘A Soldier’ where a shell is ‘moving a destined way, / thin and swift and lustful, making its moan.’ In the same poem we also find: ‘a moment his brave white body knew the Spring, / the next, it lay / in a red ruin of blood and guts and bone.’ And again in ‘France, 1917’ – ‘young flesh, through which life shines a friendly flame, / was crumbled green in the fingers of decay…’ and later in the same poem we find: ‘a forgotten boy, who hid as though in shame / a face that the rats had eaten…’ and later the ‘still land’ is described as a ‘witch who held her breath’ who ‘with a lidless eye kept watch for death.’ That brave humour can be seen in the poem ‘During the Bombardment’ where ‘each of us wore his brave disguise, like a mummer, / hoping that no one saw, when the shells came over, / the little boy who was funking – somewhere inside!’ T. P. was not the typical soldier type; he was a sensitive schoolmaster, a poet, and as a friend Harold Begbie wrote – ‘a glorious man among our glorious dead in France, a man who loved boys, was loved by boys, and by many was deemed the ideal schoolmaster.’ (‘Waste Paper Philosophy to which has been added Magpies in Picardy and Other Poems’. Introduction. p. v. Robert Norwood. 1920) It is therefore no surprise that some sensitive minds would turn towards their own ruin, perhaps to hide passions and a sense of guilt, even if tinged with romanticism, as in the poem ‘The Suicide (August Bank Holiday)’: ‘I will stand up and strip these clothes away - / one real white body shining like a star / out of the coloured dark of their array - / give myself fiercely to the sea’s embrace, / sink on her bed nor let my life arise; / feel her salt lips upon my drowned face.’ Other outstanding poems in the first half of the collection are: ‘Sportsmen in Paradise’, ‘On Leave’, ‘An Old Boot in a Ditch’, ‘The Mad Owl’, ‘Stanzas Written Outside a Fried-Fish Shop’, ‘Under the Frosty Stars’, ‘Dear, if your blinded eyes…’, ‘Time’s Fool’ and ‘Captain Oates’.

The eight poems of ‘The Sentimental Schoolmaster’ contrast starkly with the war poems and we find verse ‘To an exceeding small New Boy’, ‘To the School Radical’ which asks ‘could not the great blunt fingers of the Day / push back the guards that held your tears in sway, / and yet Night kiss them from their stubborn line, / O little friend of mine?’ – ‘The Mathematical Master to His Dullest Pupil’, ‘To His Blackboard’, ‘To a Boy Who Read Poetry for His Pleasure’, ‘To the Football Captain’ and ‘To a Boy Who Laughed at Him’ but it is the final poem which was found in his pocket after his death, called ‘Heaven’ which simply says:

‘SUDDENLY one day

The last ill shall fall away;

The last little beastliness that is in our blood

Shall drop from us as the sheath drops from the bud,

And the great spirit of man shall struggle through,

And spread huge branches underneath the blue.

In any mirror, be it bright or dim,

Man will see God staring back at him.’

In conjunction with ‘Magpies in Picardy’ I also read the earlier quoted ‘Waste Paper Philosophy’ from 1920 with an introduction from the Canadian poet, Robert Winkworth Norwood (1874-1932) who calls Cameron Wilson a ‘spirit as fine as the spirit of Rupert Brooke’ (Introduction. p. vi). There are several additional poems in this collection, some found among his papers from the trenches and unpublished, such as ‘Battlefield’, ‘Violin’ and ‘The Thrush’ and one to his sister (‘London’); his sister Marjorie also adds a poem to The Sentimental Schoolmaster called ‘L’Envoi’. But it is from the manuscript found after his death ‘Waste Paper Philosophy’ which is written as if giving advice to an imagined son that we learn more about the author, much of which is really quite profound, as can be seen here: ‘when you first go into a room make it instantly a shrine, for if you live there it is well that you live with nothing ugly. And thoughts clothe an empty room more certainly than wall-paper.’ (xii) And so if I were to recommend one book only it would be ‘Waste Paper Philosophy’ for it has everything in ‘Magpies in Picardy’ (minus the Munro introduction) and a further thirteen poems plus the philosophical piece. Wonderful!

The Friendly Enemy – by T. P. Cameron Wilson.

This is the first novel from Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson (1888-1918) published in 1913 and its twenty-one chapters tell the story of a young boy named William Wilder, the son of a drunken convict who works on board a trawler named the ‘Grace of God’, harboured in Brixham, Devonshire; Bill is bored and unhappy with his lot and returns home to London, to his hovel of a home and his father’s arms, fresh from prison. In the next chapter we meet a secondary character named Clement Anstruther Goodwin, an eighteen year old who is tired of his rich father treating him like a child; Clem is hungry for love and adventure – he steals a five-shilling postal order and confesses to his father and in private, Clem acts out scenes of heroism. That night he decides to steal twenty-four sovereigns from the cashbox and runs away to London. Now the author brings these unlikely ‘friends’ together through a street thug named Seely who with his gang are picking on the young toff Clem until Bill steps in to help; Bill and Seely fight, the latter wins but is impressed with Bill’s pluck etc. and Bill helps Clem find lodgings. Later in the novel we meet Seely again pretending to be a cripple, selling flowers and Mr. Larby, the Vicar and his ‘Conversation Club’ who shows Bill kindness and finds him a job in a match factory but there is ‘something’ missing, a ‘something’ Bill can’t describe, not being very articulate; in his frustration he gets angry with his mother and curses her; he talks to his girl Lily Carfax who doesn’t understand and finds it all amusing; he opens up to Clem but he equally doesn’t understand as Bill cannot express his emotions; he goes to see Seely but finds he is in prison and not out till the following day. And now that the scenes are set and the players are in position, the novel takes an interesting turn as in chapter XII ‘Of Stuffiness’, we meet the eccentric Dickensian character of Mr. Dixon, a very wealthy man who is tramping around and meets a young woman down at heel in a ditch with her drunken husband; Dixon, in fine Pickwick manner, persuades her to leave her man and takes her to a place of safety, her name is Mary Salt. Then we learn that this great man Dixon was the man who met Bill Wilder in the train to London at the opening of the novel and Bill wrote his name and address down for him, Dixon remembers the remarkable young boy who was dissatisfied with his work onboard ship and just up and left, so he calls on Mrs Wilder who is recovering from a night of drunkenness; Dixon finds Bill at the match factory and offers him a new life on a farm. Bill tells Dixon of his friends, Clem and Seely and Dixon asks if they will come too, Clem agrees to go and so does Seely (Seely mentions his sixteen year old orphan friend Dick who is also invited) so we see the beginning of a sort of social experiment on Dixon’s behalf, a genuine benefactor wishing to help those more unfortunate than himself. They all set off on a comical train journey to Mereham and there they watch a ‘mad’ mute, gypsy girl dancing whom Bill sympathises with, being unable to express himself before arriving at the cottage where they find Mary Salt. ‘There is something about eleven o’clock in the morning which is astonishingly destructive of all that is best in humanity.’ (p. 267) – Bill gets directions to Witnor Farm from a young farm girl he meets named Betty Handen, a fine specimen of country girl. At the farm Bill chooses his own puppy to care for then on taking butter to the widow Handen, he meets Betty again and a sweet spark plays between them. But all is not well as the ‘experiment’ seems to fail; Seely is unsatisfied with the boredom and emptiness of country life, he is too used to the ways of the city and so is young Dick; Clem wishes to return to London also (to be a clerk) but Bill wants to stay, there is still ‘something’ which he desires yet cannot express.

Two years later we see Bill still at the cottage with Mary Salt, Bill tells Mary of Betty who is in love with him, but Bill hates Betty, or so he says for really he is in love with Mary Salt, she is the ‘something’ he has been looking for all along but being inarticulate he cannot tell her. When Mr. Dixon returns he asks Bill to travel to London to see how the others have been and so he goes and looks up Tom Seely, Clem and Dick. Seely seems to be changed, much stronger in himself and confident, thinking of a political career (Dick is just the same) and Clem seems very unhappy, Seely tells him as he cannot find love; Bill calls on his father, Mr. Wilder who is sober and happy after finding religion; Bill thought Mr. Dixon had a hand in his improvement but as the chapter is headed it was ‘One Greater than Mr. Dixon’ – God! Bill goes to see Clem but finds Mr. Goodwin, his father ushering him into the lodgings, Clem’s father is furious and wants to kill Mr. Dixon for leading his boy astray as he thinks; it seems Clem has become addicted to vice and become ill and lies upstairs (Mr. Goodwin will take him home that day); Bill declines seeing Clem. Back at the cottage he meets Mary and fell to sobbing, he really loves her but cannot tell her; Bill rushes out in the rain and goes to the Handen cottage where he hears Betty singing inside – fate is awaiting his decision as he only has to knock on the door for a world of possibilities to open before him for she does love him – Bill knocks! And so we are left wondering what the future held for young Bill and Betty and what happened to Mary! The author has written a fine first novel if indeed it takes a while to establish the characters and there is a lot of parochial ‘cockney’ and street slang which I personally detest but Cameron Wilson handles it very well and the lives of the poor somewhat simple beings he creates have a vibrancy of emotions which endures time and it is a novel certainly worth reading; a novel which predicted so much from Mr. Cameron Wilson before his own fate took a decidedly different turn of events in 1918. Marvellous!

The Encyclopedia of Horror – Edited by Richard Davis.

Originally published by Octopus Books in 1981 (re-published by Hamlyn in 1987), this near two-hundred page encyclopedia is a wonderful journey through the world of the supernatural and the occult. It was this book (along with the splendid ‘Monsters and Vampires’, 1976 by Alan Frank) which had such a lasting effect through my formative years and still to this day, being always drawn to shall we say, darker dimensions! The great Peter Cushing provides the foreword before we get into the first chapter, ‘Evil Monsters’ by Tom Hutchinson which looks at Divine and Bestial Monsters, taking in the Lambton Worm and Satan: Public Monster Number One! Celluloid monsters such as ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968) and monsters within (‘Jekyll and Hyde’) are given as fine examples before Michael Parry looks at the ‘Frankenstein Saga’. Richard Cavendish delights us with ‘The Devil’s Army’ and brings out the black goat of witchcraft and the Fall of Lucifer before we succumb in Satanic splendour to the demon hierarchy, possession and Faust. ‘Vampires and Werewolves’ take up the next chapter, by Basil Copper and here we find such gems as ‘Dracula’ (1931), ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ (1936) and ‘The Wolf Man’ (1941) a masterpiece in my opinion before Copper asks ‘what is a vampire’? and shows us some great ‘vampires’ in history. It was here as a young boy my mind found something familiar, something Gothic in my own thinking – names of those which became familiar to me: Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Bathory, Sgt Francois Bertrand (1823-78), the Pere Lachaise and Montmartre Vampire, Fritz Haarman (1879-1925) the Hanover Vampire, John George Haigh, Gilles Garnier who died in 1574; Michel Verdun and Pierre Bourgot, Jean Peyral, executed in 1518 (I should also mention the lovable Ed Gein, Victor Ardisson 1872-1944 and Peter Kurten 1883-1931) but enough of my childhood companions, the next chapter also held such wonder for me for it spoke of literature which seemed forbidden – ‘The Supernatural’ by Michael Ashley, describing such fantastic writers as: Elliott O’Donnell (1872-1965), the Gothic novel: Horace Walpole (1717-97) and ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (1764), Matthew Gregory ‘Monk’ Lewis (1775-1818) and the fabulous Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) with her ‘Mysteries of Udolpho’ (1794); The Ghost Story and its development leads us into Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73), Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73) and the ‘Evil Ghost’, Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) and the remarkable Arthur Machen (1863-1947) before the Golden Age of M. R James (1862-1936). Richard Davis himself looks at the ‘Undead’: the cult of voodoo and great films such as ‘I walked with a Zombie’ (1943) and Hammer’s ‘The Plague of the Zombies’ (1966) and Doug Hill provides us with a final chapter: ‘Travelling Beyond’ – H P Lovecraft and Cthulhu etc. The book ends with a comprehensive list of films (by Richard Davis) and comics (by Denis Gifford). This is a beautiful book; a desirable book and it is very well illustrated and even though as a young boy, a child more supernatural creature than human, a child obsessed with death and nocturnal terrors with romantic notions; a boy of dark passions and obsessions delighting in such wonders as ‘Cat People’ (1943) and ‘Night of the Demon’ (1958) and ‘The Wolf Man’ (1941) and ‘I walked with a Zombie’ (1943)… the book does a splendid job in unlocking strange new worlds to eager young minds wishing to find such romantically frightening realms and live within them, as much as one can within the horrors of reality, horrors which far supersede any vampire infatuation or sweet arousal from the grave! Perfect!

Better Angel – by Richard Meeker.

Richard Meeker is the pseudonym of the American puppeteer Forman Brown (1901-1966) and ‘Better Angel’ (the title is taken from Shakespeare’s sonnet 144: ‘the better angel is a man right fair’) was published in 1933. The book is in four parts (22 chapters) and begins by introducing the main character, Kurt Gray (clearly autobiographically the author), a thirteen year old, only child of Elmer Gray the furniture store owner and his wife Abbie who live in Barton, Michigan. Kurt is awkward and effeminate and gets teased at school; his mother could not persuade him to fight back and so instils in him a sense of pride at his ‘difference’. Young Kurt has a fear of the dark because he is afraid of being blind and he has a fondness for the boy next door, Arthur Bronson, known for some reason as ‘Nob’; being a few months older than Kurt he takes on the protective role. Kurt becomes more alone and secretive and succumbs to the temptation and joys of masturbation and one day he and his friend Barry Van Cleet who is two years older, go to a disused cemetery and innocently take off their clothes: ‘they stood there in the warm sunshine like two green figurines come suddenly to life in a place of forgetfulness and silence. There was animal joy then, sheer pleasure in the joy of nakedness, of the touch of flesh, of sun and wind on uncovered bodies.’ The author handles these first experiences of sexual awakening quite well and then we find that during a game of hide and seek, Beany Gorton, who is two years older, attempts to molest Kurt who resists but is disturbed; yet this is no ‘Teleny’ (1893) with its sexual excess and the erotic moments are subtle such as when Kurt is naked before a mirror wearing only his mother’s necklace and watching himself as he masturbates and is frightened at his first ejaculation. Of course all that self-satisfaction causes terrible guilt in a young boy and Kurt begins to attend the local Methodist Church meetings, eventually feeling the urge to take the rostrum and be ‘cleansed of his sins’. At Barton High School Kurt and Nob are talking about ‘funny dreams’ (masturbation) in the boat house and Kurt realises that it is more common and not such a ‘sin’ after all. Following graduation Kurt goes to University in Ann Arbor and rooms with his friend Derry Grayling with whom he falls hopelessly in love; Kurt is also friends with Derry’s sister Chloe who gets married (but unhappy with married life she will later divorce). Kurt writes Derry a letter declaring his love for him and in turn Derry wants Kurt to meet his friend David Perrier who is keen to meet Kurt. David is quite the young bohemian aesthete and Kurt stays the night with him when Derry says there is no room at home due to his Aunt’s staying over after Chloe’s marriage; David is charming and sophisticated and tells Kurt he has been in love with him for some time and that Derry was only a means of getting close to him – phew, when the reader catches their breath they kiss before Kurt goes to New York to study music and composition. At Christmas Kurt gets a letter from Roy, Chloe’s husband saying that Chloe gave one of her reasons for divorce as her love for Kurt and he wants to meet him to discuss it… later Chloe goes to New York just as Kurt, now 22, receives his scholarship to Europe; he finds her a room and they meet in the evenings and surprise, surprise, become quite close and Chloe kisses him and declares her love for him on a bench in Central Park but Kurt tells her the reality that he is ‘different’, that he loves her brother Derry – Kurt goes off to Europe and at Sauvergne in Italy takes studio rooms at the house of Leo Rubin an artist. Chloe writes to tell him Derry and David have become close, sharing a studio together and Kurt is shattered! A telegram arrives from a young 21 year old actor named Tony McGauran whom he met at Nice (they travelled on the boat coming over together and struck up a friendship); Tony ‘was Byronic, like the pictured hero of some Victorian romance’, a ‘conversational exhibitionist’, a ‘Don Juan and St. Francis in a single body’. Tony confesses about his sexuality and his hedonistic, promiscuousness with both men and women and Kurt opens up to him despite being quite appalled at the notion of sex without love – he calls it ‘ugly’. Tony of course offers Kurt the cure and pulls him into the bedroom! Yet another surprise: Tony knows David Perrier and his friend Ozzy Brosken, his ‘guardian’! It turns out Ozzy is not David’s guardian but an ‘American Oscar Wilde’! Kurt and Tony, anticipating Mr. Rubin evicting them, (Rubin’s wife disliked Tony) find a new place to rent in the village of St. Paul where Kurt composes and Tony writes and rehearses his play – they both decide to collaborate and do Tony’s play ‘The Duchess Decides’ as an operetta/musical, Kurt providing the music and Tony the libretto. At a final dinner together before Tony goes back to New York, the Rubin’s and their friends were in the restaurant, mocking them; Kurt goes to Paris to complete the manuscript of the ‘Duchess’. Back in New York Kurt meets David, Derry and Chloe, who is still in love with him and David tells him about Ozzy and how now Derry has become involved with Ozzy and his coterie; he meets Tony too and his old music teacher Mr. Korlov who helps Kurt get a job teaching music at Brookway School in Connecticut. David visits him at the school and they receive a phone call telling them that Derry is at the Police Station charged with ‘accosting’; when they see him he explains that he was set up by an under-cover police officer at the theatre; Kurt bails him out and eventually Derry is acquitted. Tony tells him the ‘Duchess’ has been sold and a pupil named Ford Clayton at Brookway, a boy much like himself, gives Kurt a small gift of a bronze figurine of Donatello’s ‘David’. When Kurt goes to see David he finds a note from Ozzy for David to meet him – Kurt is devastated and ends up in bed with Chloe, making love in a hotel room; Chloe is disappointed of course and Kurt receives a telegram from David saying he can explain everything and so it ends, with Kurt still believing in David and their future together. It has been quite a journey and the pace rarely slowed as romantic entanglements begin and sever and begin again which are not easily anticipated but it has been an enjoyable read and ‘Better Angel’ is certainly worth reading!

Sonnets for Youth – by Frank Oliver Call.

This slim twelve page volume of sonnets was published in Toronto by Ryerson Press in1944 (250 copies) by the Canadian poet and Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Bishop’s College, Lennoxville, Frank Oliver Call (1878-1956) with a rather lovely cover design by James Edward Hervey (1873-1932) and Thoreau MacDonald (1901-1989). These twelve poems have a delicate beauty which evoke the wild shimmer of nature as in ‘Autumnal’ with its shade of Housman – ‘upon the hills, the poplars, bending double, / become mad dancing partners of the wind’; and from the same poem: ‘it is the clash and clang of the old battle / between the marshalled hosts of life and death’ and the aesthetic statuesque qualities of youth as seen in ‘White Hyacinth’ – ‘pale and dead / before our eyes young Hyacinthus lay / upon the Spartan shore’ and again from the same poem: ‘you paused a moment as you left the room, / bending a slender form above a bowl / of white and blue where hyacinths were abloom.’ The ‘bowl’ appears again in a question of antiquity in the poem ‘A Roman Bowl’ – ‘”Strange,” you said, / “the hands that formed it twenty centuries dead, / and still the work lives on. Is life the whole, / or is it but a slowly-opening door?’ The celestial loneliness of humanity that worshipped a ‘dead god upon a burnt-out star’ (‘Sceptic’ II) seems fleeting yet the permanence of time is captured in the poem ‘Frozen Garden’ which begins: ‘HER GARDEN stands today as once it stood / frozen in memory within her brain’. Call is certainly a very astute poet whose observations seem to reach out into the present. Other books include: ‘In a Belgian Garden’ (1916) which I also read and enjoyed; the title poem has the mesmerising lines: ‘and where green poplars tremble / stand shattered trunks instead, / and lines of small white crosses / keep guard above the dead.’ I also read his ‘Acanthus and Wild Grape’ (1920) with its rhymed poems and free verse: the poem ‘The Old Gods’ declares ‘OLD gods are dead’ yet goes on to say ‘human hearts still long for human love’, simply beautiful; ‘Blue Homespun’ (1924), ‘The Spell of French Canada’ (1926) and ‘The Spell of Acadia’ (1930). I shall end with his quite lovely ‘Wild Swan’:

‘THE POOL lay black within the silent wood,

Like polished onyx in an inlaid frame

Of silver birches, mountain ash like flame,

And dark green spruces. Strangely mute you stood,

Slender and youthful, the swift-coursing blood

Tinging your cheeks. Across the dark pool’s breast

A wild swan glided from its hidden nest

And floated in the shadows. From that flood

Of infinite beauty, like a soul parched and dry,

I drank – wood, mirrored in the pool, wild swan,

And youth’s brave, eager turning to the dawn

Of beckoning life. Then came a startled cry

Of sudden wonder from your lips, as on

White flashing wings the swan rose to the sky.’

Georgian Poetry – Selected and Introduced by James Reeves.

First published in the Penguin Poets series in 1962 (I read the 1968 paperback edition with a cover design by Stephen Russ), ‘Georgian Poetry’ brings together 19 poets who contributed to the brief ‘Georgian’ period of modern poetry with its English rural settings, inflammatory descriptions of war: ‘the war gave the movement an almost unforeseen impetus’ (Introduction. p. xv) and simple, non-obscure language, before ‘Georgian’ became a term of contempt. James Reeves (1909-1978), playwright, poet and teacher, of Jesus College, Cambridge gives a fine introduction to the volume which is clear and concise; Edward Marsh, the Secretary to Winston Churchill at the Admiralty was so impressed with the poet Rupert Brooke that they decided to issue a collection of modern poems, introducing new poets – Marsh came up with the name ‘Georgian Poetry’ and the first anthology appeared: ‘Georgian Poetry 1911-1912’. This new energy in poetry with its anti-Victorian sentimentality, crossing swords with old literary giants who had sank into the vast lethargy of Victorian dullness towards the end of the old century, men like Hardy, Masefield and Bridges who were once revered but now despised for their ‘stuffiness and didacticism’, seemed to strike a chord with the nation’s literary readership. Five volumes appeared edited by Marsh (1912-1922) – it is interesting to point out that 1922 is regarded as a watershed for during that year Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ was published and all was irredeemably lost, or perhaps found! The Georgian era was quintessentially English with all the sturdy bile, pessimism and cynicism that the English nation produces in its quietly brave young men and women, especially during post-war bohemian artistic movements before the mental hedonistic annihilation of the gay twenties; Harold Monro (1879-1932) says that Housman (included in this volume) was the Georgian’s ‘spiritual father’ and that Marsh was its ‘temporal patron’ – Housman (1859-1936) and to some extent, Hardy, could in fact be called ‘Georgian’ before the term was coined when one looks at Housman’s verse, as this example shows from the author’s selection: ‘her strong enchantments failing, / her tower of fear in wreck, / her limbecks dried of poisons / and the knife at her neck.’ Or in ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying’ which could almost be Rupert Brooke, but the ‘Georgian movement as a whole was not as Brooke believed, a movement of rebellion against Victorian romanticism, itself the decadent stage of Wordsworthian romanticism; it was merely the final phase of a long deterioration.’ (p. xviii) And so the volume contains the new young shoots of poetic freedom with a little of the old ‘dead wood’ of the past (such as John Masefield and W.H. Davies) but we are blessed with the likes of Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Charles Sorley (1895-1915), James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) and his wonderful ‘To a poet a Thousand Years Hence’ and ‘Tenebris Interlucentum’; Sassoon, Gurney, Graves, Blunden, Brooke and Owen all disturbingly beautiful along with Victoria Sackville-West (1892-1962) the only woman represented in the volume with her poem ‘Full Moon’. A name quite new to me was Andrew Young – ‘when coltsfoot withers and begins to wear / long silver locks instead of golden hair’ (‘Cuckoos’) and his poem ‘A Dead Mole’ is a good place to end:

‘Strong-shouldered mole,

That so much lived below the ground,

Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,

For you to raise a mound

Was as for us to make a hole;

What wonder now that being dead

Your body lies here stout and square

Buried within the blue vault of the air?’

The Mountainy Singer – by Seosamh MacCathmhaoil.

This 1919 publication by the Irish poet Joseph Campbel (1879-1944) [Seosamh MacCathmhaoil is the Gaelic form of his name] contains eighty-two short poems over 134 pages: ‘I am the Mountainy Singer’, ‘Lament of Padraic Mor mac Cruimin over his Sons’, ‘Reynardine’ and ‘I am the Gilly of Christ’. Belfast born Campbel took part in the Easter Rising of 1916 and many of his poems are lyrical ballads based on Irish legends and folklore, the Celtic twilight which Yeats popularised. I also read the author’s earlier work, ‘The Gilly of Christ’ from 1907 (fifteen poems over 38 pages) which contains poems such as: ‘I follow a Star’, ‘By a Wondrous Mystery’, ‘When Rooks fly homeward’ and a few excellent verses which I actually liked: ‘The Dark is Magical’, ‘Twilight fallen white and cold’ and ‘The Moon is in the Marshes’. Not bad!

Sonnets of Shakespeare’s Ghost – by Gregory Thornton.

Published in 1920, this short (32 page) collection of twelve sonnets dreamt-up by the author and passed off as the work of Shakespeare’s ghost seems to defend the original sonnets and the Bard’s love for his muse, scorning those who should mock such a sacred wonder: ‘They who this doubt never such beauty knew, / Nor what to poet love alone can do.’ (end of sonnet I). Sonnet II continues the theme of this platonic devotion - ‘They say a man ne’er bore such love to man, / Or, if he did, ‘twere but a cause for shame’… and it goes on: ‘My fire and air, my spirit, adored thee’ before ending: ‘Then should I not love thee and give thee place / Above all love of sense of woman set? / In love of beauty, whate’er shape ‘tis in, / There’s nought of Truth, if it must think of sin.’ In Sonnet III the author/Shakespeare’s ghost, argues that adoration and love matter not ‘what sex it be’, the specific ‘male or female to our senses’ is immaterial – ‘All thy gifts were made more rich, more rare, / By inward sweetness kind beyond compare.’ sonnet V suggests, but in XI the author asks: ‘Wherefore should I mine own heart not unfold, / And his true workings to the world disclose?’ before announcing graciously in the final sonnet that ‘No shame or scruple might my judgement see / To tell of that true love I bore to thee.’ All very interesting and incredibly well written of course but should Shakespeare’s ghost ever communicate with the living I do not think he would waste words defending trifles as this, something which is really very minor in the Bard’s life, he is too large an entity to dwell on past defences or reveal any mysteries and what mention of the Dark Lady? – none! A curious piece of literary nonsense which is really quite enjoyable!

The Cruel Solstice – by Sidney Keyes.

Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes (1922-1943) is an exceptional poet and this, his second collection from 1944 and dedicated to his friend and fellow poet John Heath Stubbs (1918-2006) appeared after his presumed death in Tunisia (Keyes joined the army in 1942). The author has an elegiac quality with an almost sensual and absorbing fascination for death which can be seen in such poems as ‘Four Postures of Death’ from the first section of the volume – ‘Landscape and Figures’; in part I ‘Death and the Maiden’, Death requests that the Maiden shall dance which she does, and Death says: ‘My people are gentle as lilies / and in my house there are no men / to wring your young heart with a foolish pleasure.’ The Maiden then has this to say: ‘Because my boy had crossed me in a strange bed / I danced for him and was not afraid. / He said, “You are too beautiful for any man / to finger, you shall stay a maid / forever in my kingdom and be comforted.”’ … ‘He beckoned’ she says, ‘and I knew that I must follow / into the kingdom of no love.’ In part II ‘Death and the Lovers’ the line ‘briar-nails tear free / my soul into your wisdom, ravish me / since she will not…’ has a distinctly erotic suggestion which continues through part III ‘Death and the Lady’ and into part IV ‘Death and the Plowman’ where ‘crooked trees / bend like old fingers’. In ‘Two Offices of a Sentry’ the cloak of Death sweeps over some rather beautiful lines: ‘I am in love with the wildness of the living. / I am in love with the rhythms of dead limbs. / I am in love with all those who have entered / the night that smells of petals and of dust.’ (II. ‘Office for Midnight’) Section II of the volume – ‘The Cruel Solstice’ opens with the title poem and begins: ‘To-night the stranger city and the old / moon that stands over it proclaim / a cruel solstice, coming ice and cold / thoughts and the darkening of the heart’s flame.’ The notion of love rears its ugly face in ‘The Doubtful Season’ which ends – ‘O in July it was our love was started / like any hare among the watchful grasses; / its running is my song, my only story / how time turns back and the doubtful season passes.’ Section III, ‘Legends’ has the enchanting poem ‘The Glass Tower in Galway’ in four parts, and the magically uplifting ‘Simon Magus’ with its last verse ending triumphantly – ‘Go pray, Simon; hide your noisy heart / clapper-tongued and lolling with conceit. / Meet your master in his house of fire / and practice wonders on the silly dead. / For you the mathematics of desire, / the frigid neophyte, the cold symbolic bed.’ The rage in those last lines seems to yawn from a chasm of boredom at the ‘silly’ conjurations. On Adonis the author says that his ‘beauty was a wound in the world’s side’ (‘Lament for Adonis’) and in ‘Rome Remember’ he ends with perfect ease: ‘how alien the lovers of your ghost’. Keyes is certainly a modern romantic and love appears always disfigured in some cruel jest, out of reach or withering away somewhere – ‘There is no speech to tell the shape of love / nor any but the wounded eye to see it’ (‘The Uncreated Images’ from section IV ‘The Wilderness’). Tremendous!

God Save the King and Other Poems – by Brian Howard.

Published in Paris in 1931 I found very few of these eighteen poems worthwhile or memorable. Brian Howard (1905-1958) of Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford tries much too hard to be astonishingly brilliant yet never quite reaches the mark. Poems such as ‘Young’ – ‘Dry death will follow quick, and I / will burn, my tears will turn to steam’ (Madrid 1925) and ‘A Small Crucifixion’ which ends: ‘with blood in his voice, balanced upon infinity / he made his bed, he made his choice, nails are now his trinity’ (November 1929) have a mild appeal yet one comes away from this slim volume thinking only how superficial these verses are, much like the author himself! Forget his poems, read ‘Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure’ by Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster instead!

The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes.

Impressed with Keyes’ second collection of verse, ‘The Cruel Solstice’ (1944) and under his magical spell, I sought out the ‘Collected Poems’ which was published in 1945 (I read the 5^th impression from 1962) with an excellent Memoir (and Notes) by his friend, the English translator and biographer, Michael Meyer (1921-2000). Meyer, who does a fine job editing the Collected Poems, tells us that Sidney Keyes (1922-1943) was a frail and sickly child who lived with his grandparents (his mother died a few weeks after his birth) and grew up isolated with his nurse; imaginative and intellectual, he had a ‘menagerie of birds, small animals and reptiles.’ He did not attend school until he was nine years old – ‘outwardly he was an amiable child, good-looking, lean and olive-screened, with fine hazel eyes. Inwardly, he lived among the heroes of his imagination. Almost from the beginning he was split by this duality.’ (p. x) He attended Dartford Grammar School and Tonbridge, like his father, but young Sidney ‘retired into himself, and became an anchorite, though an amiable one’. (p. xi) He began writing 'mature' poetry at the age of sixteen with a fondness for the Romantic poets and two of his early poems are included here: ‘Elegy’ (In Memoriam S. K. K.) from July 1938, with its fascination upon death – ‘It is a year again since they poured / the dumb ground into your mouth’ … and ‘gave you to the worms’, and ‘Prospero’ (also 1938) who ‘knows the secrets of the earth and air / and of men’s hearts.’ … ‘his clear eye / could outshine Death, and make him powerless’; in the poem, Death and Prospero ‘yarn on for hours of charms and spells, / discuss the properties of mandrake-root, / and argue whether wolf’s-bane or hemlock / is better sleeping potion.’ In October 1940 Keyes went up to Queen’s College, Oxford to study History and Meyer paints a morbid picture of the young poet saying that he ‘had either inherited or been infected with a sense of guilt and of evil destiny. The subject of pain and death fascinated him’. (p. xii) In fact, it is this sense of the macabre that drew me to Keyes, being somewhat in the same way afflicted with the notion of death and romance. By the end of 1941 Keyes had the manuscript of his first collection of poems – ‘The Iron Laurel’ which was published the following year, ‘a study of pain and death from the viewpoint of the necromancer; death is a ghoul, and the poet is a doomed child wandering in a sour land.’ (p. xiv) Keyes joined the army in Omagh, Northern Ireland in April 1942 and was commissioned into the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment in September; he left England in March 1943 and just a fortnight into active service he was taken prisoner in the Tunisian Campaign – he died of ‘unknown causes’ on 29^th April 1943 in ‘enemy hands’ aged twenty; it is that fact which reminds us poignantly that had he lived how wondrous his poetry may have bloomed! The poems, which number nearly one-hundred, are in chronological order, except for ‘The Wilderness’. Throughout the poems there is a pervading childlike sensuality in the mystery and fascination with death – ‘come night, sleep, death, my only joy’ (‘Nocturne for Four Voices’, July 1939) which becomes seductively sexual – ‘the childish promises of lilac / seduce the corpse and break his serenade; / willows and Wagner sigh like / the sentimental gossip of a shade.’ (‘Lament for a Dead Symbolist’) and here, in ‘Sour Land’ (part II, from November 1940) – ‘when night came knocking at the panes / and bats’ thin screeching pierced his head, / he thought of copulation in the lanes / and bit his nails and praised the glorious dead.’ In the same poem we find the image of a ‘running demon’ that ‘jogs along the / fallow all night long / black under moonlit cloud, though shadowless.’ But not all of the poems are dark for in ‘Nefertiti’ we find that her ‘fingers were obelisks’ and she was ‘love-stricken for a tabby-cat’! Wild flowers are plentiful in Keyes’ poems and images of the garden conjure a vanishing English landscape – ‘the trees / grabbed at the sun like grey anemones’ (‘Anarchy’ March 1942); ‘the lilac dreaming in the lover’s garden; / the wild thyme splayed against the paving-stones’ (‘Images of Distress’ June 1942) but the overall essence of the poems is one of love, pursued and fleeting (Keyes was in love with Milein Cosman (1921-2017) to whom many of the poems are dedicated, yet the love remained unrequited): ‘O never trust the heart’s assurance - / trust only the heart’s fear’ (‘Song: The Heart’s Assurance’ July 1942); ‘I’d have you proud as red brocade / and such a sight as Venus made / extravagantly stepping from a shell.’ (‘Hopes for a Lover’ March 1942); Keyes can be seen as a metaphysical romantic, questioning love and mortality:

LITTLE DRAWDA

All Soul’s, ‘41

Under the shaken trees, wait O unlucky

Returner, you rejected one:

There is no way of comforting you. Wait

Under the shaken trees and the clock striking one.

In the moon’s wicked glitter linger now

You tired ghost:

You have no stance of safety but shift

In the moon’s glitter, an uprooted ghost.

On this strong night, remain you lonely

Seeker beside me, though my heart is dumb:

We may together solve the unexpected

Secret of living, now that the clock is dumb.

Passages also appear in praise of the sea, with its cold, compassionless folding over humanity, with ‘drowned bones above the tidemark’ and the ‘thin lament / of broken shells remembering the sea.’ (‘The True Heart’ written at Omagh on 15^th April 1942); ‘the wind lifted / the hard leaves of the bay; the white sand drifted / under the worm-bored rampart, under the white eyelid.’ (‘Seascape’ August 1942). Meyer tells us that ‘his inspiration consisted, not of a series of lyrical impulses, but of a constant and urgent force’, (p. xxi) this force, as I see it, a sexually instinctive force which drives the poems has a restrained beauty which is never quite fulfilled; the poems erupt like orgasms, perfectly formed yet still there is the sense of longing:

‘Night ravished him, and so was brought to birth

 A great cold passion to destroy the earth.’

(‘Anarchy’ March 1942)

Minos of Crete: Plays and Stories – by Sidney Keyes.

This volume published in 1948 is edited with selections from Keyes’ notebooks and letters and some early unpublished poems, by his friend Michael Meyer (1921-2000). It contains two plays: ‘Minos of Crete – A Journey Under Venus’ in three acts written in the summer of 1940 while Keyes was at Tonbridge and ‘Hosea’ a modern morality written in a series of tableau; the former is rather well done and the exchange between Minos and Theseus is quite beautiful. Keyes calls the play ‘short, brutish and nasty’ for indeed it does not keep to accepted mythological accuracy. We must remember that the author was only just eighteen when he wrote the play and that he was attempting something new, yet ‘he lacked the true dramatists ability to portray the whole spectrum of emotions; and that he had, like his master Wordsworth, no true sense of dramatic flow.’ (Preface. p. vii) His stories frankly hold less appeal although they do show the young Keyes as he develops in his prose; the stories include: ‘The Albatross’ written a few weeks after his sixteenth birthday in July 1938 at Tonbridge; ‘Judy and the General’ written at Oxford; the rather sensual ‘The Hot Street’ written at Oxford in May 1941 and the amusing ‘The Famous Race between the Hearse and the Steamroller’, also at Oxford in December of ’41; ‘Mexico’ from Oxford the following year is an exercise in dullness but a commissioned piece, ‘The Artist in Society’ from March 1942 has some interesting points. But for me the jewels of the volume are the extracts from his notebook 1942-43 – ‘I make darkness because I am continually asking for love, yet never find it’ and selections from his letters 1940-43 to such friends and imagined lovers as the poet John Heath Stubbs, Michael Meyer, Milein Cosmann and Renee-Jane Scott; his letter to Violet Keyes, from Oxford, dated 1^st November 1941 casts some light upon the writing of the poem ‘Little Drawda’ written on All Soul’s ’41 – ‘last night, being All Soul’s, I went to a spiritualistic séance in a haunted room in one of the colleges.’ But also of immense importance are the four unpublished poems: ‘South Wind’ written in July 1934 when the poet was just twelve and two months old; ‘Cathay’ – ‘I cannot help but dream of far Cathay’, from June 1937 when he was fifteen; ‘Meditation of Plebus the Phoenician’ a dream poem from January 1939 and ‘Richmond Park’ (1940) – ‘this park has always been misty, uncouth / and bestial, since King Henry ran the deer.’ Juvenilia, yes, but damn good juvenilia which shows real potential as a poet; the poem continues with the third verse, declaring that ‘Herne, too, haunts the thickets sere / homeless and hanged, poor Herne - / the antlered idiot who will learn / no other wisdom but following the deer.’ Already a confidence is appearing – the poem evokes a romantic pastoral of the Royal Park: ‘ghosts of dead deer / bellow by the unseen stream forlorn.’ Magnificent!

Sapphic Songs: Eighteen to Eighty – by Elsa Gidlow.

I was mesmerised, spellbound even by Gidlow’s autobiography ‘I come with my Songs’ and her first collection of poetry ‘On a Grey Thread’ (1923), a truly tremendous work of poetry and these ‘Sapphic Songs’ (the first edition of ‘Sapphic Songs: Seventeen to Seventy’ appeared in 1976) published in 1982 shows a great poet writing some of the deepest, most revealing love poems in the English language: ‘my wide basin is full of starlight, / my moon is lighted with new fire, / I have lit every sun in the firmament / with the hurting flame of my desire’ (‘To the Unknown Goddess’ 1918); ‘but I who am youth among your lovers / come like an acolyte to worship, / my thirsting blood restrained by reverence, / my heart a wordless prayer’ (‘Love’s Acolyte 1919); ‘oh how many love years / across fields of the dead / does your fragrance / travel to me?’ (‘Invocation to Sappho’ 1965)…it is a sensual celebration of love with verse spanning eight decades. There is a very worthy and beautiful Foreword by her friend Abigail Hemstreet which praises the poet’s mystical quality like some Goddess wielding words from pagan earth – ‘in her work, she finds herself in “the realm of the sacred, the nourishing care of human life”.’ (p. ix) In fact, I find an affinity between Gidlow and that other great female poet, the Russian, Anna Akhmatova, who like Gidlow, distils pure magic from the soul of womanhood in a sisterly appreciation of what it is to be a woman and to feel the soft caress of love; the intimate friendship and ‘fellowship’ of feminine nature and the bond between the female sex: ‘you came to me last night, you came in a dream. / I walked all night at your side on a bleak beach’ (‘In a Dream 1932). But the realisation of love is not always romanticised – ‘one does not speak prettily of love’ as she says in her poem ‘Regions of no birds’ (1958), it is real and there is heat and sweat between bodies, dissolving into each other, succumbing to notions of an earthly barrier between the souls, ‘entranced, / as deities reprieved of time, / cleansed of yesterdays: knowing / in tomorrows no refuge’ (‘Out of Love’s Timeless Egg’ 1972). Some of the poems, to which there are over seventy, have been revised but they have not lost any of their initial power and in this collection you will find classic masterpieces of her art: ‘For the Goddess too well known’ (1919), ‘The Grey Thread’ (1918), ‘Valley with Girls’ (1931), ‘So still the Dawn’ (1967), the deeply pagan ‘Chains of Fires’ (1969), ‘Woman at the Lakeside’ (1974) and the wonderful ‘Love in Age’ from 1974 – ‘here on this bed holding you / in passion-shattered wonder, lip to lip / limb twined with limb / in oblivion of Thee and Me, / breathing our mingled sweat, / juices spilled out / mutually anointing / here on this bed, holding you / so human in your need / (and knowing mine) / miraculous, the human veil is rent.’ Beyond praise and timeless!

The Strange World of Willie Seabrook – by Marjorie Worthington.

Marjorie Muir Worthington (1900-1976) has written a very vivid and enthralling account of the writer William B. Seabrook (1884-1945) and their time together in this 1966 publication. The author, who confesses to being part of the ‘lost generation’, recounts how in April 1926, she and Willie set sail for France where they stayed on and off until 1934; of her untiring love for the strange and enigmatic writer who ‘had a way of making a nice woman feel that he needed her, that she alone could help him get rid of the demons that beset him, his drinking and his sadism.’ (p. 11) Marjorie tells us with almost romantic wistfulness how they lived in an apartment in Toulon with no electricity, water or gas and every morning emptied the slops bucket into the harbour; of how Willie smoked successive pipes of opium (Marjorie refused) and his leasing of a ruined Chateau overlooking the Mediterranean which because of the lack of water was uninhabitable and only used for picnics accompanied by ‘Boubou’ Willies little brown monkey he brought back from the Ivory Coast. Those familiar with Seabrook will know about the reference to eating human flesh with a tribe of cannibals in his book ‘Jungle Ways’ (1931) where a ‘young warrior who had been killed in a tribal battle’ was eaten and Willie took part in the feast! The truth is just as fantastic – Willie did eat human flesh but not in the African jungle, in Montmartre! Marjorie takes great pleasure in describing the incident and Willie ate it roasted, broiled and as a ragout: Marjorie, who never tried it, rushed out and was sick! We find them in New York during the Depression of 1930 before they journey to Timbuctoo! Willie’s alcoholism escalates, drinking two bottles of brandy a day; they survive a car crash where Marjorie is thrown from the vehicle and Willie is pulled from the upturned car before it is engulfed in flames and so Willie decides on a cure at a hospital in New York. They decide to separate for a while and while Willie was living in his penthouse he had a ‘trained nurse present during his sadistic sex games’ just in case anything went wrong! It seems the English may have cornered the market on sodomy, but when it comes to sado-masochism, we can’t hold a candle to the Americans! At the heart of Willie’s psychological problems was a ‘deep-rooted hostility towards his mother, Myra,’ which affected all his relations with women – ‘love-making, for Willie, was a complicated process, all mixed up with his complexes, fetishes, and compulsions.’ (p. 103) Still drinking, Willie voluntarily commits himself to Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane; Marjorie, alone, contemplates suicide. And so with Willie ‘cured’ of his alcoholism, they buy a cottage and land in Rhinebeck on the Hudson River – both Willie and Marjorie had been married previously (both their ex-partners married each other!) and so they decide to get married, which they did in Connecticut before Willie goes ‘under-cover’ at the New Hampshire State Asylum for the Insane to discover the difference between private and public institutions for an article he is writing.

Some readers will discover Seabrook through his writings on witchcraft, as I have done, for it was ‘one of the things that interested him passionately’; he was an authority on occult customs and ritual ‘what he called Black Magic.’ (p. 193) ‘In some ways’ Marjorie writes, ‘and I believe it dated from his earlier association with Aleister Crowley during the Greenwich Village period [1917] in both their lives – Willies witchcraft and magic were tied in with his sexual sadism.’ (p. 193-4) In certain rituals pain and sex was used to elevate the consciousness of the practitioners onto a spiritual/magical plane to induce visions and Willie’s preference was for young girls chained – ‘Lizzies in chains’ as Marjorie calls them. He does not seem ashamed by his strange desires, in fact, he flaunts it – ‘he made no secret of his sexual twist. He wanted people to know about his sadism, and to talk about it. I always felt that it was something private and horrid, to be kept out of sight like a running sore or a malignant disease.’ (p. 209) Towards the outbreak of war, Willie started to drink heavily again and in 1940 he received a gift from Harrison Smith, his first editor at Harcourt. Smith was visiting Haiti and sent Willie a ‘Ouanga’, a charm used in Black Magic (it was a bag filled with various objects, sent to a person with the intention to do either harm or to bring good fortune); Willie and Smith had been friends but this ‘gift’ turned Willie against him for he was suspicious of the Ouanga – Marjorie burnt it behind the barn much to Willie’s relief. Ah the famous barn! Willie spent two weeks in that barn with ‘Lizzie number two’, chained to the beams, in fact, we learn that the ‘Lizzie’, according to Marjorie, ‘plunged Willie’s elbows in boiling water and held them there.’ No doubt this was at Willie’s suggestion, but he had to spend time in hospital with his arms bandaged, and tied in such a way as he was unable to use them for several weeks. By this time Marjorie was sick of the ‘Lizzies’ and went to her sisters’ house, eventually returning to Willie at Rhinebeck in a fit of jealousy, wanting to kill the ‘Lizzie’ (Miss Kuhr) but it was the last straw, she leaves him and they divorce. Marjorie later finds out through a newspaper article that Willie has married Miss Constance Kuhr – Willie later dies in his bed from an overdose of sleeping pills in September 1945!

This has been a fascinating read and along the way we have touched shoulders with such luminaries as: Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Noel Coward, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, who was certainly not kind to Willie; Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, Dashiell Hammet and William Faulkner. Seabrook was certainly a damaged man, but a damaged man who could write a hell of a story; a man who ‘experimented with anything that would move life above or below the normal and respectable.’ (p. 24) But this is more than a book about Willie Seabrook, it is a book about Marjorie Worthington, a fine writer in her own right and a woman who goes beyond all reasonable boundaries for love, who in the end could just take no more and who could blame her? Utterly mesmerising!

Corvo: Saint or Madman? – by Donald Weeks.

It is a gloomy prospect to encounter such a well-researched book as Donald Weeks has written on such an almost forgotten literary genius, where pedantic nerves of steel are necessary, and having read much on the Baron, through all his misfortunes and devilish entanglements with the Catholic Church; his impoverished life devoted to spiritual endeavours and writing, one feels almost a sense of shame for those who hastened to call him friend, and then avoided him due to his insufferable requests for money. Such men are an exception and should be recognised as such, but it is an exceptional man who puts his faith and finances into such creatures! He was a man who lived through the written word – why speak when the pen can flow more fluently? Why indeed and when Mr. Weeks’ pen flows just as fluently why stop it? And so, ‘Corvo: Saint or Madman?’ published in 1971 is a hugely entertaining volume if one happens to be just as obsessed about the Corvo as the author is for it is a massively researched and meticulous biography. Like many people, Weeks, who draws much from Rolfe’s novel ‘Hadrien VII’ (1904) and his ‘Desire and Pursuit of the Whole’ written in Venice in 1909, came under the spell of Corvo through that beautiful classic ‘experiment in biography’ –   ‘The Quest for Corvo’ (1934) by A. J. A. Symons, a book which rekindled interest in the forgotten Frederick William Rolfe (1860-1913) the eccentric and erudite writer who seems to blunder through life and never quite grasp at success. Over fifteen chapters (and more than 500 pages) Weeks tells his story in as much detail as even Rolfe himself would have admired to the point of ejaculation no doubt, from the young schoolmaster becoming Roman Catholic and seeking ordination (he was refused twice, the second time in Rome; he was found ‘unsuitable’ for Holy Orders); following his rejection he attempted to make a living as an artist in Christchurch, Hampshire and in Holywell, North Wales and as a photographer in Aberdeen, (he was unceremoniously ejected from his lodgings) all unsuccessfully. We can clearly see the development between the poems of ‘Tarcissus’, the young Roman martyr, and the ‘Ballad of Boys Bathing’ (1890) where Rolfe’s blossoming adoration and physical attraction for youthful boys emerges; in the same year as ‘Boy’s Bathing’ he had met the uranian poet Charles Kains-Jackson (1857-1933) and the art critic, Gleeson White (1851-1898) who no doubt encouraged certain traits in Rolfe. In fact, 1890, a year of change, is pivotal in the study of Rolfe for he turns from the Rome of Catholicism towards art (painting and photography) and literature (from poetry to prose). The attacks in the Aberdeen newspapers of 1898 had ‘stripped him, mentally and spiritually; and Holywell had exhausted him, bodily and financially. He posted all his pawn tickets to himself in care of the main London Post Office, St Martin’s-le-Grand, and fled to the workhouse.’ (p. 172) In fact, Rolfe was so poor he had to walk the 140 miles from Wales to Oxford. Corvo’s life is indeed a journey and on the trail we encounter a cavalcade of cranks and curiosities, some familiar and some not so, such as the poets, John Gambril Nicholson (1866-1931) and Horatio Brown (1854-1926); Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914), Charles Harry Clinton Pirie-Gordon (1883-1969), Professor Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871-1955), Sholto Osborne Gordon Douglas (1873-1937), Henry Harland (1861-1905), Trevor Haddon (1864-1941), Henry (Harry) Charles Bainbridge (1874-1954), Maundy Gregory (1877-1941) and Dr. Ernest George Hardy (1852-1925), Principle of Jesus College, Oxford, all with their own curious tales to tell of Rolfe. It all reads like some Victorian farce or dark fairy story, the alienation, the paranoia, the romanticised poverty and sordidness of Venice and the infamous letters that flow like boyhood’s inky romantic flourishes with dirty pictures of nude boys enclosed under the banner of art to such like-minded souls as Mr. Charles Masson Fox (1866-1935): was Rolfe merely pandering to Mr. Masson Fox’s peculiarities in the hope of extracting finances from him or were Rolfe’s exploits genuine? here Mr. Weeks seems a little naïve to assume the Corvo, disillusioned by his thwarted ecclesiastical ambitions should not still consider himself as ‘celibate’ in the heterosexual sense of the word and his sweet stolen kisses were perfectly acceptable in the Venetian climate where Kains-Jackson’s ‘New Chivalry’ (1894) had eulogised upon the Platonic caress of youth like some sacred, spiritual devotion; the grandiosity of grime covered in silk is all too common within the Catholic Church so it comes as no surprise that the Baron should not do likewise – he quarrelled with publishers and priests alike and like a spent match his end was undramatic, dying of heart failure at the age of fifty-three. A very worthy and splendidly written work on a misunderstood misfit of his age!

Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall – by Chris Fujiwara.

This analysis of the films of Jacques Tourneur (1904-1977) published in 1998 with a Foreword by Martin Scorsese is a real work of art and excellently researched by Fujiwara. To most lovers of horror or supernatural films, of which I include myself, Tourneur will forever be remembered for directing four masterpieces of cinema, three of which were in partnership with the great producer Val Lewton. The son of Maurice Tourneur, the film maker and director, Jacques grew-up in a rather unaffectionate household and attended the Lycee Montaigne and the Lycee Lakanal. The Tourneurs went to the United States in 1914 and Jacques attended the New York Public School, before settling in California in 1918 and becoming a U.S. citizen the following year. In France during the thirties he began making films, his first being ‘Tout ca ne vaut pas l’amour’ (1931) and his last and best ‘Les Filles de la Concierge’ (1934). From 1934-1938 he worked at MGM as a director in the Second-Unit; he made shorts from 1936-1942 before making his first great and hugely successful film in collaboration with Val Lewton: ‘Cat People’ (1942). Lewton and Tourneur worked exceedingly well together and their films are memorable for their atmosphere and ambiguity, suggesting ‘transformations’ rather than showing them and using light and dark to provide spaces or ‘visual barriers’ for the imagination to fill in the gaps, a more frightening prospect than having the terrors visible. In Cat People, Simone Simon, plays Irena Dubrovna, a commercial illustrator, who becomes obsessed with an old Serbian legend concerning a ‘cat woman’; in a psychological sense we can see a fear of sexuality as something evil and the changing into a panther (as in the lycanthropic tendency of the Wolf Man) there is a mental as well as a physical fear with Freudian connotations. This can also be seen in the next great film to come from the Tourneur/Lewton partnership: ‘I walked with a Zombie’ (1943), a film for which I have great affection for which has remained with me as it would any true connoisseur of the genre. The film is a sort of ‘West Indies version of Jane Eyre’ and Frances Dee who plays Canadian nurse, Betsy Connell goes to St. Sebastian to look after Jessica Holland (played by Christine Gordon), the wife of a sugar plantation owner (Tom Conway) who has succumbed to a strange illness. Jessica is taken to the Houmfort, a voodoo temple in a memorable and atmospheric walk through the sugar canes which provides more shivers than any ‘shown’ shock horrors. Central to the film is the figure of Ti-Misery, a statue of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows which we learn was the figure head of a slave ship. The film is a true masterpiece of horror and describes the sexual tension and fear of superstition perfectly. The next film, although I would not consider it a masterpiece, is certainly a great film made in the same year as ‘I walked with a Zombie’ – ‘The Leopard Man’ (1943). This would be the last film Tourneur directed with Lewton producing before Tourneur went on to direct films such as ‘Days of Glory’ (1944), ‘Out of the Past’ (1947), ‘Berlin Express’ (1948), ‘Anne of the Indies’ (1951) etc. but in 1957 Tourneur directed the last of his horror masterpieces – ‘Night of the Demon’. Based on the story ‘Casting the Runes’ by the wonderful master of the English ghost story, M. R. James, the film (also known as ‘Curse of the Demon’ in the U.S.) sees a sceptic named Dr. John Holden (played brilliantly by an alcoholic Dana Andrews) investigate the mysterious Crowley-like cult leader Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). There are some very memorable scenes in the film such as Karswell in the British Museum and later conjuring a storm while dressed as a clown! The film also stars Peggy Cummins as Joanna Harrington, the niece of Professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham) who is killed by the demon in the opening shots; and Brian Wilde as the wonderfully named Rand Hobart. The film, like ‘Zombie’ and ‘Wolf Man’ and many others has been etched into my subconscious and is as much a part of me as breathing is. But the question of the demon being shown: Tourneur did not want to show the ‘monster’ and if the film falls from magnificent, it is for that reason; had Lewton been involved as producer I’m sure they would have decided against it but a man named Frank Bevis was producing the film and there was a fashion for showing the ‘monsters’ in Hollywood; however we can forgive the decision as the lovable old demon has become quite a charming character in his own right. Tourneur, a modest man, went on to direct several more films and films for television but he shall be remembered for the four films which have the power to persist in the mind. Entertaining!


Feasting with Panthers: A New Consideration of Some Late Victorian Writers – by Rupert Croft-Cooke.

Published in 1967, the book is divided into three main sections: Algernon Swinburne and Le Vice Anglais, John Addington Symonds and the Greek Ideal, and Oscar Wilde and the Iron Lilies. The author begins his research in the year of Swinburne’s meeting with the Pre-Raphaelites – 1857, when the Pre-Raphaelites are at Oxford. The poet Swinburne, an alcoholic and a masochist delighting in the torments of flagellation, seems to think of nothing but young school boys undergoing the misery of a good flogging, writing of it to his correspondents where we meet such eccentric and decidedly English perverts and misfits as Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes 1840-1890) whom Swinburne met in 1861 and had a huge library of erotica; the Welsh friend, George E. J. Powell (1842-1882) and Charles Augustus Howell (1840-1885); the transvestites Boulton and Parks and the Jewish painter Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) who was convicted for six weeks following lewd behaviour in a public lavatory in 1873 – Swinburne cut the friendship with him following this incident and Solomon after a spell in hospital and the workhouse, ended his days as a pauper in the latter. Also mentioned are Adah Isaacs Menken (Dolores McCord) and the drearily drab and dull man who saved Swinburne’s life and probably killed his poetic spirit: Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832-1914) who took the alcoholic poet into his care at the Pines in Putney – he was already dead and remained so until his body saw fit to join his mind and spirit in death.
The writer John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) proves himself to be a sneak in his youth and behaves abominably and despicably having heard that the Headmaster of Harrow, Dr. Charles John Vaughan (1816-1897) is having a relationship with Symonds’ friend Alfred Pretor (1846-1908); Symonds informs his father of the love letters from Pretor to Vaughan and the Headmaster is forced to resign. In 1858 Symonds goes up to Balliol College, Oxford and the following year his friend G. H. Shorter comes up from Rugby and the two become lovers before quarrelling over a Magdalene choir boy! Shorter sends Symonds’ letters and poems addressed to him to six Magdalene Fellows and Symonds leaves Oxford for a nervous breakdown, which some might say is the rightful fate for his behaviour with Pretor and Vaughan! Two friends of Symonds who were both schoolmasters have the same hunger after youth and are not so reticent about fulfilling that hunger: Arthur Sidgwick (1840-1920) a Master at Rugby, and Henry Dakyns (1838-1911) a classics Master at Clifton College, these two, along with the poet Roden Noel (1834-1894) and even the American poet, Walt Whitman, a correspondence with Symonds helps shape his thoughts on sexuality (Dakyns introduced Symonds to the seventeen year old love of Symonds’ life, Norman Moor in the Sixth Form at Clifton College, but Moor was sexually attracted to young boys and went up to Balliol College when he was 20; after travelling through Europe together the relationship ended. Moor became a classics Master at Clifton College and married six years later) but it is two Eton schoolmasters (both mysteriously dismissed by the Headmaster Dr. Hornby) who have a more profound effect upon the young man, namely the poet of ‘Ionica’ whom he sadly never met, William Johnson Cory who was at Eton 27 years and almost overnight had to resign his Fellowship from King’s College, Cambridge and changed his name to ‘Cory’, and Oscar Browning (1833-1923), a lifelong acquaintance and personal friend of Simeon Solomon (they went to Rome together). For Symonds, 1872 when he was 32 years old, became a pivotal year, he had lost Moor and discovered he was no longer sexually interested in boys and turned to the adult male.
Another name to conjure with is the author, Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883) who when he was 23 fell in love with the 16 year old William Kenworthy Browne (1818-1859) who died in a horse riding accident, and the poet Horatio Brown (1854-1926) who was in the Sixth Form at Clifton College, that hotbed of homosexuality where Symonds lectured to him, in fact, Brown seems to have worshipped Symonds and they went to Venice together, but we must not forget other set pieces in the game such as the poet Edward Cracroft Lefroy (1855-1891), the Rev. C. L. Dodgson better known as Lewis Carroll and a weak-eyed, ugly epileptic asthmatic named Edward Lear (1812-188), but we must move on to Wilde and the father of aestheticism, Walter Pater, a not very pretty hunchback who seems to have said nothing in all of his writings! We are of course in no doubt that Frank Harris is a damned liar when it comes to his role in the Wilde debacle and exaggerated pretty much the whole of his literary connections, but of interest are Wilde’s early friendships such as Lord Ronald Sutherland-Gower and the portrait painter Frank Miles (1852-1891) whom Wilde knew at Oxford and shared rooms with in London before quarrelling, Wilde moving towards literary success and Miles to a lunatic asylum and eventual suicide! The poet John Gray is of course brought into the story who met Wilde in 1889 when Gray was 23 and Marc Andre Raffalovich who met Gray in 1892 and the pairs descent into Catholicism like so many others, such as the alcoholic dwarf, Lionel Johnson who met Wilde in 1890 at Oxford through Pater (it was Johnson who introduced Wilde to ‘Bosie’ – Lord Alfred Douglas); and  Ernest Dowson, who met Wilde at the Rhymers Club and who became obsessed and poetically inspired by a 12 year old girl named Adelaide Foltinowicz (his father died of an overdose in 1894 and his mother by hanging shortly after, Dowson found her lifeless body), Dowson himself died young in February 1900, just eight months before Wilde; and also Count Eric Stenbock (1860-1895) whose eccentricity and poetry mark the excesses of aesthetic decadence and debauchery! The book of course ends with Wilde’s trials in 1895 when the public became aware of such ‘exotic’ and flamboyant behaviour and were sick of it! Wilde could have chose to escape the proceeding mockery but something made him stay to face the shame and humiliation, something brave within stood up to the onslaught and fell victim to it! Rupert Croft-Cooke has produced a most exquisitely beautiful book which I have no doubts about calling a masterpiece of literary research and criticism. Prior to reading ‘Feasting with Panthers’ I limbered up my muscles with ‘The Road of Danger, Guilt and Shame: The Lonely Way of A. E. Housman’ by Carol Efrati (2002), ‘Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford’ by Linda Dowling (1994); the genitally-obsessed ‘The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England’ by Steven Marcus (1964) and a book whose style I failed to appreciate – ‘The Man who was Dorian Gray’ by Jerusha Hull McCormack (2000) originally the doctoral thesis published as ‘John Gray: Poet, Dandy and Priest’ (1991), all quite unnecessary of course as ‘Feasting with Panthers’ needs little or no prior ‘warm-up’ to its enthusiastically written accounts of some rather marvellous and not quite forgotten individuals who still have the power to breathe new light into those decadent years, the eighteen-nineties. Glorious!


The Men of the Nineties – by Bernard Muddiman.

This is one of those books, published in 1920, quick to follow-up the interest in the nineties and to capture something of the atmosphere before it is lost forever or left to lesser men to write about, as indeed it shall be. Muddiman, in quite a short book at only 156 pages, describes the French influence upon the English writers and artists of the eighteen-nineties and how Oscar Wilde rose swiftly above the rest in the theatre; but of course, Muddiman gives his central role to Aubrey Beardsley whom he gushes over like a schoolgirl with wet knickers, enthralled by his personality as well as his intellectual learning. To the table he brings Henry Harland (1861-1905) of The Yellow Book fame and Arthur Symons, responsible for The Savoy periodical; other side ornamentation are put in place such as the critic and short story writer Hubert Montague Crackenthorpe (1870-1896) whose body was found in the Seine on Christmas Eve 1896 – ‘none of the nineties men produced a great novel’ says Muddiman which is quite true, even ‘Dorian Gray’ has its failings; and we are introduced to Dowling and the poet John Davidson (1858-1909) who later succumbed to suicide which seemed to be all the rage at one time. Muddiman goes a short distance to prove that the eighteen-nineties ‘fin de siecle’ was a pivotal decade announcing the death of Victorian morality and ushering in the splendour of the twentieth century with of course Wilde the Artist (and some would say Saint) as the inevitable sacrifice for such decadence which became a byword for degeneracy. It would take a world war before the re-emergence of such ‘Artistic’ principles could rise again to be articulated in painting, verse and the theatre. In its wake I read W. G. Blaikie-Murdoch’s ‘The Renaissance of the Nineties’ (1911) which if you prefer a more polished, pompous, dry and humourless account of the nineties you will certainly enjoy or you may fancy a long-winded yet scholarly approach as in Osbert Burdett’s ‘The Beardsley Period: An Essay in Perspective’ (1925) which I quite enjoyed or perhaps another book I found fascinating – ‘The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century’ by Holbrook Jackson (1913) which gives an excellently researched and invaluable account, but not bad Muddiman, not bad!


Poets of the ‘Nineties: A Biographical Anthology – by Derek Stanford.

This is a hugely enjoyable collection of decadent oddities from Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), Victor Plarr (1863-1929), W B Yeats (1865-1939) to Richard Le Galliene (1866-1944) and Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945) published in 1965. The poets of the nineties wished to express the intensity of life’s moments such as the Scottish poet John Davidson (1857-1909) whose ballads became infused with atheism and Nietzsche’s philosophy (I read his collection ‘In a Music-Hall and Other Poems’, 1891 and found it quite dreadful though many praised it at the time); Stanford almost seems to suggest that there was a curse upon the poets of the nineties, a curse which few survived, John Gray lived till 1934, Yeats of course lived till 1939, Arthur Symons and Lord Alfred Douglas till 1945 and Richard Le Galliene till 1947 so perhaps a few were exempt from such a curse, but it does seem to be a cult of the consumptive and the suicidal – John Davidson, fearful of his own failures and disappointments, fabulously drowned himself in the Seine at the age of fifty or thereabouts, his body was discovered some six months later by some fishermen; Dowson died of consumption aged 32; Lionel Johnson, a dipsomaniac, had a stroke and died aged 35; Wilde, disgraced and imprisoned was dead after just three years exile in France, aged 46; Beardsley, another consumptive was taken aged 26; the American poet William Theodore Peters starved to death in Paris in 1904; Hubert Crackenthorpe took John Davidson’s example and was found in the Seine; Francis Adams committed suicide, so did Francis William Lauderdale Adams who put a revolver to his head in 1893; Henry Harland who edited the Yellow Book died of consumption aged 43, Francis Thompson, an opium addict and consumptive died aged 48 and the artist Charles Conder who went mad and was placed in an asylum died at 41, coincidentally, it was the same asylum Arthur Symons went to following his attack of madness in Italy in 1908. ‘Poets of the ‘Nineties’ is a fascinating read and of all those men who burned with a ‘hard gem-like flame’ one is left with the haunting image of poor Dowson like a monstrous phantom in Soho – by 1897 the young girl Adelaide for whom he yearned had married and his father took poison and his mother took to the rope – Dowson went himself in 1900 just as the eighteen-nineties had flickered to a close. I followed this up with a 1970 reprint of ‘Poetry of the Nineties’ (1926) by Clarence Edward Andrews which adds a few more lesser-known poets to the great consumptive and drowning collective. Splendid!


Posies Out of Rings and Other Conceits – by William Theodore Peters.

William Theodore Peters (1862-1904) is an American poet but we should not hold that against him for he has produced quite a nice little book of poems in this 1896 publication which contains 87 poems most of which consist of just two, three or four lines which try to be more than they are so don’t get too comfortable. ‘Requiescat’ has eleven lines (he must have been spectacularly inspired that day) and is reminiscent of Wilde and begins: ‘Our Love is dead! Our love is dead! / Let’s cover him with summer flowers.’ The ‘Pierrot and the Statue’ ends as if seeming to sum-up many of the eighteen-nineties poets, including Peters: ‘the Statue faintly flushed, it seemed to strive / to move, - but it was only half alive.’ Actually, the more I read the more Peters became disagreeable to me and perhaps grudges should be held afterall! – his ‘Song’ is the most terrible, infantile muck one could wish to read with its six verses droning on about ‘fairy harps’ which stood ‘in a castle old’; the fact he knew Dowson and dedicates a poem to him – ‘Epilogue to Ernest Dowson’s “The Pierrot of the Minute” almost redeems him, but not quite. He died of starvation in Paris in 1904.


The Blue-Fly in His Head: Poems – by John Heath-Stubbs.

This slim volume (86 pages) published in 1962 has some marvellous poems based on classical mythology such as ‘The Cave of the Nymphs’ and these lines from ‘Not being Oedipus’:

‘Celibate, he had nothing to fear from ambitious sons;
Although he was lonely at nights,

With only the Sphynx, curled up upon his eider down.
Its body exuded a sort of unearthly warmth
(Though in fact cold-blooded) but its capacity
For affection was strictly limited.’

Poet and critic, of Queen’s College, Oxford, John Francis Alexander Heath-Stubbs (1918-2006) takes his title from the Jewish tradition in which Titus is afflicted with an insect in the brain for his punishment after the destruction of the Temple. We can see the author’s playfulness in poems like ‘Theseus on Naxos’ – ‘Delicate girls in the blush of beauty, / boys in their galloping grace, to the Beast - / product of hideous and comic lust: / the obscene guzzle, the bull-thing’s feast.’ (I); ‘Plato and the Waters of the Flood’, ‘Titus and Berenice’, ‘The Peacock and the Snake’ and ‘Household Devils’: ‘Articles don’t get written, / poems don’t get copied; / the grime of sloth settles on my life.’ Other good poems are: ‘Lament for the Old Swan, Notting Hill Gate’, ‘To Edmund Blunden on His 60th Birthday’ and some lovely little animal poems such as ‘The Hare’ which is ‘sacred to the Moon / a type of innocent sacrifice’ and ‘The Nightjar’ which appears ‘less bird than voice’ and is ‘twilight’s great moth-winged, moth-pursuing swallow, / bark-mottled invisible squatter’ or the one line poem ‘The Ants’ which simply reads: ‘You could have been human, but you aren’t’. Heath-Stubbs went blind in his left eye in 1961 and his right eye followed suit in 1978; he died at the age of 88 and his work is certainly worth searching for!

My Father and Myself – by J. R. Ackerley.

Joe Randolph Ackerley (1896-1967) has written a brilliant account of his mysterious father, Alfred Roger Ackerley, a guardsman whose secret life unfolds throughout the eighteen chapters of this delightful book published in 1968. The author, a young ‘bed-wetter’ who says that he was ‘pissing upon a world that had not accorded me the whole-hearted welcome my ego required’ (p. 76), describes his relationship with his father who became one of the directors of the fruit merchants, ‘Elders and Fyffes’ thus becoming known as the ‘Banana King’; Alfred, the King of the Bananas, married his first wife Louise Burckhardt who died in 1892, the same year that Alfred met the author’s mother, Janetta Aylward on the Channel boat. Janetta became pregnant in 1895 and Alfred refused to marry her due to an inheritance allowance from the Buckhardt’s; he was also seeing other women. And so the author’s unwanted older brother Peter was born (Peter died in the final moments of the war when he was decapitated by a shell in August 1918); a sister, Nancy was born in 1898; the author joined-up in 1915 and was wounded at the Somme, on his return to the Front he was made a Captain and wounded again before being taken prisoner and sent to Germany. Following the war J. R. went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1919 to study Law where he began writing poems – this was also the year in which the first ‘secret’ occurred and was not revealed until after the author’s father died of cancer of the tongue and strokes in October 1929 – in 1919 his parents were married! Hardly the stuff of damnation today and I was half expecting him to accuse his father of being Jack the Ripper or something outlandish but at the time there was a great stigma attached to such dishonourable and immoral behaviour. Following Ackerley senior’s death the author researches and wades through the evidence as to his father’s life and another anomaly rears its head: his father was the handsome young guardsman who attended upon two rich gentlemen – one, a Mr. Fitzroy Paley Ashmore, a barrister who matriculated from University College, Oxford in 1864 (born around 1846 he died in 1883), and the other, Count James Francis de Gallatin (1853-1915): just what was the relationship between the young and astonishingly handsome Alfred Ackerley and these two men? It was known that it was customary for young guardsmen to respond to rich, older gentlemen who required their company in return for money and sexual encounters were regular occurrences discussed in the Albany Street Barracks, Regents Park (where Alfred enlisted in 1879), and the conduct receiving the usual nudges, nods and winks was common affair. In fact, there was a notorious tobacconist shop nearby where Mrs. Truman took messages from gentlemen wishing to meet young guardsmen. The author, a homosexual himself who describes with relish some of his own sexual encounters and exploits, has more revelations up his sleeve to reveal, another mystery, his father’s ‘secret orchard’ for he  had a mistress named Muriel Perry and three daughters, twins Sally and Elizabeth, born 1909 and Diana born 1912 (the author hadn’t the heart to reveal this information to his mother, Netta who remained blissfully unaware of the situation, and he himself did not keep in-touch with his half-sisters): what other revelations may have come to light had not Alfred’s locked desk from Elders and Fyffes containing personal items and papers not been burned un-opened is anyone’s guess!

In 1925 the author took lodgings at number 6 Hammersmith Terrace owned by the Needhams, three marvellously dilapidated Dickensian characters who were gunsmiths and workers in metals: Arthur Joseph Needham, an inventor in his sixties and a ‘haunter of Hammersmith urinals’; the reclusive Helen Louisa Needham (Miss Louie) and their brother Walter Cecil Needham known as ‘Cis’ who succumbed to cancer. It turns out that the camp and curious Arthur knew Count James Francis de Gallatin in his younger days and the Count, a notorious homosexual known for his encounters with guardsmen and sailors lived nearby at 3 St. Peter’s Square and so the flames of suspicion are fanned once more – was the author’s father the plaything of wealthy gentlemen? We can only speculate and Arthur died in 1941 aged 78 taking any unspoken truths to his grave with him. And so the author takes a job with the B.B.C. in 1928 and began the idea for writing this book in 1934 but it was put away for two decades after a bomb fell outside his flat bringing the ceiling down in 1940. The Appendix describes his problems with premature ejaculation and impotence before he reveals much too much about his unhealthy relationship with his dog, Tulip! All in all a fascinating and moving account with some lovely portraits of the odd eccentric personalities of which there are too few of today. Tremendous!

The Darkling Plain – by John Heath-Stubbs.

The Darkling Plain: a study of the later fortunes of Romanticism in English Poetry from George Darley to W. B. Yeats, was published in 1950 and the author writes with clarity and distinction with his poet’s eye (he unfortunately lost his sight later in life), revealing the contrast between the ‘Classical’ and the ‘Romantic’, a revolt of ‘intuitive imagination’ against the rationalism and empiricism of the eighteenth century. From the beginning Heath-Stubbs rights-off the Victorian poets of metaphysical doubt and questioning, Browning and Tennyson, dismissing their rambling, epic works that fall dismally short of Byron and Shelley to concentrate on the lesser-known poets: Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) who committed suicide, Thomas Hood (1799-1845) and George Darley (1795-1846) whose morbidity and strange grotesque works were not popular. We are taken on a journey through the realms of folk traditions and the regionalists in chapter two, the medieval minstrels, country songs, ballads and village mummers before alighting on the minor romantic poet John Clare (1793-1864), a peasant-poet and a madman who was largely ignored during his lifetime; of all the Romantic poets, John Clare, the son of a labourer who pulled himself from the slime of his wretched situation in his attempt to escape his peasant poverty and reveal his poetic intellect showed an unusual integrity lacking in better-known poets of greater social fortune. Like Yeats love for Maude Gonne, Clare was devoted to his first, unrequited love, Mary Joyce, whom in his less lucid days he believed he was married to and this compulsion drove Clare to write his evocative poetry, a spiritual correspondence between Man and Landscape, yet the frailty of the mind would be all too consumed by the Lunatic Asylum. Housman’s ‘pastoral-dream of lost adolescence’ is touched upon although one feels Heath-Stubbs hasn’t much time for the scholar and poet whose impact influenced the new ‘Georgian’ poets. Those two old stalwarts of popularity, financially fat and bloated by applause, Browning and Tennyson are summoned in chapter three – the poetry of doubt and despair, whom the author accuses of being dishonest for failing to observe or record the changes of their age (although I must say Tennyson from the perspective of his ivory tower was aware of something called the ‘railway’ which he apparently believed incorrectly to travel upon ‘grooves’ so he was almost a faithful recorder of change); other old steam engines are stoked-up and taken out of their sheds once more, such as the ‘wistful unbelievers’, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) and the ‘intellectual pessimist’ James Thomson (1834-1882) whose ‘City of Dreadful Night’ influenced the fin de siecle ‘suicidal’ poets. The Roman Catholic mysticism of Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), G. M. Hopkins (1844-1899) and Francis Thompson (1859-1907) with his opium-infused visions are explored in chapter four before the author explodes with utter dismay at the conceited delusions of those aesthetes, those ‘Swinburnian derivatives’ of the eighteen-nineties with their ‘affected archaism of diction’ for he has little praise for such eternal spirits as Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) and Lionel Johnson (1867-1902) whom he dismisses, saying ‘those who did not die young outlived their talents and their reputations’ (p. 151); it is true that most of these poets were all play and no passion with little energy towards any iconoclastic revolt but I think the author is a little hard on the younger generation who quietly rebelled against the imposing moralistic edifice of Victorian decency, ah but there is hope in the much neglected and almost obscure poet, Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) whose ‘eighties and ‘nineties poetry is simply Byronic in style but that hope dwindles rapidly into whispered praise, but watch Heath-Stubbs gush like an embarrassed boy with an erection over the French Symbolists – Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarme etc. and his enthusiasm spills across the page and of course we are led to the sado-masochistic (and probably impotent) Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites and aestheticism’s transition towards imaginative realism; but what is this? Could it be that Mr. Wilde with his polished façade is making an entrance, paraded before us as a figure-head of Platonism (absolute beauty), a philosophical tradition whereby an aesthetic metaphysics can be constructed, before being told to stand at the back of the room like a naughty child and be silent while others take their turn – George Meredith (1828-1909) an inferior Browning – Robert Bridges (1834-1930) who dissolved into dreary dribble and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) with his jingoistic tosh and Charles Doughty (1843-1926) with his epic style in the manner of Milton… all come under the scrutiny of the author’s astute learning but one possible exception who rises above the dross is John Davidson (1857-1909) who expresses colloquially the ‘dingy urban images’ of reality before he took like a stone to water and so we therefore come to the esoteric doctrines and Celtic mythology of W. B. Yeats whose early Pre-Raphaelite-influenced works progressed steadily towards a modern realism. Heath-Stubbs, a rather good poet himself, has produced a breathtaking study of Romanticism which is both perceptive and enlightening.

Meditations in Motley – by Walter Blackburn Harte.

This collection of six essays, or as the London-born author Walter Blackburn Harte (1867-1899) terms them, a ‘Bundle of Papers imbued with the Sobriety of Midnight’ was published in 1894 and what an erudite and witty ‘bundle’ it is! In the first essay, ‘On Certain Satisfactions of Prejudice’, we are heartily reminded no to ‘mistake “prejudices” for “convictions” or vice versa’ and the author illustrates the boundless joy to be found in certain prejudices before moving on to the more serious ‘Jacobitism in Boston’. Harte, an admirer of Ambrose Bierce and Walter Pater, immigrated to Canada in 1886 and became a journalist before moving to New York in 1890; he was assistant editor of ‘New England’ and ‘Arena’ magazine in Boston and editor of ‘The Flyleaf’ (1896) and ‘The Lotus’ (1897), and undoubtedly his own failure to earn a living from his pen in London sustained and increased his condemnation of publishers for he writes scathingly of both publishers and the popular novels in his essay ‘about Critic and Criticism, with other Matters, Incidental and Irrelevant’. A pessimistic cloud descends upon the author’s essays and permeates every line as he spits fury yet he writes brilliantly and dazzlingly with savage accuracy on social and literary criticism with a thread of irony that shows his perceptive skill at analysis; the bile builds in ‘Some Masks and Faces of Literature’ only to whisper passionately like a lover upon the ‘Fascination of New Books’ before singing sweetly with a ‘Rhapsody on Music’. Although originally the volume failed to sell there is a wealth of fascinating literary subjects to be found within this ‘bundle’ and anyone wishing to know more about the author who died much too soon without sufficient recognition, should consult ‘The Fin de Siecle Spirit: Walter Blackburn Harte and the American/Canadian Literary Milieu of the 1890’s’ by James Doyle published in 1995.

In the Key of Blue and Other Prose Essays – by John Addington Symonds.

Published in 1893, the thirteen essays contained in the volume range from ‘The Dantesque and Platonic Ideals of Love’ with its examination of the love between Dante and Beatrice, notable Greek mythological gods and men and the notion of chivalrous love, where he says that ‘Love, like poetry and prophecy, is a divine gift, which diverts men from the common current of their earthly lives; and in the right use of this gift lies the secret of all human excellence’ (p. 71); the desire is not a physical sensuality, not an appetite but a ‘state of the soul’. Symonds looks at the similarity between Greek and medieval chivalry, a ‘pure spiritual enthusiasm’ originally a Dorian and ‘soldierly passion’ (it is not adulterous and excludes marriage); ‘Medieval Norman Songs’ and ‘The Lyricism of the Romantic Drama’ to ‘Lyrics from Elizabethan Song Books’, all worthy subjects and handled well in the author’s skilled hands of course but more interesting, I found were his essays containing his descriptive Italian walking tours in the ‘footsteps of Shelley’such as ‘Among the Euganean Hills’, ‘On an Alter-Piece by Tiepelo’ and his ‘Notes of a Somersetshire Home’. But the high-points for me was his touching essay on the poet whom he sadly never got to meet, ‘Edward Cracroft Lefroy’ (1855-1891), that Neo-Hellenic ‘muscular Christian’ and author of the much admired poetry collection and catalyst for uranian outpourings, ‘Echoes from Theocritus’ published in 1885, a man of ‘simplicity and absolute sincerity of instinct’; staying with the uranian theme, ‘Clifton and a Lad’s Love’ has some memorable lines of verse where the author no longer feels the need to ‘curb the current of his blood’ –

‘I found him in a lowly place:

He sang clear songs that made me weep:

Long nights he ruled my soul in sleep:

Long days I thought upon his face.’ (I)

Clifton College in Bristol is where Symonds lectured and met the seventeen year old Edward Norman Peter Moor (1851-1895) and engaged in a four year affair with him (Moor later taught Classics at Clifton in 1874). Clifton seems to have housed many notable ‘uranians’ and almost equalled Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford in its debauched delights (Symonds attended both educational institutions and at the former his seeds of hypocrisy were sown [see the case of Pretor and Vaughan] and the latter under Benjamin Jowett, his enthusiasm for choirboys) for we find at Clifton a distinguished and depraved coterie of literary men who worked as Masters and kept up a circle of correspondence, such as Horatio Forbes Brown (1854-1926), the poet who studied under Symonds; the Classics Master, Greek translator and Venetian historian Henry Graham Dakyns (1838-1911) who was at Clifton from 1862-1889; Mathematics Master, author (see his ‘Clifton Memories’ 1927) and poet, John Rickards Mozley (1840-1931) and the Manx poet and Master, Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897) who actually died at the College and probably haunts its halls! I once stayed in Clifton and was harassed by a very persistent ghost.

Symonds is a great authority on the history of the ‘Divine’ or Greek ideal of love and writes with passion but he is also a worthy poet so let us return to ‘Clifton and a Lad’s love’ to end upon:

‘To thee far off, more far than death,

To thee I make my lonely rhyme,

Condemned to see thee not in time,

Though life and love still rule thy breath.

Our pulses beat, our hearts strike on;

They beat, but do not beat together;

Our years are young, but lusty weather

Wakes in our blood no unison.’ (XV)

In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray – by Brocard Sewell.

This hugely interesting volume published in 1983 is divided, like the poet, John Henry Gray (1866-1934), into two parts: part I – ‘A Walk on the Wild Side’ looks at his hedonistic rise in aesthetic circles and part II – ‘The Canon in Residence’ concentrates on his Catholic spiritual endeavours. Gray was born in London’s Bethnal Green to a working-class Methodist family; bright and studious, young Gray unfortunately had to leave school at thirteen to contribute to the family finances and worked at the Woolwich Arsenal as a metal-turner, studying languages, Latin, French and German in his spare time, not to mention learning the violin and aspects of drawing and painting. After three years at the lathe, in 1882 aged sixteen, he studied for his Civil Service (Lower Division) Clerkship and passed in October of that year to become a Boy Clerk at the Savings Bank Department of the London General Post Office. In 1888 he joined the Foreign Office, aged twenty-two and took rooms in the Temple, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Arthur Symons, W B Yeats and George Moore. With ambitions to become a writer, Gray met Oscar Wilde in January 1891 at a Fitzroy Street poetry reading (or was it in 1889 at a dinner party in Fulham, there is some contention?) and Wilde seems to have lost his heart to the boy and introduced him to London society; the intense friendship with Wilde seems to have lasted until 1893. So here is Gray, aged twenty-three with no real experience of love or sex (we assume: was he really so naive?) with a deepening feeling towards Catholicism which led him into the faith on Valentine’s Day 1890 when he was received and shortly after confirmed at St Mary’s, Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea. Gray became acquainted with artists Charles de Sousy Rickets and Charles Hazelwood Shannon who published ‘The Dial’ to which Gray contributed and a close friendship was established with French poet, Pierre Louys (1870-1925), a notorious ‘bisexual’; during their friendship word of Wilde’s romance with ‘Bosie’ would have been mentioned and discussed in sordid and seedy corners of London and it would prove too much for the sensitive Gray who was tired of being seen as the inspiration for Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel and who in November 1892 suffered a nervous breakdown and even came close to suicide over it – there would also be some guilt over Gray’s rejection of his father and his working-class background, having pulled himself free from the slime of poverty; he became disgusted with life. Yet another factor would be introduced into this confused state during that November and that is Grays blossoming friendship with the homosexual poet and author Marc Andre Raffalovich (1864-1934), whom he met in Arthur Symons’ rooms in the Temple. Raffalovich and Wilde were at extreme odds with each other and he may have played a part in separating Gray from Wilde but it is not known to what extent (Wilde had originally bore the costs of Gray’s poetry collection ‘Silverpoints’ published in March 1893, but cancelled prior to this in January). Raffalovich and Gray shared a love of the theatre and both took to the teachings of Swedenborg and spiritism. Gray abandoned Wilde when the friendship deteriorated, along with Raffalovich, Louys and Beardsley, in some cases after several attempts to warn Wilde of his behaviour and the rumours circulating London and Paris. Following the inevitable downfall of the great aesthete, Gray retreated in December 1897 to the Jesuit fathers at Manresa House, Roehampton as a candidate for priesthood, a place attended by the poet G M Hopkins and visited by myself while an undergraduate at Roehampton. And so Gray resigned form the Civil Service at the end of November 1898 to study Holy Orders at Scot’s College in Rome. He was ordained in Rome on 21^st December three years later in 1901 before being offered an assistant curacy at St Patrick’s Church, Cowgate, in Edinburgh’s Old Town (he would become Rector of St Peter’s aged forty-one and remain so for the next twenty-seven years). There were some intermittent publications from Gray such as: ‘Spiritual Poems’ (1896), ‘Vivus’ (1922), ‘Poems’ (1931) and a novel ‘Park: A Fantastic Story’ (1932). Raffalovich died in February 1934 and Gray died just four months later on 14^th June; as to the nature of their relationship the author believes it was platonic and I tend to agree for although Raffalovich was definitely homosexual, Gray seemed less committed and may even, like Louys been bisexual, but like Hopkins, Gray seems to have hidden his desires within the Catholic Church and spiritual asceticism. For another perspective on Gray and an altogether different psychological analysis you may wish to turn to as I have done, to Jerusha Hull’s ‘The Man who was Dorian Gray’ published in 2000, (unfortunately I did not like her narrative approach to biography but it is a scholarly work nonetheless), all in all, Brocard Sewell has written a thoroughly interesting volume about a brilliantly perplexing and much divided man!

Unforgotten Years – by Logan Pearsall Smith.

‘Unforgotten Years’ is an immensely interesting autobiography by the American born essayist and critic, Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) published in 1938. Written in an informal style which is a pleasure to read, Smith tells us of his Philadelphia Quaker up-bringing and his early life attending Quaker meetings with his parents – ‘there can be no doubt’ he says, ‘that I was born a vessel of wrath, full to the brim of that Original Sin we all inherit from that crude apple that diverted Eve’ (p. 36). Yet at a young age, through the influence of his older sister who became interested in literature and philosophy, the Divine essence seems to leave him – ‘since I attained the state of Sanctification at the age of seven I have never felt the slightest twinge of conscience, never experienced for one second the sense of sin’ (p. 40). The Smith family travelled to England in 1872 and young Logan was taken with London, staying at the grand houses while his parents talked on Quakerism; in 1882 Logan, his father and his sister went to visit Walt Whitman (his ‘Leaves of Grass’ had a profound effect upon his sister and thence upon Logan); Walt stays with the Smiths for a month and they visited each other quite often, remaining firm friends throughout the poet’s remaining years. At the age of nineteen in 1884 Logan attended Harvard and entered its intellectual social scene with relish and it was at Harvard that he discovered and admired the writing of Matthew Arnold and Theosophy. Following his year at Harvard Smith went to Germany to study in Berlin and found a fondness for Wagner – he met Matthew Arnold in Dresden and was deeply disillusioned by the man. He returned to the United Sates in the autumn of 1886 and entered the family glass bottle business, becoming a clerk in their New York warehouse with the prospects of becoming a wealthy man, but he was disappointed by this and to his father’s displeasure, abandoned it for a literary life and arrived in England in 1888, aged twenty-three, where he enters Balliol College, Oxford, befriending the great Benjamin Jowett and attending his dinner parties, even staying with him in his Malvern cottage. He read Walter Pater at Oxford and was hugely influenced by his writing before he graduated in 1891; and so the young man of learning travelled to Paris, to the Montparnasse quarter, taking rooms near Whistler’s studio and getting to know the artist quite well along with Roger Fry and Lowes Dickinson (Smith is less than kind about the endless parade of self-absorbed bohemian artists all painting the same variations of the same old styles; there is little originality, he finds in Paris). In France he admired the writings of Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, immersing himself in the richness of their style. His first book about Oxford was published in 1895 but was not well received, but through its publication he became friends with the poet Robert Bridges and got to meet the great fellow American writer, Henry James. Smith then retires to an 18^th century farmhouse, ‘High Buildings’ in Sussex where he stayed for ten years in solitude, reading, mostly Pater and Baudelaire and learning his craft of writing, consumed by the art of literature. One of the most interesting chapters concerns his hunting for manuscripts, unearthing forgotten letters in the archives of private houses, ingratiating himself first with the owners of such literary gems usually through a letter of introduction by a common acquaintance. In this manner he was able to discover the unpublished letters of John Donne and Sir Henry Wotton (see his ‘The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton’ (1907) and also the correspondence between Carlyle and the second Lord Ashburton and Horace Walpole to Madame du Deffand. Smith is a prolific writer whose works include: ‘Trivia’ (1902), ‘More Trivia’ (1921), ‘Afterthoughts’ (1931) and ‘A Treasury of English Aphorisms’ (1943) and ‘Unforgotten Years’ is a tremendous and rewarding read, yet he tells us nothing about his infatuations, there is no mention of love or sexual desire; he is a man all too unconcerned by mere mortal frivolities of the flesh, or so it seems, but under the façade of the man of letters there must have been great passions, even if he chooses not to disclose them, which is a pity, yet it does not alter the fact that Smith has written an absolutely fascinating account of his life with little concern about inflating his ego or literary stature for the eyes of posterity. Superb!

Ionicus – by Reginald, Viscount Esher.

In 1858 a remarkable volume of poetry was published titled ‘Ionica’ by the Eton schoolmaster William Johnson (1823-1892) who changed his name to William Cory in October 1872 following his mysterious dismissal, in fact he was forced to resign, from Eton in the Easter of that year. This book, ‘Ionicus’, published in 1923 by the 2^nd Viscount Esher – Reginald Baliol Brett (1852-1930), a somewhat semi-distinguished historian and politician who was fifteen at Eton when he came under the influence of Cory, then William Johnson. Brett presents here the letters written to him by Cory which began in the summer half of 1868; Brett is of course flattered and keeps up a correspondence with the poet and scholar William Johnson. And so waves of letters ebb and flo between them filled with idle, trivial matters of school life, politics and literary interests interspersed with the worthless doings of inflated personages bound by titles such as Lord such-and-such and Earl so-and-so, puffing-up the inherent, nauseating snobbery of such privileged, and often odious, personages like Brett, who left Eton in the summer of 1870 to go up to Trinity College, Cambridge in October of that year only to surround himself with delicious, golden-haired ‘courtesans’. The Eton dismissal of Cory is touched upon, although much more is not being said, for we are to understand that he was ‘encouraged’ to resign due to his teaching methods and system of developing and appreciating shall we say the boys’ romantic ideals in a classical manner; this was all too much for the Headmaster of Eton (from 1864-84), a stuffed Victorian carcase by the name of James Hornby (1826-1909), the same moralistic masochist who dismissed Oscar Browning (1837-1923) from Eton for the same alleged offences. Having left Eton, Cory leads a far from cloistered life, for he travels widely and accepts dinner invitations and other social engagements with great enthusiasm and with his health failing his mind often flows over the pupils he has taught, whom he has given so much to. Brett, still bearing a passing resemblance to a scholar, grows a little fatigued with Cory’s correspondence, or at least is not as dutiful in answering as he once was, yet the letters reach Cory, a scholar and poet who will forever be remembered and revered for the line ‘they told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’ – who but the heartiest philistine and simplest of mind could fail to see the beauty of that line and what is it about these simple words which invoke such perfectly uplifting wonder? And so the correspondence which began in 1868 ends with Cory’s death in 1892. The volume ends with some notes upon the writing of the poetry in ‘Ionicus’ (appendix I) and ‘Lucretilis’ (appendix II). I would suggest reading ‘Ionica’, the 1905 edition edited by A. C. Benson  before turning to this more selective volume which throws more light upon the poet, yet never enough to reveal fully the man, the scholar and the poet to step completely from the shadows. Quite good!

Private Opinion: A Commonplace Book – by Alan Pryce-Jones.

This is an interesting and innovative volume of recollections and criticisms published in 1936, based on the author’s boyhood and adult book browsing which reads like a love-affair with books in almost chronological order; he has this to say about dear old Dodsley’s ‘Collection of Poems, in six volumes, 1743-1758’ which by the way he says is ‘unreadable’ – ‘to re-open Dodsley is to renew the refreshing – at times – experience of turning one’s eyes away from an untrustworthy embryo to an accomplished funeral urn.’ (p. 14) Alan Pryce-Jones (1908-2000), critic, author and book collector weaves his reminiscences of Eton – ‘the elms and the cloisters at night, and the Delphin Classics (unread, though, for the most part, by me) in the Library gallery’, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read ‘The Poetical Works of John Langhorne D.D.’ (on a scholarly pretext for playing truant to London), through the tangled web of youth (there is a mild fascination for reading in lavatories) attaching great significance to the books he reads (English, German and French authors) and his memories, such as ‘The Coral Island’ by R. M. Ballantyne (1857) which brings to mind his grandmother in Beningbrough, and thus his Nanny, Miss Snell squashing frogs with her ‘flat nanny’s heel’ in the garden. (p. 47) Pryce-Jones was an extraordinary idle school boy: ‘anybody with a strain of comfortable weakness in his nature is likely to be incapacitated for life by six years of Eton’ (p. 21) He remembers some rather obscure volumes with all the affection of a book-lover: Anne Blanchard’s ‘Midnight Reflections’ (1822), Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ which he read in 1915 at the height of the war when he would walk in the garden at Penhurst ‘with the wind the right way, we could hear a hollow booming’ (p. 23), Shenstone’s ‘Essays on Men and Manners’; ‘Dr. Johnson’ by Hollis (the author’s first review for the London Mercury), H. N. Brailsford’s ‘Voltaire’, Mrs. Molesworth’s ‘The Cuckoo Clock’ (1895) and William Gaunt’s ‘London Promenade’ (1930) which ‘has appeal chiefly for those who, like myself, do not live there’ (p. 71)… these remembered books, like bombs are either effective and explode with a wealth of vision upon the reader that lasts a lifetime or they are ineffective duds which fall without fatalities and remain on the shelf, unread and unloved by few; the lover of books finds excuses to see beyond the ‘commonplace’ and so does Pryce-Jones in such unremarkable and some would say unrewarding tomes as Sitwell’s ‘German Baroque Art’ or the marvellous volume of ecclesiastical decoration by the Rev. Edward Cutt’s, ‘Essay on Church Furniture’ (1854) a ‘rare treasure’ whose ‘accuracy is chilling’ or the six volume collection of ‘Seats of the Noblemen and Gentry’ by Rev. F. O. Morris, which sent up a ‘unique and appropriate smell’, a smell known to book lovers, an aroma of a ‘deserted summer-house with that of a decidedly unused library, a smell at once damp and inky and nostalgic, a smell of leisure, warmly damp, with a suggestion of port rather than of water, it goes straight to the head.’ (p. 175) But the author does give us his opinion of a bad book and gives examples to support this – ‘The Season: A Satire’ by Alfred Austin, whose dreary lines of schoolboyish verse makes the reader squirm with embarrassment, but no doubt there are many more examples if one were unkind enough to reveal them. Pryce-Jones went on to be Assistant Editor at the London Mercury (1928-32) and Editor of the Times Literary Supplement (1948-59) as well as serving in the war in France with the 4^th Hussars and in Intelligence at Bletchley Park. Other works of his include: ‘The Spring Journey’ (1931) detailing his travels in the Middle East, ‘People in the South’ (1932), ‘Pink Danube’ a novel under the pseudonym Arthur Pumphrey (1939) and his autobiography ‘The Bonus of Laughter’ (1987). There is a touch of sophistication about this book and a flavour of aestheticism which is delightful and may not suit all tastes that prefer their reading matter less stuffy, but this lovely little book is more than welcome to join the circle of friendship.

If it Die – by Andre Gide.  

Published in 1920 and later translated into English by Dorothy Bussy, ‘If it Die’ is a magnificent memoir by Andre Gide (1869-1951) of his early life up until his mother’s death in 1895. Gide presents us with the shameless truth about his infatuations with young boys and is frank about his own habit of pleasuring himself – he was dismissed from the Ecole Alsacienne for three months when caught masturbating and eating chocolate in class, a perfect combination of sins! One can be assured of the accuracy of what one is reading when the author declares such intimate details about themselves. There are tales of bullying and of smallpox before the young Gide shams nervous breakdown to escape the aggression at school and Doctors suggest a water cure which certainly helps but then there are the headaches… He becomes friends with Pierre Louis, later Louys (1870-1934) poet and writer, famous for his ‘Les Chansons de Bilitis’, but of most interest is his friendship with the painter Paul Laurens (1870-1934) with whom he went to Africa with in January 1894 (Laurens was on a travelling scholarship); at Biskra they immersed themselves in Arab life, in the cafés and markets and between them they shared other pursuits such as the young body of a not yet sixteen year old prostitute named Meriem – delightful excursions aside, Andre was free to indulge his peculiarities such as his growing interest in young boys, especially brown-skinned beauties. In fact, it was an endless round of prostitutes and ill-health. Onwards went young Andre through Tunis, Sicily, Naples, Rome and Florence where they parted and Andre went to Geneva. There he met his old friend Pierre Louis and his friend Ferdinand Herold and mentioned some of his escapades in Algeria, especially that of the little prostitute Meriem and of course under the same sexually charged spell Louis and Ferdinand travelled to Biskra and devoured her sexually also. Andre seemed to discover that sex was actually good for his physical health, hmm, what took him so long? But after breaking down again he spends time in Switzerland recovering his health in the cold mountain air. With his new discovery in mind off Gide trots to Algiers again in 1895, but alone in his hotel in Blidah and in despair, he is about to leave when he notices the names of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas on the arrivals board (Gide had already met Wilde in Paris and knew of his reputation so removed his own name from the board with the intention of leaving the hotel); Gide leaves the hotel but has a change of heart, perhaps thinking Wilde had seen his name and would feel affronted at his leaving, anyway he returns. Wilde in fact, had arrived in Algiers with the twenty-four year old Douglas on 17^th January 1895 and spent long hours watching the young boys and smoking hashish; Wilde roamed the streets like an old rampant lion with Douglas the young cub at his side (Douglas was the stronger personality with an irresponsible fatality) and together they hunted the young ‘gazelles’ as Douglas was fond of calling the boys, one particular ‘gazelle’ Douglas took a liking to was fourteen year old Ali. Gide paints an accurate portrait of Wilde, unlike Douglas the deplorable liar and destroyer of Wilde, for we get a sense of Wilde’s sadness at the approaching and inevitable confrontation with Bosie’s father – ‘I have been as far as possible along my own road. I can’t go any farther. Something must happen now.’ Then of course his hurt at those around him who had abandoned him, such as Pierre Louis who tried to talk to Wilde about his conduct; there was a misunderstanding in the words about Wilde’s friends being his lovers, what Wilde actually said he reports was ‘Good-bye, Pierre Louis; I wanted a friend; now I shall have nothing but lovers.’ Many had walked away sensing a terrible fate awaiting Wilde in England. With Bosie away enslaving the heart of Ali, Andre and Oscar went to a little café and met ‘Bosie’s boy’ Mohammed, playing a flute and Andre was smitten. Outside, Oscar asked Andre if he wanted Mohammed to which Andre answered ‘yes’; Oscar found it all quite amusing and no doubt had great pleasure in thinking he was leading Andre astray into a sinfully wicked wilderness, not of course knowing that Andre had already explored some of this wilderness for himself. Later that night after many cocktails they met the two boys from the café, Mohammed and his friend and so they were taken each into the gentlemen’s rooms; Andre writes: ‘long after Mohammed left me I stayed there in a state of quivering jubilation, and although I had reached the summit of pleasure five times with him I revived my ecstasy many more times, and back in my hotel room I relived its echoes until morning.’ Wilde and Gide left Algiers on the same day while Bosie was busy with his Arab boy, Ali, wanting to take him to Biskra. Douglas asked Gide to meet him in Biskra which Gide was at first against doing but meet him he did and the little Ali who was dressed like a prince with Bosie waiting on him hand and foot like a servant; they stayed at the Royal Hotel and Gide was sick of Douglas’s fawning over the little prince with the eyes of a ‘gazelle’, a little prince who seemed to stray beyond Bosie’s grasp and into the arms of girls, much to Bosie’s dismay and ultimate rejection. And so the book ends quite abruptly with the death of Andre’s mother and his own engagement to his cousin Emmanuele and whatever awaits him in the future!

A Cornish Childhood – by A. L. Rowse.

This excellent ‘autobiography of a Cornishman’ was published in 1942 by the author and historian, Alfred Leslie Rowse (1903-1997). Through its nine chapters Rowse, with his ‘natural desire to leave some memorial of oneself, whatever may come to us’ (preface) describes his struggle as an unwanted child in a working-class family, growing up in Tregonissey, a ‘china-clay village of the ‘High Quarter’ near St. Austell in Cornwall to break free from the expectations that poverty designed for him and immerse himself in education. Rowse writes beautifully about village life where the ‘stoning of strangers by children is quite usual’; the gossip and the various occupants that come and go within his small world where his parents run a local shop, the boy’s duties forever getting in the way of his intellectual pursuits. There is little love in the household and no encouragement from the family and his older sister Hilda, whom he adores and who brings out more strongly his feminine side, seems to take more care of him than his mother Annie and his father Richard, sees no real good in the boy for if he isn’t working and making a wage then he’s no good to anybody; he doesn’t seem to see that attaining an education is a worthy vocation, even for a Cornishman. As a child, Rowse is nervous and suffers night terrors, thanks to his parent’s habit of frightening him every time he goes to bed, even at Oxford he would suffer from this disposition. Despite his background, Rowse, a solitary and intelligent boy with a ‘nostalgia for life’ and a somewhat curious, inquisitive interest in history, puts his mind and his soul to attaining a University education and sets his heart upon Oxford, particularly Exeter College. We hear about how he was affected by news of the Titanic sinking and fascinated by the Crippen case before winning a scholarship to St Austell County Grammar School where he became librarian and had the pick of the choicest books. With his lovely singing voice he becomes a choirboy and is devastated when his voice breaks and he says that the ‘effect of preparation for Confirmation was to increase my sexual interest and excitement’ (p. 156); he was attracted to Anglo-Catholicism and considered entering the Church; later writing poetry would replace any religious ambition or interest. Throughout the book one hears the deafening resentment he felt for his position in life and towards his family and his determination to succeed is highly commendable. Of course we hear mention of the war and how it affected the village and work in the shop (Rowse begins to keep a diary from April 1918 from which he quotes much of his boyhood anger and joy). The small detail of village life going on around him as he toils towards his University dream – during his examinations there were two murders within half a mile of his home, a seven year old boy was lured away by an older youth who threw his dead body into a disused clay-pit full of water and followed him into it to his own death and a man also poisoned his wife. In March 1921 aged seventeen he sits for an English scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford but fails: ‘a scholarship or suicide’ he writes in his diary (p. 251). He meets his boyhood hero Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) known simply as ‘Q’ who inspires him and encourages him to go on with the pursuit of a scholarship, which he does and wins a place at Christ’s Church, Oxford and later becomes a Fellow of All Soul’s College, Oxford. This is a really splendid account of a boy’s ambition against the odds of fulfilling his dream and breaking the mould with which he felt he did not fit and there are some wonderful passages which are quite enlightening on the working-class attitude to education and the struggle to better oneself through a desire for learning. Outstanding!

Enemies of Promise – by Cyril Connolly.

Published in 1938 (I read a revised edition from 1949) and dedicated to Logan Pearsall Smith, ‘Enemies of Promise’ by the literary critic Cyril Vernon Connolly (1903-1974) is set out in three parts: I. Predicament (9 chapters), II. The Charlock’s Shade (7 chapters) and III. A Georgian Boyhood (8 chapters); although the author writes with a little pomposity and some imagined Divine rite of authority, he does indeed write well on the subject of literary criticism and expounds his theories of literary longevity and writing for posterity – ‘Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.’ (p. 19) He gives various examples from passages in the books that have stood the test of time examining the notion of ‘style’ (form and content), by authors such as: Norman Douglas, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and Ernest Hemingway from the Modernist school which incorporates the frivolity of ‘Dandyism’ – ‘Dandies are perfectionists’: Eliot, Firbank (dialogue) and later David Garnett. Connolly introduces the two styles of the ‘Mandarins’ (Realists 1918-28) and the ‘Vernacular’ or ‘anti-Mandarin’ (New Realists 1928-38), the former represented by: Woolf, Strachey, Proust, Huxley, the Sitwells and Joyce (complexity), and the latter by: Hemingway (slang), Lawrence (colloquial style), Maugham, Wyndham Lewis (informal), Katherine Mansfield, Isherwood, Orwell (both left-wing) and Gertrude Stein (simplicity); he brings Auden to the fold saying his poetry is ‘private’ and ‘esoteric’. In part II Connolly looks at the pitfalls of ‘successful’ literature and vents his anger towards the detrimental factors that prevent ‘success’ – journalism, publishers, marriage and children (time and finances) and of course ‘success’ itself! With the bile well and truly exhausted (almost) he is free to turn to part III and the business of autobiography in his ‘A Georgian Boyhood’ which begins profoundly: ‘I have always disliked myself at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life.’ (p. 143) And so we learn that he was born in Coventry on 10^th September 1903, lived in Africa and then Bath with his grandmother and then Ireland; that he considers himself ‘ugly’ and in effect is nothing short of a spoilt snob; he disguises the identity of his private school, St Wulfric’s (actually St Cyprian’s School, Eastbourne) where he is friends with George Orwell and Cecil Beaton; he has a romantic nature and is prone to playing the fool and being witty, which makes him popular. He won the Harrow History Prize and went up to Eton to flourish amongst the other snobs where he was educated in the noble and gentlemanly art of punishment, persecution and bullying and regular torture, particularly (but not exclusively) from a boy named Godfrey Meynell (1904-1935) who later won the Victoria Cross! But Eton is not just a collection of snobs engrossed in hurting others for pleasure in an endless whirl of abuse, no of course not, Connolly learnt how to be a ‘fag’ under a ‘fag-master’ and to take his humiliation like a man for they always provided a chair to lean across when a good flogging was necessary, in fact it seems compulsory – ‘the Captain of the school, Marjoribanks, who afterwards committed suicide, was a passionate beater.’ (p. 182) And so like many a young flower crushed and trampled by the heavy unrelenting boot of education, the author suffers from ‘ruined nerves’ due to the beatings but the author’s capacity to make others laugh ingratiated himself towards his tormentor, Meynell and they became friends and Connolly joined him in his sadistic delights in terrorising the boys: ‘Godfrey Meynell was the Hitler, Highworth the Goering, and I the Goebbels, forming a Gestapo who bullied everyone we could and confiscated their private property.’ (p. 183-4) Ah, the joys of public school life! There are the usual boyhood romantic attachments and affectionate intrigues in a sort of Machiavellian and psychological jostle for hierarchy; he even makes the acquaintance of that deplorably useless aesthete Brian Howard! In the summer of 1921 his father takes him to France and young Connolly manages to get lured into a brothel by some pimp but without money for the pleasure and probably not knowing what to do anyway as he is very innocent in the ways of the flesh, he makes his excuses, like a frightened cleric, turning out his pockets and paying what little he had for the drinks and promising to send the rest of the money on, which he does, all the while fearing his father may find out, which he doesn’t. In 1922 he won the Roseberry History Prize and the Brackenberry History Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. ‘Enemies of Promise’ has been an enjoyable read and the ‘total of such moments’ in his life are indeed quite interesting!

The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle – by Palinurus.

Palinurus is the pseudonym of Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) and ‘The Unquiet Grave’ was originally published in ‘Horizon’ in 1944 (Connolly was Editor from 1940-1949) and the copy I read was a 1955 reprint of the revised edition. This is a strangely inspired and erudite volume consisting of quotations, epigrams, aphorisms, axioms and reflections by the author, an ‘editor living in Bedford Square’ during the war years where he kept three notebook journals from the autumn of 1942 to the autumn of 1943: ‘in the diaries an art-form slumbered, - an initiation, a descent into hell, a purification and cure.’ (Introduction. p. xii) He goes on to say that ‘all grief, once made known to the mind, can be cured by the mind’. (p. xvi) ‘Palinurus’ was the pilot of Aeneas in the ‘Aeniad’ who fell overboard and so ‘Unquiet Grave’ can be seen as the tomb of Palinurus where ‘the ghost of Palinurus must be appeased. He is the core of melancholy and guilt that works destruction on us from within.’ (p. xiii) The volume is written in three parts: part I, Ecce Gubernator (‘Behold the Pilot’), part II, Te Palinure Petens (‘Looking for you, Palinurus’) and part III, La Cle Des Chants (‘the Key to the Songs’); there is also an Epilogue which asks who was Palinurus? Connolly stresses the importance of the permanence of the written word, to strive for perfection and eradicate sorrow – ‘the human brain, once it is fully functioning, as in the making of a poem, is outside time and place and immune from sorrow.’ (p. xvi) It can all seem quite pessimistic but there are some truly insightful passages – ‘No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn by ourselves, from a book.’ (p. 4) that cancels out most of the population then! The quotations range from the sociological, political and philosophical aspects of such notions as: ‘love’, ‘marriage’, ‘paganism’, ‘freedom’ (loneliness), ‘Christ and Christianity’, ‘women’, the ‘artist’, ‘sleep’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘angst’; authors quoted include: Sir Walter Raleigh, Matthew Arnold, Schopenhauer, Yeats, Kant, Donne, Freud, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Heidegger, Pascal, De Quincey and Blake. He also promotes a ‘justification of suicide’ giving four examples: Philip Hezeltine (composer Peter Warlock) who killed himself by gas in 1930, aged 36; American poet Harry Crosby who shot himself aged 40 in 1929; poet Rene Creve, who shot himself in 1935, aged 34 and the poet Mara Andrews who killed herself aged 32 at the time this volume was being written. All quite intriguing and sometimes perplexing, but interesting nonetheless!

Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf – by Rennell Rodd.

Published in 1882 (I read the 1906 edition) and often cited as Rodd’s first volume of poetry, it is in fact a re-working of his 1881 ‘Songs in the South’ with two poems removed (‘Lucciole’  and ‘Maidenhair’ both dated 1879) and some additional poems (‘Hic Jacet’, ‘In Chartres Cathedral’, ‘A Song of Autumn’, etc.) The volume has an introduction, ‘L’ Envoi’ by none other than Oscar Wilde whom Rodd, the 1^st Baron Rennell (1858-1941) who went on to become a British diplomat and politician, associated with during his time at Balliol College, Oxford. Wilde had arranged for the publication of ‘Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf’ for Rodd while in the United States, inserting the introduction which is verbose and quite superfluous to the poems which are surprisingly good; it is unnecessary for Wilde to stamp his air of aesthetic superiority upon the book and although Wilde meant no malice it displeased Rodd and eventually came between them signalling the break-up of their friendship and Rodd’s distancing himself from Wilde when the scandal began to break. But if we ignore the introduction (Rodd wanted it removed from all future copies) we find ourselves immersed in a perfect little volume of verse, in fact, Rodd far surpasses Wilde in his verse (Wilde is a quite inferior poet) and that is the opinion of one who is devoted to the great Irish man! The sonnets and songs throughout the volume have a sublime yearning for love and a melancholy air of loss or distance between souls that touch briefly and part – ‘By the high cliff’s edge where the wild weeds twine, / and he would not speak or move, / but his eyes would gaze from his soul to mine, / my eyes that would answer without one sign, / and that were enough for love.’ (‘If Any One Return’) One gets a sense of Thomas Hardy’s dark mood as found in his ‘Wessex Poems’ of 1898 (‘Neutral Tones’) or his  later ‘Moments of Vision’ of 1917 (‘We sat at the window’). The author conjures the Roman legions in his poem ‘In the Coliseum’ (Rome 1881) – ‘This is the hour of ghosts that rise; / line on line of the noiseless dead’, and again in the beautiful 1879 poem ‘A Roman Mirror’ where he finds a ‘broken mirror by a maiden dead’ and ‘the beads she wore about her throat / alternate blue and amber all untied’. The third verse goes on to say that there is ‘no trace to-day of what in her was fair! / only the records of long years grown green / upon the mirror’s lustreless dead sheen, / grown dim at last, when all else withered there.’ The passage of time sweeps through the centuries where ‘she sighs / and sets the dead land lilies in her breast’. The romance of the sea is not lost upon Rodd as can be seen in ‘By the South Sea’ (1879) which has a particularly lovely seventeenth verse – ‘shall we glide away in this white moon’s track? / does it not seem fair in your eyes! / - to drift and drift with our white sail black / in the dreamful light of the skies’ and also in ‘Where the Rhone goes down to the Sea’ (1880) where one could almost be reading Masefield. Of the five delightful sonnets represented here there are some splendid lines such as the beginning of ‘Une Heure Viendra Qui Tout Paiera’ (1879): ‘It was a tomb in Flanders, old and grey’ and ends portentously – ‘His only record is the dead man’s threat, - / “an hour will come that shall atone for all!”’ In ‘Imperator Augustus’ (1879) we feel the loss of the dead boy whose image has been set in marble and there is definitely an erotic undertone: ‘tired of too much empire, and it seemed a joy / fondly to stroke and pet the curly head, / the smooth round limbs so strangely like the dead, / to kiss the white lips of his marble boy / and call by name his little heart’s-desired.’ Rodd went on to write other volumes: ‘Poems in Many Lands’ (1883), ‘Feda, with Other Poems Chiefly Lyrical’ (1886), ‘The Violet Crown and Songs of England’ (1891) and ‘Ballads of the Fleet and Other Poems’ (1897) which no doubt I shall turn towards in the future, but for now, ‘Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf’ has satisfied a quite demanding and obsessive reader! ‘Oh wreck of the lost human soul set free / to gorge the beast thy mask of manhood screened!’ (‘Actea’. 1881) Superb!

Transit of Venus: Poems – by Harry Crosby.

Reading this collection of poems published in Paris in1929 by Harry Crosby (1898-1929) the American poet born into a wealthy Boston banking family, can seem like a slap in the face for the reader until one digs a little into the strange and colourful life of the author. Following his time at St Mark’s preparatory school he served with the Ambulance Corps in France during the First World War aged 19; the ambulance he was in was hit by a shell and Crosby escaped fate and was unharmed – he was awarded the Croix de Guerre medal in 1919! After the war he attended Harvard from 1919-1921 but he had no intention of going into the family banking business and escaped fate yet again; aged 22 he met Mrs. Richard Peabody (Mary Phelps Jacob (1892-1970) and fell immediately in love with the married woman, six years his senior. Mary, whom Harry called Polly, eventually succumbed to Harry’s charm and they embraced an affair before Polly divorced her alcoholic husband in 1922. Free and financially secure the lovers were married (it remained an open marriage) and lured by the European art and literary scene the pair went to decadent Paris and to Bohemian Montparnasse where the immersed themselves in opium, cocaine, hashish and champagne and planned a suicide pact (Harry seemed to have a death-wish and suicide was always a romantic notion at the forefront of his mind). Polly changed her name at Harry’s instigation to ‘Caresse’ in 1924 and they both founded the ‘Black Sun Press’ publishing exquisite books by exciting young writers (Harry published his first book ‘Sonnets for Caresse’ by Black Sun in 1925). In fact, Harry became obsessed with sun symbolism and imagery; he was a ‘sun worshipper in love with death’. The open marriage suited Harry as he was free to explore his sexual identity, Caresse had an affair with Henri Cartier-Bresson and in 1928, Harry met the 20 year old Josephine Noyes Rotch in Venice and they had an affair until June 1929 when Josephine got married, but in August the affair was fanned into flames once more by Josephine who was cruelly jealous and possessive. The Crosby’s returned to the United States in November 1929 and Harry and Josephine spent four days in a Detroit hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Harry Crane – on 10^th December Harry and Josephine were found dead on the bed in a friend’s studio from gunshot wounds, they both had a bullet hole to the head and Harry was holding the pistol in his hand; there was no suicide note but it was stated that Harry had shot Josephine, probably after they arranged a suicide pact and after he shot her he spent around two hours with her body and maybe even going for a walk before he lay next to her and shot himself! They were both dressed except for having bare feet – Harry had tattoos on the soles of his feet, a cross on one and a pagan sun symbol on the other; his toe nails and finger nails were also painted red! Harry’s wedding ring was found on the floor, stomped flat. There are some fine books concerning Crosby such as ‘Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby’ by Geoffrey Wolff (1976) and ‘Shadows of the Sun: The Diaries of Harry Crosby’ edited by Edward Germain (1977) both of which I have read and found fascinating! After all that how can his poems compare with reality?

The poems in Transit of Venus, of which there are 62, were inspired by and dedicated to Josephine, his lover, the ‘Fire Princess’ where the ‘moon / lives in her arms / shows in her face’ (‘Priestess’) and mystical sun symbolism is a theme throughout the volume. I have to say I found his life more interesting than his verse which is something between William Blake and Gertrude Stein with the death obsession of Stenbock thrown in – ‘hurled soon to the grave / rushed to and passed from the earth’ (‘Goddess of Mirth’) though there is none of Stenbock’s decadence, the poems are stark slithers of occult lore and mythological notions – ‘among lanterns and torches / and flags unfurled / She and the Sun / are not of this world.’ (‘Ritual’) Crosby read extensively on spirituality and philosophy, including De Quincey which fascinated him and it is most likely that Transit of Venus was inspired more by the narcotics he was taking rather than Josephine but he expresses some sort of love compulsion for her – ‘a girl comes from afar / in naked ignorance / ghost of defunct / unburied circumstance / one soul in two / two with one soul / to roll like a wheel / from the one to the other / love to the lover.’ (‘A Girl comes from afar’) – an intensification of their sexual union, an alchemy of desire that ‘grows less and less / as sleep devours our nakedness.’ (‘Magic Formula’) The same powerful sexual imagery can be seen in Crosby’s ‘Mad Queen: Tirades’ published in 1929 which I also read with its ‘first strong thrust of / Sun into the Soul’ (‘Heliograth’) and the poem ‘Invocation to the Mad Queen’ which ends: ‘burn to gold / fierce and unerring as a conquering sword / I burn to gold / fierce and undaunted as a lion lord / seeking your bed / and leave to them the / burning of the dead.’ (There is a wonderful poem, ‘Target of Disgust’ in which Crosby curses Boston, as a  ‘City of hypocrisy’ of ‘flatulence’, ‘stink-stones’ and ‘dead semen’; a city of ‘tea rooms’, ‘invalids’ and ‘fetid breath’) The more astute will also notice in ‘Transit of Venus’ a fascination for hands in several poems and in the poems ‘Hands’ and ‘Nicer Hands’ (we also see the same in Crosby’s friend and fellow poet Hart Crane, such as his ‘Episode of Hands’). The poems will not be to all tastes (I struggled) but there is feeling among the dark passions and sun symbolism and for those wishing to read more there are several collections including: ‘Red Skeletons’ (1927), ‘Chariot of the Sun’ (1928) and ‘Sleeping Together’ (1929) and for those wishing to know more about Caresse there is her own autobiography ‘The Passionate Years’ which I refrained from reading as there are many inaccuracies in it although it is no doubt interesting and there is a biography by Anne Conover Carson, ‘Caresse Crosby, from Black Sun to Roccasinibalda’ (1989). Strangely bewildering yet compelling!

Raiders’ Dawn and Other Poems – by Alun Lewis.

This is the first collection of verse from the Welsh poet Alun Lewis (1915-1944) published in 1942 (I read the 6^th impression from 1946) and it really is a very powerful and masterful collection. Lewis was a soldier involved in that old ‘dirty business’ of war, where – ‘the guns’ implacable silence / is my black interim, my youth and age,’ yet like all poets (the term ‘soldier-poet’ seems such an insult) he was an intensely compassionate, sensitive man enthused by human nature and the solemnity of nature, not unlike Edward Thomas during the First World War whom Lewis greatly admires and pays homage to in the poem ‘To Edward Thomas’ (Lewis visited his memorial stone above Steep in Hampshire) where ‘like you I felt sensitive and somehow apart, / lonely and exalted by the friendship of the wind / and the placid afternoon enfolding / the dangerous future and the smile.’ Lewis, the son of school teachers, was born in Cwmaman near the town of Aberdare in Wales; in 1926 he attended Cowbridge Grammar School before going up to Aberystwyth University in 1932 where in 1935 he got a First in History (B.A.) before going to Manchester University to study for an M.A. in Medieval History. He returned to Aberystwyth in 1937, married teacher Gweno Ellis in 1941 whom he met in 1939 and in 1940 joined the Royal Engineers before a commission in the infantry battalion; he was sent to India with the South Wales Borderers in 1942. The volume is ordered into five parts: ‘Poems in Khaki’, ‘Poems in Love’, ‘Songs’, ‘On Old Themes’, ‘And Other Poems’ which displays the author’s poetic strengths to the full. In the title poem, ‘Raiders’ Dawn’ there is an almost nursery rhyme simplicity as it begins: ‘Softly the civilised / centuries fall, / paper on paper, / Peter and Paul.’ and ends rather darkly: ‘blue necklace left / on a charred chair / tells that Beauty / was startled there.’ Lewis is great at depicting the small seemingly insignificant moments of war unlike other poets of the time who dwell on its horrors, as in ‘The Soldier’ (I) where ‘summer leaves her green reflective woods / to glitter momently on peaks of madness.’ and in the poem ‘The Public Gardens’ where Lewis walks in his khaki, observing the scene around him, the ‘twin sycamores staring the darkness massively under balconies of leaf, / and an empty rococo bandstand’… ‘a thin little woman in black stockings and a straw hat with wax flowers’… ‘an older wealthier lady, gesticulating and over-dressed’ and ‘a boy with his crutches laid against the wall.’ Throughout the isolation and death which Lewis captures, the juxtaposition of nature and the nostalgia of its remembered beauty also exists, as in ‘Odi et Amo’ where ‘summer blossoms break above my head / with all the unbearable beauty of the dead.’ But perhaps the poem I personally admire the most is ‘Lines on a Tudor Mansion’ which is quintessentially English with the steadfast, centuries-weathered old brick house in the landscape, which begins: ‘slim sunburnt girls adorn / lawns browsed by fawn and doe / through three long centuries this house / has mellowed in and known / only the seasonal fulfilment / and the commemorated generations.’ Lewis goes on to invoke the ghost of ‘Samson dead / and Delilah dirtying her hair / in the dust of the fallen Faiths.’ But for most nothing shall remain, there will be no time-withstanding memorial of great distinctions achieved, ‘we leave no monumental homes, / no marble cenotaphs inscribed with names.’

To any poet the death of a child, the destruction of all the innocent human possibility is perhaps the most profoundly disturbing and Lewis in his ‘On a Bereaved Girl’ recalls ‘the devilry of the dead’ which is ‘also passionately flung away for ever’. Lewis was devoted and protective of his younger sister Mair, born 1921 (he also had two younger brothers Huw and Glyn) and despite being thrown into the arena of war he still held strong to his compassion; yet he does not shy away from the stark reality and encounter with death, as in ‘To a Comrade in Arms’:

‘When bees swarm in your nostrils

And honey drips from the sockets

Of eyes that to-day are frantic

With love that is frustrate,

What vow shall we vow who love you

For the self you did not value?’

The most celebrated and anthologised of the author’s poems is ‘All day it has rained’ which evokes the harsh rain, ‘drenching the gorse and heather’; the rain that ‘possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain’ and soldiers’ talk of ‘girls, and dropping bombs on Rome’; the ‘quiet dead and the loud celebrities / exhorting us to slaughter’; the poem echoes Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Rain’ and Lewis begins: ‘All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors / have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,’ before concluding in a pilgrimage ‘up the wooded scree / to the Shoulder o’ Mutton where Edward Thomas / brooded long / on death and beauty – till a bullet stopped his song.’

The volume speaks of the grand tragedies of war yet the most tragic of personal tragedies occurred on 5^th March 1944 when twenty-eight year old Lewis, stationed in Burma, was found dead at the officers’ latrines, a bullet wound to his head and his revolver in his hand – was it an accident or was it suicide? Many seem to believe it was the latter and that the Army declared it an accident in the line of duty; out there, amidst the threat from the Japanese there was always a sense of death – ‘the soldiers’ frozen sightless eyes / end the mad feud. The worm is love.’ [‘Threnody for a Starry Night’] War intensified the physical fear of death which was ever-present and attained, to the poet, mythological proportions – ‘I felt the universe with my fingers; and it was / compounded of bone and sinew, like the naked / loins of Theseus, the slayer, the young hero’, [‘Fever’] Tremendous!

In the Green Tree – by Alun Lewis.

Having read Lewis’s first collection of poems ‘Raiders’ Dawn and Other Poems’ (1942) I felt compelled to read this volume of ‘prose letters’ published in 1948. There is an interesting preface by the Cornish historian A. L. Rowse who sadly never knew Lewis and considers him one of the two greatest poets of the Second World War (the other being Sidney Keyes); there is a ‘Sonnet on the Death of Alun Lewis’ by Vernon Watkins (1906-67) and I really liked the distinctive drawings by John Petts. Lewis, whose ‘mind was sharp, resolute, independent – and fastidious’ (Postscript. p. 140) is a notable poet and his ‘abstract intellectual verse’ speaks of a ‘Celtic sensuousness’ in time of war and his poetic integrity extends to his letters and prose for they are rich in the celebrations of the mundane and personal thoughts; the ‘Letters from India’ which encompass his correspondence to his wife Gweno from Christmas 1942 – 20^th February 1944 (including the last letter to his parents dated 8^th February 1944) are presented in stories such as ‘The Voyage’, ‘India’ and ‘Burma’ which have some incredibly searching questions and realisations – ‘although I’m more and more engrossed with the single poetic theme of Life and Death, for there doesn’t seem to be any question more directly relevant than this one of what survives of all the beloved, I find myself quite unable to express at once the passion of Love, the coldness of Death (Death is cold) and the fire that beats against resignation, acceptance.’ (‘India’. April 1943. p. 36) There are also remarks which give further insight into Lewis such as this from 30^th September 1943: ‘When I was leaving Karachi, one of the instructors said to me, “you’re the most selfish man I’ve ever met, Lewis. You think the war exists for you to write books about it.” I didn’t deny it, though it’s all wrong.’ (p. 47) There is something haunting about the ‘Short Stories’, of which there are six: ‘Night Journey’, ‘The Raid’, ‘The Earth is a Syllable’, ‘Ward “O”3 (b)’  and ‘The Orange Grove’ (both of which I enjoyed immensely) and ‘The Reunion’; Lewis is a very skilful writer (see his poetry collections ‘Raiders’ Dawn’, 1942, ‘Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets’, 1945 and short stories ‘The Last Inspection’ 1942) and an enormous talent was taken from us that 5^th March 1944 when, as I believe, he took his own life with his revolver. The most poignant and touching moment of the volume is the Postscript by Gwyn Jones from the Welsh Review of June 1944; Jones was a friend of Lewis whom he first met in Aberystwyth early in 1941, calling him a humble, modest and compassionate man who ‘saw and felt as only poets can, and despite his youth had lived through cycles of experience.’ He goes on to say that ‘each year he grew increasingly master of his craft, he was working free from the rarely literary influences to be seen in his earliest writing, and the war years had matured him as he might not have matured in ten years of peace.’ (p. 139) I would suggest, as I have done, reading the first excellent biography ‘Alun Lewis: A Life’ by John Pikoulis (1984) which gives a really good background to the development of the stories and of course the poet’s life in Wales, England, India and Burma. Jones kindly ascribes the poet’s death to ‘an accident while on active service. He was at this time a Lieutenant with the Sixth Battalion of the South Wales Borderers’ (p. 138) but perhaps the most touching note Jones has to say should end this short piece on a grand and gracious fellow of enormous poetic stature, cut tragically short – ‘He was a brave and splendid young poet, and his death, like the death of all such, is a limb torn from the living.’ (p. 141)

Selected Poems 1930-1960 – by Vernon Watkins.

Well, here I am on day four of my ‘self-isolation’ during the Covid-19 virus pandemic and what better opportunity to catch up on all the poetry reading I have been looking forward to! And so, between thoughts of why there is such an urgent need for toilet paper and a general compulsion to selfishly empty the shops of produce, I turn to the ‘Selected Poems 1930-1960’ (1967) by the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) who was educated at Repton School, Derbyshire and Magdalene College, Cambridge. Watkins was associated with Dylan Thomas whom he met in 1935 and worked at Bletchley Park from 1942-45, but what about his poetry? My initial thoughts were that there are some interesting, lyrical pieces here with some quite beautiful lines such as ‘Not yet! Do not touch, / break not this branch of silver-birch,’ (‘The Turning of the Leaves’) and ‘White on my limbs in the linen sheet / and gold on my neck the sun.’ (‘The Collier’) and he confidently uses repetition in the poem ‘The Mummy’ – ‘His eyes are closed. They are closed. His eyes are closed. / His hands are clenched. They are clenched. His hands are clenched.’ And again from the same poem: ‘Year chasing year, following and following.’ He draws a portrait of the ‘great Irish silly Billy’ in ‘Yeats in Dublin’ whose ‘raised head was noble, / his voice firm and sweet.’ There is some depth to the poems and Watkins is a very competent poet under the long shadow of Auden and I desperately willed myself to like him, even clinging to his more macabre work such as ‘Gravestones’ which usually cannot fail to capture my Gothic heart and my interest – ‘Sunk are the stones, green-dewed, / blunted with age, touched by cool, listening grass. / Vainly these died, / did not miraculous silence come to pass.’ One eye closes… sneeze! ‘the dead live, and I am for their kind.’ Cough! In fact, I found his poems just too damn busy to completely hold my attention, but withholding final judgement and having the time between angry thoughts for those inconsiderate bastards (toilet-roll hoarders again – what do they know that we don’t?) and compassion for the elderly, alone and cut-off from society, those that we are doing our duty to protect, I turned to several other collections by Watkins while holding the feather of Maat and a box of tissues (perhaps the last box whose value doubles every second!) and so I run my mind through ‘Cypress and Acacia’ with its forty-six poems published in 1959, cough, cough, sniff… ‘Fidelities’ and its sixty-one poems published in 1969, yawn, cough, sneeze… ‘Affinities’ with its forty-one poems published in 1953 – splutter, sniff, and stretch legs while damning those panic-buying sons-o’-bi’… and oh, I may actually like this collection! There has been a reprieve for Mr. Watkins with his volume ‘The Death Bell: Poems and Ballads’ published in 1954! Yes there is something relative here, something which can speak to me about this time of catastrophe, this bloody isolation! Maybe not, but there is something damned good here: ‘The Strangled Prayer’ which speaks of ‘strange creepers where the moth-wing stirs. / Conscience fights echoes, footprints on worn stairs, / and my ten fingers separate the stars, / bless my strained heels. I drown in a child’s hair.’

‘Bones make a circle round my naked moan.’

Between nose-blows and Breaking News Bulletins I read the ‘Pledges to Darkness’ and luxuriate to the sensual beauty of Nefertiti with her eyes ‘set in death, being taught with joy to see / the radiant Master guard the stations of her soul.’ I can appreciate these poems, in my dark mood of reflection, poems like  the ‘Ballad of Crawley Woods’ – ‘Who guards the secret of this wood / dropping from hill to wave?’ Its death-imagery soothes me; there is no fear, sniff, cough… ‘A skeleton rose near Crawley Woods, / heaved the gravestone back, / dock-leaves covered his ankle-bones. / The night around was black.’ It certainly is!

A Portion for Foxes – by Anthony Thwaite.

An absence of birdsong, civilisation crumbles, and isolation continues… I steered my poetic enthusiasm through Jon Silkin’s ‘Amana Grass’ (1967) and ‘The Principle of Water’ (1974) before diverting off to T. Sturge Moore’s ‘The Vinedresser and Other Poems’ (1899) to alight on ‘The Portion for Foxes’ by Anthony Simon Thwaite, published in 1977. Thwaite, born 1930 and educated at Christ Church, Oxford was a close friend of Philip Larkin and spent two years in Japan; his interest as an amateur archaeologist shows in many of these poems such as ‘Rescue Dig’ and ‘Digging a Saxon Cemetery’ where the archaeologists are ‘scavengers / dressed in our casual / clothes without ritual, / turning up ornament, / weapon, cremation, / plotting your downfall.’ There is the mild stink of Ted Hughes evoked in ‘The Unnamable’ where something ‘creeps away to die, like animals, / but does not die. It burrows in the thick / compost at ends of gardens.’ Oh the beauty of that rich compostable muck! The poem continues incorporating the human element with its thin veneer between the world of beasts –

‘You recognise the sounds, you smell the scent:

More, you too crouch in darkness, where an animal

Crawls on all fours, head down, the collapsing tunnel.’

‘Metamorphosis’ is quite a beautiful poem too which begins sensuously – ‘Something is changing. Soft fold on fold of flesh / loosen, go liquid, swell, are filled with sighing.’ The erotic imagery continues as ‘the wound opens, closes, aches again.’ Further on the ‘fold on fold’ of ecstasy is more apparent as ‘the body’s instruments, the choir of love, / tremble and falter; stumbling, become one, / singing of such an ecstasy as can move / habitual gestures or inert repose / into the dance of animals, the groan / dashed from the dropping petals of a rose / as thorns thrust stiffly in a summer wind, / and pulse and impulse, leaping, fell behind.’ Other poems vibrate with strong lines: ‘Boundaries’, ‘A Moment in the South’, ‘By the City Wall’, ‘A Girdle Round the Earth’ and ‘A Portion for Foxes’ where we find what the cat has brought in – ‘the heads of sparrows, / a mole’s pink paws, the black and marbled innards / torn from a rat, a moorhen’s claws: / rejected spoils, inedible souvenirs, / a portion for foxes.’ In ‘My Oxford’ there is the ‘sound / of copious liquid drenching someone’s bike’ before Thwaite presents us with a picture of Louis MacNeice who was ‘underneath the mask a lonely man’; a ‘lugubrious comedian / or elegiac dandy, more and more / driven into the corner of yourself.’ (‘For Louis MacNeice’) and Sylvia Plath, who ‘breathed a legend out with your last breath’ is summoned back in the poem ‘Heptonstall: New Cemetery’. But I am one who likes to meander through the mire of misery and melancholy so I found my delight in ‘Witch Bottles’ that ‘squat / under some old cottage’s hearth or threshold, / revealed by the wreckers, that they chill the air.’

‘In its belly rusty pins transfix

A chopped-out felt heart, musty in its faint

Stink of phosphate, mingling plucked hair and piss.

Charmless, a talisman exposed and shrunk

To this coagulated baleful mass:

Corroded brass, nail pairings, thorns, the scum

Gathering and thickening, and now dispersed.

Somewhere a gaunt crone shrieked in the fire’s heart,

Grey flesh annealed to stone, its smeltings here.’

Thwaite is an excellent poet and this collection has succeeded in turning my mind from the ever-impending doom and disaster of the outside world and the increasing worries of isolation; with eager fevered-brain I sucked-up and spat out his fourteen poetry monologues ‘Victorian Voices’ from 1980, ‘The Owl in the Tree’ from 1963 and the impressive ‘The Stones of Emptiness: Poems 1963-66’ from 1967 with its excellent ‘Leavings’, ‘At Dunwich’ and ‘Personal Effects’, and all before the barricades go up and armed Police and soldiers are patrolling the streets!

The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.

Balcony-singing and social distancing; blood on the streets and the death-rate rises: we are all turning animal now! A perfect time for poetry and here on day six of my fourteen day isolation I am putting my poetic faith in the hands of the American poet, Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) whose first two collections have been on my list of great works to read for some time! I read the 1966 edition of the ‘Collected Poems’ and wandered precariously through the first collection – ‘Open House’ from 1941: ‘My secrets cry aloud. / I have no need for tongue. / My heart keeps open house.’ Roethke’s introspection and deep sense of bodily specifics and lineage pulls the reader in, as in the poem ‘Feud’ where we find the ‘menace of ancestral eyes’ and that ‘exhausted fathers thinned the blood,’ and it goes on, ‘you curse the legacy of pain; / darling of an infected brood, / you feel disaster climb the vein.’ The internal menace escalates as ‘your seed / denies the blessing of the sun’ and the ‘dead leap at the throat, destroy / the meaning of the day.’ The dead raise their ugly heads once more in ‘Death Piece’ where ‘invention sleeps within a skull / no longer quick with light, / the hive that hummed in every cell / is now sealed honey-tight.’ The ghost of Roethke’s father seems ever-present throughout the volume as in the poem ‘Premonition’ where the young poet is walking with his father, ‘matching his stride with half-steps’; beside the river, his father ‘dipped his hand in the shallow: / water ran over and under / hair on a narrow wrist bone’. There is also the fear of disease as ‘the scratch forgotten is the scratch infected’ (‘Prognosis’) and the same fear that is summoned as the ‘wind lay motionless in the long grass. / The veins within our hands betrayed our fear.’ (‘Interlude’) I felt a kind of affinity with the poem ‘The Signal’ which speaks of strange light sources seen in the corners of the eye, the ‘things the eye or hand cannot possess.’ From childhood the author was always close to nature and we get a sense of this in poems such as ‘The Coming of the Cold’ where ‘the ribs of leaves lie in the dust, / the beak of frost has picked the bough’ and ‘The Heron’ who ‘jerks a frog across his bony lip, / then points his heavy bill above the wood. / The wide wings flap but once to lift him up. / A single ripple starts from where he stood.’ and again in ‘The Bat’ where ‘something is amiss or out of place / when mice with wings can wear a human face.’ The fleshy external wrapping of the soul, troubles Roethke, the ‘fabric stitched on bone’, the ‘cloak of evil and despair’ is the subject of ‘Epidermal Macabre’ as the poet says he hates his ‘epidermal dress, / the savage blood’s obscenity, / the rags of my anatomy, / and willingly could I dispense / with false accoutrements of sense, / to sleep immodestly, a most / incarnadine and carnal ghost.’ In the second collection, the much celebrated, ‘The Lost Son and Other Poems’ from 1948, the author affirms his place among the literary greats with his ‘greenhouse poems’ – the young Roethke spent much of his childhood around the climbing plants, the young shoots and rotting vegetables of his father Otto’s market-garden greenhouses (Otto, a German immigrant, died of cancer in 1923 along with Theodore’s Uncle who committed suicide, the young poet was just fourteen!). I particularly loved these poems as I too was fascinated by my father’s greenhouse and brewed and conjured strange and repellent smelling muck in warm plastic vessels like some mad professor; Roethke’s powerful eleven-line poem ‘Root Cellar’ speaks directly to the earth-born child in all of us:

‘Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,

Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,

Shoots dangled and drooped.

Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,

Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

And what a congress of stinks! –

Roots ripe as old bait,

Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,

Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.

Nothing would give up life:

Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.’

In ‘Moss-Gathering’ the author ‘always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, / as if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland; / disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance, / by pulling of flesh from the living planet; / as if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.’ And in ‘Child on top of the Greenhouse’ the image of that glass cathedral is brought to mind with its ‘splinters of glass and dried putty. / The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers’. At the end of all this looking back he asks: ‘What’s left of my life? / I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk!’ (‘The Lost Son’) The reader then encounters further collections: ‘Praise to the End’ (1951) – ‘I hear the owls, the soft callers, coming down from the hemlocks. / The bats weave in and out of the willows, / wing – crooked and sure, / downward and upward, / dipping and veering close to the motionless water.’ (‘I cry, Love! Love!’); ‘The Waking’ (1953) in which the title poem begins: ‘I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.’ And the poem Roethke wrote for one of his students thrown from a horse, ‘Elegy for Jane’ in which he says: ‘if only I could nudge you from this sleep, / my maimed darling, my skittery pigeon. / Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love: / I, with no rights in this matter, / neither father nor lover.’ ‘Words for the Wind’ (1958) has some light pieces and poems for children as well as love poems and other meditations… ‘I am! says the Lamb’ (1961), nonsense poems and ‘The Far Field’ from 1964 before ending with sixteen previously uncollected poems but in these dire times when we do not know what will survive of us, one poem from ‘Words for the Wind’ seem more than relevant during my forced isolation: ‘The Pure Fury’ – ‘How terrible the need for solitude: / that appetite for life so ravenous / a man’s a beast prowling in his own house, / a beast with fangs, and out for his own blood’. How true!

A Map of Verona: Poems – by Henry Reed.

Coronavirus: Day Seven of isolation! The sun is shining, birds are returning; people are nowhere! But there is no need for despondency as today I am flying the flag for a fellow Brummie poet, Henry Reed (1914-1986) who as well as being a fine poet was a translator, journalist and radio dramatist who worked for the BBC following the war in which he served in the Army; he was educated at King Edward VI School, Aston and the University of Birmingham (sound of faint applause) and ‘A Map of Verona’ is his only collection of poetry published in 1946. The first section: Preludes, has the title poem, ‘A Map of Verona’ in which he sings: ‘and in what hour of beauty, in what good arms, shall I those regions and that city attain / from whence my dreams and slightest movements rise? / and what good Arms shall take them away again?’ There is nothing shocking, just a solemn and quiet romantic notion – ‘under your glance my dead selves quicken and stir, / and a thousand shadows attend you where you go.’ (‘Morning’) and a sense of loneliness: ‘after sunset must I be made to watch / the lawn and the lane, from the bed drawn to the window, / the winking glass on top of the garden wall, / the shadows relaxing and stiffening under the moon? / I am alone, but look, I have opened the doors, / and the house is filling with cold, the winds flow in.’ (‘Outside and In’) But perhaps the most popular poem from the collection is his ‘Lessons of the War’ (in three parts), particularly part I ‘The Naming of Parts’ in which Reed characterises an Army instructor giving a lecture on the Lee Enfield rifle, juxtaposing the beauty of plants and flowers with the weapon of death –

‘This is the safety catch, which is always released

With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me

See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy

If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms

Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see

Any of them using their finger.’

In ‘Chard Witlow’ Reed seems to parody Eliot: ‘as we get older we do not get any younger.’ He goes on: ‘There are certain precautions – though none of them very reliable - / against the blast from bombs, or the flying splinters, / but not against the blast from Heaven,’ before we reach the refrain – ‘pray for me also under the draughty stair. / As we get older we do not get any younger.’ Six poems represent the next section ‘The Desert’ and the final part, VI ‘Envoy’ sees the author planning a garden – ‘whatever sort of garden / You, I, or we shall build, / neglected much, or cared for, / and all its great designs / fulfilled or unfulfilled: / built over ruined shrines, / where others have loved and worshipped, / or built on virgin ground: / shaped or disorderly, / let it at least be / different from this’… ‘let it suffer autumn and spring, / its trees deciduous, / let it flower in sudden moments / for you, me, or us’… ‘whether it stand / with its precincts walled or open, / or whether a city surround it, / or it stand at the sea’s edge, / with the wild and the broken beyond it, / where the winds flicker and hiss, / let it at least have this: / among its ruined temples.’ The third section of the book is ‘Tintagel’ with its four parts before we get into the more interesting ‘Chrysothemis’ for here be darkness to distress! Well, just a little perhaps to lighten the dark days ahead! Chrysothemis is the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and the sister of Electra – ‘I cannot follow them into their world of death, / or their hunted world of life, though through the house, / Death and the hunted bird sing at every nightfall.’ … ‘I have set myself to protect, / against the demons that linger inside our walls, /their saddened, quiet children of darkness and shame.’ The fear continues: ‘It is my house now, decaying but never dying, / the soul’s museum, preserving and embalming / the shuttered rooms, the amulets, the pictures, / the doorways waiting for perennial surprise, / the children sleeping under the heat of summer, / and lastly the great bronze doors of the bridal chamber, / huge and unspeaking, not to be pressed and opened, / not to be lingered near, then or thereafter, / not to be pounded upon by desolate fists, / mine least of all.’ Ah, those ‘desolate fists’! The volume ends with ‘Philoctetes’ which has some great writing; Philoctetes was the companion of Heracles (he lit Heracles funeral pyre and received his bow and arrows; on the way to Troy he was wounded and left on Lemnos. Am oracle later reveals that Troy will not fall until the bow and arrows of Heracles are brought back to the Greeks and so Odysseus and Diomedes fetch Philoctetes back where he is cured of his wound  – ‘I have lived too long on Lemnos, lonely and desperate, / quarrelling with conjured demons, with the ghosts / of the men and women with whom I learned to people / the loneliness and despair; and with those others: / the silent circle / of the men and women I have been and tried to be.’ The book ends almost prophetically: ‘the ghosts dislimn and vanish; the god departs; / my life begins; and a man plants a tree at daybreak.’ An image which seems more relevant in these troubling times!

Collected Poems – by Peter Porter.

Shelley and sex and sheets of gloom for the foreseeable future… perhaps a time will come when we should all consider the ultimate in social distancing – suicide! On Day Eight of my self-isolation during the Coronavirus outbreak I am reading the ‘Collected Poems’ of Peter Neville Frederick Porter (1929-2010), the Australian-born, British poet who came to England in 1951. I didn’t know of his two suicide attempts in England before returning to Brisbane at the time of reading these poems or that his first wife Janice committed suicide in 1974, so on that lighter note what did I think of the poems? The ‘Collected Poems’ was published in 1983 and contains the eight published collections from 1961-1981 in chronological order and the first volume, ‘Once Bitten, Twice Bitten’ (1961) has some dark and humorous pieces very wittily composed on many themes encompassing tea rooms, cancer, hurried sex, suits and prams and alarm clocks… There are some lovely little observations: ‘a thin heart hates a fat man’ (‘Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, Once Shy, Twice Shy’), images of sickness: ‘we do not know whose kiss has bled / the pale lips on the vivid bed’ (‘Sick-Room at Home’), suburban suicide: ‘give up thinking, work hard, buy a car, / get married, keep a garden, bring up kids - / answers to all the problems that there are, / except the love that kills, the death that lives.’ (‘Conventions of Death’) and brief moments of sexual frenzy: ‘I’ll gear the dream to sex. That sharp face / is with me now – it will not let me use / its landlocked body. I try to kiss a place / where I have been. It scolds, its words refuse / my tonguing. I am naked, in disgrace / with love, skulking under its high-heeled shoes.’ (‘Death’s Morning Shadows’) and again in ‘Beast and the Beauty’ which ends: ‘so he sits alone in Libraries, hideous and hairy of soul, / a beast again, waiting for a lustful kiss to bring / back his human smell, the taste of a woman on his tongue.’ Those readers opposed to the sexual titillation have the option of a ‘shilling’s worth of gas’ (‘Suicide Unmasked’). The sexual imagery continues in Porter’s second volume ‘Poems Ancient & Modern’ from 1964; in one poem, ‘An Anthropologist’s Confession’, the protagonist witnesses a rape – ‘I saw on the other bank a naked girl, / beautiful as pearl, wade from the shelving shore / till waves tapped her vagina. She curled / her hair up high and splashed her body.’ All perfectly innocent and lovely until: ‘two naked girls stood behind her. Then / roaring upstream, a goatherd, miserly thief of his own flock for the grim woven / cloth he wore, splashed to her side, his bulging beef

Fuming with lust. He spreadeagled her and laid

Her on the milky clay. I watched from

Across the mild water, my ears and eyes sprayed

By yells and splashes. I felt the thong

Of his lust whipping her, his short sword invade.

His tongue in my own lips like a strap of fire.

Fill her with blood I heard myself say.

I left the place purged in

Conscience by this rape as though my own

Semen had uncurdled. I knew myself virgin

And my shame fell on me like a stone.’

Porter seems to confess to erotic fetishes – ‘I wish I were a nylon thread / meshed against your thigh’ (‘Nine Points of the Law’) and something quite relevant to contemporary scenes of panic-buying: ‘spending money is the kindest orgasm.’ (‘Shopping Scenes’) The tone changes a little in the next collection, ‘A Porter Folio’ (1969) which is a very clever volume of historical and religious inspired works resembling Eliot with threads of Betjeman in style and his erudite, intellectual wings are stretched further in ‘The Last of England’ (1970) where he seems to cram everyone and everything into the poems and does it very well! ‘Preaching to the Converted’ (1972) really goes to confirm that Porter is a poet with ‘sex on the brain’ but always expressed with a fine sense of wit as in ‘Sex and the Over Forties’: ‘It’s too good for them, / they look so unattractive undressed - / let them read paperbacks!’ Other volumes are: ‘Living in a Calm Country’ (1975), ‘The Cost of Seriousness’ (1978) and the delightful ‘English Subtitles’ (1981) in which the author asks: ‘How Important is Sex?’ – ‘Not very’, he says, ‘the sight / of mummy’s hair puts us on the spot, / a cave more mysterious than the mouth.’ He goes on to say that ‘I am a respecter / of power, having seen a skinny girl / screaming in the playground, oblivious / of boys, wake to her hormonal clock.’ The book ends with Porter’s 1972 piece ‘After Martial’ which is the sort of Greek pornographic erotica one would expect – ‘the flavour of sodomy comes out / the other end as halitosis.’ (XII. Ixxxv) I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Porter’s ‘Collected Poems’ and consider it compulsory reading for any lover of modern poetry or anyone in search of the oblivion from Coronavirus – a strange thought enters my head: why not read the complete works of Wordsworth, it is surely overdue? But things haven’t got that bad just yet!

Sugar Daddy – by Hugo Williams.

Being a natural hermit, this isolation is no hardship! Day Nine of my Coronavirus self-isolation and restriction increases as freedom diminishes in the preservation of humanity! But there is only so much tea one can drink, how absurd is that remark coming from an Englishman? I know, anyway, I put my idle hours to Hugo Williams, a Windsor-born poet (1942) who attended Eton College and won numerous literary prizes; he was also the son of the actor Hugh Williams and this collection, ‘Sugar Daddy’ was published in 1970. The book is in three parts and the poems which are quite minimalist in style about such subjects as love and marriage, fatherhood and separation; in the poem ‘Terminal’ we get a sense of the bustling airport where ‘con-men come at you like squids’; where one finds ‘maps in cobwebs’ and ‘neon arrows laughing.’ An obsession with other people and what they are up to is expressed in ‘The Couple Upstairs’ which says:

‘She was not always with him up there,

And yet they seemed inviolate, like us,

Our loves in sympathy. Her going

Thrills and frightens us.’

In ‘Early Morning’ the dull routine at the beginning of each day is given a greater importance – ‘the mirror, the running water, / the delay the reckoning, like sex. / … The basin is a porcelain pelvis / pressed against my own.’ The same ennui is found in part two where we find the ‘Woman in a New House’ whose ‘mind is crammed with love and ambition. / The future makes me fall asleep.’ (v) and in part three – ‘I don’t know what to do / as you pass your time / perfecting the darkness between us.’ (‘Couple’) and ‘The Elephant is Overturned’:

‘Some hand

Has cut a section through my house.

Our bedroom is an open dig where we are petrified,

Naked as the lovers of Pompeii’ (ii)

Some Sweet Day – by Hugo Williams.

This volume of short, abstract poems published in 1975 has some interesting and comic pieces on the themes of childhood and love, mortality, the interior and exterior world; in ‘Sonny Jim Crowned’ a picture of a haemophiliac boy is painfully and humorously brought to life as he is told ‘how good he is at Ludo / in case he dies before we let him win again’ and later we are told that ‘we’re not allowed to mention the bits of blood / which fly off him, staining our clothes, / when he skips among us like a little doll, / showing off as usual.’ Nature of course is summoned too as ‘a summer breeze / is drying out the sticky lime trees. / It fills and lifts in the branches / and my ribs heave.’ (‘Home’) and again as in the poem ‘Empires’ where the author stares ‘for hours / at the giant purple weeds / wandering aimlessly over the battlefield / of the garden, their airborn seeds / spiralling up over the graves / of the chrysanthemums’ and ‘Hemlock’ – ‘I have drawn up / all that is doubtful in the earth. / Mist gathers in my stem.

When I nod my head late at night

The air fills up with dust

And the books with ignorance.’

Hugo Williams is an exceptional poet evoking a world of childhood and childish gestures, observing the world around him, through youth and adulthood; a world in which it is all too easy to become over-sentimental, yet Williams cannot be accused of this. In fact, I was so taken by these poems and those in ‘Sugar Daddy’ (1970) I went on to read his wonderful ‘Writing Home’ collection from 1985 which has some lovely autobiographical poems and splendid verse centred upon his father.

A Correct Compassion and Other Poems – by James Kirkup.

Isolation-dreaming, a literary lethargy: I am losing my grip on reality! Day Ten of Coronavirus isolation and after a brief lapse of my rational mind in which I read Stephen Phillips’ (1864-1915) collection of ‘Poems’ (1897) with its ‘Christ in Hades’ I turned to ‘A Correct Compassion’ published in 1952 by the poet, translator and travel writer, James Kirkup (1918-2009). Kirkup, who studied at Durham University, writes with a Northern romantic perspective upon the rolling horror of the sea, the harbours and the night crossings, where ‘passengers embark, anonymous / beneath the swinging arc-lamp’s / gesticulating melodrama.’ (‘Tyne Ferry: Night’) and there is a strong passionate link to the past, a masculine harking for history in poems such as ‘A Matter of the Past’ where he asks: ‘was it a day like this, beyond Eboracum, / that you were laid away, you Roman boy, in stone and darkness?’ The ghost of Yeats comes through in Kirkup’s ‘Swan Legends’ in which a ‘fellow swan has died’ and the remaining swan ‘soars into the afterglow / of that deep summer where all deaths belong,’ The poem continues wistfully – ‘into the stars, and sings alone, / then folds the wings that will no longer soar, / and with one last wild cry, through endless day / thunders down miles of darkness, like a stone.’ But perhaps the most overpowering emotion in the collection is love: ‘though I knew it was some other hurting, / I felt that first farewell as if it were our last.’ (‘First Parting’) and the absolutely brilliant ‘Human and Divine Love’ where Kirkup declares ‘the mortal pain / Love gives to the immortal loneliness of man’; yet beyond the loneliness, beyond the sculpture-influenced poems and beyond the ‘Invocation for Raising the Dead’, is a positive desire for a cleansed and miraculous new earth – ‘now shine, great Sun, upon a singing earth again, / and let all clouds be golden, bringing a golden rain!’ (‘Elizabeth Regina as the Four Seasons: Summer’) we find the image of a ‘fountain’ in the poem of that name representing the poet’s love, as ‘a terrible enchantment binds me here / in deepening darkness, and I cannot move, / fountain, bright fountain, image of my love.’ More relevant of the days ahead perhaps and the catastrophe the world is going through is the poem ‘The End of the World’ which states that ‘this is the world with no horizon, excepting / where we stand together. For there / the strange earth and stranger heaven / touch with delicate decision, and remove / man’s loneliness in a miraculous confusion.’ The poem ends rather prophetically:

‘But we are together.

And though I do not know you, and never saw

Your unseen face, nor heard your lifted voice,

And though you were my enemy, my love – though we are blind,

Within this breaking moment, at the world’s black end,

I feel your trembling cease; and know,

Too late, that you were once mankind.’

Sailing to an Island – by Richard Murphy.

Drowning in despondency in my own absorption on Day Eleven of this damned yet necessary isolation during the Coronavius pandemic, I swept my weary mind over Ivor Gurney’s ‘War’s Embers and Other Verses’ from 1919 before alighting upon this marvellous collection, ‘Sailing to an Island’ by the Irish poet Richard Murphy (1927-1018) who studied English at Magdalene College, Oxford. Published in 1963, the volume is divided into three parts and the title poem in part one the author depicts the reality of the idyllic ‘sailing to an island’, where ‘the breeze as we plunge slowly stiffens: / there are hills of sea between us and land, / between our hopes and the island harbour. / A child vomits. The boat veers and bucks.’  The poem ends with a sense of relief: ‘later, I reach a room, where the moon stares / cobwebbed through the window. The tide has ebbed, / boats are careened in the harbour. Here is a bed.’ Murphy has a lyrical charm even when the subject is rather ghastly as in ‘The Cleggan Disaster’ (off the West Coast of Ireland in 1927) where ‘the night was like a shell, with long sea surges / loudening from afar, though no one was listening.’ The sea is an ever-present monster that drives men to awful deeds – ‘bothered by women no more than by the moon, / not concerned with money beyond the bare needs, / in this boat’s bows he sheathed his life’s harpoon.’ (‘The Last Galway Hooker’)

The sea subsides in part two where we find ‘The Woman of the House’, a poem in memory of Murphy’s grandmother, Lucy Mary Ormsby (1873-1958) who lived in the West of Ireland; a woman whose ‘mind was a vague and log-warmed yarn / spun between sleep and acts of kindness.’ There are many fine poems in part three but I personally liked ‘The Philosopher and the Birds’ which begins: ‘a solitary invalid in a fuschia garden / where time’s rain eroded the root since Eden, / he became for a tenebrous epoch the stone.’ A poem which goes some way in describing how I feel at the moment – a ‘solitary invalid in a fuschia garden’! Murphy is a hugely intellectual poet and does not fail to deliver on all levels of what the reader demands from poetry; I went on to read his 1968 publication, ‘The Battle of Aughrim’ (the battle fought in 1691, south west of Athlone in Ireland) which was commissioned by the BBC and was just as impressed with Murphy! Sensational!

Antarctica – by Derek Mahon.

On Day Twelve of self-isolation during this scourge of Coronavirus I wasted what little sanity I had on reading the ‘Complete Poems: 1927-1979’ of Elizabeth Bishop and was dreadfully disappointed and regretted it; I found nothing that spoke to me! But hope remained and I found my salvation on Day Thirteen in ‘Antarctica’ published in 1985 by the Belfast-born poet, Derek Mahon (born 1941). The poet presents us with a view of Kensington, where Ezra Pound lived, as a ‘great good place / of clean-limbed young men / and high-minded virgins, / cowslip and celandine,’ (I-ii) and he asks ‘what price the dewey-eyed / Pelagianism of home / to a lost generation / dumbfounded on the Somme?’ (‘A Kensington Notebook’. I-vi) A glimmer of that Irish humour and wisdom is delivered in ‘Squince’ as ‘the eyes are clouded where / he lies in a veined dish: / is this the salmon of wisdom / or merely a dead fish?’ The frenzy of lust which is never very far from the subconscious mind is brought vividly to life in the poem ‘Ovid in Love’ where the Latin poet, ‘aroused’, ‘grabbed and roughly tore / until your gown squirmed on the floor. / Oh, you resisted, but like one / who knows resistance is in vain; / and, when you stood revealed, my eyes / feasted on shoulders, breasts and thighs. / I held you hard and down you slid / beside me, as we knew you would. / Oh, come to me again as then you did!’ (‘Ovid in Love’. Amores I,v) In the poem ‘Antarctica’, Mahon, who studied at Trinity College, Dublin, captures brilliantly the atmosphere, the ‘ridiculous’ and the ‘sublime’ as he places the reader among the polar party, there in that tent when Laurence Oates, on his birthday, 17^th March, walked out to his death in a noble endeavour of self-sacrifice to save his three companions; poor ‘Titus’ Oates, Scott said ‘it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman – we all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.’ How utterly heartbreaking is that stoic, quiet reserve, the ‘nod’ and the ‘pretending not to know’ which the author evokes:

‘I am just going outside and may be some time.

The others nod, pretending not to know.

At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

He leaves them reading and begins to climb,

Goading his ghost into the howling snow;

He is just going outside and may be some time.

The tent recedes beneath its crust of rime

And frostbite is replaced by vertigo:

At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

Need we consider it some sort of crime,

This thumb self-sacrifice of the weakest? No,

He is just going outside and may be some time –

In fact, for ever. Solitary enzyme,

Though the night yield no glimmer there will glow,

At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

He takes leave of the earthly pantomime

Quietly, knowing it is time to go: -

‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’

At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.’

Death, noble or not, is never far from us, and in these troubling times, we wait, ‘as if ghosts already, / we search our pockets for the Stygian fare.’ (‘October’) and poignantly, in ‘Tithonus’ he declares:

‘I dream of the past,

Of the future,

Even of the present.

Perhaps I am really

Dead and dreaming

My vigilance?’

In the Stopping Train and Other Poems – by Donald Davie.

This excellent collection from 1977 by the Barnsley-born poet Donald Davie (1922-1995) of St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge is a tour de force of abstract and astonishingly lyrical verse, poems which as he says himself ‘describe their own birth, and this / is what they are – a space / cleared to walk around in.’ (‘Ars Poetica’) And so, as we walk around the volume there is some exceptional work here such as ‘An Apparition’ where the poet, spying the shade of Gina, says he saw her walk ‘suddenly, in white / brassiere and panties under / a fish-net wrap; your sallow skin,… firm and sullen to fire,’ and in ‘Townend, 1976’ he asks: ‘when does a town become a city?’ but it is the title poem of the collection, ‘In the Stopping Train’ which achieves a certain greatness for we are reminded of Edward Thomas and his ‘Addlestrop’ when Davie writes – ‘I have got into the slow train / again. I made the mistake / knowing what I was doing, / knowing who had to be punished.’ But who is to be punished? The poet answers: ‘the man going mad inside me’ saying that ‘this journey will punish the bastard’, and it shall, for anyone who has been on such a long train journey will know that frustration and that form of ‘self-abuse’ is a regular ‘punishment’ for commuters like myself. The same commuters will recognise the internal hatred as ‘he abhors his fellows, / especially children; let there / not for pity’s sake / be a crying child in the carriage.’ a punishment beyond endurance for most men for who has not wanted to bash the brains out of some bawling brat on the train? ‘Torment him with his hatreds, / torment him with his false / loves. Torment him with time / that has disclosed their falsehood.’ Perhaps the most obvious punishment is ‘time, the exquisite torment!’ And our poet continues in philosophical mode – ‘what’s all this about flowers? / they have an importance he can’t / explain, or else their names have.’ And with a touch of cynicism he says ‘some people claim to love them. … Love them? Love flowers? Love, / love … the word is hopeless: / gratitude, maybe, pity…’ before the poem ends on the saddest words a fellow human can utter:

‘He knew too few in love.’

This is such a marvellous collection that I went on to spend Day Thirteen of my Coronavirus confinement reading Davie’s ‘Collected Poems: 1950-1970’ (1972) and ‘Collected Poems: 1970-1983’ (1983) which contained among such wonders his collections: ‘Brides of Reason’ (1955), ‘A Winter Talent’ (1957), ‘Events and Wisdoms’ (1964), ‘Essex Poems’ (1969), ‘The Shires’ (1974) and ‘The Battered Wife’ (1982) – this is definitely essential reading!

New Lines: An Anthology – Edited by Robert Conquest.

After celebrating my partial freedom from self-isolation during the Coronavirus pandemic with a couple of volumes by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922), his ‘In Vinculis’ (1889) appropriately written in an Irish prison, and ‘The Love Sonnets of Proteus’ (1882) – I needn’t have bothered! I turned to Robert Conquest’s ‘New Lines’ anthology published in 1956. Conquest seems to write quite detached and with little passion in the introduction, saying that a ‘poem needs an intellectual backbone’ (does it really?) and he simply relishes attacking those ‘metaphysical poets’, oh well he was a man approaching forty worshipping at the shrine of William Empson. The volume attempts to contain nine poets, only one of which is a woman, Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) into a very loose bracket known as the ‘Movement’ (oh dear!), the usual malarkey ensues, anti-romantic, insufferably witty… abstract and obscure trifles of little significance from the likes of John Holloway (1920-1999) Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), D. J. Enright (1920-2002) and John Wain (1925-1994), but there are some outstanding works here, as one would expect, from Philip Larkin (1922-1985) such as his brilliant ‘Church Going’ in which he takes ‘off his cycle-clips in awkward reverence.’ and he asks, ‘after dark, will dubious women come / to make their children touch a particular stone’. Thom Gunn (1929-2004) is here with his ‘Lerico’ – ‘Shelley was drowned near here’ and ‘Byron was worth the sea’s pursuit.’ The great Donald Davie (1922-1995) puts in an appearance with his ‘The Fountain’ and ‘A Head Painted by Daniel O’Neill’ before Robert Conquest (1917-2015) takes up the gauntlet with such poems as ‘Epistemology of Poetry’ and ‘Antheor’. Mostly disappointing but a few small glimmers of hope!

Collected Poems – by William Plomer.

I have had my eye on Mr. Plomer for quite some time and this 1960 publication of his Collected Works is a really excellent volume containing his volumes: ‘Notes for Poems’ (1927, ‘The Family Tree’ (1929), ‘The Fivefold Screen’ (1932), ‘Visiting the Caves’ (1936), ‘Selected Poems’ (1940), ‘The Dorking Thigh’ (1945) and ‘A Shot in the Park’ (1955); there are also poems from his ‘In a Bombed House’ (1942) and ‘The Heart of a King’ (1955). William Plomer (1903-1973) divides his volume into several parts such as ‘African Poems’, ‘Poems written in Japan’ and ‘Poems of the Affections’ etc. In his section called ‘Philhellinisms’ is the beautiful poem ‘Archaic Apollo’, the ‘slender god’ on whose breast ‘the Aegean lay / while the whole of history was made; / that long caress could not warm the flesh / nor the antique smile abrade.’ Plomer goes on to describe Apollo as being ‘as he was, inert, alert, / the one hand open, the other lightly shut, / his nostrils clean as holes in a flute, / the nipples and navel delicately cut.’ In the excellent section ‘A Time of Prisons and Ruins’ are found some rather good poems such as ‘The Ruins’ where we find the lines: ‘snapped off and earthquake-scattered / segments of Corinthian columns lie / fluted like celery-stalks in stone / buff-biscuit on the desert grey.’ and ‘some stand, supporting yet / fragments of pediments soon to fall. / Acanthus capitals can be kicked / out of the sand like fossils. Surely / - no moral need be drawn from this? / bright poisonous gourds have coiled / over the vast cylinders, but these / small wild musk-melons ought to quench our thirst.’ Another poem in the section is ‘The Silent Sunday’ and there are some pretty dark references for which Plomer is known for; in verse two, ‘half way down the hill a murder case / once drew idle crowds to stare’ and in the next verse, ‘face downward lay the huddled suicides / like litter that a riot leaves.’ Verse four mirrors the childish fears of most of us who have encountered some strange person living like some animal – ‘they say some woman lived for weeks / hidden in bushes on the common, then drew lots / and ate each other’… ‘an almond tree suggests that this is spring / but on the right an oak retains its leaves.’ There are some wickedly satirical poems in the section ‘London Ballads and Poems’ such as ‘A Ticket for the Reading Room’, ‘Mews Flat Mona’ and ‘Father and Son’ (1939) or ‘The Playboy of the Demi-World’ (1938) where we meet D’Arcy Honeybunn, of Mayfair who is a ‘rose-red sissy half as old as time’; a ‘perennial pansy’ who entertains ‘ambiguous couples wearing slacks and specs / and the stout lesbian knocking out her pipe.’ In ‘The Murder on the Downs’ from the ‘Country Ballads and Poems’ section we find Bert and Jennifer, lying in the bracken as Bert ‘slowly pulls / a rayon stocking from his coat, / twists it quickly, twists it neatly / round her throat.’ But my favourite poem with its dark macabre tone is his masterful ‘The Dorking Thigh’ in which we encounter Stanley and June who are house-hunting and find a ‘Tudor snuggery styled / ‘Ye Kumfi Nooklet’. The salesman shows them around the house and June opens a cupboard door and ‘out there fell / a nameless Something on the floor. – Something the workmen left, I expect, / the agent said, as it fell at his feet, / nor knew that his chance of a sale was wrecked. ‘Good heavens, it must be a joint of meat! – Ah yes, it was meat, it was meat alright, / a joint those three will never forget - / for they stood alone in the Surrey night / with the severed thigh of a plump brunette…’ The poem goes on to reveal that a ‘trouser button was found in the mud / (who made it? Who wore it? Who lost it? Who knows?) / but no one found a trace of blood / or her body or face, or the spoiler of those.’ The grisly find deters the couple and June ‘made Stan take a flat in town.’ The poem and the collection met all my expectations of it and more, in fact, there is some absolutely brilliant writing here from Plomer and I would definitely recommend his Collected Poems to any lover of good poetry!

Collected Poems – by Robert Gittings.

Published in 1976, the ‘Collected Poems’ of Robert Gittings (1911-1992) contains the following collections: ‘Wentworth Place and Other Poems’ (1950) with its long poem ‘Wentworth Place’ about John Keats: ‘The garden darkens. Central summer / wheels its gold circle down to shade. / The moths are out to hum and hover / over the upturned pale-faced stalks, / and she too walks, / chasing a birdsfoot of annoyance / between her eyebrows, but at once / checked by the tenderness of distance, / shaping a warmness from the south / to share her mouth.’ and Gittings, of Jesus College, Cambridge, is at his best in such poems as the interesting, ‘Roman Villa in England’, a ‘miniature of Rome’, where an ‘altar that a god / once guarded now is gone; / where the white image stood / course lichens eat the stone; / the temple in the wood / is worshipped now by none / but beetle, worm and brood / of weird inhuman bone.’ ‘Famous Meeting: Poems’ (1953), ‘This Tower My Prison’ (1961) which I found the most successful collection and has the poem ‘The Great Moth’ which begins: ‘Visitant to our dumbly human home, / dull coal or shrivelled leaf, the great moth lay,’ and goes on in the second verse: ‘strange, confident, the legs that crooked my finger / settled like truth, though little I had to give, / knowing how short such breath-spans linger, / how brief the creatures live.’ Also here is the poem on the vicar and diarist, Francis Kilvert (1840-79), the ‘priest of the ancient rite’ in the poem ‘Kilvert at Clyro’ where ‘an angel satyr walks these hills - / not only here but in us all’ and the poem ‘The Fox’ in which we meet Darwin on his Beagle expedition, land at the island of San Pedro where he sees a new species of fox and casually creeps up behind it to smash its head in and take it as a prize! Other collections are: ‘Matters of Love and Death’ (1968), ‘American Journey’ (1972) and ‘Dead Ones, Live Ones’ begun in 1972.

Collected Poems – by Patrick Kavanagh.

The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) who is somewhat reluctant to call himself a ‘poet’ says that ‘poetry made me a sort of outcast. And I was abnormally normal.’ He goes on to say that ‘I do not believe in sacrifice and yet it seems I was sacrificed.’ (‘Author’s Note’, p. xiii) This Collected Poems published in 1960 is a testament to the man’s resilience who declares that ‘on many occasions I literally starved in Dublin’ before confessing that ‘if I had a stronger character, I might have done well enough for myself. But there was some kink in me, put there by Verse.’ (p. xiv) – I like him already! The volume begins with his first collection published in 1936, ‘The Ploughman and Other Poems’ with its rural hardship, unsentimental reality of poverty and peasant superstitions – ‘O PAGAN poet you / and I are one / in this – we lose our god / at set of sun.’ (‘To a Blackbird’) and ‘CHILD do not go / into the dark places of soul’ (‘To a Child’) and he conjures the magnificent owl in his ‘Four Birds’ – ‘night-winged / as a ghost / or a gangster, / mystical as a black priest / reading the Devil’s Mass.’ In his well-received collection ‘The Great Hunger and Other Poems’ (1942) we find ‘the Man after the Harrow’, ‘driving your horses through / the mist where Genesis begins’ and the poem itself ‘The Great Hunger’ which begins ‘CLAY is the word and clay is the flesh’ is a powerful work about Patrick Maguire, a farmer who lives with his aged mother and his spinster sister Mary Ann; the sexual frustration and loneliness is increasingly evident and the sense of melancholy throughout the whole collection [other volumes are: ‘A Soul for Sale’ (1947) and ‘Later Poems including Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’ (1960)] is quite overwhelming and the author, an ‘outcast’ marked-out from society by poetry says it all when he says: ‘my purpose in life was to have no purpose.’ (p. xiv) Excellent!

The Whitsun Weddings – by Philip Larkin.

This is Larkin’s third volume of poetry published in 1964, containing thirty-two outstanding poems which speak of the terrible search for happiness summoned from the ordinary reality of sadness; the unpretentious perception of a changing world and his response to it. The volume begins with this pessimistic yet also joyous tone in the poem ‘Here’ which ends: ‘Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands / like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, / hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, / luminously-peopled air ascends; / and past the poppies bluish neutral distance / ends the land suddenly beyond a beach / of shapes and shingle. Here is influenced existence: / facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.’ There is an unbearable sense of melancholy here as one finds in Hardy’s poems, whom like Larkin, I also adore, the ‘neutral’ transitional ‘nothingness’ of space inhabited between the urban and the suburban; a landscape of provincial love and death; it is the same  impersonal desire for solitude and for the destruction of the self found in Larkin’s second and first mature volume of poetry ‘The Less Deceived’ (1955) after he had shaken off the Yeatsian influence of his first volume: ‘The North Ship’ (1945) both of which I also read and enjoyed, as in the poem ‘Wants’ – ‘beyond all this, the wish to be alone’ and ‘beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs’. There is a sense of belonging, as we can see in the poem ‘Mr Bleaney’, who told himself ‘that this was home, and grinned, / and shivered, without shaking off the dread / - that how we live measures our own nature’. But love is always the barometer for ‘in everyone there sleeps / a sense of life lived according to love.’ (‘Faith Healing’) Larkin (1922-1985), the novelist, poet and librarian who read English at St. John’s College, Oxford (1940-43) is often accused of being too gloomy and introspective but for me that is his strength, he accepts the imperfect for what they are and does not strive for perfection; within the innocent happiness wrenched from misery is great humour and a rebellious nature that puts his fingers up to society and stuffiness and records the world around him as can be seen in the beautiful ‘Whitsun Weddings’ – ‘we passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls / in parodies of fashion, heels and veils, / all posed irresolutely, watching us go,’ and one can almost see and hear the ‘fathers with broad belts under their suits / and seamy foreheads; mothers, loud and fat; / an uncle shouting smut’ and of course there are the women who ‘shared / the secret like a happy funeral’. Larkin may not be considered a great love poet but the theme of love is never far from his verse: ‘how separate and unearthly love is, / or women are, or what they do, / or in our young unreal wishes / seem to be: synthetic, new, / and natureless in ecstasies’ (‘The Large Cool Store’) and again in one of Larkin’s best loved poems ‘An Arundel Tomb’ with its metaphysical survival of the soul through love and the fear of death accompanied by the desire for death which satisfies Larkin’s acceptance of mortality and begins: ‘side by side, their faces blurred, / the earl and countess lie in stone’; hand in hand, the poem like the monument  is a remarkable memorial to love’s permanence, with a ‘faint hint of the absurd - / the little dogs under their feet.’ Anyone who has been to the tomb, as I have will draw the same poetic inspiration of love’s enduring devotion beyond the grave as indeed did Larkin, in those two stone figures who ‘would not think to lie so long. / Such faithfulness in effigy’ where ‘only an attitude remains’. Larkin reads the stone and interprets the chivalric beauty where ‘time has transfigured them into / untruth. The stone fidelity / they hardly meant has come to be / their final blazon, and to prove’ and here Larkin seems to sum-up the whole meaning of existence for humanity in two lines that end the poem: ‘our almost-instinct almost true: what will survive of us is love.’ How true!

High Windows – by Philip Larkin.

Larkin’s fourth and final volume of poetry from 1974 containing twenty-four poems continues his preoccupation with death and the same transient nature of life interlaced with love but that old Arundel romance has gone – ‘when I see a couple of kids / and guess he’s fucking her and she’s / taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, / I know this is paradise.’ (‘High Windows’) and of course the much quoted ‘Annus Mirabilis’ – ‘sexual intercourse began / in nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) - / between the end of the Chatterley ban / and the Beatles’ first LP.’ Despite the sexual revolution that went on around him he is still able to notice the beauty of nature as in ‘The Trees’ which are ‘coming into leaf / like something almost being said; / the recent buds relax and spread, / their greenness is a kind of grief.’ The overwhelming urge to blame is spelt out in ‘This be the Verse’ which begins famously ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / and add some extra, just for you.’ – They certainly do! The pleasure of sex and the knowing power of death over us are all that we really have; sex is the lit row of candles that lights the way along a steady path towards the inevitable end of life – ‘at death, you break up: the bits that were you / start speeding away from each other for ever / with no one to see.’ (‘The Old Fools’) and we all become old fools, the lucky ones that make it, those that can ponder life’s meaning as they are opening its back door – ‘perhaps being old is having lighted rooms / inside your head, and people in them, acting.’

The Hollow Hill and Other Poems 1960-1964 – by Kathleen Raine.

This collection from 1965 by the poet and critic Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) of Girton College, Cambridge, is a really impressive volume drawing upon Raine’s deep inspiration from the landscape of Northumberland and Scotland, the border-world with its mystical and visionary qualities as well as her own experiences and impressions from her childhood: ‘an impulse / of rose like the delight of girls’ breasts / when the nipples bud and grow a woman / where was a child, a woman to bear / a child unbegun’ (‘Rose’); this joyous awakening of childhood, of poetry and love is all splendidly told in her first volume (of three volumes) of autobiography, ‘Farewell Happy Fields’ (1973) which I have also been reading along with her second volume ‘The Land Unknown’ (1975) and enjoying immensely where she tells of her strict Methodist upbringing, the first stirrings of love and how at the age of fifteen she contemplated suicide (although not too seriously) when her admirer Roland, who swore undying devotion to her, (a devotion thwarted by Kathleen’s father when he forbade them to see each other) cast her aside for the Roman Church. I really admire Raine’s poetry and read her early collections some twenty years ago and felt an immediate connection. The title poem in this collection, ‘The Hollow Hill’ in six parts has many references to death – Kathleen at the age of 12 was moved when her 11 year old cousin Jimmy died of cerebral meningitis: ‘his death invaded and possessed me’, she says in ‘Farewell Happy Fields’ and that possession is still evident in The Hollow Hill, as can be seen here in the second verse: ‘the moving now has drawn its thread / tracing the ravelled record of the dead / through all the wanderings of the living. / Reaching at last the sum of our becoming, / the line inwound into a point again, / the space of the world full circle turn / into the nought where all began.’ In the third verse death seems more poignant as ‘the grave is empty, they are gone: / in the last place they were, their clay / clings crumbling to the roots of trees, / whose fibres thread their way from earth to earth again.’ One is reminded of the powerful bull in the field she knew as a child that gored the farmer; this symbol of strength and virility she feared yet respected, that was shot by the butcher and its lifeless weight of flesh taken away from the barn, that ‘dark house of the dead’ which can ‘pierce. / From world to world there’s a needle’s eye: / … to touch with fingers of life a dead man’s heart’. Part three tells us that ‘each star of life has gone its way / tracing the cross-ways of the world’ before part five declares that ‘when a soul departs, a white bird flies: / gull, gannet, tern or swan?’ This is a really accomplished collection which far surpasses many of the volumes I have recently read such as ‘The Collected Poems of William Empson’ (1949) a friend of Raine’s which I found cold and abstract, intellect without emotion; ‘Tulips and Chimneys’ (1923) by E. E. Cummings – complete nonsense and a couple of collected works by Geoffrey Hill (1985) and Gavin Ewart (1980), both rather good, but reading ‘The Hollow Hill’ has inspired me to re-read Raine’s works and so I read ‘The Lost Country’ (1971) and ‘The Oracle of the Heart’ (1980) with renewed respect and interest and with my fascination for things ‘otherworldly’ and beyond the grasp of the living, that romantic space concealed from us, I felt the same fascination and repulsive shame as the young poet, forced to drown her litter of kittens in a bucket of water and then to dig their grave – ‘so young, blood was already on my hands.’ (‘Farewell Happy Fields’. p. 55) Raine does not constrict her spiritual views and expands into the world of the occult in relationship to nature which can be seen in her first collection of poems ‘Stone and Flower’ (1943) – ‘Let my body sweat / let snakes torment my breast / my eyes be blind, ears deaf, hands distraught / mouth parched, uterus cut out, / belly slashed, back lashed, / tongue slivered into thongs of leather / rain stones inserted in my breasts, / head severed, / … if only the lips may speak, / if only the god will come.’ (‘Invocation’) and particularly in the ‘spell’ poems from the collection ‘The Year One’ (1952), but most of all I admire her poetic independence and integrity, as she followed her own inner daimon; as she says at the end of her poem ‘The Path’ – ‘and I must walk the path of fire / that trembles, is scattered, reassembles / on all the sunlit moonlit waters of the world’.

A Room in Chelsea Square – by Michael Nelson.

Originally published anonymously in 1958, this is a fabulously astute satire written by Michael Nelson (1921-1990) in which we meet a witty collective of odd characters and survivors from the sumptuous days of the ‘bright young things’, reminiscent of Waugh’s ‘Brideshead’. Nicholas Milestone, a naïve, provincial reporter from a poor home encounters the enormously rich (the book begins: ‘He was very, very rich’) and terribly camp aesthete, Patrick, a nasty, manipulative character Nelson based on Peter Watson. Patrick invites Nicholas to London on the promise of a job and has him stay at his hotel suite. The flamboyant Patrick then decides with his friends Ronnie Gras, an obese hedonist based on the writer Cyril Connolly, and Christopher Lyre, a manic depressive based on Stephen Spender, to produce a fashion magazine called ‘Eleven’. There are some good passages and plots – Christopher is in love with Michael Herbert Henry, an ex RAF pilot who later dies in a plane crash and all the signs point to suicide; there is the newspaper proprietor Stuart Andrews of the Daily Gladiator who knows just what the public wants: ‘sex and scapegoats’; and the moments when it all falls apart for Nicholas when he hesitates on being asked to go away with the controlling Patrick, in fact, he flees the hotel suite and comforts Christopher after Michael’s death and finds himself cast aside by Michael who has a new man to take on holiday with him and to spoil and manipulate as he wishes. Entertaining!

Minding My Own Business – by Percy Horace Muir.

I read this autobiography straight off the back of reading ‘Everyman Remembers’ (1931) by Ernest Rhys with its talk of publishing and the likes of Wilde, Whitman, Swinburne and Yeats (and who can forget poor old Frank Podmore condemned by Rhys for sadistic, unspeakable acts, mysteriously taking himself quietly to a pond to end it all) which in itself is a marvellous tome for bibliophiles to drool over. Perhaps a little more concerned with the ins and outs of the business end of publishing and the book trade is ‘Minding my own business’, the autobiography of Percy Horace Muir (1894-1979) published in 1956; Muir, who seems to have fallen into the business, like so many, quite accidentally, recounts over twenty-four chapters, (227 pages) his avid book collecting and his joining the firm of Elkin Mathews the antiquarian bookseller. Charles Elkin Mathews (1851-1921) who with his partner John Lane (1854-1925) established The Bodley Head bookshop and publishing company in 1887, (he left in 1894 to set up Elkin Mathews Ltd) was instrumental in the decadent nineties as the publisher of The Yellow Book quarterly (1894-7). The cut-throat world of the book trade, the politics of book publishing and collecting during the twenties and thirties are enormously interesting in Muir’s skilled hands as he has a familiar, confidential manner in his writing and hugely entertaining are the many book-lovers and those that work within the business appearing like musty gargoyles and remnants from the decadent period such as the two monocle-wearing brothers, Robert Gathorne-Hardy (1902-73) and Edward Gathorne-Hardy (1901-78), both of Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, the latter, a bohemian socialist specialising in 18^th century Literature; or A J A Symons (1900-1941) who wrote the exceptional ‘Quest for Corvo’ (1934) which brings in the marvellous Christopher Sclater Millard (1872-1927) of Keble College, Oxford, the Wilde bibliographer, dealer in rare books and friend and secretary to Robert Ross (there is a fairly decent biography of Millard, ‘Loyally Yours’ by Maria Roberts published in 2014 which is worth seeking out); Muir recalls an incident concerning Millard the Jacobite socialist, whose ‘story was a sad one, and that “what had been folly at Oxford became criminal misdemeanour in later life”’ (p. 50). That horrid old man, Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) the American man of letters who lived most of his life in England makes several appearances much to Muir’s annoyance and abhorrence of him and there are passionate collectors such as Richard Jennings (1881-1952) and Alfred Edward Newton (1864-1940) and throughout all the sherry drinking and grubby searching for first editions, the disappointment and skulduggery of forgers, this is a really intimate read; Muir falls on hard times following the loss of a libel case but pulls through again but less interesting to me were his trips away in the thirties hunting musical manuscripts in Germany before the outbreak of war. ‘Minding my own business’ is a tremendously understated little book which will appeal to those who love books and the history of book publishing and collecting and worth it for me purely for the few pages concerning the enigmatic Christopher Millard! Delightful!

From the Joke Shop – by Roy Fuller.

I have waded through so many sleep-inducing and altogether second-rate volumes of collected works recently that I almost abandoned the will to live: Randall Jarrell, Richard Aldington, John Berryman, Edwin Muir, Austin Clarke, Isaac Rosenberg and Geoffrey Hill, all have left a nasty taste in the mouth, but poetry being hit and miss, to fall upon a hit is so very sweet! And the source of all this saccharine-shaped stupidity: ‘From the Joke Shop’, a poetry collection published in 1975 by the Lancashire poet and novelist, Roy Broadbent Fuller (1912-1991). Roy, who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1968-73 and whose first published work ‘Poems’ (1939) showed the influence of Auden and Spender, takes on a more reflective stance, inhabiting ‘another’s alien softness’ (‘Orphans’) and contemplating the notion of old age and its process where ‘days seem short in middle-age’ (‘Youth and Age’) – ‘Sunning myself (high summer in the garden), / my fingers brush against my solid thigh. / I think: quite good material for compost.’ (‘Ludicrous Reflections’). Fuller declares proudly that ‘I’m becoming odd enough / myself to tempt a spare biographer’ (‘Insomnia’) and there is a slight recurring theme of wakefulness and insomnia – ‘cold drinks, / hot drinks and pees have somehow doodled in / the cipher hours of insomnia’ (‘Insomnia’) and ‘our petrified existence with the dead / haunts wakeful nights like cocktail memories / sour with the senseless things we did or said’ (‘Dreams Sacred and Profane’). All poets are familiar with the small hours with their haunting sleeplessness where the poet scribbles thoughts and words into a notebook only to find nonsense, ‘gibberish’ in the cold light of day: ‘The window frames a leggy yellow rose. / I hurry out to rescue drowning bees. / The bedside notebook yields its gibberish.’ (‘Variations’) This is a fine collection and a poetical reprieve from the innumerable dross found between two covers of certain poets and it has saved me from ‘a lingering death, in my mythology’ (‘Heart Disease’).

The Collected Poems of T. E. Brown.

Published in 1900 after the Manx poet, Thomas Edward Brown’s (1830-1897) death, by his friends, the classics scholar Henry Graham Dakyns (1838-1911), poet and Venetian scholar, Horatio Forbes Brown (1854-1926) and the poet William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), there are some fine lyrical pieces here, such as ‘Betsy Lee’ and ‘Kitty and the Sherragh Vane’. Brown, who liked to take solitary walks on the Downs, was educated at Christ Church, Oxford (1849-1853) and he became a schoolmaster; he joined the staff at Clifton College, Bristol in 1864 and became firm friends with fellow Clifton master H. G. Dakyns and old Cliftonian, Horatio Brown. In fact, H. F. Brown writes an impressive and almost intimate introduction (he was a difficult man to know thoroughly) on T. E. Brown in the ‘Poems of T. E. Brown’, selected and arranged by H. G. D. and H. F. B. and published in 1908 (and in my opinion is more preferable to the ‘Collected Poems’) but

Brown was an earnest poet; Brown was a private man;

A schoolmaster at Clifton whose poems actually scan!

There’s beauty and there’s spirit – a most unlikely don,

But his narrative verse is like Browning, but worse,

It goes on and on and on!

‘The Doctor’, ‘Tommy Big-Eyes’, one about a witch of Manx:

Read and reflect on the hours that passed from which you get no thanks!

There is a sort of lyricism in ‘Foc’s’le Yawns’, I mean ‘Yarns’;

He was a natural-born poet, shy in ways to show it

With gentlemanly charms!

‘Betsy Lee’ and ‘Christmas Rose’, ‘Captain Tom and Captain Hugh’ –

I better read the lot I suppose there’s nothing else to do!

Messrs Dakyns, Brown and Henley in this hugely overgrown

Collected Works, such a tribute lurks

To Thomas Edward Brown!

Poems – by Percy L. Babington.

Dedicated to his brother, Humfrey Temple Babington and published in 1911, this slim volume of verse by Percy Lancelot Babington (1877-1950) of Tonbridge School and St. John’s College, Cambridge (1896-99) are not the poems of a young undergraduate of the fin-de-siecle, yet they have the same artistic sentiments – ‘Thro’ balmy May this loving pair hath sped / unwitting of the future, or the past; / careless of all save love, that in them bred / bright thoughts, and fairy fetters round them cast.’ (‘Myrtilla and Erophile’. part I) But what is love without death, for ‘Love is comfortless on Death’s dim shore.’ (part III) The pre-war splendour of the English countryside is summoned in his ‘Ballade of Kentish Woods’ and I particularly liked ‘The Deserted Home’ where ‘white jasmine sways upon the lonely walls’ and where ‘solitude holds undisputed sway’; a place where ‘birds have ceased their matin calls.’ A few of the poems recall the beauty of Egypt (Babington was a Librarian at the Cairo Medical School from 1899-1902) and what poet has never been possessed of the moon, as in ‘To the Beloved’ where we find the sumptuous ‘moon-entranced sea’ before Babington wonders off into the rather dull and ponderous ‘The Students’ until a few final flourishes occur with his Sappho and Horace poems. The author, who was an assistant master at Yardley Court School, Tonbridge (1904-10) and a Cambridge University Extension Lecturer in literature (c. 1912-1937), only published this one slim volume of poems, which although shows some flashes of inspiration, has signs of ‘last century’ tiredness about it, before delighting the British public with his ‘A Collection of Books about Cats, with notes’ (1918) and his ‘Browning and Calverley, or Poem and Parady’ (1925), but arguably his greatest achievement is his ‘A Bibliography of the Works of John Addington Symonds’ (1925, republished 1968).

The Greek Anthology: Epigrams from Anthologia Palatina XII – by Sydney Oswald.

Privately issued in 1914, this translation into English verse of the Anthologia Palatina XII by Sydney Oswald, a pseudonym of Sydney Frederick Mcillree Lomer (1880-1926) of the Lancashire Fusiliers and the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, is a very worthy and tender translation of the works of Strato and Meleager, together with some epigrams of uncertain authorship; there are passages of sensual beauty on themes of Greek love as in these from Strato: ‘as pretext garlands from the boy I bought, / then, leaving him, my house I lonely sought; / where round the gods did I the garlands twine / with fervent prayers the boy might soon be mine.’ (‘The Garland Weaver’), or this from ‘Love’s Immortality’ – ‘how shall I know if my love lose his youth, / who never for a day hath left my sight? / He, who but yesterday was my delight. / I needs must love to-day if love be truth, / and if I love to-day, to-morrow’s light / against our love will e’en forbear to fight.’ In the preface Lomer gives his thanks to John Ellingham Brooks (1863-1929) who helped with the translations (did Lomer’s friend Captain Lionel Evelyn Oswald Charlton also help with the translation?) and to John William Mackail (1859-1945) for permission to use the titles from Mackail’s book ‘Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology’ (1890), in fact, one wonders just how much of the volume is Lomer’s actual translation. There is a melancholy innocence which runs through the verse – ‘our childish lips did taste / of pleasant kisses, culled by friendship chaste’ (‘Envious Time’) and again, in ‘Antiochus’ from Meleager – ‘on his tender lips did sate / Desire, and parching thirst abate.’ Two years prior to its publication, in 1912, Lomer was involved in a minor scandal when a nineteen year old bandsman from his regiment, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, named Robert Buchanan, apparently shot himself on Lomer’s bed at Lomer’s home in Chesterfield (it is a fascinating tale, see my article ‘The Dead Soldier’); perhaps Lomer was thinking of Buchanan when he writes in the beginning of the volume, a ‘silent dedication’ – ‘To…’ which ends: ‘here in this book I will not write thy name, / for this sad world shall never know the might / of our grand love; so let it hidden stay, / graved in my heart; and though men deem it shame / that thou and I should love, the very sight / of thy dear face shall charm their scorn away.’ I do believe Lomer knew more about the suicide than he gave in his evidence and carried that guilt until his own passing in 1926 – ‘this line I’ll place upon the tomb above, / ‘Stranger, behold the murd’rous guilt of Love’.’ (‘The Guilt of Love’). A fine volume of verse indeed.

 Edward Perry Warren: The Biography of a Connoisseur – by Osbert Burdett and E. H. Goddard.

Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928), the eccentric Boston born American art collector and author on uranian themes, began writing his autobiography towards the end of his life and got no further than the first three chapters in this book published in 1941 which recalls his schooldays, his time at Harvard (1879, BA 1883) and his exploits at New College, Oxford University, of which we are on familiar ground; Warren as a young boy was obsessed with religion and various aspects of religious ceremony, in search of spiritual meaning in his life and a way of accepting his own homosexual desires; drawn to poetry, especially that of Shelley, he would do anything rather than enter his father’s paper mill business and young Warren, viewed as ‘different’ by his parents and siblings, was mostly left to pursue his own course. The three chapters are well written and one can’t help wanting more of the same; Warren’s literary editor, Osbert Burdett (1885-1936) continues the story of his curious life, looking at Warren’s, or ‘Ned’ as he liked to be called, collecting mania, his travels through Italy and Greece and his association with his friend and lover, John Marshall (1860-1928) who became Warren’s secretary in 1889 (Marshall intended to go into the Church until he met Warren at Oxford in 1884, in fact, Warren, an immensely wealthy young man, wooed Marshall through his correspondence until the latter succumbed, much to the disappointment of his parents). And so the two men lived together at Lewes House, in Lewes, East Sussex, entertaining fellow scholars and antiquarians – later, Marshall married Warren’s cousin, Mary Bliss in May 1907 and an air of bitterness entered the relationship. The volume which stretches over 400 pages picks its way, almost tip-toeing, through Warren’s written works: his poetry which he wrote under the name of Arthur Lyon Raile – ‘Itamos’ (1903) and ‘The Wild Rose’ (1913), the latter impressing the poet Robert Bridges, with whom Ned corresponded – ‘Eros, abides/ until / thou come redeemer momently from ill. / Then, seeing the fair / blossom of youth, though it were born to kill, / ‘tis his to dare.’ (‘The Lover’) and ‘sink back, my soul, in sleep, / that youthful dreams may echo round its close; / or deeper still, / even to the fountain of thy youthful dream.’ … ‘truth springs upward from his love alone…’ (Lad’s Love); the short story ‘The Prince who did not Exist’ (1900), ‘A Tale of Pausanian Love’ (written in Naples in 1887 and privately printed in 1927), ‘Alcmaeon, Hypermestra, Caeneus’ (1919) and his ‘Magnum Opus’ in three volumes – ‘The Defence of Uranian Love’ (1928-1930), that great ‘lonely monument of a lonely man’. ‘The Biography of a Connoisseur’ is a disordered, rambling and repetitive read – Burdett, who excelled himself with ‘The Beardsley Period’ in 1925, had the good decency to expire in 1936, leaving this volume unfinished (much as Warren had done in 1928, perhaps the curse was already in full swing when Burdett stepped from the arena!) and so the task of finishing the cumbersome biography with its seventeen chapters was left to Burdett’s assistant, Edgar Henry Goddard (1896-1983) who had no hope of making sense of it all, yet he completed it and probably gave a great sigh of relief! Yes it is sometimes difficult to read, mostly through Warren’s proviso that it be written without judgement or criticism, only statements of facts, which leaves the author little room for exploring ideas and opinions, but it shows a life lived through a passion for collecting. In fact, in conjunction with this book I read ‘Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren and the Lewes House Brotherhood’ by David Sox published in 1991, a full half-century from Burdett and Goddard’s soulless attempt and we finally have something worthy of Warren’s reputation! ‘The Biography of a Connoisseur’ gives us a curious glimpse through a dirty window upon the fascinating world of Edward Perry Warren and there is much to commend the volume, such as the extensive correspondence between Ned and Marshall (and Robert Bridges); ‘Bachelors of Art’ wipes clean that window and we can see clearly the strange collection of odd gentlemen that surround Ned and Marshall, two delightful bookends, and the obsession for antiques – I advise reading them both to get a better perspective of Warren!

 

The Weary Road: Recollections of a Subaltern of Infantry – by Charles Douie.

I have had this fascinating memoir on my reading list for over a year and it was truly worth the wait! Published in 1929 (I read the 1988 edition), there is a fine introduction by Major-General Sir Ernest Swinton KBE CB DSO RE who was suitably impressed when he read it in its original eight articles titled ‘Memories of 1914-1918’ published in ‘The Nineteenth Century and After’ (March-October 1928), edited by Carroll Romer. Charles Oswald Gaskell Douie (1896-1953) born in London, seems to have had a lonely childhood when he entered boarding school aged eight; he entered Rugby School in 1910 and gained a scholarship in History to Oxford but unfortunately his education is interrupted when war broke out and he left to join the army in August 1914. With his commission as temporary 2^nd Lieutenant, 7^th Battalion, the Dorset Regiment, he went to France in January 1916 and spent much of his time digging reserve lines on the Somme. The Weary Road with its ten chapters, begins with his military service and his excellent observations as to the character and conduct of the common soldier, the sense of duty and honour, the resolute stoicism and silent heroism; the eternal flame of brotherhood formed by battalions, powerfully written without the flowery sentimentality and jingoistic nonsense one finds in some volumes on the First World War. The daily plight of the soldier, the mud, the stuttering machine guns and bursting shells, the trenches, barbed wire and dug-outs, littered by the corpses of comrades are all distinctly recalled by Douie who has an excellent flare, one may even say a poetic perspective, for noticing the beauty of nature away from the trenches, the woods and rivers and the birdsong… in fact, it was his easy manner of description which drew me towards The Weary Road when I read the following passage as I stood in the little cemetery at Authuille: ‘One evening I stood there looking over the broad marshes of the Ancre and the great mass of Aveluy Wood beyond. There was a lull in the firing, and everything was still. The sun was setting; perhaps the majesty of Nature had stayed for one moment the hand of the Angel of Death. The river and marshes were a sea of gold, and the trees of the wood were tinged with fire. To the South were the square tower of Aveluy Church and the great trees surrounding the crucifix at the junction of the roads, known as Crucifix Corner. Shadows were lengthening in the woods and on the marshes. A cool evening breeze blew gently through the graves of our dead.’ (p. 142-3) The scene as I stood there was a little different but the Ancre, the woods, the quiet stillness around the graves was there; cows stood in the field beside the Ancre, woodpeckers and the scream of peacocks were on the air and bats flew in the twilight as I stood there and wept, not for the terrible waste of life, the sadness of which is intolerable, but for the remembrance of having endured the same horrors as Douie on the Somme in July 1916; of standing with ghosts at Crucifix Corner and seeing the Church at Albert with the ‘image of the Virgin and Child dependant at a miraculous angle from the tower.’ Douie is excellent when recounting his time on the Somme in the Ancre valley, La Boisselle and the Battle of Thiepval in the spring of 1916, he does not descend into romantic tales of individual bravery, although he does touch on a few personal stories of fellow soldiers who died in the line of duty, there is a sense of whatever the hardship, whatever the discomfort, physical and mental, there is a purpose to every action at the Front and to many, the exhilaration mixed with fear, and death, ever-present with every footfall meant life was lived in a state of nervous tension – War is a ghastly business but it needed to be done!  Douie was in Italy during the Armistice and wasn’t demobilised until the spring of 1919 to resume his education with a Worfield scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford; he entered the Civil Service on the Board of Education in 1927 (he was also educational advisor at Wormwood Scrubs Prison) before being invited to be Secretary of University College, London until 1938. In 1939 he joined the Ministry of Information; in fact, his post war career is presented in his second volume of autobiography, ‘Beyond the Sunset’ (1935). Tremendous!

Beyond the Sunset – by Charles Douie.

The second and final volume of autobiography by Charles Douie (1896-1953) published in 1935 concludes with his time following the Great War which he brought to life so vividly in his first volume ‘The Weary Road’ (1929). ‘Beyond the Sunset’, formed of eight chapters, shows Douie at a loss after his time as a soldier, seemingly unable to fit into the world of peace as one might imagine for a young man who entered the military straight from school; he accepts the Worfield Scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford in the spring term of 1919 – ‘at Oxford I did not work, but this was by arrangement with the dons’. (p. 24) He passes his Civil Services Examinations and enters the civil-service in London on the Board of Education and we hear about this committee meeting and that debate or about his time on the Board of such-and-such and although it is a comfortable read it is all rather dull compared to The Weary Road; there is very little romance or passion, in his previous volume or in this, in fact, he only stirs to anything resembling ecstasy when he is talking about the Russian ballet or the memorable mountains he has climbed – his chapter on mountaineering almost reaches peaks of greatness and there are flashes of his old brilliance as he scales the Lakeland fells, participating in rescue parties and he positively glows over his love of the Alps which he describes wonderfully. Strangely, Douie married Margaret Cuthbert in 1931, a fact he feels unimportant to mention, he’d much rather talk about his moments of insomnia, meeting Siegfried Sassoon and other well-known personages, his determination to bring libraries within the reach of the poor to improve education and his time during the General Strike, all have their time in the sun, but charming as the volume is, the sun has indeed set upon Mr. Douie and the best of him was left in the trenches of the Somme. Worth a rainy-day read!

Oscar Browning – by H. E. Wortham.

This delightful volume at over three-hundred pages by Hugh Evelyn Wortham (1884-1959) of King’s College, Cambridge (M.A. 1921) was published in 1927 and produced at the behest of his Uncle, the educationalist and historian, Oscar Browning (1837-1923) in June 1923. It is written in three parts: Eton (nine chapters), Cambridge (six chapters) and Old Age and Wortham does not shy away from the controversies which surrounded Oscar Browning’s, or the ‘O.B.’ as he came to be known, life; in fact, O.B. stipulated that ‘there are some things which can only be explained after my death and ought to be known’. (p. 2) But of course we get a biased representation of the great man for the dutiful nephew sweeps away the muck that naturally gathers around such worthy gentlemen of strange distinctions and somehow much of the material consulted, such as letters and other documents pertaining to O.B.’s Eton days has gone missing! There is no mention of the artist Simeon Solomon who disgraced himself in a public lavatory and only small mention of Wilde, but we do learn by way of compensation how O.B. excelled in Latin and Greek and at the end of his life had mastered forty languages, was spoilt by his mother and suffered frailty of body as a child, and how upon entering Eton in January 1851, approaching fourteen years old, he quickly came to dislike the school and became unpopular, suffering ill-health. His tutor was the great William Johnson (1823-1892) another controversial figure who published the influential volume of poetry ‘Ionica’ in 1858. Some of O.B.’s early passions at Eton are recounted, such as Lord Dunmore and F T E Prothero, but it was at Eton that his ‘persecution mania’ began. Following Eton he entered Cambridge but it is as an Eton Assistant Master and his principles of reform where the story takes an interesting turn; O.B. steadfastly called for the teaching of classics, Latin and Greek, to take priority over science and athleticism, the latter’s domination at the school was something which detested him. He seems to have got on well when the new Headmaster of Eton, an ‘Oxford man’ named Dr. James John Hornby (1826-1909) arrives in 1868 but they soon fell out over O.B.’s unconventional teaching style, particularly the teaching of history and preference for the classics; he was seen as a radical reformer, a liberal, and Hornby, a horrid little man with an equally squalid little mind, thinks O.B. is undisciplined and mistrusts him and even suggests O.B. encourages immorality amongst the boys – O.B. certainly did become intimate with his pupils, especially a boy named George Curzon (1859-1925), the son of Lord Scarsdale whom O.B. met in 1874 and delighted on taking his ‘favourites’ on vacations to Europe, to encourage their learning and develop their appreciation for art and culture. Because of this, O.B. had to agree with Hornby’s request not to see or speak to Curzon. The Halls within colleges reek of gossip and rumours and the correspondence between the two stubborn giants is fascinating until on 16^th September 1875 O.B. is dismissed by letter from Hornby. He appealed to the Governing Body but to no avail and he left at Christmas 1875. In September 1876 we find him at King’s College, Cambridge and O.B. has lost none of his fury for the vile and vulgar Hornby (whom by the way also dismissed William Johnson for similar supposed offences), yet he works tirelessly and establishes the DTC – Day Training College for teachers. The old persecution mania followed him wherever he went and he made friends and enemies alike as he swept through the colleges on the whirlwind of his fame, he seemed to know anyone who was anyone and doors would open for him. But doors in the college remained shut and he was thwarted several times on pursuing lectureships and professorships within academia which would have meant a substantial rise in fortunes, yet obstructions seemed to plague him. Regretfully, he retired from Cambridge in 1909 and later went to live in Rome with the idea of writing the great historical books he had intended in his youth and although he was prolific, the great works remained dreams and he was a disappointed man. He died in Rome on 6^th October 1923 and his ashes were sent to King’s College, Chapel. Religion was at the heart of the man (he flirted with Christian Science) and throughout all his life one cannot fail to appreciate what a generous and kind-hearted man he was, even to the detriment of himself; his interests were wide and so was his conversation; his faults were many, he was vain, egotistical and even snobbish but he was a great teacher who looked for the good in his students and encouraged the inner genius to blossom – a little peculiar, yes with a distaste for authority but a force to be reckoned with! Very good, but for a more accurate portrayal of O.B. read Ian Anstruther's 'Oscar Browning: A Biography' published in 1983, a book which really does put flesh back on old bones and summons the charm of a gentler, more innocent age!

Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge & Elsewhere – by Oscar Browning.

Oscar Browning, ‘Senior Fellow and some time History Tutor of King’s College, Cambridge and formerly Assistant Master at Eton College’, published these memoirs in 1910 when he could be regarded as quite harmless, being in his seventy-third year (he died thirteen years later in 1923) but the old O.B. had lost none of his steam! Through a blustering twenty chapters the great pedagogue relates the history of his long and interesting life amongst dons, politicians and literary figures and all the many adventures he has undertaken, in fact, the volume is more a sort of travel book interspersed with moments of teaching for the old dear certainly gets around! We read about the famous men and women he has known such as Walter Pater, George Eliot, Tennyson and Robert Browning and he even mentions briefly those who possess similar beliefs as himself such as Simeon Solomon, Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds and Horatio Brown of whom more should be written, although they are left to stand for themselves and he does not go into questions of morality too deeply. And so comes the great battle with the new Headmaster of Eton, Dr. Hornby, a deplorable figure who encourages athleticism and manliness and accuses Browning of impropriety and familiarity with the boys, thus encouraging immoral behaviour, although not in so many words, he seems to dance around the real accusations and leaves Browning perplexed as to why he is being dismissed or perhaps he is just pleading ignorance, either way, Browning casually tip-toes past the great climax of his end at Eton and leaves some of the angry bile found in his correspondence to spill out in Wortham’s later biography of 1927. But through all of the volume Browning’s love of teaching and his notions of reform and improvement are firmly fixed; his passion for music and his strong bond of friendship show a man determined to make his mark upon the world and he certainly did! Very enjoyable!

 

My Life and Adventures – by Earl Russell.

The author, John Francis Stanley Russell (1865-1931), the 2^nd Earl Russell and elder brother of the philosopher, Bertrand Russell, published this volume of autobiography in 1923 when he could look back over his mostly misspent and privileged life with some sense that it hadn’t all been a failure and he writes at great length over thirty-six, mostly inconsequential chapters to prove it. I usually warm to an author in the midst of their autobiography but not the Earl and after the interesting flourish of his school days at Cheam School (1877) and his time at Winchester (1870) his tale becomes a weary one. One of his only redeeming features was his friendship with the poet Lionel Johnson (1867-1902) whom he met at Winchester and continued a furious correspondence with. Russell entered Balliol College, Oxford in October 1883 to study classics under the great Jowett, a man who later famously accused Russell of writing a scandalous letter in May 1885 and when asked by Russell to produce the letter Jowett refused until the debacle escalated to the point of Russell leaving Oxford there and then in May; the ‘scandal’ and suggestion of impropriety seems to dog Russell for the remainder of his life while he continued to deny such abominable behaviour, but he sums his early mishaps quite admirably as – ‘Birched by a Bishop, sent down by the great Jowett, and prayed over by the Lord Chancellor; my experiences were accumulating.’ (p. 111) His wealth carries him to the United States where he displays a typical aristocratic arrogance and then in 1890 he is hooked by a woman named Mabel Edith Scott who along with her viciously evil-minded mother ensnare the Earl into marriage, a marriage which lasts three months; after much mud-slinging and accusations – Mabel even throws sodomy into the pot to cook the Earl with in court but it all turns out in the Earl’s favour, yet there is a certain stink of wickedness which seems to follow the Earl for where there is smoke… In 1900 the Earl puts his neck in the noose a second time and marries Marion Somerville, known as Mollie, in Nevada and in England they make a home and fuss over their cats and dogs until the Earl is arrested for bigamy in 1901 and sent to Holloway prison for three months! He pleads ignorance of the law knowing he is still married to Mabel, the Countess Russell – they eventually divorced and he and Mollie also eventually divorce in 1915; it seems marriage is not agreeable to the Earl who attempts the suicidal act one more time with third wife, Elizabeth, an author, in 1916 – he does not mention her in the volume as they separated in 1919 and she took liberties in using the Earl as a character in one of her trifling books. All in all it has been a disastrously eventful life messing about with motor cars, marriages and throwing money around as if it meant nothing; the only interesting thing he did was to publish ‘Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson’ anonymously in 1919 – not very wicked, just very silly!

Old and Odd Memories – by Lionel A. Tollemache.

London born Lionel Arthur Tollemache (1838-1919), a seemingly shadowy erudite figure in literary circles who was educated at Harrow (1850-56) and Balliol College, Oxford (1856-60) published this very interesting volume of nine chapters worth of recollections, anecdotes and quotations in 1908 and there are some rather curious but pleasant sketches of such people of his acquaintance as the great Dr. Vaughan at Harrow who taught Tollemache Latin and Greek; Gladstone, Benjamin Jowett, Herbert Spencer, Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes) and the ‘peculiar and paradoxical’ Rev. C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll); he also puffs-up his own historical importance (his ego strides over every page) and we get chapter and verse on the Tollemache family history. Tollemache, an advocate of euthanasia who suffered from weak eyesight, eventually going blind some years before his death, recounts a wealth of intimate and personal anecdotes and conversations of enormous importance to literary history although many of his attempts at humour seem to fall flat or just do not translate to the present at all for they are very dry and hardly worth a titter even from the most ardent of titterers! He has little to say about his wife, the daughter of Lord Egerton, Beatrix Lucia Catherine Egerton, a fair poet herself (see her ‘Engleberry and Other Verse’ of 1890) whom he married in 1870; she co-authored Tollemache’s ‘Safe Studies’ (1884), a series of articles on such themes as: historical prediction, longevity, literary egotism and physical and moral courage which are really worth reading – for her part she supplied 28 of her poems for the volume. Tollemache rambles on again much in the vein of Old and Odd Memories in his ‘Nuts and Chestnuts’ (1911) which is a ‘second course’ to the earlier volume where we find the likes of Tennyson, Dr. Johnson and Ruskin among others being discussed; in fact, I had such a strange and mesmerising pleasure, almost like being half-asleep, in reading the volumes mentioned above, that I just had to continue the soporific splendour by reading his collection of essays ‘Stones of Stumbling’ (1893) where we find him pontificating on the delights of euthanasia, in the ‘Cure for Incurables’ with its ‘legalised suicide by proxy’ and ‘The Fear of Death’ – ‘is the fear of death less or greater in modern than in ancient times?’ he asks, before Tollemache leads us into biblical criticism with the ‘Divine Economy of Truth’ and ‘Neochristianity and Neocatholicism’. Other books by Tollemache which I shall not descend into include: ‘Recollections of Pattison’ (1885), ‘Mr. Romane’s Catechism’ (1887), ‘Benjamin Jowett: Master of Balliol’ (1895), ‘Essays, Mock-Essays and Character Sketches’ (1898) and ‘Talks with Mr. Gladstone’ (1903) – yes, Tollemache flaunts his intelligence and may be weak of eyesight but certainly is not myopic in his vision for he has much to say and sometimes says too damn much but he has a quality all of his own, making the dry and dull almost fatally racy, if one’s imagination will permit such liberties in stuffy old Victorian England, but not quite!

 

Olivia – by Dorothy Bussy.

This charming tale of a young girl’s passionate infatuation with her headmistress is based on autobiographical fact for the author, Dorothy Bussy born Strachey (1865-1960), sister of the more famous biographer and essayist of the Bloomsbury Group, Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), who married Simon Bussy, a French painter in 1903, recounts a year at a finishing school, Les Avons, in France as a sixteen year old girl; this flower of English restrained sexuality bursting from its young bud, Olivia, is awakening to her own romantic inclinations for Mlle. Julie, one of two headmistresses, the other being the tiresome invalid, Mlle. Cara, at the boarding school for thirty girls. This is the bisexual Bussy’s only novel, written in the 1930’s but not published until 1949, and the school is based on her own time and experiences at Les Ruches in Fontainbleau; the two headmistresses, Julie and Cara are based respectively on Mlle. Marie Souvestre (1830-1905) and her lover and fellow founder of the school, Mlle. Caroline Dussaut (1833-1887); like Marie and Caroline, Julie and Cara’s affections for each other become cold and there is a great falling out between them through jealousy and much hurt in the relationship; Cara suffers from real or hypochondriacally imagined headaches and eventually dies from an overdose of chloral. The tale relates quite accurately real events and Dussaut probably died in similar circumstances in 1887. There are a few tender moments and of course the inevitable sad parting where Julie acts coldly towards Olivia, following Mlle. Cara’s death, handing her a paper cutter as a parting gift which Olivia hurls from a window, but no real surprises, yet the story is quite delightful and pleasurable to read. Beautiful!

Memoirs of Life and Literature – by W. H. Mallock.

Socialist, economist and novelist, William Hurrell Mallock (1849-1923) published these splendid memoirs in 1920 when he was on the threshold of death, almost, and he delights in his remarks concerning his life in Torquay, his private tutor (and friend of Tennyson) Rev. W. B. Philpot, his days at Balliol College, Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize in 1872 and his thoughts on liberalism; his association with Benjamin Jowett and Lord Wentworth, the grandson of Byron and Wentworth’s brother-in-law, the poet, Wilfred Blunt (1840-1922); Mallock also mentions other regular literary scoundrels of his time that he came to know in some capacity – Swinburne, Browning, Ruskin and Carlyle, a man who ‘blew his nose in a pair of old woollen gloves’ (p. 49); Aubrey de Vere, the Irish Catholic poet, Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes), a man who ‘as Drydon said to Shadwell, would have been the wittiest writer in the world if his books had been equal to his conversation’ (p. 44) and Lord Lytton, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), the novelist and his poet son, Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton (1831-1891) who wrote under the name of ‘Owen Meredith’. Of course he has much to say upon his own works: ‘The New Republic’ (1877), ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ (1879), ‘A Romance of the Nineteenth Century’ 1881), ‘The Old Order Changes’ in three volumes (1886), ‘The Veil of the Temple’ (1904) and ‘The Reconstruction of Belief’ (1905) and says it rather well before the latter half of the volume descends into endless nonsense about London and its Society and his time spent at various grand country houses and castles, his support for Roman Catholicism and anti-socialist notions. All in all the volume promised the beginning of a beautiful friendship but ended rather tiresomely.

 

The Poetical Works of Lord Houghton (in Two Volumes).

Lord Houghton, the much referenced and quoted, Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-1885), of Trinity College, Cambridge and Fellow of the Royal Society, is known for several distinguished facts, such as his friendships with Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Swinburne and Thackery and that he was refused by Florence Nightingale and was the owner of an extensive library of erotica which had a fine collection of de Sade; he was a great talker and wit and wrote poetry as these ‘Poetical Works’ attempt to prove! These volumes contain works from his previous collections: ‘Poems of Many Years’, privately issued in 1838 and published in 1840, ‘Poetry for the People and Other Poems’ (1840) and ‘Palm Leaves’ (1844); many of his earlier works are typically sentimental and introspective and others show his wide travels on the continent where he took up residence, particularly Greece where he is able to flaunt his knowledge of the classics with verse on Ullysses, Olympus, Corinth, a vision of the Argonauts and Sappho, who laid her hand ‘lightly on low chords, - / a voice that sobbed between its words.’ (‘A Dream of Sappho’) and there are his meditation fragments on Venice. I thought little of his ‘Palm Leaves’ with their Arabian legends – Nimrod, Abraham, Moses and Solomon, which I thought rather dull and he tops it off with his overly long ‘The Burden of Egypt’ before an attempt at rectifying this with his occasional poems and his ‘Funeral of Napoleon’, but sadly all too late! Volume II continues in the usual strain with poems of sentiment and reflection and thoughts on friendship and love and a final attempt at the right to wear the laurel leafs of a distinguished poet with his sonnets, songs, narrative poems and legends – oh let him wear them, for he is dead and can sing no more! He had the foresight to rightly declare in his preface (p. xi) that he came to the realisation, like all decent poets inevitably do, that one is only ‘one among many, and that his gift, small or great, is not the especial miracle he may justly at first believe it to be.’ If one throws a stone one will surely hit a poet, whether they declare themselves to be or not and the mystique, like certain notions of romance, died a long time ago, alas. Houghton is probably more widely known and praised for his ‘Life and Letters of Keats’ (1848) rather than his poetry but it would be a pity to dismiss him completely as his verse is all perfectly delightful and all perfectly forgetful!

 

Bosie: Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends and Enemies – by Rupert Croft-Cooke.

The author, Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-1979) was on friendly terms with Bosie for the last 25 years of the poet’s life, having met him at the age of nineteen in 1922 when Bosie had already been through pretty much the worst that can be thrown at any man, condemned as the cause of Wilde’s downfall and for not suffering the same ruination in prison. This book, published in 1963, attempts to set the record straight concerning Bosie and the long-held belief that he betrayed Wilde and turned against Robert Ross with all the Douglas venom which his father, that old bore and bigot, the Marquess of Queensberry, poured upon Wilde. Croft-Cooke, a sympathetic, intelligent and passionate man on the subject, tells us how Bosie, a ‘spoilt and pretty’ boy, whose parents divorced in 1887 due to his father’s adultery, left Winchester School aged eighteen  in 1888 to enter Magdalen College, Oxford in 1889 (he left in 1893 without a degree) and became friends with his cousin, the poet, Lionel Johnson who had met Oscar Wilde in Oxford in early 1890 and how he, as if by fate, brought the great Irish wit, then aged 37 and Bosie, then aged 21, together one afternoon in 1891 at Wilde’s house on Tite Street; and so the chess pieces were in place for this tragedy to commence! Wilde’s position after Robert Ross seemingly led him astray into the underworld of male prostitution and ‘feasting with panthers’ seems a precarious one, invited to the great houses not on equal terms with his host, for he was not from what one would call ‘upper class stock’, had it not been for his success he would have been unworthy of such privileges and looked down upon, as it was he was little more than an amusing court jester, brought out for the sake of entertainment, and he played it to the hilt; but Wilde believed he was cut from a finer thread and had a right to such splendour. Meanwhile the pawns and other minor pieces play their moves: William More Adey (1858-1942), Reginald Turner (1869-1938) and Robert Baldwin Ross (1869-1918) and the old familiar play with its courtroom trial and imprisonment in 1895, and Wilde and Bosie together in Naples, comes to its final scene, when Wilde, exiled to France, dies on 30^th November 1900, ten months after the despised Queensberry died in January, and Bosie receiving the telegram on 1^st December to arrive in Paris the next day to find Oscar already nailed in his coffin. With this episode behind him, Bosie tries to live a normal life, or as normal a life an aristocrat with a great inheritance to waste can have, he buys a racecourse at Chantilly and falls in love with fellow poet, Olive Custance – they elope and marry in March 1902 and a son, Raymond is born the same year; he becomes editor of The Academy in 1907, befriending the assistant editor, Thomas William Hodgson Crosland (1865-1924) who leads him into the world of litigation which takes off two years later when he also ends his friendship with Ross, almost echoing the paranoid persecution mania of his father, the Marquess: ‘I no longer care to associate with persons like yourself who are engaged in the active performance and propaganda of every kind of wickedness, from Socialism to Sodomy.’ (p. 225) Ross still had Wilde’s prison letter, ‘De Profundis’ up his sleeve, originally intended for Bosie, Wilde simply didn’t know what to do with it after he left prison in 1897 and seemingly forgot all about it, but Ross never forgot and kept it safe, along with certain letters of the Wilde and Bosie correspondence he stole after Wilde’s death. In 1910 Bosie sells The Academy which goes downhill and disappears and the following year he becomes a Roman Catholic. But that terrible year of 1913 where his troubles escalated, a year in which he separated from his wife, Olive and was made bankrupt in January and criminal proceedings (libel action) against Bosie by his father-in-law began; the Arthur Ransome libel in which Ransome with permission from Ross quoted from Wilde’s prison letter (the unpublished portions from De Profundis) in his book ‘Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study’ (1913), blaming Bosie for his downfall – Bosie also read the unpublished parts of De Profundis and Wilde’s accusations really hurt him deeply. There is also the Chancery case in which his father-in-law, Colonel Custance who had no male heir and not pleased with the way his grandchild was being brought up, began an action for a ward of custody of Raymond for a substantial allowance to Olive which rankled with Bosie – from all this, the Ransome case which Bosie lost, the one conclusion Bosie drew from this is that Ross is to blame for everything and he is Bosie’s obsession: ‘enemy number one’ as Wilde was his father’s! Bosie hits back with ‘Oscar Wilde and Myself’ in 1914, an awful piece of blasphemous egg-throwing and a terrible attack on Wilde and Ross written by Crosland and approved by Bosie; it is one of the explosive factors which determines most peoples’ attitude towards Bosie as a vindictive and shameless liar with the same persecution mania his father suffered; it would begin several decades of mud-slinging and introduced many other figures to the arena, such as the ‘unstable and disloyal but clever’ (p. 255) bibliophile, bookseller and private secretary of Ross, Christopher Sclater Millard (1872-1927) who published anonymously ‘Oscar Wilde Three Times Tried’ in 1911 and a ‘Bibliography of Oscar Wilde’ in 1914 (Croft-Cooke also knew him towards the end of his life); William Sorley Brown, Herbert Moore Pim (1883-1950), John Betjeman, who wrote to Bosie in 1924 while still a boy at Marlborough (unfortunately the letters were destroyed by John’s parents). The libel cases continued – Bosie and Crosland found a boy named Charles Garratt in prison willing to testify against Ross on acts of indecency and Colonel Custance also brought another action against Bosie – Bosie fled to France and Crosland was arrested and charged with accusing Ross of committing sexual acts with the boy Garratt but in court Garratt said he had never seen Ross. War breaks out and Bosie returns to England to face the charge by Custance (and unknown to him, Ross too, for ‘falsely and maliciously publishing a defamatory libel on and about Robert Ross’) and he is met by a detective and arrested at Folkestone. He is remanded in Brixton Prison for five days and bound over for one night in Wormwood Scrubs which he hates; in November 1914 the trial between Bosie and Ross begins and Bosie wins settling for costs paid by Ross – it brought Ross to his knees and his health broke down, eventually dying four years later in 1918. Bosie spends the remaining years arguing over Shakespeare’s sonnets, attacking modern poetry and pouring venom on T. S. Eliot whom he hated; meeting young disciples of poetry and curious admirers of the Wilde scandal to whom Bosie behaved as the perfect gentleman, and even being found guilty of libelling Winston Churchill in 1923 over Churchill’s part in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. His mother died in 1935 aged ninety-one and Bosie was devastated, the loss seemed to heal his soul of much of the anger from the past and there are attempts at reconciliations. In 1944 he published ‘Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up’ in which he attempts to re-write the truth about himself and Oscar, for many it is too little too late, but he does take his share of some portion of the blame. Friends stayed by him such as George Bernard Shaw and Marie Stopes (1880-1958) who petitioned for a Civil List pension for Bosie, which he did not win. Olive died in 1944 and Raymond had spent many years in a mental institution, eventually dying in 1964. Bosie died with some serenity at 4 a.m. on 20^th March 1945 and was buried three days later at the Franciscan Friary, Crawley in Sussex next to his mother. The author, Croft-Cooke who went on to write the excellent ‘Feasting with Panthers’ (1967) has produced a marvellous account of Bosie, his friends and his enemies, and initiated a re-assessment of the poet and love of Wilde’s life who only really wanted to see fair play done!

 

A Message in Code: The Diary of Richard Rumbold, 1932-60 – edited by William Plomer.

William Plomer (1903-1973), a fine poet and novelist, published these selections from Rumbold’s diary in 1964 and it is presented in six parts: Oxford and After (1932-39), The War Years (1939-45), Hunting for the Key (1945-54), Living in Ceylon (1954-56), The Unanswerable Question (1956) and The Last Years (1956-61). Plomer edits the diary of his friend and second cousin, Richard William John Nugent Rumbold (1913-1961) with great care and attention and writes a splendidly sensitive introduction on the young writer, whose first novel, ‘Little Victims’ in 1933 caused a scandal. It was written while Rumbold was up at Christ Church, Oxford and with all the tell-tale signs of a first undergraduate publication; it received unfavourable reviews and did a lot of harm to his reputation. Rumbold was brought up in the Catholic faith and tragedy struck the family early on when his mother, Anne Christian Rumbold, nee Nugent, committed suicide by throwing herself into the Seine River in 1928 and young Richard was left to his detested, bullying and abusive father, Captain Charles Edmund Arden Law Rumbold. The diary begins in July 1932, just after his 19^th birthday and we learn of his literary ambitions and friendships with such notable authors as Lord Alfred Douglas and Harold Nicholson, the latter becoming a firm friend as well as his relative, William Plomer. Rumbold, a depressive and effeminate man seems always to be searching for something, for his own identity, for fame and literary success, afraid of failure and afraid of inheriting his mother’s madness; he travels widely in his efforts of self-discovery (and perhaps to escape his inner torments), to Russia, Turkey, Greece, Switzerland, East Africa and the United States; it is while travelling to the latter that he meets a woman who becomes his devoted friend – Hilda Young. At the outbreak of war Richard joins the Royal Army Service Corps but in March 1940 he is discharged as physically unfit on account of his tuberculosis; he joins the RAF the same year as a pilot and the thrill and freedom of flying gives him almost a religious ecstasy, and the bond of friendship in the barracks is something he has been searching for but again he is discharged in March 1943 as unfit on medical grounds. Exasperated by feelings of eternal loneliness, a feeling which sometimes descends into suicidal thoughts, he seeks psychiatric help from a psychoanalyst named Denis Carroll (1901-1956), a Trinity College, Cambridge man with whom he forms a great attachment and the diary becomes a method of therapy for him – ‘I want to make life mathematical, to exclude emotions. Every problem should be regarded as a sum’. (20^th September 1942. p. 62) Despite Rumbold’s neurosis and insecurity, he has a deep altruistic desire to help other people and worthy causes and one gets a sense of his ‘separateness’ from the world around him and the need to belong. The picture drawn from the diary entries are those of a very distracted and unsettled young man who is in search of spirituality – he becomes interested in Buddhism and travels to Ceylon, Japan and India in the 1950’s; an operation on his lungs in 1957 and a spell at a sanatorium gave him some hope until he suffered a breakdown – news of the death of Denis Carroll in 1956 and the death of his sister Rosemary by suicide in 1957 did little to help him and so with Hilda off he goes to Greece and Tangier where he experimented with hashish and we learn that he had also undergone electric convulsive treatment for his psychosis back in England and it is not surprising to read that this deeply troubled man who followed up his first book, sixteen years later in 1949 with his autobiography, ‘My Father’s Son’ under the pseudonym, Richard Lumford, and in 1953, published with Lady Margaret Stewart, ‘The Winged Life: A Portrait of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Poet and Airman’, that he tragically, either by suicide or accidentally, fell from his hotel window in March 1961 and was killed instantly at the age of 47. His restless spirit which could not find contentment or fulfil the promise of his art has now found the calm and serenity he deserves and may the little literary work he has left us bring enjoyment and a sense of the importance of life!

Life For Life’s Sake: A Book of Reminiscences – by Richard Aldington.

The poet, biographer and essayist, Richard Aldington (1892-1962) published this volume of reminiscences in 1940 and to anyone unfamiliar with the Imagist Movement which revolted against Romanticism and Victorian sentimentalism, he will be little known and after reading this book the reader will remain sadly, still quite perplexed and unenlightened. He was born in Portsmouth and almost dismisses his childhood, saying little of his parents and not mentioning his siblings; he studied at Dover College before entering the University of London and leaving to become, shamefully, a ‘sport’s journalist’, redeeming himself in writing reviews of French literature. We learn that he greatly admires Swinburne – unfortunately Swinburne without alcohol to fire his poetic inspiration was like Wilde without some young rough boy to entertain and amuse: dull and creatively impotent. Aldington enters the literary circle of Ezra Pound (yawn), and W. B. Yeats and becomes a great friend and champion of T. S. Eliot, so for literary-minded readers it has some fascinating glimpses of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Herbert Read, Norman Douglas in Florence, Harold Monro, of whom he paints a priceless picture of him drunk and hugging trees, and Reggie Turner, a ‘wrinkled ugly little man, with the habit of batting his eyelids like an owl.’ (p. 377) Aldington married the poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), better known as H.D. in 1913 (they divorced in 1938) and after a while the romance becomes stale (no doubt due to the loss of their stillborn child in 1915, which he does not mention); he joined the army in 1916 and went to the Front in December that year and some of his accounts of narrow escapes are quite interesting if to be believed and details of his mental fatigues after he was demobbed in early 1919 seem all to common  – he suffered a breakdown several years later, (his first novel, ‘Death of a Hero’ of 1929 is based on some of his war experiences). Apart from the few humorous reflections and literary observations, Life for Life’s Sake is quite an unrewarding read; the book ends with Aldington saying that he ‘can say truthfully that during approximately half a century of infesting this planet I have very seldom indeed been bored; and that is as good as any other definition of success in life’ (p. 411) and if the reader can say the same after reading this book then there is a good reason for living life, for life’s sake. A pleasant meander through literary byways!

 

The Death of the Scharnhorst and Other Poems – by Arch Alfred McKillen.

I had never heard of Arch Alfred McKillen (1914-1984) which is not surprising as there is very little information to be found on him, although we do know that he enlisted in the United States Navy in 1939 and was at Pearl Harbour during the Japanese attack in 1941 and that after the war he became a bookseller and published a book titled ‘Lady Windermere’s Man’ in 1983. This volume of poetry published in 1952 contains 62 poems which delight in the melancholy wonder of love, a love for his own sex where letters which say too much and are ‘boldly written’ can be passed off as the ‘careless informality of friends’ (Of This Great Voiceless Love) or an infatuation to fulfil one’s desires upon the Greek gods of old – ‘Beautiful pagan, possess me! / over thy body my fingers I race. / Hot on thy cheeks are my kisses, / naked with thee in a lovers’ embrace’ (Apollo); a desire for union and acceptance at any cost – ‘Hold me, and kiss me and teach me to sin!’ (Lonely Heart). But there is always the heartbreak and the pain which causes McKillen to give the advice to ‘beware of love! Be lonely, lad’ (Too Much of Life); that ‘lad’ echoes throughout some of the verse and harks back to Housman’s Shropshire Lad poems and much of McKillen’s work is in the ballad form – ‘spin onward, old world, to your ending. / The hearts that you break and condemn / will someday rise madly against you, / reversing your judgement of them’ (The Old Sea Wall). In contrast to love there is also the horrors of war where we feel the surprise and shock of the attack on Pear Harbour – ‘Harbour surprised, / torpedo and shell / tear through the living, / Harbour of Hell!’ (The Litany of Pearl Harbour) and the title poem, ‘The Death of the Scharnhorst’, where we learn that ‘on Christmas Day in forty-three / the Nazi Scharnhorst put to sea’ or the landscape of death where the ‘fields of wheat are rotten / where a thousand heroes fell’ (The Road to High Wood). The tone of the volume is sadness, the sadness for the loss of love, its fatalistic emptiness and un-enduring attraction when ‘someday you should look in mine’ (the face of the poet) ‘then ever look away’ (Nocturne) and the sadness for those lost in war, an almost pagan loneliness shaped by the elements – ‘it rains tonight and wolf-winds howl’ (It Rains Tonight).

 

Shakespeare and Company – by Sylvia Beach.

Shakespeare and Company published in 1956 (I read a 1959 edition) is a magical journey along the evolution of the famous bookstore in Paris which opened in November 1919 by its American owner, Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) and the many literary-minded men and women who haunted its shelves. Beach first had the idea of opening a French bookstore in America but due to the high rental costs, her friend and fellow bookseller (and eventual lover who committed suicide) Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955) suggested she open a bookstore in Paris selling American books and so Shakespeare and Company was born. Famous writers soon flocked to the store such as Andre Gide, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and of course James Joyce whom Beach took on as her literary client, supporting him financially and publishing his ‘Ullyses’ in 1922 and his ‘Pomes Penyeach’ in 1927; (G. B. Shaw refused to subscribe for a copy of Ullyses) and we learn about Joyce’s bad eyesight and his strange fears and superstitions – he was terrified of dogs and afraid of the sea, heights and infection to name a few; more interesting are the tales of how copies of ‘Ullyses’ had to be  smuggled into the U.S. from Canada aided by Ernest Hemingway, who was undoubtedly Shakespeare and Company’s ‘best customer’. In fact, Beach was so busy with Joyce that she had to turn down many other publishing works including Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and Aleister Crowley’s memoirs; she paints a rather unflattering portrait of the Great Beast – ‘His clay coloured head was bald except for a single strand of black hair stretching from his forehead over the top of his head and down to the nape of his neck. The strand seemed glued to the skin so that it was not likely to blow up in the wind. A self-mummified-looking man, he was rather repulsive.’ (p. 94) Other memorable names include the composer, George Antheil, poet, Robert McAlmon and his wife Bryher, the daughter of Sir John Ellerman; Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, artist and poet, Marsden Hartley and poets Mina Loy, Leon-Paul Fargue and Paul Valery. The volume is a fascinating glimpse into the literary world of the nineteen-twenties, through the thirties’ depression and the war when the Nazi’s attempted to confiscate the books (they were hidden beforehand and the name of the bookstore painted over) and to Sylvia’s six months in an internment camp whereupon after her release she went into hiding right up to the liberation. Shakespeare and Company with its 23 chapters and 230 pages was an absolute joy to read and it is a testament to Sylvia’s determination and strength to continue, even in the face of adversity, proving herself and her bookstore to be an essential part of the literary world! There are also quite a few superb photographs to illustrate the text and aid one’s immersion into this absolutely fabulously written account of a simple bookstore which became a legend to all bibliophiles! 

A Roving Recluse: More Memoirs – by Peter F. Anson.

This volume of reminiscences by the writer of religious and maritime subjects, Peter Frederick Anson (he was born Frederick Charles Anson, 1889-1975) was published in 1946 as a companion to his first volume of memoirs, ‘Harbour Head’ in 1944. The eleven chapters of ‘A Roving Recluse’ are enthusiastically written and written well, concerning Anson’s childhood in which he made model theatres and collected theatre programmes, always with that deep interest of the sea to which he yearned; the theatre interest became a passion for architecture. He attended Little Appley prep school in Ryde as a day-boarder from 1898-1902 and then Wixenford School from 1902-04 where he excelled in music and drawing. Suffering from Influenza and rheumatic fever in 1904, he was expected to go to Eton or Harrow but never went to public school and it is from the age of sixteen that his interest in religion really began to take hold, especially the mode of ritual – ‘the external presentation of religion, that is, worship rather than a system of morals.’ (p. 12) Sceptical and logical, Anson spent nine months at Eyke Rectory in Suffolk, where he became curious about the Catholic Church and in 1906 he was staying with his grandmother in Windsor, (he was living in Bournemouth from 1905-08) preparing for Confirmation by the Rev. J. C. Ellison, the vicar of the Anglican parish church. With his mind ever on ecclesiastical matters, he became aware of Anglo-Catholicism – ‘the lure of incense, more than of vestments, drew me to other churches in the country’ (p. 30) and thus the dilemma within him began – ‘even at nineteen I began to suffer from “Roman Fever”’ (p. 32) and his interest began to alight upon the idea of monasticism and a life of contemplation – ‘I fitted up an oratory in a cupboard in the eaves of my bedroom, and furnished it with a crucifix and candlesticks’ (p. 36). In fact, one gets a sense of the erotic concerning his interest in the ecclesiastical accoutrements of Catholicism. He had a brief flirtation interest in Theosophy and Annie Besant and devoured books by Blake, Poe, Pater and Wilde before his name was entered for the entrance examination for Christ’s Church, Oxford – he failed the exams and thus never entered the hallowed halls of Oxford, destroying his notions of a diplomatic career; instead, he decided to study architecture and spent two years at the Architecture School in Westminster which he enjoyed immensely. Still with the lure of the monastic, he spent two weeks of the Easter vacation of 1910 at Caldey Island off the Welsh Pembrokeshire coast, a Benedictine monastery to test his vocation for life as an Anglican monk. Three months later he returned to become a novitiate. Along with Anson’s ‘sea fever’ (he had an overwhelming love for the sea and those who sailed upon it) was still the ever-present ‘Roman fever’ and so in 1913 he became a Roman Catholic. The remainder of the volume tells us about his journeys through Italy (Anson was an accomplished artist and spent three months on a painting tour in Tuscany in 1924) and the Franciscan monks in the monasteries he came to know (he joined the 3rd Order of Franciscans in 1922, taking the name ‘Peter’). We also learn something about the friends he made, mostly Catholic converts such as Canon John Gray, the poet and friend of Oscar Wilde who was ordained in 1901 whom Anson knew from 1919-34, and Gray’s lifelong friend, Andre Raffalovich who gave great parties in Edinburgh (p. 157-161); the author, Cecily Hallack (1898-1938), sculptors Eric Gill, whom Anson first met in 1917 and remained friends until Gill’s death in 1940, and Hew Lorimer (1907-93) and Scottish poet and novelist, George Scott-Moncrieff (1910-74), a nephew of the Proust translator, Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff (1889-1930). From 1936 Anson lived at Harbour Head in the north-east coast of Scotland where he could watch the sea and the boats being roughly tossed about, concluding that his life was ‘not unlike a long voyage on a choppy sea; my ship tossed about like a shuttlecock for many a long year.’ (p. 226) Anson has lived a full and interesting life but there is the sense that it has been a lonely life for there is no mention of love apart from the brotherhood born of the simple monastic life, which is a pity for the flower of any personality I would argue is the impulse towards sex and the spirit, the two channels which haunt us and I believe makes us quite remarkable, beyond that it is all teacups and roses; nevertheless, he writes awfully well and other books of his include: ‘Fishermen and Fishing Ways’ (1932), ‘The Quest of Solitude’ (1932), ‘The Benedictines of Caldey’ (1940), ‘Churches, their Plan and Furnishings’ (1948), ‘The Call of the Cloisters’ (1956), ‘Fashions in Church Furnishings, 1840-1940’ (1960) and ‘Bishops at Large’ (1964).

Ruling Passions, the Autobiography of Tom Driberg.

Ruling Passions, published posthumously in 1977 (I read a 1978 edition) is a very honest and frank account of the life of Thomas Edward Neil Driberg (1905-1976), a man ‘born out of due time’ in Crowborough, Sussex in 1905, shy and timid, he became an MP in 1942 and the volume centres mostly upon his sexuality – sex is the intrinsic compulsion of his life, the driving force behind everything he seems to do, his ruling passions. The sex seems to be all matter of fact, just another function like breathing, despite it being illegal at the time and one forms the opinion that he worships at the urinals like an altar in the church – he develops a ‘love-hate relationships with lavatories’ (p. 13). Apart from his various ‘lavatory sojourns’ (he seems to be an expert upon the locality of such temples to hurried love) we learn a little about his older brothers, Jack Herbert Driberg of Hertford College, Oxford who ate human flesh in Africa and had a pet lion, and James Douglas Driberg who studied medicine at London Hospital, won the M.C. as a surgeon in the First World War and went bankrupt, in fact, he describes his family members as being in one or other of the following camps – ‘insanity, religious eccentricity of various kinds, broken marriages, homosexuality, drug-addiction, and several cases of alcoholism’. (p. 43) Young Tom attended Lancing College from 1918-1923 where he became an acquaintance of Evelyn Waugh and suffered disgrace for his ‘nocturnal activities’ in his final year due to allegations against him by two boys who accused him of sexual overtures, he was set apart and lost his privileges and it was kept quiet so that his ‘delicate’ mother should not know; Tom does not miss the chance to mention that the Headmaster of Lancing College from 1909-1925, the Rev. Henry Thomas Bowlby (1864-1940) who became  Canon of Chichester, was once arrested and charged with molesting little girls on a train and managed to get off with his clerical collar unstained. Tom went up to Christ Church, Oxford in 1924 on a scholarship where he became friends with W. H. Auden; in his final year he did some writing for the Cherwell and he left without his degree in 1927. He became friends with Robert Graves and Laura Riding but angered them to near homicidal tendencies over a silly misunderstanding in addressing them, Robert accusing him of ignoring Laura which is all very puerile of Graves; more satisfying to know is the rumour that the Russian ballet dancer Nijinsky could perform ‘auto-fellatio’ thus furnishing ‘the body with as much potassium as the normal healthy male should need.’ (p. 67) After Oxford Tom became interested in the Communist Party and spent a week as a pavement artist, forming friendships with the Sitwells and attending lunch with the notorious Aleister Crowley at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in London under Crowley’s misplaced belief that Driberg was enormously rich and fulfilled the criteria to become the next ‘World Teacher’, Driberg declined but enjoyed many of Crowley’s famous curry dinners cooked by A.C. himself. In 1928 Tom began working as a reporter for the Daily Express and wrote the William Hickey column from 1933-1943 (the identity of William Hickey was anonymous yet it would come to his aid and rescue several times when dealing with the police when caught in a sticky situation shall we say). There is a funny account, no doubt it was not funny at the time, of Tom being charged with ‘indecent assault’ in November 1935 and appearing at the Old Bailey, accused by two Scotsmen who he gave a bed for the night (and not missing the opportunity to sleep between them on the excuse that he did not want them alone either upstairs or downstairs) – he was found not guilty. He was expelled from the Communist Party, spent time in America just before the Pearl Harbour attack and met Alfred Hitchcock, staying with him for several weeks in Hollywood. He won the Maldon by-election and was M.P. for Maldon from 1942-55 (and M.P. for Barking from 1959-74); he saw first-hand the atrocities at Buchenwald in 1945, met Guy Burgess in Moscow in 1956 and introduced him to a favourable lavatory where he could meet certain young men; in fact, Driberg definitely led an interesting and at often times amusing life for he is a very witty writer, especially on the subject of his sexual encounters – there seems to be an awful lot of semen being thrown about during the inter-war years, and most of it Driberg’s! Undoubtedly some spotty boy will write a thesis upon it one day. Yes, his life certainly was ruled by ‘deviant sex, exotic religion – and Left-wing politics’, as perhaps it should be!

Private Road – by Forrest Reid.

Having previously read Forrest Reid’s first two works: ‘The Kingdom of Twilight’ (1904) and ‘The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys’ (1905) and been spellbound by his writing, I wanted to know more about this fascinating Irish novelist and Private Road, Reid’s second volume of autobiography published in 1940 (his first ‘Apostate’ appeared in 1926) is a mesmerising journey into his life and passion for writing. Forrest Reid (1875-1947) was born in Belfast and became apprenticed to a Belfast tea-trade company before going up to Christ’s College, Cambridge to read medieval and modern languages from 1905-08. His first book was published in 1904 and he became friends with Padraic Colum, a disciple of Henry James and another friend of his at this time was William Brown Reynolds (1874-1925), a musician and inventor who had a scientific obsession to discover ‘perpetual motion’. Reid, a collector with an admiration for Socrates, felt things deeply, he had a ‘passion for humanizing things’ and lived in an almost twilight world of river-gods and tree-spirits, absorbed in pagan mythology – a ‘divine world existing beyond the flux of time and fate and change’ (p. 17). At Cambridge, where he says there seemed to be ‘an almost total absence of any genuine interest in literature, either early or contemporary’ (p. 54), he became intimate friends with Augustus Theodore Bartholomew (1882-1933) who became Librarian at Cambridge from 1900 until his death with whom he also shared a love of Henry James, and he became acquainted with Osbert Burdett and Rupert Brooke who were both at Kings, and Ronald Firbank of Trinity College, whom he saw quite often, the latter he describes as ‘feline and sophisticated’ who seemed ‘unreal’ (p. 55). Forrest was on the whole disappointed by Cambridge and even begrudged an afternoon wasted at Magdalene listening to A. C. Benson reading poetry, quite unmusically. He meets the Abbey Theatre players, Yeats and Synge and goes into great detail about his love of animals, especially the many cats and dogs he has had (even a marmoset monkey which had to go when the cat turned against it). Also amongst his friends were E. M. Forster, Walter de la Mare, whom he met in 1913, and the poet and dramatist, A.E. (George Russell, 1867-1935) with whom Reid discussed literary and spiritual matters, disagreeing with much of A.E.’s  views on literature, and on spirituality – Reid disregarded the older Irish writer’s advice to meditate, concentrating on symbols as in eastern mysticism, all Reid wanted to understand was the ‘voice of nature’, but A. E. did say he saw ‘beings who were not of this world’ (p. 132). I find Reid’s pagan, supernatural sensitivity to the ‘spirit of place’ similar in outlook to Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood who also have an atmosphere of dreaming and an occult mood about their work, in fact, Reid says he once saw the ghost of a small boy descending the stairs while in Eastbourne and followed him until he disappeared . He admired Anatole France and the poet Ralph Hodgson (1871-1925) but was not taken by Edward Thomas, who he didn’t like. Forrest Reid is such a sensitive writer that it would be foolish to ignore his works which include: ‘The Bracknells: A Family Chronicle’ (1911), ‘Following Darkness’ (1912), ‘At the Door of the Gate’ (1915), ‘Pender among the Residents’ (1922) and ‘Young Tom’ (1944). Excellent!

 

Following Darkness – by Forrest Reid.

In Forrest Reid’s fourth novel, ‘Following Darkness’ published in 1912, which the author dedicated to E. M. Forster, we are told in the opening lines that it is an unfinished autobiography of Mr. Peter Waring, an art critic who died in ‘tragic circumstances’ aged 36, on 10^th September 1911; the manuscript is in the possession of Peter’s friend, Mr. Owen Gill, who says that Peter’s death is a mystery, yet to him it is ‘perfectly clear that he was murdered’. He goes on to say that ‘it is evident that he had come under the influence of strange and disreputable persons, who professed to experiment in occult sciences – spiritualism, and even magic.’ But the heart of the novel is Peter’s boyhood and tender youthful steps towards love. Sixteen year old Peter Waring, the son of a National schoolmaster (his mother left his father when Peter was young and he does not remember her), struggles with the usual questionings and urges of adolescence, rejecting his father’s Christianity to become an agnostic. He spends much of his time at Derryaghy House in County Down, the home of his wealthy benefactor, Mrs. Carroll, and it is here that he meets brother and sister, Gerald and Katherine Dale, the former, a pianist and the latter he falls madly in love with. When Peter goes away to school he lives with his Aunt Margaret and Uncle George McAllister in Belfast above a shop with their children, Gordon, Thomas, George (with whom Peter is horrified he has to share a bedroom with) and ten year old Alice who is very affectionate towards Peter and puts a dead mouse in the soup (liking him enough to warn him of her childish crime so that he doesn’t have any!) At school Peter makes friends with Owen Gill, an intellectual son of a solicitor who introduces Peter to Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ (Owen and Peter write to Tolstoy and Owen keeps up a correspondence with him). Following an awkward party at the Gills’ residence Peter develops the idea of confession although he does not specify to what sins he has broken, presumably the usual boyhood abuse and misdemeanours – Peter’s father does not fully trust him and there is a distance between them which remains; and so with the idea of confession he writes to a priest, Mr. Henry Applin of St. Mary Magdalene and at the meeting at the priest’s home Peter could not say what was troubling him. Peter’s cousin George whom he shares a bedroom with shows Peter his fine collection of dirty postcards kept under the floorboards and behind Peter’s back reads his letters from Katherine (his Aunt Margaret also goes through his pockets searching for letters and evidence of corruption) – when George mentions Katherine they end up fighting and Peter giving him a bloody nose before Aunt Margaret attacks Peter and almost kills him with a blow to the head! Despite all this he does well in the school exams. When Peter’s best friend, Owen meets Katherine the two get on very well and Peter becomes jealous, thinking Katherine finds him more intellectually attractive – Peter is alone with Katherine in the woods and behaves ungentlemanly when he attempts to seduce her by kissing her; she is horrified and hits him. George’s dirty cards are found and George blames Peter; Uncle George writes to Peter’s father and the latter confronts Peter, accepting his innocence but at the same time also not trusting him. Owen is sympathetic towards Peter and Peter brings the matter of his ungentlemanly behaviour towards Katherine into the open. There is a nice scene where Peter goes to Derryghary House with the intention of confronting Katherine and apologising but he remains outside, looking in at them through the window, ‘like a ghost’ before slipping away. Another nice scene is where Peter is at the fun fair and meets the girl, Annie Breen who misunderstands his question about being kissed, referring to Katherine, and she thinks he means her and kisses him. On the carousel, Peter notices George and Katherine and hears his name called – he looks for them but loses them before later Katherine finds him and they make up and she tells him she loves him. Katherine’s mother arrives at Derryghary and she is not pleased with the relationship and takes Katherine away. Peter’s thoughts turn towards death and suicide – he decides to stay out all night lying on the cold, wet ground; he becomes ill and is diagnosed with acute pneumonia – his plans of entering Oxford are dashed as he has to go abroad for the climate and he tells Mrs. Carroll that his illness wasn’t accidental and she is quietly understanding and calls him her son for she is the mother he never had. This is a most unusual book for its time with some rather wonderful scenes, vividly visual and memorable which resonate with the reader who has been wounded by love and wandered forward with a broken heart into the darkness of life. Extraordinary!

 A Son of Belial – by Nitram Tradleg.

These ‘autobiographical sketches’ were published in 1882 by Nitram Tradleg, which backwards reveals the author’s name, Martin Geldart, who later became an Anglican priest. Norwich born Edmund Martin Geldart (1844-1885) will be familiar to admirers of the poet G. M. Hopkins as they were friends at Oxford and throughout these fourteen chapters Geldart relates, sometimes quite humorously, the various incidents and people he encountered during his short life. We discover in the first chapter, ‘A Happy English Child’ how Edmund enjoyed trapping frogs in flower pots before skewering them with a pointed stick until his older brother, William (1842-1858) came and cut them in half with his hatchet (p. 8); of their church and chapel existence and how they moved from Waterfield Terrace, Blackheath to Reigate in Surrey, a place he loved and called ‘home’ where they had a ‘doll’s cemetery in the garden’ and where he symbolically executed his Governess, Miss Atkinson, known as ‘mad Atky’ by beheading an effigy of her – apparently she witnessed it and took it in good spirits! At Reigate he attended an Independent chapel while harbouring a deep ‘fear of hell’ yet, ‘no love of God’ and ‘no sorrow for sin’ (p. 53). Edmund attended the Merchant Taylor’s School in London when he was eleven before leaving London for Manchester, or Altrincham to be precise, where he became a great enthusiast of bug hunting and Greek as opposed to Latin. He won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford in 1863 and there are some marvellous descriptions of life at Balliol, or Belial, as he insists on calling it and of his friends and masters alike, such as the great Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893), Professor of Greek and Master of Balliol, to whom he gives the name Professor Jewell – many of the stories of Jowett are familiar to those who have read wide on such subjects connected to Balliol and its scholars; there are also sketches of Canon Henry Parry Liddon (1829-1890), referred to as Canon Parry, and Vincent Stuckey Stratton Coles (1845-1929), given the name Vicentius Staccato, and of course Geldart’s ‘ritualistic friend’, Gerard Manley Hopkins known as Gerontius Manley – Hopkins rather unkindly described the ‘hagard hideousness’ of Geldart in a letter to his mother dated 22^nd April 1863 as having ‘grey goggle eyes’ a ‘shuddering gait or shuffle’ and a ‘pinched face’ and famously added that he ‘would not have had twenty Balliol scholarships to change places with him’, but despite this they became intimate friends (Hopkins spent time at Geldart’s family home in the summer of 1865 and was quite taken by Edmund’s younger brother, Ernest, born 1848, saying in a letter that he was ‘looking at temptations, esp, at E. Geldart naked’, see Robert Bernard Martin’s ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life’. 1991. p. 114) Geldart, who regarded himself as an Evangelical, took a teaching role after Oxford at Manchester Grammar School and he seems to have suffered in 1868 some sort of nervous breakdown and so he went to recuperate in Corfu and spent three months in Athens. The following year he was ordained in the Anglican priesthood and became curate of All Saints, Manchester and in 1871 curate of St. George’s, Everton, Liverpool (he became a Unitarian the following year). Geldart wrote much on Greek and religious matters and married Charlotte Frederika Sophia Andler (1841-1923) in 1868 but she doesn’t get a mention by name in the volume, just the casual fact that he got married (they had three children, one dying before the age of one). I found the volume most interesting, not the least because just three years after it was published, Geldart, whose socialistic-style sermons disagreed with his congregation, was asked to resign from his position as minister of the Free Christian Church in Croydon and in a nervous state of health once more, he decided to go to France to stay with an old friend but was reported missing on the night boat to Dieppe, assumed drowned after committing suicide on Friday 10^th April 1885, he was 41 years old, the same age that his own mother, Hannah had died in 1861. ‘I suppose it was suicide’, writes Hopkins to his friend Alexander W. M. Baillee (1843-1921) on 24^th April, saying that ‘his mind, for he was a self tormentor, having been unhinged, as it had been once or twice before, by a struggle he had gone through.’ Hopkins, who also suffered from his own ‘struggles’ and thoughts of suicide, thought A Son of Belial an ‘amusing and sad book’ and perhaps it is no coincidence that his darker poems such as ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’ were composed during this period, but for Geldart, the struggles ended just three years after this volume was published which makes it all the more poignant for the reader.

 

The Last of England – by Ted Walker.

The Last of England published in 1992 is the second autobiography by the Lancing born, West Sussex poet Edward Joseph Walker (1934-2004) and it is a deeply honest and intensely emotional memoir; an enduring love story telling the harrowing tale of his wife, Lorna’s eight years of illness with cancer and the struggle of coping together, and the raw nakedness of bereavement. Ted and Lorna Benfell, born 1933, met when they had just entered their teens and they fell in love, a love which grew in strength and so they were married in 1956 and had four children: Edward (1958), Susan (1958), Margaret (1959) and William (1964); that love is described and revealed in Ted’s first autobiography, ‘The High Path’ published in 1982. Ted, who read modern languages at St. John’s College, Cambridge begins the book five weeks after Lorna’s death and Ted, devoid of poetic inspiration and stuck in a teaching job, wants to get away from all the kind people with their good intentions, their sympathy and condolences and the memories of two people joined together in love, now one person alone and so he leaves it all behind and goes to France and then on to Spain, a country he loves and feels will help with his grief (he travelled their in 1979, see his book ‘In Spain’ published 1987). And so through his time in Spain, such as attending a bullfight with his daughter Susan (chapter 4), the story of his wife’s battle with cancer begins to be unfolded from the first operation whereby a small tumour is removed from the bone of her nose in 1978 through to a part of her upper jawbone being taken away and eventually losing an eye also. This is a remarkably revealing tale drawn deep from the soul of Ted, a master of language, who confesses at one point that he once attempted suicide in the garden with a shotgun and admitting appropriately that ‘in the midst of life we are in farce’. (p. 21) The poetic muse may have left him and like Cyril Connolly in his ‘Enemies of Promise’ he knows as all creative souls know that ‘domesticity gets in the way of a writer’s progress’ (p. 16) but it is precisely the domestic nature of love, the little things we do for each other that confirms the presence of love more than any grand gestures ever could, the simplicity of sharing and understanding and touching. On Christmas Day 1983 Lorna, who had been a smoker like Ted, suffers a heart attack, probably due to the anxiety of awaiting the operation on her jaw and she is taken to hospital and Ted like the dutiful husband, lover, sensitive man and poet, throws his whole being, every fibre into the care of Lorna, even becoming a non-smoker on 31^st January 1984 – four months later Lorna undergoes her jaw operation. In chapter 6 he tells us about the ‘cryo-surgery’, the burning off of tumours and the awful smell that lingers, the smell of death from the dead tissue permeating the whole existence of Lorna which was sometimes embarrassing but another part of the tragedy of cancer surgery. Unfortunately the cancer continued to Lorna’s lungs and she was given only weeks to live. The family gathered around the hospital bed is an all too familiar scene trying to reach Lorna, all wanting to connect with a wife, a mother, a grandparent for the final time, to say something wise and necessary to hear, but everything seemingly inadequate – Ted hears the death rattle (it is the first death he has witnessed) and there is a ‘sudden convulsion, and the rattle ceased, and she was utterly still.’ Following the funeral in April 1987, and Ted’s visit to Spain, he returns to England and visits Lorna’s friend Audrey (Audrey Joan Hicks nee Baxter) who is staying at a farmhouse in Yorkshire; Audrey is also recently bereaved and together they work towards finding each other again and discovering life without their partners – Ted recognises right away that he ‘loved and needed Audrey’. She was happy and grateful to see Ted, her husband John had been dead nine months to Ted’s loss of Lorna, now five months. And so gradually the two lost souls build some sort of a life from the wreckage of death, witnessing the devastation of the 1987 hurricane where Chanctonbury Ring had been ‘thinned to a smudge’; drawing closer together, needing each other, they travel to Spain in 1988 and when they return they get married in Chichester and embrace a new life together. This is a very beautifully written book and through all its chapters it is the strength of love, the devotion and passion that makes us human and able to give ourselves to another – Ted had Larkin’s words, perhaps the most romantic in the English language, ‘what will survive of us is love’, carved on Lorna’s tombstone, in fact, Ted is a much underrated poet, only true poets themselves recognising his greatness – I much admired his first collection ‘Fox on a Barn Door’ (1966) and his third, ‘The Night Bathers’ (1970); as a poet he is very precise, his words are not merely ornamental, they are instrumental and placed like the stones of a path. I should place him amongst the likes of Auden, Larkin and Hughes and his poems have had a huge impact on me, much as ‘The Last of England’ has too (I defy any reader not to shed tears, particularly through chapters three, five and seven). But what happened to Ted and Audrey after they were married? The book does not obviously disclose this, but they settled in Spain in 1997 and sadly Ted died there age 69, near Valencia on 19^th March 2004, yet there will always remain a deep sense of Sussex about Ted Walker, a wonderful writer and a truly great poet!

T. H. White: A Biography – by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s biography of the novelist Terence Hanbury White (1906-1964) is an extraordinary rewarding read, exposing White’s various eccentricities and difficult relationships with his parents who subsequently separated – he was born in India and came to England in 1911, entering Cheltenham College in September 1920 until July 1924; he matriculated to Queen’s College, Cambridge in the Michaelmas term of 1925 where he was a ‘dangerously attractive young man’, which is hard to believe when one sees the older world-weary White, who fell under the spell of his tutor and life-long friend, Leonard James Potts (1897-1960) with whom he kept a long correspondence (see ‘Letters to a Friend’. 1982). White was diagnosed with tuberculosis and told he had just six months to live (his mother was over-protective and enjoyed exaggerating his frailty) and so on 21^st June 1927 he was admitted to Brompton Hospital and a week later sent to Frimley Sanatorium until his discharge on 18^th October. With his new lease of life, he was never really facing his own termination, White travelled to Italy arriving at Naples on 6^th November 1927 where he learnt Italian; he commenced to Capri, Amalfi and Rome and his inclinations were drawn to the homosexual both in life and in art, as something rather ‘tragic’, perhaps something his mind fought against throughout his life. He was back at Cambridge for his final term when he published his first volume of poetry in March 1929, ‘Loved Helen and Other Poems’, a rather interesting little volume, (unfortunately I failed to appreciate his verse after reading ‘A Joy Proposed’. 1980). After Cambridge he taught at a prep-school (1930-32) and then became Head of the English Department at Stowe in Buckinghamshire from 1932-36 where his first novel ‘They Winter Abroad’, published under the pseudonym James Aston caused something of a stir. At Stowe White threw himself into his interests and activities: fox hunting, fishing, shooting and flying – he learnt to fly at Sywell aerodrome in Northamptonshire and other literary works followed: ‘Earth Stopped’ (1934) and ‘England have my Bones’ (1936); during this time he became an intimate friend, mostly through correspondence, with David Garnett (1892-1981), for more on this see ‘The White/Garnett Letters’ edited by David Garnett in 1968. White took a cottage on the Stowe estate and became fascinated with falconry, living with his Goshawk from Germany which he trained making mistakes along the way until it escaped; his next Goshawk he called ‘Cully’ (he also had an owl called Archimedes and two sparrow hawks); Cully died and White worked with two merlins – his volume, ‘The Goshawk’ published in 1951 is a warts and all account of his passion for falconry. In 1938 came the first in his Arthurian sequence of works, ‘The Sword in the Stone’ before he went to live in Ireland in 1939 staying at Doolistown for six years, deciding not to fight as a soldier and suffering feelings of guilt while corresponding with those of his friends in England, like Garnett and the curator and collector, Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962), who were subjected to the bombings. He lived in Alderney from 1946 until 1957 and lectured in the United States throughout 1963-64. Much of White still remains a mystery despite the great Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) casting a little light on her murky subject, for instance, White became overwhelmingly obsessed with a young boy known as ‘Zed’ like some tragic Humbert Humbert figure pining after (and controlling) Lolita or Hadrian for Antinous – he was fascinated by Hadrian and had enjoyed Marguerite Yourcenar’s book on Hadrian, perhaps identifying with him, but who was this young ‘Zed’ with whom White could not repair the damage of their dissolved friendship? Whatever lies behind the mystery White still emerges from this fascinating look at his strange and enigmatic life as a complex, independent and strong-minded literary oddity! Excellent!

For Sylvia, An Honest Account – by Valentine Ackland.

Valentine Ackland (1906-69), born Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland is known more for being the lover of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner than for her poetry and this book, written almost as a love letter to Sylvia whom she met in 1930 was finished in July 1949. Published in 1986, there is a fine foreword from a mutual friend of Valentine and Sylvia, Bea Howe, who introduces us to her first impressions of Valentine before we are immersed in Valentine’s own account where we hear about her desperate shyness, her ‘silent uncooperative’ nature and her sickly childhood and the torment and persecution from her sister, Joan Alice Elizabeth Ackland (born 1898), eight years her senior; the nightmares, the loneliness and the walking in her sleep; her devout High Anglican mother, Ruth Kathleen Ackland (nee Macrory) and Valentine’s confirmation aged eleven. As a child she had a deep desire for security and love. She was sent to school in France where she fell in love for the first time in May 1922 with a girl three years older than her, aged twenty named Lana who returned that love, a perfectly innocent and romantic love and nothing more; Valentine’s sister Joan found out about the relationship by reading her letters and told her mother about it; Valentine’s father, Robert Craig Ackland was disgusted and angry by the relationship and Lana’s family were furious about it too. They had to swear never to meet or write to each other again and despite this her father never forgot or forgave her and because of this Valentine was sent to a domestic training college in Eastbourne where she had to board as some sort of punishment, but the training college turned out to be rife with lesbian activity and a very masculine Headmistress – Valentine pined away without Lana choosing not to eat and eventually her parents allowed Lana to stay over one night; eventually Lana married her cousin and Valentine was made to attend the wedding, broken-hearted. Her sister Joan got married and her father died of cancer in 1923 and Valentine decided to get married purely to escape the wrath and domination of her sister who still tormented her; Valentine got engaged to a boy she knew as an eleven year old, now living and working in Java, meanwhile in 1924 she had met an older Roman Catholic woman in Camberwell whom she refers to as ‘x’, a speaker for the conservative party with whom she became a lover and they remained friends and lovers for many years. In another turn of events, she meets a young man named Richard [Turpin] whom she agrees to marry and breaks off the engagement with the man in Java – they were married at Westminster Registry Office and Richard being inexperienced with women and a homosexual could not consummate the marriage (Valentine was still deeply absorbed by ‘x’); a week after the Registry marriage the couple were married more formally at Westminster Cathedral and Valentine shockingly wore her hair in the short Eton crop style that was popular amongst bohemians. Richard, finding it hard to desire Valentine and her pain during his sexual attempts (it was found she had an abnormally tight hymen) and the excuses on her part to avoid intimacy took their toll and Valentine, who was still seeing ‘x’, she began a drinking habit which seemed to release her from the crippling shyness (she was introduced to alcohol by ‘x’ when she was seventeen). Valentine had asked for help on more than one occasion and was rebuffed by the doctors she sought help from. She agreed to have surgery to correct her hymen and after the operation she went to Dorset with ‘x’ and they lived in a cottage living on ‘biscuits & Bovril’ and visited the writer T. F. Powys (1875-1953) and his wife and sisters and smoked pipes and it was here that any love for Richard fell away and she decided to stay at the cottage in Dorset. We are told that she sat as a model for Eric Gill and met Oliver Lodge and how she became pregnant from an affair and suffered a miscarriage; her divorce from Richard and descent into alcoholism and her meeting with Sylvia Townsend Warner in 1930. Despite all the tragedy and confusion in her life and the damage caused by her sister, it was poetry that seemed to fill the void and eventually, an acceptance of love, a pure and honest love which Sylvia provided. She died in November 1969. ‘For Sylvia’ is an outstanding and very rewarding read!

 

Ingram Bywater: The Memoirs of an Oxford Scholar, 1840-1914 – by William Walrond Jackson.

William Walrond Jackson D.D. (1838-1931) a scholar of Balliol College, Oxford (1856-60) and former Rector of Exeter College, Oxford (1887-1913) published this fine volume of memoirs by his friend and fellow scholar Ingram Bywater (1840-1914) in 1917 and we are given a thoughtful account of Ingram, a delicate and sensitive only child, born in Islington, London who attended University College School aged 13; he then went on to study Greek at King’s College School, acquiring a distaste for athletics and a liking for tobacco, he was an ‘inveterate smoker’. Aged eighteen he won a scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford, entering in the Michaelmas term of 1858 where he attended Jowett’s lectures, became acquainted with Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne and John Addington Symonds (along with Burne Jones, William Morris and the poet Coventry Patmore) and became a member of the Old Mortality Society. Following his departure from Queen’s College in 1862 he was elected a Fellowship of Exeter College, Oxford (according to the statutes of the day a Fellow and a Tutor must remain unmarried); in 1864 he learnt German in Hanover before deciding to study the language and literature of Greek philosophy – his great works were published subsequently: the fragments of Heraclitus in 1877 and Aristotle’s the Art of Poetry in 1898. Following Professor Jowett’s death in October 1893 the Greek Chair became open and after much deliberation Bywater won the Regius Professorship of Greek. Bywater did eventually marry in 1885, the widow of Hans William Sotherby (1827-1874), a charming woman named at birth, Charlotte Cornish (1840-1908), a familiar name of ecclesiastical and academic distinction, the daughter of Charles John Cornish (1804-1979) and Elizabeth Rhodes Cornish (1804-1853); her cousin was the schoolmaster  and scholar, Francis Warre Cornish (1839-1916), Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and Vice-Provost of Eton (1893-1916) who as well as being a friend of the great M. R. James, published the ‘Extracts from the Letters and Journals of William Cory’ in 1897; (his son, Gerald Warre Cornish, born 1874, also of Eton and King’s College, was an author too; he died at the battle of the Somme in 1916). Charlotte’s brother, Rev. Charles John Cornish (1834-1913) became the vicar of Debenham in 1859 and her two nephews also became writers: Charles John Cornish (1858-1906) on natural history and Dr. Vaughan Cornish (1862-1948) on geography. Charlotte became ill in 1907 and passed away the following year aged 67. Also mentioned in the memoirs is Bywater’s friend and fellow scholar (Oriel College, Oxford), Mark Pattison (1813-1884) the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford with whom he kept up a correspondence – Pattison’s ‘Memoirs’ published in 1885 are an excellent account of the ‘behind the scenes’ grumbles and underhand dealings of the Oxford dons during the 1840’s and 1850’s, in fact, I found it equally as interesting as Bywater’s journey of the self through the dreaming spires of Oxford, but then I am a little peculiar. Also well-known and stressed throughout the volume is Bywater’s love of books and collecting, in fact, he is a self-confessed bibliophile and an interesting observation quoted from a letter received from Sir Herbert Warren (1853-1930), Vice Chancellor of Oxford University from 1905-09 relates a conversation between himself and Bywater, discussing books: ‘‘There are various reasons for buying books.’ [says Bywater] ‘Some people buy books for the contents, and that is a very vulgar reason; and some people buy books for the binding, and that is a little better and not so vulgar; and others buy books for the printing, and that is really a very good reason; but the real reason for which to buy a book is the margin! Always look at the margin.’’ (p. 161) And on that basis Bywater’s Memoir of an Oxford scholar is a wonderful collection of perfectly precise margins which are nothing short of astounding!

 

On the Edge of Paradise: A. C. Benson, the Diarist – by David Newsome.

This utterly beguiling biography of the schoolmaster and author, Arthur Christopher Benson (1862-1925) was published in 1980 and the author, David Newsome makes excellent use of Benson’s famous diaries which runs to 180 volumes dating from 1897-1925; previously, Benson’s friend and fellow scholar, Percy Lubbock (1897-1965) published extracts from the diaries in his excellent 1926 publication which I enjoyed immensely. Newsome, through twelve chapters and over 400 pages (with illustrations) really gets behind the fibres of the old Cambridge don and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury who won a scholarship to Eton in 1874 and went up to King’s College, Cambridge in 1885. Benson was inspired to keep a diary after reading the ‘Extracts from the Letters and Journals of William Cory’ by Francis Warre Cornish, published in 1897, itself a beautiful volume, and Benson identified himself with William Cory (born William Johnson 1823-1892), the schoolmaster and poet who romanticised his platonic friendships with boys and was dismissed from Eton in mysterious circumstances. Benson’s whole life seems to be a desire for love yet he was unable to form any intimate attachment and although he was probably aroused by sexual thoughts he could never equate romantic desire with the physical act of sex, which to him seemed repugnant and the establishing of a new friendship or the pleasure of courting a young boy or man and forming a romantic attachment meant everything to him – just as those young undergraduate ‘swans’ of Charles Sayle (1864-1924) the Cambridge University librarian and poet whom Benson met, thought of his young adored disciples as something to be worshipped, his conquests, such as Archibald W. R. Don (1890-1916) of Winchester and Trinity College, Cambridge, were always rather flagrantly ‘almost a religion to us’ [see Sayle’s Memoir of Archie Don, (1918)]. Benson, unlike Sayle and other predatory satyrs such as Oscar Browning, who flaunted his recent, tender acquisitions like splendid hyacinths, managed to be less conspicuous with his sentimental emotions, confining his deepest thoughts on the subject to his closest friends and to his diary; friends such as Lubbock, Howard Sturgis (1855-1920) of Trinity College, Cambridge, Frank Rayner Salter (1887-1967) of Magdalene College, Cambridge, Stephen Gaselee (1882-1943) of King’s College, Cambridge and Gaillard Thomas Lapsley (1871-1949), a Harvard graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge who all had similar sentiments. Benson’s first crisis or ‘misfortune’ as he termed it occurred on Thursday 9^th November 1882, a depression bordering on madness, no doubt a spiritual and a sexual crisis which seemed to shape his attitude towards intimate affection, something he craved yet could not endure. He always considered himself a ‘romantic and a realist’, a sentimental spectator who continually lived ‘on the outside of things’. Newsome brings to light Benson’s thoughts on the young fauns who seemed to be attracted to the shy old bachelor, such as Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), the novelist of Emmanuel College, Cambridge who became utterly infatuated with Benson and the old don’s attraction to the beautiful young Eton scholars such as Edward Horner (1888-1917), Julian Grenfell (1888-1915) and Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947), all of Balliol College, Oxford; and Winchester scholar George Mallory (1886-1924) of Magdalene College, Cambridge. We learn that Benson didn’t like his brother Hugh’s friend Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913) known as Baron Corvo, or the ‘exorcist’ as Hugh called him, and that after an initial dislike of A. E. Housman, another don who suppressed his sexual instincts, Benson warmed to the scholar poet, just as he warmed to the brilliant scholar and ghost story writer, M. R. James (1862-1936) Provost of King’s College, Cambridge and Eton College who became increasingly difficult to know, for Benson recognised the hunger and ache of the cloistered homosexual. Benson’s second devastating depression in which he even contemplated suicide came between 1907-09 and again in 1917 in which his breakdown resigned him to a stay at St. Michael’s nursing home in Ascot. The war had taken some of the oldest and dearest friendships from him: Rupert Brooke, Julian and Billy Grenfell, Archie Don and Edward Horner and he seemed continually perplexed by the on and off friendship with Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), that old literary pivot. Arthur Christopher Benson is a fascinating man and his diary records a lost age of academic history and the great personalities that distinguished themselves (and sometimes disgraced themselves) and Newsome has given us a mere glimpse into that world, but a magical glimpse all the same. Marvellous!

A Priest’s Psychic Diary – by Rev. Jack Dover Wellman.

This interesting little volume with a foreword by Richard Baker was published in 1977 and it is in two parts: one – Encounters, and two – Reflections, the former is concerned with the various spiritual assistance Reverend Wellman has given to those in need, ministering to the sick, whether through prayer or the actual ‘laying-on of hands’, the divine energy which flows through the healing power of prayer, and the latter emphasises his beliefs in the paranormal process of healing. Wellman touches on various branches of psychic techniques such as telepathy, premonition and precognition before explaining the forces of evil through demonic entities and haunting, to possessions and exorcisms. Wellman talks with authority of mysterious things and experiences he has encountered throughout his time as a priest and I thoroughly believe he had some degree of psychic ability yet Wellman himself is a little mysterious too! The Reverend Jack Dover Wellman (1917-1989) was born in Portsmouth and in 1939 he had high intentions of going up to Oxford but for the outbreak of war; he joined the Royal Navy and was stationed at HM Dockyard Portsmouth for his training before going to HMS Vernon which was actually Rodean School which was taken over by the Admiralty in 1941 from the War Office for torpedo and mine training. It was here that Wellman met the artist Francis Cyril Rose (1909-1979) and Lord Evan Tredegar (1893-1949), an occultist who performed the Black Mass at every opportunity. From what one gathers from the book ‘The Dust has Never Settled’ (1992) by Robin Bryans (1928-2005), Wellman was one of a dozen sailors who were drunk and drugged (Tredegar was fond of adding drugs to the communion wine) and taken by Lord Tredegar and a sixteen year old Robin Bryans to Ovingdean Church to perform the Black Mass, in fact, Ovingdean Church seems to be the centre of many sordid activities during the war and after! When the war ended Wellman took theological training and was ordained a deacon at Rochester Cathedral on 5^th October 1947, aged 30. Following his ordination he served in the parishes of Christ Church, Dartford, St. Margaret’s, Lee and St. Michael’s, Chester Square, London. He then served for three years as a chaplain in the RAF until in April 1956 he became the vicar of Emmanuel Church, Hampstead until his death in 1989 (apparently he also knew the occult writer John Symonds). In 1988 appeared his other volume, ‘A Priest and the Paranormal’ and he seems to have been married once for he mentions his devoted wife several times in the book, in fact, she was Dorothy R M Kinsey, born in Portsmouth in 1921 and they were married in Kensington in 1947 but it seems they were only married for three years or less as she married James W Preece in 1950 so perhaps she wasn’t all that devoted to Jack after all and for all his psychic ability I bet he never saw that coming!

 

Author Hunting, by an Old Literary Sportsman: Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing 1897-1925 – by Grant Richards.

Published in 1932, this is the second volume of autobiography, the first being ‘Memories of a Misspent Youth’ (1932), in which the publisher and author, Grant Richards (1872-1948) who brought out the World’s Classics Series in 1901, reminisces over his publishing career which began in Henrietta Street in 1896 when he was 24 years old. Richards croaks through 21 chapters of mostly stupendously dull literary chaff and for some reason he has a maniacal aversion to using ‘full stops’; in fact, one would have to be an enormous book-crank to enjoy his tit-bits on the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Edward Verral Lucas but then comes the author’s saving grace for he has much to say on the ‘sombre’ scholar-poet who was always very ‘precise’, A. E. Housman; strangely Housman didn’t want any profit from his volume of poetry, ‘A Shropshire Lad’ – Grant Richards published the second edition in 1898 and also his ‘Last Poems’ in 1922. Other rewarding moments in Author Hunting are the fascinating glimpses into the worlds of such authors as Alec Waugh (1898-1981) whose first novel ‘The Loom of Youth’ (1917) was a scandalous success; Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Llewelyn and John Cooper Powys and the impulsive, childlike Ronald Firbank (1886-1926) who was ‘always looking over his shoulder’ and had ‘dealings with wizards, crystal-gazers, astrologers and soothsayers’ (p. 250), really a remarkable ‘shy man with acute instincts’. Grant Richards manages to turn a somewhat uninteresting book of dusty literary moments into an exquisite delight and one cannot fail to admire such a man who actually had a heart and offered support to many a struggling author that he favoured. 

 

John Lane and the Nineties – by J. Lewis May.

This is a superb volume of biography and literary reminiscences by James Lewis May (1873-1961) who knew and worked for the publisher John Lane (1854-1925) at the famous Bodley Head publishing house. May dedicates the book which appeared in 1936 to his friend and one of the first authors under the Bodley Head name, Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947) and over nineteen very pleasurable chapters he brings the image of John Lane and the establishing of the Bodley Head to life. Lane, the Devon-born collector of books and prints became a clerk at the Railway Clearing House before opening the Bodley Head bookshop in Vigo Street with co-founder, Charles Elkin Mathews (1851-1921) in 1887. The Bodley Head (named after Sir Thomas Bodley) which specialised in antiquarian books began publishing in 1894 and soon after Elkin Mathews went his own way. There are some delightful anecdotes, one concerning the poet A. C. Swinburne who lived on the first floor at 3, Great James Street; on the second floor lived Lane’s friend from the Clearing House, William Lestocq and his friend, poet and scholar, Hubert John de Burgh and the pair were great entertainers and gave splendid parties to which Swinburne protested at the noise and disturbance, shouting “this place is nothing but a dirty pot-house, a dirty pot-house!” (p. 22) and the fact that Lane was a member of that strange literary gathering the ‘Sette of Odd Volumes’ with their periodical dinners to which on one occasion Oscar Wilde was guest of honour and Lane was most impressed with his talk, as of course one would be (p. 30). And so the familiar parade of dandies and decadents appear before us such as Beardsley whom Lane greatly admires, poets Francis Thompson (1859-1907), John Davidson (1857-1909) and Le Gallienne; even that weird old Baron Corvo (Frederick Rolfe), ‘that strange, erratic creature, half-imposter, half-genius’ turns up on page 82. In April 1894 the first of an illustrated quarterly named The Yellow Book set the literary world alight with its daring prose, poetry, criticism and art; Henry Harland was an editor and Beardsley was art editor until 1895 when he took up with the Savoy; thirteen volumes appeared until it disbanded in 1897; a year later Lane married Annie King, the famous ‘Mrs John Lane’ as she is often known. Oscar Wilde also appeared in The Yellow Book until the scandal erupted during his arrest and trial and there was some stone-throwing outside Vigo Street (Lane was in the United States at the time and very concerned with the trial) and Lane had to agree that Wilde should no longer appear in any further editions of The Yellow Book; the Bodley Head had also printed Wilde’s ‘Salome’ and Lane had great capacity and enthusiasm for his authors whom he befriended, championed and supported, especially the poets such as Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), William Watson (1858-1935) and Stephen Phillips (1864-1915) of ‘Christ in Hades’ fame and some extraordinary publications appeared under the Bodley Head imprint, such as John Gray’s ‘Silverpoints’ in 1893, George Egerton’s (pen-name of Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859-1945) ‘Keynotes’ (1893) and Norman Gale (1862-1942) whose ‘Orchard Songs’ of 1893 has a lyrical, pastoral beauty. Gale, a minor poet who was also an assistant master at Rugby was ‘rather a big, florid man, who wrote discreetly fleshly poems about pretty milkmaids, and apple-blossom, and rustic junketings’; a man ‘possessed of a pretty gift for turning melodious, flowing verse of no marked originality’ (p. 103) and, as I found myself, an almost erotic obsession for knees; a good example of his ‘fleshly’ un-original verse (a little harsh there James) is his poem ‘Cicely Bathing’ which begins – ‘The brook told the dove, / and the dove told me, / that Cicely’s bathing at the pool / with other virgins three’. There is no denying the importance of John Lane and the Bodley Head publishing house during those glorious nineties and James Lewis May has produced a worthy volume, conjuring the smell of strong coffee and Turkish cigarettes, the absurdities of aesthetes and the rush of laudanum racing through one’s soul to sit beside such giants as Osbert Burdett’s ‘Beardsley Period’ (1925), Muddiman’s ‘Men of the Nineties’ (1920) and Holbrook Jackson’s ‘The Eighteen-Nineties’ (1913) to name a few. 

 

Pages from a Private Diary – by Henry Charles Beeching.

Published anonymously in 1898 (I read the second impression from 1899), Pages from a Private Diary is reprinted from the Cornhill Magazine with some alterations and omissions and it is from the pen of the clergyman and poet, Henry Charles Beeching (1859-1919). Beeching, who was educated at Balliol College, Oxford (1878-1881) before taking holy orders in 1882, writes on various subjects, such as the joys of bicycling – ‘so far I have escaped injury, but Bob, the fox terrier, was run over this morning. No doubt he was a good deal to blame.’ [5^th August 1896] (p. 68); or the pleasure of yuletide where our good Reverend enters the festive spirit and asks – ‘why do some folks wish me “a happy” instead of “a merry Christmas”? [25^th December 1896] (p. 139) and ‘Christmas cards I will never send: no, not even in revenge; and I have a hope the custom may soon die,’ [1^st January 1898] (p. 321) which are my sentiments entirely, along with birthdays and other anniversaries! Other entries are mostly of a literary turn, particularly concerning Shakespeare for whom he has a special interest and Jane Austen, particularly Pride and Prejudice which he has been reading; the diary begins on the author’s birthday, 7^th May 1896 and ends on 23^rd February 1898, taking in the likes of Robert Burns, William Morris, Coventry Patmore and Benjamin Jowett along the way while making some mildly interesting observations such as the one on 21^st June 1896 where he ‘stood for some time on the doorstep drawing in the electrical force of London, and feeling like a mouse in oxygen. It is only we country cousins who really enjoy London, just as it is only Londoners who really enjoy the country’. (p. 35) or this from 24^th November 1897: ‘If a man is a poet or painter, and is sure of dying before his boom is over, let him write his name in every book’. (p. 307) Beeching became the Canon of Westminster Cathedral from 1902-1911 and the Dean of Norwich from 1911 until his death in 1919 and it is hard to believe this volume was published in 1898 while the author was approaching 40 years of age as it seems quite stiff and old fashioned as if he had not heard of, let alone read any of the so-called ‘decadent’ writers, which he probably hadn’t. I also took the time, either from stupidity or curiosity, to read several other books by Beeching from his poetry: ‘Love in Idleness’ (1883), ‘Love’s Looking Glass’ (1891), both in collaboration with his Oxford friends and fellow poets, John William Mackail (1859-1945) and John Bowyer Buchanan Nichols (1859-1939); ‘’In a Garden and Other Poems’ (1895) along with his curiously interesting ‘Provincial Letters’ from 1906 which I heartily recommend [Beeching also wrote volumes on Milton, Francis Atterbury (1909) and Henry Vaughan (2 volumes in 1896) which are worth digging out]. Perhaps a greater sense of humour would have helped the book from falling into the depths of neglected volumes but one must remember Beeching is a member of the clergy and sadly restricted by many modes of humour that falls towards the improper, which no doubt the Balliol man enjoyed heartily in his undergraduate days, however, there are moments of mirth such as his entry for 1^st February 1898 when he is mentioning his two peacocks whom he has wittily named ‘Thomas’ and ‘Love’; to stop the peacocks wandering off he buys some guinea fowl to keep them company yet their noise keeps him awake and it seems the Doctor is the only one who enjoys the sounds as he likes to be kept awake – ‘peacocks or no peacocks, doctor or no doctor, those birds must die.’ (p. 335) Readers of a strange turn of mind and scholastic seclusion will no doubt find much to fascinate them in this volume as I have found and a rainy day can become quite beautiful improved with a dose of Beeching. Enjoy! 

 

The Story of My Life (in six volumes) – by Augustus Hare.

In masochistic mood I decided to inflict upon myself the reading of the six volumes of autobiography written by that supernatural enthusiast, travel writer, raconteur and eternal bachelor, Augustus John Cuthbert Hare, who was born in Rome in 1834; quite an undertaking, as most sane readers will prefer the abridged one volume, ‘Peculiar People: The Story of My Life’, but no, having an element of Scandanavian blood, a people known for their capacity to injure oneself beyond normal measures, I turned to volume one, published in 1896 and immersed myself in the misery of Hare’s childhood to learn that he was a ‘most unwelcome addition to his parents’ large family’, his parents being Francis George Hare (1786-1842) and Ann Francis Paul (1788-1863). Soon after his birth he was passed from his natural mother to his Aunt Maria, born Maria Leycester (1798-1870), widow of the boy’s uncle, the Reverend Augustus William Hare (1792-1834), his father’s brother. Maria had written to Ann Francis requesting little Augustus be brought up as her own child and Ann agreed and wrote back, saying ‘if any one else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others’. As a child he was frequently in the presence of his uncle, the Reverend Julius Hare and his wife, ‘evil’ Aunt Esther at Hurstmonceaux Rectory in East Sussex; Aunt Esther, born Jane Esther Maurice (1814-1864), a foul and despicable creature, ordered that the young boy’s pet cat, ‘Selma’, be taken from him and hanged to death; she even took great pleasure in ordering the child to be locked in the church vestry at Hurstmonceaux between services. Augustus went to Harnish School in Wiltshire where he says he was taught nothing before going to Dr. Vaughan’s Harrow in 1847 where he says he was still taught nothing but fell into the natural regime of fagging and bullying. He was a sickly child and had to wear an iron frame to correct his spine; he left Harrow after one year and endured several tutors – ‘It is only by God’s mercy that I did not commit suicide’. (p. 256) Drawing was a great resource to young Augustus who showed a talent for landscape and architectural depictions (his splendid illustrations run through each volume) and we hear about the ‘family spy’, a strange and seemingly harmless gentleman who prefered to spend his life just following the Hare’s around and observing them, knowing all their intimate secrets and every move they make; nowadays we have the television to provide marginally more interesting entertainment than stalking some familiar person or persons. Augustus fills his volumes with letters written and received and journal entries so that nothing seems to escape his meticulous accuracy in painting this portrait of his life and those he has encountered. In 1853, aged nineteen, Augustus entered University College, Oxford where he fell under the spell of the mighty Jowett of Balliol, with whom he became great friends while at Oxford. His Uncle Julius died in January 1855. There is more on Hare’s Oxford life in volume two until his time of leaving in June 1857 and then begin his wandering around Europe and the Southern and Northern counties; his first book ‘Epitaphs for Country Church-yards’ appears in 1856 before he was commissioned to write the ‘dusty, dead and colourless’, ‘Handbook of Berks, Bucks and Oxfordshire’, published in 1861. Having the great fortune of the right family connections, Augustus is welcomed into the many stately homes and castles where he delights in the sumptuous dinners and table talk on the eccentric history and ghostly tales and legends, often staying in the haunted bedrooms; Augustus is in his element describing the architectural features and the landscape of such country piles whether in Northumberland or in Tuscany and the antiquarian musings and family gossip he attaches to his wanderings make it a very personal journey and one cannot help thinking what a huge snob Mr. Hare is and why there is never any talk of falling in love or romantic devotion; supposing he had some sort of a sex life he seems to have been very careful in keeping it private, even from himself, yet he is a sensitive young man and never fails to describe his dreams and premonitions, something he does throughout the volumes, and we encounter the mysterious Madame Martine Larmignar de Trafford, a seer who seems to predict the future, and Hare’s sister ‘Esmeralda’, a devotee of Roman Catholicism since 1854 (she became an Oblate Sister of the Precious Blood), seems equally devoted to Madame de Trafford. In the next volume his sister ‘Esmeralda’, actually born Anne Francis Maria Louisa Hare in 1832, dies in May 1868 and there is much talk and rumour of poisoning and that the likely suspect is Hare’s brother, Francis George Hare (1830-1868); two years later (March 1870), Hare’s mother, born in 1798, suffers a paralytic seizure on her left side from which she never recovers. Hare, the dutiful son whom some would argue had an unnatural devotion to his mother, looks after her and travels with her while writing his ‘Walks in Rome’ (published in 1871) until her death on 13^th November 1870 and her body remains at Holmhurst, their home in Sussex, until the 19^th. Augustus is of course devastated and throws himself into writing, spending sometimes 12 hours a day, his three volume biography of his mother, ‘Memorials of a Quiet Life’ (1872-76) which seems to offend some family members. Volume IV (1900) concerns aspects of his solitary life and literary work at home and abroad, his travels in Spain as his research for his ‘Wanderings in Spain’ published in 1872 before volume V leads us into his writing of the ‘Life and Letters of Frances, Baroness Bunsen’, 2 volumes published in 1879 and his meetings with Tennyson, Browning, Whistler and even a meeting with Oscar Wilde on 21^st June 1883 (p. 386); we also learn more about his friendship with Lord Houghton – Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-85) the poet and collector of erotic works. The final volume contains amongst other things his attendance at the funeral of Matthew Arnold on 19^th April 1888; his writing of the ‘Story of Two Noble Lives’ (3 vols. 1893) about Charlotte, Countess Canning and Louisa Beresford, Marchioness of Waterford, also the writing of the Gurney memoirs: ‘The Gurneys of Earlham’ (2 vols. 1895). In early life Hare met Wordsworth and thought him ‘conceited’, no doubt he was, but Hare can also be accused of the same and thank goodness he is or we would not have these lengthy (each touching or exceeding 500 pages) volumes of reminiscences which Hare himself thought would not be read by the average reader, or if so only dipped into, and that they were only really intended for family members. But for me, it was his ghosts that led me to Augustus Hare, stories such as the spine-tingling ‘Vampire of Croglin Grange’ in Cumberland or the ‘Haunted House in Berkeley Square’ and it is with his ghosts that I shall remain.

 

Memories and Hallucinations – by D. M. Thomas.

This volume of autobiography was published in 1988 by the poet, translator and novelist, Donald Michael Thompson, born in 1935 in Redruth, Cornwall. The book is presented in the form of a confessional, matter of fact, talk with his psycho-analyst, going over the passage of his life and we learn from the off that he has an Oedipus complex and he is very frank about what he would have liked to do to a youthful version of his mother, who died in 1975. Perhaps not so shocking now but nevertheless still a little startling and one must admire such honesty. Poems and fragments of erotic dreams lead the reader through the 22 chapters of the author’s life with its many strange Freudian ‘coincidences’ from his family’s two year residence in Melbourne, Australia when he was 14 and their return to England; his National Service days where he learnt Russian language and where aged nineteen he learnt the noble art of masturbation, a bit of a late starter but he was a dedicated practitioner, delighting in pornographic magazines and ‘sporting his oak’, through his time at New College, Oxford where he got his First and became a teacher in Plymouth, to his marriage to Maureen and sad suicide of his friend, Andrew. This is an excellent volume of autobiography but one can’t help thinking what a dirty unfaithful bastard Thomas is for cheating on practically every woman he got close to and seeing them as sexual objects, a very primitive male view of women, from his wife Maureen, (he had two children named Caitlin and Sean with her), whom he later divorced to marry Denise, the woman he had an affair with, only to divorce her too, to the many students he took advantage of as a teacher. Yes a complete shit in his attitude and selfish gratification, but who wasn’t back in the sixties and seventies? Thankfully we know better today, or do we? Sometimes I wonder… Of course he has much to say on his own published works from his first poetry collections – ‘Two Voices’ (1968) and ‘Logan Stone’ (1971) to his novels, ‘The Flute Player’ (1979) and ‘The White Hotel’ (1981) for which he is perhaps most well known and he makes living near Hereford Cathedral where he worked as a college lecturer seem almost bohemian, but not quite, yet I must admit one thing I share with him is his admiration of the Russian poets, Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova. Enjoyable and revealing!

Rookery Nook – by Ben Travers.

Not being familiar with the author I decided to explore this rather charmingly titled volume by the novelist and playwright, Ben Travers (1886-1980) and was delighted by every turn of the page. Travers, a very sharp and witty writer of comical escapades, known for his ‘Aldwych farces’ of the 1920’s, published Rookery Nook in 1926 and it is a rip-roaring depiction of society and manners during the ‘anything goes’, or supposedly so, era of the twenties. ‘Rookery Nook’, is the home of Mr and Mrs Mantle Ham who have taken a holiday to Scotland and let their house, situated on Swallow Road at the corner of Lighthouse Road, Chumpton Town, Somerset, to the recently married (three months) Augustus (‘Gussy’) Longhampton and his wife, Clara, formerly Posset of ‘Posset Jam’ fame who live in London. Unfortunately, Clara has to attend to her sick mother and cannot travel to Chumpton with her husband which is surely a sign for mischief. On his arrival at Rookery Nook, while Augustus is attempting to unpack in the much ornamentally cluttered comfort of the Mantle Ham’s abode, he notices a staggeringly beautiful blonde woman in pink pyjamas, a barefoot maiden, sitting on the hall table and so the pieces are set for a delightful farce to ensue. The woman, a ‘fugitive Venus’, we learn is Rhoda Marley who lives next door at ‘Pixiecot’ with her half-German step-father named Putz who has ‘run her out’ for eating wurtleberries (‘wurts’) and the maidservant, Nutts, told Putz – ‘You ate wurts and Nutts split. What a vegetable tragedy,’ exclaims Augustus. Rhoda is seeking sanctuary at Rookery Nook and does not wish to return to her step-father, whom she actually admires as a man of strong manly notions and Augustus decides to confront him and is ‘run out’ himself by Putz, a wonderfully drawn character, and his bull terrier dog named Conrad. Also living at Chumpton at a house named ‘Frascati’ are the Twines, now, Gertrude Twine, formerly Posset, is Clara’s sister which makes Harold Twine, her timid, hen-pecked husband, Augustus’s brother-in-law and this brother-in-law was in Swallow Road and saw the silhouettes of Rhoda and Augustus in the bedroom window and assumed that Clara was with Augustus and he dutifully informs his nosey wife, Gertrude who in turn, believing Clara to be with her mother, tells Harold to return and make sure. He enters the unlocked house, trips over the unpacked portmanteau and Augustus causes him to doubt what he actually saw, even suggesting Harold has been drinking. Naturally after much confused thought Harold jumps to the conclusion that Augustus has a woman in the bedroom. Later Harold and Gertrude return and Rhoda hides in the scullery; not finding a woman in the house Gertrude tends to believe her husband has been seeing things again and is mistaken. But it all unfolds when the ‘daily’ servant named Mrs. Leverett arrives the next morning to take up the tea and sees Rhoda asleep in the bed and it soon gets back to Gertrude who smells deception and beastliness and wants her sister to know what sort of a man she has married! Meanwhile, unaware of Mrs. Leverett finding Rhoda in bed asleep, Augustus wires to his car salesman cousin, Clive Fitz Watters who has a flat in Kensington to come and help him. Harold goes to see Augustus (Rhoda is hiding in the cupboard) and ends up being chased by Conrad, Putz’s vicious dog, who causes havoc in the house; Rhoda comes out of concealment to stop the attack on Harold and then when Gertrude arrives Conrad has a new victim to chase while Harold and Rhoda both hide in the cupboard; Gertrude secretly confronts Putz who tells her the story of Rhoda and why she was ‘run out’ by him etc. all the while his trousers are falling down as he holds Conrad in his arms and Gertrude has to hold his trousers up; Augustus overhears their plans behind a fence and finds out that Clara is scheduled to arrive the next day in a furtive attempt by Gertrude to catch Rhoda in her pyjamas and expose Augustus as a philanderer – the plot continues that Rhoda cannot leave without clothing and Putz keeps an eye on the house to make sure she does not leave. Harold Twine usually plays golf with the fearsome Admiral Juddy who being put out goes to Frascati searching for Harold; Harold, now drawn into the deception after Rhoda saved his life from being torn to shreds by Conrad, attempts to get some of his wife’s clothes for Rhoda to escape the house which he does but on his return he walks straight into Putz and Conrad who were waiting for such an attempt and in the struggle Putz takes the suitcase full of Gertrude’s clothing to his house. Clive, who saw Gertrude alone waiting for Clara at Bristol, helps Twine try to secure a hired car with no success while Juddy goes to Rookery Nook looking for Twine and so Putz sets Conrad into attack mode and the dog smashes up a room filled with ornaments as he attacks the cat and Juddy ascending the stairs who hides in a bedroom and sees the lovely vision of Rhoda who explains her predicament. Meanwhile, in Bristol, Gertrude has met Clara and her mother and they go in the car while Gertrude intends to travel by rail but she fails to get on the train when it leaves. At Rookery Nook, Putz sneaks into the house and confronts Juddy and Rhoda and leaves with the few ‘oddments’ of clothing Harold was successful in retaining – Augustus and Juddy both attack Putz and eventually put him into a car with the idea of Harold and Clive stranding him somewhere in the marshes which they succeed in doing; then Juddy goes to Pixiecot and forces Nutts to surrender some of Rhoda’s clothing and the Admiral takes care of Rhoda taking her to his home just before Clara and her mother arrive in the car. Being unwell and tired, the mother goes to bed and finds Augustus’s blue silk pyjama trousers along with a pair of pink silk pyjama trousers – the explanation is unsatisfactory and when Clive, Harold and Augustus confront Clara it does not go well and Clara is in tears with the intention of taking her mother and staying with her sister Gertrude; After further explanation and making up she wants to see the girl for herself. Harold, thinking he can resolve the whole mess goes to see Juddy and brings him and Rhoda to Rookery Nook and Clara, seeing Rhoda recognises her as her old friend from school. When Gertrude arrives later to find her mother in her bed she goes to Rookery Nook and Augustus has it all out with her and Rhoda decides to go back to live with her step-father, Putz, who comes to the Nook and makes a fourth at Bridge with Juddy, Clive and Harold and even a submissive Conrad is welcomed. Rookery Nook is a fine tangle of a tale and there were moments in the story where I burst out laughing as Travers is an excellent conjurer with his dialogue and mannerisms and his characters are so well drawn that they are believably substantial in one’s mind. There is no doubt that Travers is a brilliant writer and following on from Rookery Nook I read his other Aldwych farce also from 1926, ‘A Cuckoo in the Nest’ which is equally enjoyable and tremendously comical in its misadventures. Simply wonderful!

 

The Legend of Aleister Crowley: A Study of the Facts – by P. R. Stephensen.

Having read most of what Crowley has written and much of what has been written about him, ‘The Legend of Aleister Crowley’, published in 1930 by Mandrake Press, has always strangely eluded me, so it is with a sense of curious satisfaction to finally turn its pages. The book, which is a ‘Study of the Documentary Evidence Relating to a Campaign of Personal Vilification Unparalleled in Literary History’ is composed of five chapters: ‘The Man Crowley’, ‘Early Period, 1896-1907’, ‘”Equinox” Period, 1908-1914’, ‘The War’ and ‘After the War’ and the author, Percy Reginald Stephensen (1901-1965) an Australian writer with communist leanings known as ‘Inky’, presents a worthy defence of Crowley’s character and reputation and does not fall completely under the spell of Crowley, the magician, and all the supernatural and ‘evil’ nonsense surrounding him; Stephensen, who had a hand in running Mandrake Press, is a friend of Crowley’s and he stresses that after all, he is ‘a man’, although he does blame Crowley’s schoolboyish ‘perverse humour’ which spoils many of his finest poems for much of the initial attacks against him, a humour whose fury was aimed at everything from Christianity, Rationalism and the Rosicrucian’s, to Theosophy, Spiritualism and the Alpine Club. Stephensen takes us through Crowley’s undergraduate verse, 1896-97, (‘White Stains’, ‘Aceldama’) and 1898 (‘The Tale of Archais’, ‘Songs of the Spirit’ and ‘Jephthah’) and the various reviews in the press, some of which are favourable but most of which accuse him of being too serious, finding faults in his youthful Swinburnian exuberance, which shows poetic potential, a ‘poet of distinction, whose ideas nevertheless were possibly dangerous’ (p. 35); his later poems written and published while Crowley was travelling through various continents such as: ‘The Mother’s Tragedy’ and ‘The Soul of Osiris’ (both 1901), the latter, attacked by that old windbag G K Chesterton in the Daily News and ‘Tannhauser’, ‘Ahab’, ‘The Star and the Garter’, ‘Alice, an Adultery’ and ‘The Sword of Song’ (all 1902), the latter, one of his finest volumes of verse according to Stephensen, containing his acidic reply to Chesterton, all either perplex or astound the reader; Crowley was a poet, a true poet of fire and romance, earthy and lyrical, who assumed the mask the poet wears and threw himself into adventures; he did not care for public opinion which therefore infuriated his reader; his poetry became overlooked and neglected for the more sensational aspects of his life, whether real or not. Stephensen argues that Byron suffered a similar fate! – Crowley’s three volume Collected Works appeared in 1905-07 and Capt. J F C Fuller’s winning essay ‘The Star in the West’ was published in 1907 having won a competition to write a critical essay upon the Collected Works. Despite all this Crowley failed to attain the heights as a poet that someone like Yeats achieved, unlike Yeats, Crowley was unwilling to compromise and not merely ‘playing at religion’. Stephensen cites the Looking Glass trial of 1910 as a major factor in bringing public attention to Aleister Crowley; The Looking Glass reviewed the performance of the Rites of Eleusis and attacked the ‘New Religion’ of ‘Crowleyanity’ and provoked the Jones [Crowley’s friend George Cecil Jones] vs The Looking Glass libel trial following suggestions that there had been ‘unmentionable immorality’ between Crowley, Jones and fellow magician, Allan Bennett; and other specific factor was  Crowley’s leaving England during the First World War for America, taking a seemingly pro-German, pro-Irish stance and his articles and editing of The International to the publication of his novel (written in 27 days purely for financial reasons), ‘Diary of a Drug Fiend’ in 1922 which showed the principles of Thelema to free oneself from addiction, yet it was misunderstood and then came the death of Raoul Loveday at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, a temple dedicated to ‘orgies of vice and all sorts of sexual debauchery and indecency’, and the interviews with Loveday’s young wife, Betty May who exposed the sordid life at the Abbey, all factors contributing to Crowley being vindictively attacked in the press. This trail of venom was followed by the 1923-24 hatred which appeared in John Bull and the Sunday Express and Crowley being in want of funds he was unable to defend himself and thus became a prey to all sorts of filthy and scandalous accusations from murder to cannibalism! Stephensen has produced an invaluable collection of reviews and newspaper articles which tell the tale of a directed campaign of hatred towards a fine poet and thinker, a man who ‘created his own thunderstorm’ at a time when the average dullard took what was written in the newspapers as truthful and beyond reproach. It is entertaining to dissect Crowley psychologically and to unravel the myth but one must absorb his literary and magical works to understand him and form an unbiased opinion and not get caught up in the infernal nonsense the press has written about him, as Stephensen, a competent and knowledgeable author, writes, ‘intelligent people will form a truer estimate of the case concerning an English man of letters whose literary achievement is undeniable, whatever else may be said or rumoured’. (p. 157)

Between Two Worlds – by John Middleton Murry.

This intriguing autobiography published in 1935 by the writer and critic, John Middleton Murry (1889-1957) has some fascinating glimpses into the literary world of the Bloomsbury fringes that the author encountered and there is a deep understanding of Murry through his own self-analysis. Born in Peckham, his father was an ambitious civil servant and his mother was a pretty dreamer whose dreams were not fulfilled, young Murry, precocious and pedantic, a ‘timid little boy who could not sleep without a knotted towel for company’, detested the poverty he was born into and all forms of ugliness; showing a capacity for learning he was awarded a scholarship in 1901 to Christ’s Hospital and with his intellectual growth he acquired the usual snobbish sentiments as the gulf between his parents and the class he was raised in widened, as he says himself he was ‘part snob, part coward, part sentimentalist – all these elements were in me’ (p. 80). He wins a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford and in 1910 travels to Paris where the naïve and virginal Murry first enjoys the delights of sexual intercourse with a ‘petite femme’ he falls in love with named Marguerite; when Murry returns to England they correspond for a while and the love seems to deepen but when it comes to meeting Marguerite again the coward in him comes to the fore and without a word he turns his back on her – coward! He treated her appallingly and in his own words he sums up that he sacrificed love because he was afraid of being ‘dragged back to’ his ‘old level of existence’. The weak-willed young scholar who never sought out ‘experiences’ but shimmered through existence letting encounters and experiences happen to him seems to fall into literature and edits a magazine which he calls ‘Rhythm’ in the autumn of 1911 and through frequenting Dan Rider’s bookshop off St. Martin’s Lane he meets that preposterous poseur whom many a young fool hero-worshipped, Frank Harris (1856-1931); he also met a friend of Harris’s, a young Oxford man, biographer, novelist, critic and editor of ‘Isis’ magazine, Hugh Kingsmill (1889-1949), but upon meeting Harris there was the admiration and respect towards the ‘generous’ older man of letters, but it wasn’t long before Murry discovered Harris to be a plagiarist and he felt let down by him although he said nothing of his discovery. During this time Murry was still in love with Marguerite and saw himself somewhat like that other doomed author and social outcast, Richard Middleton who committed suicide in Brussels because of a ‘devouring love’; Murry, in a state of depression, to rid himself of the memory of Marguerite did what any young, self-respecting undergraduate did at the time and that was to seek out a prostitute and so he does and so he brings back gonorrhoea as a reward and a new memory to cherish. But it is through this degradation and self-loathing that the resurrection or liberation from the memory of Marguerite (or more probably the guilt from the cowardly act of leaving her with no word) begins, from the soul to the body, like an exorcism. Soon after this at the end of 1911 he is corresponding with the New Zealand born author, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) having been impressed with her stories. Murry, the coward who is ‘terrified of life’, begins to hate Oxford, which seems ‘unreal’, seeing no future career for himself and after asking Mansfield’s opinion as to whether to stay or not, she suggests he leave and so he does. He lodges with Mansfield and takes on some review writing for The Westminster Gazette and admits that he drifted into literature to ‘avoid other occupations’ but he cannot avoid the poverty he is once again plunged into. This seems to be a recurring theme throughout his life, or at least the early part which this book is concerned with, his love for Katherine which was filled with anguish and periods of separation, their inability to settle anywhere for long, moving from one place to another and Murry’s opinion that he was inhuman and without a sense of belonging, the daemon which continually haunted his steps. Murry and Mansfield became acquainted with the artist Henri Gaudier (1891-1915) and his Polish born, author ‘wife’, Sophia Brzeska (1872-1925) and the couples seemed inseparable in mind and body and they had plans to live together. Murry and Mansfield found a house and decorated it; Gaudier, travelled there deciding to surprise them but was shaken when he overheard Murry and Mansfield at an open window discussing he and Sophie’s coming to the house and how it would spoil things and so upon sending a telegram saying Sophie could move into the house they were dismayed at the rebuff and eventually learnt the reason why; the friendship soured beyond the point of repair and the hostility began towards Murry, even threatening to kill him which Murry believed Gaudier capable of. The strain of avoiding Gaudier’s threats were telling on Murry yet he could not be avoided for ever and one day in May 1913, Gaudier bursts into Murry’s office (living space) in Chancery Lane and confronts him, demanding money for drawings of his which were published in ‘Rhythm’, even striking him. It appears that Murry considered Gaudier’s friendship too intimate for a man towards another man, something which would re-occur in the strange connection Murry and Mansfield had with D. H. Lawrence and Frieda, the portrait he paints of Lawrence, one minute worshipping Frieda and the next minute threatening to kill her is quite disturbing and Lawrence to me seems quite insufferable as a person, as does Murry for they each portray different aspects of male love and aggression, Lawrence, a very physical man wants a relationship with Murry which is a firm, manly bond almost in the ritualistic sense, he is wanting a token of their ‘togetherness’ which could be seen as a sexual act in the purely masculine, something we gather from the wrestling scene in ‘Women in Love’ (1921) between Rupert Birkin (Lawrence) and Gerald Crich (Murry) which is based on the relationship between Lawrence and Murry, (Murry was decidedly not impressed) and it is this notion of ‘connection’ which scares Murry to the point of abandoning Lawrence and placing a barrier between them, once again the coward comes to the surface. Murray and Lawrence frequently argued and disagreed on matters of psychological differences and Murry’s belief in the importance and influence of the writings of Dostoevsky (see his ‘Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study’. 1916) which opened Murry up to the possibilities of self analysis; Lawrence blamed Oxford for Murry betraying his class, after all he was uprooted from one class and prepared for another until he was not accepted in either and in doing so became distant with his own family too. Despite all his cowardly actions and snobbish mannerisms I was drawn to Murry and even felt some sort of parallel with my own life, for I am equally ‘inhuman’ and prone to the same ‘snobbish’ abhorrence of ugliness and cowardly interpretations, as perhaps most of us are when the façade of pretence is laid bare. When Katherine has her divorce from her first husband Murry and Katherine marry on 3^rd May 1918 at the Kensington Registry office and although there is a deep love between them it seems the love is deepest when they are not living together and writing to each other about their need for the other. Katherine has a long illness before she died of tuberculosis in France, aged 34 in 1923 and the book, after thirty-two chapters (500 pages) just seems to fade out of existence, like another long illness and like Murry it too has walked between two worlds.

 

Roses, Pearls and Tears – by Raymond Heywood.

This collection of poetry published (by Erskine Macdonald) in 1918 by Lieutenant Raymond Heywood of the Devonshire Regiment is dedicated to ‘the women of the Empire and those of their splendid men who have fallen and to all who have known the discipline of Pain and Sorrow’. Heywood, a deeply sentimental soldier-poet who composed his poems while serving in France and in the East, and who devoted half the proceeds from the book to help the women left by the men from his company who fell, asks: ‘Oh, that it were within my power to stay the hand / of pain and death – the bitter waste of years; / but what is time and life? – when in God’s better land / love lies beyond our Roses, Pearls, and Tears.’ There are some fine poems in the volume, many of which reflect upon the author’s love for Devon: ‘I think that when the roses blow / down Devon way I’ll go again / to some dear, quiet place I know, / and hear the blackbird’s sweet refrain: / there, when the western shadows fall / around my world at close of day, / my heart will understand it all, / and find sweet peace down Devon way.’ (‘Down Devon Way’) and poems that speak of the horror of war such as ‘Eventide at Ypres’: ‘A solemn stillness fills the air, / the shadows long and longer grow; / broad sunbeams lie across the square, / where soldiers come and go; / round ruined tower stray swallows glide / and slowly, slowly sinks the sun / at Ypres – when the day is done. / no more the shattered trees resound / with song of many a happy bird; / but far beyond the fire-swept ground / the crashing guns are heard! / and yet sometimes like whispers sighed / soft breezes through those tree-tops run / at Ypres – when the day is done.’ Many of the poems show a tender manliness towards his fellow soldiers – ‘a little cross, / to compensate my loss; / crushed are the roses’ petals, crimson red, / time does not matter now. My boy is dead.’ (‘Son’) and a homoerotic devotion towards his ‘Tommy lads’ who have had their ‘sweetness pressed from youth and love and life’: ‘To-day my hero-lover went away; / it was so hard to part; / I stand alone – the hours / are sad and long, - the flowers / are drooping, like my heart. / To-day my hero-lover went away. / To-day my hero-lover went away, / he looked so strong, and now / he’ll tread the soil that’s red / with life-blood of God’s dead. / He kissed me on the brow - / my hero-lover when he went away.’ (‘A Prayer’) and again in ‘A Man’s Man’ – ‘he was a man… I linger where his cross / shines white among the shadows, and I know / my very soul is strengthened by my loss. / My comrade still in death – I loved him so.’ It seems difficult to associate Heywood the poet and Heywood the soldier when he writes such beautiful and tender verse as 'Rose Leaves' -

'I did not know so soon would end the day
In which the roses bloomed - scarce had they found
The sun's caresses, when they died away,
And shed their withered petals on the ground.
I did not know that when you had to go,
The sunshine with the roses would depart -
But you'll come back to me one day, and so
I'll keep the rose-leaves fragrant in my heart.'

Heywood is an accomplished minor poet who in my opinion deserves better recognition, but there is a mystery surrounding the poet for I have researched the Army archives and not found a Lieutenant Raymond Heywood serving with the Devonshire Regiment; we know that he fought in France (poems are listed as written at Neuve Chapelle (‘A Soldier Sleeping’, 12^th March 1915) and Givenchy (‘Reverie [in my dugout]’, Autumn 1915); also ‘To a Robin (in Flanders)’ and ‘By Sanctuary Woods’ Ypres) and he was sent to Macedonia, Salonika and was at Doiran (see poem ‘The Discipline of Sorrow’ by Lake Doiran, Serbia 1917) and with that in mind it is probable that he served with the 10^th Service battalion of the Devonshire Regiment and that ‘Raymond Heywood’ is a pseudonym. He did survive the Great War and in 1919 published his second and final volume of poetry, ‘The Greater Love: Poems of Remembrance’ (Elkin Mathews). He should be better known as a poet and sit amongst the ranks of other soldier poets such as Owen and Sassoon and not forgotten and perhaps one day his true story can be told!

The Roof Climbers Guide to Trinity – by Geoffrey Winthrop Young.

I have had this small volume on my reading list for two decades and finally got round to reading it. Published in 1899, the author, poet and mountaineer, Geoffrey Winthrop Young (1876-1958) writes rather wonderfully on the technical skills involved and the various climbing routes of Trinity College, Cambridge, one of the most beautiful of the ‘College Alps’. There is something particularly romantic concerning the art and sport of night climbing, the nocturnal meanderings around the college turrets, towers and rooftops, the midnight expeditions avoiding the proctors and prowling porters; the silent figures (climbers usually climb in pairs) in the shadows like phantoms clinging to drainpipe and gutter, to pillar and parapet, battlement and balustrade, making an ascent upon ‘staircase peak’ or the ‘Great Library chimney’. Young takes us through ‘New Court’, ‘Nevile’s Court’ with its Hall and Reading Room and the chimneys, ‘Castor’ and ‘Pollux’; ‘I Court’, ‘Great Court’, the Chapel and the Library and of course the Great Gate, which was conquered in 1927, the ‘last great peak of the range to fall’, and one really gets a sense of the outlaw undergraduate, the twilight Byronic climber, the unsung hero making the summit – many of the dons turned a blind eye to the practice (some even climbed themselves) and oftentimes the police overlooked the climbers’ gentle art. Prior to the Second World War, another volume which I enjoyed and can recommend for enthusiasts of the art was published in 1937 – ‘The Night Climbers of Cambridge’ by ‘Whipplesnaith’, pseudonym of Noel Howard Symington (1913-1970) which contains some splendid photographs of the young ‘villains’ on such climbs as the ‘Old Library Traverse’ and the ‘O’Hara Pinnacle’ also known as ‘Tottering Tower’; the reader clambers with the author over St John’s, Pembroke, Trinity, Kings and Clare and the Bridge of Sighs, first traversed in 1923 or 24; there’s even the great escape from the roof of Marks & Spencer! Following the popularity of The Roof Climbers Guide to Trinity, Young published his ‘Wall and Roof Climbing’ from Eton College in 1905 which is rather a dull affair on the history of such things as ‘rock versus roof’ and ‘mountain versus wall’; in fact, the only thing I found of interest (and I’m a peculiar sort of chap) was his piece on ‘Interior Climbing’ (doorway, window, chair, table, sofa, mantelpiece, staircase, passages etc.); his volume of reminiscences, ‘The Grace of Forgetting’ (1953) has some delightful descriptions of  halcyon days spent boating, canoeing and punting on the Thames before the world descended into war and his time at Ypres and the Italian Front, but it is with the danger and beauty of the night climb that the reader will think of Young and the majestic pinnacles of the colleges. It makes me wonder if today’s undergraduates experience the pleasure of ‘Wet Bobs Traverse’ or the ‘Kitchen Plateau’, I do hope so!

 

Flannelled Fool: A Slice of Life in the Thirties – by T. C. Worsley.

This absolutely perfect volume of autobiography published in 1967 (I read the 1985 edition) by the schoolmaster and critic, Thomas Cuthbert Worsley (1907-1977) is a delightful account of the author’s early years as the son of the eccentric Dean of Llandaff, a man who ‘disliked and distrusted the Welsh’ and whose life reads like a series of Pickwickian misadventures; of Cuthbert’s time at Cambridge where ‘the years had slipped by under the shadow of a wasteful attachment to a friend’; his complete and utter ignorance of sex, knowing nothing of masturbation at the age of nineteen; his own sexual awakenings during his time as a schoolmaster; the death of his younger brother ‘Bengy’ and his time at Gordonstoun school at the invitation of its founder, Kurt Hahn (1886-1974) where they ending up throwing books at each others’ heads! Born in Durham in 1907, Cuthbert was the fourth of five children born to Frederick William Worsley (1873-1956) and Catherine Ethel Payne (1874-1956) who were married in 1901; his father, Frederick, D.D. (Durham University), M.A. (Cambridge) a man who thought his children were just a distraction and didn’t even bother to visit Cuthbert at Marlborough College where he was ‘always cold and usually hungry’ for the first four years (although he did write once a year on his birthday) is a peculiar sort of man, easily bored by achievements whose ‘remoteness seemed part of his superiority’. At Cambridge (St John’s College) Cuthbert could ‘pride myself after two years at University that I had never opened a book, apart from the set of books for the Classical Tripos: and even these were shamefully neglected’. (p. 41) His father, Canon Worsley who had spent most of his time playing golf, billiards and drawing nude women, anything to distract from clerical duties, became Dean of Llandaff. At home, Canon Worsley and his wife had been estranged for several years, they did not speak to each other and the notion of ‘family’ was just pretence. One day, after a silent dinner, the Dean announced – ‘I am leaving here tomorrow. You can all find yourselves somewhere else to live.’ (p. 56) The next day he left without a word. Later we learn, as did Cuthbert himself, that his father came from a long line of country baronets; Canon Worsley’s brother, Frank, won the ‘Sword of Honour’ and ‘seduced his Colonel’s daughter’ before being wounded and decorated in the Great War, marrying his nurse from the hospital and giving her a daughter, all before discharging himself from hospital, abandoning them and going into permanent hiding which seems a common trait of the Worsley men! The Canon himself, Frederick, was born in Singapore, educated at Brighton College, worked in a bank where there was an ‘incident with the till’, tried to enter the acting profession before deciding to study at London University, take Holy Orders. Not long after his marriage to Catherine in 1901, the ‘first signs of the fatal pattern began to show’, he was ‘bored by his success; he was unhappy as a mere curate.’ He took a ‘living’ in Lincolnshire, a gift from a cousin and spent all his time shooting and fishing; when the first child ‘John’ (actually Francis Frederick Worsley) was born in 1902, the proud mother, Catherine, was shocked to find her husband, the ‘future Dean in what they call a compromising position with the nursery maid’. (p. 141) A ‘bastard son’ was born to the maid and to prevent scandal she was paid off and dismissed. Wanting to better himself, the family spent two years in Durham while Reverend Worsley studied for his Doctorate – it was at Durham that Cuthbert was born on 10^th December 1907. Still unhappy, Frederick wanted an ‘Oxbridge’ education so spent two years at Cambridge – it was at Cambridge in 1912 that the fifth and last child was born: ‘Bengy’ (Richard Geoffrey Worsley). Frederick becomes Assistant Warden at the Theological College in Llandaff before he surprised the family and took off to war as an Army Chaplain in France and Italy. At the end of the war he was reluctant to hurry back to the family – there was a ‘little widow woman in Genoa’ who kept him busy. She even came to England and set up a house in London to which the Warden retreated much too often until he was given an ultimatum and had to remove her from his life; it was this which caused the great rift between Frederick and Catherine Worsley and they hardly spoke a civil word between them for eleven years after until Warden Worsley was made Dean – ‘now there came into the picture a little masseuse from Tonypandy’ whom he took to resorts – why did Catherine put up with this disgraceful behaviour? The end was surely in sight, and so it was, the Dean was forced to resign on ‘ill health’ and as mentioned, walked out of the family home, the official residence of the Dean. For Cuthbert, who admits to being a ‘social, intellectual and athletic’ snob’ cricket and other games supplied a ‘pretence of virility’, but in fact he was hiding his ‘repression of sexual potency. The excessive value placed on the athlete made my ignorance acceptable both to myself and others. It enabled me to escape noticing what in fact was missing. The generalised homo-eroticism which I discovered in the rituals of the playing fields satisfied my inclinations enough to keep them “pure”.’ (p. 89) Another factor, which probably played a major part in the Dean’s decision to break-up the family and in Cuthbert’s development, was the death of the youngest son, Bengy, who had won a scholarship to St Edward’s College, Oxford, by drowning. It occurred one Sunday in July 1928 while Cuthbert and ‘Bengy’, both non-swimmers, were in the sea bathing at Dunraven Bay, Southerndown, Glamorgan. Suddenly, they were swept out of their depth and in the struggle for life, which mother witnessed from the beach, Cuthbert managed to make it to the shore while fifteen year old Bengy was brought back from the waves dead. Cuthbert had to telephone his father, the Dean – ‘”You bloody fool, you!” was his comment.’ (p. 110) Cuthbert goes on to say that ‘however gentle everyone was with me, I had the facts to face. I was alive and he was dead. He, the specially beloved of them all, the little genius, the most precious of any of us, hadn’t survived. I had. And how could I forget that in the final climax of that deadly crisis, I had cast him off? I had torn myself free. If I hadn’t, there would, of course, have been two deaths instead of one. True. But I had, I had actually, physically, deliberately, wilfully torn his clutching hands away from my thighs.’ (p. 111) When Cuthbert left Cambridge he was at a loss as to his future prospects and so he fell into what all apathetic undergraduates fall into – teaching; he became an assistant master at Wellington College (simply known as ‘College’ in the book) and having failed to keep control of the History class had to resort to the administering of a ‘beating’ with the cane; five trouble-makers were ‘massacred’ in this way and the discipline problem was solved! ‘Cuthie’ reveals some frank sexual feelings and activities such as his first memorable erection as a schoolboy at Brightlands School when he was in Mr. Donavon’s side-car with his chosen ‘little friend’ on his knee, or his ten days in Munich with a boy named Heinz who showed him what to do with his erection, or his seduction of Mr. Leith, one of the masters at Wellington, all rather quaint now but in the thirties really quite dangerous behaviour (though not uncommon). There’s the usual disagreements and fights between the younger, more ‘left-wing’ members of staff, and the unmovable, traditional, ‘old-guard’, masters such as ‘Talboys’ (Rollo St. Clare Tallboys, 1877-1953) and ‘Hoffman, the Hun’, differences which figure prominently among schoolmasters and the Headmaster, Malim (Frederick Blagden Malim who was Master from 1921-37) who walks a line between the two factions. Later, we hear that his father, four years after walking out on the family is asking for £500 or he will be in jail – apparently he tried to set himself up as an Estate Agent in Portsmouth and his partner went off with the deposits – the money was sent to him, ‘twice’; eventually he was ‘pensioned off’ if he ‘promised to stay put in Bath and not attempt any more business ventures’. (p. 138-9) And here he remained, taking up bowls (during the war he became a clerk in the Admiralty Administrative Branch, in Bath, and some years after the war ‘died at his desk’, aged 82. Cuthbert, like his father, feels the boredom of his profession and wants adventure and time to write (he had several poems and articles published in various periodicals and papers), and so, aged 26 and feeling alone, he left ‘College’ and became a private tutor. With the beginnings of a novel he eventually abandons, he is enticed to Gordonstoun school for a term by its Headmaster (and founder in 1934), Kurt Hahn to give a report on conditions and teaching practices there while working on his novel and playing a little cricket which sounds idyllic – the report is not favourable to Hahn and the comic scene of the books being thrown at each other ensues. The novel is discarded and through his friendship with the poet Stephen Spender he goes to Spain and during the Civil War woks as part of an ambulance unit; in the second World War he joins the RAF and finds it all ‘drill and bull’ before suffering a nervous breakdown and being discharged until he finds his place among the staff of the New Statesman. This is such a charming and rewarding volume of autobiography that it leaves trails of faint joy in the mind which remains, eternal. Cuthbert wrote several works under the name T. C. Worsley, such as ‘Behind the Battle’ (1939), ‘The Fugitive Art: Dramatic Commentaries 1947-1951’ (1952), ‘Television: The Ephemeral Art’ (1970) and ‘Fellow Travellers’ (1971). He became ill with emphysema in 1964 and had to retire due to ill health in 1972; in increasing pain, he took an overdose at his home in Brighton on 23^rd February 1977.

Ronald Firbank – by Jocelyn Brooke.

Published in 1951, this biography of the innovative and sensitive novelist Ronald Firbank by the author, Jocelyn Brooke (1908-1966) is a fascinating and enjoyable read. Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank was born in London in January 1886, the son of Sir Thomas Firbank M.P., Ronald, as he became known, is a rather vague and mysterious figure who seemed to create his own legend; a shy and reserved man with a mother fixation who became a striking, rather eccentric character in literary circles. As a sickly child, he was spoilt endlessly by his mother and accustomed to the luxuries life had to offer. In 1906 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, instead of the more aesthetically enlightened Oxford, having already published his ‘Odette’, he became quickly sought out and talked about by literary-minded undergraduates, yet he seems to have done little at Cambridge, except host decadently lavish parties in his splendidly furnished rooms, in fact, his ‘time there was a pleasant interlude, nothing more.’ (p. 31) He was up at Cambridge during the time Oscar Wilde’s son, Vyvyan Holland (1886-1967) was there in the Michaelmas term of 1906 and they became close friends; Vyvyan recalls his friendship with Ronald in his excellent volume, ‘Son of Oscar Wilde’ (1954) where he says that ‘he was quite unfitted for playing any games, and I do not think he ever did much work. I never knew what he read, but he must have read something or he would not have been allowed to stay up.’ He goes on to say that ‘Ronald Firbank and I came down together in June, 1909. During the whole of his time at Cambridge, Ronald not only never passed an examination, but never sat for one,’ He became a Roman Catholic convert in 1907 and was received the following year. He left Cambridge in June 1909 without a degree and with no future plans he seemed destined for the diplomatic service according to his father’s wishes, but Sir Thomas died in 1910, a ‘blessing in not a very deep disguise.’ (p. 37) Ronald’s tall, slender, stooping figure and frivolous behaviour became well-known amongst the aesthetes and other habitués of the Café Royal, clinging to fin de siecle traditions; he was extremely shy and awkward, a neurotic aloof introvert and he was vain also, ‘staining his finger nails with carmine’ and endlessly dieting – he would sustain himself on ‘peaches and Champagne, varied occasionally by a caviar sandwich.’ (p. 42); he overly indulged in alcohol and drugs and found it tedious to settle down – Paris was his spiritual home. In 1911 he travelled to Egypt and became interested in Egyptology – ‘It is said, too, that at about this time he became deeply interested in magic, under the influence of Aleister Crowley.’ (p. 38). Grant Richards, in his excellent ‘Author Hunting’ of 1960, describes Firbank as ‘the most nervous man I had dealings with and in some ways he was both cunning and suspicious’, a man who had ‘dealings with wizards, crystal-gazers, astrologers and soothsayers’. At the outbreak of war in 1914, he retired to Oxford and spent his time writing his early novels: ‘Vainglory’ (1915), ‘Inclinations’ (1916) and ‘Caprice’ (1917) before returning to London; his novel ‘Valmouth’ appeared in 1919, and his works show the breezy, gossipy dialogue and innovative narrative for which he became known for as an author. His mother, Lady Harriet Firbank died in 1924 and Ronald’s health began to break down. His last novel was the wonderful ‘Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli’ published posthumously in 1926; a tragedy set in Spain, written in a series of scenes reminiscent of that other Catholic eccentric, Frederick Rolfe, which opens with the christening of a dog at the Cathedral and leads, through rather bawdy and unorthodox practices to the final scene, which reflects Bloxam’s ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ of 1894, where the satyr-like Cardinal, naked, ‘nude and elementary now as Adam himself’, except for his Mitre, is in pursuit of Chicklet, the choirboy, who had been chasing mice in the Cathedral, missed the responses and failed to attend to the Cardinal. He is subsequently locked in the Cathedral, alone with the mice. Feeling remorse, Pirelli goes to free the boy who is ‘witching as Eros, in his loose-flowing, alb’ and mad with desire and lust, Pirelli chases Chicklet through the dark aisles of the Basilica, like a ‘dance of death’; the ghostly shadows  haunting like some gothic, Anne Radcliffe-inspired ‘Udolpho’; unable to grasp the boy, the Cardinal falls lifeless to the floor. In ill health, Ronald moved between Rome, Egypt, Paris and London and he died in Rome on 21^st March 1926, aged 40, and like some farcical episode in one of his delightful novels, having been mistakenly buried in the Protestant cemetery he was removed and interred in the Catholic cemetery: his life and work seemed inseparable and distinctive to the end. His enduring appeal has produced several biographies, all of which I enjoyed and can recommend, from the excellent biography by Miriam Benkovitz (1970) who also wrote the Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo) volume in 1977 and the Firbank Bibliography (1963); the rather uninspired James Douglas Merritt’s offering of 1969 and the rambling 1973 volume by Brigid Brophy, ‘Prancing Novelist: a Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank’, all are worthy, but I found Brooke and Benkovitz more interesting!

Married to a Single Life: An Autobiography 1901-1938 – by Wilfrid Blunt.

Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt (1901-1987), artist, botanical illustrator, and man of many interests, was born in Surrey, the son of the Reverend Arthur Stanley Vaughan Blunt and Hilda Violet Master and brother of the more familiar, Anthony Frederick Blunt (1907-1983), the art historian and Russian spy. In this 1983 publication, Wilfrid speaks quite frankly about his life in the teaching profession and his sexuality throughout eleven delightful chapters which begin with his arrival or ‘invention’ for he says he was ‘invented, along with the vacuum cleaner and the Dorothy Perkins rambler, in the year 1901.’ The family move to Bournemouth in 1906 which is where his love of flowers begins and along with his brother, Christopher Evelyn Blunt (1904-1987) he enjoys collecting butterflies, which they called ‘bugs’ – one amusing fragment concerns his brother, Christopher, who is showing the Bishop of Winchester his specimens and casually asks, ‘I say, Bishop, are you a bugger too?’ (p. 16). Another interest, astronomy, is ignited at his prep school, Hazelhurst in 1912 while his family are living in Paris. Wilfred then attends Marlborough College with its brutal conditions and prison-like atmosphere where barbaric rituals are the order of the day – if you wish to know the delights of the game called ‘bum-shaving’ or the joys of ‘hot-potting’ (p. 60-61) then this is a book for you! He left Marlborough in 1920 and won a scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford in October of that year as an open mathematical exhibitioner and it was here that he fell in love for the first time (Wilfrid is a late developer, sexually), with his friend, Rupert Goodall – for a similar view of Marlborough at this time and its tender flirtations see T. C. Worsley’s marvellous autobiographical volume ‘Flannelled Fool’ (1967). Blunt studies at the Royal College of Art and becomes the art master at Haileybury College from 1923-1938 under the Headmaster, John ‘Bottie’ Talbot and finds himself in love once more with a boy at the College, Stephen Haggard, who went on to become a talented young actor; Wilfrid confesses his love for Stephen and the latter is shocked and although they remained friends the love was never reciprocated – Stephen died in February 1943 at the age of 32. In 1938 Wilfrid became the art master at Eton which he touches upon in this fist volume of autobiography (he remained there until 1959) with its Common Room flutters of romance and outrages from the traditionalists at notions of change; it is at Eton that Blunt finds an interest in pottery which is soon overshadowed by a fascination for singing in which he almost obsessively begins to train and develop his vocal range – like the butterflies his brother collected, Wilfrid seems to flit from one interest to another, yet, he is always drawn to teaching. A further volume of autobiography, ‘Slow on the Feather’ published in 1986 looks at his Eton years (1938-1959) and one wonders whether a third volume was intended from 1959-1983 where he was the curator of Watt’s Gallery in Guildford, Surrey. Blunt died in Guildford in 1987 and ‘Married to a Single Life’, with its abundance of photographic illustrations, is an absolutely enjoyable read!

 

The Story of the Catholic Church – by Cuthbert Wright.

Cuthbert Wright (1899-1948), a fine poet who has appeared in ‘Eight Harvard Poets’ (1917) takes us on a breezy jaunt through history in this 1926 publication which tells the story of the development of the Catholic Church. Of course it begins at the beginning with the story of Jesus, an ‘obscure Syrian peasant’ and goes on to recall the Saints and martyrs, those instigators, or should one say perpetrators, of Christianity, such as the very ‘human’ Saint Augustin and his confessions – ‘O God make me chaste, but not yet’ which seems to suggest the whole of the Catholic Church’s attitude to sex and celibacy in one sentence; in fact, there has always been an element of sensuality and seduction involved with the Church, whether spiritual or physical – ‘Religion is another Eros which allures and never satisfies.’ (p. 83) There are some delightful nuggets too: the heretic Arius died in a latrine, don’t you know! But Catholicism is a serious business and the Dark Ages are filled with ascetics, hermits and solitaries (monasticism) before Saint Benedict (480-543) gave us the notion of the cloistered sanctuary (Carthusians, Cluniacs and Cistercians) and then we arrive at the pilgrimages and crusades into the Holy Land, the first in 1095 in which several hundred Jews and Arabs are slaughtered and thus begins a pattern throughout history for killing in the name of God; there are other crusades, failures and fiascos which define the Middle Ages before we come to the interesting ‘feudal’ period of Papal celibacy in which married priests are excommunicated or even killed; in England, Henry II finds Church Law too lenient and so makes his friend, deacon Thomas a Becket, Arch Bishop of Canterbury believing that Becket is mine, therefore the Church is mine also! But Becket took his duties seriously and as Primate of the English Church refused to sign the King’s ‘Clarendon Articles’ (constitutions limiting Rome’s grip on the English Church) which would have given England independence from the Catholic Church and an allegiance to the Church of God. In 1164 the king ordered that Becket be arrested yet the nimble Archbishop, following the Convocation at Northampton (a feast for the poor of the city), flees to the continent. He returns to England six years later, arriving at Canterbury where the ‘pestilent priest’ excommunicates the English Bishops. Four knights knowing of the King’s rage against Becket, travel from Normandy and on the day following Christmas, the eve of the Holy Innocents 1170, Becket is in the sanctuary of the Cathedral when the four knights rush the nave and strike him, dashing his brains out, the violation of the Church causes outrage and eventually makes Becket the martyr, Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Wright sails us through the conversion of Saint Francis, the abiding to poverty and chastity, the redemption and restoration which led to the revolt of feudalism between the serfs and the barons before he guides us through the turbulent waters of Rome and the Renaissance and how art and the church embrace one another, from the Romanesque to the birth of Gothic in 13^th century England and France and into the crashing waves of 16^th century England and King Henry VIII with his application to Pope Clement VII for divorce which the Pope delays over which results in Henry’s Act of Supremacy in 1534 making the King not the Pope the Head of the Church of England (the Church remained, like Henry, Catholic); Protestant sympathies creep in with Archbishop Cranmer under King Edward and thus begins the destruction of the monasteries – Queen Mary, who is very Catholic (high church, ritualistic) has three-hundred Protestants burnt, including Cranmer until a new English renaissance begins under Catholic Queen Elizabeth whereby Protestants are tolerated until rival Queen Mary Stuart persecutes the Roman Catholics. Wright introduces the birth of Baroque art and Michelangelo before the  joys of the Inquisition under Phillip II of Spain – Mary Stuart is executed and her legacy leaves the ‘crown’ to Phillip who in turn plans the invasion of England to restore the Catholic faith; his Armada is defeated in the Channel in 1588. From the French Revolution we enter upon the modern age of Romanticism, with the Oxford Movement of Newman, Pusey and Keble and the Catholic theory and philosophy continues with Cardinal Manning, Huxley and Matthew Arnold before the horrors of the First World War of 1914. When laid out meticulously before one it is not difficult to see how ludicrous the Catholic Church is but also how hypnotically powerful defined by its papal wealth and intrinsic religious hold of history, its vestments draw one in to the ritualistic devotion of Christ and the Saints. A number of artists and writers have turned towards Rome and the Liturgy in the past and no doubt will continue to do so. I can understand the appeal from a romantic standpoint, the lure of the sensual ceremony of the mass, but I am also drawn to the equally rich, pagan, satanic rituals of the occult with their obscene and cruel deities, both have their poetic beauty. The history of the Catholic Church is a long one which continues to grow and develop, slowly into a new century and like the centuries before it strives to stir the spirit of the faithful and define its relevance to our daily lives. Wright has written an objective and perceptive account of the origins of the Catholic Church and shows a deep understanding of the fabric of worship where faith is our only strength, in the Catholic sense, faith in prayer and faith in the authenticity of the Gospels for the ‘basic axiom of all religion is faith, and nothing but faith.’ (p. 288)

 

Prompting the Age: Poems Early and Late – by A. L. Rowse.

I have read many works by the poet and Tudor historian, Alfred Leslie Rowse (1903-1997), from his autobiography ‘A Cornish Childhood’ (1942), and his ‘Strange Encounter’ (1972), ‘Homosexuality in History’ (1977) and ‘The Road to Oxford’ (1978) to his ‘Collected Poems’ (1981) and I find him strangely compelling – I recently read the superb biography about Rowse: ‘A Man of Contradiction: A Life of A. L. Rowse’ by Richard Lawrence Ollard (2000) which is a must read for enthusiasts of Rowse the scholar and poet. ‘Prompting the Age’, published in 1990 and dedicated to Harold Acton is a collection of 75 poems which lies somewhat between the Auden and the Betjeman in their feel. Rowse says that his poetry expresses the ‘private side of my life, where all the history I was writing, by which I earned my living, represented the public side.’ Rowse is an observer of humanity, with little sympathy for them – ‘it is fitting that the weak in general / should go to the wall.’ (‘Humans’) The sexual undercurrents are definitely detectable with ‘shy sexy talk’ and ‘phallic cigarettes’ and the act itself is often suggested unflinchingly in such poems as ‘Crickhowel’ where ‘lascivious lovers, hide behind the trees,’ and ‘the sight of lovers, to accost the eyes. / each cosy nook of coast is not without / its couple about to copulate.’ It is disturbing to think that just before the wild abandon of penetration during the delights of al fresco sex some idle ‘passer by’ poet is watching your sweet tremors of ejaculation from some seclusion in great detail – be warned fellow enthusiasts of external passions! In ‘Voices’ we hear the ‘veritable voice of love’ and in ‘Monmouthshire Bus’ we tremble at the sight where ‘Summer sighs out / its heart in loaded boughs of sycamore’, a sight which surely explodes upon the senses like those copulating couples. Rowse’s poetry has an amusing and earthy quality which is sometimes unexpected; in ‘Sunday Evening at Stratford’ he reflects on how ‘men go to wives – the expectant ritual of marriage bed. / the diurnal routine of vapid lives: / would it not be better to be dead?’ Perhaps, for there is always the possibility that one’s spirit shall remain as long as it ‘does not poke his nose in jug / like an ill-mannered pup or pug, / confines himself to sniffing roses’ (‘The Spirit of the House’) – what an elegant way to spend the afterlife – sniffing roses (and spying on copulating couples, no doubt!)  

 

Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator – by Jean Findlay.

Jean Findlay, the great, great niece of Scott Moncrieff, has written such an evocative account of the poet and translator’s life, that one feels the long wait for a biography has been almost worth it. And so it has, for Findlay draws extensively on unpublished letters in this 2014 publication and slowly shapes the man who would famously translate Proust and show his two characteristics, that of the purely masculine, the heroic soldier of the Great War, and that of the private, feminine aesthete who was comfortable with his own sexuality. Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, born in Scotland in1889, the son of William George Scott Moncrieff (1846-1927) and Jessie Margaret Scott Moncrieff (1858-1936), was educated at Winchester College on a scholarship in 1903. Four years later in 1907, he met Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Baldwin Ross (1869-1918) who often held literary salons at his house, 40 Half Moon Street, Mayfair, (see the excellent and perceptive 1990 biography, ‘Wilde’s Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross’ by Maureen Borland which I heartily recommend); Robert, who appears to be a most faithful and diligent friend, introduced Charles to his private secretary and fellow Wilde enthusiast and scholar, the bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller, Christopher Sclater Millard (1872-1927); Millard, a ‘Jacobite’ and Roman Catholic of Keble College, Oxford, lived at the Bungalow, 8 Abercorn Place, St. John’s Wood and was almost reckless in his flagrant encounters with men compared to Charles with his discretion (see Maria Roberts’ excellent biography ‘Yours Loyally: A Life of Christopher Sclater Millard’. 2014 and also ‘The Quest for Corvo’ by A. J. A. Symons. 1934). In 1908 the family moved to Edinburgh and Charles studied Law and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh; in the same year, he met a young fellow Scot who became his friend and lover, Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890-1918) of Trinity College, Cambridge, who later went on to become a classics master at Shrewsbury School. It is not surprising to learn that in the same year, Scott Moncrieff’s short story, with its outrageously homo-erotic beginning suggesting an act of schoolboy fellatio, ‘Evensong and Morwe Song’ was published in the ‘New Field’ literary magazine. Charles graduated in 1914 with the intention of going to either Oxford or Cambridge but he did quite poor in the entrance examinations and as signs of war were looming he was commissioned into the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. In France, Charles found ‘God in the trenches’ and became a Catholic convert while in Ypres in July1915, going to mass at every opportunity and recording the churches and chapels he visited in his notebook. In April 1917 he was wounded in the leg at Arras and was forever lame; during that year Charles had several poems published in the anthology, ‘The Muse in Arms’ by E. B. Osborn. On 23^rd January 1918 while at the wedding of the poet, Robert Graves, Charles met the young, handsome soldier poet, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) and for Charles it was love at first sight but Owen remained an unrequited love for Charles; soon after, Charles introduced Owen to Bainbrigge and they met at an oyster bar in Scarborough on 22^nd February 1918 and an intimate friendship was born – Scott Moncrieff was to lose the two dearest friends and loves of his life to the war: Bainbrigge was killed in action on 18^th September 1918 and Owen not long after, on 4^th November; Charles was devastated and in a poem to Bainbrigge he boldly wrote: ‘Mind of my intimate mind, I claim thee lover.’ Another young soldier friend who was dear to Charles died soon after Owen, a poet named Ian Hume Mackenzie Townsend who never saw action and died in Edinburgh aged just 20 on 12^th December 1918 – his only volume of poetry ‘Forgotten Places’, a volume which is dear to my own heart, was published posthumously in 1919. Charles wrote of Townsend that: ‘Like fire, I saw thee / smiling, running, leaping, glancing and consuming’. After the war Charles met and became friends with the young actor and playwright Noel Coward and together they enjoy themselves in the literary sport of lampooning the Sitwells. His first translation the ‘Song of Roland’ appears in 1919 followed by ‘Beowulf’ in 1921 and a year later the first of his seven volume masterful Proust translation of ‘Remembrance of Things Past’: ‘Swann’s Way’. Findlay goes into great detail over the translations and shows what a brilliant and instinctive translator Scott Moncrieff was with his fascination for ancestry and obsession for accuracy, he brought Proust to life for many English speaking readers of the time, particularly within the Bloomsbury circle. Perhaps we should not be too surprised to learn that this man of tireless endeavours also worked for the Secret Service as a spy in fascist Italy in 1923 and there became enamoured for the works of the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) whom he considered quite a genius and wanted to translate his complete works into English but sadly Proust had consumed him, the final volume appearing in 1930, the year Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff died of stomach cancer in Rome aged just 40. At a little over 350 pages and at 16 chapters, Findlay has produced a lasting tribute to Scott Moncrieff, ‘a man who one day could write a metaphysical poem of great depth, and on the next a filthy, funny limerick’ (p. 295) and like the translator, Findlay’s biography will remain timeless!

Confessions of a Convert – by R. H. Benson.

Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914), Catholic priest and author was ‘brought up’, he says in his ‘Confessions of a Convert’ published in 1913, ‘in an ecclesiastical household for twenty-five years; I was a clergyman for nine years, in town and country and a Religious House. My father was the spiritual head of the Anglican communion’ (p. 3-4) In fact, Hugh’s father was Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, whom he goes on to describe as a stern and remarkable man, outlining his father’s Anglican principles, contradictions and religious matters – ‘Religion at home, then, was always coloured and vivified by my father’s individuality’. (p. 10) He admits that his father ‘dominated me completely by his own forcefulness’ and Hugh, his youngest son who suffered with a stammer, tried always to impress and please him. Prior to reading the ‘Confessions’ I read the excellent two volume ‘Life of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson’ published in 1916 by the Jesuit, C. C. Martindale which quotes extensively from ‘Confessions’, various letters and a book I read in conjunction – ‘Hugh: Memoirs of a Brother’ published in 1915 (I read the 1920 edition) by A. C. Benson who says in his preface that Hugh’s ‘life before he became a Catholic had a charm and vigour of its own’; Martindale who knew Hugh as ‘too keen and alert to new impressions’ mentions Hugh’s close friendship with Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo) although understandably not going into too much detail as to why the relationship turned sour and their friendship ended with Corvo spitting vitriol from every direction at Hugh. As the youngest child, Hugh, when not ‘throwing stones at goldfish in the pond’ or ‘bored and irritated by the poems of George Herbert’, grew up amongst his elder creative siblings: Arthur Christopher Benson (1862-1925), schoolmaster at Eton (1885-1903) and Magdalene College, Cambridge (1915-25) critic and author whom he grew closer to in later life; Edward Frederick Benson (1867-1940), novelist and socialite, and Margaret Benson (1865-1916), author and Egyptologist. Hugh was closest in affection to his mother, Mary, with whom he shared all his thoughts and Hugh was probably the least affected of the Benson oddities. Young Hugh seems quite an ordinary if somewhat spoilt boy, as we can see from this letter dated 10^th July 1881 from his sister Maggie to their brother, Arthur: ‘Hugh has a frightful craze for inventing murderous instruments. He has invented one guillotine and two guns.’ (‘Life and Letters of Maggie Benson’. A. C. Benson. 1917. p. 41); he went to Eton College in 1885 and was confirmed in 1887 which must have pleased his father, yet he takes it all quite matter of fact. He describes his interest in Theosophy and Swedenborgianism, and his deep fascination for the supernatural or ‘mystical’ element of religion, particularly through music; he was drawn to the self-discipline of denial and asceticism through the simple ritual of the spirit – he believed in moral beauty more than external beauty. On a mountain in Switzerland he had a near-death experience when he fell unconscious – ‘I neither feared God nor loved Him’ (p. 26). Failing his attempt to enter the Indian Civil Service he goes up to Trinity College, Cambridge to study classics and theology in 1890 and chose the life of a clergyman: ‘marriage seemed to me then, as always, quite inconceivable’. (p. 29) He studied under Dean Charles John Vaughan at Llandaff in 1893 and was ordained as a deacon in 1894 ‘after a very strange, solitary retreat, in which for about a week all religious sense deserted me.’ (p. 32) This retreat took place near Lincoln and it was filled with prayer and meditation; A. C. Benson in ‘Hugh’ says that he was in a state of ‘tense excitement’ and that the ‘solitude and introspection had an alarmingly depressing effect upon him’ in which he found ‘no truth in religion’, that ‘Jesus Christ was not God’ and that ‘life was an empty sham’, declaring that he was ‘if not the chiefest of sinners, at any rate the most monumental of fools’. His faith returned and he began his work at the Eton Mission (Hackney Wick) in 1895. He was ordained as a priest by his father the same year and ‘went into the Addington woods alone, telling myself that I was now a priest’. (p. 39) Following the death of his father in October 1896, Hugh, weak in health, a ‘great smoker of cheap cigarettes’ (‘Hugh’), left the Eton Mission and went to Egypt, returning through the Holy Land and was enlightened by the view that the Anglican Church was isolated, ‘lonely and provincial’ (p. 46) and thus the stirrings of his conversion began to radiate; the Holy Land had ‘revived again his sense of beauty and width of proportion’ (‘Hugh’. p. 219) From May 1897-June1898 he took a curacy at St Mary the Virgin, Kemsing, Kent before going to Mirfield, a Benedictine-like theological community where he took his vows in 1901 and immersed himself in study and prayer; he could see that Anglicanism and Catholicism both had their defects: the Anglican had a ‘certitude of faith, the unity of believers’ while the Catholic ‘flaws are merely those of flawed humanity, inseparable from the state of imperfection in which all men are placed’ (p. 151-152). He left Mirfield in 1903 and had come to the conclusion that ‘there is nothing secular but sin’ (p. 155). In September 1903 he was received into the Catholic Church and ordained as priest the following year mostly to the disapproval of the ecclesiastical community who believed he was being disloyal to his late father, although his family stood by his decision and did not falter in their love for Hugh. Monsignor Hugh Benson died of pneumonia in Salford on 19^th October 1914 with his brother Arthur at his side; he was buried in the orchard at his reputedly haunted Hare Street house in Hertfordshire which he had bought and restored and lived in for several years before his death. Despite the reverence and confessional aspect of the volume, one cannot help feeling that Hugh leaves a lot unsaid and much of his priestly yearnings is a romantic desire for the elegant accoutrements of Catholicism, which drew many a soul to its confines. ‘Confessions of a Convert’ is a very rewarding book and a beautiful, thought-provoking entrance into the world of his various writings!

 

 As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil: The Impossible Life of Mary Benson – by Rodney Bolt.

Coming hot off the heels of Arthur Benson’s ‘Life and Letters of Maggie Benson’ (1917) I plunged straight into Rodney Bolt’s ‘As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil’ (he takes the title from a remark made by the composer Ethel Smyth about Mary Benson) which was published in 2011 (I read a 2012 edition). The book is produced in three parts and it tells the story of Mary ‘Minnie’ Sidgwick (1841-1918) born in Skipton, Yorkshire who having at the age of just eleven attracted the attention of her older second cousin, Edward White Benson (1829-1896) twelve years her senior who was ordained deacon in 1853 and priest in 1857; Edward and Mary came to an understanding when she reached the mature age of twelve and he twenty-four through an intimate correspondence that they will one day marry – Edward ‘restrained his passionate nature for 7 years, and then got me!’ (p. 54) The marriage took place in Rugby on 23^rd June 1859; initially Mary had no ‘real’ love for Edward, but she felt a devotional duty towards him, Mary travelled abroad for the first time during their honeymoon to Switzerland. On their return at the end of July 1859, Mary found herself almost forced into settling down to married life at Wellington College, in Berkshire where Edward was Headmaster from 1859-1872, and a very good one by accounts inspired by Dr. Arnold; Edward ran a quite brutal regime of discipline at Wellington and Mary came to be liked by the boys. Mary desperately wanted to please Edward but she found the keeping of accounts, paying bills and other forms of ‘household management’ a dull and tedious affair and often neglected her duties which displeased Edward immensely and caused many a hurt word. Edward, since his days as a schoolmaster at Rugby (1852), had suffered from neuralgia and dark depressive moods which only intensified at Wellington. Another aspect of Mary’s behaviour which infuriated him was her interest in spiritualism and participation in séances with her philosopher brother Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) who had an interest in the occult; Edward denounced spiritualism and forbade his wife to continue in these. In the year after the marriage, their first child Martin White Benson (1860-1878) was born (with a stammer) soon followed by: Arthur Christopher Benson (1862-1925), Eleanor Mary ‘Nellie’ Benson (1863-1890), Margaret ‘Maggie’ Benson (1865-1916), Edward Frederick Benson (1867-1940) and Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914) who also suffered from a stammer – none of the children were to marry. After the birth of Hugh in 1871, Mary had a breakdown, she was diagnosed with neurasthenia and sent to Scotland to recuperate and failing this to Germany and it was there that she met and fell in love with Ellen Hall. Mary had always been attracted to her own sex and Mary’s love for women went beyond mere infatuation, there was a deep mental, physical and even spiritual attraction for her and her close relationships formed with young women seemed to fulfil something that Edward could not achieve; she saw these relationships with women, these ‘carnal affections’ or ‘fusings’ as a sacred and divine aspect of love which gave her spiritual satisfaction as well as physical; in fact, it was these relationships which, mostly with Edward’s blessing, sustained their marriage and kept Mary relatively sane and interested in life. Ellen was one of many girls to attract Mary’s romantic inclinations: just before Fred’s birth in 1867, the 26 year old Mary fell in love with Emily Edwardes, said to be ‘number 39’ in her list of lovers; Emily and her mother who indulged in spiritualism with Mary (séances, automatic writing, table-tipping etc.) lived at the haunted Yately Hall and after Mary spent a week with Emily at Hastings to recover from Fred’s birth, she came home and confessed all to Edward, who with gracious understanding, forgave her and relations improved. This seemed to become a pattern in Mary’s life and Edward came to see how important Mary’s female friendships were to her and to the peace and harmony of their marriage. Soon after Mary returned from Germany and the arms of Ellen, Edward became Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral (1883-1896), but Mary was racing towards her own spiritual crisis. This crisis played out during a relationship she formed in 1875 with an older mysterious Evangelical woman named Mrs Mylne, whom Mary called ‘Tan’, it was this woman with her strong, domineering personality and spiritual beliefs which led Mary back to God again. And so Edward became Bishop of Truro in Cornwall in 1877 (until 1882) but congratulations were soon followed by commiserations the following year when the Benson’s eldest son, Martin, who showed exceptional scholastic promise, died at school in Winchester aged just 17 of ‘brain fever’ (meningitis); Edward blamed himself for pushing the boy’s scholarly education and sank into his depression yet it was Mary who was strong and gave strength and spiritual support to Edward. Love blossomed once again for Mary the next year (1879) when she met Charlotte Mary Basset, a woman whose riches were gained in copper mining, and she became known to Mary as ‘Chat’. Edward accepted the Archbishopric of Canterbury (1883-1896) and the Benson’s moved to the sprawling Lambeth Palace where Mary came into her own as the Archbishop’s wife, losing her youthful shyness, organising occasions with authority and entertaining guests with charm and wit. She met the composer Ethel Smyth in 1885 who was 27 to Mary’s 44 and fell in love with her but to her surprise Ethel fell in love with Mary’s daughter, Nellie, who reciprocated her affections and caused much jealousy in Mary, but tragedy struck when Nellie died of diphtheria in October 1890, aged 27. Mary’s broken heart swiftly alighted upon Lucy Tait (1856-1938), the daughter of the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Campbell Tait (1811-1882) following the death of Nellie, in fact it was Edward’s idea that Lucy should live with them as a companion or ‘replacement daughter’ for Mary, much to the annoyance of Maggie Benson, who had returned from her archaeological excavations in Egypt with her new lover – the shy and retiring, Janet ‘Nettie’ Gourlay (1863-1912), whom Maggie had met in 1896 while assisting Maggie on the dig in Karnak at the Temple of Mut (they published their account of the dig in a book: ‘The Temple of Mut in Asher’ together in 1899); it seems that homosexuality or some diversion of the sex instinct ran rampant through the Benson family: Mary Benson’s desire for women, her two daughters, Maggie and Nellie, expressing the same needs and her sons, Arthur (who after a failed homosexual romantic attachment at Cambridge avoided all forms of intimacy) and Frederic, the socialite who sought his same-sex affections in villas on the isle of Capri and of course Hugh who was devoutly celibate, or so we are led to believe. There is also  this same-sex desire found in the Sidgwick family, for example, Mary’s brother, Henry, the philosopher, despite marrying Eleanor Mildred Balfour, had strong homosexual urges throughout his life; and Mary’s nephew, Arthur Hugh Sidgwick (1882-1917) [cousin of the Benson siblings and son of Mary’s brother, the Rugby schoolmaster, Arthur Sidgwick (1840-1920)], of Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford, who became a schoolmaster and author, was also homosexual. Mary soon started over-eating, binging heartily and thus she became bulimic; Arthur sank into depression. Tragedy struck once more when in October 1896 Mary’s husband, Edward, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died during a visit to the Gladstones at Harwarden (he was buried at Canterbury). Unable to remain at Lambeth Palace, Mary and her lover Lucy, the children: Maggie and Fred, move to Winchester, and later in 1899 to Tremans house, a fine rambling pile in Horsted Keynes, Sussex and it was here that Mary once again took an interest in spiritualism and the occult. Arthur brought his friends such as George Mallory and Edmund Gosse to Tremans and Maggie brought her lover Nettie; Hugh, who was in the process of converting to Catholicism, had become enamoured and involved with the sham Catholic priest, Frederick Rolfe, whom he brought to Tremans and whom Fred elegantly described as ‘picturesque and depraved and devil-ridden’ (p. 308-9). Along with the strange sexual weavings of the Benson family there ran a touch of madness which broke out at intervals throughout the parents and siblings – Edward suffered much from his dark depressive feelings and so did Arthur who spent much of his time in despair and in nursing homes due to his depression and sometimes suicidal feelings; now Maggie had succumbed and in 1907 her odd behaviour increased and she ‘tried to strangle herself with a piece of string. She set her bedroom curtains alight’. (p. 316) She became delusional and even violent and had to be restrained and tied up after she either tried to murder her mother or kill herself, the record of this is vague and perhaps deliberately so. Maggie was committed to St. George’s Convent, an institution for the insane and later sent to the Priory in Roehampton. Arthur believed it to be a break-out of the Benson insanity and was reassured that the madness would not continue as neither of the siblings married or had offspring. In October 1913 Maggie was sent to Wimbledon for private care and just a year later Hugh died, caused by over-work and pneumonia. Maggie never really regained her faculty of reasoning and died in May 1916. During the following summer of 1917 Arthur suffered a complete mental collapse and had to retire to a nursing home to recover as Mary became increasingly deaf – she died on 15^th June 1918 and Arthur joined her in 1925. After Mary’s death it was left to Fred, who would continue to enjoy life until his own death in 1940, to clear the Benson paraphernalia at Tremans and he took great delight in burning some of the ‘dangerous stuff that had better perish’. (p. 345) Despite this loss of manuscripts, diaries and letters, the Bensons, who may appear as a ‘fuddy-duddy’ collection of dusty scholars and clerics, egotistical and much too inward looking and family obsessed for comfort, proved to be quite modern in their attitudes to sex and sexuality and they are assured a place in literary history and their memory shall never perish; they created numerous novels, poems, autobiographical and critical works which increase our understanding of the Victorian and Edwardian literary period for which we should be thankful! A very fascinating book indeed! 

The Cement Garden – by Ian McEwan.

Published in 1978, Ian McEwan’s first novel is reminiscent of a gothic tale of horror yet it is placed in the modern world, a world of teenagers, tower blocks and sports cars surrounded by childish logic which is in places amusing and tragic. The narrator of the novel, a 14 year old boy dealing with all the complex issues that acne demands of him named Jack who presents a portrait of his life with his parents and three siblings and the strange relationship between them all; in fact, soon into the novel there is the incestuous game of ‘doctors’ played by the young Jack and his elder sister by two years, Julie, upon Jack’s younger sister by two years, Sue which although a charming exploration of childhood’s infatuation with the mysteries of sex and the differences between the male and the female, the game almost oversteps the boundaries of decent behaviour. Jack seems driven by an outsider’s point of view and by his own compulsion to serial masturbation which is a trait among most male adolescents. We learn that their house is the only one left standing in the surrounding streets as all the others have been cleared away to build a motorway which never got built; the house stands alone except for a few tower blocks overlooking it. This sense of isolation is paramount to the story and captures the feeling of confused adolescence blossoming upon the derelict suburban wastelands where the prefabs used to stand. The parents are equally alone, without visitors to the house and the father, with his controlling manner and weak heart, has the notion of cementing over the garden to make it more manageable; he is soon taken out of the equation early on when he dies from the strain of carrying the cement bags up from the cellar. The family become more insular and the mother succumbs to illness herself, not really letting on the extent of her illness to the children except Julie; there is a touching little scene in which Jack, on his way to school, returns home and secretly watches his mother through the window clearing away the breakfast dishes and he suddenly realises that his mother continues to exist when he is not there, independent of himself and his siblings. Eventually the mother becomes bed-ridden and all family ceremonies (Jack’s fifteenth birthday where he sings and Julie does a handstand) take place at her bedside. When the mother dies the children are faced with the question of what to do with her. The plot seems completely convincing to me and the children do exactly what I probably would have done in the situation, afraid of being separated and their home left empty and broken into – they decide not to bury their mother in the garden as they would be seen from the tower blocks and that would be the first place she would be found, they have the idea to encase their mother in cement in a large metal trunk in the cellar. This secret between the siblings bonds them closer together and older sister Julie, on the threshold of womanhood who likes sunbathing in her bikini naturally becomes a mother figure, especially to the youngest boy, Tom, who is 6 at the time of their mother’s death and regresses to babyhood (carried by Julie and put in a cot at night); Tom also dislikes being a boy and finds pleasure in dressing like a girl and wearing a wig and both older sisters enjoy the thought of a little sister to dress up and talk girly to, seeing it as quite harmless. Julie finds herself a boyfriend named Derek who is 23 and a professional snooker player while younger sister, Sue immerses herself in reading and writing imaginary letters to her dead mother in a notebook. Jack and Julie’s relationship seems rather strained, he is aroused by her growing feminine beauty yet her maturity increases the gulf between them, although she does admit to him that nothing has happened sexually between her and Derek. Towards the close of the book, a naked Jack goes to Tom who is crying in his cot and Jack joins him in bed, trying to soothe his tears; motherly Julie watches from the doorway and she and Jack become close, she undresses and naked together they embrace as Jack in an act of babyhood, suckles her nipple. Just then, Derek walks in on this tender incestuous brother and sister display and finds the whole scene disgusting. After he storms out the siblings resume their tender touches and seduction, comparing their body parts until Julie instigates sexual intercourse with Jack, putting him inside her; later they are interrupted by sister Sue and the sound of Derek in the cellar hammering at the cement casket; soon after there is the familiar blue lights seen from the window as the police arrive and no doubt, social services and we are left to wonder at the prospects of these four children. A wonderfully written first novel which remains fresh and relevant in today’s world!

 

Wilde’s Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross – by Maureen Borland.

This fascinating biography of Robert Ross (1869-1918) was published in 1990 and outlines Ross’s life through four parts: Moral Dilemma (1869-1900), Tranquil Years (1900-1913), Bitter Years (1913-14) and Years of Despair (1915-18). Moments of his life are perceptively drawn such as the great ‘ducking incident’ which occurred on Friday 8^th March 1889 at Kings College, Cambridge to which he had matriculated in October the previous year. Robbie, who was not discreet about his sexuality and unashamedly displayed effeminate mannerisms, had attacked Oscar Browning, a much favoured Master at Cambridge, in an article in the college magazine, ‘Granta’; for this transgression six undergraduates hurled Ross into the college fountain and the incident caused Ross much upset, depression and even thoughts of suicide – we are informed by author Brian Masters in his volume ‘The Life of E F Benson’ (1991) that one of the perpetrators was none other than E F Benson himself and we are told that Ross forgave him for this. Not surprisingly Ross was put off university and left, never to return; he also had to leave home at the age of 20 due to his odd behaviour, in other words his homosexual practices and his Roman Catholic leanings, for this he was ‘banished to Edinburgh’ where none but the most ardent Catholic homosexual found some vestige of pleasure and delight. And so in the wilds of Scotland, fervently detesting Edinburgh, Ross settled to working for William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) on the ‘Scots Observer’, despising his difficult relationship with Henley as much as his time in Edinburgh; under such strain he fell ill in February 1890 with peritonitis and had to return to London. Borland writes exquisitely on the Ross-Wilde relationship, highlighting Ross’s complete allegiance and devotion to the poet and dramatist; the firm and faithful friendship that he offered, even when Wilde turned his back on Ross when Wilde went back to Bosie despite Ross advising him not to for his own sake; even this did not break the friendship and it is no wonder that Ross became Wilde’s literary executor. After Wilde’s death in 1900 we find the shadow of one Walter Edwin Ledger (1862-1931), an eccentric bachelor, manic depressive and sometime ‘homicidal maniac’ lurking in the wings, planning to compile his Wilde bibliography and Ross as executor was thrown into his company. At the same time Ross also became passionately entangled with a young clerk named Frederick Stanley Smith (born 1886); Ross and Smith lived together and Smith acted as Ross’s secretary. Enter upon the scene the fabulous Christopher Sclater Millard (1872-1927), a fellow Wilde enthusiast and scholar who wrote under the pseudonym Stuart Mason; Millard was also in the process of forming his Wilde bibliography and Ross introduced him to Walter Ledger that they should combine forces on the project. I personally find Millard fascinating in his own right (see Maria Roberts biography ‘Yours Loyally: A Life of Christopher Sclater Millard’. 2014); he was in Oxford in April 1906 and was arrested for gross indecency committed in Iffley the previous July against 19 year old Harry Tinson; Ross proved to be a worthy friend and stood by Millard, attending both court appearances in May – Millard was charged guilty at the Assizes of gross indecency and sentenced to three months imprisonment. Following his sentence Ross found him work on the Burlington Magazine and he also assisted Ross with editing Wilde’s 12 volume Collected Works. Due to Millard’s disgrace Walter Ledger fell out with him and Ross in turn and abandoned his own part in their joint bibliography. Ross had met and become enamoured of a young Winchester College scholar named Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930) whom he also introduced to Millard; the young Scot would later go on to translate the works of Proust. Wilde’s Collected Works (12 volumes) were published in June 1908 by Methuen and to celebrate the momentous occasion a dinner was held to honour Ross and their publication at the Ritz Hotel on Tuesday 1^st December 1908 attended by many notable scholars and public figures. Oh to have been present at this strange collection of odds and sods which included: Ross and his lover, Frederick Smith, Ross’s brother Alex, H. G. Wells, Walter Ledger, Osbert Burdett, George Ives, Christopher Millard, Aleister Crowley, More Adey, Wilde’s children Cyril and Vyvyan Holland, Frank Harris, Robert Sherard, Oscar Browning, George Prothero (of Kings College, Cambridge), Sir Martin Conway… Bosie was invited but did not attend. Borland rambles through the remainder of the tranquil years into the years of bitterness and despair. Millard is up before the beak once again after the arrest of Charles Nehemiah Garratt who testifies to leaving Millard’s flat on 18^th September 1913; in the same year the Wilde monument by Epstein is unveiled by Crowley in an unofficial ceremony at Pere Lachaise, the graveside is attended by a group of British artists and poets. Ross died in 1918, the same year in which Millard is again accused of gross indecency and sentenced to 12 months in Wormwood Scrubs prison. On the 50^th anniversary of Wilde’s death on 30^th November 1950 Ross’s ashes are taken to France and placed in a special chamber which Ross asked Epstein to design in the monument, and so rests the remains of Robert Ross, eternally Wilde’s devoted friend.

Bishops at Large – by Peter F. Anson.

I was led to this strange volume by the equally strange and not too insignificant autobiography entitled ‘The Dust has Never Settled’ (1992) by Robin Bryans (1928-2005) which has some fascinating insights into sexual behaviour and occultism, from sex with a prostitute in St Dunstan’s Church, Ovingdean and Evan Frederick Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar (1893-1949) drugging the communion wine in order to have his wicked way with the sailors at Rodean, to Tredegar and his friend, the artist Francis Cyril Rose (1909-1979) performing the Black Mass and several connections with the magician Aleister Crowley…, but I am not writing a review in praise of Mr. Bryan’s most amusing book, and so, ‘Bishops at Large’, at almost six-hundred pages and published in 1964, is a stupendous collection of cranks, zealots, sex maniacs, faith healers and charlatans who belong to the autocephalous churches of the past one hundred years. I am already a convert to the excellent writings of Peter Frederick Anson (1889-1975) and have been for some time since reading his remarkable autobiographies: ‘Harbour Head: Maritime Memories’ (1944) and ‘A Roving Recluse: More Memoirs’ (1946) which are both beautifully written and depict Anson’s love of the sea and his rich and varied interest in religious and monastic life. Anson, an artist and author who spent time as an Anglican Benedictine monk on Caldey Island from 1910 when he was 21 years old until 1924, converted to Catholicism in 1913 and travelled to Rome to see the Pope, writes with passion and authority through experience upon the plight of the Catholic seafarer and upon maritime ways and the adventures of seamen; he is a student of ecclesiastical affairs and the religious life and has published some outstanding books on the subject, such as his ‘The Quest of Solitude’ (1932), ‘The Benedictines of Caldey’ (1940) and ‘The Call of the Cloister’ (1956). ‘Bishops at Large’, a massive undertaking by Anson and thoroughly researched and compiled, has a fine introduction written by Rev. Henry St John, who describes the ‘little known by-paths’ in 19th and 20th Century ecclesiastical life and the study of episcopal churches as “movements of a ‘Catholic’ type mainly deriving from dissatisfied and unstable elements of Catholicism or Anglo-Catholicism. They stand as a rule for ‘Catholicism’ without the Pope, but their preoccupation, amounting to obsession, is the recovery of Christian unity by the widespread, and, in effect, indiscriminate propagation of ‘valid episcopacy and priesthood’. (p. 15) In their mania for true Catholic orthodoxy and apostolic succession, the churches become fragmented, causing schisms and splits, becoming more and more eccentric in their beliefs based upon the ‘irrepressible, the ridiculous and the pathetic; naive goodness and sincere idealism, unconscious vanity and, at times, conscious roguery: its promoters frequently unstable to a degree, eccentric in some cases to the point of craziness moving in a dream-world of unreality’. (p. 16) Splinter churches become rivals and Bishops who found them, mostly lapsed Roman Catholics or disgruntled Anglicans prepared for excommunication, invent grand pretentious titles for themselves, claiming spurious university degrees and they give elaborate, pompous names to their churches. The first of these ‘Bishops’ Anson explores is Jules Ferrette, ‘Mar Julius’, (1828- c.1904), the French-born, ‘Syrian-Jacobite Bishop who was charged with being an impostor when he came to London to attempt to form the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church of the West in 1866; the so-called ‘Bishop of Iona’, a ‘freelance prelate’, was forced into hiding but not before finding a kindred spirit in the form of an ‘erratic, unstable, hot-headed Welsh clergyman’ (p. 44). Reverend Richard Williams Morgan (1815-1889) was a Welsh Anglican priest who accepted the validity of Ferrette’s episcopate and as a Welsh Nationalist who detested the English, seemed a perfect candidate for consecration – he took the name Mar Pelagius I, Hierarch of Caeleon-on-Usk, the first Patriarch of the restored Ancient British Church. Anson passes next to Dr. Julian Joseph Overbeck (1820-1905) the German lapsed Roman Catholic priest who wanted to re-unite the church of the east with the west, aided by the English Hellenistic, Stephen Georgeson Hatherly (1827-1905) who was part of the ‘underground movement’ of the Greek Orthodox Church; he introduced the Byzantine Rite to his chapel in Wolverhampton; both Overbeck and Hatherly would bring about the prevalence of the Eastern Churches, Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox in England a century after their attempts to reunite them. We next come to the visionary romantic, Ambrose Phillipps de Lyle (1809-1878) who was received as a Roman Catholic aged fifteen; Ambrose wanted to ‘restore the contemplative form of monastic life in England’; ‘restore the primitive ecclesiastical chant’ and see the ‘restoration of the Anglican Church to Catholic Unity, and thus to reunite England to the See of St Peter.’ (p. 57) He was also a friend of Henry Edward Manning. This is all the stuff of Catholic Saints and martyrs and one can get a sense that the religious life is not all one of continual devotion to Christ, but the everyday disturbances of what it is to be human and sometimes weak. Anson also introduces the ‘Scottish Pusey’, Alexander Penrose Forbes (1817-1875) who belonged to the Scottish Episcopal Church and who was influenced by the Oxford Movement; he became Bishop of Brechin in 1847 until his death. Next for the author’s scrutiny is Frederick George Lee (1832-1902) the poet and writer on theology, church history and occult phenomena who was vicar of All Saints, Lambeth and a friend of the Irish poet, Aubrey de Vere (1814-1902) before the charismatic figure of Richard Charles Jackson (1851-1923), the Oxford aesthete and collector, priest, Bishop and eccentric hermit, makes himself known; Jackson knew Walter Pater (1839-1894) who was infatuated with him and Jackson was the inspiration for Pater’s ‘Marius, the Epicurean’ (1885). Anson also looks at the Theosophical, Rosicrucian and occult influence within the Catholic church which is absolutely absorbing such as Joseph Rene Vilatte, ‘Mar Timotheus I’ (1854-1929) with his Theosophical and Ordo Templi Orientis links; Ulric Vernon Herford, ‘Mar Jacobus’ (1866-1938), the eccentric visionary and Unitarian minister, the Bishop of Mercia who corresponded with the notorious Frederic Rolfe, ‘Baron Corvo’ and we hear about Arnold Harris Mathew (1852-1919), the ‘Earl of Llandaff’ and ‘pseudo-Bishop’ of the Catholic Church of England who had deep interests in Theosophy (Annie Besant, Krishnamurti and Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater, who himself had some rather unhealthy relationships with young boys) – “Father Mathews had continued to break the laws of the Catholic and Roman Church by taking a wife in 1892, and, later on, getting himself raised to the episcopate in a schismatic body.” (p. 212) Mathews felt persecuted by the Anglican Bishops as so many came into direct revolt; in 1914 the Anglo-Catholic parishioners made complaints over the sexual antics of the Bishop of St Pancras, Frederick Samuel Willoughby (1862-1928) of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge (1880-83) who was asked to resign by Bishop Mathews due to his homosexual activity and allegations of immorality in the form of sexually assaulting children. The remaining chapters deal with the claims of succession in various branches of the church, such as the ‘Ferrette succession’ where we find yet another sexual monster in the guise of the Bishop of Hackney – Reverend Francis George Widdows [Nobbs] (1850-1936) who was convicted at the Old Bailey in 1902 and received two years hard labour for ‘grossly indecent conduct’ with an altar boy (he also received ten years in 1888 for ‘criminal practices’ against schoolboys and there was another charge in 1896 of a ‘serious sex offence’ against a 14 year old boy); he is also the author of ‘Ex-Monk Widdows’ (1898); Herbert James Monzani Heard, ‘Mar Jacobus II’ (1866-1947), the Brixton Schoolmaster who did ‘curious things’ when he became Bishop in 1922. Then we come to the Vilatte succession which mentions that old rogue, the notorious Reverend Harold Francis Davidson (1875-1937), the Rector of Stiffkey and the ‘Prostitute’s Padre’ who died after being attacked by a lion named ‘Freddie’ at Skegness, and who can forget John Sebastian Marlow Ward (1885-1949) of Trinity College, Cambridge who was an authority on Freemasonry and the occult and his wife Jessie of Golders Green who had visions of the Apocalypse and Christ’s return in 1928 (they bought a property in New Barnet to welcome Christ back as a home for him); John and Jessie also founded the Abbey of Christ the King, a fifteenth century half-timbered Tithe barn chapel which was re-erected at Hadley Hall. Another eccentric is Dr. William Bernard Crow (1895-1976) the Freemason and authority on esoteric knowledge who became Bishop of Santa Sophia (ordained 1935); Crow corresponded with the occultist Aleister Crowley from 1944-47 concerning Crowley’s Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. Then follows the Mathew succession with Monsignor Bernard Mary Williams, real name – James Charles Thomas Ayliffe (1889-1952) and other Theosophists and occultists such as: Reverend William Frederick Geikie-Cobb (1857-1941), Reverend Colin William Scott-Moncrieff (1879-1943), Bishop Robert King (1869-1954), Reverend James Ingall Wedgwood (1883-1951), Bernard Edward Rupert Gauntlett (1881-1924), George Sydney Arundale (1878-1945) the ‘Bishop of India’ and Monsignor Frederick James, music teacher, Theosophist and actor who was said to perform occult ceremonies at his St John’s Wood Oratory and his Knightsbridge ‘Sanctuary’. After a brief mention of the Most Reverend James Bartholomew Banks, ‘Mar James I’ (1894-1975) who was consecrated Bishop by Willoughby in 1922, the final chapters deal with the ‘Catholicate of the West’ and brings us Hugh George de Willmott Newman, ‘Mar Georgius I’ (1905-1979) and the ‘Divine healer’, Reverend Harold Percival Nicholson, ‘Mar Johannes’ (1905-1968) before ending with the ‘miscellaneous churches’ which claim to be ‘Apostolic’, ‘Catholic’ and ‘Orthodox’. There is such an enormous amount of information in this volume that it would take several readings and further research to fully appreciate the magnitude of Anson’s work and no doubt a second volume should be produced by some competent scholar to show the succession into the new century. Bishops at Large is a fascinating read and confirms that religion, as well as bringing spiritual enlightenment and a firm basis in faith to the community can also breed perverted desires, egotistical fanaticism and psychopathic intentions which we have seen in our modern times can lead to very damaging results indeed in the form of extremist ideology. We see that there has always been extensive fractures within the church which are mostly caused by the disturbing appetites of the ecclesiasts who either want to build a New Jerusalem in the manner of obscure religious bodies (sects) or claim false validity to Episcopal authority – the human element in religious labours of faith are always open to corruption and wrong interpretations and as such, Anson has produced a masterpiece in the study of Episcopal churches and their sometimes controversial founders.

Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer – by Nevil Shute.

Written in 1953 and published the following year, ‘Slide Rule’ (11 chapters) by the engineer and novelist, Nevil Shute Norway (1899-1960) is the only non-fictional work the author published and it depicts his life from his birth in 1899 until 1938, mostly concentrating on his aeronautical engineering career or as he calls it ‘messing about with aeroplanes’. The author, who was born with a stammer, opens the book with quite an acute case of wind which he mistakes for heart attacks before beginning at the beginning, and his birth in Ealing in 1899. We hear about his education or lack of it for he was always playing truant, and of his time at the Dragon School in Oxford run by the Headmaster, C. C. Lynam, known as the ‘Skipper’, until he left in the spring of 1913; Nevil attended Shrewsbury School under the Headmastership of C. A. Alington in 1913 and at the outbreak of war joined the school’s Officer Training Corps. Now, let it be said that I have never read a Nevil Shute novel nor will I ever to my dying day, and nothing would induce me to change that, so why did I read this mildly interesting, if one is fascinated by airships (dirigibles), aeroplanes, engines and money, autobiography? I was simply drawn to the volume at the mere mention of that remarkable classics master of Shrewsbury School, who was ‘sent into the army and to France who never should have gone at all’, Phillip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890-1918) whom Shute describes as a ‘brilliant young Sixth Form schoolmaster at Shrewsbury’ and goes on to say he was a ‘tall, delicate, weedy man with very thick glasses in his spectacles without which he was as blind as a bat. He had a great sense of humour and enormous academic ability; when the time came for him to go into the army I have no doubt that he went willingly and made a good officer in regard to morale and within the limits of his physical deficiencies’; Shute quotes Bainbrigge’s sonnet written in the trenches, ‘If I should die’, a parody on Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ and calls it ‘one of the best war poems that I have ever read’ (p. 27-28) and certainly something I quite agree with; the poem begins ‘If I should die, be not concerned to know / the manner of my ending, if I fell…’ and famously ends citing some of the things Bainbrigge enjoyed, such as ‘good dinners’ and ‘curious parody’ – ‘swimming, and lying naked in the sun, / Latin hexameters, and heraldry,’ and of course: ‘Beethoven, Botticelli, beer, and boys.’ Not long after Bainbrigge wrote that sonnet, he was dead. Shute’s only brother Fred was wounded in France and died aged 19 in 1915. Nevil was in Dublin during the Easter uprising of 1916 – his father worked at the General Post Office and Nevil saw shots fired and men and horses killed; he helped as a stretcher bearer. At Christmas he left Shrewsbury School and the following summer was at Woolwich, Royal Military Academy; he failed his commission to become an officer and in August 1918 enlisted in the infantry as a private but would never see combat due to the Armistice in November. After the war deaths from Influenza mounted and Shute became a member of the Army funeral party. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford (1919-1922) of which, unfortunately, he says very little. After Oxford he worked for de Havilland aeroplanes and learnt to fly in 1923. He doesn’t say much about writing except that it was a way to relax in the evenings; his first attempt at a novel [‘Stephen Morris’] in 1923 was unpublished and left on the shelf, so was his second [‘Pilotage’] the following year. In 1924 he joined the staff at Vickers Ltd. as the Deputy Chief engineer under Sir Barnes Wallis of ‘bouncing bomb’ fame and worked on the airship R100. His third attempt at a novel became his first published work – ‘Marazan’ in 1926, a novel in which he devoted eighteen months of his evenings to writing, twice and sometimes three times (all the words “bloody” had to be changed to “ruddy”). And so we hear about the tests and difficulties with the R100 which was almost finished by the summer of 1929, its first flight taking place on 14th October that year, a year also seeing his second novel, ‘So Disdained’ published. But then occurs the disaster of the R100’s sister ship, the R101 in October 1930 which was on its way to India and the crash seemed to end the British interest in airships. In 1931 he sets up the company, Airspeed Ltd. which he runs until 1938, a year where he retires from engineering and poignantly ends his autobiography prior to war saying that ‘once man has spent time in messing about with aeroplanes, he can never forget their heartaches and their joys, nor is he likely to find another occupation that will satisfy him so well, even writing novels.’ Shute had planned to follow ‘Slide Rule’ with a further autobiography possibly titled ‘Set Square’ but it never got written and maybe we should be grateful for another book on his love of aviation and his passion for ‘nuts and bolts’ (along with a new found love of Australia where he settled) with an almost cold disinterest in writing (he wrote 22 novels) and exploration of feelings and emotions is hardly worth reading. For more on Shute take a look at the 1976 biography by Julian Smith which digs a little further beneath the skin. For me, Shute’s reluctance to open his soul and explore the non-engineering background made ‘Slide Rule’ like one of those engineering manuals Shute would have known so well, nevertheless, the early experiments in flight and aeroplane design more than makes up for the lack of the personal touch by the author and it is a worthwhile read.

 

The Haunted Mind – by Hallam Tennyson.

I came to this fascinating book ‘The Haunted Mind’ published in 1984 through reading Wilfrid Blunt’s second volume of excellent autobiography, ‘Slow on the Feather’ (1986) which recounts the years 1938-1959 in which Blunt taught art at Eton (Blunt’s first volume, ‘Married to a Single Life’ published in 1983 is equally as magical) and where he met the strange figure of Hallam Tennyson. Hallam, or to give him his full name, Beryl Augustine Hallam Tennyson was born in Chelsea in 1921, the great grandson of the Victorian poet, Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) and he describes himself as an ‘economic Marxist’, a ‘bisexual, self-centred, liar, thief, cheat’ who is ‘capable of considerable generosity and self-sacrifice’ (p. 2). The original title of this volume was to be ‘Man on a Crossing’ because it describes a man at the crossroads of ‘class, sex, religion, politics, race and nationality’ and Hallam seems to be quite an extraordinary man with an unusually high sex drive yet he is also ‘exalted’ by celibacy, a typical ‘introvert who hates sport’ but someone who acquired an almost fanatical mania about tennis, a passion which ‘can only be described as demented’, in fact, his one golden rule was: ‘no sex before tennis’. His parents, Sir Charles and Ivy Tennyson had ‘hoped for a girl’ so Hallam was probably a disappointment, nevertheless, he was often mistaken for a girl and young Hallam played up to the role, acting as a girl to please his mother – he had a very special close bond to his mother and all his life felt an intimate need for the company of women whom he felt comfortable with. As a boy he was sent to Eton where the normal sadistic undercurrents and harmless relationships are formed, in fact, at Eton he was sexually active as were most boys and he discovered the joy of mutual masturbation and on the other hand, so to speak, delighted in taking tea with the great tutor, provost and ghost story writer, M. R. James. He passed the Balliol entrance examination and went on to study medieval history. During the war Hallam worked in Egypt and Italy with the ‘Friends’ Ambulance Unit and in October 1945 he married Margot Walloch, a German Jew in North Kensington (the couple were to have three children) and the following year they travelled to West Bengal with the American Quakers where he met Gandhi; Hallam was so taken by the Bengal people that he learnt their language and had a love for them which remained all his life. After two years in Bengal they returned to England and lived in the East End where Hallam considered becoming Catholic – he realised his mistake in time. He published a volume of stories, ‘The Wall of Dust’ in 1948 and joined the BBC in 1956, the same year as his novel, ‘The Dark Goddess’ was published; he remained 14 years with the BBC as Assistant Head of the Drama Department. Although Margot who had become ill was tolerant and understanding of Hallam’s homosexuality they eventually separated though remained close – Hallam even tried ‘sex aversion therapy’ to no avail. His relationships with men too often ended with violence against him (Hallam was a pacifist) and sex seems to become a humiliation, a masochistic tendency accepting sordid situations or perhaps even a sacrifice as in the ‘suffering maternal role’; for Hallam homosexual acts are ‘rites of symbolic magic’ (p. 227); despite this, love was always around every corner or was it just a physical need within him to satisfy his sexual desire? He believed that ‘love transcends obsessions’ and his search for love would have drawn him into some dangerous intimacies and it was not surprising to discover that in  December 2005, Hallam, aged 85 was found stabbed to death in his bed in Highgate – the crime remains unsolved to this day. When one knows the outcome on a life revealing itself with all of the pitfalls it makes that life all the more poignant. ‘The Haunted Mind’ is a very thoughtful and philosophical read which presents us with a detailed self observation of a man consumed by the sexual and spiritual essence of being alive.

 

Lighting Candles: New and Selected Poems – by Ruth Bidgood.

This collection of 75 poems published in 1982 by the Welsh poet and local historian, Ruth Bidgood (1922-2022) draws upon her early volumes of verse – ‘The Given Time’ (1972), ‘Not Without Homage’ (1975) and ‘The Print of Miracle’ (1978) with a small section of new poems too. Bidgood, born Ruth Jones in Seven Sisters near Neath, the daughter of the Reverend William Herbert Jones and teacher mother, Hilda Garrett, attended Port Talbot Grammar School and St. Hugh’s College, Oxford where she read English; during the war she was a wren in Alexandria, Egypt before she married David Edgar Bidgood in 1946; they had three children – the marriage lasted until the nineteen-seventies. Although she was writing poetry around 1965 it was the following year that the poetry of Edward Thomas influenced her work and the landscape of mid-Wales inspired her writing where ‘tended paths make patterns / of purpose quietly achieved’ (‘Microcosm’ from ‘Not Without Homage’, p. 32) which echoes Bidgood’s’ whisper in the Welsh wilderness, the sense of the survival of the human presence in the landscape, ‘quietly achieved’ through the seasonal turning of time and like Thomas, she is attuned to nature, immersed in its every movement, ‘to accept as mine this given time, / to live the haunted present and know the forest’s shadow’ (‘The Given Time’, p. 1). The poet is content to be part of a land praised for its beauty and its mystery with no regrets or wish to know what lies beyond hill and mountain, ‘no need to wonder what heron-haunted lake / lay in the other valley’ (‘Roads’ from ‘The Given Time’, p. 4). In ‘Sheep in the Hedge’ from the same collection she contrasts the soft wool of the ‘woolly maniac’ with the sharp brambles and spiky thorns of the hedge where the bewildered sheep finds ‘there is too much world forcing itself / through slit eyes into her dim brain - / a spiky overpowering pattern of thorns’ (p. 21) which are truly beautiful lines conjuring the perfect aspect of the simple sheep too eagerly drawn to roam in dangerous environments.  In ‘Burial Path’ (from ‘The Given Time’) there is a sense of tradition as she is one of four coffin carriers taking the deceased ‘up the old sledge-ways, the sinew-straining tracks’ and she relates how ‘forty times and more / I put my shoulder to the coffin / before the weary journey was accomplished / and down at last through leafless oaks / singing we carried you to the crumbling church, / the ancient yews, at the burial place of your people.’ (p. 14) Death is recalled in many poems such as ‘Feathers’ (‘Not without Homage’) where ‘white feathers marked / where death had stopped.’ (p. 28) and in ‘Hanging Day’ (also ‘Not Without Homage’) the scene of the ‘doomed ones’ approaching the execution is seen as a celebration, an ‘old pleasure’ full of mirth while the condemned man or woman are ‘hooded, noosed, and jerked / into blackness’ (p. 23); the same merriment one sees in ‘Girls Laughing’ (‘The Print of Miracle’, p. 67) where the poet watches two girls attempting to fold a sheet which begins quite tenderly ‘I can remember laughing like that.’ Bidgood is a poet of place and community exploring rural tradition and the people who live in and work in the landscape where there is a sense of permanence as we can see in the poem ‘Standing Stone’ (from ‘The Print of Miracle’)  where the ‘ephemeral’ trees may hide the stone waiting to be revealed by time once more and offer ‘ancient orientation’; the poet places her hand upon the stone ‘when the dark mind fails, faith lives / in the supplication of hands / on prayer-wheel, rosary, stone.’ (p. 43) and again, in ‘Burial Cyst’, from the same collection, that same permanence invokes contemplative wonder when a search for the remains of an ancient grave in the peat moor land reveals a ‘little slab-lined grave, / open and empty, we were silent’ as one feels one should be like being in a church or chapel – ‘human only, sunk in the primeval couch,’ (p. 51). Ruth Bidgood, a quiet and sombre poet in the pastoral tradition is exceptionally gifted and I feel blessed for encountering her verse which has left a rather beautiful and memorable impression upon me.