Howard O’Hagan (1902-1982) was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, the son of a roving medical doctor, Dr. Thomas F. O’Hagan (c.1877-1957) and his wife Mary (c.1880-1944). Howard was the elder of two children, and the only son. He grew up in Calgary, Vancouver, and a series of mining and railroad towns in the Canadian Rockies before the family settled in 1919 in Lucerne, to the west of Jasper, Alberta. Over the next two decades, probably in the summers, O’Hagan worked intermittently as a Rocky Mountain guide, based out of Jasper. O’Hagan attended the University of British Columbia for one year before transferring to McGill University, where he studied under Stephen Leacock. He earned a B.A. in 1922 and a LL.B. in 1925. He was very briefly a lawyer, and then became a journalist. He spent part of 1927 in Australia, where his first story was published in The Sydney Morning Herald. Returning to North America, he worked from 1928-30 as a press representative for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. From 1931-34 he had an extremely well-paying publicity job for the Central Argentine Railway, living in Buenos Aires, but he returned again to the Canadian Rockies in 1934, where he wrote his first novel, Tay John. O’Hagan was soon induced to move to Berkeley, California, by his friend Harvey Fergusson; there he met his wife, Margaret Peterson (1902-1997), an artist and an art teacher (from 1928) at the University of California. The two were married in 1937. In 1950, after his wife refused to take a McCarthy-era loyalty test, the couple moved to British Columbia, and some years later to Sicily, where they lived from 1963 to 1974, when they returned and settled in Victoria, British Columbia. Late in life O’Hagan suffered severely from sciatica. He died on 18 September 1982 at the age of eighty.
O’Hagan was not a prolific writer. His second book was Wilderness Men (1958; revised 1978), a collection of sensitive re-creations of historical figures. It was followed by only two other books, The Woman Who Got On at Jasper Station and Other Stories (1963; revised 1977), and a second novel, The School-Marm Tree (1977), based on a story of the same title in the 1963 collection, which was itself developed from an early story, “The Pool,” published in Story, November-December 1939.
For a novel by a Canadian writer, on an intrinsically Canadian subject, it is odd to note that the first edition of Tay John was published only in England, and by a short-lived publisher that was in business for less than a year. The very slightly revised 1960 edition was published by Clarkson Potter in the United States, with an introduction by O’Hagan’s friend Harvey Fergusson, and it wasn’t until 1974, when it was finally published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, that Tay John began to become known as a classic in Canadian literature.
P
Pain, Barry. Stories in the Dark (London: Grant Richards, 1901).
This collection of ten stories is perhaps the most essential of Barry Pain’s short story collections, as it consists mainly of weird stories. A few are classics, particularly “The Moon-Slave,” “The Undying Thing,” and “The Diary of a God,” while a few others are rather minor efforts. Pain’s entire output is very uneven. His humorous tales were very popular in his lifetime, though many of these stories have not held up well with the passage of time. However, the best of his horror and fantasy stories ensure that his work will never be entirely forgotten.
Pain, Barry. Three Fantasies (London: Methuen, 1904).
The title of this elusive book makes it sound much more desirable than it actually is. The short story which opens the book, “Cheevers and the Love of Beauty,” is the best in the volume. A local busy-body businessman is accused of having no love of beauty, and the remark rankles him. Soon afterwards he encounters a gypsy who reads his palm, and remarks upon this fact. For a small sum of silver, she gives him a love of beauty for seven days, during which time he neglects his business and spends his days at the National Gallery, much to the bewilderment of all who know him. After seven days, he returns to his normal self. The two novellas in this book are romance stories, neither of which really count as fantasies in the modern sense.
Paton, Raymond. The Tale of Lal: A Fantasy (London: Chapman & Hall; New York: Brentano’s, [1914]).
The Tale of Lal concerns Lionel, known familiarly as Lal, who is one of the four lion statues in Trafalgar Square—the Pleasant-Faced Lion. Lal comes to life every generation or so and cryptically influences the lives of some selected children. (Lal’s mystery and aloofness prefigures that of C.S. Lewis’s Aslan.) The children are young Ridgwell and his sister Christine, and they meet the grown-up beneficiaries of Lal’s previous dispensation of wisdom and influence, the Writer (no name is attached to this character), and the present Lord Mayor, who had been a miser before under Lal’s influence he changed and adopted the orphan boy who became the Writer. Some of the Lord Mayor’s odd behavior one evening before the stature of Lal is observed by a caustic newspaper writer, Mr. Learnéd Bore, who publishes an account in his column, which gives rise to a lawsuit. The court case is orchestrated by the Writer to be a victory for the Lord Mayor. And that’s all. The novel itself is episodic, not very well structured or thought-out. Generously it might be called a light diversion—less generously, a dull bore.
Little is known of Raymond Paton. He published two other novels, both apparently non-fantasies, The Drummer of the Dawn (1913), set in England and Morocco, with a literary bohemian who is affected by his friendship with a boy; and The Autobiography of a Blackguard (1925), in which a French violinist believes that he had sold his soul in return for his artistic abilities—this was filmed in 1925 as The Blackguard, with a script by Alfred Hitchcock.
Paul, Phyllis. Camilla (London: William Heinemann, [1949]).
Camilla is the third novel by Phyllis Paul, coming fifteen years after her second, inaugurating the second phase of her novel writing career, during which she published nine novels between 1949 and 1967.
The plot centers on a brother and sister who were orphaned when young. They were raised separately, and even in adult life their paths do not cross much. Both are roguish to the point of petty criminal behavior. Hartley Rupell grew up under better circumstances than his sister, in a rich foster family where he received little affection. As a young man he became secretly involved with a woman—the affair ended with her suicide, and while the death was not exactly caused by Hartley, he had knowingly failed to prevent it. He became a clergyman, but that came to a disgraceful end, after which he made his living by blackmailing wealthy perverts. Frances Rupell is older by a year or so, and her backstory has its share of blemishes. When a young woman, she published a mawkish volume of verse, and earned ridicule, followed by a loveless marriage to a literary man decades older than her. The union produced a son, but Frances walked out when the boy was two. After she was persuaded to return, there was a humiliating scene where her husband (aided by Frances’s own brother) insisted she was an impostor and threatened to expose her to the authorities. After that, Frances moved frequently, taking employment as a servant, while stealing from her employers.
Frances and Hartley meet again after a gap of several years when they become associated with the same family, the Grants, comprising a widowed father plus son and daughters, including one named Camilla. The theme of the book, from nearly every direction, is distrust, and this extends too from the author to the reader. The background of both Hartley and Frances is unfolded very slowly, over many chapters, and sometimes in many pages of interior monologues by either of the main two characters. As the novel progresses, the more the reader distrusts and dislikes most of the characters.
The child Camilla appears in only one scene, when Frances has come to the house apparently to take part in the philosophical or occult discussions which take place there. Hartley is already attempting to work some scheme upon the family. Frances and Camilla form a quick bond. When Frances returns some weeks later, she sees Camilla on the staircase, and asks to visit with the girl again. By the reaction to her idle comment, Frances knows something is amiss. It turns out that Camilla had been sent back to her school some weeks ago, and she has disappeared. After three weeks, p
eople have begun to assume some fatal mishap. So Frances’s experience is accepted as a vision by some members of the Grant family, and considered a fraud by others. Here deceit comes to the fore again, as both Hartley’s and Frances’s motives are questioned, by each other as well as by the Grant family, particularly the father. The question of the truth is for long held in abeyance.
As a novel, Paul made some odd choices about how to tell the tale, and some of these choices make difficulties for the reader. As a character study, the book works much better. Paul’s insight into these varied and often seedy characters is the stepping stone to the type of novel she wanted to write—the type of novel which she would write for the rest of her career. Camilla, though flawed structurally, exhibits many interesting qualities. Maurice Richardson, reviewing the book anonymously in The Times Literary Supplement, noted (without needing exaggeration) that “Miss Paul has considerable talent for conveying subjective sensations, but her narrative needs a psychiatrist to explain exactly who is doing what to whom” (25 November 1949).
Paul, Phyllis. The Children Triumphant (London: Martin Secker, 1934).
Phyllis Paul’s second novel, The Children Triumphant. was published by Martin Secker in May 1934.
The Children Triumphant begins in December 1917 in the fictional hamlet of Rushmile in Kent. It tells the story of two girls, Edith Coventry and “Jemmy” [Jemima] Lacey. Edith’s father had been well-paid doing aircraft industry work for a period during the war, and the money allowed Edith to get some education. Her friend Jemmy was not so fortunate, and both seem unlikely to marry owing to the shortage of men after the War. Edith is soon further burdened by the death of her step-mother, after which she must raise three younger step-siblings by herself, as well as care for her father. Edith never warms to the children, and believes “they were born to be stoned” (p. 57). Jemmy is a curious character who seems to love Edith in a more than merely friendly way (though lesbianism is never stated), professing that she is uninterested in marrying and hopes to move away sometime with Edith. Edith, on the other hand, grows into a cold and incommunicative woman. She ends up surprising Jemma by marrying above her station. Her husband, Arnold Race, is the older brother of Harriet with whom Edith had become slightly acquainted when attending school as a girl. Jemma feels abandoned, but Edith is described (in phrases typical of Phyllis Paul) as looking “like a person in love with her own damnation” (218), and it is noted that “the blaze of feeling she had had for him [her husband] at first had burnt itself out in a few weeks” (221). Eventually Arnold comes to understand Edith’s “startling disregard of other people’s feelings” (252), and when, against Edith’s will yet with her consent, he brings home to raise the young orphaned son of his dead friend, the results turn tragic, as Edith feels trapped again in an impossible situation as she had been before.
Comparing The Children Triumphant to its impressive and self-assured predecessor, it seems a slight step downward in quality. The structure is halting and uncertain, particularly in the first half of the book, while in the second half both the writing and the narrative flow are much more carefully worked out. One wonders, then, if The Children Triumphant, might actually have been the first novel Paul wrote, even though it was published second, for some of its flaws seem typical of an author finding their way in the process of composing a novel. Whether this is true we will likely never know. Still, the book was well-received on publication, with the Times Literary Supplement noting that “Miss Paul writes with an icicle, in a fine and distinguished way that is quite her own, concerned with a misfit in life . . . the effect is sombre, impressive, moving” (31 May 1934); and Graham Greene in the Spectator noted that Paul has “a serious claim to be judged as an artist” (14 June 1934). It would be fifteen years before Paul published her next novel.
Paul, Phyllis. We Are Spoiled (London: Martin Secker, 1933).
Phyllis Paul (1903-1973) published eleven novels, the first two of which came out from Martin Secker between July 1933 and May 1934, after which there was a fifteen year gap before her third novel appeared in late 1949. Though Paul later felt her first two novels were of a different type than those she wrote afterwards, they are nevertheless remarkably assured efforts.
We Are Spoiled is the story of the childhood and adulthood of several children brought up in Hammersing in slightly-rural England. The children include Christian Lauria, his two cousins Nancy and Louise Cloud, and neighbors Barbara Morrison and, most importantly, Jael Lingard. Jael is the central figure—an imaginative girl whose life is under the control of a Mr. Llewellyn (how he became guardian to Jael is never made clear), a distant and depraved figure who takes Jael to his life in Paris, where he treats her quite openly as a cynical experiment. Though Llewellyn is a thorough rake, he is beyond sexual interest in Jael, yet he makes her take a vow of chastity. Another figure involved in the drama is Llewellyn’s son Hallam. Some years pass and Jael returns to Hammersing, now under the leash of Hallam. Old friendships, loyalties and rivalries are reignited, and the effects of growing up are shown to have taken a heavy toll on most of the children, leading in the end to madness in one case, and death in another. The underlying theme of the book is probably best expressed by Jael, who thinks: “was there any reason why life should not become quite unbearable? Considering that by the progress of its mental development humanity was enlarging its capacity for suffering, then why should not life become quite unbearable, not merely to the individual, but to the race? Why should not humanity at length utterly reject the curse of life and die away, another scrapped experiment in ‘evolution’? . . . But the mind of humanity showed signs of sickness. It was not the mind of a child at all, but a clever, self-conscious mind, tormented, and growing sicker every day” (pp. 238-239).
To find such attitudes expressed in a first novel is unusual, but the book is especially worth reading not for such modern cynicism, nor for the characters (who are not always convincing), but for the unusually assured prose style and deft wit. The reader is pulled into the narrative by the very first sentence:
The Laurias came to Hammersing heath in the very bleakest of springs, and Mrs. Lauria, her urban spirit altogether failing at the sight of the place, went upstairs a few days after the removal with the suitable last words, “I am going to rest,” and lay down and died. (p. 7)
This odd but fresh style continues throughout the rest of the book. While there is nothing of the fantastic about the story, the manner of its telling and its moods are fairly gripping and enchant the reader. As the Times Literary Supplement noted, while “many effective chords are struck, it is not easy to discern a dominating harmony. There is music here, angelic or devilish, but hardly earthly” (6 July 1933).
Peake, Mervyn. Boy in Darkness (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 1996). Illustrated by P.J. Lynch.
This is the first separate edition of Peake’s novella, first published in 1956 as part of a multi-author collection of three novellas, Sometime, Never. It is peripherally related to Peake’s magnificent trilogy, Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959). In Boy in Darkness we have the story of young Titus, who wanders away from his castle on an adventure into unknown lands. There is not much plot to the story. Young Titus finds himself led to the powerful Lamb in its underground chamber by its sycophantic followers, the Hyena and the Goat. The whole thing is a rather surrealist adventure, and a delightful and heavily sarcastic comment on Christianity and the nature of human worship. A very special and precious story, not to be missed (though I have to question whether any children, for whom this particular edition is intended, will see the point of it). The illustrations by P.J. Lynch need also to be commended; they are clearly modelled after Peake’s own illustrations to his stories, and they complement the story of Boy in Darkness very creditably.
Pemberton, Clive. The Weird o’ It (London: Henry J. Drane, 1906; expanded edition Seattle: Midnight House, 2000).
In its first edition, this volume contained ten short stories, all weird in nat
ure. The Midnight House edition includes one additional story, “The Mark of the Beast,” for which, irritatingly, no source is given. The Midnight House edition also contains a breezy introduction, light on biographical facts, by publisher John Pelan, who claims that “Pemberton’s tales would have been as at home in the American pulp Weird Tales as they would be stacked alongside the works of Blackwood, James and their contemporaries.” The statement if probably true of Weird Tales, which published a far larger number of mediocre tales than it did of first-rate ones, but Pemberton had none of the high level of skill found in Blackwood and James. Still, his work should not be entirely dismissed: the stories are skillfully written grues, successful in attaining their small ambitions. Perhaps the best stories in the book are “The Pool” and “The Bulb.” In the former, a young artist’s wife is haunted by the pool nearby their new residence. The artist hears a local tale that previous occupants had been drowned in the pool owing to a curse, and he rushes home to find the inevitable. In “The Bulb,” an ancient flower bulb and an associated descriptive papyrus is found inside a mummy case recently purchased at an auction. The bulb is planted and grows. Eventually the papyrus is translated and it warns of the fatality of the bloom of the bulb of Neshta, which lives for one moment and takes the life of someone in that same moment, a revenge planned for a future grave-robber.
Late Reviews Page 18