At a Month's End: part 3

Continuing with part 3 of At a Month's End: leaves from the diary of a man of the time, told in three parts in London Society magazine in 1887: one of the less findable Bertha Thomas stories I decided to rescue from archive limbo, in part for its Devon interest.

At a Month's End: part 2

Continuing with part 2 of At a Month's End: leaves from the diary of a man of the time, told in three parts in London Society magazine in 1887: one of the less findable Bertha Thomas stories I decided to rescue from archive limbo, in part for its Devon interest.

At a Month's End: part 1

As a follow-up to Bertha Thomas: bibliography, I decided to rescue one of her less findable stories from archive limbo: At a Month's End: leaves from the diary of a man of the time, told in three parts in London Society magazine in 1887.

Mrs Harcourt Roe

Ryde, Shaw's Tourist's Picturesque Guide to the Isle of Wight, 1873

"Mrs Harcourt Roe" is another forgotten novelist with an Isle of Wight connection. She's described in an 1893 Isle of Wight Observer review of her novel A Man of Mystery as "a lady, well-known in the Island”, and she lived at Ryde in the 1890s. I just researched a bit (well, more than a bit) on her life and works.

Bruges-la-Morte photos

I just took the liberty of colour-adjusting the thirty-five beautiful photos by Ch.-G. Petit et Cie (Charles G. Petit & Co.) that illustrate Georges Rodenbach's 1892 novel in French, Bruges-la-Morte: roman (The Dead [City of] Bruges: a novel) - see Bruges-la-Morte (January 2009).

Bournemouth in fiction

It may be of interest to some readers if I elaborate on the references in the previous post to pre-1915 novels mentioning Bournemouth (not necessarily as a central setting). Apart from a couple of major players like Thomas Hardy, it's a catalogue of little-known and forgotten authors and works.

... Tess of the D'Urbervilles contains one of the most picturesque and accurate descriptions of Bournemouth. It is perhaps most fully depicted in Adrian Savage by Lucas Malet, and is visited and described in Allward by E.S. Stevens, Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie, The Seamy Side by Besant and Rice, Jill-all-Alone by Rita, and in Tracked Down by Headon Hill. It is further seen in W. B. Maxwell's war-time romance A Man and his Lesson. Among other recent novels in which Bournemouth appears are: The Race Before Us, Guy Thorne; Zitta Sees Herself (Boscombe), E. M. Delafield; The Sins Ye Do, Emmeline Morrison; A Bit of Blue Stone, Maxwell Gray; Tyranny, Holloway Horn; Ring Up the Curtain, J.C. Nevill; Barbara Justice, Diana Patrick; Blinkers, H.A. Vachell; Mr. Justice Maxell, Edgar Wallace.
- A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Bournemouth, Poole, Christchurch, Avon Valley, Salisbury, Winchester and The New Forest Covering the Years 1914/15, Ward Locke guide

• Bournemouth appears in Hardy's 1893 Tess of the D'Urbervilles as the fashionable Sandbourne, where Tess takes up residence as Alec's mistress, and cuts his throat.
• Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of the novelist Mary St Leger Kingsley, Charles Kingsley's daughter; her 1911 Adrian Savage takes place in  Paris and Bournemouth (as Stourmouth).
• Bournemouth (as Bournesmouth) and the Christchurch area feature as the setting of ES (Ethel Stefana) Stevens' 1915 Allward: A Story of Gypsy Life.
• The 1913 Sinister Street (Volume 1 / Volume 2) is Sir Compton Mackenzie's bildungsroman about the coming of age of two illegimate siblings born of rich parents.  
• The Seamy Side (1889? by Walter Besant and James Rice) portrays a Bournemouth created as "a colony of invalids"

They were not "mere brick-and-mortar speculators" who built Bournemouth ; no, rather they were sickness-and-mortality speculators, and the result of their speculations is pictured for us in The Seamy Side, by Besant and Rice
Seaside England, Ruth Manning-Sanders - 1951

• Jill-all-Alone by "Rita" (Mrs W. Desmond Humphreys, née" Eliza M. J. Gollan) I have little about:

Jill grew up alone in the woods a free spirit, then the squire desires her. He is foiled, but Jill dies.
- Novels in English by women, 1891-1920: a preliminary checklist, 1981

• Tracked Down is a 1902 crime novel by the novelist clergyman Francis Grainger (aka Headon Hill).
• The 1919 A Man and his Lesson is by William Babington Maxwell, novelist son of Mary Elizabeth Braddon.; it concerns a successful dramatist and barrister, who learns a lesson about life from being torn between love for two women. 
• Guy Thorne's 1910 The Race Before Us is a polemical novel attacking the degeneracy of the aristocratic classes; it begins with the murder of a nobleman by high-frequency current in a Bournemouth quack hydropathic clinic.
• The 1917 Zella Sees Herself (out of interest, written in Exeter) was the strongly autobiographical first novel by Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood (aka EM Delafield), best known for her Devon-set Diary of a Provincial Lady.
• I haven't been able to find anything much about Emmeline Morrison's 1923 The Sins Ye Do, except that it was a romance adapted for film in 1924.
• Holloway Horn's 1922 Tyranny is a male-written polemical melodrama of Catholic angst, concerning a young Irish woman called Gwenda, who despite having had many lovers via her job as a stenographer and chauffeuse, finds her Catholic upbringing makes it impossible for her to marry the one who really does it for her, a divorced man.
• Ring Up the Curtain (1920) by John Craunston Nevill was described by The Spectator as " a very entertaining theatrical novel of the type more or less originated by Mr. Compton Mackenzie".
• The plot of the 1921 Blinkers: A Romance Of The Preconceived Idea by Horace Annesley Vachell, is described by the 1921 American Library Association catalogue as "The heroine has been brought up to see life honestly instead of through 'blinkers; and this honesty brings her safely through disillusionment to ultimate happiness".

- Ray

Full Dark House

Euw. I just spent most of the day in bed coughing, courtesy of a bug I picked up mid-week. But it gave me a chance to read Christopher Fowler's Full Dark House.

I mentioned Fowler's "Bryant & May" detective series in 2010, when I read his 2008 The Victoria Vanishes. Possibly I dropped into the series at the wrong point (i.e. its then final book), but I've remedied that by reading the first, which Felix kindly sent me.

Full Dark House starts with the rather bold device of introducing an elderly duo of London detectives - Bryant and May - via killing one of them off in a bomb explosion. Then the story proceeds by intercutting the surviving partner's investigation with a flashback to their first case together, a series of gruesome murders (apparently themed serial murder based on the Greek muses) in the Palace Theatre in November 1940, during the London Blitz.

Police procedural is a staple of fiction, but Fowler's angle is that Bryant & May work for the bizarre and underfunded "PCU" (Peculiar Crimes Unit) which - with the exception of the dapper and stoical May - is largely staffed by misfits from other departments. Bryant, heading it, is a "tortoise-like" badly-dressed hypochondriac who sees no problem in consulting mediums as an aid to the investigation of crimes such as the "Leicester Square Vampire". Again, the idea of mismatched detective partners is pretty staple, but Bryant and May are extremely likeable, and Full Dark House is populated with similarly sympathetic grotesques.

The plot is, essentially, an extended 'contrafactum' on The Phantom of the Opera, and the book skilfully portrays the gothic atmosphere, and the relationships and conflicts within a theatre company producing a revival of Offenbach's satirical Orphée aux enfers in what proves to be a controversial adaptation: the faux-nude costumes risk breaching the Lord Chamberlain's then censorship of theatrical nudity. Fowler neatly slots this fictional production into the theatre's real timeline - a gap between summer 1940, when a revival run of Chu Chin Chow ceased due to bombing, and summer 1941, when it restarted. Overall the novel is a vigorous and historically accurate take on Blitz-era London - darkly comic without being the least flippant about the horror of the time - and Fowler's general fascination with the little-known corners and 'deeps' of London shines through (for example, I'd never heard of The Other St Paul’s on Vauxhall Bridge) - but without the book turning into a "research dump" of what the author found out. I highly recommend it.

The only downside is that this is a book where (at least, if you're me) you constantly want to Google the details. The Palace Theatre, of course, still exists, and deserves to be considered in its own right a character in Full Dark House. As is easily findable online, it started out in 1891 as Richard D'Oyly Carte's Royal English Opera House, but rapidly failed in that role (in part due to its initial run of Sullivan's lacklustre Ivanhoe) and became The Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1892. Ir's a building of the astonishing complexity required to contain all the machinery of top-of-the-range stage productions. The arthurlloyd.co.uk Musical Hall and Theatre site has a special feature - The Royal English Opera House - Now the Palace Theatre - with photos, contemporary sketches, and even floor plans of its many levels.

As I mentioned back in 2010, there's more of interest at Christopher Fowler's website. His Independent series on forgotten authors is also worth checking out: the Neglected Books site has usefully collated archive links: “Invisible Ink".

- Ray

Edwin Drood

A recommendation, if you didn't see it: the current BBC adaptation by Gwyneth Hughes of Charles Dickens's half-finished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, serialised in 1870 until its termination by the death of Dickens. (see the BBC feature Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens's last mystery finally solved? and the BBC2 microsite).

Due to previously-mentioned events over Christmas, I've only just seen the concluding part of the two-part series.

Read on - if you don't mind spoilers.

The first episode set the scene in Cloisterham (a thinly-disguised Rochester) where Drood, a slappably optimistic and fortunate young engineer, is visiting his fiance Rosa Bud (to whom he is betrothed via an arrangement in her late father's will) and his uncle John Jasper (an opium-addicted choirmaster). What Edwin doesn't know is that Jasper has the hots for Rosa, and has repeated opium dreams of throttling Edwin in the cathedral. A further tension is thrown into the mix by the arrival from Ceylon of the mixed-race orphan twins Neville and Helena Landless. The hot-blooded Neville too fancies Rosa, and immediately gets into an argument with Edwin over this. But what neither of Edwin's rivals know is that Edwin and Rosa aren't that into each other, and have more or less amicably agreed to break their engagement. Things come to a head on a dark and stormy night, when Edwin and Neville, apparently reconciled, visit the cathedral at night, and Jasper gets another especially vivid vision (maybe real - we don't know) of throttling Edwin. End of episode.

Judging by both the dramatisation and the novel text - there's a nice copy of the 1870 Chapman & Hall imprint on the Internet Archive (ID mysteryofedwindr00dickrich) - Dickens was doing something rather different from his usual fare. This is not a cast-of-thousands tranche of Victorian social commentary, but an economical and claustrophobic psychological mystery. The scenario reminds me a deal of a Maxwell Gray novel: there's a guilt-ridden ecclesiastical character, as in The Silence of Dean Maitland; and a young woman with three suitors, as in The Reproach of Annesley. Maybe the simplicity was down to Dickens losing his touch; he was exhausted by a tour of America, and had sufferered a minor stoke - a precursor to the one that permanently interrupted his work on the novel. Nevertheless, he's still on form with atmosphere and characterisation.

Dickens did leave a sketch of  where he intended the story to go: essentially it came down to John Jasper having murdered Drood:

His first fancy for the tale was expressed in a letter in the middle of July. "What should you think of the idea of a story beginning in this way?--Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years—at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate." This was laid aside; but it left a marked trace on the story as afterwards designed, in the position of Edwin Drood and his betrothed. I first heard of the later design in a letter dated "Friday the 6th of August 1869", in which after speaking, with the usual unstinted praise he bestowed always on what moved him in others, of a little tale he had received for his journal, he spoke of the change that had occurred to him for the new tale by himself. "I laid aside the fancy I told you of, and have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work." The story, I learnt immediately afterward, was to be that of the murder of a nephew by his uncle; the originality of which was to consist in the review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted. The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him. Discovery by the murderer of the utter needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon commission of the deed; but all discovery of the murderer was to be baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the body, not only the person murdered was to be identified but the locality of the crime and the man who committed it. So much was told to me before any of the book was written; and it will be recollected that the ring, taken by Drood to be given to his betrothed only if their engagement went on, was brought away with him from their last interview. Rosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer.

- Charles Dickens, letter to friend and biographer John Forster, published in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 1876, vol. 1

But the many authors who have picked up and run with the story - see Continuations, in the Wikipedia article - have varied in whether they took up this hint. The recent BBC adaptation doesn't entirely.

Spoiler warning again.

Episode 2 begins, as did Dickens, with general consternation after the night of the storm due to Drood's disappearance. Neville naturally falls under initial suspicion, with Jasper happy to fuel that suspicion, but no real evidence implicates him.

Meanwhile, Bazzard, the geeky assistant of Rosa's guardian, is doing some detective work, finding that Neville and Helena Landless are half-siblings of Edwin, and that their mutual father appears not to have died in military service in Egypt as supposed, and is in fact alive somewhere and picking up his pension. Jasper continues to be angst-ridden, but despite this pursues increasingly aggessive attempts to court Rosa. His mental state isn't helped by the revelation that his jealousy had become misplaced after Edwin and Rosa were no longer an item.

Ultimately Bazzard's trail leads to the discovery of an unexpected corpse in the Drood tomb, just as Jasper drags Rosa into the cathedral and confesses to Drood's murder. But, simultaneously, the corpse is found to be that of an older man, apparently dead for a year or so - and Edwin, fresh back from Egypt, walks into the cathedral wondering what's been going on. He'd left town in a huff after Rosa broke off the engagement, and that was why he hadn't written.

This turn of events so fazes Jasper that his story unravels. He and Edwin aren't uncle and nephew, but half-brothers - he was the illegitimate one - and he has for years been consumed with anger at their father's favouritism toward Edwin. A year previously he had killed their father when the latter arrived in Cloisterham and snubbed him yet again: the elder Drood is the corpse in the tomb. In Jasper's opium-addled mind, the murder of the elder Drood and the fantasy of murdering Edwin had become so conflated that he had come to believe he had actually murdered Edwin. Believing himself to be haunted by Edwin, he kills himself. In the slightly feelgood aftermath, his friends and family forgive him posthumously; Edwin and Neville depart for foreign climes as half-brothers, friends and business associates; and Helena Landless becomes engaged to the Rev. Mr. Crisparkle, the canon of Cloisterham.

While perhaps the web of family connections stretches coincidence a little too far, nevertheless I think Gwyneth Hughes did an extremely good job of completing a story where the resolution could have been a little too linear. In the novel as far as Dickens wrote it, everything (including his own guilt) points to Jasper having murdered Edwin. This adaptation nicely had it both ways, with that evidence being just as valid, except for another murder, while leaving the reappearance of Edwin thoroughly plausible. The motivation for the murder - intense anger at a parent's favouritism for one sibling, exacerbated by the favoured sibling's inability to perceive a problem - is psychologically plausible. Luckily I'm not in that situation, but I know people who have been, and it's highly toxic. So all in all, a rather good production.

If you're in the UK, both episodes are currently watchable online with BBC iPlayer at the BBC2 microsite The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

- Ray

Adventure at Horseshoe Cove

While Googling "Horseshoe Cove" (mentioned previously) I ran into a unconnected reference; it's the name of a location in Florence L Barclay's 1910 romance novel The Mistress of Shenstone.

Like a number of writers little known a century later, Mrs Barclay was a highly popular novelist whose work included her debut romance The Wheels of Time and the bestselling The Rosary. The Times obituary favourably recalled her work,which praised her ability to tackle themes of romance and religious feelings in a way that dispensed with Victorian piety yet retained moral integrity:

Her death removes a figure as well known ten years ago to large sections of the novel-reading public as Charles Garvice, Marie Corelli, or Ethel M Dell. Her most popular book, "The Rosary," enjoyed a circulation of vast dimensions, and made friends of the author in homes all over the land.
...
It was one of the secrets of her success that she managed to be entirely sincere, and yet to infuse into an atmosphere which many people regard as narrow a kind of repressed excitement.
...
A writer who appealed to and won the affection of so many of her fellow country men and women is no negligible quantity. Indeed, there is reason to think that Mrs Barclay understood the tendency of her age better than many contemporary novelists whose technical skill exceeded her own. The way in which she blended passion with the spirit of pilgrimage was distinctly post-Victorian.
- Death of Mrs Barclay: a loss to millions of readers, The Times, March 11, 1921

The Mistress of Shenstone tells of the young and beautiful Lady Myra Ingleby, who goes for a rest cure incognito in Cornwall after the death of her husband in some unnamed military adventure at "Targai", somewhere in the Middle East.

"You know perfectly well that Lord Ingleby volunteered for this border war because he was so keen on experimenting with his new explosives, and on trying these ideas for using electricity in modern warfare, at which he has worked so long."

(Does she really want to be married to this guy? Anyhow...)  In Cornwall, her life is saved by a young man called Jim Airth, who helps her climb a cliff after she falls asleep on the beach and is cut off by the tide, and the two fall in love and become engaged. Jim, however, doesn't know that she is Lady Ingleby; and she doesn't know that Airth was the man who accidentally killed Lord Ingleby by prematurely detonating a mine. This naturally enough places a tension on their relationship, with a further twist when a telegram appears to indicate that Lord Ingleby is still alive, and there are also class issues (eventually resolved when it turns out that Jim Airth is himself an aristocrat going incognito).

Some of the book is fairly silly, such as Lord Ingleby's dog that gets vibes of his death and dies in sympathy, and also reflective of the prejudices of its time (for instance, the idea that the protagonists must be of the same class for a proper resolution). But it's well-plotted and well-paced, and not at all a bad read; it was filmed in 1921 (see IMDb).

Here's the full book at Project Gutenberg - E-text No. 26235 - and here are the chapters featuring the beach and the cliff climb: In Horseshoe Cove / Jim Airth to the rescue / "Yeo, ho! We go!" / 'Twixt sea and sky.

Many of Mrs Barclay's works are on the Internet Archive (see creator:"Barclay, Florence L. (Florence Louisa), 1862-1921") as is the subjective, but nonetheless interesting, biography by one of her daughters, The life of Florence L. Barclay: a study in personality. There's more biography, and some works, at Literary Heritage West Midlands; as the commentary says, some of her shorter works - such as "My heart's right there" - are morbidly patriotic by modern standards. Contrary to the now more popular anti-war writers and poets of World War One, Mrs Barclay (like Jessie Pope) was distinctly jingoistic at times.

It's a righteous war, my girl; and every man who fears God and honours the King, should be up, and out, and ready to do his share; and every woman who loves her home, must be willing bravely to do her part, by letting her man go. And if she has to hear that he has given his life, she must stand up, brave and true--as a soldier's wife or a soldier's mother--and say: 'God save the King!'
- from My heart's right there

- Ray

The Fatal Oak

Just a quick link to another article of bibliographic interest I wrote for the Devon History Society: The Fatal Oak, concerning Anna Eliza Bray's novel Warleigh; or, The fatal oak. A legend of Devon, which relocates the (probably) true story of an Elizabethan murder to the English Civil War.

- Ray

The Broken Tryst

I just finished reading The Broken Tryst (Maxwell Gray, 1879).

It's a melodramatic romance, set mostly around the village of Brightdale, telling of the loves of Ethel Arden, nicknamed "Brightie" by her family. A 19-year-old orphan, she was rescued from a shipwreck as a baby, and brought up by her indulgent foster-parents, the elderly Ardens.

Ethel has a gently flirtatious friendship with Will Brackenbury, a nice-but-irresponsible miller's son, which goes sour when he asks to marry her and she replies that she could only marry a man in uniform. In response partly to this, and partly to his father's criticism for high jinks including suspending an old farmer from a tree while scrumping apples, Will quits town and joins the army incognito.

Ethel is hurt, but not much, and aims her sights loosely at Cecil Wymmering, whose family owns the nearby Wymmering Manor; but she snubs him at a party when she meets the world-weary Major Leslie Tempest, 15 years her senior. The two develop a strong mutual attraction - despite, unknown to Ethel, Tempest's intended engagement to a society heiress - and after a picnic, they agree to meet the next day in a clifftop dell. Ethel goes home to find a mysterious visitor called Mr Richards, evidently known and disliked by her foster-parents, who gives her a gift of a gold bracelet.

The next day Ethel goes to the dell, but Tempest doesn't turn up (the "broken tryst" of the title). Unknown to her, the previous night Tempest had a near-fatal fight with the stranger, and both have left town. It's later explained that the two are enemies over an earlier disagreement over gambling. Tempest sends a short and formal note of apology for breaking their appointment. Ethel is deeply upset, and has no backup (Cecil is engaged to someone else). She throws herself into study, and time passes. She nearly dies of a fever, and on her recovery goes to stay with London relatives of the Ardens, touring Europe with them, and starting to enjoy life again.

Meanwhile, Will Brackenbury has returned to Brightdale, having earned an honourable discharge for saving his colonel, Lord Lyndon, in battle. After initial resistance, his father and he make their peace. At the time of his arrival, a man has been found dead after an accidental fall near Brightdale; it is "Mr Richards", revealed to be Richard Arden, the elderly Ardens' son and Ethel's dissolute father. His earlier visit to the Ardens had been to claim Ethel as his daughter, a scheme he only gave up when the Ardens gave him their money saved as Ethel's inheritance. Will is sent to London to fetch Ethel home for the funeral.

Will finds Ethel at a vulnerable point, just shaken by seeing Major Tempest with another woman at a concert, but she comes home with Will; both are favourably impressed by the other's new-found maturity. Ethel arrives just in time for Richard Arden's funeral, and Will explains to her the family history; she is upset, but delighted to find that she is her foster-parents' grandchild. Over time, Ethel and Will become closer, and the two marry, though with considerable misgivings on her part because she's still thinking of Tempest.

After their first child is born, Will's old commanding officer, Lord Lyndon, comes to visit Brightdale to thank the young soldier who saved his life. Ethel is horrified to find that Lord Lyndon is Leslie Tempest (Will knows about Tempest, but not that his commanding officer was the same person). Tempest has come to ask Ethel to marry him, but he does the decent thing and takes his leave. Ethel's upset after he has gone, however, gives all away, and the incident drives a further wedge between between Will and Ethel.

On rather frosty terms, they continue for a few years, Will becoming a gentleman farmer and acquiring a manor house in idyllic surroundings, until finally they see a newspaper story telling that Tempest has died in action. Ethel is finally able to cry and release her pent-up disappointments, and the two are reconciled to live happily ever after.

Location / chronology questions

I found The Broken Tryst very readable; as a single-volume novel, it tells the story quite tersely, and it's virtually free of the highly purple landscape/sunset descriptions of MG's later novels. It's not explicitly set in the Isle of Wight, but as I wrote earlier - see Brightdale - an added interest is that its location there is highly identifiable.  Brightdale is Brighstone; the route over the down to Wymmering Hall locates it as Westover Manor, Calbourne (though the architectural details differ from the reality); and the landscape description of the manor where Will and Ethel finally make their home matches Mottistone Manor.

Despite the whole family complications and interlocking past history being a bit contrived, the book worked for me. However, I did get distracted by needing to Google frequent puzzles about fixtures and dates, and I agree partially with the Belfast News-Letter reviewer's comment at the time:

As for the author's chronology, all we can say is that it baffles us completely. We should like it to be explained to us what Spanish sea fight is recollected by the lieutenant, and also in what Eastern campaign young Brackenbury gains two medals and a clasp.

Actually the chronology is reasonably consistent. The general setting appears to be late 1860s: Ethel's visit to St James's Hall to hear "Nilsson" sing must refer to Christina Nilsson, and most likely to a celebrated concert in 1869 marking the move of the Philharmonic Society to that venue. Tempest's having a "pile of photographs" places it after after affordable paper prints came in (see Google Books) and Lieutenant Arden's prized roses, the Marshal Niel and Cloth of Gold, would have been fairly new varieties (this 1913 Biltmore Rose Catalogue dates the Marechal Niel's introduction to 1864). As to Will's "Eastern campaign", the timeline would fit the 1868 Expedition to Abyssinia, which was launched from India.

None of this fits Lieutenant Arden's rant about an English sea-battle "exactly this day twenty years by my log-book" with "a Spanish squadron" - unless he means that he was 20 years old. There are a few such naval engagements in the 1796-1808 Anglo-Spanish War, and the timeline would work if we assume him to be in his mid-80s. On the other hand, some of the specifics are plain authorial invention: the "late affray with the Neilghoorkees, at Bombadore", in which Tempest dies, is fictitious, and I'd bet money it was inspired by the title of Major William Murray's 1834 An account of the Neilgherries, or, Blue mountains of Coimbatore, in Southern India.

- Ray

Sweethearts and Friends

As part of the ongoing project to read the works of Maxwell Gray, I just finished Sweethearts and Friends (Heinemann, 1897 - first serialised in Atalanta magazine), a considerably polemical romance about an ambitious and otherwise highly compatible couple divided by the cultural sexism of late-Victorian England.

The story starts some time in the early 1870s with the Langtons, a middle-class family living somewhere off the Fulham Road, London. Amy Langton is one of several siblings, an awkard 17-year old given to closeting herself away with books, spilling ink, and worrying the family by her ambition to be a doctor. Under her pillow she keeps a skull which, embarrassingly, is brought out by the family dog and dropped on the carpet when a friend of the family, Vivian Lester, is visiting. Lester has nearly everything going for him: orphaned at 24, he owns an estate at 'Baron's Cleve', is rich, handsome, erudite and charming (they all call him The Immaculate). But to Amy his views on women are anathema; he holds that:

The ideal woman is a being whose weakness is her strength, in whom feeling replaces intellect, meekness and refinement power. who should be a rest to her husband by her freedom from toil, a strength to him by the appeal of her weakness, a joy to him by her freedom from sorrow.

Amy's chief inspiration is her intellectual friend Louisa Stanley, a governess at White How, the small private finishing school by Lake Windermere that Amy attends. Louisa, having received an inheritance, is able to finance her own medical studies, and on leaving school at 18, Amy is determined to do likewise. The Langtons dislike the idea, but her older stepbrother Steven (the head of the family, as Mr Langton is dead) convinces them they should indulge her until what they see as a whim passes, so she moves in with Louisa. She spends a summer vacation at Steven's home, also in Baron's Cleve, where she has long and droll conversations with Vivian about life, gender and politics (he calls her "dear pythoness" and "dear prophetess"). Eventually he asks her to marry him: "Let me be your knight; let me rescue you". She says that she would rather not be rescued, and they part on sad terms.

Five years later,Vivian is in the Riviera near the town of Col Apri, and by accident runs into Amy; she is in charge of a party of invalids convalescing at a nearby pension (one of them is Louise, now a qualified doctor but suffering ill-health from overwork; another is Lettice Marshall, a family friend). Vivian's own circumstances have changed; he is now guardian to a 5-year-old Italian girl, Angela, the daughter of a deceased artist friend. Although on his way home to England, he decides to stay in the area for a while. As Vivian and Amy are walking, they run into Lettice, who falls and makes a show of hurting her leg. During the subsequent weeks at the pension, she flirts with Vivian, deliberately appealing to his knight-and-rescuer fantasy, until he falls in love. Amy, looking on as she tends to the increasingly ailing Louise, is despondent.

Vivian, forced to make a brief return to England, entrusts little Angela and his dog Nep to Amy's care. While he's away, there's an incident: the boisterous Angela accidentally jostles Lettice, who boxes her ear. In retaliation, Angela bites Lettice, and the protective Nep goes for her as well; Amy gets bitten by Nep while restraining him. On Vivian's return, Lettice gives a very airbrushed account of the incident, omitting her own role, and Vivian is all for having Nep put down - until the full story is revealed. Vivian is taken aback at Lettice's capacity for deceit, but at that moment the news of his engagement to Lettice breaks at the pension, and he is dragged along with the general celebration by the multifarious international guests. Their remaining time in the Riviera is considerably frosty, worsened by Vivian's realisation that Lettice doesn't like Angela.

Back in England, relations between Vivian and Lettice deteriorate further. While he realises more and more how much he cares for Angela, Lettice wants nothing to do with her. Looking for sympathy, he goes to visit Amy, and is depressed when she brushes off his hint at his relationship problems, and also when he spots congratulatory flowers on the table. She explains that they concern her engagement, which he assumes to mean marriage, further depressing him. They talk at cross-purposes until she reveals that it is actually her engagement as Assistant Surgeon at the New Hospital for Women.

Five years pass. Amy is consulting physician with her own practice, and she is among the few of her friends and family neither married nor betrothed; even the now-dying Louisa is engaged. Vivian, now a respected Member of Parliament, is also single, in a lukewarm engagement to Lettice, who has been briefly engaged to the serial philanderer Charlie Lovelace. It is 1879, and Amy is in the public gallery of the Houses of Parliament listening to a debate over the repeal of the Breach of Promise Act. The MP for Dalesbury - Vivian - gives an eloquent and evidently guilt-driven speech on selfishness and fickleness of men in their dealings with women. Amy realises she loves him. After giving the speech,Vivian goes to the Marshall household and, helped along by the presence of Charlie Lovelace, who is flirting with Lettice, makes the break from their engagement. A month later, he runs into Amy when he is visiting Baron's Cleve and proposes marriage again. Suspecting it to be on the rebound, she refuses.

Some months later, Amy is driving home after dining at the Langton house when she sees the light of a major fire in the city. Her brother, visiting from Australia, wants to see it, so they drive there and find it to be the burning mansion of Lord Loughborough, Vivian's uncle. A man - we guess it to be Vivian - appears at a balcony, lowering a child to safety. The firemen throw up a rope, but Vivian is knocked down by falling timber. Suddenly Amy runs out through the crowd and climbs the rope to the balcony, lowering the semi-conscious Vivian to safety before jumping down herself. The two, bruised and burned, don't meet again until they've recovered. Vivian proposes a third time, admitting he has been "a hide-bound prejudiced ass" about women's roles, and Amy accepts. "If the marriage proved a happy one ..." the novel concludes, "... no authentic record is as yet discoverable".

An early work?

This is an interesting novel in a number of ways, particularly in its break from plain romance/melodrama in favour of a clear and (to the modern reader) positive polemical intent in tackling issues of women's emancipation. Maxwell Gray (Mary Tuttiett) was a known supporter of suffrage, and a signatory to a petition in favour of the Woman Suffrage Bill in 1910. That said, there are oddities, easiest explained by quoting Hilda Gregg's 1898 review to the effect that the book appears not to be a mature work, but written in the 1870s:

... we still incline to the belief that it was written at the period of which it treats, and for some reason or other withheld from publication until the present time. Colour is given to this hypothesis by the asides in which the author indulges on such subjects as golf and bicycling, Zola and Ibsen (the Scandinavian playwright is introduced as a novelist, by the way), and the closure, which have all the appearance of being interpolated to bring the book up to date; while the triumphant "Fulfilled in 1897," as a footnote to a prophetic passage referring to a parliamentary debate, would, we hope, be impossible in the case of a prediction uttered after the fact.
...
This leads to the most astounding scene in the book, and one which is apparently intended to be taken seriously. The Immaculate is alone on the balcony, which firemen and spectators are alike afraid to approach from below. They have thrown him a rope, but he is too much injured to use it. Then, "with a wild cry of 'With him or for him,' a tall young woman dashed through hosestreams, policemen, and firemen, caught the rope, swarmed up it like a cat, and reached the tottering balcony in a few seconds." We have never seen a cat swarm up a rope; but far be it from us to limit the powers of that ingenious animal, or of Amy, who "could tie herself into knots, and do wonderful things on the horizontal bar." Once on the balcony, she fastens the rope round the Immaculate, lifts him up and over the rail, and lets him down, then leaps to the ground, knocking down a fireman in her fall. The result to the fireman is not stated, but we fear that it must have been serious; the result to Amy is that she marries the Immaculate. We regret to say that he urges her to this step with the plea, "I am your Frankenstein. You have given me life"; but perhaps as a married woman she rescued sufficient time from her professional avocations to correct her husband's quotations before they appeared in his parliamentary speeches. "Amy's husband," we are told, "never forgot the cry that rang through the roaring flames surrounding him of 'With him or for him!'" Probably not; nor probably did his acquaintances ever allow him to forget it. As for the firemen, policemen, and other casual auditors, they must have felt that for once a bit of Adelphi melodrama had wandered into real life.

The astonishing youthfulness of this scene is a strong support to our theory (save that we can scarcely imagine a mature writer allowing it to pass as anything but a skit), but there are a good many touches in the book which remind us that the Maxwell Gray we know best possesses what the eighteenth century would have called "an agreeable rallying turn." Still, as we have seen, the funniest things in the book are those which to all appearance are not intended to be so.

- The Medical Woman in Fiction, Hilda Gregg, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, July 1898.

I don't disagree with the "early work" theory. Maxwell Gray is an author who so regularly incorporates her environs into her novels (a trait called in writing-crit circles Dischism) that the works often provide leads to where she can be placed historically. In the case of Sweethearts and Friends, the fictional White How school is highly identifiable as Langrigge House in Bowness, a small private school where Maxwell Gray was working as a governess, aged 24, in 1871. The detailed descriptions of the place strongly suggest that at least that section of the novel was written very close to the time Maxwell Gray was there.

- Ray

... our fathers that begat us

A couple of years back - see M and other non-comical comics - I briefly mentioned Chris Ware's graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, which I've just been re-reading.  It's a poignant and semi-autobiographical exploration of the psychology of  Corrigan, a timid postal worker in his 30s, as he meets his father for the first time.  It is, however, a nonlinear story, with the main thread interwoven with Jimmy's dreams and fantasies and with flashbacks, particularly to the childhood of Corrigan's grandfather at the time of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (see this hypertext thesis and this Illinois Institute of Technology project) with its 600-acre stucco-coated "White City".

The threads weave even more tightly with interactions between past and present also interact: Jimmy's neuroses and dreams (such as his fear of women and his recurring dream of a tiny horse) appear to come from the traumas of his grandfather's childhood rather than his own. Through these connected narratives, the story gradually reveals and dissects the history of a family with a repeating motif of fractured relationships, all leading to Jimmy's crippling inability assert himself and interact with the world.  I'm pleased to see that the sampler at Random House, and the CNN review (A not-so-comic comic book) and interview with Chris Ware are still online.

Somewhat in contrast, I've also been reading Exit Wounds, also an acclaimed graphic novel, by the Israeli artist Rutu Modan.  This takes a somewhat different angle on fatherhood, beginning when Koby Franco, a 20-something taxi driver in Tel Aviv, gets a call from the nearby Army Headquarters, where a female soldier, Numi, tells him his estranged father Gabriel may be dead, possibly the single unidentified victim of a suicide bombing. He isn't much interested, but Numi (who is keener than him to investigate) gradually draws him into following official and unofficial avenues to see if Gabriel is the unknown victim.  Initially Franco thinks of the tall and gangly Numi as 'The Giraffe', but the two become increasingly close as they pursue the puzzle of Gabriel's whereabouts.  Numi, however, has an agenda of her own, and Koby becomes increasingly troubled at the revelations of his father's complex love life.

Although the blurb at Drawn and Quarterly (here, and see the sampler) describes Exit Wounds as particular "portrait of modern Israel, a place where sudden death mingles with the slow dissolution of family ties", the location doesn't strike me as crucial to the story; any kind of mass accident, anywhere, could have led to the mystery. The central theme is, like Jimmy Corrigan, an investigation of a single fractured family. It's not as convoluted as the stream-of-consciousness Corrigan, but it's nevertheless sensitive and gripping, and it was rightly nominated for the 2007 Quill Awards.

- RG

A Costly Freak

Back to the Maxwell Gray (Mary Gleed Tuttiett) project: I just read her 1894 novel A Costly Freak.

It concerns an impoverished and rather naive curate, who finds £30 inside his Bible and believes it's an apport put there by God.

A Costly Freak is discussed in my book A Wren-like Note: the life and works of Maxwell Gray (Mary Gleed Tuttiett). See the official site, www.maxwellgray.co.uk


- Ray

Artzybasheff and Artsybashev

Artzybasheff: Life panorama of fictional lunar inhabitants and visitors, 15th December 1958: click for full spread and associated article identifying them.

Further still relating to the link Bill Higgins sent, it's worth checking out the work of the Ukrainian-born artist Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965). For some reason I'd never encountered his work before, and I'm sorry it took so long to make the acquaintance. It ranges from the near-photorealistic straight portraiture (though, more often than not, with surreal background elements) of his cover art for Time magazine to the highly surreal, such as the anthropomorphised machines of his Machinalia and Diablerie; his depictions of pathological mental states, Neurotica; and the nightmarish swastika-based fantasias of his anti-Nazi art for Time.

Life magazine also featured his artwork. See this Speaking of Pictures feature for 3rd November 1941; his explanation of flying saucers for 21st July 1947 (its biomorphic alien gun is remarkably reminiscent of the artwork of HR Giger, particularly the 'space-jockey' of Alien; the designs for improving the human form for 12th March 1951 (see man and woman); the previously-mentioned panorama of fictional Martians for 24th September 1956; and this similar panorama of fictional lunar creatures for 15th December 1958. See the Google Books magazine search option for many more.

Artzybasheff is further known for his book illustrations, such as those for Charles G Finney's forgotten classic The Circus of Dr Lao. His work is collected in a standalone book, As I See.

A striking collection of extraordinary images from one of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed and unique American artists. This fantastical collection teems with ironic imagery which documents our culture’s vanity, aggression, dreams, and neuroses with biting wit and wisdom. Boris Artzybasheff’s striking graphic style, which includes everything from grotesque experiments in anthropomorphism, to the depiction of vivid and extreme ranges of human psychology and emotion, is displayed to full effect in this seminal collection of his work. A stunning collection from an artist with a strong sense of design and humour!

- As I See blurb, Titan Books edition

Artzybasheff was the son of Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927, same surname - just different conventional transliteration). Artistic ability clearly ran in the family, as the latter went to art school. , However, Artsybashev instead turned a similar thematic interest in the outré to writing, producing short stories and novels - by turns amusing, subversive and horrific with their themes of sex, suicide and murder - that scandalised Russian society in the closing years of the Tsarist regime and were banned by the subsequent Soviet regime. His most popular novel was the 1907 Санин (transliterated as Sanin or Sanine) whose Wikipedia description deserves some kind of prize for the most misleadingly coy description of a novel:

Its hero, twentysomething Sanin, after a long absence from home, comes back to visit his mother and sister. During his stay he meets varied people, some of whom are neutral, amazed, threatened or excited by his way of thinking about the world and human existence. Sanin remains confident and self-assured and at the end of the book leaves town.

The Cornell Press blurb is more informative. The title character Sanin is an intellectual antihero who quietly goes around behaving with complete disregard for conventional morality:

The hero of Artsybashev's novel exhibits a set of new values to be contrasted with the morality of the older Russian intelligentsia. Sanin is an attractive, clever, powerful, life-loving man who is, at the same time, an amoral and carnal animal, bored both by politics and by religion. During the novel he lusts after his own sister, but defends her when she is betrayed by an arrogant officer; he deflowers an innocent-but-willing virgin; and encourages a Jewish friend to end his self-doubts by committing suicide.

At the time, the novel was denounced as pornographic, but it isn't remotely by modern standards; you can read it in translation at Project Gutenberg (EText-No. 9051). The cause for offence was that it appealed to, and appeared to encourage, the attitude of a disaffected generation in Russia who were cheesed off both with traditionalism and with the failure of political action to alter things. Sanin came out at the beginning of the "Period of Reaction" when pro-Tsarist factions were increasingly undermining progressive changes introduced after the 1905 Russian Revolution (though it wasn't written in response to this; it had been rejected by publishers in 1903).

Sanin appeared at the psychological moment, late in the year 1907. The Revolution was a failure, and it being impossible to fight the government or to obtain political liberty, people in Russia of all classes were ready for a revolt against moral law, the religion of self-denial, and all the conventions established by society, education, and the church. At this moment of general desperation and smouldering rage, appeared a work written with great power and great art, deifying the natural instincts of man, incarnating the spirit of liberty in a hero who despises all so-called morality as absurd tyranny. It was a bold attempt to marshal the animal instincts of humanity, terrifically strong as they are even in the best citizens, against every moral and prudential restraint. The effect of the book will probably not last very long, — already it has been called an ephemeral sensation, — but it was immediate and tremendous. It was especially powerful among university students and high school boys and girls — the "Sanin-morals" of undergraduates were alluded to in a speech in the Duma.

- Essays on Russian Novelists (William Lyon Phelps, 1911 - p 248 onwards).

A number of other Mikhail Artsybashev works are online at the Internet Archive: search on creator:"Artsybashev, M. (Mikhail), 1878-1927". His first anthology, Tales of the Revolution, is characteristic of his style and themes.
- Ray

Percy Greg update

Further to last year's Early spaceships: JJ Astor and Percy Greg (a post on some rather eccentric early SF set on Mars), Bill Higgins - aka Beamjockey - kindly sent me a link to his weblog mentioning that Percy Greg has had a Martian crater named after him: see Hot Martian News: Craters Named for George Pál & Percy Greg. Thanks!

Bill's post links to a short obituary of Greg in The Academy and Literature, Volume 37, 1890, which summarises Greg's career and beliefs:

Mr Percy Greg, who died on Christmas Eve, was a native of Manchester, where he was born in 1836. His father was Mr. William Rathbone Greg, the well-known writer on social and economical questions. Mr. Percy Greg devoted himself to literature and journalism; and, after serving ou the Manchester Guardian, removed to London, where he wrote leading articles for the Standard and other papers. Some of his earliest work appeared under the name of Lionel H. Holdreth. Two volumes, entitled Shadows of the Past and The Spirit of Inquiry, were radical in their tone, as to both theology and politics. The list of books published under his own name is lengthy: Interleaves in the Workday Prose of Twenty Years (1875), The Devil's Advocate (1878), Across the Zodiac (1880), Errant (1880), Ivy, Cousin and Bride (1881), Sanguelac (1883), Without God (1883), The Verge of Night (1885), The History of the United States (1887). Mr. Greg was to the last a fierce partisan of the South in the war of the Secession, and the "Lost Cause" had no advocate on the other side of the Atlantic so warm and so implacable. Perhaps his best book is Interleaves—a little volume of verse that is very little known. Here too the Southern Confederacy is heroically sung; but, apart from these mistaken efforts, it contains "The Martyr of Doubt," "The Martyr of Faith," "Why should the Atheist fear to Die ?", "Thy Kingdom come," and "Hallowed be thy Name." These pieces are expressive of widely different sentiments; but all are marked by strong poetic feeling. The two last-named have been included in the recent Hymnal edited by the Rev. John Hunter.
- W. E. A. A.

So, if you missed it, do check out Early spaceships: JJ Astor and Percy Greg for more details on Greg's only SF novel, Across the Zodiac, of which a number of editions are online at the Internet Archive. A precursor to the "sword and planet" genre, it tells via the device of a purported found manuscript the spaceship journey to Mars of an unnamed narrator ("the Innominate") and his time among the "Martialists" there. The Martialist society is strange: a secular scientific culture far advanced in technology yet essentially feudal, and sexist even by late-Victorian standards (on Mars, women are not considered worth educating).

It's unsurprising that the few contemporary reviewers thought it weird. The Pall Mall Gazette (January 20, 1880) guardedly made no critical comment whatsoever, just giving an extended description of the plot and concluding

A STRANGE JOURNEY
...
There is reason to suppose that Mr. Greg and his Innominate believe themselves to have been dipping far into the future, and to have seen "a vision of the world and all the wonders that shall be." This question the readers—and they should have many—must settle for themselves.

The Morning Post (January 27, 1880) was far less guarded.

ACROSS THE ZODIAC

This is a book written manifestly in imitation of Jules Verne's celebrated stories, and as an imitation it is decidedly successful, but it certainly lacks originality, the the humour which makes up "Un Voyage a la Lune" &c, so amusing is totally absent. Perhaps the most successful original work of this class of late years was Bulwer's "Coming Race," because, under the guise of fairy tale, there was also a thin and steely vein of satire, and the descriptions throughout were remarkably poetical and beautiful. Mr. Greg's "Across the Zodiac" seems wanting in purpose, and three volumes of fabulous adventure would need the pen of a Swift to render them interesting and readable. Still it would be unjust not to accord a fair meed of praise to this venture on the part of a clever man to inculcate his peculiar views and doctrines under the guise of a fiction, as said before, of the Verne class. As usual with writers of this kind of book, the author starts by declaring that he did not write it, but that it is the result of his clever talent at deciphering hieroglyphics. He finds a MS., and this description of a trip across the Zodiac is the result. The style in which the book is written is rather flowing and graceful than otherwise, and not a few of the descriptive passages are not deficient in poetical beauty. The main defect, however, is that there is too much of it—it is too long and spun out. We cannot feel interested beyond a very limited extent by accounts of fabulous places and scenes, so that more often than not books like "Across the Zodiac" resemble the man who tried to sit down between two stools—they come to grief. Too long and marvellous to interest grown-up people, they fail because they are, on the other hands, too learned to amuse children, who, in the present instance especially, are not likely to be amused by innumerable passages on the relationship that exists between the sexes in the Zodiac. Under a thin disguise Mr. Greg entertains his readers through not one but many chapters on his peculiar views concerning the proper intercourse which should be maintained between the fair and the sterner sex, the laws of marriage, and the education of children. After all, it is best perhaps to say your say boldly, and to express your serious opinions in the form of serious essays on social subjects, and not to have recourse to the somewhat played-out artifice of allegory. It is not given to every man to be a Dean Swift or a Bulwer, and Mr. Greg will do well in future to bear that fact in mind.

Greg is an interesting but odd character, an author who swung from youthful atheism and idealism to religiosity and ultra-Toryism, as well as being - at least in later life - something of a fantasist with a rabid hostility toward the winning Union in the American Civil War. The short obituary in the literary news section of The Star (Christchurch, New Zealand, 3rd March 1890) says that his best novels

... were laid in the South during this struggle, and the principal battles 'twixt Northerners and Confederates are most vividly and realistically described in "Errant" and "Sanguelac". Both of these stories are indeed admirable specimens of military romances. One imagined them written by a daring adventurous soldier, who had been through the war himself. As a matter of fact, Mr Greg was a pale, emaciated invalid who had never even crossed the Atlantic.

Addendum (upgraded from comments) Bill Higgins sent a further excellent link to a lovely image from Life magazine (see Picasa and the original in Google Books) of Boris Artzybasheff's 1956 painting of literary inhabitants of Mars. I have to admit I'm a literary philistine on this topic; I only recognised HG Wells' War of the Worlds Martians (and that from the graphic novel League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2 rather than the Wells description). See the next post for more about the artist.

- Ray

The Last Sentence

As part of an ongoing project to read all the works of Maxwell Gray (Mary Gleed Tuttiett), I just finished her novel The Last Sentence (serialised in 1892, published in three volumes by Heinemann in 1893, illustrated by Alfred Henke).

In brief, it concerns the events leading to the tragedy of an eminent judge forced to pass a death sentence on his own daughter by a secret first marriage when he was a young barrister.

All in all, it's a very readable novel, quite Hardyesque in its sometimes grotesque turns of fate, and it never goes entirely beyond the edge of believability. I am, however, not clear why Cecil's conflict of interest wouldn't be grounds for calling a mistrial. The scene of the judge dying after collapsing in court may well have been inspired by Thomas Noon Talfourd, an author and judge who died in 1854 after suffering an apoplectic fit while addressing the jury from the bench. The downside is that after reading more than a few Maxwell Gray novels, you start to spot leitmotifs such as the respectable central character tormented by a secret misdeed that comes back to bite him, and the feisty proto-feminist heroine with a trio of suitors (a Mary Sue if I ever saw one), and even locations (Mary Tuttiett had visited a few places such as Windermere before her lifelong incapacity, and her characters go there too). Unlike a number of her other novels, its setting isn't explicitly identifiable as the Isle of Wight, but the regional dialect and descriptions of a south-facing coastal location with a chalk down cut off by a sea cliff plausibly put "Swanbourne" as one of a number of manors somewhere slightly inland from Freshwater Bay or Alum Bay, either of which could be the coastal hamlet "Seagate" of which Cynthia thinks disparagingly:

... the little watering-place the sudden up-springing of which on her father's land was the chief source of her wealth. The sight of this, too, vexed her. Shortly before her father's death certain plots of his land had been sold on building leases. Hence a ghastly row of jerry-built stucco villas, a focus of cheap-trippers, bathing-machines, nigger bands and other horrors.

(I suspect this is the author talking; a number of Maxwell Gray poems are similarly hostile to modernity, and she refers similarly to "the latter-day torment of mushroom villas" in another novel, The House of Hidden Treasure).

The Last Sentence is available on the Internet Archive (ID: lastsentence00hencgoog). It was filmed in 1917 (see the IMDb) with some wise changes in character names; the novel is overloaded with very similar C- names.

The Last Sentence is discussed in more detail in my book A Wren-like Note: the life and works of Maxwell Gray (Mary Gleed Tuttiett). See the official site, www.maxwellgray.co.uk

- Ray

More from Hell

In December 2007 - see Dante's World - I mentioned enjoying Niven and Pournelle's Inferno, a modern retelling of the Hell section of Dante's Divine Comedy. I just finished (considerably faster than I did The Lair of the White Worm) reading the 2009 sequel, Escape from Hell (Tor Books, February 2009, ISBN-10: 0765316323).

A bit of necessary preamble: in Inferno, the science fiction writer Carpenter falls from a window during a drinking stunt and wakes up in what resembles the Vestibule of Hell as depicted by Dante. Initially sceptical, he dubs the place Infernoland, and struggles to rationalise it in SF terms. But finally, convinced by physical impossibilities such as regeneration from mortal injuries, he accepts its reality as Dante's Hell. Although puzzled by some aspects (for instance, how he mostly meets Americans, just as Dante mostly met Italians) he concludes that Hell is a kind of theological last chance. Hell is escapable, but only for those with the resolve to journey to its centre. He undertakes this quest, guided by a reformed Benito Mussolini in a Virgil-like role, and accompanied by Jerome Corbett, a pilot who died in a Space Shuttle accident, and William Bonney (i.e. Billy the Kid). Hell's geography is more or less as described by Dante, but with elaborations due to new forms of sin, such as industrial pollution, overtaking archaic ones such as simony.

Escape from Hell initally finds Carpenter despondent in the Wood of Suicides, telling his story to the tree that is Sylvia Plath. Near the centre of Hell, he had been seized by a bearded man who exploded, and found himself reconstituted back in the Vestibule, where undecided souls chase banners for eternity. Adopting Mussolini's role as a guide, he persuaded a lawyer, Rosemary Bennett, to follow him in retracing the journey to escape, but now he has lost her.

Carpenter finds Hell considerably more complex than he had understood at the end of Inferno. He is not alone among damned souls allowed to wander free in Hell - a role gained, it seems, by virtuous acts and altruism such as freeing trapped souls - and Hell itself is changing. Because Hell must mirror Catholic doctrine, Vatican II has changed the status of many past sinners, and Hell's bureaucracy is struggling to keep up. Hence another way of gaining leniency, and even power, is to be recruited to Hell's infrastructure (whether as simple guards, or in helping to computerise records in Dis, Hell's adminsitrative centre).

Norman Spinrad described Inferno as "the ultimate Sam Peckinpah movie with all the matter-of-fact solidity of a Hal Clement novel ... lunacy of a transcendent order". Escape from Hell came across as less striking and slower-paced, now that I know the scenario, but it makes up in general character-building and historical interest. Niven and Pournelle focus, for instance, on the Hughes-Plath relationship, the motivation of Robert Oppenheimer, and indictment of various forms of US political corruption relating to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The focus on US contemporary persons makes for a slight impediment to reading - I needed to keep a bookmark at the glossary of names - but it was overall a very enjoyable sequel.

On the subject of Dante, reviews are coming out for the Dante's Inferno videogame. There seems general agreement that it's spectacular. But as The Independent said - see Hit & Run: Abandon all hope, it's Dante's Inferno: the game - Dante was an intellectual type not really fitted to the genre:

Dante has been beefed up into a blood-hungry crusader, and the date has been rewound by 100 years. The problem for the developers is that Dante paints himself as a man constantly on the verge of passing out in fear of what confronts him. He doesn't, at least in the version I studied, kick open the gates of Hell and invite the evil dead to bring it on. Yet the poet painted a vast and terrifying landscape in the Divine Comedy, with miserable souls facing punishments that still sear the imagination. And the developers have realised this terrain with great relish – it's hard not to be swept up by the sheer scale and gory glory of the game.

I'm not terribly into that style of game (I wouldn't know an Xbox 360 if it bit me) but its polish and detail - many Dante characters are featured - is certainly an indication of the enduring power of Dante's vision. See the official site. Perhaps, as Inferno did, it'll spark a further renewal of interest in the original.

See also: 1935 ante's Inferno.

- Ray

Out-takes: copyright and crime

I've been getting into a daft habit of carefully making a note of news relevant to JSBlog, then forgetting to upload it. Purged from my organiser:

Men at Work plagiarised 'Down Under' riff ("Flute melody taken from 1935 'Kookaburra' children's song, Australian court rules", Kathy Marks, The Independent, 5 February 2010). This means Men at Work potentially owe millions to the copyright owners, Larrikin Music. See the previous Kookaburra fossil exposed for background. Personally I think the result stinks, and that the quotation in question, a tiny riff between verses, was nothing more than a nice homage to a tune that had become de facto public domain due to its obscure copyright status. Quoted in The Age, the founder of Larrikin Records and original owner of Larrikin Music, Warren Fahey, says exactly this:

He recommends the copyright owner, Larrikin Music, should "gift" the song to Australia, arguing that most Australians believe they already have public domain ownership of the song anyway.

"The past week has seen thousands of emails, letters to the editor, radio commentary and internet forums criticising the judgment," says Fahey, who sold Larrikin Music to Music Sales Corporation in 1988 and whose folk band is called the Larrikins.

"Many of these incorrectly criticise Larrikin Records and myself as the protagonist, asking, 'How could someone so dedicated to Australian music do such a thing?' The Larrikin brand has certainly been tarnished by what many see as opportunistic greed on behalf of Larrikin Music/Music Sales."

A "larrikin" is, incidentally, one who subscribes to Australia's folk tradition of anti-authoritarianism - see Larrikinism - and the opposite of a "wowser".

Harry Potter and the great Google onslaught ("The bunfight over Google's library project only serves to remind us that intellectual property battles are nothing new", Robert McCrum, The Observer, Sunday 14 February 2010): the always interesting McCrum writes about great intellectual property battles in history such as the first recognition of literary "piracy" in the 1660s, arguing in effect that these didn't kill literature in the past, so the disputed Google Library Project may have innovative effects we can't predict. See preview of Adrian John's book Piracy.

Forget 'serious' novels, I've turned to a life of crime ("Murder mysteries, once looked down on, are now fit for the literary elite", Stephanie Merritt, The Observer, 14 February 2010). Merritt argues the ... er ... merit of the crime genre as historical fiction. I thoroughly agree; one of the best historical novels I know is Peter Lovesey's murder mystery Wobble to Death, with its fascinating background in Victorian endurance races and their attendant corruption and strychnine-doping (see Strychnine - a lesser-known past).

This artwork was made by a killer. It is no less valid for that (Deborah Orr, The Independent, 11 April 2009): concerning the difficult issue of what we should feel about art made by murderers. In the literary field, she mentions the well-known case of William Chester Minor, a schizophrenic murderer who made thousands of contributions to the OED from his cell in Broadmoor. The excellent and prolific historical crime novelist Anne Perry, creator of the William Monk series, also springs to mind.

- Ray