CELESTIAL CHESS
American scholar and lettered medievalist, David Fairchild, swings a plum sabbatical at Cambridge University, where he is given full access to a rare manuscript written by a mad monk of shameful repute—Geoffrey Gervaise. The Westchurch Manuscript has lain neglected in the University vaults for centuries . . . or has it? A shadowy nefarious cabal has had an interest in the manuscript for a very long time and sharpens its claws anytime anyone probes its secrets. Expecting a pleasant year pursuing his passion for medieval literature, Fairchild quickly finds himself entangled in the centuries old curse that surrounds the manuscript and its mysterious author. Murders ensue, the Supernatural stirs and old haunting grounds are disturbed. Fairchild must make some hard decisions if he is to save a family that has lived under the Gervaise curse for generations.
Buoyant with humor, and electrified by suspense and shuddering frights, Thomas Bontly’s Celestial Chess is at long last available again. In his new introduction to the novel, Thomas Kent Millar reveals everything he loves about this sadly neglected novel and relates his decades-long quest to see it back in print. Bravo!
With a pace that sizzles like a five-minute blitz match, Celestial Chess is on the board, so what do you say to a quick game?
Your move . . .
CELESTIAL CHESS by Thomas Bontly
Copyright © 1979 by Thomas J. Bontly
Published by permission of the Thomas J. Bontly (1939-2012) Literary Estate
Introduction Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Kent Miller
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any part or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.
Edited by Jonathan Eeds
Cover design by Michelle Policicchio
Original cover art by the Viet Hung Gallery (Tran Viet Hung,)
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Interior illustrations by Culpeo S. Fox
Author’s Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal
This book was crafted in the USA but is printed globally
Printed in the USA
ISBN 978-0-9987065-9-7
Published December, 2019
Bruin Books, LLC
Eugene, Oregon, USA
For inquiries: [email protected]
Visit the scene of the crime: www.bruinbookstore.com
INTRODUCTION
Thomas Kent Miller
There was logic and coherence enough in the whole affair to persuade me that what I’d stumbled onto—of all the preposterous perils of scholarship!—was a haunted manuscript.
—From Thomas Bontly’s Celestial Chess
Far be it from me to compare myself to anyone in the hallowed halls of literary royalty. Yet as this 40th anniversary publication of Thomas Bontly’s Celestial Chess approached, and considering that this event is the culmination of a desire I’ve lived with for some forty years, I found my thoughts often turning toward H. C. Koenig.
Toward whom? you may ask.
As many of my readers may know, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there lived and worked in England a writer of fantasy of prodigious talent named William Hope Hodgson. Following his writing four novels and a myriad of short stories, he died in April 1918 at the age of 40 in a battle at Le Touquet Berthe during The Great War (which we call World War I today). Then, as is an all-too-common fate for many authors regardless of their levels of success or talent, he was promptly forgotten and his books went out of print. By the early 1920’s he may as well have never existed.
However, book collector and authority on genre fiction H.C. Koenig had “discovered” Hodgson in 1931 in an anthology of ghost stories, whereupon he embarked on a campaign to bring Hodgson back into the spotlight. Koenig never let up; he was committed to getting William Hope Hodgson back into print. In the early 1940’s, he was able to interest a few magazine editors to include some Hodgson, however these appearances proved inconsequential. Finally, after prolonged badgering, Arkham House publisher August Dereleth in 1946 released a 639-page omnibus edition of Hodgson’s four novels titled House on the Borderland and Other Novels. As is often the case, when a new edition by a forgotten author is published, other publishers don’t need to be persuaded to follow suit (though in those pre-digital, pre-POD days this process would necessarily take more time than we would allot today).
That was the first domino, and now William Hope Hodgson and his work are ubiquitous among devotees of that branch of literature.
So what does any of this have to do with Thomas Bontly, his novel Celestial Chess, and me? First off, I would venture that Mr. Koenig experienced an epiphany of sorts in Europe in 1931 when encountering Hodgson for the first time, similar to the epiphany I clearly experienced in California in 1980 while reading Celestial Chess.
In point of fact, my life and Bontly’s and Koenig’s all intersected, in a manner of speaking, in a liquor store on 25th Ave in San Francisco in 1980. It was then and there that I spotted the Ballantine Books paperback edition of Celestial Chess on a spinner rack in the corner of the store; its title and cover art intrigued me so I gave the clerk $2.25.
When I read the novel, I was amazed. Amazed because it was difficult for me to get my head around the ideas that the tale was virtually perfect and that it was created by a mere human being, and I, like Koenig, wanted nothing better than to share my discovery, as well as my certainty that the novel was nothing less than a spot-on homage to M.R. James, the great and influential Edwardian medievalist and bibliographic scholar who reveled in cataloging books, which he did for the contents of many of the libraries of the colleges of the University of Cambridge. He also presided as provost of King’s College, Cambridge (1905–18), and of Eton College (1918–36). But his real claim to fame were the annual Christmas-time ghost stories he conjured up to read aloud to his colleagues in group settings—stories, which when published as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911)—were heralded as the finest ghost stories of the generation.
My situation, then, starting in 1980, was simple enough: I had no connections. Nothing happened except my doing a lot of talking, all of which was probably ignored, and that’s how it stood for 30 years. Except that I kept myself busy as the editor-in-chief of a respected magazine and by writing books and essays.
Then, some ten years ago (30 years after my pur-chasing the Bontly paperback), as a direct consequence of my long and passionate interest and regard for yet another turn-of-the-century writer—this time of perfect terror tales, Arthur Machen—my wife and I hopped on a plane and ended up in Wales, Machen’s home stomping grounds and the source of his literary essence. Upon our return, I did a computer search for a site where I could find like-minded people and discovered, to my great joy, the literary group The Friends of Arthur Machen, which communicated via a Yahoo chat capability. My very first message to the group was, in a way, a stretch. In the course of my comment, I felt compelled to segue from Machen to M.R. James and thence to Bontly and Celestial Chess, which led to my standing on my metaphorical soapbox singing the praises of Bontly and his novel. I recall that there were two or three short noncommittal responses from group members and one that, by any standard, was acrimonious, and that was all.
Little did I know what Fate had in store for me!
The universe settled down into a steady state of entropy for me, and life went on for still another ten years; except that during those years, up until the present, I became a formidable presence among The Friends of Arthur Machen, contributing several scholarly essays to its journal and other essays to the various journals of other notable UK literary groups, one of which was Rosemary Pardoe’s Ghosts and Scholars
to which I contributed a “late review” of Celestial Chess (M.R. James Newsletter in 2012).
Thus, in other words, from the time of my purchasing the book in a San Francisco liquor store in 1980 to the late 2019 incident I’m about to describe, 40 years had passed.
I mentioned Fate a moment ago, and here is how it unfolded: When ten years ago I contributed a note to the Arthur Machen group, mentioning Celestial Chess in no uncertain terms, I had no idea that the preeminent scholar of J.R.R. Tolkien among other things had read my post and made a note to check out the book someday. In the meantime, without any further word about Bontly or Celestial Chess, that scholar, Douglas A. Anderson, and I became friends via email, having much in common.
Then a few weeks ago, he emailed to apologize that it took him 10 whole years, and that he had finally picked up a copy of Celestial Chess, read it, and agreed that it needed to be revived, an estimation he shared with the publisher of Bruin Books, Jon Eeds. Then Doug got me into the loop, introducing Jon and me. Jon was quite taken with the book and remarked:
“Doug gave me a real gift when he asked me to read Celestial Chess. In a nutshell, I liked everything about the book: the plot, the characters, the setting and the splashes of humor. The parallel story set in the 12th century gives the narrative some serious supernatural roots.”
Thus, the book you are about to read is the culmi-nation of 40 years of my anticipation. My efforts during those years certainly don’t compare to Koenig’s, of course. Yet, if it wasn’t for me and my serious devotion to this book, it’s doubtful that it would have ever seen the light of day again.
~§~
Thomas Bontly’s 1979 novel Celestial Chess is a riff on ghost stories, particularly M.R. James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.
The 1970’s and 80’s was an era prone to the updating of classic genre themes. There seemed to have been a bit of a publishing fad back then to ask: “How would [classic genre novel title] be written knowing what we know today?” Michael Crichton made an excellent career of this. Congo was a reworking of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Eaters of the Dead of Beowulf, and Jurassic Park of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, to name only some. Peter Straub brought Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan up to date as Ghost Story. Wilbur Smith did the same with Haggard’s She as The Sunbird, and Nelson DeMille revisited The Quest of the Holy Grail as The Quest (1975 and 2013). Bontly has treated M.R. James similarly.
Dr. Bontly, a Stanford University graduate and an English Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, wrote four novels between 1966 and 1988, no two in the same genre: aside from Celestial Chess, there was a U.S. mid-western regional novel, a European spy thriller, and a boy’s coming-of-age adventure. He said, “I like to try different things.”
Of Celestial Chess, he said, “I don’t think of myself as a writer of gothics. This one just turned out to be a ghost story. It was fun to write, but I don’t think I’ll write another”. Nevertheless, as a university English professor, he sometimes gravitated to classic ghost stories. In 1969, he wrote the often reprinted paper “Henry James’ ‘General Vision of Evil’ in Turn of the Screw” and later presided over a UWM course titled “The Ghosts of Literature,” which, to be frank, I presume was a course about ghost stories. (This would have been about the same time I took a course “The Supernatural in Litera-ture” at San Francisco State University taught by Leonard Wolf who had edited The Annotated Frankenstein and The Annotated Dracula.)
I’m not aware of Bontly discussing M.R. James and Celestial Chess in the same breath, yet his novel touches on both James the man and his ghostly works rather dramatically. For instance, David Fairchild, the novel’s protagonist, like James, is an antiquary studying ancient manuscripts in Cambridge, and he is in his early thirties, the same age James was when he wrote the first of his ghost stories, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book”. In fact, the principle characters of Celestial Chess are all scholars at the fictitious Duke’s College, Cambridge. At King’s College, Cambridge, James was himself a student and a scholar, where, along with Eaton’s, according to Victorian and Edwardian ghost-story authority Michael Cox, he “passed virtually his entire adult life.” Likewise, central to Celestial Chess is Duke’s library where the mysterious Westchurch manuscripts are preserved and sequestered away from the world at large:
We entered the library . . . there were stained glass windows, gothic masonry, rows and rows of ancient books, and at the back of the long nave, an iron gate with spiked tips, which sealed off that holy of holies, the Special Collections.
And of course, not only were libraries, large and small, and collections and catalogs of books central to many of James’ stories, his entire life revolved around them as well. After all, as Cox reminds us, his “grand ambition [was] cataloguing all the Cambridge manuscript collections—a stupendous undertaking that was eventually completed in 1925”.
Likewise, the historical and architectural background and sense of stone and mortar is tangible in Bontly’s novel, no doubt due to the author’s attending Cambridge in 1961-62 on a fellowship.
In short, Bontly seems to have given David Fairchild many of the characteristics of a young M.R. James—in much the same way that James put himself into many of his stories.
Touches of biography aside, the novel repurposes some of James’ dominant themes. At the heart of Celestial Chess is a haunted manuscript with an attendant spectre, elements that bear comparison to James’s “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and “The Tractate Middoth”, while the novel’s devil cult that is killing off antiquaries left and right is comparable to Karswell’s cult in “Casting the Runes”.
Of course, since Celestial Chess is a novel, it needed to be constructed differently than James’ short stories, for example. Bontly builds a whole provenance for his haunted manuscript. To whit, twenty-five percent of the book takes place in the 12th century and deals with the entire life of the tormented priest/scholar/poet/rogue Geoffrey Gervaise. So far as I can tell, being no expert on medieval matters, Bontly’s portrayal of the 12th-century bears comparison with works by Umberto Eco and Ellis Peters.
Now, while I have described how this novel touches on M.R. James in both character and theme, there is no way to avoid the fact that portions of the book are overwhelmingly anti-Jamesian. As scholar Jacqueline Simpson recently reminded us, James had “no patience” with “tiresome” sex in ghost stories, and Celestial Chess, whatever else it is, is a product of the risqué 70’s, when popular novels were expected to be explicit. Thus, the two principal characters (modern and 12thcentury) are copulating constantly. Fairchild’s exploits, being written from his first person point of view manage to be somewhat discreet, while Gervaise’s omnisciently-described interludes are anything but!
That said, the novel is titled Celestial Chess for good reason. The soul of the story is indeed a game of celestial chess game between a certain tortured 12th-century monk and the Devil wherein the stars are in fact the pieces, the board is an iron grate with 64 holes held up to the sky, and the time span of the games is years rather than hours.
[S]omehow, whether drugged, dreaming or hallucinating, [the monk] arranged to meet Satan over a chess board . . . When Satan appeared, each player had one move. If a piece was taken, it could no longer be in the game. New lists were drawn up, minus whatever pieces had been lost, and [the monk] would go back to his study and his calculations for the next encounter. Each night a new chess problem was diagrammed in the stars….
Naturally, Satan is the victor, though his opponent is allowed one final move that is delayed eight centuries; this is a story that suggests there are powers in the universe that can blithely detonate stars—turning them into supernovas—merely to better an arrogant earth-bound monk at chess. As such it is rather the flipside to Arthur C. Clarke’s poignant story “The Star,” wherein a star with attendant planets, one of which is home to an advanced but doomed civilization, explodes so that its light is eventu
ally seen on the Earth as the star over Bethlehem heralding the birth of Christ.
When all is said and done, Celestial Chess is a loving paean to M.R. James’ conceit of haunts and scholars co-existing. The contemporary Publisher’s Weekly review of Celestial Chess said, “Bontly’s supernatural mystery is a literary feat, bristling with terrors but lightened by comic asides and thoroughly believable. Bontly exhibits the imagination and style that have already won him a Maxwell Perkins Award”. Another from The Washington Post said, “In less skilled hands such a story could easily have become a mere piece of pretentious spookery. But Bontly does an expert job of making the improbable convincing. A scholar himself, he gives a fine three-dimensional picture of the lives of scholars, today and in the 12th century, and even better, he knows how to convey the almost feverish dedication to a small comer of knowledge that can make such lives quietly exciting”.
In the final analysis, I found Celestial Chess both wildly entertaining and wildly thought-provoking regarding the mechanics of the universe—about both the persistence of spirits (whether or not James took them seriously) and the drama inherent in cosmic astronomy.
Thomas Kent Miller
Redlands, California
November 2019
CELESTIAL CHESS
Thomas Bontly
For Marilyn, a celestial mate
Acknowledgement
The author wishes to thank the University of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate School for their generous support while this book was in the making.
Except for certain personages of the Twelfth century, all the characters in this novel are fictitious and bear no intentional resemblance to persons living or dead. There is no “Duke’s” among the colleges of Cambridge University.
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