It is
extraordinary to consider that the author of forty-two 'William'
collections, over an equivalent number of years, also had time to pen
forty adult novels and miscellaneous short stories.
At the
time of writing 'Mist,' Crompton had an opportunity to explore other
genre having been forced to give up teaching, incapacitated by polio
in her right leg in 1923, consigning her – in her mid-thirties - to
a wheelchair. Of the nine latter collections, only 'Mist and Other
Ghost Stories' (1928) dealt solely with the supernatural. Surprising,
considering Crompton's long-held interest in the subject, since
attending St Elphin's Boarding School in Lancashire, which boasted
its resident ghostly nun.
Possession, and its encroaching effect upon loved ones, is the
predominant theme in most of the thirteen tales. Pan sensually
implicates himself in the object of the first tale, ('The Bronze
Statuette') before appearing in person – barely disguised – in
the second. ('Strange'). Inherited jealousy rears its ugly head in
'The Spanish Comb,' although a modern feminist perspective wouldn't
be without credence.
Crompton's strongest tales feature women wronged in the more
authentic domestic situations. In 'Rosalind,' an artist's model –
caught in a love triangle – becomes the victim of one of her
suitors' shallow self-interest. In 'The Little Girl' an elderly
woman recalls a ghostly friend of her youth and the connected guilt
harboured by a late aunt.
In
'Hands,' a bride, having made the decision not to discuss the late
first wife of her new husband, finds herself an unexpected victim of
her apparently honourable choice. 'The Sisters' finds a suitor
unwittingly coming between two inseparable sisters, as gradual
tragedy seals their fate. 'Mist' is the atmospheric portent to the
first silent witness of a past crime, seen to be committed with a
motive unlike that assumed by the locals. These five are the best,
but the remaining eight don't hold a dud.
If the
content appears over-familiar in 2015, derivative they are not. Most
admirable in these tales, from a world of middle-class cosiness, is
the emotional honesty and lack of faux sentiment in the best.
Their perspective, from a stoic, independent woman, adds a modernity
in the narrative voices strengthening what might otherwise have
solely survived as period charm alone. There may be a sameness in
each, but subjective imagination can easily compensate for what is
left out. The simple exposition and crisp matter-of-factness of
Crompton's prose-style – oddly reminiscent of the 'Williams' - is
another of those less-is-more object lessons to the rest of us on how
to write today. (At least for the first draft). Those presuming her
out-of-date should take a second look.
It is
good to see Sundial back after a year's enforced break. There is a
'forthcoming' list of mouthwatering titles, like this, in dire need
of re-release.
* * *
*
Pan and
the Peak Experience
(Part 2)
The
influence of 'The Golden Bough' cannot be overstated. With its
perspective cultural rather than theological, between 1890-1915 it
comprised eighteen separate print-runs making it, for a whole
post-Victorian generation, as ubiquitous as 'Origin of Species' or
The Bible itself. From here, the new generation bridged the crucial
link between the pre-Christian natural and post-Gothic supernatural,
to manifest a sensibility definably modern.
Initially,
this was by no means obvious since the book's influence soon ignited
several well known groups and sub-groups, some decidedly eccentric,
almost all educationally privileged. e.g. Rupert Brooke with the
Bloomsbury Set, Cecil Sharp, Ernest Seton, Ernest Westlake and Gerald
Gardner. Today, we may perceive with cynicism such actions of the
time as from a bunch of mainly male, upper middle-class sexual
inadequates with too much spare cash and time on their hands. While
this may largely be true of the excesses of Crowley and his
followers, previous decades had laid more mindful, socially
conscious, and long-lasting foundations.
The
misguided impression that these authors were merely hopelessly fey
and faux
nostalgists,
repudiating modernity, could not have been more wrong. Away from the
Wiccan eccentrics and Crowley's sado-masochistic disciples was a
desire for a more humanely progressive future, one more spiritually
liberating, companion to nature, and non-materialist. A
broader influence beyond their bounds was undoubtedly being wrought
by more committed writers. In
truth, they shared a view of nature parallel to that of the
modernists, albeit without the intellectual, urban perspectives.
The
new women authors found their own form of empowerment; one less
Pan-ish and often more Sapphic. For the literary woman, desireless
for the confines of her 'expected place,' the groundwork had also
been laid; by Amelia Edwards, Margaret Oliphant and other physical –
and metaphysical – explorers of their generation. The next saw
Vernon Lee, Mary Butts and May Sinclair follow suit, progressing the
feminist cause still further, yet from equivalent circumstances.
Consummate
supernaturalist Amelia Edwards' curriculum
vitae reads
as having little bearing or relevance to her gender and is itself one
of the great undersold tales of late-19th
century industry and endeavour. Her books on Egypt, its landscape and
antiquities, her transatlantic sales of wide-ranging literary
interests and unrelenting networking, single-handedly wove a web
connecting international scholars and curators that stretched across
half the world. Margaret Olipant, her contemporary, bore a toughness
through contrasting familial circumstances that manifested a
prodigious (rather than merely prolific) number of novels and essays.
Even her late clutch of supernatural tales, though rather less in
number, leave a legacy all their own. A regular contributor to
Blackwood's pages, she virtually coined the term, 'social science,'
after one of her pieces in 1860.
Later,
Vernon Lee's theory of 'psychological aesthetics' again moved the
narrative voice further away from the old Christian certainties. Mary
Butts, perhaps closer to neo-paganism from her writings on
pre-Christianity and Crowley association, was rare in articulating
such mystical topics from a woman's perspective. May Sinclair, known
almost exclusively for one of three supernatural collections, shared
Lee's interest in the new Freudian psychoanalysis, coining the term
'stream-of-consciousness' in an essay reviewing the narrative voice
of the first book in the Pilgrimage
novel series of Dorothy Richardson.
By
the Twenties, the priestly narrator hadn't so much been sidelined as
virtually banished in England's uncanny, with only the traditionally
conservative crime thriller filling in the gaping void left by his
absence. The new generation of authors may have advanced into
modernism, but there remained something of a middle-brow audience;
one still hungry for depictions of Establishment tropes being
dismantled. (Such tropes having to be present at the outset).
Awareness
of the uncanny in literature was seemingly triggered to a higher
level than ever before in the Romantic Age; specifically after Blake
and his followers. The problem then, as up to the time under
discussion, was the growing self-awareness running well ahead of the
language needed to recognise, define and describe it. As the
philosopher Colin Wilson once pointed out; 'The problem with the
Romantics is that they didn't know how to canalize these volcanic
energies from the depths of the psyche. Faced with the awesome
spectacle of a mountain by moonlight, Wordsworth confessed that he
was filled with a sense of “unknown modes of being.” (p. 29,
'Superconsciousness – The Quest for the Peak Experience,' 2009). A
perception that might best be described as mere passive
acknowledgement. Most
recently, Wilson explored how an individual's awakening of the
right-brain, triggered by one's own heightened perception of any
positive event, stimulates it to experience joy, actualisation and
self-belief. A phase of modern history founded upon what he termed –
after Abraham Maslow – 'the discovery of inner freedom.' (p.13). Is
it not therefore likely that this would have empowered that
individual into first challenging, then overcoming, the accepted,
assumed reliance upon a Biblical
external
force?
Wilson
himself was ambiguous on the subject of God, where one might have
expected silent atheism. (In the same book, he later refers to
atheists as 'stupid'). More than one of his prior generation
had no such qualms. Forrest Reid also had experiences that had
already played-out the Maslow / Wilson discovery. If not easy to
define, of one thing he was certain. They had 'nothing whatever to do
with religion...(but)...created by some power outside myself,'
('Private Road', p. 125), 'climbing the mountain road to Glenagivney
in Donegal,' until 'I abruptly emerged – a glory of sunset
glittering on the sea below me and flaming across the sky.'
Perhaps
his most powerful peak experience came one steaming June while a
student. He was cramming for intermediate exams in a field in
Northern Ireland. Suddenly, anticipating the arrival of Hermes,
Dionysos, and 'hairy-shanked Pan-of-the-Goats,' he had the compelling
urge of a reaching out to some spiritual liberation also reaching out
for him. 'For though there was no wind, a little green leafy branch
was snapped off from the branch above me, and fell to the ground at
my hand. I drew my breath quickly; there was a drumming in my ears; I
knew that the green woodland before me was going to split asunder, to
swing back on either side like two great painted doors...'
Reid
says he then hesitated, drew back, but the vision lingered on; 'the
tree was growing in my room, and I could feel the hot sunshine on my
hands and body.' Hardly surprising that Reid felt the need to repeat
this evocative recollection in both the first and
second
parts of his memoirs. ('Apostate', p.158-9, (1926) and 'Private Road'
, p.196-7, (1940)).
(Part
3 next month)
