by Roger Dobson
Bulwer-Lytton may be a figure of fun on the Internet, but he unwittingly cast a darker shadow on the world. His novel Rienzi, The Last of the Tribunes (1835) was adapted by Wagner as his third opera, and this, in turn, had a devastating influence on the adolescent Adolf Hitler, who doubtless saw in the visionary fourteenth-century orator Rienzi establishing a republic and restoring pride to Rome the prefiguring of his own destiny. Of his first viewing of the opera he later chillingly stated, ‘In that hour it began’. One can’t blame Bulwer for the rise of the Nazis—Hitler doubtless would have found some other catalyst for his foul dreams; but in view of the way the twentieth- century’s blood-drenched history developed, it could be argued that Bulwer was among the most influential authors who ever lived. He would have been horrified by the consequences of one of his novels, but he did indeed change the world.
JOHN GAWSWORTH: KING OF REDONDA
Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, 1912-1970.
(Better known as John Gawsworth.)
Inside Notting Hill, Portobello Publishing, 2001
Of all the bohemians who have dwelt in Notting Hill over the years none was more quixotically colourful than John Gawsworth, the bacchanalian King Juan I of Redonda. Gawsworth inherited the fantasy kingdom from the writer Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865-1947), who emigrated to Britain in 1885 from the Leeward Islands where he had been crowned King Felipe of Redonda, a mile-long volcanic rock, on his fifteenth birthday. Shiel had an erratically successful writing career, becoming friendly with Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen, Ernest Dowson and other literati of the day, and lived for a time in St Charles Square, off Ladbroke Grove.
King Juan, who possessed Irish, Scottish and French blood, was born Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong at 97 Gunterstone Road, Kensington, on 29th June 1912. Educated at Merchant Taylor’s School, and living with his mother at Colville Gardens W11, and then at 40 Royal Crescent, Holland Park, Fytton Armstrong became a fanatical collector of literary memorabilia: autographs, letters, manuscripts, jottings and signed editions. After leaving school the ‘Book Boy’, as he was called, rented a basement room at 17 Sunderland Terrace W2 and embarked on a bohemian lifestyle as a scholar-poet. He worked at a Soho bookshop, then for the publisher Ernest Benn, and by his early twenties had published several pamphlets of poetry, compiled bibliographies of writers he admired, written a biography of Machen and edited a series of anthologies of horror and mystery fiction. He adopted John Gawsworth as a romantic pen name in honour of his descent from the Fitton family of Gawsworth Old Hall in Cheshire. (Mary Fitton is reputedly the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets).
In 1931 the nineteen-year-old Gawsworth, working as a clerk for a Fleet Street publisher, had written to Shiel, then in his mid-sixties, and became his foremost champion; he helped him gain a civil list pension and lobbied publishers about his books. Although Shiel reigned as King Felipe for sixty-seven years, he regarded Redonda as a largely private concern: but the shrewd, promotionally-minded Gawsworth, appointed the realm’s Poet Laureate, soon assumed the role of éminence grise. In 1936, at Shiel’s cottage near Horsham, Sussex, Felipe and Gawsworth cut their right wrists with a penknife and mingled blood. Through this rite, witnessed by the writer Edgar Jepson, Gawsworth became Shiel’s heir apparent. When Shiel died on 17th February 1947, Gawsworth acceded to the throne as Juan I, arranged his own coronation and began a mercurial reign, holding his ‘Court-in-Exile’ in the taverns and bars of Soho and Fitzrovia. Later the Alma pub, at 175 Westbourne Grove W11, became Redonda H.Q.
During Shiel’s reign several writers, including Jepson, Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, had been ennobled, with Gawsworth acting as Regent. As King Juan he extended the practice, creating an Intellectual Aristocracy to perpetuate his predecessor’s memory, issuing royal documents on antique Venetian paper. Arthur Machen, Rebecca West, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Arthur Ransome, Victor Gollancz and many other authors were awarded dukedoms or knighthoods in recognition of their services to Shiel or the realm.
In 1938 this slim, fox-faced, red-haired prodigy with his bent boxer’s nose became the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lived comfortably in a flat at 33 Great James Street, Bloomsbury, with his first wife, Daily Mail journalist Barbara Kentish, and mixed with writers such as T.E. Lawrence, Edith Sitwell and Dorothy L. Sayers. Lawrence Durrell, four months his senior, was immediately attracted by Gawsworth’s professional manner when they met in 1932. The obliging Gawsworth helped Durrell get his early poems into print. Paying tribute years later, Durrell wrote: ‘I was a complete literary novice and a provincial and the meeting was an important one for me, for in John I found someone who burned with a hard gem-like flame—the very thing I wished to do myself. . . .’
Founding two literary magazines and helping neglected writers who fell on hard times, Gawsworth, afflicted by ‘dipsobibliomania’, became one of the capital’s great characters. Known as ‘the last of the Jacobites’, he was an ardent Irish Republican and, after serving in India during the war, an Indian Nationalist who converted to Hinduism. The poet John Heath-Stubbs, appointed a Redondan duke in 1949, wrote: ‘It was said that there was a superstition in Fleet Street that if you met Gawsworth twice in one morning you would die within the year and he would be your literary executor.’
Gawsworth’s solid neo-Georgian verse, continuing the romantic lyric tradition of Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, was the antithesis of the stark, socialistic modernism of the 1930s. Although anachronistic, his prolific output was admired in its day, but after his wartime service in the Royal Air Force he failed to fulfil the promise of his precocious youth. Although his Collected Poems appeared in 1949, and he was a catholic and able editor of the Poetry Review from 1948 to 1952, his subsequent career was marred by a prolonged descent into alcoholism. By the 1960s, when he was living at 35 Sutherland Place, Notting Hill, he was headed downhill: his publications had diminished to a trickle of ephemera commemorating his dead mentors. The ‘Inveterate old diabetic bookman, slipper-padding around my shelves and files’, as he described himself, lived off the sales of manuscripts and books, and a good deal of the proceeds went on drink.
When feeling low, Gawsworth would visit the church of St Mary of the Angels opposite his home, and kiss the foot of the statue of St Joan: both he and Joan, he said, had been victims of English persecution. In 1968, after accepting a sum of money to leave Sutherland Place, Gawsworth effectively made himself homeless and was thrown on the charity of friends and his consort, Eleanor Brill of Peel Street W8, referred to as ‘Queen S.J.’—sub judice since the King never got around to marrying her.
John Gawsworth in later years.
Early in 1970, after an appeal was launched for the indigent poet, the BBC made a documentary about him for Late Night Line-Up. The portly, cane-wielding Gawsworth is shown visiting old literary friends and promenading the streets of Soho and Bloomsbury with great dignity. Near the end of the film, when he greets Durrell in a London pub, he is cheerfully drunk.
The same year, having managed to lay his hands on the collected funds of £1400, Gawsworth enjoyed a binge at the Alma which lasted several days, followed by a sojourn near Florence, where he fell in love and ended up in hospital with haemorrhaging stomach ulcers. The years of riotous living took their inevitable toll and Gawsworth died three months after returning to Britain, at the Brompton Hospital on 23rd September 1970. He was fifty-eight.
The Realm of Redonda was thrown into confusion at his death. In 1958 he had put the realm on the market, advertising it in The Times at a price of one thousand guineas. An avalanche of letters and telegrams poured in from around the world, and a member of the Swedish royal family sent fifty pounds as a deposit; but, feeling he was ‘vulgarising a noble kingdom’, Gawsworth withdrew the offer. In 1960 Gawsworth is believed to have passed on the kingship to Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan, but the Irish playwright was just one of a number of candidates selected as his heir.
Most Redondan scholars acknowledged the Sussex-b
ased publisher and writer Jon Wynne-Tyson (King Juan II), the literary executor of Shiel and Gawsworth, as the most fitting successor. With some of his courtiers, including Shiel’s bibliographer A. Reynolds Morse, Juan II landed on Redonda on Good Friday in 1979 and they made the perilous ascent of its 971-foot peak. In 1997, at the age of seventy-three, Mr Wynne-Tyson abdicated in favour of the eminent Spanish novelist Javier Marías. Among the distinguished writers and artists honoured by Señor Marías, known as King Xavier, are Francis Ford Coppola appointed the Duke of Megalopolis, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar the Duke of Trémula, A.S. Byatt the Duchess of Morpho Eugenia, William Boyd the Duke of Brazzaville, Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante the Duke of Tigres and German novelist W.G. Sebald the Duke of Vertigo. In addition, Señor Marías has founded an imprint to celebrate writers associated with the kingdom. Shiel and Gawsworth have gone, but the Realm of Redonda seems imperishable.
DWELLER IN THE TOMB OF MAUSOLUS: THE RETURN OF PRINCE ZALESKI
The coded mens sana in corpora sano emblem of
The Society of Sparta, from ‘The S.S.’.
The Lost Club Journal No. 3, Winter 2003/Spring 2004
pseudonym ‘Philip Lister’
Like Poe’s detective, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin, M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski originally appeared in only three tales: the stories that make up the Keynotes volume entitled after him and published by John Lane in 1895. If Shiel had not been so versatile—he produced science fiction, horror, crime and future war stories, historical novels and romantic melodramas—he would probably have enjoyed far greater celebrity by disciplining his fertile pen and cranking out a stream of Zaleski sequels. Zaleski would have entered public consciousness, rivalling Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown as an infallible crime fighter whose exploits the Victorian and Edwardian public would have eagerly followed. Generations of crime fiction enthusiasts would have taken Zaleski to their collective bosom, and Shiel could have taken the prince through a string of bizarre and exotic adventures into old age, as Conan Doyle did with Holmes: the hero of Baker Street being around sixty at the time of ‘His Last Bow’, at the time of the First World War.
Had this been the case, Hollywood might have discovered Zaleski in the 1930s or 1940s, and Basil Rathbone, Anton Walbrook or Vincent Price signed up to impersonate the cerebral sleuth for RKO or Universal. Alas, Shiel refused to settle for a cosy reputation; he was continually conquering new territory and pushing at the boundaries. In April 1895 he wrote to his sister Gussie after Prince Zaleski appeared: ‘Thanks for your praise. But why do you insist on comparing me with Conan Doyle? Conan Doyle does not pretend to be a poet. I do.’ These were the days when Shiel was content to adhere to the ‘art for art’s sake’ philosophy. In later years, when he sought to use his books as vehicles for the education of the common reader, his work suffered. But most poets do not write long series of detective tales, and so Shiel was fated to abandon the prince; for a time at least.
The first Zaleski tales are now regarded as classics of their genre. Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares pay tribute to ‘the mandarin M.P. Shiel’ in their Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (Buenos Aires, 1942; New York and London, 1981). The essentially sedentary nature of the prince contributed to Borges and Casares’ creation of Don Isidro, who solves mysteries from the discomfort of a Buenos Aires prison cell. The authors write:
Without leaving his nightly den in the Faubourg St Germain, the gentleman Auguste Dupin captures the troublesome ape who caused the tragedies in the Rue Morgue; Prince Zaleski, from his remote palace retreat, where in sumptuous surroundings the jewel rubs shoulders with the music box, the amphora with the sarcophagus, the idol with the winged bull, solves the crimes of London; and last but not least, Max Carrados carries with him everywhere the portable jail cell of his blindness.
Zaleski appeared at just the right moment in literary history. In 1891, a catastrophe at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland deprived the British reading public of their favourite character: the news was broadcast in The Strand Magazine in December 1893, and black armbands were worn in the streets. Another enduring sleuth, Sexton Blake, had made his début precisely a year earlier, in April 1894. Not all critics appreciated Prince Zaleski however. In the Saturday Review in April 1895 the book was savagely condemned—by no less a critic, it appears, than H.G. Wells, who would later admire the apocalyptic splendour of The Purple Cloud and praise it in one of his books. In his address to the Horsham Rotary Club in 1933 Shiel referred to ‘my friend H.G. Wells’; though the villainous womaniser E.P. Crooks in his Rosicrucian tale ‘The Primate of the Rose’ is believed to be a caricature of Wells. One wonders what Shiel made of the notice in the Saturday Review:
This we sincerely hope, is the low water-mark in ‘Keynotes’. We doubt if Mr John Lane in his short but brilliant career has ever published anything half so bad before. Prince Zaleski is Sherlock Holmes ‘volumed in a Turkish beneesh ’ . . . For Baker Street there is a ‘lonesome room, shrouded in the sullen voluptuousness of plushy, narcotic-breathing draperies’. But there is no doubt of its being Sherlock-demented: he has the pallor, the woven fingers, the habits of stimulants and prolonged concentration, the uninteresting narrative friend, all the old attributes . . . The style of the book is inimitable, a veritable frenzy of impure English. . . . But the book is too foolish even to keep one laughing at it. We fail to see where the ‘Keynote’ comes in.
Title page of first edition of Prince Zaleski, John Lane,
The Bodley Head, London, 1895.
Well, you either admire Prince Zaleski or you don’t. Quite why Zaleski is an exile is never explained. Shiel states in the first tale, ‘The Race of Orven’: ‘Never without grief and pain could I remember the fate of Prince Zaleski—victim of a too importunate, too unfortunate Love, which the fulgor of the throne itself could not abash; exile perforce from his native land, and voluntary exile from the world of men!’ (Wells, or the Saturday Review critic, took exception to this fulsomely exotic opening.) Had there been an enduring series Shiel would perhaps have chronicled this fatal romance. And it would also have been wonderful to see him pitted against, or in league with, Shiel’s beautiful femme fatale Xélucha. What a team they would have made!
Zaleski’s country mansion—later we learn it is an abbey—is saturated in Poesque gloom. Shiel writes: ‘It was a vast palace of the older world standing lonely in the midst of woodland, and approached by a sombre avenue of poplars and cypresses, through which the sunlight hardly pierced.’ The abbey-mansion is ‘a vast tomb of Mausolus’: ‘The hall was constructed in the manner of a Roman atrium, and from the oblong pool of turgid water in the centre a troop of fat and otiose rats fled weakly squealing at my approach.’ The house is deserted of people and furnishings, and the corridors and apartments are choked with dust. But in the prince’s remote tower-room, all is opulence and the treasures of lost ages:
The room was not a large one, but lofty. Even in the semi-darkness of the very faint greenish lustre radiated from an open censerlike lampas of fretted gold in the centre of the domed encausted roof, a certain incongruity of barbaric gorgeousness in the furnishing filled me with amazement. The air was heavy with the scented odour of this light, and the fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa—the base of the bhang of the Mohammedans—in which I knew it to be the habit of my friend to assuage himself. The hangings were of wine-coloured velvet, heavy, gold-fringed and embroidered at Nurshedabad. . . . Side by side rested a palaeolithic implement, a Chinese ‘wise man’, a Gnostic gem, an amphora of Graeco-Etruscan work. The general effect was a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom. Flemish sepulchral brasses companied strangely with runic tablets, miniature paintings, a winged bull, Tamil scriptures on lacquered leaves of the talipot, mediaeval reliquaries richly gemmed, Brahmin gods. One whole side of the room was occupied by an organ whose thunder in that circumscribed place must have set all these relics of dead epochs clashing and jingling in fantastic dances. As I entered, the vaporous atmosphere was pa
lpitating to the low, liquid tinkling of an invisible musical box. The prince reclined on a couch from which a draping of cloth-of-silver rolled torrent over the floor. Beside him, stretched in its open sarcophagus which rested on three brazen trestles, lay the mummy of an ancient Memphian, from the upper part of which the brown cerements had rotted or been rent, leaving the hideousness of the naked, grinning countenance exposed to view.
The mansion is a doppelgänger of the House of Usher. Indeed, Sam Moskowitz called Zaleski ‘Sherlock Holmes in the House of Usher’. The story’s opening reflects that of Poe’s tale. Poe’s unnamed narrator approaches the bleak mansion and is conducted to Roderick Usher’s apartment, where ‘Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length’ as Zaleski does on the narrator’s entry: ‘Discarding his gemmed chibouque and an old vellum reprint of Anacreon, Zaleski rose hastily and greeted me with warmth . . .’ The description of the tower room owes much to the apartments from ‘House of Usher’ and ‘Ligeia’. Roderick Usher’s chamber is pervaded by a Gothic gloom:
The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. . . . Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered.
In ‘Ligeia’ the chamber has an added richness and opulence: