Timlin, William M. The Ship That Sailed to Mars (London: George G. Harrap, 1923; ltd ed.; reprinted in 1993 by StoneWall Publications of Ventura, California).
The Ship That Sailed to Mars is a book of legendary beauty and equally legendary rarity, written and illustrated by the English-born artist William Mitcheson Timlin (1892-1943) who spent much of his life in South Africa. A large oversized book, with the text hand-lettered by the author/illustrator, and with 48 full-color plates, the book was originally issued in November 1923 an edition of only 2,000 copies (priced astronomically at 42s. each, with 250 of these shipped to America and sold by Frederick A. Stokes for $12 per copy).
The story is basically a fairy-tale, despite the science-fictional overtones of the title. It tells of an elderly inventor who designs and—with the help of fairies—builds a huge ship (that looks almost exactly like a terrestrial sailing ship) which he sails to Mars, a planet with its own fairies who have troubles of their own, which the inventor helps to solve. The story is in many ways slight, but with the added dimension of the Rackham-esque illustrations, one finds a unique charm in the book. Timlin made pictures for a second book, The Building of a Fairy City, which was regrettably never published, though some of the artwork was reportedly issued in South Africa on picture postcards.
Tourneur, Nigel. Hidden Witchery (London: Leonard Smithers, 1898). Decorated by Will Mein.
A collection of seven short stories and one drama, all written between 1894-97. The book is very rare owing to its limitation of 450 copies, and the stories remain unknown as no anthologist has as yet reprinted any of them. The book is collectible in its own right for having been published by the great decadent publisher of the 1890s, Leonard Smithers.
The titles of the stories practically ooze the atmosphere of the Yellow Book era: “The Apogæon of Cupid”; “The Leman’s Love”; “The Tithe at the Moorstone”; “The Passing of Lilith”; “At the Sign of Kypris”; “In the Hidden Hours of the Night”; “At the Cross-Roads on the Moor”; and the drama, “The Potion, or, the Tragical Ending of the Loves of Viola, Duchess of Siena, and Marzio, Seigneur d’Alibert, her sometime Lover.”
In a short “Advertisement” prefacing the book, Tourneur writes: “ ... Till irremeable Old Age sets his knotted hands to the shafts, Passion wheels the vehicle of Life; sometimes visibly, sometimes invisibly . . . Throughout the following stories and sketches—scantily in part, and, it is feared, obscurely, through symbolism—there may be traced the inception, growth, strength, waywardness, and maturity of its physical manhood, culminating in self-knowledge and abnegation.”
The writing style is very fin de siècle, mostly passably done but the prose is not without amateurish and clumsy traits. Occasionally there are nice passages. But the plots are often un-involving, and one finishes each story with a sense that the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Many of the stories concern romances, but the supernatural gets fair play in atmosphere and plot.
“Nigel Tourneur” (sometimes “N. Tourneur”) was one of several pseudonyms used by Maclaren Mein (1872-1935), who was born and educated in Scotland but in adulthood a longtime resident in Thundersley, Essex. Mein’s most successful pseudonym, “Patrick Vaux,” was used mostly on naval fiction about future wars.
The artist Will Mein, (William Gordon Mein, 1866-1939), a cousin of the author, provided three very nicely decadent full-page illustrations, similar in style to Aubrey Beardsley, along with a number of tail-pieces and chapter headings.
V
Verne, Jules. An Antarctic Mystery (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1899). Translated from the French by Mrs. Cashel Hoey.
In an article on the works of Edgar Allan Poe published in La Musée des Familles, Avril 1864, Jules Verne (1828-1905) observed of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) that “the story of Pym’s adventures breaks off in mid-air. Who will take it up again? Someone bolder and more daring than I, who does not fear to launch himself into a sphere of the impossible.” Thirty years later Verne himself did just that, in Le Sphinx des Glaces (1897), which first appeared in English as a serial, beginning in 1898, in The Boy’s Own Paper under the title Captain Len Guy; or, An Antarctic Mystery. It was subsequently collected in The Boy’s Own Annual for 1899, and also came out as a separate volume, re-titled An Antarctic Mystery, from Sampson Low, Marston and Company, London, around October 1898, with a U.S. edition, published by Lippincott, a month later (though it is dated 1899). Sadly, none of these versions use Verne’s more poetic French title, which in English would be Sphinx of the Ice-Fields.
Poe’s masterful narrative is open-ended, deliberately lacking closure so as to leave the mysteries foremost in the reader’s mind. Inevitably this invites others to write continuations of the story, and the attempts made to explain Poe’s mysteries are inevitably disappointing. Verne’s sequel was the first published, beating out Charles Romyn Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899) by a matter of months, though it seems likely that both were being written around the same time. And both Verne and Dake hinged their sequels on the supposed reality of the character of Dirk Peters, Pym’s companion, who according to Poe’s note at the end of the book was still alive in 1838, a resident of Illinois.
Verne’s story is set some eleven years after Poe’s. Captain Len Guy of the Halbrane is the brother of the Captain Guy who sailed with Pym, and Len Guy has come to believe that his brother, and others of the ill-fated expedition, may still be alive. The book is narrated by a Mr. Jeorling, who takes passage on the Halbrane and though initially skeptical becomes convinced of the truth of Poe’s narrative, supporting Captain Guy in his search for his lost brother. Any sequel to Pym is almost by its nature bound to rehash familiar material, as the new expedition retraces the steps of the earlier one, moving farther and farther south towards the pole and Pym’s mysterious end. Verne adds new hardships for the crew of the Halbrane to overcome, including mutiny and the capture of the Halbrane by a rolling iceberg, leading to its complete destruction. One mysterious crewman of the Halbrane turns out to be the half-breed Dirk Peters, Pym’s companion, who reveals that contrary to what Poe published, Pym never returned to America but drifted off in the Antarctic, after he and Peters had become separated. Verne brings the story to an implausible conclusion. Captain Guy eventually find his brother, and the enormous Sphinx they encounter is revealed to be a lodestone—an enormous magnet. Pym’s frozen and dead body is discovered six feet up the Sphinx, magnetically bound by the iron of the gun which he carried over his shoulder. Dirk Peters falls dead of grief.
Both as a novel in its own right and as a sequel to Pym, Verne’s story is unsatisfying. A weak work written in Verne’s old age, his own earlier imaginative writings are much, much better.
Viereck, George Sylvester. The House of the Vampire (New York: Moffat, Yard & Company, 1907).
The House of the Vampire is the first novel by the German-born Viereck (1884-1962), who came to the United States around 1896. This novel was preceded by two collections of poetry, one in German in 1904, the other in English, and a collection of plays. The second volume of poetry, Nineveh and Other Poems (1907), was unusually successful, with a decadent and pansexual sensuousness. Viereck’s novels written in collaboration with Paul Eldridge, beginning with My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew (1928), were best-sellers, but Viereck’s literary reputation has not withstood the controversy over his pro-German work in both the First and Second World Wars. From 1942-47, he was imprisoned for failing to have registered in the U.S. as a paid propagandist for the German government. His marriage broke up when he refused to repudiate the Nazis, and thereby he also became estranged from his son Peter Viereck (1916-2006), a poet and a founder of the mid-twentieth century American conservative movement. Viereck’s literary career foundered, but his memoir of his prison experiences, Men into Beasts (1952), was fairly successful. In his final years he became reconciled with his son.
The House of the Vampire is t
he story of a young man, Ernest Fielding, who comes to live with and to be the protégé of Reginald Clarke, a genius of literary conversation and wit. What the reader soon learns is that Clarke is a kind of psychic vampire, who drains the creative works from the minds of those close to him and passes them off as his own. Clarke is clearly based on Oscar Wilde, and the homoeroticism between Clarke and the young men he preys upon is always present in the background (if covertly stated). Well-written, and engaging at its short length, the novel achieves its small ambitions and, unstained by the author’s later politics, it remains well worth reading.
Visiak, E.H. The Shadow, in Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (London: E.H. Samuel, 1936), anonymously edited by John Gawsworth.
E. H. Visiak was the working name of Edward Harold Physick (1878-1972), who was known familiarly as Harold. Over his very long life he published poetry, literary criticism, and fiction, as well as editions of works by Milton. Visiak’s third novel, Medusa (1929), was a great advance upon his first two, The Haunted Island (1910), a juvenile adventure fantasy, and The War of the Schools (1912), a schoolboy tale written in collaboration with C.V. Hawkins (1872-1949), the founder and headmaster of York House School. After Medusa, which was not a publishing success, Visiak worked on and completed two further novels, David Treffry and The Shadow of Hamond Layton. At that time he could find no publisher at all for David Treffry, which more than thirty years later emerged in only a slightly altered form as Visiak’s autobiography, Life’s Morning Hour (1968). The Shadow of Hamond Layton was turned down by successive publishers beginning as early as 1931, and its continued rejection demoralized Visiak so much that he ceased writing fiction for some thirty years. It appeared in print in October 1936, retitled more simply as The Shadow, not as a stand-alone book but as the lead item in a massive anthology, anonymously edited by John Gawsworth, titled Crimes, Creeps and Thrills: Forty-Five New Stories of Detection, Horror and Adventure by Eminent Modern Authors. There are a number of illustrations sprinkled through Visiak’s novel—poor in quality, with the artist uncredited—as well as through the rest of the volume.
The Shadow is made up of thirty-two chapters, divided into two parts, fourteen chapters in the first part and eighteen in the second. This first part covers several months after the Christmas holidays of 1905; the second part takes place some five or six years later. The Shadow centers on a young boy, Edmund Shear, who is around fourteen when the book starts. He attends the Mindanao House School near the coastal town of Lowestoft in Suffolk. When Edmund stays for the Christmas holidays at the manor-home of a local schoolmate, Anthony Layton, he becomes obsessed with a portrait of Anthony’s great-great grandfather Hamond Layton that hangs on the wall of the guest room. Hamond Layton was a kind of rogue, a smuggler or pirate, depending upon which stories one has heard about him. A frequent visitor to the Layton house is Walter Jervons, a neighbor who is having an affair with Mrs. Layton (a widow, forbidden to remarry by her husband’s will) while at the same time Jervons is cheating her out of her money. Other visitors include Mr. Anderson, the elderly owner of a shipping company who takes a liking to Edmund; Mrs. Evans, a local busybody, and promoter of a theosophic philosophy of New Idealism, who hosts lecturers at the house where she lives with her grand-daughter Margaret Conyers (who is nearly the same age as Edmund and Anthony); and a large malevolent man named Thurston who has a long black beard and purports to be an artist. Nearby lives an old fisherman called Jerusalem John, who is over a hundred years old, and who was a friend of Hamond Layton’s in his youth. Another significant character is Mr. Atwell, the headmaster of Mindanao House School.
In part one, Edmund notes parallels between Hamond Layton and some of the characters in Captain Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship (1839)—headmaster Mr. Atwell has also explored some of the psychology of this old novel in a manuscript entitled “The Triangle of Personality”—but these correspondences as well as Visiak’s own characterizations are murky at best. Apparently Visiak intended the good aspect of Hamond Layton to be embodied in Edmund Shear, while his evil side is to be discerned in Thurston, who appears occasionally and mysteriously throughout the book. When Jerusalem John dies, he leaves Edmund a scarf that had belonged to Hamond Layton, and a letter to Hamond from his lover, Barbara, whom Hamond had abandoned to pursue his evil ways. At the end of part two, Hamond Layton is in a sense psychologically redeemed through Edmund and his love for Margaret Conyers, despite Thurston’s machinations against them. Visiak interestingly ties some of these ideas together through ship symbolism and (in the voice of Thurston) what is called “ship-talk.”
One of the larger problems with this novel is that while it is (like Visiak’s other novel, Medusa) obsessed with the sea and with sea-imagery, the plot here is entirely landlocked and claustrophobic. Additionally, while Visiak’s ideas are interesting, he does not make it easy for his readers to understand or follow them. Hints here and there are offset with frequent doubts about the motivations of most of the main characters. Visiak holds them too distant from the reader for sympathetic understanding.
After The Shadow was published, Visiak’s friend David Lindsay wrote perceptively to Visiak on 7th January 1937: “The symbol has long been hammered out in your mind, it is part of your mind by virtue of time, labour, and certainly mental suffering. Yet in this very quality lies the book’s inaccessibility to the common mind (I, who have so often heard you dissect the symbol, am privileged, and still I am far from having dived to its bottom). A duality of metempsychosis would always be sufficiently difficult to the mind of the plain reader—I suggest that a trinity is so exceedingly difficult, that you should have dealt with the task of illuminating it as a principal point. Perhaps I am wrong, and others may find it clearer. I will no more praise or criticize it here, but merely repeat (for the time being) that you have again given the world, of your very self.” Lindsay’s view makes sense, and one wonders what readers purchasing a volume with a sensational title like Crimes, Creeps, and Thrills would have thought of such a slow, subtle and ultimately unsuccessful story that contains few of the elements promised in the anthology’s title.
Visiak, E.H. The Shadow (unpublished revised version, dated 1967-1968).
Colin Wilson (1931-2013) began a long correspondence with E.H. Visiak in August 1964, when Visiak was eighty-six years old. The two writers finally met in June 1967 when Wilson visited Visiak at a nursing home in Hove. Wilson’s friendship with Visiak proved instrumental in inspiring Visiak to resume productive literary composition, and Wilson also helped to see a number of Visiak’s writings re-published, or published for the first time. Wilson and Visiak, together with J.B. Pick, also collaborated on a book, The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (1970).
After their first meeting, Wilson returned to his home in Cornwall with several manuscripts by Visiak, including the typescript of a novel then titled The Haunted Boy. (Wilson evidently did not realize for some time that The Haunted Boy was merely a temporary retitling of The Shadow, and seeing it in typescript form he assumed incorrectly that it was unpublished—some of Wilson’s published comments about the book reflect his misunderstanding.) Wilson read the book and was impressed, though he felt it needed to be reworked. Initially he offered to collaborate on the revision with Visiak, detailing some of his ideas to Visiak in a letter of October 1967. Visiak turned to the revision himself, and completed it soon after his ninetieth birthday in late July 1968. A few months later it was turned down by John Baker, the publisher who was just bringing out Visiak’s autobiography and who was also reissuing Visiak’s books on Conrad and Milton. Wilson again offered to rewrite the book in collaboration with Visiak, but (fortunately) this came to naught, for Wilson’s ideas as expressed in his letters to Visiak would have turned the book into a more typical Colin Wilson work than one reflecting Visiak’s own eclectic aesthetics. (Wilson once noted that “I settled own one day to try and rewrite the beginning of the novel, and completed a chapter, which I sent to Harold. Predictably, he was rather shocked by it,
and that was the end of our attempt at collaboration.”)
In his revision Visiak retained the basic two part structure of the 1936 published version, adding an opening section (“On the Trail”) to part one, which was now comprised of seventeen chapters, while part two was expanded to eighteen chapters. Though the new version is made up of a prologue and thirty-five chapters, compared with a total of thirty-two chapters in the earlier published version, the revised novel is only about five thousand words longer than the original. Yet it is not so simple to say that Visiak merely added to the existing book. It is an entirely rewritten book, with about seven new chapters added (three in part one, and four in part two), and with many of the chapters, especially in part two, cut in some way from the earlier version and added to in other ways. Yet the story told is essentially the same, with some added scenes and many amplifications (more appearances of Thurston, who befriends Anthony in order to corrupt him; and of Edmund’s encounter with an elderly woman, a fortune-teller and companion of Thurston’s; various premonitions and visions are added; and more specific sea-imagery detailed in the descriptions). There is one noteworthy alteration—Edmund’s love interest, Margaret in the early version, is renamed Marjorie, and their close association begins earlier.
The most significant element in the revision is the addition of the opening prologue, which reframes the book in an entirely new way. It is written by an unnamed psychical researcher, who has come to Lowestoft in 1923 (all the dates given in the earlier version are thenceforth removed), and while researching another matter, purchases at a local auction a batch of manuscripts, diaries and a painting related to the Layton family, formerly of a now derelict local manor-house. The researcher in fact becomes the author of the rest of the novel, based upon his interpretation of these materials and their history.
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