by Roger Dobson
Arthur Ransome, 1884-1967.
Bohemia in London, Chapman & Hall, London, 1907.
Ransome is celebrated today for his Lakeland adventures for children, Swallows and Amazons and its sequels, but his first substantial book was Bohemia in London, his somewhat fictionalised chronicle of his early years in the metropolis, published in 1907 when he was only twenty-three. Bohemia in London, by turns comic, poignant, lyrical, rumbustious and elegiac, is a minor classic. In episodes which owe something to Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, the young Yorkshireman sets out to ‘make real on paper the strange, tense, joyful and despairing, hopeful and sordid life that is lived in London by young artists and writers’. He charts his ‘uncomfortable happy years’ in Chelsea studios and cheap lodgings, Soho coffee houses and restaurants, Fleet Street taverns, Hampstead salons and vanished bookshops in Charing Cross Road. Interspersed with Ransome’s adventures are delightful anecdotes involving past denizens of Grub Street: Dr Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Carlyle, Leigh Hunt and others. The book was reissued as a paperback by the Oxford University Press in 1984, the centenary of Ransome’s birth, with an Introduction by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis.
Towards the close of his Bohemian idyll Ransome devotes a chapter apiece to three fellow-strugglers, respectively entitled ‘A Novelist’, ‘A Painter’ and ‘A Gipsy Poet’. Even Shiel enthusiasts would fail to recognise the anonymous protagonist of the novelist chapter as the king of Redonda, for to disguise his identity Ransome introduced a number of deceptions into the narrative. Of course his purpose is not to provide a biographical account of Shiel but to give a portrait of a writer attempting to survive in uncongenial surroundings.
There are clues, however: the novelist’s powerful physique is described along with his crisp and curly black hair, dark eyes and black brows; his admiration for Poe, Dumas and detective tales is stated; his conversation is much the same as the staccato dialogue in his books; his method of writing is feverish; his absorption with his health, medical research and egregious theories is stressed; and Ransome notes that a letter from him arrives in an envelope bearing a crest.
The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome, posthumously published in 1976, shows conclusively that Shiel is the unnamed hero of the novelist section. Explaining how Bohemia in London was composed Ransome states that he was ‘a little worried because in one of its chapters I had written of M.P. Shiel in a manner that, though friendly, I feared he might not approve. I told him what I had done and asked if I might dedicate the book to him. Shiel, not hoodwinked in the least, replied, “Dedicate the book to me and libel me as much as you please”.’
Ransome wrote two versions of his first encounter with Shiel, the most authentic doubtless being the later, skeletal account in his autobiography (see Chapter Seven, ‘Office-boy in London’). In 1902, aged seventeen, Ransome left Leeds to work for the publisher Grant Richards as an office junior in Leicester Square for 8s. a week. Ransome recounts how he was sent to collect a manuscript from Shiel. He says he found the writer inhabiting lodgings in Bloomsbury’s Guilford Street, though the address was probably in nearby Guilford Place, where Shiel lived for a time.
[Shiel] was sitting on a chair in the middle of a bedroom, writing on a pad and throwing down the sheets as he wrote them to be picked up and put into order by a young woman who was sitting on the floor keeping a baby quiet. I joined her on the floor and waited, watching Shiel and thinking of Balzac. Shiel stopped at last and gave me the bundle of manuscript for which the printers were waiting [the book was probably The Weird O’It, published by Grant Richards in December 1902]. Incredibly he said, ‘No time to talk now (I had not said a word), but you can come and see me again’.
In his earlier account, in Bohemia in London, the episode is expanded. The anonymous novelist is said to have sent an invitation to Ransome after reading a reference to his work in one of Ransome’s ‘diminutive essays’. In producing this factitious account Ransome manipulated events to suit his own artistic ends, perhaps incorporating the incidents of several meetings.
In Bohemia Ransome expresses his disappointment at finding such a great man living in a street ‘dingy, miserable, more depressing than the rest’. An elderly landlady, ‘Mrs Gatch’, opens the door, and after waiting for a time in a shabby dining room Ransome is directed upstairs. He enters ‘the most dishevelled room it is possible to imagine’. The bed is unmade and a baby is howling.
The novelist, in a dressing-gown open at the neck, and showing plainly that there was nothing but skin beneath it, was writing at a desk, throwing off his sheets as fast as he covered them. A very pretty little Irish girl, of about nineteen or twenty, picked them up as they fell. . . .
The first deception has been introduced. Shiel’s wife, Carolina, was, as we have seen, a Parisian Spaniard, but had Ransome given the wife’s true nationality Shiel’s identity would have been unequivocally revealed. By portraying her as Irish, he preserves his friend’s anonymity; though doubtless the literary world recognised Shiel anyway.
In this account Shiel is more welcoming. Apologising for the chaos, he is drowned out by the baby’s cries and he orders his wife to remove the infant. ‘Take it out!’ he yells. She does so dutifully. Complimenting Ransome on his essay (there probably was such an essay in the Weekly Survey to which Ransome began contributing around this time) Shiel praises Ransome’s youth, bemoaning his lot: ‘Ah me, what it is to be young! I was a strapping fellow when I was as young as you. And now! Oh, you fortunate young dog!’
At this period Shiel would have been only thirty-six or thirty-seven. His affected manner amuses his guest. Shiel continues: ‘Aha! You are thinking that it is not worth while to be a success, if this is all it leads to. Eh! What? Yes, I am right. I can always tell. That is the curse of it. Look at my wife, for example. She loves me. Yes. But she does not guess that I know she looks upon me as a big bull baby, very queer and mad, but so strong that it has to be humoured. . . . She is always afraid that I shall throw Victor Hugo [the baby, in reality one of Shiel’s two daughters] out of the window.’
Shiel imperiously commands Mrs Gatch to bring up a bottle of burgundy and the two men talk of literature, ‘and . . . the untidy bed, the unclean room, the wife and the baby were as if they had never been. In spite of his unwashed hands, in spite of the dressing-gown, he won his way back to greatness. He lifted the tumbler magnificently to watch the ruby of the wine, while he talked of Edgar Allan Poe, and of his methods, and of that wonderful article on the principles of composition. . . . From Poe we came to detective and mystery tales, Gaboriau, Sherlock Holmes, and the analytical attitude, and so to the relations between criticism and art. It was a most opulent conversation.’
As Ransome leaves he sees Shiel’s wife, who has been parading up and down the street, ‘hurry back into the house with Victor Hugo, to resume, doubtless, her occupation of sorting the pages of deathless prose that her “big bull baby” dropped from his desk’.
Ransome made further visits, ‘and always the room was in the same condition. . . . How he could work! Sheet after sheet used to drop from his desk. Sometimes when I called upon him he would be in the middle of a chapter, and then he would ask me to sit down and smoke, while his pen whirled imperturbably to the end. He could write in any noise, and he could throw off his work completely as soon as the pen was out of his hand.’
Shiel had fallen in the world. He had experienced acute poverty on coming to England from Montserrat in 1885 (‘Try not to be strange,’ his father told him in vain on his departure). A decade later the fruits from his first books, Prince Zaleski (1895), the chronicles of an exotic detective, and Shapes in the Fire (1896), a collection of weird stories, enabled him to rent an apartment at 3 Gray’s Inn Place, and mingle with the literati of the day: Lionel Johnson, Richard Le Gallienne, George Egerton, Olivia Shakespear and others. When his funds shrank Shiel descended to a less fashionable artistic quarter and churned out serial stories for magazines. In the late 1890s Shiel stayed with his
friend Ernest Dowson in a dismal lodging-house in Guilford Place, which may well have been the establishment run by Mrs Gatch described in Bohemia in London. The house is featured in The Weird O’It, as is Dowson, who appears as B—, a poet who keeps late hours, drinks deep and dies young.
In the concluding section of ‘A Novelist’ Ransome says Shiel leaves England for a time: ‘I did not hear from him again for several years, when a letter that came in a crested envelope told me he was settled in a flat. Would I come to dinner?’ This suggests that there was a hiatus in the friendship, but their reunion may have occurred in 1903. Ransome finds Shiel living in Bloomsbury again, but in comparative luxury, and with a housekeeper. Shiel rises to greet his friend, then sits down again, saying he is ‘very ill’. ‘Look at you, you young bullock,’ he says, ‘and then look at me—a miserable wreck.’ Ransome describes the ‘wreck’: ‘He lay back in his chair, with his black hair crisp and curly, his cheeks red and healthy. . . the muscles of his throat were as fine and beautiful as those of a statue.’
Shield drinks sour milk, grimacing. He explains that a great doctor, Verkerrsen, attributes the long lives of the Hungarians to its consumption. ‘Ugh!’ he says, ‘but I think the Hungarian sour milk must be nicer than the sour milk of London. Ugh! Disgusting. But I must take it, I suppose.’
Miraculously restored to health by the milk, Shiel is buoyant at dinner. Then something occurs to him. ‘I say,’ he exclaims, ‘my wife is dying in Dublin this week. Pass the toast.’ Ransome, quite naturally, is lost for words, but Shiel moves swiftly on to an ingenious new theory: that everything, from molecules, human beings, the world and the universe, is a brain. The chapter closes with Ransome wishing he could see the novelist again, but his friend is abroad: ‘I think he is in France,’ writes Ransome. ‘I never dared ask if the wife lived or died. It would have been so difficult to find the correct manner. Something like this, I suppose: “By the way, that wife of yours; underground or not? Pass the cigarettes”.’ Lina did die at this period, but in Paris not Dublin, which she preferred to England. ‘Londres n’est pas jolie’ is her only utterance in Shiel’s posthumously published Science, Life and Literature (1950). Shiel remarried in 1918, but he and his wife, Mrs Lydia Fawley Jewson, separated in 1929.
Ransome’s autobiography contains a few additional details. At an undated gathering at Shiel’s flat he was introduced to one of Shiel’s sisters—‘I turned to see beside me a smiling negress’. It has been established in recent years that Shiel’s mother, Priscilla Ann Blake, was a descendant of slaves. Ransome’s final encounter with M.P. Shiel occurred in St Martin’s Lane, where the stout and elderly Shiel, in his famous velvet smoking-jacket, was running in and out of the gutter. ‘Wait!’ he gasped. ‘Back in a minute. I turn at St Martin’s Church.’ Ransome comments: ‘He had long given up his early belief in sour milk as an elixir of life, at least in English sour milk [this reference to milk would have been fully understood only by readers familiar with Bohemia in London], but now made a point of running each day from his lodging to St Martin’s Church, and strongly advised me to do the same. If a man were to run a mile or two every day, he was sure, there was nothing to prevent his living for ever.’
Shiel continued jogging after moving to L’Abri near Horsham in 1930. Dodging traffic on country roads at night proved perilous, so John Gawsworth, Redonda’s poet laureate, thoughtfully fitted the old man with a belt bearing a rear light.
In the last decade of his life Shiel busied himself with a colossal study of Christ. Entitled Jesus, this unpublished—and unpublishable—work was described by its author as ‘a (truer) translation of Luke, with my criticisms, in which is some detective work’. It contains the revelation that St Paul was Lazarus, ‘who, in his anti-Sadducee craze for resurrection, stayed four days in a tomb; and this book, I fancy, is my top-note. . . .’
Ransome would undoubtedly have been delighted to know that despite the withering years the ‘big bull baby’ championed eccentric theories to the end.
Shiel’s crazy story did not close with his death. The Gawsworth scholar Steve Eng reported that after Shiel’s cremation at Golders Green Gawsworth took charge of the ashes and went off for a drink with his wife. ‘The barman placed the parcel of ashes on a shelf for safekeeping. He was preparing a salmon sandwich when the couple noticed with horror that ashes were trickling down into the sandwich! It was duly handed to the customer, James Agate, the eminent drama critic. . .’ Gawsworth retrieved his package and pointed out to the unamused Agate, ‘You’ve just eaten part of M.P. Shiel.’
This comic-macabre episode had a sequel. Gawsworth took to keeping the ashes in a brass tea-caddy, and as Steve Eng writes: ‘In the late 1960s Gawsworth’s latest landlord sold his building, and the beleaguered poet was forced once more to move. Friends helped his evacuation; as they paused for a little tea, the grotesque inevitable happened; one of them brewed up the contents of the tea-caddy from Gawsworth’s mantelpiece. This mistake was not detected till most of the ashes of M.P. Shiel had been drunk down. . . .’
A PALIMPSEST OF THE THREE IMPOSTORS?
Arthur Machen, c.1890.
Faunus, No.7, Autumn, 2001
Throwing out a Mynydd Maen of ancient notebooks at the dawn of the Millennium, I undertook the laborious task of ploughing through them to determine if anything was worthy of preservation. Depressingly, very little was. From hundreds of doubled-sided leaves, only some twenty sheets and a pocket notebook devoted to Machen material seemed worth keeping. Among the heterogeneous collection are such things as the birth and death dates of Helen Vaughan (5th August 1865 and 25th July 1888), from the endnote often deleted from editions of The Great God Pan, but restored in the Tartarus Press edition of Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (1997) and the Creation Books version of Pan (1993).
Scribblings from Victorian street directories show that the Bun Shop, or Bun House, where R. Thurston Hopkins claimed he talked with Machen and (rather dubiously) with Ernest Dowson1, was at 417 The Strand: it remains a wine bar and restaurant, Da Marco’s. The news office of The Globe ‘where one sent one’s early Turnovers’2, as Machen states autobiographically in ‘N’, was at 367 The Strand, near the Lyceum Theatre. Alfred Denny’s bookshop, famously mentioned in Far Off Things3, was at 304 The Strand. The Spanish Restaurant where Machen dined was at 17 Beak Street, W1. There are notes on Winifred Graham’s overcooked portrait of that ‘connoisseur of the occult’ the Revd Montague Summers: ‘I wanted to sense the vibrations in the room where he worked, since his pen has brought to life every form of creepy horror. Ghosts and ghouls, vampires and other diabolical beings troop through his blood-curdling pages which are not mere fiction.’4
A pasted-in advertisement from the Panacea Society warns that crime, banditry and the distress of nations will continue until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott’s Box of Sealed Writings (see Revelation 11:19 and 4:4, which prophesies the Box and the Bishops¾perhaps). The tragic prophetess Joanna is buried in St John’s Wood, a few minutes’ walk from 12 Melina Place. It was pleasing and useful for a future edition of The Lost Club Journal to rediscover the name of Daphne du Maurier’s uncle Comyns Beaumont, the revisionist geographer who in The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain (1946) and Britain—The Key to World History (1949) argued that biblical events occurred not in the Holy Land but in and around (ahem) Edinburgh. As every schoolboy knows, ‘the islands of the sea’ (Isaiah 11:11) refer to Britain. It makes one proud, doesn’t it?
Some of the Machen notes relate to biographical and creative matters which do not appear to have appeared in print; so they seem worthy of an essay, albeit a rambling and disjointed one, in Faunus. Let’s begin with the enigma of the ‘lost’ Machen tale. On 1 February 1894, the thirty-year-old Machen wrote to his prospective publisher John Lane, from 36 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury:
My dear Sir,
I have been thinking over our conversation last night, and I have come to the conclusion that it would not be advisable to bind up the story I t
old you with ‘The Great God Pan’, for though the two stories are different in many respects, they are conducted with much the same mechanism; Mr Clarke appears again with his ‘memoirs’; the chief personage is not a descendant of the fauns but of the ‘Little People’. Of course the working out is different, but still I think that the one story would spoil the other.
But I find I have a number of short tales and sketches which have appeared in the St James’s Gazette and other papers which would just double the book.
I have them in a book and should be glad to show them to you when you please.
I think you would like them.
I remain,
Yours faithfully,
Arthur Machen
This tantalising missive did not, for reasons too dim and distant to recall, appear in the Selected Letters (1988)—it can be found in one of the bound volumes of transcript letters at Newport Library—but it will immediately arouse the Macheniac’s curiosity. ‘Mr Clarke appears again with his “memoirs”.’ Surely Clarke and the ‘Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil’ appear only in The Great God Pan. And who is the descendant of the Little People? The likeliest candidate is Jervase Cradock, the unhappy half-human hybrid from the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’, yet he is hardly the ‘chief personage’: Professor Gregg and Miss Lally are the principal characters in the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’.
98 Great Russell Street, from The Residences of Arthur Machen by John Gawsworth.
Machen began writing The Three Impostors at 36 Great Russell Street in the spring of 1894, after he and Amy had returned from their two-year sojourn near Turville in the Chilterns. So at the time of the letter to Lane the concept for the Little People story may have differed considerably from the work the Bodley Head published in 1895. Transmutations may indeed have taken place. Could it be that the frame story of the romance originally involved Clarke rather than Mr Dyson? A few of Machen’s rather interchangeable young gents about town appear in more than one story. Austin and Phillipps, bewildered by the Stevensonian mystery of ‘The Lost Club’ (1890), resurface respectively in The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors. Villiers figures in Pan and ‘A Wonderful Woman’ (1890). But Clarke does not appear to have been resurrected—at least not in print. Perhaps Machen realised that in Dyson, already established in ‘The Inmost Light’ as a sleuth, literary man and student of the science of London, he had a more memorable character than the colourless Clarke (who seems to be some sort of businessman), and so a supernatural detective series was born. Clarke’s Japanese bureau had been transferred to Dyson in ‘The Inmost Light’. Machen himself possessed such a desk, and another fictional counterpart of this bureau may have been owned by Lucian Taylor some years before the events of The Three Impostors. (A few clues in The Hill of Dreams imply that Lucian’s adventures take place in the 1880s. ‘Some Suggestive Dates in the Life of Lucian Taylor’ is an essay yet to be written. The action of The Three Impostors seems contemporaneous with its composition: the fastidious Dyson is rather offended by the success of Robert Elsmere, which appeared in 1888, and the book appears to have been available for some time.)