Most of the stories in The Ferry of Souls are introspective, mystical and melancholy. In the title story, the ferryman of souls must also accept unseen passengers which are believed to be unchristened spirits of the past. “The Sea Child” (Colour, September 1921) tells of a boy who, while sailing, finds a baby girl on a sandbar. He takes the girl home, and she is raised with him by his parents. When she has become a young woman, they realize they are in love, and they plan to marry. First, the girl wants to visit the sandbar where she had been found, and this results in tragedy. In “The Werewolf” (noted as “brief but good” by Montague Summers in his 1933 study, The Werewolf), a youth and his dog seek refuge one night at a cottage in the forest. There he finds a solitary, attractive woman, whom his dog fears. That night as he sleeps she attacks him in wolf-form, but his life is saved by his dog. “The Moorland Stream” tells the tragic story of a youth who sees a water-nymph. “The Payment” (Colour, July-August 1922) is the story of a sin-eater, while in “Mirage” a thirsty man in a desert imagines a loved countryside. Overall, these are fine vignettes, but they rarely reach the usual scope or breadth of a short story. At times a bit prosy for their length, individually they attain their small aims nicely.
Salmon’s final two books were also companion volumes of stories, Flowings and Ebbtides: Stories of the Vicar and the Doctor (1939) and In a Western Parish: More Stories of the Vicar and the Doctor (1940).
Saltoun, M. After (London: Duckworth, 1930).
In life, Alban Grier had been a well-travelled explorer and a man of few morals—a cad with women, and even a murderer, who had killed a fellow prisoner in order to prolong his own life. After some sort of accident by which he was killed, Grier finds himself in a curious afterlife, where he is guided by the seemingly affable Perdus, a demon who arranges for his many pleasures. Gradually Grier comes to realize that he is in hell, which is not so much a place but a state of mind. Here the demons permit all sorts of activities in order to exhaust any remaining goodness in a person. All of the inhabitants of this superficially pleasant afterlife are in the end destined for the fires of the Pit, whose vivid reality is witnessed by Grier in the wilds outside of town. Though the Christian world-view of heaven and hell is completely unquestioned in this novel, there are some more subtle and interesting philosophical discussions throughout. Overall, this is a well-written and engaging example of a Christian afterlife fantasy.
Mary Helena Grattan-Bellew was born circa 1859 in Ireland, the daughter of Thomas Arthur Bellew (1820-1863), who was Member of Parliament, County Galway, and his wife, Pauline Grattan (1842-1908), whose family was very prominent in Queen’s County. Thomas Bellew and Pauline Grattan married in September 1858, and legally changed their surname to Grattan-Bellew by Royal License in March 1859. Their other child was Sir Henry Christopher Grattan-Bellew (1860-1942).
On 7 July 1885 Mary married Alexander William Frederick Fraser (1851-1933), who became the 18th Baron Saltoun in 1886 (in modern times he has been renumbered as the 19th Baron). They had three sons and one daughter. After was Lady Saltoun’s only book, and her only known work of fiction. She died on 8 October 1940, at the age of 81.
Saul, George Brandon. Liadain and Curithir: A Medieval Irish Love Story—and Four Tales from the Elf-Mounds (Philadelphia: The Walton Press, 1970).
This slim volume contains one long story and four short ones, all based in some way upon Irish traditional materials. A note at the end of the title story states that it is “an interlude in the vision of Gormflaith, whose story is told in full in The Red Queen.” This refers to Saul’s earlier short novel The Red Queen (1967), which is Saul’s semi-historical retelling of the life of an early Irish queen noted for her beauty, pride, and the astonishing degree to which she was able to manipulate her husbands and son, often with disastrous results. The tale of “Liadain and Curithir” has only an oblique relationship with the earlier novel, in that Gormflaith and her husband, the High King Malachy, request that the harper Crespin tell them a good love story, and the story he tells to them is that of Liadain and Curithir, both poets, who meet and fall in love on Liadain’s visit to Connacht as part of her poetry circuit. Curithir asks her to marry him, but she feels compelled to complete her tour first, and asks him to come to her home in the south at the end of the summer. When Curithir arrives, he finds that the monk Cummine has poisoned Liadain’s love for him and made her a bride of Christ, a vow she will not reject, leading to eventual tragic results. Saul intermingles some modern sentiments into his love story, and his prose style is occasionally stiff and academic, but overall he makes a fine story out of the legends.
The four other tales in this volume are equally entertaining. “How a King Got His Sword” exhibits duplicity and payback when a man named Dubdrenn covets the sword of Socht, which was rumored once to have belonged to Cuchulainn. “Of a Girl’s Jealousy and Its Outcome” concerns two young elf sisters, each of whom has a love for the renowned warrior Fionn. One of the sisters has built an enchanted lake, and the other casts a spell on it that will age any mortal who bathes in the lake and turn their hair silver. Fionn is lured to the lake so that the other sister, who has said she would never marry a grey-haired man, would no longer be interested in him.
George Brandon Saul (1901-1986) was for many years a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Among his many scholarly works are A.E. Coppard: His Life and His Poetry (1932) and The Shadow of the Three Queens (1953), an excellent and concise introduction to traditional Irish literature, revised and expanded as Traditional Irish Literature and Its Background: A Brief Introduction (1970). Two paperback anthologies are of especial interest, The Age of Yeats (1964)—notable for the rare inclusion of works by Dunsany, Ella Young and James Stephens alongside works by Yeats and James Joyce—and Owl’s Watch (1965), a collection of literary horror stories (including one brief tale, “The Vermilion-Headed Man,” by Saul himself, originally published in 1948). Beginning in 1967, Saul published a burst of fiction, much of it related to Irish mythology. These include the short novel The Red Queen (1967), Carved in Findruine: Tales Out of Irish Tradition (1969), A Little Book of Strange Tales (1969), Liadain and Curithir (1970), a nineteenth-century American story, In Mountain Shadow: A Tale of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country (1970), and two short children’s stories, King Noggin (1971) and The Forgotten Birthday (1971).
Savage, Henry. The Receding Shore: Leaves from the Somewhat Unconventional Life of Henry Savage (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1933).
Henry Savage (1879-1965) was a literary gadfly of the early twentieth century, an editor, poet, parodist and biographer who published over two dozen various volumes and who seems to have known a large number of London’s literary figures. He is primarily remembered (when remembered at all) as the friend and biographer of Richard Middleton (1882-1911), whose writings he collected in several books after Middleton’s early suicide. At the beginning of his Middleton biography, Savage wrote: “while we were acquainted I had not only no inclination to gather facts relating to him, but an excessive contempt for facts in general.” This contempt is equally apparent in Savage’s autobiography, and it is indeed a flaw, making for a less useful and less accessible book than it might otherwise have been. Without grounding facts, or sufficient context, Savage’s fascinating anecdotes are like pearls of a necklace broken off from their string. However, if one approaches Savage’s autobiography already having an understanding of the general shape of his life, one appreciates better the stories he relates, thereby relishing the subtle glistening of his wit and his discerning eye, as well as the often epigrammatic qualities of his personal reflections. Thus, despite his contempt for facts, Savage should probably be best remembered as a memoirist.
Savage was born in the Raynes Park Tavern, near Wimbledon in Surrey. The tavern was run by his father, who had spent twelve years working on the East India Railway before returning to England. Henry, the oldest of four (he had two brothers and one sister), grew up in the environment of a public house—slig
htly aloof from it, by reason of his interest in literature and poetry, but also deeply appreciating the contact it provided with all sorts of human characters. As he would later write, “it was borne upon my bewildered mind that the exclusive life is not the full life, that fulfilment comes only from feeling at one with all mankind” (p. 242). Along similarly reflective lines Savage writes near the end of his book, “A long procession of men and women have I sojourned with—disreputable for the most part they would be termed by people with long, lugubrious faces. But they interested me. I was—I am—one of them. We all seek our own herd” (p. 253).
Young Henry attended New College in Eastbourne, but left when he was sixteen. After his father’s death, he fought in the Boer War in South Africa from 1899-1902, returning to manage the pub with his brother. In 1905, noticing an advertisement in The Academy, he joined the New Bohemians, a literary/drinking society which included among its members Arthur Machen, Richard Middleton, Edgar Jepson, and other young poets and artistic types. Savage married Mary Elizabeth Rayne in 1908 and they separated around 1916—he alludes in his autobiography to a number of affairs with women, but is reticent about his marriage, never mentioning his wife’s name or the fact that he had a son, Guy Rayne Savage (1913-1989).
It was through connections with the New Bohemians that Savage began publishing poems, articles and book reviews, and his friendships widened. His early positive appraisal of D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock (1911), published in Vanity Fair, brought about a friendship with Lawrence and his wife. Some years later he discovered the writings of Dorothy Richardson, inaugurating a lifelong friendship.
Savage was for a time on the staff of Vanity Fair. During the first years of World War I, he was an editor at The Academy where he worked closely with T. W. H. Crossland. His subsequent enterprise was the short-lived but elegant hardcover magazine, The Gypsy (1915), which contains contributions by a number of the New Bohemians and artwork by his friend Alan Odle, who would become Dorothy Richardson’s husband. Savage’s first book was a volume of verse, Escape and Escapades (1915); it was suitably praised by Arthur Machen in a review in The Evening News.
Beginning in 1917 Savage served as a Royal Engineer in France. After the end of the war, he started writing for The Bookman’s Journal, and served as its assistant editor for about two years (1920-22). Savage’s parody of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), titled A Long Spoon and the Devil, appeared in 1922 from Cecil Palmer, who later in the same year published his Richard Middleton: The Man and His Work. Through Cecil Palmer, Savage became the London correspondent of the American literary monthly, Book Notes Illustrated, published out of Connecticut by Edwin Valentine Mitchell, a lawyer turned literary man.
From 1925-27 Savage worked at The Reader’s Library, preparing abridged versions of the classics, and writing (or often co-writing, with Hayter Preston) photoplay novelizations of films, like The Eagle (1925), based on Pushkin’s novel Dubrovsky and starring Rudolph Valentino; or The Sea Beast (1926), developed from Moby Dick and starring John Barrymore; or Faust (1927), based on Goethe’s play and directed by F. W. Murnau.
After leaving The Reader’s Library, Savage led an even more Bohemian existence, sharing rooms with the painter John Flanagan (whose painting of Savage appears as the frontispiece to The Receding Shore), and gambling down on the south coast of France. Savage reminisces of meetings there with Michael Arlen, W. Somerset Maugham, and the macabre writer Tod Robbins, who Savage describes as “a remarkable character; a little man, on the dwarfish side, but stockily built and immensely strong. His hobby was to strip to the waist—usually in some fashionable restaurant—draw up his arms to exhibit powerful muscles, and glare about him defiantly. Agitated waiters would then rush forward to surround him as much as possible from public view, when he would allow himself to be appeased and, still glowering defiance, slowly resume his clothing” (p. 217).
Around this time Savage was engaged to edit the six volumes of Aleister Crowley’s Confessions—only two volumes of which appeared in print in 1929 before the publisher went bankrupt. Savage claimed that most of his editorial work “was concerned with cutting out the libels,” but he felt that the work as a whole compared favorably with the memoirs of Casanova. Savage had some four or five years earlier been given the job of editing Roger Casement’s diaries for publication, but when the Home Secretary promised two year’s hard labor to the owner of the diaries (Peter Singleton-Gates) should they be published in Great Britain—not because of the obscenities but because of the light thrown on the methods of Scotland Yard—the plans for publication were scrapped.
In 1930 Savage published a strange volume with the title How to Manage Our Women. Illustrated by Aubrey Hammond, it is a quasi-autobiographical account of Savage’s bohemian life in London and at his cottage in Winchelsea (here called Shinglesea), and the uninterrupted feminine presence at both places. It is told in the form of letters written to friends. Savage’s 1932 novel The Gentleman of the Shade is a historical romance set in the eighteenth century. Neither book was successful.
An account of an Italian trip, and a visit to Norman Douglas at Capri, precedes Savage’s return to England, and here his autobiography comes to an end. Of his later life a number of things should be said. In 1938 he published Lords of the Household: A Cat Chronicle, an illustrated account of the cats with whom he had shared a house. A volume of verse titled Songs and Satires (1946) was followed by an edition of The Love Letters of Henry VIII (1949). Savage’s last volumes were three small undated booklets of erotic poems, self-published as though “for the Author’s friends by The Cytherean Society,” including Hymn to Selene (c. 1954), Armida (c. 1961) and Winged Phallus (c. 1963). In his final years he lived in Chelsea but spent each winter at Tenerife in the Canary Islands. He occasionally contributed letters to various publications, reminiscing about friends like Frank Harris, Lord Alfred Douglas, or of times of long ago. He died in Chelsea in the spring of 1965.
Late in life Savage described The Receding Shore as “a desperate attempt to compress half a lifetime into 80,000 words”—the length insisted upon by the publisher who commissioned it and who went out of business after seven hundred copies were sold. In the late 1950s, Savage was completing a further volume of reminiscences, entitled Promenade Picturesque, but it was never published, and the whereabouts of Savage’s papers are unknown. This is a loss. Though Savage’s ruminations on his own life are thoughtful and interesting, his literary reminiscences, especially if properly contextualized and footnoted, would be a worthy addition to our knowledge of his times and his many literary friends.
Savery, Constance. Tenthragon (New York: Alfred H. King, 1930).
Constance Winifred Savory (1897-1999) was born in Wiltshire, the eldest of five daughters of a clergyman. She was one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford University (Somerville College, 1920). After a few years of teaching and the death of her mother, she moved in with her father to help him with his small parish in East Anglia, where she devoted herself to writing. Her first published book, also for many years her only adult fiction, was Forbidden Doors (London: George G. Harrap, 1929), which had been shortened by her publisher; the American edition restored the text to the author’s preferred form. Retitled Tenthragon, it came out the next year. Her first of many children’s books came out in England in 1930. In 1980, she completed Charlotte Brontë’s short fragment Emma; it came out bylined as by Charlotte Brontë and Another Lady.
Tenthragon is the story of the orphan Patric (“Paddy”) Tenthragon, aged nearly seven, who returns to his family home Thragoness after having lived (happily) with another family for some years. The Tenthragon estate has a number of homes, including Thragonwell and Thragoness, as well as the Other Thragoness, which is a doubled house at the back of the original Thragoness. There are a number of odd pairings or doubles in the book, including the two servants named Mary, twins confusingly given the same first name, and the two brothers Brendon (Paddy’s guardian) of Thra
goness, and his hunchbacked and twisted brother Hugh, restricted to the Other Thragoness by a number of locked and forbidden doors between the connected houses. The family history itself is confusing, Brendon had six brothers and one sister, and one uncle, whose grandson is young Paddy. These ingredients give a Gothic feel to the book, but there is nothing fantastical in the novel.
Though the main character is a child, the book is not for children. It is a kind of psychological study of a boy who is described at the end of the book as “a little idiot, brought up on a farrago of idle dreams and inventions” (p. 307). Paddy believes the cruel tales about his guardian told to him by one of the Marys, and falls for the cruel deceptions and threats of Hugh Tenthragon, after Paddy has come to the Other Thragoness by mistake. All this amounts to a great deal of family drama, and misery for young Paddy. The unsatisfying denouement involves complications from family history and the surprise arrival of significant family members barely mentioned previously.
The book as a whole is fairly well-written and parts of it skillfully explore that borderland between a child’s perspective of fairy-tales and romanticism and the outer world of reality (Paddy insists that there is a dragon in Thragoness), but other parts are significantly less successful.
Sawyer, Nesta. The Reason of the Beginning and Other Imaginings (London: John M. Watkins, 1921).
This small book collects some twenty-eight tales, most of them very short. It is the only book by its author, who was born Ella Ernestine Sawyer in Norfolk on 14 September 1893. She was called Nesta for her entire life. In the spring of 1925 she entered into what has been described as a marriage of convenience with an American businessman Seymour Obermer (1867-1957), but she had a long lesbian affair with the artist Gluck (1895-1978), and one of Gluck’s most famous paintings, Medallion (1937), depicts Gluck and Nesta. Besides short stories, Nesta also wrote plays, two of which were produced by her friend Leon M. Lion, including “Black Magic” (1931) and “So Good! So Kind!” (1933). A later play, “Mind over Marriage” (1957), was under her married name. Nesta Obermer died in Switzerland on 3 October 1984.
Late Reviews Page 21