The researcher visits the manor-house, finding it like a wrecked ship, and spends the night there. On the following day he meets a neighbor, an old woman who is the grand-daughter of Jerusalem John. She is able to fill in important gaps of the story told by the batch of papers, including the fact that Thurston was the bastard son of Hamond Layton, and, more surprisingly, that Edmund Shear was Hamond’s son’s bastard (Visiak leaves the details of genealogy unclear, though Hamond is here called Anthony’s great-grandfather, while he was Anthony’s great-great-grandfather in the earlier version). Thus their psychological affinities are now due to kinship, and the psychical researcher is able to note that of the triangular relationship between Edmund, Thurston and Hamond Layton, Hamond was the base, Edmund and Thurston the collateral sides, with Thurston personifying the sinister side of Hamond’s nature. These revelations serve to point readers in the direction Visiak wished them to follow to interpret his characters and his novel. This framework on its own makes for a significant improvement to the novel. Most of the other alterations are improvements as well, the tightening of the narrative, and the smoothing of the plot into a more logical flow, while making the parallels between Hamond and Thurston, and Hamond and Edmund, as well as Hamond’s love-interest Barbara and Edmund’s love-interest Marjorie, more discernable.
At the beginning of part two there is a new chapter with Edmund meeting Mr. Anderson after leaving Mindanao House and entering a public school at Wimbledon. The next chapter jumps forward to Edmund at age twenty-three, having become Manager at the offices of the Anderson Shipping Line. The new material added to the plot thereafter involves a visit to Mrs. Layton, in her reduced circumstances, where Edmund comes to realize that she is his mother. Edmund worries that because he is a bastard Marjorie will not have him, but she proves faithful to him, and she is fortuitously rescued from Anthony’s assault upon her (made at the instigation of Thurston), leading to the same climax as in the earlier version, as Edmund refuses to kill Thurston, which means saving himself and in effect redeeming Hamond.
Overall the revision amounts to a significant improvement to Visiak’s novel. The new framework is a better entrance to the story, and the narrative itself is more structured and more accessible to the reader. It is remarkable that Visiak could do such a successful recasting at age ninety of a work originally written nearly four decades earlier. The Shadow, in its revised form, still has flaws, but it deserves publication, being Visiak’s most realized and achieved work, significantly better than Medusa, which also has flaws. Though eccentric and individualistic (as David Lindsay wrote, no one but Visiak could have written this), The Shadow remains incomparable to any other novel in the canon of supernatural literature.
W
Waite, Arthur Edward. The Golden Stairs: Tales from the Wonder-World (London: The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1893).
The occultist A.E. Waite (1857-1942), through his long career, occasionally turned to the writing of fiction as an expression of his metaphysical interests. First came a short novel Prince Starbeam (1889), and this was followed by the collection The Golden Stairs (1893). Parts from both of these early books were reworked and revisioned three decades later into The Quest of the Golden Stairs (1927).
The Golden Stairs contains eight unrelated stories. In the title story, young Hildebrandt learns in his quest that the Golden Stairs are not a physical phenomenon but a spiritual one, they are the path of progress through life. Some of the other tales have even less plot and less focus, being overly descriptive and meditative. A quote from the beginning of “The Haunted Marsh” should serve as an example:
The Marsh is vast, and at night is very solemn, for it is adread with the dim windings of melancholy mist-covered roads, and the phantasmal uncertainties of spectral footpaths going over endless wastes of forlorn meadows. The song of the evening lark is hushed early, for his “blithe spirit” is chilled by the ascending mists; with damp folds they stifle the bleating of the sheep who stray unpenned over the road. But it is chiefly in the black quickset hedge that there is any stir of life; the unceasing whirr of the grasshopper sounds harsh and loud within it; there is nothing in the whole insect world so like the working of the machinery. The winds blow over the wide marsh with a homeless cry; but there are times when there is no wind, when silent masses of black cloud steal up softly and gradually till the light of the moon is quenched.
There is nothing wrong per se with such lyrical description, but the story continues on in the same mode for thirteen more pages, and to the reader such endless descriptions become a quagmire of fleeting images. Of the other narratives, “The Seven Sapphires” perhaps works best as a story, telling of a young prince named Metron who is presented with a beautiful young companion, Gabriel, by a sinister Man in Red. Through Gabriel’s sacrifice, Metron is able to achieve his great destiny.
“The Bells of Fairyland” is also an interesting tale, in which people hear the distant music of fairyland and long to comprehend its message. The final story in the book, “An Elfin Legacy,” is not really a story but a reflection by the author, addressing his readers about the messages in his stories.
Waite has blended some interesting aspects of fairyland into his stories, but overall he has failed to make them interesting as stories.
Wandrei, Donald. The Eye and the Finger (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1944).
A collection of twenty-one stories, reprinted from Weird Tales, Esquire and other magazines. It is rather a hodge-podge assemblage, mixing science fiction and fantasy. Most of the stories are pretty terrible, particularly the ones which try to give pseudo-scientific explanations to weird phenomena. However, some really striking moods and images occasionally come through. For this reason alone the collection might be considered worth reading; but on the whole it is disappointing and a bore. Wandrei is at his best when he tries, simply, to describe unusual events, as in the scene of the red snow falling in “Something from Above,” but all too often he descends into the worst pulp excesses. The best stories are the simpler ones, like “The Painted Mirror” and “The Crystal Bullet.” “The Lives of Alfred Kramer” is effective even with Wandrei’s forced explanations, but this is probably because the story owes most of its power to its main situation, which Wandrei has lifted and adapted from Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber. Parts of “Earth Minus” work, but these again are the descriptive scenes rather than the explanatory passages. “The Red Brain,” now hailed as a classic, is really rather silly, but some of its cosmicism works if you can overlook the unintentional hilarity of the scene of the Antarean Brains holding an assembly. One other story deserves a mention—”A Fragment of a Dream”—mainly because it is reused in a slightly revised (and better) form in Wandrei’s novel The Web of Easter Island (1948). As a whole this book is an unbalanced collection with a lot smacking of filler.
Wason, Sandys. Palafox (London: Cope & Fenwick, 1927).
Palafox is a very curious novel. Its eponymous character, Bernard Palafox, is a painter who comes into possession of a small convex metal disk which enables him to read the secret thoughts of others. He calls the device an Ideoscope. First, at an auction, Palafox manages to learn about a valuable item and to use this knowledge to his advantage. He throws a party with his gains, where he encounters Diaphra Manningtree, a beautiful young violinist with whom he quickly becomes enamored. There follows a series of silly, overdone situations (including a trip to the strange imaginary kingdom of Tussilago) during which Palafox pursues marriage with Diaphra, but she holds back, sensing some kind of sinister hold on him. Palafox interprets this as her unconscious awareness of the Ideoscope, and he determines to be rid of it, but some of the thoughts he overhears (e.g., ones pertaining to a murder) delay his resolve. The tone throughout the novel is light and occasionally sarcastic, but it swerves uncharacteristically in the final chapter, when on a whim Palafox attends Mass, where he has a kind of revelation. Soon after this he sees Diaphra, and the crucifix which she wears happens to touch the Ideoscope and it
burns up in a flash, leaving a pile of ash. Nothing remains to prevent the marriage of the two lovers.
The novel opens with an irrelevant five page “Introduction” by Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), the author’s friend of three decades, and a short note by the author, referring sarcastically to his being deprived of “a fat and important living in Cornwall for holding an illegal service” and noting that he had been “advised by two experts in ecclesiastical law that in their considered opinion there is positively nothing illegal in this tale.”
The author was the Reverend Sandys Wason (1860-1950), who studied at the Westminster School, then in Paris and Hanover, before he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1889, receiving a B.A. in 1893. He was the founder of the Oxford student magazine The Spirit Lamp: An Oxford Magazine without News, whose original nature was entirely altered when the editorship was taken over by Lord Alfred Douglas, who changed the subtitle to An Aesthetic, Literary and Critical Magazine, and included contributions by Oscar Wilde and Count Stenbock. Wason studied at the Ely Theological College, and was ordained a deacon in 1894, and a priest in 1898. He served as Curate of Elmswell, Suffolk, from 1894-97; of St. Andrew’s, Plaistow, Essex, 1897-98; and of St. Michael’s, Shoreditch, London, 1899-1904. He was the Vicar of Cury-cum-Gunwalloe, Cornwall, from 1905 until 27 May 1919 when he was removed and persecuted for his High Church Ritualism.
Wason published two books of verse, Magenta Minutes: Nonsense Verse (1913) and Simon Dean and Other Poems (1913), and was co-editor (with Herbert J.C. Grierson) of The Personal Note: or, First and Last Words from Prefaces, Introductions, Dedications, Epilogues (1946). In the early 1930s, Wason became friends with the novelist Frank Baker, then at the beginning of his writing career. In the late 1930s, Wason wrote a second novel, Storm in an Egg Cup, about a scientist who found a way to make synthetic eggs. The book was completed and offered for publication, but never published and no manuscript survives. Roy Tricker’s amateurish biography Mr. Wason ... I Think (1994) includes a large number of Wason’s poems.
Weston, Jessie L. The Soul of the Countess and Other Stories, with Verse Preludes. (London: David Nutt, 1900).
Jessie Laidlay Weston (1850-1928) is primarily remembered for her studies of Arthurian legends, and in particular for her controversial book, From Ritual to Romance (1920) , in which she expounded her belief that the grail legends descended from pre-Christian Celtic rituals, and that some of these rituals survive to the present day in confused forms used in secret occult practices. From Ritual to Romance became widely known after T. S. Eliot acknowledged his debt to the book in his poem The Waste Land (1922). Most of Weston’s other books were translations and interpretations of medieval texts, which she published from the mid-1890s through the First World War.
The Soul of the Countess is her only book of fiction. It contains six stories, each with a verse prelude. (Weston published one small volume of poetry, The Rose Tree of Hildesheim and Other Poems, in 1896.) All of the stories have a medieval flavor, and most deal with specifically Christian themes and ideas. In the title story, one of the longest in the book, a human soul is sought for a wood-spirit, reworking the basic idea from de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine (1811). “The Sorrow of the King” tells of the journey of the Three Wise Men to see the infant Christ, while “Our Lady of the Forest” relates the legend behind an isolated chapel in a great forest, in which Lady Margaret evaded treachery in an attempt to help a dying man, appearing to her enemies as a vision of the Virgin Mother. In “The Unknown Master” a singer unknowingly does God’s work with his inspiring gift of music. In “The Last Valkyr”—one of the best stories in the book—Eric, because of his love for the Christian Thyra, sides with those of the new faith against those of the old, despite a Valkyr appearing to him and promising him a place in Valhall. In the final story, “The Archbishop That Was a Saint,” the ascetic archbishop is allowed to enter heaven only when someone has prayed for him. That this person turns out to be the gregarious abbey librarian Baldwin, whom the Archbishop always thought insignificant, is ironic, for the memory of the Archbishop is long held in honor on earth while Baldwin is quickly forgotten.
Weston’s stories are well-crafted if not particularly original; their combination of fairy tale and mystical elements will be especially appreciated by devotees of George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis. As a final note, I’d like to acknowledge with gratitude the kindness of Peter Gilbert of the Lawrence University Library in Appleton, Wisconsin, in arranging a method for me to read this especially rare book.
Whitehead, Henry S. Pinkie at Camp Cherokee (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931).
Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932) is remembered primarily for his short stories, many of which were originally published in Weird Tales magazine in the 1920s and early 1930s and collected posthumously in two volumes published by Arkham House, Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946). Less known is the fact that Whitehead published two books during his lifetime, the first being a work of populist theology, The Garden of the Lord (1922), the second being a novel for boys, Pinkie at Camp Cherokee.
In the 1920s, Whitehead was involved with a number of summer camps for boys, and he was one of the owners of Camp Cherokee on Long Island, so in one sense his novel can be viewed as a kind of advertisement for the camp. Whitehead’s first story for boys, “Baseball and Pelicans,” had been submitted to Clayton H. Ernst, editor of The Open Road for Boys, and it was published in the June 1926 issue. Ernst told Whitehead that he should write a book around the tale, and Whitehead took up this advice during the winter of 1929-30 while he was ill. The two main episodes in Whitehead’s short story were expanded into a novel titled Pinkie—Superguy. The title was sensibly changed by the publisher to Pinkie at Camp Cherokee. It centers around a young red-haired boy from Barbados named James Roderick Evelyn Maurice Kelley-Clutton, who is nicknamed Pinkie because his skin turns pink rather than tan when exposed to the sun. The story is told by a regular boy Bill Spofford from Pencilville, Ohio. Pinkie, with his British accent and complete lack of knowledge of regular American traditions, serves as the proverbial fish out-of-water, and an object of ridicule for most of the boys at the camp, until they come to realize that not only is he talented—his running abilities win a competition, and his unorthodox batting, cricket-style, wins a baseball game—but worthy of their respect and friendship. Of course rivalries between campers and other nearby camps are presented in a simplistic us/good versus them/bad mentality, and the chumminess between the friendly boys is often cloying and sentimentalized. The attitudes are dated, and the whole book would be a dire read save for two stories inserted as tales told to groups of boys. In one (pages 83-90), Pinkie tells a story around a campfire of a West Indies negro superstition about acquiring luck from a Dead Man’s Tooth. In the second (page 148-158), the camp Chief tells the weird life-story of a thin match. Remarkably, this tale appeared in a slightly different and longer form as “The Thin Match” in the March 1925 issue of Weird Tales. These two inserted tales account for the only value of this book to the modern reader.
Wilson, Colin. Metamorphosis of the Vampire (unpublished novel, written 1992-94).
Metamorphosis of the Vampire is an unpublished sequel to The Space Vampires (1976), written over a two-year period from July 1992 through July 1994. It is roughly two-hundred and seventy-five thousand words—its size being only one of the reasons that it has remained unpublished to this day. Colin Wilson (1931-2013) wrote about twenty novels, including several works in the Lovecraftian tradition (e.g., The Mind Parasites), and some of a more general fantastical nature (e.g., the Spider World series).
One need not know The Space Vampires in order to read the sequel. Basically, the protagonist of the sequel, Richard Carlsen, is the grandson of Captain Olaf Carlsen of the earlier book. There is an infodump early in the sequel that tells all that needs to be known of the first book. While The Space Vampires is a kind of pulp-styled adventure novel, with philosophical overtones, the philosophy tak
es over in the sequel; basically, after the first third of the book, the story becomes Colin Wilson’s version of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus. It is filled with Wilson’s usual obsessions (mental powers, sexuality, and the evolution of humanity), yet it feels oddly rooted in the ethos of the 1960s (this datedness is perhaps another factor in the novel remaining unpublished).
One day in 2145, the psychologist Richard Carlsen realizes that he is a vampire, and finds other vampires (some being extraterrestrial) in New York City who, by strictly heterosexual methods, exchange vital energies during a kind of psychic lovemaking. Carlsen exchanges energies with a number of younger and younger women, with Wilson’s (unconvincing) protestations that these exchanges do not amount to pedophilia. I suspect these encounters are probably the main reason why the novel has remained unpublished. After nearly three hundred pages of this (about one third of the book’s length), the tone abruptly shifts, and the rest of the story takes Carlsen on an astral journey to three planets of the star Rigel, here becoming overly indebted to David Lindsay’s novel, about which Wilson has written extensively. Carlsen’s companion Kreiski recalls Lindsay’s Krag in various ways; Wilson, following Lindsay, invents new colors—creel, delfin and gallex, to Lindsay’s ulfire and jale. The remaining two-thirds of the novel is episodic and convoluted, and (sad to say) elementally boring. Overall, Metamorphosis of the Vampire is not a very good novel, even among Wilson’s rather mixed oeuvre, though I suspect Wilson’s devotees will consider it more important as an expression of Wilson’s philosophy than as a novel. This is perhaps rightly so.
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