THE LOST CLUB JOURNAL

Rounding up the unusual suspects

How wonderful that the new deity, the great universal engine of modern communications -- the Lost Club worships at the electronic shrine -- should devote so much (cyber)space to obscure and neglected littérateurs.

Nigel Burwood, who owns Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road, runs a most entertaining website www.anyamountofbooks.com dedicated to 'Minor Characters' -- 'generally people who are footnotes to literary history' -- and 'Oddballiana': in other words the type of folk our group exists to celebrate. Mr Burwood writes:

I am interested in a diverse group of writers. There is talk now of 'transgressional writers' or 'antinomians' but this is an older crowd. You could call them outsiders or marginals -- even oddballs.

I'm thinking of Arthur Cravan, Amanda Ros, M. P. Shiel, Ronald Firbank, Montague Summers, Lautréamont, Jacques Vaché, Mary Butts, William Beckford, Robert Walser, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, Natalie Clifford Barney, Lord Berners, Theodore Wratislaw, Edgar Saltus, Brian Howard, Count Stenbock, John Gawsworth -- the usual suspects.

Searching for these names on the Internet 'using Alta Vista (the scholar's friend)', Mr Burwood found a cheering increase in the number of website references. For example in January 1997 he discovered eighteen sites featured Gawsworth; in April 1998 he found ninety. Eighty-one sites listed Montague Summers in 1997; by 1998 it was 225. There were sixty-five 'hits' for Beckford in 1997, and 220 in 1998. Lautrémont had increased from 700 to 1,350. 'To put these findings in context, Shakespeare gets you 22,000 hits, Charles Dickens, 12,000, Samuel Beckett, 4,500, Evelyn Waugh, 1,350, Dorothy Sayers, 850, and George Gissing, 300,' says Mr Burwood. Checking out Lost Club favourite J. Maclaren-Ross, Mr Burwood discovered that he contributed additional dialogue on the film The Electronic Monster (1958). 'Not a lot of people know that.'

The Any Amount of Books website has short profiles of several of the 'Minor Characters', such as Alfred Charlemagne Lambart (1861-1943), who was friendly with Max Beerbohm and Count Stenbock. Stenbock left him £200 in his will. When he died his daughter burned all his correspondence; clearly a great loss. Brian Howard and his little known poetry features. His one book¸ God Save the King (1930), was published by Nancy Cunard's Hours Press in Paris. Good copies sell for £150. There is a tribute to Robert Hamer (1911-63), the film director and poet -- he made and adapted Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), was published in New Verse and has been called 'the greatest miscarriage of talent in the post-war British cinema' (he had a drink problem). He directed perhaps the finest sequence in the Ealing horror omnibus Dead of Night (1945) -- the Haunted Mirror episode -- and, if you'll forgive our mention of it, in his enjoyable Father Brown (1954) a detective named Valentine (Bernard Lee) poses as a car salesman named Dobson.

In the section 'Billionaire Book Collectors' Mr Burwood points out that Bill Gates -- the Microsoft guru not the 'other' King of Redonda -- is 'apparently extremely well read and collects manuscripts . . . He is so keen on Fitzgerald that he is known in some circles as "The Great Gatesby".' Tender is the Night is his favourite. There is an honourable mention for Maundy Gregory, Corvine enthusiast, one-time general manager of the Benson Company, owner of the Whitehall Gazette and the Ambassador Club, intimate of royal houses, including the Windsors, MI5 chief, provider of Lucullan feasts, seller of honours -- and possible murderer: see Arthur Machen, by Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, for the story of how Gregory was involved with one of Machen's old theatrical flames, Mrs Frederick Rosse, 'The Shepherdess'. In The Quest for Corvo (1934) A. J. A. Symons tells how one of Gregory's many agents had, 'at considerable cost', salvaged five copies of Frederick Rolfe's 'lost work' Don Renato; or, An Ideal Content (printed but not published in 1909) from the depths of a rat-haunted printer's cellar. (The book was eventually published with an Introduction by Cecil Woolf in 1963.)

Mr Burwood has a thought-provoking section on unsaleable books. He writes: 'Slow-selling, common used books are often referred to (with a curse) as "dogs".' Chief among these is The Scallop (1957), published by Shell:

It is an attractive 4to book dealing with the iconography of the scallop and would be quite valuable if it were not so incredibly common. Copies were sent to every Shell shareholder and were (possibly) given out at petrol stations . . .

Other unsaleable books include works by Thomas Armstrong, F. W. Bain, Ann Bridge, Thomas B. Costain, Galsworthy, Francis Parkinson Keyes, C. E. Montague, Walter H. Page, Cecil Roberts, H. M. Tomlinson, Morris West and Humbert Wolfe . . .

Also worth avoiding are Donn Byrne, Lloyd C. Douglas, the American novelist Winston Churchill (not to be confused with the British Prime Minister), Howard Spring and Frank Yerby. In the USA, Ron McKuen heads the list, I am reliably informed.

Would any readers care to defend any of the above? It's surprising to see Howard Spring on the white elephants list. Perhaps, along with Morris West and Galsworthy, he is too readily available in paperback. Spring, born in 1889, was a solid and dependable romantic realist, in the tradition of A. J. Cronin, and his Shabby Tiger, Fame is the Spur! and My Son, My Son! remain engrossing yarns. Spring was born in Cardiff, the son of a jobbing gardener from County Cork. After working for the South Wales News and the Yorkshire Observer, in 1915 he moved to the Manchester Guardian. In 1931, after coming to the favourable attention of Lord Beaverbrook, Spring became an influential book reviewer on the London Evening Standard. He went to live in Cornwall after the outbreak of war in 1939 and devoted himself to novels, dying at his home in Falmouth in 1965. Fame is the Spur! (1940), the story of a Labour leader's rise to power, was suggested by Ramsey MacDonald's career and humble origins. Shabby Tiger (1934), the story of painter Nick Faunt and various unconventional love affairs -- with its famous disclaimer 'There is no such city as Manchester' -- and O Absalom! (1938), retitled My Son, My Son! for subsequent editions because of the famous novel by Faulkner, were both effectively dramatized on TV, along with Fame is the Spur! Who could forget the adorable Maeve, played by the Pre-Raphaelite Prue Clarke, in My Son, My Son?

Posterity recognizes Enoch Soames

Bryan Welch of the Bookplate Society reviews A Bibliography of Enoch Soames (1862-1897) by Mark Samuels Lasner, with an Afterword by Margaret D. Stetz; published by The Rivendale Press, Oxford (1999):

When Max Beerbohm first opened Holbrook Jackson's The Eighteen Nineties he looked eagerly in the index for Enoch Soames -- fearing that he would not be there. He was not. This appears to have inspired Beerbohm to write his memoir of Soames, thus beginning the task of restoring him to a place in the literary canon, even if not that exalted rank which Soames believed his due. For Soames, the Catholic diabolist, hungered after recognition and fame. Max writes how Soames sold his soul to the Devil for the chance to visit the British Museum Library a hundred years thereafter to assure himself of his place in the literary canon. Though Soames was disappointed by the neglect his works suffered, Beerbohm has been proved mistaken in his estimation of Soames' significance. This comprehensive bibliography, modelled on the Soho Bibliographies, scrupulously records Soames' works -- published and unpublished -- contributions to books and periodicals, publications about Soames and an iconography of images of Soames. The published works are of extreme rarity. No copies of his two books Negations and Fungoids have been traced in public collections. Only two or three copies of Negations are believed to remain in existence in private hands, jealously guarded by their owners. Fungoids is probably even rarer -- only three copies are reported to have been sold. Soames is known to have published a third book but of this even the title is a mystery -- though Lasner evinces circumstantial evidence of pseudonymous publication and suggests the work may be Walt Ruding's An Evil Motherhood. Mark Samuels Lasner is to be thanked for this important addition to Soames studies - the list of publications about Soames will be particularly valuable to other scholars pursuing this elusive writer. Let us hope that we shall also see in the near future a critical edition of Negations and Fungoids, so that these significant texts will become available to a wider audience.

In March 2001 several Lost Clubbers, including Bryan Welch, were privileged to see, at a meeting of the Eighteen Nineties Society, Stephen Calloway's unique copy of Negations: a splendidly neat little volume. Unfortunately, through a printer's error, the text had somehow been collated with pages from Alice Meynell's The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays (1897). The Soames bibliography (£20) is obtainable from the publisher Steve Halliwell at PO Box 97, High Wycombe, Bucks HP14 4GH.

The letter that never was (alas!)

Imagine, if you will, the fervid pounding of the heart of one of the LCJ editors when on opening his mail some time back, the address 'Lynwood, Amersham, Bucks' sharing the same missive with 10 Barnes Street, Providence, caught his eye. Machen replying to a letter from H. P. Lovecraft was surely too good to be true, and so, alas, it proved. The lack of extant correspondence between Machen and Lovecraft is one of those sad lacunae of life that is best answered by manufacturing it, and so Mark Samuels, of the Machen Friends and Ghost Story Society, has done just that. His skilful pastiche of Machen's style, capturing the sage's voice, is worthy of reproduction here. Machen did know of Lovecraft's existence. S. T. Joshi's H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (Necronomicon Press, 1997) tells how Machen was sent a copy of 'Supernatural Horror in Literature' when it appeared in W. Paul Cook's journal The Recluse in 1927. Kipling, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James and Lord Dunsany also received copies. (We've said it before, elsewhere, but the thought of Kipling reading Lovecraft is somehow surreal.) Machen wrote to Donald Wandrei thanking him for the essay, saying how it had 'held' him. It seems unlikely that Lovecraft and Machen ever communicated since HPL would surely have mentioned it to his other correspondents. And he disliked 'fawning upon the great' -- witness his reluctance to meet Dunsany on the peer's US tour in 1919 -- and so would doubtless have been too diffident to approach such a grand old man of letters as Machen. But if he had summoned the courage to write, here is how a Machen reply might have run . . .

Lynwood

Amersham

Bucks

June 26, '29

H. P. Lovecraft, Esq.

10, Barnes St

Providence, R.I.

USA

 

Dear Mr Lovecraft

Firstly, please accept my apologies for having left your letter unanswered for some time. The delay is due to our being set free from the bondage of Loudoun Road and also, I must confess, to my age and infirmity. I do nothing quickly and very little well.

Do not consider it a liberty to have written to me as a complete stranger and let me assure you that the use of my phrase 'the Aklo letters' in your story 'The Dunwich Horror' was welcome. Indeed, I am grateful to you for having given me the opportunity to see the story and the journal 'Weird Tales' wherein it is included. I found 'The Dunwich Horror' of absorbing interest. The opening is admirable with its description of the New England landscape. As you mention that you are familiar with my books you may remember my long passage on Miss Wilkins in 'Hieroglyphics'. A sense of loneliness is diffused throughout her New England stories and I believe there is a similar vein in 'The Dunwich Horror'. I note that you have employed a theme that I used in 'The Great God Pan' and hinted at in 'The White People'. It is not to the puritan's taste.

Dread and fear are presented to your hero Dr Armitage on his path yet he does not stumble and his feet do not go down to destruction. There is a great lesson here I feel.

Your style, incidentally, strikes me as remarkably like that of Edgar Allan Poe in places. It is perhaps too distinct but, as in Poe, I fancy that I sometimes detect the sound of a voice that is not that of man, but which hails from the centre of powers in undiscovered regions of which we know next to nothing.

I do not have to hand the copy of 'The Recluse' that one of your citizens, Mr Donald Wandrei, sent me last year. My books are not yet in order after our move. However, your essay on supernatural literature featured in that publication impressed me greatly. I will endeavour to recover it and will be glad to give you some comments when next I write.

Yours sincerely

Arthur Machen

Mark hopes to build this fictional correspondence into an epistolary tale some time.

Theodore by Theodora: a Powys memoir

Theodora Gaye Scutt, the daughter of Lost Club regular Count Potocki, has published a memoir of T. F. Powys, Cuckoo in the Powys Nest (2000), published by Brynmill Press. Mrs Scutt was brought up by Powys and his wife Susan, and he book gives an intimate portrait of the Dorset genius and mystic from the early 1930s until his death in 1953. Lost Clubbers who have read Mrs Scutt's sketch of her father in Issue 2 will know that she is a writer with trenchant style and refreshing candour. As her publishers state: 'Mrs Scutt writes in an entirely unselfconscious way, with vivacity, perceptiveness, and firmness of judgement, not least in respect of herself. Here is a galaxy of personalities, many of them celebrities in their day, others obscure but as strongly individualized.' Theodore Powys is best remembered for his religious allegory Mr Weston's Good Wine (1927). God and the archangel Michael visit the village of Folly Down to bring the villagers wine, love and death. Cuckoo in the Powys Nest is available, price £20, from The Brynmill Press, at Pockthorpe Cottage, Denton, Harleston IP20 OAS.

Les femmes de siècle

It is encouraging to see that the Lost Club is not alone in trying to draw attention to overlooked authors. A new study by Talia Schaffer for the University Press of Virginia seeks to revive interest in many little-known woman writers of the 1890s. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000) champions the cause of such figures as Ouida, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Florence Farr, Lucas Malet and Vernon Lee, plus many more who do not have even their limited reputations. The author also suggests that better-known male writers owe some of their effects to these: Wilde, for example, learnt from Ouida's lively wit and vibrant women characters, while Hardy drew heavily on a Malet novel for the plot of Jude the Obscure.

Persephone Books of 59 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3NB

<www.persephonebooks.com> is mostly devoted to reprinting overlooked books by women writers. These include Marghanita Laski's The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953), with an introduction by P. D. James, Mariana (1940) by Monica Dickens and Consequences (1919) by E. M. Delafield. Of particular note is the collection Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, whose One Fine Day (1947) is praised in The Reader's Guide to the Twentieth Century Novel as 'enchantingly perfectly . . . outstanding . . . distinguished not only by its flawless construction but also by its magnificent descriptions . . . and couched in richly sensuous prose'. This novel, one of only five she wrote in a long writing career, was reprinted by Virago in 1985 and won her comparisons to Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Bowen. One Fine Day is described as 'almost a hymn of praise to the English' (a rare enough thing in itself), and as 'a novel of infinite subtlety, perception and delicacy, full of tenderness and humour - and yet with a pervading strain of melancholy tingeing the optimism like autumn leaves in an Indian summer'. The stories are almost as equally quietly effective, finely conveying the very curious atmosphere of the war years. Persephone is to be congratulated for reviving interest in Mollie Panter-Downes and in other neglected writers.

Sex in the unswinging Sixties

Looking for some Lobsang Rampa titles (see Issue 2) in the Corgi paperback of The Hill of Dreams (1968) reminded us of that publisher's rather coy category in the famous buttoned-up and restrictive Sixties. Under 'General' we find The Virility Diet, Sexual Life in England, The Bridal Bed, Unmarried Love, Mrs Grundy (illustrated), Sex in America, Frank Harris's My Life and Loves and Man and Sex. No doubt when you ordered them they arrived in plain brown paper wrappers. Still on this subject, we do hope the Lost Club will be running in a century's time if only so our succeeding editors will be able to devote time and research to the manifold legions of obscure writers and books from past ages. For example, Michael Goss of Delectus Books (27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3XX) sends a wants list carrying such curiosa as Intrigues in a Boarding School, The Autobiography of a Footman, Plain Tales of the Birch, The Confessions of Miss Coote, The Castle of the Whip and The Peeress and the Page. The Pastimes of a Convent sounds like a deeply devotional work. We have been looking for these, with little success, in various book emporia and charity shops. Ah, as we've observed before, so many books -- so little time!

Nat Gould rides again

Further to our piece on the prolific Manchester-born racing novelist Nathaniel Gould in Issue 2, journalist Tony Glynn (Mancunian and proud of it) writes to say that no less a figure than Samuel Beckett, that famous left-arm medium pace bowler and left-handed bat, was a Gould enthusiast in his younger years (and in his later ones?). Tony, who lives at Southport where Gould was educated, writes:

. . . I was listening to RTE Irish radio as I often do and they were doing a series remembering Sam Beckett. Among the items from the radio archives were the memories of one who was at Trinity College, Dublin, with Beckett, in the early twenties. This chap said that, while there, Sam developed a passion for Nat Gould's novels and went around telling everyone that Gould was the greatest writer in English of all time.

It had to be pointed out to the radio audience that Nat Gould 'wrote romances of the turf in which the favourite was dramatically saved from being nobbled in the last chapter' -- well, that was the quote more or less.

A biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame (1996), by James Knowlson, has a few lines on Gould, confirming Beckett's adoration. And we thought he was just a hack.Tony also had some interesting remarks to make on a subject new to us: Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907-75), whose career shows that alien conspiracy theories are nothing new.

The Lobsang Rampa yarn [Issue 2] reminded me of the 'Shaver mystery' -- another example of how gullible people can be -- well, at least, how gullible science-fiction fans can be, and I suppose fans can be marginally regarded as people . . . It was Marion Bradley who filled me in on it.

A bloke named Richard Sharpe Shaver began to sell a series of yarns to Amazing Stories around 1945 when it was edited by the controversial and colourful Ray Palmer. Shaver's yarns dealt with a malignant race of robots or some such, dwelling under a mountain which just happened to be near his home in North or South Carolina, or Snake's Navel, Idaho, or some other such centre of world civilization. (Marion told me that Shaver was a pipe-welder who discovered the secret of pulp writing.)

It was that good old American bogey, the threat from outside: the Yellow Peril, Orson Welles' Martians, the Communists, Saddam Hussein . . . it seems the 'Shaver mystery' set fandom by the ears for a time because Palmer (obviously seeing a chance of improving circulation) backed Shaver in declaring it all to be true and he even devoted an issue wholly to Shaver. The lunatic fringe gathered around Palmer and Shaver in their Chicago base while the truly orthodox and scientific scorned them from the feet of the Pope himself, His Holiness John W. Campbell of Astounding in New York.

Shaver claimed all his stuff about the robots was true, and they threatened the world. He opened the affair with 'I Remember Lemuria' in the March 1945 Amazing, which brought in 2,500 letters. The Shaver business boosted the magazine's circulation tremendously but alienated many fans. The stories were presented as being based on fact and put forward a 'von Daniken-like cosmology' [see the entry on Shaver in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction] with humanity manipulated by 'detrimental robots'. It lasted until 1947 but Palmer revived the whole circus as late as 1961 in a small circulation mag he was editing and, to the end of his days, Shaver declared it was all true!

Ah, where would we be without literary oddballs? Well, there'd be no Lost Club for a start.

The Gardiner who is not a farmer

Can any readers give us news of a mysterious book entitled Why I Am Not a Farmer by R. H. Gardiner? This is the subject of an anecdote related by Professor Roger Smith at Aylesford Literary Weekends. It appears the book was quite definitely seen prominently displayed on a lectern in the window of a bookshop near the Cathedral Close at Salisbury, one Sunday. But when an enquiry was made after it the following week, the book was gone, and another was in its place. The staff denied any knowledge of seeing or selling such a title or anything like it. The manager said he personally selected the titles for display and had never heard of this one. The book is not to be found in any library catalogues. To add to the mystery, the episode has hints of several authors who were themselves equally enigmatic. The first book by reclusive author Ernest Bramah (to be featured in a later issue), the creator of Kai Lung and the blind detective Max Carrados, was entitled English Farming and Why I Turned It In (1894), not dissimilar to the mystery book, and certainly scarce enough to warrant display. Rolf Gardiner, ecologist, visionary and founder of the Springhead Ring, also wrote on farming matters, though did not use the initials R. H. Then there was Ralph Harrison Gardiner, the author of Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy (1943). And, of course, the elusive C. W. Blubberhouse lived in the Cathedral Close, Salisbury, for some years. All very tantalizing.

Maddeningly and bafflingly

The TLS annual round-up of International Books of the Year, as chosen by fifty distinguished writers, would not normally be fertile ground for Lost Club types. But Redondan peer William Boyd used it to praise the work of William Gerhardie, saying he'd been reading through his books all year, 'most of which are, maddeningly and bafflingly, out of print' -- a phrase which could be applied to many authors covered between these pages -- and drew attention to his 'ruthless, dark humour', describing him as 'a great comic writer'. Evelyn Waugh acknowledged a great debt to his work, which is indeed playful satire of a high order. We hope to feature a survey of his novels in a later issue.

Trashy book

It's not only bookdealers and libraries who are guilty of putting volumes in the trash (see 'Honourable Mentions'), a member of the Lost Club editorial board was searching high and low for an inscribed copy of a cherished biography but it was nowhere to be found. He eventually discovered the book, to his dismay, at the bottom of a garbage bag, kept by his fireside, whence it had tumbled undetected. Its appearance had not been improved by being covered in all manner of unidentifiable stuff. He was relieved to have found the biography but wondered how many books he has lost this way.

Those charming people reunited

One of the myriad delights of attending the Friends of Arthur Machen weekend at Caerleon in March 2001 was seeing Machen's biographers Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton reunited. Forty years ago they collaborated on their fine biography of Arthur Machen, published by their subject's old sparring partner and occasional headache Martin Secker in 1963. (We hope to carry an item on Secker in a future issue.) When these two pioneering researchers began their work Machen had been the subject of only two books, Vincent Starrett's monograph in 1918 and William F. Gekle's Arthur Machen: Weaver of Fantasy in 1948. The paperback edition of the Reynolds and Charlton biography (1988) is still available, price £10.50, from the LCJ editors, Roger Dobson at 50 St John Street, Oxford OX1 2LQ < rogeralandobson@hotmail.com> and Mark Valentine at Stable Cottage, Priest Bank Road, Kildwick, near Keighley, West Yorkshire BD20 9BH mark.valentine@btinternet.com. Now proceedings are in hand to obtain a copy of John Gawsworth's unpublished Machen biography from the 1930s. Richard Rogers, the Lost Club's man in Los Angeles, is on the trail . . . (Late flash: A photocopy of Gawsworth's biography is now in the hands of the Machen Friends. While no masterpiece, it contains many previously unknown facts about the Apostle of Wonder and is certainly worthy of publication. Among many fascinating details, it explains, for the first time, why only a handful of copies of Machen's first publication Eleusinia were ever received by his family. And we hear how Machen met M. P. Shiel - and his first wife, Amy.)

Laughing matter

Prion Books, Imperial Works, Perren Street, London NW5 3ED; tel: 020 7482 4248 <www.prionbooks.com> has launched a series of Humour Classics in compact hardback editions, with new introductions. As well as obvious favourites such as Saki, Jerome, Thurber and E. F. Benson, the series has revived some slightly less well-known classics which fit the Lost Club bill. These include the hilarious spoof Augustus Carp, Esq, By Himself, Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man (1924), the sanctimonious memoir described as 'the funniest unknown book in the world' by Robert Robinson, a wireless commentator. The author, Henry Bashford, an eminent medic, wrote nothing else remotely like it. Also reprinted, with an introduction by Peter Ackroyd, is Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures (1845) by Douglas Jerrold, an author to whom Arthur Machen, in The Three Impostors vein, was once somewhat improbably compared. H. F. Ellis's The Papers of A. J. Wentworth, B.A., (1949), his one title that has survived, is reissued with an introduction by Miles Kington: and there are many others in the series.

The disadvantage of a large oeuvre

The Times Literary Supplement commented earlier in the year on the 2000 Annual Report of the Royal Literary Fund, which provides charitable support to writers, libraries and other causes, partly from the proceeds of royalties bequeathed to it by deceased authors. Its listing of royalty incomes provides an interesting barometer of the level of interest in these authors. In 2000, it seems that both G. K. Chesterton and Patrick Hamilton enjoyed a revival of interest, while Somerset Maugham declined. But of particular note to the TLS was that the 250 books of Eden Phillpotts generated a meagre £35 in total royalties between them. The TLS enquired heartlessly, 'does anyone remember [him]?' -- and answer came there none. Now, Phillpotts (1862-1960), a Redondan duke, is an author for Lost Clubbers to take to their heart. Compared to Hardy for his Devonshire novels, author of a spry series of classical fantasies, and a forerunner in the field of whimsical fantasy (with his The Lavender Dragon), Phillpotts has undoubtedly suffered from his prolixity, which must daunt even the most assiduous of collectors. Surely no library is complete without at least one Phillpotts in it, and we enjoin every reader to rescue a few of his titles from oblivion next time they visit a second-hand bookshop. It won't aid the Royal Literary Fund (but with £5m a year from Winnie the Pooh, they can probably stand that) but it will show we stand four-square for all lost authors, no matter how large their oeuvre.

Literature is now cutting edge ? or something

The Lost Club rather prides itself in being behind the times rather than at the cutting-edge of British culture. After all, the 'art' at Fortress Tate Modern left one of your philistine editors a gibbering wreck and practically on the verge doing away with himself (he enjoyed the magnificent views of the Thames though). But perhaps we were overly precipitate and pessimistic in forecasting the demise of literature as we did in our Introduction to Issue 1. We found in our files an article from the TLS from a couple of years back which quoted various trendy youth magazines. Apparently The Face proclaimed: 'Literature now kicks. Never mind it being the new rock 'n' roll -- it's more than that -- it's escapism, it's fantasy, it's like action person produced film footage and it's even bloody exciting'. Interesting to realize it's taken some callow scribe to discover anew what Homer was aware of three thousand years ago. The Big Issue declared: 'The hippist place to be seen reading from your new novel is in a club, alongside DJs. Literature is hip again.' All this is tremendous exciting news; though fashions change so rapidly that books are probably already 'so nineties'. We ageing souls at the Lost Club are just a little puzzled at some of the recondite terms used here: hip, DJs, rock 'n' roll, action person produced film footage. What on earth do they mean?

Across time and space

Steam Engine Time, a new journal devoted to the study of science fiction, includes in its first issue an essay by co-editor Bruce Gillespie on Olaf Stapledon, the vintage British SF writer whose works tend to be more respected than read. The essay looks at Stapledon's major works, Star Maker, Last and First Men and Last Men in London, and lesser-known pieces. Far-ranging in their span, extending across millions of years and the immensities of space, Stapledon's books seem to lack human vitality, but Gillespie gives a thoughtful overview. He also draws out something of Stapledon's own humanly flawed story and rescues him from being a mere museum piece. Steam Engine Time is available in the UK from Maureen Kincaid Speller, 60 Bournemouth Road, Folkestone, Kent CT19 5AZ.

Ephraim Ketchall: gone (1877) but not forgotten

David Lowenthal has sent in some fascinating material on a little-known scientific trailblazer and polymath Ephraim Ketchall (1788-1877). Mr Lowenthal's article 'Ephraim Ketchall: A Forgotten Pioneer of Modern Geography' appeared in The Professional Geographer in 1969 (Vol. XXI, No. 1). Here are some excerpts.

Neglected alike by economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, Ketchall's contributions lie as much within all these fields as in the physical sciences, history, and geography. But it is time to accord his prescient geographical insights the recognition they richly deserve. As a theorist, Ketchall was unrivalled in his epoch for the boldness of his speculations and the relentless logic of his arguments. His undoubted talents were however, vitiated by many of the defects of the self-made scholar; unlettered, unstable, iconoclastic, megalomaniacal, Ketchall was, for all his brilliance, a prey to numerology. His arithmetical mysticism, together with his turgid literary style, accounts for the fact that Ketchall is little read today ¾ indeed, even in his own time no one would publish his tracts, which he himself turned out on an ancient handpress . . .

The seventh son of an improvident wharfinger in Old Mystic, Connecticut, Ketchall attracted early attention, indeed notoriety, by his uncanny mathematical skills, and from the age of three gave public demonstrations of the manipulation of large numbers. Like most such talent, however, Ketchall's soon faded, and before long he could scarcely recite the square root of two. Childhood association with men of learning nonetheless weaned him away from the rough background of his paternal home, and gave him a taste for argument and a zeal for self-improvement which induced him naturally to religious studies. From the age of nineteen Ketchall served as an itinerant preacher for the Connecticut Tract Society. This career terminated when Ketchall agitated for a revision of the Old and New Testaments in line with his theory that the books in each should be arranged in alphabetical order. Asked to recant, he challenged the orthodox to debate the proposition, and heretical obduracy led to his peremptory dismissal and the seizure of all his books and papers. In consequence, not one copy of Ketchall's revised testaments remains in existence, and the modern scholar must refrain from passing judgment on the merits of his case.

From religion Ketchall turned to ethnography. A self-designated disciple of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and of Ephraim George Squier, Ketchall made many explorations of his own in the Mississippi Valley and in Mexico, tracing the extent of ancient mounds and pyramids with a view to determining their age. Commendable in themselves, these efforts led Ketchall to speculate on the interrelations of engineering and civilization. As a young man, Ketchall had been deeply distressed by Buffon's denigration of New World flora and fauna. Proofs by Jefferson and Benjamin Rush that American plants and animals were in fact larger and more diversified than corresponding Old World species, conjoined with his own archaeological inquiries led Ketchall during the 1830's to consider whether in the scale of her manmade as well as of her natural forms America did not surpass Europe, Asia, and Africa. Patriotic zeal plunged Ketchall in acrimonious dispute with European scholars on such matters as the size of the pyramids (which he maintained had been exaggerated for propaganda purposes), but no measurements could shake his faith in Americans as earthmovers. Unfortunately, Ketchall was so eager to demonstrate the superiority of American civilization that he assumed a much higher specific gravity for buildings in the United States than in Europe, while structures in the Nile Valley and the Tigris and Euphrates would have had to be made of pumice to validate Ketchall's estimates of their weights.

Ketchall's inquiries in other fields of knowledge, if more modest, were no less striking and original than those in political economy and archaeology. His advocacy of simplified spelling made Noah Webster seem a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. His systems of calendar reform involved reordering the days of the week and the months of the year both alphabetically and according to some formula so abstruse as to remain unintelligible to this day. As an educator and psychologist Ketchall pioneered in teaching children how to read with block letters ingeniously weighted and magnetized so as to encourage 'correct' combinations.

Most of these reforms, however, were deemed impractical or impracticable by Ketchall's earth-bound contemporaries. Lonely and embittered, Ketchall turned late in life to a study of synoptic toponymy, but he lacked the technical equipment essential for any scientific investigation of regional anatomy, and made no worthwhile contribution to this field. Death approaching, he had a coffin constructed of the heaviest materials then available; after his demise, he was sunk in it off the family wharf on Long Island Sound.

Ketchall's major works, all privately printed in New London were the following: From Amos to Zephaniah; or, New Light on the Old Testament (1815); The American Indian; an Inquiry into His Mounds, Reliquary Sites, Sacred Edifices, and Other Structures, as Evidences of Early Civilization (1833); Earthworks, in the New World and the Old (1839); Ketchall's Practical Calculator: Tables for Determining the Specific Density, Weight, and Volume of Engineering Structures in Every Country (1849).

Needless to say, because of Ketchall's eccentricity and obscurity, none of these works can be found in British copyright libraries; but at least the old chap has a fine champion in David Lowenthal.

Ol' red eyes is back

What a vintage year for albino villains was 1936. Not only did Daphne du Maurier's Luciferian Vicar of Altarnun -- that admirer, if not worshipper, of the old gods -- arrive on the scene in Jamaica Inn, but the year also saw the publication of Anthony Skene's Monsieur Zenith: a celebration of one of the most unusual heroic bad guys in all crime fiction. The book has been published in Savoy Books' new series of fantasy classics. Sexton Blake connoisseurs will recognize the name immediately, for Zenith was one of the detective's most popular foes. As Jack Adrian explains in the Introduction Zenith is 'utterly fascinating, utterly charismatic . . . an extraordinary outlaw of breathtaking impudence -- and breathtaking violence at times ¾ who viewed all rich men and great institutions as fair game, and was capable of imbibing jaw-dropping amounts of opium without it having the least effect.

' . . . Skene wrote nearly 60 novellas plus another 15 or so full-length novels that featured his top-hatted, dress-suited outlaw with the snow-white hair, leprous skin and crimson-irised eyes. And Browning automatic. And swordstick. Never forget the swordstick . . .

'In Monsieur Zenith there is no sign of Sexton Blake, which is a pity. Blake's bouts with the melancholic albino safe-cracker, jewel thief and reckless adventurer are invariably diverting, especially those novellas with a weird or fantastic or science-fictional counterpoint to them.'

Anthony Skene (originally 'Skeen') was the pen name of George Norman Philips, who produced fifty full-length paperbacks between 1916 to 1948, plus at least one hundred novellas. 'To those figures may be added another ten or even twenty "short" novels (all roughly 50,000 words each), numerous short stories and a good deal of journalism,' writes Mr Adrian. Yet Skene was only 'a part-time writer': in the real world he was a quantity surveyor for HM Office of Public Works. Mr Adrian characterizes Skene's writing style as 'a remarkable mixture of the mandarin and the hardboiled . . . Skene was writing a species of stripped-down, toughened prose a good half-decade before Dashiell Hammett (whom he later much admired) codified the modern American demotic into a new and muscular language.' His last book was The Ripper Returns (1948): 'the Ripper survives beyond his normal life-span and constantly changes identity, by stealing the "life-force" of his victims'.

Skene encountered 'a true albino, a man of about fifty-five' in the West End just before the First World War, and when in 1918 he needed to create a villain for the Union Jack magazine, in which Blake's adventures had run since 1894, he drew upon this unknown man, who never knew that he would have such an effect on romantic literature. For though Zenith may be unknown to modern readers, 'crimson-irised eyes' should sound familiar. The character influenced an even more charismatic swordsman -- one still happily flourishing -- Elric of Melniboné. Michael Moorcock contributes an appreciation of Zenith to the Savoy edition. Zenith appears in Mr Moorcock's recent romances, Fabulous Harbours (1995) and The War Amongst the Angels (1996), where he teams up with Sexton Begg, a kind of multiversal alter ego of Sexton Blake. For further details of Monsieur Zenith, contact Savoy <www.savoy.able.co.uk> at 446 Wilmslow Road, Withington, Manchester M20 3BW.

Searching for the elusive yarns of yesteryear

Where are all the second-hand booksellers who are interested in the sort of obscure fiction lauded by the Lost Club? With a few honourable exceptions, it would seem that fiction other than the tediously ubiquitous 'modern firsts' is treated with disdain by dealers. A recent major Book Fair in Yorkshire, with over sixty stands, was well-stocked with such riveting subjects as Industrial History, Northern Topography, Military, Sport, Leather Bindings and Botany, but could muster barely a handful of stalls that had anything like a decent display of fiction -- and most of that was by the safe names. Lost Clubber Rodney O'Connor remarks: 'I have been on quite a few book hunting expeditions recently but to little avail. Interesting old fiction has always been a shy and retiring species but now I fear it's close to extinction. There's been a mass closure of second-hand shops in the South in recent years and the stock in those remaining is pretty dire.' The enthusiasm evinced by our readership suggests that there are still plenty of people out there searching for the romances and yarns of yesteryear, and it is surely time that the book trade began to take notice. Suggestions from readers for bookshops and mail order dealers who do stock our sort of book are welcome: we will publish details here.

Your co-editor takes an opposing view: 'Every second-hand shop I enter I see a dozen books I'd like: the classics I should have read years ago -- Sax Rohmer, Guy Boothby, Herman Cyril McNeile, Grace Aguilar, Florence Marryat and Gwenyth Bludgeon. I ration myself to buying only forty books a week because of shortage of space. The things I have under the bed . . . ' But perhaps some of us are just looking in the wrong place. A Lost Clubber from the Fenland region reports seeing a copy of The Great God Pan filed under Erotica recently. Admittedly it was the rather lurid Creation paperback edition, but still . . . Perhaps there are piles of The Cosy Room lurking next to hotel guides, or Hieroglyphics under Egyptology. Blackwood's Pan's Garden has inevitably been seen on the Nature shelf. Some dealers do this on purpose, of course, in order to provoke barks of surprise from customers: 'What's this doing here?' Theology is always worth a look -- one of your editors has turned up among these shelves Paul Jordan-Smith's collection of literary essays On Strange Altars and Wilfred Ewart's World War I novel Way of Revelation. (More on Ewart in a later issue. His freak death (murder?) in Mexico City at New Year 1923 is dealt with in Javier Marías' Dark Back of Time, for details of which see 'Honourable Mentions').

Warning: books can seriously damage your health

As with most things, literature has its dark and dangerous side. Books are fine in moderation but excessive reading can have a deleterious effect on one's health. The eyesight of your editors, for example, is not what it was. Too many readers take the pursuit of literature to alarming lengths, and history is riddled with the names of writers and readers who have been driven mad by this anti-social activity. All manner of pernicious and subversive ideas lie in books, to ensnare the unwary, and so the Lost Club was relieved to hear that an American association has been established to combat the crisis of young people's addiction to the written word. Fortunately in Britain computer games keep many young people from forming a dependency and prevent over-stimulation of the mind, and we should be thankful that modern television is largely free from programmes which might encourage children to pick up a book.

The following stark warning against the dangers of becoming a book addict was posted on the Internet and comes to us courtesy of John D. Squires and Stephen R. Donaldson. We trust that the original author, whoever he or she may be, would not object to us disseminating this vitally important text.

LITERATURE ABUSE: AMERICA'S HIDDEN PROBLEM

Self-test for Literature Abusers

How many of these apply to you?

1. I have read fiction when I was depressed, or to cheer myself up.

2. I have gone on reading binges of an entire book or more in a day.

3. I read rapidly, often 'gulping' chapters.

4. I have sometimes read early in the morning or before work.

5. I have hidden books in different places to sneak a chapter without being seen.

6. Sometimes I avoid friends or family obligations in order to read novels.

7. Sometimes I re-write film or television dialogue as the characters speak.

8. I am unable to enjoy myself with others unless there is a book nearby.

9. At a party, I will often slip off unnoticed to read.

10. Reading has made me seek haunts and companions which I would otherwise avoid.

11. I have neglected personal hygiene or household chores until I have finished a novel.

12. I have spent money meant for necessities on books instead.

13. I have attempted to check out more library books than permitted.

14. Most of my friends are heavy fiction readers.

15. I have sometimes passed out from a night of heavy reading.

16. I have suffered 'blackouts' or memory loss from a bout of reading.

17. I have wept, become angry or irrational because of something I read.

18. I have sometimes wished I did not read so much.

19. Sometimes I think my reading is out of control.

 

If you answered 'yes' to three or more of these questions, you may be a literature abuser. Affirmative responses to five or more indicate a serious problem.

Once a relatively rare disorder, Literature Abuse, or LA, has risen to new levels due to the accessibility of higher education and increased college enrolment since the end of the Second World War. The number of literature abusers is currently at record levels.

Social costs of literary abuse

Abusers become withdrawn, uninterested in society or normal relationships. They fantasize, creating alternative worlds to occupy, to the neglect of friends and family. In severe cases they develop bad posture from reading in awkward positions or carrying heavy book bags. In the worst instances, they become cranky reference librarians in small towns.

Excessive reading during pregnancy is perhaps the number one cause of moral deformity among the children of English professors, teachers of English and creative writing. Known as Fetal Fiction Syndrome, this disease also leaves its victims prone to a lifetime of nearsightedness, daydreaming and emotional instability.

Heredity

Recent Harvard studies have established that heredity plays a considerable role in determining whether a person will become an abuser of literature. Most abusers have at least one parent who abused literature, often beginning at an early age and progressing into adulthood. Many spouses of an abuser become abusers themselves.

Other predisposing factors

Fathers or mothers who are English teachers, professors, or heavy fiction readers; parents who do not encourage children to play games, participate in healthy sports, or watch television in the evening.

Prevention

Pre-marital screening and counselling, referral to adoption agencies in order to break the chain of abuse. English teachers in particular should seek partners active in other fields. Children should be encouraged to seek physical activity and to avoid isolation and morbid introspection.

Decline and fall: The English major

Within the sordid world of literature abuse, the lowest circle belongs to those sufferers who have thrown their lives and hopes away to study literature in our colleges. Parents should look for signs that their children are taking the wrong path ¾ don't expect your teenager to approach you and say, 'I can't stop reading Spenser.' By the time you visit her dorm room and find the secret stash of the Paris Review, it may already be too late.

What to do if you suspect your child is becoming an English major:

1. Talk to your child in a loving way. Show your concern. Let her know you won't abandon her ¾ but that you aren't spending a hundred grand to put her through Stanford so she can clerk at Waldenbooks, either. But remember that she may not be able to make a decision without help; perhaps she has just finished Madame Bovary and is dying of arsenic poisoning.

2. Face the issue: Tell her what you know, and how: 'I found this book in your purse. How long has this been going on?' Ask the hard question ¾ Who is this Count Vronsky?

3. Show her another way. Move the television set into her room. Introduce her to frat boys.

4. Do what you have to do. Tear up her library card. Make her stop signing her letters as 'Emma'. Force her to take a math class, or minor in Spanish. Transfer her to a Florida college.

You may be dealing with a life-threatening problem if one or more of the following applies: 

* She can tell you how and when Thomas Chatterton died.

* She names one or more of her cats after a Romantic poet.

* Next to her bed is a picture of: Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner or any scene from the Lake District. 

Most importantly, remember, you are not alone. To seek help for yourself or someone you love, contact the nearest chapter of the American Literature Abuse Society, or look under ALAS in your telephone directory.

 It's cheering to hear that this menace is being combated in the USA. Fortunately most British adolescents tend to associate books with education and school, and so shun them, and the problem is thus nowhere near the epidemic proportions in these isles. Alas, the pernicious influence of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is having a deleterious effect on drawing young and old to reading, and so our watchword must be -- eternal vigilance. But we have a solution to the problem: send your unwanted books to the Lost Club. We'll find a safe, hygienic way of disposing of them.

'You see, but you do not observe'

Jon Wynne-Tyson has sent an amusing Sherlockian squib which appeared in the press some years back. It was claimed to be the shortest Holmes tale in existence:

Holmes and Dr Watson went on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of fine wine they lay down for the night and went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his friend. 'Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.' 'I see millions and millions of stars,' replied Watson. 'What does that tell you?' asked Holmes.

Watson pondered for a minute then finally said: 'Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three in the morning. Theologically, I can see that God is all-powerful and that we are small and insignificant. Meterologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow.'

'Yes,' said Holmes, 'but what does it tell you overall?' Watson was silent for a minute. Then Holmes spoke: 'Watson, you imbecile, some scoundrel has stolen our tent.'

The man named Manhood

Bibliophile and writer Jonathan Wood has kindly sent some material on 'the mysterious H. A. Manhood', an archetypal literary outsider. Frank Herrmann, writing in the Bookdealer in August 1997, paid tribute to Manhood. Harold Alfred Manhood died in Sussex, aged 87, in 1991. From the 1920s he was a prolific short-story writer, producing many collections (published by Jonathan Cape in Britain and Viking Press in the US). His novel Gay Agony (1930) and his short-story collections Crack of Whips (1934) and Fierce and Gentle (1935), led to him being acclaimed as one of the most notable literary figures of his age; yet he gave up fiction -- to brew cider.

Frank Herrmann wrote:

Soon after he began achieving literary success, Manhood tired of urban life and bought a four-acre plot of land near Henfield in Sussex. On it he placed an old railway carriage which he converted for comfortable living, and there he beavered away, coming up to London only to see editors and publishers. He made himself self-sufficient by growing his own produce. All life there on his own for some years, he married.

In the 1980s Mark Valentine heard a rumour that Manhood -- surely dead by now, we thought, since he had ceased publishing -- was living in this bucolic fashion. Since then, of course, your editors have been kicking themselves that they didn't attempt to get in touch. Frank Herrmann continued:

. . . after the war he began to resent a growing editorial interference with what he wrote and he was appalled by the puny payments he received for his very considerable output. So in 1953 he stopped writing, bought more land, went in for brewing cider, and never wrote another word.

He contacted me about selling his personal library and also his working papers and archive shortly before his death. I went down to see him and his wife in Sussex. The railway carriage still existed but he had been living in a simple bungalow nearby for some years. There I was given the largest helping of smoked salmon and strongly brewed cider I have ever had.

The archive was the most astonishingly complete we had ever encountered. Everything was there: notebooks of ideas, early drafts, finished handwritten manuscripts, typescripts, all correspondence with editors and publishers, including his invoices and payment receipts, the reviews of everything he had written and all the various editions of the published titles. The final manuscripts had been bound in a series of magnificent vellum bindings by his friend Sandy Cockerell of Cambridge . . . [Gay Agony, writes Mr Herrmann, existed as six vellum-bound volumes of the original manuscript with the seventh being the corrected typescript.]

Manhood wanted it all to go to a library where it could be studied by future generations. He realized that the work of his own generation would be eclipsed in the short term, but hoped that interest in it would later revive.

The British Library bought the collection: 'Anyone interested can see it all in the British Library's Manuscripts Department.' Perhaps even now there is some dedicated Manhood scholar working on a biography or bibliography.

H. A. Manhood's short stories are in the same mould as those of T. F. Powys and A. E. Coppard, with a strong rural setting and leavening of folk wisdom, and a sense of allegory or fable to them which hovers on the brink of the fantastic without embracing it fully. There is no doubt that his two earliest collections, Nightseed (1928) and Apples By Night (1932), are by far the strongest. His later work can be desultory and diffuse, with too much reliance on twist endings, sentimental set-pieces and straightforward fishing yarns. But in these early books, there is an aura of strangeness and a definite feeling of the presence of a vital, original imagination. He is particularly adept at the arresting and unusual simile, and at conveying a sense of the timeless and archetypal in both the country and characters of his stories. A good example is 'The Unbeliever', from Nightseed, which tells of the ancient curator of an historic hunting lodge deep in a forest, not much visited, and his wrestling with belief and unbelief, and his strange carvings: all the enigmatic quality of de la Mare's work is here. Some of his tales can be brutally macabre, such as 'Three Nails', about a domestic crucifixion, or 'The Cough', about a consumptive child. Although Manhood wrote one novel, Gay Agony, it is in the short story form that he is a master, and a good selection of his work would be welcome: the Selected Stories of 1947 is a plentiful but not especially discerning offering.

The curious case of Count Stenbock

We were pleased to see the poet, novelist and critic Jeremy Reed paying tribute to the decadent legend of Stanislaus Eric Stenbock in an essay, 'One Hundred Years of Disappearance' in his collection Angels, Divas and Blacklisted Heroes (Peter Owen, 1999). As Mr Reed states, Stenbock's gifts as a poet were modest, but it's his character that captures the imagination. He is a perennially fascinating figure, one of those writers whose extravagant drink and drug-raddled lives are of greater significance and interest than their creations. Arthur Symons, in puritanical mood, characterized the Count as 'one of the most inhuman beings I have ever encountered; inhuman and abnormal; a degenerate, who had I know not how many vices'. Symons referred to Stenbock's home at 21 Gloucester Walk, Camden Hill, as 'a certain house, rather out of the way, one of a row of houses where several degenerates lived'. Conversely, Yeats called Stenbock 'Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men'. Stenbock is truly a lost author. His poetry collections, Love, Sleep and Dreams (1881?), Myrtle, Rue and Cypress (1883) and The Shadow of Death (1893), are almost impossible to find. Studies of Death: Romantic Tales (1894), his collection of short stories, was reprinted by Dutro Press in 1995. Nothing is known about the book Of Kings and Things. Did his disapproving family destroy copies of his works after his death? Mr Reed comments:

. . . Stenbock's existence evades proper biographical evaluation, just as his books have almost dematerialized and grown to be extreme bibliophilic rarities. Stenbock has become an extravagant fiction.

Stenbock's pronounced effeminacy, his self-destructive gravitation to excess of alcohol and drugs, his exhibitionistic dress, his cultivation of occult mystique, his inheritance of Estonian estates and the menagerie he kept all qualify him for a place in Huysmans' A Rebours, that fin de siècle compendium of pathological neuroses.

It's a wonder the Count wasn't arrested while he walked the streets as an offence to public order. Mr Reed states:

Transvestism, seems to have been his mode of expression. The set of his blanched hair touched his shoulders, he wore bright silk shirts, oriental costumes, he painted his nails and used perfume and loaded himself down with jewellery, he took as his escort a life-sized doll.

Stenbock was born at Thirlestane Hall near Cheltenham, but was heir to great estates in Estonia, and on coming into his inheritance in 1885 he spent two years at his palace at Kolk. At Oxford he and a friend -- who later went insane -- amused themselves by practising a new religion each week. His menagerie consisted of a scarlet-shawled monkey, a python (fed on living rats), toads, lizards and salamanders and tortoises crawled about his incense-laden living quarters while exotic birds flew around his head. He had dinner brought to him in a closed coffin as a toad perched on his shoulder. A red lamp burned between busts of Shelley and the Buddha, and he had several of the morbid paintings of Simeon Solomon, the equally doomed and tortured sexual invert. How could his prose and poetry hope to compete? Mr Reed writes:

His poppy-red wallpapers, the snake he trailed to coil round his body, the thick Smyrna carpets, the perfumes with which he scented his fingers, the roast peacock on which he dined, the whole overstrained neurology of the aesthetic addict were, in a way, a substitute for the lack of conviction in his poetry.

Stenbock died, aged 35, at his mother's home, Withdeane Hall, near Brighton, on 2 April 1895 ¾ by fabulous irony the first day of Oscar Wilde's trial. His grave in Brighton Cemetery is in a dilapidated state, local Lost Clubbers Alexia Lazou and Tom Sergant tell us. Tom says: 'Two winters ago the cross snapped out of its socket. It was wrapped round with ivy whose stem is thick as your wrist so it may be that which brought it down. I passed by in May [2001] and cleared away some litter -- two empty cans of cheap lager and an old pair of black and gold knickers, so someone's been enjoying themself on Stenbock's bones.' Withdeane Hall still exists, in London Road, but has been converted into a block of flats. Isn't it time John Adlard's solitary study of the man, Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties (1969), was reprinted for the new generation of Nineties addicts?

Honourable Mentions

Through these Lost Club pages on the Tartarus Press website, published by courtesy of Ray Russell, we have not only heard from J. Maclaren-Ross's son Alex, but from Judith Bourne, Ross's great-niece in Australia, who is writing a history of her remarkable family. Maclaren-Ross's sister Caroline was Judith's grandmother. Alex put us in touch with Paul Willetts, whose biography of Maclaren-Ross is scheduled to be published shortly. We thought a detailed biography would be impossible, but Paul has managed to track down a great many of Julian's friends, associates and drinking companions. Penguin is also preparing to publish Of Love and Hunger (1947), Ross's novel about vacuum-cleaning, referred to in Issue 2. A relation of M. R. Munro Faure, the 'singleton' (?) featured in No. 2, has also been in touch via e-mail. Isn't the Internet wonderful? . . . Lost Club articles on Mary Webb appeared in the Chester Chronicle, the Hastings and St Leonards Observer and the Southport Visiter in spring and summer 2001: Mary went to school in Southport, as Mary Gladys Meredith, and wrote her anti-bloodsports novel Gone to Earth (1917) while living in Chester, while her husband taught at the King's School (where Stanley Weyman had worked). Mary died at a nursing home at St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, in 1927. One of your editors, recently visiting St Leonards, tried to determine whether the nursing home, in Quarry Hill, still exists. Local researcher and Sheila Kaye-Smith enthusiast Michael Bristow-Smith wrote to us after the Hastings Observer article appeared in August: he identified the location of the home (now a block of flats) some time ago. Also in August, after being contacted by the Lost Club, the Bournemouth daily paper, the Echo, carried an article on thriller writer Guy Boothby (1867-1905), Australian-born creator of Dr Nikola, a forerunner of Dr Fu Manchu. He is buried in Bournemouth Cemetery. David G. Rowlands, a Nikola devotee, has written an essay on Boothby and his villainous creation for a future issue. Where appropriate, we intend approaching regional newspapers and magazines about 'The Lost'; though such proselytzing on behalf of the dead can be an uphill struggle. The Yorkshire Post has ignored several of our petitions about that local lad made good, Sarban. No cricketing connections presumably . . . Fortunately some Lost Club figures are being introduced to a wider audience. Ray Russell was interviewed about the remarkable Chapman Winstone Blubberhouse (see 'In-and-Out-of-Print', Issue 2) by John Peel on Radio 4's Home Truths in September 2001. Ray performed brilliantly, but we wonder how CWB would respond to comments on his bizarre name ('What's so funny about "Chapman"?' as he's said in the past). Ray also broached the sensitive subject of Blubberhouse's poetic rival Algernon Blooms ('I'm forever fated to be yoked to that degenerate': CWB) . . . Eric Stevens has published a 150-copy edition of John Barlas's The Lyric-Epic of Love (2001): the first publication from manuscript of the 164-sonnet sequence (the first sixty-four poems appeared in Love Sonnets, 1889). Barlas has gone down to posterity more for his Anarchist-Socialist activities than his verse. After he was arrested in 1891 for firing a pistol near the residence of the Speaker of the House of Commons, Wilde stood bail for him. Further details of The Lyric-Epic of Love are available from Eric Stevens <belleric@dircon.co.uk> at the Fortune Green Bookshop, 74 Fortune Green Road, London NW6 1DS . . . In March the Sunday Times (once one of the world's great newspapers, but 2 Samuel 1:25 sums up the present situation) vouchsafed the sensational revelation that Edgar Rice Burroughs was inspired to write his Tarzan adventures by Kipling's tales of Mowgli. Not only has this been known for sixty years, Kipling himself refers to the matter in Something of Myself (1937). Our fondest Sunday Times scoops in recent years include the report that Citizen Kane was about to be remade; that Jack Kerouac was bisexual; and that Machen had an 'occult agenda' to promote paganism with 'The Bowmen' (what an incompetent fist he made of it, using St George as a character) . . . The curse of the Black Douglases continues: according to Bosie (2000), Douglas Murray's biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, only Richard Middleton achieved 'lasting fame' among the New Bohemians circle. Perhaps in an alternate universe. H. Montgomery Hyde's biography of Douglas credits Machen with the authorship of Middleton's Ghost-Ship collection . . . We were pleased to hear President George W. Bush pronouncing on bookish matters: 'One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.' At least Lewis Carroll's Alice would have agreed with him. That famously expensive visitor to the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, Bill Clinton, for all his sins, is learned in Marcus Aurelius, and now he is no longer shackled to the Oval Office he may have resumed his old habit of reading a book a day. Perhaps he could let us know what his current reading consists of . . . James Branch Cabell's aphorism from Jurgen, 'The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true', was quoted twice in the Daily Mail within a matter of weeks last year . . . Some of the unforgettable verse of William McGonagall (1830-1902) was quoted in the Mail's Answers to Correspondents column in March 2001: 'Prince Leopold he is dead!/Who often his lustre shed,/especially by singing for the benefit of Esher School' and, from 'The Tay Bridge Disaster': 'It must have been an awful sight, to witness in the dusky moonlight'. Amanda Ros was also cited as a contender for the worst poet . . . Strange how A. E. Waite is still obscure, yet hundreds of thousands have encountered his name. In the original version of The Magus (1966) Waite is credited with lines from The Key to the Tarot (1910). In 2000 he was acknowledged on an advertisement for The Economist, featuring the Tarot pack designed by Pamela Colman Smith, Golden Dawn member and Arthur Ransome's associate who crops up in Bohemia in London (1907): see Issue 2 . . . ' "I write about men better than anyone since Dashiell Hammett," says [famous insulter of grannies James] Ellroy, not in boast but with the certain knowledge that he is right': The Guardian (April 2001). Such balderdash one reads in the press nowadays . . . Unbelievably, Dr John Dee, magician, angelologist and translator of the Necronomicon, and Somerset Maugham were mentioned within minutes of one another on an episode of The Priory, a Channel 4 'yoof' entertainment show, last summer. There's hope for humanity after all, but quite what a member of the Lost Club was doing watching such trivial stuff is a matter of grave concern. 'Why is Dr John Dee's name not as familiar to us as those of many of his contemporaries at the court of Queen Elizabeth . . . ?' asks a journalist in the Mail on Sunday's colour supplement (April 2001). Well, it is -- if your reading isn't restricted to newspapers and magazines . . . According to a contact in the Eighteen Nineties Society, the London Evening Standard ('the best paper in the world': Stevenson's The Dynamiter) referred to one 'Max Beerbohm Tree' earlier this year. Perhaps it was Enoch Soames getting his own back . . . The Evening Standard magazine Hot Tickets was vitriolic about William Blake during the Tate exhibition of his work in 2000: ' . . . a man most loved by posterity for being a mad amateur who made a principle of nonconformity. He was Romantic, neoclassical and naïve, his mannerisms drawn grotesquely from Michaelangelo and turned into a formula. The passionate respect we pay to him is beyond the sane man's understanding'. Funny to think of some fellow from a tabloid (which all too often refers to the mythical Edgar Allen Poe) lambasting a genius, isn't it? . . . Our first issue carried a piece lamenting booksellers' treatment of unwanted volumes, but worse was to come. The Guardian reported in August 2000 that the British Library, supposedly the custodians of the nation's literary heritage, has thrown out 80,000 books over the past ten years. The Evening Standard reported: 'Although the policy is not currently in operation, it was suspended only because of a shortage of staff to carry it out.' Truly the inmates have taken control of the asylum . . . Negra espalda del tiempo, by Javier Marías, has been published as Dark Back of Time by New Directions in New York. This work has much on Gawsworth and the isle of Redonda. John Sandoe's Books, 10 Blacklands Terrace, London SW3 2SR, stocks copies <www.johnsandoe.com>. In April 2001, dual Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee joined Javier's court as the Duke of Dishonra, having been presented with King Xavier's first one-million peseta Realm of Redonda Award, voted on by a jury of eighteen peers including such distinguished figures as Francis Ford Coppola, Pedro Almodóvar, A. S. Byatt, William Boyd, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, John Ashbery and C. Gabriel Infante . . . Fowlers End (1957), Gerald Kersh's comic novel of low-life, praised in the aforementioned The War Amongst the Angels, has been published in Harvill's new London Fiction series, with an introduction by Mr Moorcock. More about the remarkable Kersh (1911-68), author of Night and the City (1937) and 'The Brighton Monster' (1953) and many other mystery, horror and SF stories, in a future issue . . . Our critique of Jocelyn Brooke and his Orchid Trilogy, promised for this issue, has been held over because of length. Jonathan Hunt, who is working on a biography of the author, addressed the Sandgate Society in Kent about Brooke on 14 July 2001. It is hoped a plaque will be unveiled on the Brooke family's former home in Radnor Cliff one day. Penguin is to reissue The Orchid Trilogy, with an Introduction by Jonathan (a Lost Clubber) in 2001 . . . W. T. Stead and his campaign against child prostitution featured in a dramatized documentary on Channel 4 in March 2001. What with this and Walter: The Secret Life of a Victorian Pornographer, shown eighteen months ago, the channel is spoiling us. That both documentaries revolved around sexual matters is doubtless a coincidence. Enid Bagnold, of National Velvet fame, was described, using modern terminology, as a 'smackhead' in Nick Davies' controversial documentary on drugs shown on Channel 4 in June 2001. Enid, it seems, became addicted to morphine after an operation . . . Heresy heard on Channel 4's house-hunting show, Location Location Location, in April 2001: 'Arrange your books in order of height to give your shelves form and structure.' We do have a riposte to this interesting suggestion, but are too gentlemanly to voice it . . . The scene: an Oxford charity shop. A woman, hunting for clothes with her companion, says excitedly: 'There's another room through here. [Stepping into alcove] Oh no, it's only books!' Words cannot convey the crushed desolation in her voice . . . The horror! The horror! One of your editors -- we won't embarrass him by naming the fellow -- recently purchased a book by Ernest ('He was a big man, and his big gun felt good in his hand, like a big woman') Hemingway. It does have a surprise appearance by 'the Devil's Disciple', Aleister Crowley, in it, and Arlen is complimented, but what is the Lost Club coming to? We'll be reading Gertrude Stein next. Jeff Dempsey, writing in Colin Langeveld's Doppelgänger Broadsheet recently, wondered if his chums feared for his sanity: he confessed to reading stories by authors who are still alive! The shame of it . . .

The Daycadongs gather for Dowson Day

Members of the Eighteen Nineties Society and Lost Clubbers marked the centenary of Ernest Dowson’s death with a gathering at Ladywell Cemetery, Lewisham, on 23 February 2000. The headstone was adorned with a handsome wreath and a notice quoting Wilde’s words on hearing of Dowson’s death (‘Poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was . . .’ ); absinthe and claret were poured on his grave, flowers were laid and his biographer Jad Adams read some of Dowson’s poems. Miss Alexia Lazou of the Nineties Society attended looking splendid in full Victorian mourning costume which lent a period atmosphere to the scene. The group were following in a noble tradition since a few days prior to the ceremony we discovered that John Gawsworth and the Dowson Society had organized a fiftieth anniversary commemoration. We resolved to do the whole thing over again in 2050 . . . (At least young Tim Russell, heir to Tartarus Press, will be able to continue the commemoration.)

Unfortunately, despite being fed fascinating morsels such as the lunatic theory that Dowson may have committed the Whitechapel murders of 1888 (Dowson’s associate M. P. Shiel has also been nominated as a suspect: see Iain Sinclair’s Downriver [1988], p. 191), the national press gave scant coverage to the event. ‘Why are you so interested in this person?’ asked a puzzled jeune fille from the Daily Telegraph, concluding her telephone interview saying, ‘I’ve got a lot more information now.’ (Collapse of stout party: clearly the Lost Club press release on Dowson Day had been inadequate at seven pages.) If anything appeared in the Telegraph we missed it. In the afternoon writer and Ghost Story Society member Michael Chislett led the modern Daycadongs to 159 Sangley Road (formerly Sandhurst Gardens), Catford, the house of R. H. Sherard where Dowson died in the arms of Sherard’s wife Marthe.

In the evening there was an enjoyable sequel at the Coal Hole bar in the Strand. Mr Gawsworth’s rakish father was a regular here, and Dowson is said to have frequented at the Bun House (or Shop?) over the road, at 417 The Strand: it still exists, and is now a wine bar and restaurant called Da Marco’s. ‘Should we try to find a gutter to spend the night in?’ Mr Bryan Welch of the Bookplate Society suggested in true Nineties spirit, before it was concluded that gutters aren’t what they used to be. Instead the party admired the romantic gas lamp at the rear of the Savoy Hotel (unromantically fed, it is rumoured, by methane from the Thames). With Miss Lazou standing in the glow of the lamp the scene looked most fin de siècle. Earlier, as some of the party neared the Coal Hole, a bulky figure in a stylish hat and period Inverness cape swept past, and from the rear this mysterious and elegant gentleman bore a striking resemblance to the late author of The Hill of Dreams. Clearly the creation of the Lost Club is stirring up the phantoms of old London.

When the Feast is Finished: The Life and Legend of Ernest Dowson, a collection of tribute essays by various hands, is currently in preparation and should be available in 2001 or 2002. An edition of Dowson’s complete poems, edited by Professor R. K. R. Thornton and Caroline Dowson, will be published by the University of Birmingham Press.

Rupert Cook remembered

Oxford bookseller and Machen Society associate Rupert Cook, who died aged 53 from motor neurone disease in March 1999, has been immortalized in Javier Marías’ Negra espalda del tiempo (1998; English translation published by New Directions in the US as Dark Back of Time). Now Rupert’s girlfriend Linda Mowat has published an account of his courageous battle against the debilitating disease, one of the most pernicious devised by Mother Nature.

As Long As Possible is available from her at 7 Mount Street, Oxford OX2 6DH <lindamowat@cs.com>, price £9.99 (trade £5.99). Proceeds will be donated to Sir Michael Sobell House, the care home in Oxford where Rupert died, and the Motor Neurone Disease Association. A talented artist and linguist, Rupert was a valued friend to archaeologists, academics, film extras and literary coves. He appeared as an extra in such films as Shadowlands, Tom & Viv, The Madness of King George, Wilde and many other productions. Running Lusitania Books, Rupert came across many unusual items (sheet music for an ‘Angels of Mons’ waltz, for instance), and he enjoyed literary spoofs. In 1994 he took pleasure in drawing our attention to a listing in an Oxfordshire bookdealer’s catalogue: Go With the Flow: Studies in the History of Laxatives & Suppositories from Neolithic Times to the Industrial Revolution (Alabama, 1973; xii + 879 pp.) was described as ‘Probably definitive’. Manchester University ordered the volume which makes one wish it had existed! The author’s name, X. S. Motion, really gives the game away. Clean & Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom & the W. C. (BCA, 1971), also listed in the catalogue, looked a little dubious, but one never knows.

Long before the Lost Club was a gleam in the editors’ eyes, Rupert helped champion the life and work of the venerable Yorkshire-born poet and novelist Chapman Winstone Blubberhouse, a self-styled ‘literary fossil’. He managed to get him listed in a college yearbook and produced a rare entry on him from a literary guide. Naturally, in view of his curious cognomen, it was assumed that Blubberhouse was imaginary until letters and press references to him materialized. ‘Chappers’, as he is known to his intimates, was last heard of having forsaken his home at The Hermitage, The Close, Salisbury, for that haunt of artists, the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where he spends much time contemplating a title for his unfinished (?) memoirs. C. W. Blubberhouse: The Wilderness Years perhaps? Blubberhouse’s arch-rival (a former friend) was the fey Oxford poet and suicide Algernon Blooms (‘author of nothing much worth mentioning’: CWB). The eccentric Brighton cleric, atheist and interminable grumbler Frederick Ogle-Gormley (1919-1999) also played a vital role in the Blubberhouse saga. CWB and Ogle-Gormley (and Lovecraft) were cited in Rupert’s funeral address by one of his archaeologist friends: he would have been delighted. Before his illness struck, Rupert enjoyed two expeditions to Blubberhouses Hall, the venerable manor house of the great Yorkshire family, nestling in its valley in Wharfedale. All Blubberhouse’s sought-after books seem to have vanished from the British Library and Bodleian. (‘It’s a conspiracy,’ he told us.)

Redondans mourn Reynolds Morse

Besides Brocard Sewell another crusader for literature was lost to us in 2000: Albert Reynolds Morse, inventor, businessman, arts patron and champion of M. P. Shiel died on 15 August in St Petersburg, Florida. He was born in Denver, Colorado, on 20 October 1914 and educated at the University of Colorado and Harvard School of Business Administration. Working in the plastics industry, he was succeeded as president of IMS Company on his retirement by his son Brad. With his wife Eleanor Reynolds Morse amassed the world’s largest collection of works by Salvador Dali, now housed in The Dali Museum in St Petersburg. He was an inventor, with a number of patents to his name, a gardener, yard-worker, ex-ski champion, mountain climber and a fine nature poet. He published The Works of M. P. Shiel: A Study in Bibliography in 1948, updating and expanding it into a monumental four-volume study (1979-83). He wrote: ‘Shiel was to writing what Dali was to art in the 20th Century. Both these intellectual giants led me on tremendous stimulating adventures which were a constant challenge to me – not to emulate but to observe, study, yes – and to love – with an unending gratitude.’ Mr Morse assembled the world’s largest collection of Shielian books and material and donated it to the Shiel Room of Olin Library, Rollins College, Florida. His other books include The Limerick, A Facet of Our Culture (1944), Folk Poems and Ballads (1945), Dali: A Panorama of His Art (1972) – he published the first monograph on Dali in 1958 – and Some Fifty Unprofessional Poems (1991). His friend and associate publisher, bookseller John D. Squires, wrote: ‘His last days were clouded by the tragedy of Alzheimer’s, which stole from him the memories of a long life, fully lived. Even at the end though, he still recognized his wife Eleanor as the one remaining truth in his life.’

Lost Club types hit the headlines

The words ‘Lost Club figures’ and ‘banner headlines’ seem a contradiction in terms, but the improbable occasionally happens. In June 2000 when Javier Marías launched his collection of Shiel’s fantasy tales, La mujer de Huguenin (Huguenin’s Wife), published under his Reino de Redonda imprint, his press conference in Madrid attracted journalists from as far as Mexico, Germany and Peru. The resulting international press coverage has consolidated the posthumous European reputations of Shiel and John Gawsworth. Javier’s novels Todas las almas (1989; translated as All Souls, 1992) and Negra espalda del tiempo have introduced tens of thousands of readers to the legend of Redonda. The latter explains how Gawsworth’s successor, Jon Wynne-Tyson (King Juan II, 1970-97), passed on the Redondan crown to Javier, who now reigns as King Xavier, though not without opposition from one rival monarch. La mujer de Huguenin, translated and annotated by Antonio Iriarte, a member of the Machen Friends, contains important appendices listing all the known members of Redonda’s ‘Intellectual Aristocracy’ created by Shiel, Gawsworth, Jon Wynne-Tyson and King Xavier, plus maps and photographs of the Caribbean islet. Tartarus Press recently published Shapes in the Fire (1896), Shiel’s collection of decadent and bejewelled stories, with an Introduction by Brian Stableford. Meanwhile, Javier has contributed to a US anthology, Lost Classics (2000), which celebrates neglected gems. He has some exciting plans lined up for his realm.

The return of Engelbrecht the invincible

Savoy Books of Manchester has done sterling work over the years in reissuing the works of unappreciated writers such as Henry Treece and Jack Trevor Story. Now Savoy has published Maurice Richardson’s classic comic fantasy collection The Exploits of Engelbrecht, with tributes by Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn. The book, a sumptuous edition with purple endpapers, contains a wealth of illustrations by artists such as James Boswell, Ronald Searle and Gerald Hoffnung from Lilliput where the stories originally appeared in the 1940s. Savoy has included new drawings from James Cawthorn, John Coulthart and Kris Guidio. The Exploits of Engelbrecht Abstracted from the Chronicles of the Surrealist Sportman’s Club, first published in 1950, was an influence on the early writings of J. G. Ballard who is quoted in the Savoy edition as saying: ‘It’s a marvellous book with terrific panache and swing.’ Engelbrecht is a surrealist dwarf boxer who hunts witches at Nightmare Abbey on Walpurgis Night, goes several punishing rounds with a Grandfather Clock (with ‘Death with a Scythe – a damned sharp one, too’), finds himself in one story in the grip of a man-eating orchid and takes on the Great Kraken. One tale features a surrealist golf course – with only one hole, though ‘It’s a devilish long hole’. Club members spend a riotous night at the Old Plant Kingdom of Varieties, where all parts are played by members of the vegetable kingdom: ‘You can always rely on them for a sincere performance, but for a good deal of it you just have to sit there and watch them grow,’ explains the narrator. ‘It’s a bit agonizing now and again, especially during love scenes. You’d scarcely credit the time it takes some of these diffident vegetables to make a pass at one another.’

In another tale the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club plays Mars at football on the moon. The match is refereed by Cecil B. DeMille (‘picked for his crowd work’). Frederick Engels, Charles Peace, Origen, Nebuchadnezzer, Atilla the Hun, the Venerable Bede, Luther, Ethelred the Unready and Judas Iscariot turn out for earth. Unlikely characters such as Heliogabalus, Bishop Berkeley and Aubrey Beardsley manage to score. In ‘Engelbrecht and the Demon Bowler’ a host of distinguished figures take part in a cricket match: the Marquis De Sade, W. G. Grace, of course, and Salvador Dali, whose ‘lobs soared up to dizzy heights and came down accompanied by unmentionable objects’. In the other zany tales Engelbrecht stands for parliament, elopes with a cuckoo clock and fights ‘an assortment of frightful phantasms of the unconscious, skeletons from the well-stocked cupboards of Nightmare Abbey’.

Maurice Lane Richardson (1907-78) began his career as a publisher’s reader and reviewed regularly for The Observer, The New Statesman, the TLS and other journals. As Savoy’s blurb states: ‘He was interested in anybody and anything unusual; in thrillers, criminals, gossip, psychiatry, boxing, women. He was fascinated by snakes, insects, rats – by animal life generally – and by any natural phenomenon that enlarged his knowledge of human behaviour.’ His other books include Little Victims (1968) and Fits & Starts (1979). He edited Novels of Mystery from the Victorian Age (1945), containing thrillers by Wilkie Collins, Stevenson and Le Fanu, and was one of Gawsworth’s Redondan nobles. In his Afterword Michael Moorcock pays tribute to Richardson and the other great literary characters who drank and swapped yarns in Soho and Fitzrovia in days gone by: Henry Williamson, Robin Cook ‘dying before your eyes’, Gerald Kersh, Jack Trevor Story. These were writers ‘Able to produce the shortest, sparest amount of copy for the maximum available dosh, they could be relied upon for laconic wit, a touch of genius, no matter what they were writing. Kersh could do you two columns of rhyming couplets after a splash of cold water to his face and the promise of payment on delivery . . . They’re still at it somewhere, in a seedy basement barroom they call heaven. And they’re gathering around Richardson because he remains one of the best.’ We’ll have more on Gerald Kersh in a future issue. Engelbrecht is available from Savoy at 446 Wilmslow Road, Withington, Manchester M20 3BW <www.savoy.abel.co.uk> at £20 (post free in the UK); Europe £22.50 and the rest of the world £26. Tales of old Soho

The riotous Soho of Julian Maclaren-Ross and his associates has passed into golden legend. Life there was much more glamorous and exotic, even in the grim Fifties. Tales of the ‘gilded gutter’ were told on Radio 4 in September 2000 in a five-part series The Gargoyle Club, presented by journalist and author Nigel Richardson (whose Breakfast in Brighton [1998] is a delightful read for admirers of London’s southernmost suburb). The series focused on the beauties, boozers, eccentrics, rebels and unconventional habitués of the nicotine-stained pubs and dives of the 1950s. ‘. . . an enormous number of books were washed away with the drink, and dreams replaced the actual hard practical work,’ the late Daniel Farson, chronicler of Soho, reminisced in a 1991 broadcast.

Chief among the Soho regulars was Nina Hamnett, the Queen of Bohemia, the witty painter and artist’s model who ended up a scarecrow traipsing around pubs with a tin soliciting handouts: ‘Got any mun, dear?’ In her twenties Nina had fallen under the spell of Aleister Crowley (déjà vu anyone?), and enrolled in his Astrum Argentium, the Order of the Silver Star. The order’s temple was at 124 Victoria Street, and the occultists once summoned up ‘the God’ there; but that’s another story . . . Amusingly, in later years Nina won damages from a newspaper which suggested she’d participated in one of John Gawsworth’s Redondan ceremonies. She and her publishers Constable were sued by Crowley in 1934 after she hinted in her autobiography Laughing Torso (1932) that Crowley had practised black magic at his villa at Cefalù, Sicily. The judge, Mr Justice Swift, announced on the fourth day of the case: ‘I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.’ (This was of course in the age before network television.) The jury duly found for the defendants. The New Zealand writer Dan Davin has recorded how he, Nina and Maclaren-Ross were badly shaken by the film The Lost Weekend. ‘Afterwards, Nina had to be administered a stiff rum before she was strong enough to wait for a taxi in which to return to the Wheafsheaf.’ Maclaren-Ross, however, strategically identified with the nurse in the alcoholic ward rather than the drunken author, and so escaped guilt and fear. Nina, who had affairs with Roger Fry and Anthony Powell, died, aged 66, in 1956 after falling (jumping?) from the windows of her lodgings in Westbourne Terrace and impaling herself on railings. Legend naturally has Crowley placing a curse on her.

In the radio series the late Henrietta Moraes, ‘Bohemian London’s greatest-ever sex symbol’ – she was painted by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud – recalled the gentleman publisher and bookseller David Archer (‘a left-wing Fascist and patron saint of the Forties and Fifties poets’), whose Parton Press was the first to publish Dylan Thomas. Henrietta ran a coffee bar at Archer’s Greek Street bookshop, and as she recalled in her autobiography: ‘David wasn’t the slightest bit interested in selling any books, he just liked to be surrounded by them. Passing strangers would wander in and ask for a copy of The Outsider, which was selling like hot cakes at that time. We had about sixty copies stuck away on a back shelf somewhere. David would become very flustered and say “No, no, no, we haven’t anything like that here. You’d do much better to go up the street to Charing Cross Road to Foyle’s. Good morning.” ’ Archer took his life while living in an East End hostel in the 1970s. Henrietta became swept up in the Sixties drug world. She worked for Richard Booth’s Cinema Bookshop at Hay-on-Wye before moving in as assistant to her friend Marianne Faithfull (like her associate Mr Jagger, a Machen admirer we hear). Her memories of the artistic sub-culture of the period are presented in lively fashion in Henrietta (1994). Writers certainly seemed more flamboyant back then. At the Gargoyle Club Henrietta witnessed ‘Philip Toynbee . . . [shooting] a stream of vomit, like the trumpet of the angel Gabriel, six feet across the room’. The Gargoyle itself – ‘The Club of Twenty Thousand Reflections’ – occupied the top floors of a building at the corner of Meard and Dean Streets and opened in 1925, designed by the bizarre combination of Sir Edwin Lutyens and Henri Matisse. The walls and pillars of the ballroom were covered by Matisse in glass squares, many of them symbolically peeling in after years.

The absence of authority made Soho a refuge for the celebrated and the obscure. Marginalized figures could hide there, and the rich and successful enjoyed mingling with writers, artists and thinkers. As George Melly has written: ‘The fifties were a time of austerity, of punitive conventions, of a grey uniformity which would astound even the most enthusiastic defender of the current puritan back-lash. Soho was perhaps the only area in London where the rules didn’t apply. It was a Bohemian no-go area, tolerance its password, where bad behaviour was cherished – at any rate in retrospect. Only bores were made unwelcome.’ In Nigel Richardson’s series George Melly characterized another Soho regular Colin MacInnes, the cult author of Absolute Beginners (1958) and cousin of Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, as ‘One of the great quarrellers of our time.’ He had one useful tip for Mr Melly, however, telling him that he should always contrive to wear one decent item of clothing.

While highly entertaining, the programmes did give the impression that the ‘Fabulous Fifties’ represented the high tide of roistering excess whereas a proud tradition of drunken artistic behaviour dates back to the l9th century and before. (De Quincey searching for his lost soulmate Ann did feature briefly.) It was in 1926 that Augustus John, the art critic T. W. Earp and Nina Hamnett decreed that the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street would thenceforth be the nucleus of Bohemian London. Rimbaud and Verlaine lodged at 35 Howland Street, off Tottenham Court Road, in the early 1870s and learned colloquial English in the pubs. William Beckford – quite a gadabout in his day – lived at 22 Soho Square where, legend states, he was taught music, aged six, by Mozart, aged eight.

The Nineties writers drank, fought, loved and perished with Fitzrovia and Soho as a background continuum. Dowson, for example, courted a 16-year-old barmaid from the Horseshoe pub before he fell fatally in love with Adelaide Foltinowicz at the ‘Poland’ restaurant in Sherwood Street. Dowson’s friend Lionel Johnson, another unquenchable quaffer, lived for a time at 20 Fitzroy Street, at the Century of Artists Guild community with Herbert Horne and Selwyn Image. In one incident, reported by Edgar Jepson, Johnson was lighting the way downstairs for Dowson and Victor Plarr after an all-night literary soirée when ‘Dowson and Johnson lost their footing and rolled over one another down the first flight, their progress illumined by a terrifying flare from the lamp which rolled with them. There is a Providence – But for it, the world would have been saddened next day to learn that two poets had perished on the same staircase.’ One would have liked to be present when Johnson, with much alcohol imbibed, lectured Dowson on the virtues of chastity with citations from the Church Fathers. To paraphrase Keats, ‘Great spirits then on earth were sojourning’! Of love and vacuum cleaning

Further to the item on Julian Maclaren-Ross in our first issue, we were pleased to discover that despite all his works being out of print, his early novel Of Love and Hunger (1947) is praised in The Reader’s Companion to the Twentieth Century Novel (1994), edited by Peter Parker. The guide devotes a page to it, and it’s described as ‘one of the most evocative novels of the Depression’. Set in 1939, the grimly amusing book is based on Maclaren-Ross’s experiences as a vacuum-cleaner salesman in Bognor Regis, a period later documented in Memoirs of the Forties. When Maclaren-Ross told Graham Greene he was selling vacuum cleaners Greene asked, ‘Are you doing it to get material?’ ‘No, I’m doing it because I wouldn’t have any money otherwise,’ he replied. In Of Love and Hunger the narrator Richard Fanshawe has lost his job as a journalist in Madras, where he has contracted a dose, and returned to Britain in disgrace. Demoralized, broke and with sundry creditors, he trails around giving vacuuming ‘dems’ to bored housewife ‘prospects’. Sacked by his company, Fanshawe goes to work for a rival firm Sucko and is elevated to Leading Salesman for Worthing. He embarks on a novel and has an affair with Sukie, a colleague’s wife; gets ejected from his digs and becomes embroiled in the scams of his team leader Smiler Barnes, who illegally sells second-hand machines: a practice which will be familiar to readers of Memoirs of the Forties. Fanshawe becomes involved with Jackie, a glamorous widow. Ross’s attempt to create an English style ‘equivalent to the American vernacular used by such writers as Hemingway, Cain and O’Hara’ predominates: ‘She knew her stuff, no doubt about that. All smooth, scented, and warm and a kiss like a mouthful of rice pudding. Her teeth didn’t get in the way and she knew what to do with her tongue.’ In an epilogue set three years later Fanshawe is a captain in the army, having risen through the ranks – never a likely scenario where Private Ross was concerned. He is over his obsession with Sukie and plans to marry Jackie. For the characters ‘A happy ending is being had by all.’ Of Love and Hunger sounds much better than much comic social realism currently on the market, so why isn’t it in print? It’s almost as though modern publishers’ mantra is: ‘If it’s not in print no one wants to read it.’

Like many Lost Club types, Maclaren-Ross is not as celebrated as he deserves, so compiling a checklist is no easy task; but we believe his complete list of works is as follows: The Stuff to Give the Troops (1944), Better than a Kick in the Pants (1945), Bitten by the Tarantula (1945), The Nine Men of Soho (1946), Of Love and Hunger (1947), The Funny Bone (1956), The Weeping and the Laughter (1953), Until the Day She Dies (1960), The Doomsday Book (1961; in print in the US), My Name is Love (c. 1964), Memoirs of the Forties (1965). His two translations are Pierrot by Raymond Queneau (1950) and Maigret and the Burglar’s Wife (1954).‘Threnody on a Gramophone’, ‘The Sea Coast of Bohemia’ and ‘Khaki and Cockayne’, the proposed sequels to The Weeping and the Laughter, his ‘Lost Atlantis’ autobiography, exist only in the realms of unwritten books. Some bright spark should write them as novels.

The Marlowe mystery

The Time Out Book of London Short Stories (1993) contains an intriguing essay, ‘Newman Passage or J. Maclaren-Ross and the Case of the Vanishing Writers’, by the filmmaker and novelist Chris Petit, in which he attempts to track Maclaren-Ross and his associates through the dead ends of the years. Newman Passage is the sinister byway linking Newman Street and Rathbone Street which Michael Powell used for the scene of the prostitute’s murder in Peeping Tom (1960). Maclaren-Ross – who strangely does not seem to refer to the film anywhere (its genre was his preferred territory) – said the passage was known to Soho types as ‘Jekyll and Hyde Alley’, ‘because it was the sort of place through which Mr Hyde flourishing his stick rushes low-angle on the screen’. The adjacent warehouse yard, he explained, was a convenient spot ‘into which one sometimes guided girls in order to become better acquainted’. (In that case, there should be a plaque to Ross here.) One of the vanishing writers referred to in Chris Petit’s essay is the elusive G. S. Marlowe, the author of the extraordinary cult success, now forgotten, called I am Your Brother (1935), which sounds a little like ‘The Dunwich Horror’ with a London setting. Maclaren-Ross, who adapted the book for an unproduced radio drama in 1938, refers in Memoirs of the Forties to ‘the repulsive mother of the schizophrenic young composer, shuffling and snuffling around the Soho markets in search of offal on which to nourish her other, perhaps imaginary son: a monster product of maybe artificial insemination, who lived in an attic above his brother’s studio and had to be fed raw liver and fairy stories once a day’. When they met, Ross found Gabriel Marlowe, comfortably ensconced in a Kensington flat with an attractive secretary, to be ‘very large, Nordic looking, in his middle thirties, amiable, ambling, almost ursine in appearance. Like a big gentle blond bear . . .’ Maclaren-Ross never discovered Marlowe’s nationality: he variously speculates that he was Scandinavian, Viennese or from the Danube basin. He told Maclaren-Ross that I am Your Brother originated as a bedtime story told to the children of Sir Roderick and Lady Jones (Lady Jones was Enid Bagnold, the author of National Velvet) while staying with them in the country. Ross says that Marlowe had worked in Hollywood, where he met Greta Garbo, and written the script of David Copperfield (1934); though the name of Hugh Walpole, who plays the vicar in the film, appears in the credits. Marlowe was friendly with Walpole, however, so Ross’s statement may have had some foundation. Maclaren-Ross later visited Marlowe in a larger, modern flat in Chelsea: ‘Here, on an afternoon in Spring, I found him living in an Edgar Wallace-like opulence, surrounded by dictaphones, telephones, and typewriters, with a brand new secretary even better looking than the last.’ In the spring of 1940 Marlowe, who was Jewish, left Britain for Norway – mistakenly believing it the one place the Nazis wouldn’t invade ‘ . . . and Marlowe, who had meant on returning to join the British Army never returned, never published another book [but see below], was in due course written off as dead by all including his literary executors.

‘Yet was he dead? For a few years ago I was drinking champagne cider with a man who’d known Marlowe before the war, and claimed to have met him recently, alive and well, in some village the name of which I can’t remember. This man had no idea he was supposed to have been lost in Norway, so asked no searching questions, and in the village inn they had together sunk a pint. Thus Marlowe contrived to enshroud himself in mystery right up to the end, if indeed it was his end.’ If any readers do know what happened to Gabriel Marlowe, perhaps they could tell us. And we should very much like to trace Maclaren-Ross’s son, Alexander; last heard of living in Kent.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

Forgotten Beat fiction writer Alfred Chester (1928-71) experienced a flicker of renewed interest in September 2000 when he was recalled by Diana Athill in her memoir of her time in publishing, Stet. She suggested that she was probably the only person who still remembered his work, which included Here be Dragons: Stories (Paris, 1955), Jamie is my Heart’s Desire: A Novel (London, 1956) and The Exquisite Corpse (London, 1970). The TLS shortly afterwards published a photograph of Chester with other literati, and cited a short description of his ‘owlish face’ and ‘ill-fitting red wig’. The wig seems to be more famous than its owner, since a subsequent TLS correspondent wrote in to remind readers of an essay by Cynthia Ozick, entitled ‘Alfred Chester’s Wig’, published in the New Yorker and selected for Best American Essays. Suspicions that Chester might belong to the same mysteriously ambiguous category as C. W. Blubberhouse were allayed when his books were located in the British Library and on the Advanced Book Exchange database. Curious collectors are already beginning to show interest in his works. Are there any other authors better known for their appurtenances than their writing? John Davidson, the Nineties poet, is remembered for his wig. Perhaps investing in a hairpiece is one of the roads to literary immortality.

Temporal voyaging with the master of the multiverse

Returning to Mr Moorcock . . . Further to our item on Barry Pain in our first issue, we discovered that the revised edition of Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (Millennium, 1993; Orion, 1996) has its third volume dedicated to Pain. The first, An Alien Heat, is dedicated to Ronald Firbank (grouped together with the boys from Hawkwind); the second, The Hollow Lands, is dedicated to Swinburne. In his Introduction Michael Moorcock writes of his fondness for the characters of the fin de siècle. The trilogy is his homage to the ‘inspired dandyism’ of The Savoy, The Yellow Book, and such figures as Wilde, Beardsley, Dowson, Harland and Whistler. ‘I had a passion for Wilde and Firbank in my late teens. For a while I took to wearing oddly-cut jackets and trousers, dipping carnations in green ink and dusting my embarrassingly robust features with talc in the hope of looking paler and therefore more interesting.’ Jherek Carnelian, the hero of the saga – an uncharacteristically relaxed aspect of the Eternal Champion – visits the London of 1896 in quest of the prize of his heart, the ultra-respectable Mrs Amelia Underwood, of Collins Avenue, Bromley. Many misunderstandings ensue since Jherek is naturally unfamiliar with ‘Dawn Age’ customs. He believes, for example, that the inhabitants of the Victorian age have access to primitive time machines. ‘There are many references to them in the literature,’ he explains. Details of historical events and personages have been much distorted over the millennia. The denizens of the End of Time believe King Kong to have been the King of New York, and this is one of the least of their misapprehensions. In the series the author pokes gentle fun at his own creations on a scale that must be unique in literature. Even the doomed Elric of Melniboné has been transplanted from prehistory and the Age of the Young Kingdoms to the End of Time (the proud Prince of Ruins, born wanderer though is he, didn’t enjoy his trip much). The battered time machine in which Jherek travels to 1896 is vaguely dated from two thousand years before the 19th century: it’s the machine from Behold the Man (1978) which the tortured Karl Glogauer uses to journey back to Judea only to have his quest for Jesus unfold in a tragic fashion. Glogauer, later a member of the Guild of Temporal Adventurers, appears briefly in the third Dancers volume, The End of All Songs (this and The Hollow Lands title were inspired by Dowson lines) when the characters travel to the earth’s infancy, only to encounter H. G. Wells’ Time Traveller: the Lower Devonian gets quite crowded! Mr Moorcock retrospectively dedicated the entire Dancers saga to Grant Allen (1844-99), whose novel The British Barbarians (John Lane, 1895) concerns a visitor from futurity who comes up against Victorian mores and manners. Michael Moorcock’s championing of 19th century literature runs throughout his work. In Mother London (1988) Guy Boothby’s occult mastermind Doctor Nikola is praised. C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne and K. and Hesketh Prichard, W. Pett Ridge and Alfred Austin also crop up, testifying to the wide range of the author’s affinities. Captain Marryat’s Japhet in Search of a Father (1836) – ‘one of the best comic picaresques of the early nineteenth century’ – Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834), his romance of Dick Turpin, and George Meredith’s The Amazing Marriage (1836) are commended in the dedication to The War Amongst the Angels (1996). We also note a pleasing reference in the book to a firm of brewers and distillers, Ackroyd and Sinclair. And as all his readers know, Mr Moorcock has long celebrated the work of the delightful Ernest Wheldrake, whose Posthumous Poems appeared in 1881 but has not so far been reprinted. Singletons and one-hit wonders< Surely one of the most