by Roger Dobson
Montague Summers, 1880-1948.
All this has led to widespread interest in his works, and several of his occult and theatrical titles remain in print, including his classic collection of horror tales, The Supernatural Omnibus, first published in 1931.
Summers’s profoundest secrets doubtless died with him; but it is possible to untangle a few of the threads surrounding his life, which, as his bibliographer Timothy d’Arch Smith has said, was a ‘curious commixture of spooks and sex and God’.
Montie (as he signed himself to intimates) was born into a rich Evangelical Anglican family in Clifton, Bristol, on 10th April 1880. His autocratic father, a pillar of the community, was a banker, the head of a mineral water company and a J.P.
Soon after his birth the family migrated to Tellisford House, a large elegant residence at Clifton Down. Young Summers adored the house, particularly the fine library which became his sanctuary. Here he shuddered with delight over the Gothic romances of Mrs Radcliffe and Harrison Ainsworth. His fascination with drama began through enacting old plays on the stage of his miniature theatre. Like many of the homes Summers would inhabit during his roving life Tellisford House was haunted. The most curious manifestation occurred after his father’s death when the house had been sold. Its new mistress was startled by a mysterious stranger with a white beard, spectacles and skull-cap. Montie, on hearing the story, immediately identified the spectre—it was his father!
After tuition at home and at a nearby private school Summers entered Clifton College at the age of fifteen. Excused games because of his delicate constitution, he seems to have been a solitary figure. This was probably due to his early isolation from boys his own age; his brother and five sisters were all his elders. Taking solace in writing, he produced essays, stories, poems and plays, juvenilia which has not survived.
It seems that during family holidays on the Continent, particularly in Italy, Montie first became drawn to Catholicism. Its dignified rituals suited his artistic temperament. Summers’s exotic tastes emerged when he went up to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1899. Assuming the role of a decadent, he burned incense and dressed extravagantly. His ebony cane’s silver handle bore ‘an extremely immodest representation of Leda and the Swan’. Like his idol Oscar Wilde—who had paid the penalty for flouting Victorian morality—Summers was brilliant and witty: though his perverse and obscene conversation, delivered in a piping voice, was obviously calculated to shock. The hot-house spirit of the age had cooled by the turn of the century, but he was evidently still its slave. Doubtless he adopted Wilde’s maxim—‘The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.’
Although a fine classical scholar Summers left Oxford with an inferior degree. He spent two years at Lichfield Theological College, travelled in Europe, and was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Bristol in 1908. In 1907 his first book, Antinous and Other Poems, had appeared. These lush, decadent verses showing the influence of Swinburne were not what one would expect from an aspirate to the cloth. Two titles—‘The Faun’ and ‘To a Dead Acolyte’—will convey the work’s neo-pagan flavour. Several poems reflected Summers’s sincere, if incongruous, piety, but they did not prevent the book being denounced as ‘corrupt’. The poet was elated by this reaction.
Summers was appointed curate at the village of Bitton near Bristol in 1908. Perhaps the strain of parish duties and frustration caused by serving under an elderly and eccentric cleric took their toll; for when a friend visited him he was shocked to find Summers professing an ungodly obsession with evil and Satanism. The vicarage was reputedly haunted, and this doubtless intensified the young curate’s agitated state. Then a sexual scandal involving another clergyman led to Summers appearing in the dock accused of pederasty. He was acquitted and speedily left the area.
In 1909 he embraced the Roman Catholic faith, adopting the additional names Alphonsus Joseph-Mary. Summers apparently felt that the Anglican Church’s rites lacked efficacy, and that true spiritual power lay only with Rome. He spent a short time at a seminary near Guildford, but it seems unlikely that he went on to take holy orders. No authentic evidence of his being ordained has ever emerged, and the matter is one for conjecture. One tradition states that Summers’s ordination was cancelled when the ecclesiastical authorities discovered he was homosexual.
Whatever the truth was, Summers styled himself a priest from 1913 on, though he retained the Anglican title of ‘Reverend’. He celebrated Mass in continental churches and in private oratories in successive homes in London, Alresford in Hampshire, Oxford and Richmond. In later life he hinted that he had been ordained by a bishop in Italy, and although such procedure would have been irregular his orders could be considered valid.
It has been suggested that Summers converted for diabolical ends. As Joseph Jerome speculates in Montague Summers: A Memoir (1965) ‘if on his “dark side” he desired to serve the Devil, that also would supply a motive, an unhallowed one, for seeking ordination’. Summers, it is said, conducted a Black Mass in the garden of his Hampstead home in 1918. If the ceremony was held—as seems almost beyond dispute—there were doubtless others. Summers would not have been the first priest to turn Satanist.
From 1911 Summers became a schoolteacher, holding posts at Hereford and in London. From 1922-26 he was senior English and Classics master at Brockley County School in London. He plainly had little enthusiasm for teaching, but his quaint ways and erudition appealed to his pupils (no doubt his pupils appealed to Montie). One of them provided a description of Summers for Joseph Jerome’s Memoir: ‘His dress was as near as it could be to his beloved Restoration and Queen Anne period, with a long frock coat, purple stockings, buckled shoes, tall mounted cane, and hair shaved at the sides and long at the back, until it appeared to be almost a short wig.’
Evening Standard cartoon of Summers by Matthew Sandford, c. 1925.
The garb reflected Summers’s adoration of the past. In his biographical note in Twentieth Century Authors (New York, 1942) he wrote: ‘I find modernity frankly detestable. I like old books, old china, old wine, old houses, tranquillity, reverence and respect. . . .
‘Above all, I hate the sceptic and modernist in religion, the Atheist, the Agnostic, the Communist, and all Socialism in whatever guise or masquerade.’
During the First World War Summers launched upon his career as a professional writer, beginning his distinguished editorship of Restoration plays under the aegis of Arthur Henry Bullen’s Shakespeare Head Press. The first work to gain new life was The Rehearsal by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in 1914. The Works of Aphra Behn followed the next year.
Summers, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1916, went on to edit the cream of seventeenth-century drama for the Nonesuch Press and the Fortune Press. The works of Congreve, Wycherley, Otway, Shadwell and Dryden appeared in fine limited edition sets between 1923-32. All won warm reviews, save for the Dryden where pressure of work led Summers into error. His pioneering histories, The Restoration Stage (1934) and The Playhouse of Pepys (1935) established him as the greatest authority on the period theatre. Richard Le Gallienne commented that he had achieved ‘so lonely an eminence in his own field that he alone is qualified to be his own final critic’.
Summers’s activities were not confined to the printed page, however. He believed the plays had much to offer to modern audiences, and in 1919, at his suggestion, The Phoenix Society was founded for the presentation of Elizabethan and Restoration drama. Twenty-six plays were revived, featuring such performers as Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike and Ernest Thesiger, before the society disbanded in 1925. Montie, the group’s chairman, was very popular with the players. He left the society in 1924 after a series of rows, and the remaining productions were below standard.
In 1926 the first of his occult studies, The History of Witchcraft and Demonology, appeared. In Summers’s words it ‘caused a sensation and was an immediate “best-seller”. It was written from what people are pleased to call a “medieval” standpoint, an
absolute and complete belief in the supernatural, and hence in witchcraft.’ Subsequent works included The Geography of Witchcraft (1927), The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), The Werewolf (1933) and others. The author nailed his colours firmly to the mast in these books. Demonic possession, sorcery, lycanthropy and vampirism were indisputable historical phenomena, he argued, citing such sages as the early Christian chroniclers, James I and Cotton Mather. Summers believed that Satanism was a worldwide conspiracy: ‘Witchcraft—black magic—Satanism, call it by what name they will, for it is all one, the cult of the Devil is the most terrible power at work in the world today,’ he warned.
Some bemused critics believed his attitude was a pose. Surely no twentieth-century writer could accept such lurid superstitions, they felt. Summers zealously denounced the practice of the Black Arts in prose reeking of fire and brimstone, calling for the return of the death penalty for witches. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ he thundered. Were such attacks his method of doing penance for the blasphemies of past years, and, if so, what caused this amazing volte-face? A possible solution to the question will be left until last.
Despite his ‘repentance’ Summers still relished his unsavoury reputation which had grown with the years. While living in Oxford from 1929-34 legends clustered around him. His dog or his secretary Hector Stuart-Forbes, was said to be his ‘familiar’ —his black hound was named Cornelius Agrippa after the famous medieval sorcerer whose dog was reputedly an evil spirit. On one occasion Summers is said to have been sprinkled with holy water by a Jesuit testing for demonic reactions. Aleister Crowley—with whom he did not get on—was reported to have turned him into a giraffe, though Montie was unaware of the transformation.
In his third volume of memoirs, Drink and Ink (1979), Dennis Wheatley tells how he met the scholar while researching his first Black Magic novel, The Devil Rides Out (1934). Staying with Summers at Wykeham House, Alresford, Wheatley was disturbed to find large spiders on his bedroom ceiling. In the garden his wife ‘came upon the largest toad she had ever seen’. (The Prince of Thriller writers was presumably unaware of the haunted staircase, or he would no doubt have added this to his catalogue of the sinister.) Summers flew into a rage because Wheatley refused to buy an old book. ‘Never have I seen such a complete change of expression,’ Wheatley wrote. ‘From having been normally benign his face suddenly become positively demonic.’
Wheatley later used Summers as the model for his evil clergyman Canon Augustus Coopely-Style in To the Devil—A Daughter (1953). Montie was possibly the inspiration for another fictional cleric devoted to magic, Canon Paul Fenneau, in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. And perhaps Ernest Thesiger’s mad scientist Dr Praetorius in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) owed something to Montie.
Interviewed by Paul Dehn in 1933 Summers gave a graphic description of Satanic rites, teasingly suggesting he had witnessed such scenes. He evidently made a strong impression, for more than thirty years later Dehn gave him a passing mention in his screenplay The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Summers was one of the few champions of the Gothic novel. Some of these, such as Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, appeared under his editorship in the 1920s. His history of the school, The Gothic Quest, was published in 1938.
In his Introduction to Otranto he describes the genre’s attractions: ‘The Romantic writer fell in love with the Middle Ages, the vague years of long ago, the days of chivalry and strange adventure. He imagined and elaborated a medievalism for himself, he created a fresh world, a world which never was and never could have been, a domain which fancy built and fancy ruled. And in this land there will be mystery, because where there is mystery, beauty may always lie hid. There will be wonder, because wonder always lurks where there is the unknown.’
Summers also resurrected several classic occult works and translated the Malleus Maleficarum. Copies of his translations of The Confessions of Madeleine Bavent, a seventeenth-century account of possession, and Sinistrari’s Demoniality were seized by the police on the grounds of obscenity and destroyed in 1934. The books are generally considered to be dull rather than obscene.
Early in the war Summers settled at 4 Dynevor Road, Richmond. Illness and the strains of war curbed his prolific pen, although he produced a final crop of books, including Witchcraft and Black Magic (1946), The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (1950) and his fascinating, if rambling autobiography, The Galanty Show (1980). He contributed many articles to Everybody’s Weekly on subjects ranging from ‘Is Hitler Really Dead?’ in 1945 to his thoughts on Mrs Radcliffe, Poe, Beardsley and witch-finder Matthew Hopkins.
Worn out and aged beyond his years, Summers died at home on 10th August 1948. He was buried in a Richmond cemetery. The prospective occupants of the house felt oppressed by its sinister atmosphere—it was haunted, naturally—and an exorcism was conducted. Montie would doubtless have approved of such a melodramatic coda to his story.
The mysterious disappearance of Summers’s manuscripts after his death is to be lamented.1 Among them were two plays, another study of the shudder-romances, The Gothic Achievement, and at least two chapters of a biography of Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis had been written. The whereabouts of these works—if they still exist—are unknown, but it is possible they may come to light one day. Some of Summers’s correspondence (including his letters to Stevie Smith) has emerged in recent years.
Such works are unlikely to illuminate the essential enigma of the man, however. All that is certain is that he possessed a dual personality—and was a Jekyll and Hyde in reverse. He began as Hyde, renounced his scarlet sins and settled down to a reasonably respectable life, denouncing all dabblings in dark powers. Yet because he was a ‘born actor’ Summers could not resist fashioning a romantic mask of secrecy and sensationalism, convincing many that he was in the thrall of Satanic forces. As to the catalyst for this repentance, an acceptable theory has been suggested by Timothy d’Arch Smith in his Montague Summers, a limited edition booklet (1984). A clue to the riddle may lie in the late Anatole James, a pseudonym for the son of a respectable Hull solicitor, who met Summers in 1918. James witnessed the Black Mass at Hampstead during Christmas 1918.
Years later, when an old man, he told Mr d’Arch Smith that only three people had been present: himself, Summers and a youth. James was bored by the whole affair; but during the next few years he and Summers went out on the town together, with Montie ‘made up to the eyes and reeking of scent’. But then, in 1923, in a chance encounter in the street, Summers cut James dead, and their friendship was over. Soon afterwards Summers took up his pen—and the sword—against Lucifer’s legions and began publishing his condemnatory occult works. His old life was dead. Why did he mend his ways so radically?
Mr d’Arch Smith writes: ‘My opinion is that from one of his blasphemies, perhaps from their accumulation since 1908, he had learned a terrible lesson. In his shambling, amateur way—and it must be emphasised that he was not the sort of practical, by which I mean intellectual, magician who will guard himself against the dangers inherent in such practices of some sort of psychic kick-back—he had discovered and not a moment too soon that the god he worshipped and the god who warred against that god were professionals.’
Notes:
1. Since Roger’s essay was published, the Montague Summers archive has been found and is now located at Georgetown University, Washington DC. It includes manuscripts, letters and his certificate of ordination as a deacon in the Anglican church. [Ed.]
W.B. YEATS AND THE GOLDEN DAWN
W.B. Yeats, 1865-1939.
Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, April 1987
William Butler Yeats was that rara avis, a poet whose greatness is recognised in his lifetime. The years since his death in 1939 have only added lustre to his name. Yet Yeats’s chief source of inspiration—his belief in the invisible world of supernatural forces—has long embarrassed the literary establishment. How could one of the twentieth-century’
s greatest artists swallow such will-o’-the-wisp absurdities as spells and fairies, spirits and elementals? The answer to the riddle is that Yeats was no prosaic Anglo-Saxon but a mystical Celt. During his idyllic boyhood holidays at Sligo he ventured into another realm—the domain of spectres, banshees and the sidhe. He talked with the people of his own race who had encountered the faery folk—those who were not of this world, the ‘others’. And even if they had not seen them, they believed they had . . .
Yeats himself once saw a strange light moving over a river in this haunted region, and then it had climbed Knoknarea mountain at inhuman speed. In his early twenties, taken to a séance by Katherine Tynan, he became the focus of some sinister force; in his struggles to break free he smashed the table where he was sitting. Such incidents, he felt, could not be explained rationally, and so all his life he attempted to pierce the veil of mystery that divided the material world from the spiritual one, questing after a philosophy that would satisfy his poetic ambitions and his religious sensibility. He believed that one of the gateways to the hidden spheres lay in the study and practice of that most ancient of arts—magic.