The Library of the Lost: In Search of Forgotten Authors

by Roger Dobson

  The very word ‘Hippodrome’ had, for me, a faintly immoral flavour. . . .

  Perhaps because of this coddled upbringing, Brooke rebelled as a young man. His taste for low-life regularly drew him to seedy Dover, but the Hippodrome proved ‘a bitter disappointment, the haunt of Dover shopkeepers on Saturday nights. . . . Where was the wickedness of yesteryear?’ The Hippodrome revues, rumoured to be a hotbed of sin and licentiousness, clearly weren’t what they had been in his younger days, he decided.

  Being an imaginative little soul, Brooke was beset by all manner of childhood fears and misapprehensions. A master of poignant and gentle humour he gets much mileage from childish misconceptions. His mother and Ninnie collect for a sadistic organisation called ‘Cruelty to Children’; he hears that the Sandgate vicar ‘used incest’. The lifeboat keeper at Seabrook wears an earring and so is imagined to be an honorary woman. A woman tollgate keeper is mistaken for his father because she, like Mr Brooke, wears a cap. Oxford and Trinity College, where his father was educated, seem to him to lie in the region of Sandgate and Folkestone.

  Brooke began writing seriously while a pupil at Bedales in the early 1920s. He produced stories published in The Ray, a magazine he edited with Julian Trevelyan. One tale, ‘Afterwards in the Library’, got him into hot water with its ‘frankness’, and The Ray had to be withdrawn from circulation and the two offending pages of the story pasted together. While under the influence of Aldous Huxley’s fashionably acerbic novels and H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, Brooke also discovered the 1890s and became a Futilitarian. ‘The truth was . . . it had suddenly been revealed to me—almost overnight—that Life was Futile,’ he explained. He became like Ernest Dowson ‘a little weary’ and, like Webster, ‘much possessed by death’. ‘It seemed to me that the typical Huxley young man was the lineal descendant of Dorian Gray, des Esseintes and the poet of Cynara’, though he failed to realise at the time that Huxley’s daring and decadent characters were intended as satiric portraits: Huxley ‘laughing at his own vestigial ninetyishness’. ‘It was all very exciting, and I thoroughly enjoyed my new role; other people, however, tended to be rather unappreciative of its outward manifestations. . . .’

  This Modernist mode would influence his conduct, literary style and attitude to life for many years.

  While at Bedales he produced, ‘a vast turgid novel written in a style derived, I suppose, from Wells, Hugh Walpole, Sheila Kaye-Smith and other of my pre-Huxley favourites’. The scene was laid in the Elham Valley and was packed with ‘as many local place-names as I could squeeze in without sounding like a guide-book.’ This had the result of adding a new dimension to Brooke’s familiar fields and landmarks.

  I saw them through the romantic haze of a novelist’s imagination. It was rather as though one should visit Dorset after being immersed in the novels of Hardy, or—a more probably contingency in my case—Romney Marsh after an intensive course of Sheila Kaye-Smith (a novelist I had much admired in my pre-Huxley days, chiefly because she wrote about places I knew). The only difference was that, in the case of this particular countryside, I happened to have written the appropriate ‘regional’ novels myself: the Elham Valley, in fact, had become for me already, as it were, Brooke country.

  He became fascinated with a lonely house called Ileden standing on the crest of Barham Downs. ‘So obsessed did I become with the name that I felt compelled to talk about it on the slightest pretext, just as a lover will seize upon the least opportunity to mention the name of the beloved. . . . I remember asking Julian [Trevelyn] whether he thought it would make a good title for a novel. Julian looked rather dubious: ‘it depends,’ he said noncommittally, ‘what sort of novel, don’t you think.’ This obsession with a house is comparable, of course, to Machen’s boyhood wonderment over Bartholly, the house shining out from the verge of Wentwood which years later inspired The Great God Pan.

  From the frontispiece to The Dog at Clambercrown, The Bodley Head, London, 1955.

  The Dog at Clambercrown is perhaps Brooke’s most accomplished memoir, though Olivia Manning found his material was stretched too thin by the time he produced this work. It concerns his boyhood quest to find an almost mythical inn, lying ‘at the back of beyond’ in the isolated country south-west of Bishopsbourne. Rumours of the inn haunted Brooke’s imagination from infancy and it became for him one of the ‘romantic symbols of the inaccessible’. His obsession with the Dog flared up anew in his teenage years when he became a tyro ‘regional novelist’, the self-appointed ‘Swan of Nailbourne’ (a tributary of the Stour which runs in this region of Kent). The book, subtitled ‘An Excursion’, tells how Brooke, aged 16, never having entered a pub he says, set out on his ‘Journey into the Interior’ to find the inn. In The Dog, part travel book, part memoir, Brooke narrates a dual quest: he alternates with his boyhood memories the account of a journey to Sicily in 1953: he served in Italy and Sicily during the war. From boyhood he was fascinated by the myth of Proserpina (appropriate for a botanist; Proserpina was gathering flowers when Pluto abducted her), and he set out to visit Enna, the place where legend says the story took place. His Sicilian journey mirrors his quest to find the Dog at Clambercrown, and he portrays Kent as every bit as romantic a location as anything to be found in Greek and Roman myth. To reveal the end of Brooke’s search would be to spoil prospective readers’ enjoyment. Suffice to say that Brooke, ever the writer, realised ‘that my experience would make a rather good story—perhaps, even, it might form the basis of a full-length novel . . .’ Brooke never wrote this particular novel, but the inn remained in his consciousness and the memoir called The Dog at Clambercrown was his way of ‘paying off, belatedly, a debt to the past’.

  NOTES

  1. Many thanks to Jonathan Hunt for providing a copy of this review. The Lost Club’s Brooke file has expanded enormously thanks to him.

  2. Other synchronous links exist between Machen and Brooke. Brooke’s essay The Birth of a Legend, published by Bertram Rota, deals with Machen’s association with the composer John Ireland, some of whose compositions were inspired by Machen’s tales. The essay was reprinted by the Machen Society in Avallaunius 16 (1997). Brooke, who knew and admired Ireland, tells how the composer was picnicking on Chactonbury Ring on the Sussex Downs, in the 1930s, when some children dressed in white garments began playing and dancing before him¾in total silence. Ireland glanced away for an instant, then found the children had vanished. He wrote to Machen, hoping the sage of the strange and occult could provide an explanation, and received the enigmatic response, ‘Oh, so you’ve seen them, too, have you?’ Even curiouser, A.E. Waite, Machen’s greatest friend, acquired a holiday home, The White Cottage, at Bishopsbourne in 1927. He and his daughter Sybil, who lived in the nearby village of Bridge, spent their summers at Bishopsbourne. Did he and Brooke ever meet? It is possible, since as a young man Brooke lived at Bishopsbourne with Ninnie, his old nurse; though it is significant that Brooke never wrote about Waite, which suggests they did not know one another. Another odd coincidence, is that Brooke worked in the Village Bookshop in Highgate owned by Waite’s disciple Philip Wellby.

  3. A little detective work using the clues Brooke gives in the trilogy soon enables the reader to identify Eric Anquetil as Curling. Brooke dedicated The Military Orchid to Curling, and on looking up his name in the British Library Short Title Catalogue it can be seen that in 1938 Curling published a biography of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the poet and poisoner, whose activities also attracted Oscar Wilde’s pen. Wainewright is disguised as ‘William Penycuick’, an eighteenth-century poetaster and poisoner, in The Goose Cathedral. More than a little of William Beckford’s character appears to have crept into Penycuick, for he has built a folly in Wiltshire and becomes an English milord, practising Black Magic at Cefalu in Sicily in the manner of Aleister Crowley.

  4. Brooke was not the only imaginative master to hail from this region of East Kent. In 1862 M.R. James was born at the rectory at Goonestone, on the eastern side of Barham Dow
ns. The film director and Machen enthusiast Michael Powell, who portrayed the landscape in loving and romantic fashion in A Canterbury Tale (1944), was born at Howlett’s farm (now famous as the late John Aspinall’s zoo park), just north of Bishopsbourne, in 1905. His family later moved to the Hoath farm just outside Canterbury. Writing about his boyhood in A Life in Movies (1986) Powell alludes to the watertower on the downs in a manner that suggests it made an impression on him also. He was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, from which Brooke, three years his senior, twice ran away. Jonathan Hunt has discovered that the fellow pupil he absconded with was Charles Frend, later to become a film editor and director: he worked with Hitchcock—as did Powell—and made The Cruel Sea.

  ROGER DOBSON: A FIRST, INCOMPLETE CHECKLIST OF PUBLISHED WRITINGS

  Compiled by Mark Valentine

  1985

  Arthur Machen: Apostle of Wonder, edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson, Caermaen Books, 1985. Includes ‘Priest of Nightmare, Apostle of Wonder’ [essay]; ‘Biographies and Studies’ [bibliographical notes]; ‘A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Homes of Arthur Machen’ [essay]. 62 pp. booklet, limited to 250 numbered copies.

  ‘Arthur Machen: The Wizard from Gwent’ [essay], Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, July 1985, Vol.12, No.7, Issue 135.

  ‘The Book That Never Was: Lovecraft’s Tales’ [review of three Arkham House collections], Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, December 1985, Vol.12, No.12, Issue 140.

  1986

  Arthur Machen, Artist & Mystic, edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson, Caermaen Books, 1986. Includes ‘The Homes of Arthur Machen: A Revised List’ [essay]. Booklet. Limited to 300 copies.

  ‘The Mysterious Montague Summers’ [essay], Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, July 1986, Vol.13, No.7, Issue 147.

  Taverns and Temples: A Guide to Some London Haunts of Arthur Machen, by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson, Caermaen Books, 3rd March 1986. Topography. Pamphlet, 4 pp.

  1987

  Ann Lee: the Manchester Messiah, St John Press, 1987. Biography of the prophetess. Booklet. St John Press was Roger Dobson’s own imprint: this is probably its only title.

  ‘Arthur Machen’ [article, bibliography], Book & Magazine Collector, 45, December 1987.

  Dreams and Visions, by Arthur Machen & Morchard Bishop, Caermaen Books, August 1987. Includes ‘Oliver Stonor 1903-1987’ [brief obituary; uncredited].

  ‘Sherlock Holmes: A Centenary Celebration by Allen Eyles’ [review]; ‘Letters to an Editor: Montague Summers to C.K. Ogden’ [review], Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, July 1987, Vol.14, No.7, Issue 159.

  Strange Oxford: a guide to local legends, folklore, ancient sites, magic and mystery, edited by Chris Morgan . . . with additional material provided by Roger Dobson [and others]. Includes ‘Hell-Fire, Fiends & Black Magic’; ‘Montague Summers—Oxford’s Demonologist’; ‘Dr Mirabilis . . . Roger Bacon’ [essays].

  ‘Tales of Remote Futures’ [essay], edited by Ian Bell, William Hope Hodgson: Voyages & Visions, Ian Bell, 1987.

  ‘W.B. Yeats & The Golden Dawn’ [essay], Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, April 1987, Vol.14, No.4, Issue 156.

  1988

  Aklo, a Journal of the Fantastic, Spring 1988, edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Includes ‘The Strange Case of the Reverend Montague Summers’ [essay].

  Machenstruck: Tributes to the Apostle of Wonder As Selected by the Society of Young Men in Spectacles, [Roger Dobson and Mark Valentine], Caermaen Books, 1988. Booklet, 16 pp.

  ‘M.P. Shiel and Arthur Ransome’ [essay], Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, June 1988, Vol.15, No.6, issue 170.

  ‘A.E. Waite—Magician of Many Parts by R.A. Gilbert’ [review], Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, August 1988, Vol.15, No.8, Issue 172.

  ‘The Books of the Beast: Essays on Aleister Crowley, Montague Summers and Others by Timothy d’Arch Smith’ [review], Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, September 1988, Vol.15, No.9, Issue 173.

  Selected Letters of Arthur Machen: The Private Writings of the Master of the Macabre, edited by Roger Dobson, Godfrey Brangham and R.A. Gilbert, The Aquarian Press, 1988.

  ‘Sherlock Holmes: The Last Mystery’ [essay], Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, February 1988, Vol.15, No.2, Issue 166.

  1989

  Aklo, a Journal of the Fantastic, Summer 1989, edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Includes ‘A King in Bloomsbury: M.P. Shiel’s Bohemian Years’; and ‘A Minor Mystery in The Great God Pan’ [essays].

  ‘Arthur Machen, The Lonely Dreamer’ [article], Books Maps & Prints, September 1989, pp. 42-5.

  1990

  ‘Chronicles of Secret Lives’ [essay], Machenalia, Vol.2, edited by R.B. Russell, Tartarus Press.

  ‘Ghost Story Gazetteer: Montague Summers’ [essay], The Ghost Story Society Newsletter, No.6, October 1990.

  ‘The Hermit and the Mystic: Two Who Are One?’ [essay], Machenalia, Volume 1 edited by R.B. Russell, Tartarus Press, 1990.

  ‘Obituary: Colin Summerford’, Avallaunius No.5, Spring 1990.

  1991

  Aklo, a Journal of the Fantastic, Winter 1990-91, edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Includes ‘Introduction’ to ‘Arthur Machen: A Tribute’ by Colin Summerford.

  Aklo, a Journal of the Fantastic, Summer 1991, edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Includes ‘Was M.P. Shiel The Man Who Lost His Way?’ by Roger Dobson.

  ‘Extraordinary Prose: The Fiction of M.P. Shiel’, The Kingdom of Redonda, 1865-1990, a celebration, edited by Paul de Fortis for The Redondan Cultural Foundation, The Aylesford Press, 1991.

  ‘Ghost Story Gazetteer: Arthur Machen’s Gwent’ [essay], The Ghost Story Society Newsletter, No.8, July 1991.

  ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Haunts of Montague Summers’ [essay], The Goth, Vol.4, June 1991.

  1992

  Aklo, a Journal of the Fantastic, Autumn 1992, edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson. Includes ‘Fiona Macleod and the Anima Celtica’ [essay].

  ‘Ghost Story Gazetteer: Macabre Manchester’ [essay], The Ghost Story Society Newsletter, No.10, May 1992.

  Review of Tell Me Strange Things, edited by Brocard Sewell, Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, July 1992, Vol.19, No.7, Issue 219.

  1993

  A Few Letters from Arthur Machen: Letters to Munson Havens, Aylesford Press, 1993. Booklet limited to 83 numbered copies. Introduction by Roger Dobson.

  ‘All Soul’s Day’ [commentary on the novel by Javier Marías], Antiquarian Book Monthly, March 1993, Vol.20, No.3, Issue 227.

  ‘Exploring Machen Country: A Guide to Some of the Real Places Behind the Fiction’ [essay], Avallaunius No.11, Autumn 1993.

  ‘Ghost Story Gazetteer: Stoke Newington and Beyond’ [essay], The Ghost Story Society Newsletter, No.13, July 1993.

  ‘Machen’s Books’, Antiquarian Book Monthly, September 1993. Essay on Containing a Number of Things: Vincent Starrett and Christopher Millard, Correspondence on the Books of Arthur Machen, 1920-1923.

  ‘ “The Poet Machen”: An Extract from M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud’ [essay], Avallaunius, No.10, Spring 1993.

  Review of Containing a Number of Things, edited by R.B. Russell, Antiquarian Book Monthly, September 1993, Vol.20, No.9, Issue 233.

  Review of ‘The Machen Society Is Brought to Book; All Souls (1992), by Javier Marías’, Avallaunius, No.10, Spring 1993.

  Review of The Weird Tale (1990), by S.T. Joshi, Avallaunius, No.10, Spring 1993.

  ‘Waugh on Sex’ [article], The Doppelgänger Broadsheet, Vol.3, No.2, November/December 1993.

  1994

  ‘C.S. Lewis: Champion of Romance’, Antiquarian Book Monthly, May 1994, Vol.21, No.5, Issue 241.

  ‘Ghost Story Gazetteer: Oxford Revisited’ [essay], All Hallows, No.6, Journal of The Ghost Story Society, June 1994.

  Redondan Cultural Foundation Newsletter No 1, February 1994, edited by Roger Dobson and Mark Valentine. Pamphlet. Includes ‘Here Comes the Lady’ [report; uncredited].

  Review: ‘The Joy and Pa
in of Shadowlands’ [film], Antiquarian Book Monthly, May 1994, Vol.21, No.5, Issue 241.

  1996

  ‘Dobson Says!’ [article], The Doppelgänger Broadsheet, Vol.4, No.3, [no date, 1996].

  Redondan Cultural Foundation Newsletter No.2, February 1996, edited by Roger Dobson and Mark Valentine. Pamphlet. Includes ‘Irish Flag Flies on Redonda’ and ‘Royal Archive Sold at Sotheby’s’ [reports; uncredited].

  Redondan Cultural Foundation Newsletter No.3, November 1996, edited by Roger Dobson and Mark Valentine. Pamphlet.

  Review: ‘Lost Souls by Javier Marías’, The Doppelgänger Broadsheet, Vol.4, No.10, November/December 1995/ January 1996.

  1997

  ‘Haunted Cinema 6: The Exorcist, All Hallows No.14, February 1997.

  Ornaments in Jade by Arthur Machen, Tartarus Press/Caermaen Books, 1997. Blurb. [A copy exists, signed to fantasy scholar John D. Squires, in which Roger Dobson describes himself as ‘the humble blurb writer’].

  Présentation, [introduction] ‘Substitution’ [‘Change’] by Arthur Machen, translated by Norbert Gaulard, Le Visage Vert, No.3, June 1997.

  Review: ‘H.P. Lovecraft: A Life, by S.T. Joshi’, The Doppelgänger Broadsheet, Vol.5, No.31, 1997.

  Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, by Arthur Machen Tartarus Press, 1997. Introduction.

  ‘To Cut or Not to Cut’ [essay], All Hallows No.16, October 1997.