Then by Turret Books in Kensington, watering-hole of several poets who drank up the proprietor's wine as payment—overpayment it could be said, for these were thirsty men—for their appearance in Turret-published pamphlets, I was offered the copy of The Shadow of Death which had belonged to Adine Ruckert, the wife of the young composer, Norman O’Neill, whom Stenbock had befriended and in whose biography written by Derek Hudson (friendly with Turret's owner and probably the source of the Adine rarity) can be found some unpublished Beardsley drawings that were given to Stenbock by the artist. It is worth recording that Turret's proprietor, Bernard Stone, was the first rare book dealer to protect the dust-jackets of his stock with a cellophane covering. My purchase (and the poets’ carousals) were overseen by a waxwork effigy of Sigmund Freud, dressed in a tweed suit, a permanent central figure in Stone's showroom.
When the typescript of Earnest was ready it contained no more than four biographical pages on the Count and, when I came to talk about the poets’ themes and philosophies, some few scattered lines of his poetry. I had been advised that the publisher Routledge & Kegan Paul was looking for a book on the homosexual theme in late nineteenth-century literature, an interest perhaps aroused by the well-attended Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. As it turned out, Routledge had already commissioned such a book, an anthology edited by Brian Reade, curator of prints and drawings at the V&A who had mounted, almost singlehandedly, the gallery's exhibition. Nevertheless, Routledge agreed to look at my work. It was sent off to one of their readers. The report, not altogether discouraging, carried a serious caveat. The reader had never heard of any single one of the Uranian poets making up a fair platoon if not company of men fighting the war for the establishment of the New Chivalry and warned Routledge that the submitted manuscript might well be the completest fiction, a literary joke that would cause red faces within the Routledge camp if it were published.
This suspicion inspired me and a friend, Victor Hall, to invent a fictitious Uranian poet, the Reverend Travers Hartington Quince, M.A. (1890–1990). Quince, author of Ragamuffin Roundelays (1952) and Bats, Boots, and Bathing Togs (1919) was cast in an ascetic mould and would not have cared for Stenbock's romanticism.
Consultation with Brian Reade put Routledge's mind at rest and our two scripts were then sent out to an arbiter in case one of us contradicted the other on matters of fact. Enter Brian Hill, poet, thriller writer, translator of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Gérard de Nerval, who reported neither of us to be at loggerheads with the other. Our books were published on the same day, my birthday coincidentally, in 1970.
Some years after that John Adlard published his biography of Stenbock. He'd been over to Estonia from where the Stenbock family originated and turned up a lot of useful material. I was invited to add a speculative bibliography in which my Christmas card greeting of 1961 featuring Stenbock's poem “On the Freezing of the Baltic Sea” from The Shadow of Death was then the only poetical piece of his ever to have been reprinted. Come to that, there was precious little reprinted prose, although in its eighth issue of July 1970 a Carnaby Street glossy magazine, Jeremy, had featured his tale, “The True Story of a Vampire,” from Studies of Death.
David Tibet was to change all that with a series of magnificent Stenbock productions including the collected poems and Studies of Death. This is his latest and, I confidently expect, his best tribute yet to a writer, all thanks to him, no longer forgotten.
Timothy d’Arch Smith, June 2017
Count Stenbock's style, including his grammatical conventions and his use of punctuation, is as idiosyncratic as his personality. I would like to note some of the editorial decisions I made whilst transcribing the stories and poems that I have selected for Of Kings and Things.
Firstly, wherever possible, I have consulted all the original manuscripts in Stenbock's hand that I was able to locate. But in many cases, the manuscript has vanished. I have access to many of his original typescripts, with Stenbock's holograph comments and corrections, and have used those also. For the stories in Studies of Death (David Nutt, London, 1894), and for many of the poems that were published during Stenbock's lifetime I have chosen for this collection, I have been able to locate neither manuscript nor typescript, so in such cases I have had to use the first editions of his work, in my personal collection, as the source of the texts reprinted here.
I wish to emphasise that, as Stenbock carefully checked, and corrected, his manuscripts and typescripts, I have remained true to what he saw as errors, and have followed his observations as to how he evidently wished his text to appear. I have kept in mind, too, that Stenbock spoke several languages fluently, and wrote in French, German and English as well as, occasionally, Polish, Russian, Flemish, Classical Greek, and Latin. He sometimes lived a somewhat peripatetic lifestyle, in places where various languages were all spoken—in the family manor of Kolga, for instance, German, Russian, and Estonian were all used widely. It is clear that many words and many tongues lived in, and around, him at the same time.
His use of italics was unpredictable. In his manuscripts and typescripts, the word or phrase to be italicised was underlined, and I have faithfully italicised everything he underlined. Sometimes, he would underline words or phrases in languages other than English—which I have, again, italicised—but generally he did not do so. Such words and phrases he would occasionally insert within quotation marks, and at other times he would not mark them in any way; once more, I have faithfully followed the original manuscript, typescript, or first edition, depending on what source I could find, unless I have very good reasons to amend the text. So, in “La Girandola”, I have neither used italics nor quotation marks for the drama L’Arlessienne [sic], but have italicised the ballet La Mort de Cléopâtre [sic] which is mentioned just a few lines later, purely on the basis of staying loyal to Stenbock's idiosyncrasies. This is not meant to be, in any way, a critical edition!
I have, however, made a few silent corrections; my faithfulness to the conventional spelling of a very common word has, in this and a small number of other instances, overcome my loyalty of fidelity to the Count's sidereal channelling of language. Stenbock's use of accents, especially in French, was wayward. In “The Other Side”, he constantly writes the French word “mère”, “mother”, as “mêre”. I have done the same in correcting his misspelling of the masculine name “Célestin”, in Studies of Death's “The Death of a Vocation”, as the accent-less ‘Celestin’—as well as in “La Girandola”, where the same character appears just once. Evidently the gentleman is French. But in French the name is spelled with an acute accent over the first “é”, although in neither the David Nutt Studies of Death, nor in the typescript of “La Girandola”, does the name show the required accent.
I do want to take this opportunity to make some brief observations about three instances of Stenbock using a language not native to him in a specific, and erroneous way. As I mentioned earlier, this is not a critical edition and I did not want to leave a trail of footnotes throughout the book. But these points are perhaps worth making. In “The True Story of a Vampire” in Studies of Death, the vampire says, in Polish, “Nie umiem wyrazic jak ciehie kocham”. My partner, Ania Goszczyńska, a Pole, says that it should read “Nie umiem wyrazić jak cię kocham” (“I can't express how I love you”). It may well be that the typesetters did not possess the “ć” with an acute accent; it is even less likely they owned the letter “ę”. We also think that the typesetter may have mistaken the “b” in Stenbock's handwritten “ciebe” for an “h”, inventing the word “ciehie”; “ciebie” would almost work—it does mean “you”, but is in the wrong grammatical form for the sentence. So we have silently corrected the Vampire in the story to speak Polish as well as he no doubt did, for Carmela did remark “Indeed he seemed to know all languages.”
In “Viol d’Amor”, the tombstone is engraved with “La musica e l’Amor che muove il Sole e l’altre Stelle” (“The music and the Love which moves [sic]
the other stars”), an expansion of Dante's famous, and final, line in his Divine Comedy, “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (“The love which moves the other stars”). Stenbock has updated Dante's early Italian form of the verb “movere” to the modern Italian form, “muovere”, but has forgotten to change the form of the verb, which in Dante is the third person common singular form of the present indicative, reflecting the verb's subject “L’amore”, to the third person common plural present indicative, “muovono”, required by the two subjects of the clause, “La musica e l’Amor”. So Stenbock should have written either “La musica e l’Amor che movono il Sole e l’altre Stelle” if he wished to adapt Dante's line whilst keeping the verb true to Dante's Italian, or “La musica e l’Amor che muovono il Sole e l’altre Stelle”, if he wished to make the verb contemporary. As one will understand, the extreme tedium of this observation made it easy for me to decide not to add it as a footnote.
Finally, and mercifully somewhat briefer, in “The Child of the Soul”, Stenbock mentions a village in Flanders called either “Ostreke” or “Ostraeke”; he has corrected the typescript, but it is difficult, at every use of this word, to see what he actually did intend to write. I asked my friends, the Dutch Reinier van Houdt, and the Flemish Johan de Ryck, what they thought he meant to write. Nor were they able to work out what the newspaper that is read, The Ostraeke Anteeger, which is neither correct Flemish nor Dutch, could be. After the appearance of the first edition of Of Kings and Things, Hans Dens wrote to me, suggesting Stenbock may have had in mind Oostakker (“East-Field”), a suburb of Gent. Hans went on to say that in the East Flemish dialect used at that time, Oostakker could have been pronounced, and hence written, “Osteke” or “Osteraek’r”. He also points out there was a hotel and a church there, as well as a railway station which brought in tourists from Brussels and Oostende.
I give an illustration of a different problem, arising from his distinctive choice of words. In “The True Story of a Vampire” in Studies of Death, the vampire, Count Vardalek, was said to return from Trieste bringing the young children “presents of strange Oriental jewellery or textures”. One would think that Stenbock intended to write “textiles”—but how can one know? Stenbock was a rara avis in every way, often in the company of opium or alcohol, and “textures” would perhaps have been as sensually, as tactilely, appropriate to him (as I imagine it would have been to Thomas De Quincey) as “textiles”.
Another difficulty arose when Stenbock quoted something, incorrectly, from memory. Three examples may suffice, all in Latin. In “The Other Side”, Gabriel wonders where his “antique image of Our Lady perpetuae salutis” is. He is referring to the image of the Blessed Mother known in English as “Our Mother of Perpetual Help”; but her Latin title is “Nostra Mater de Perpetuo Succursu”; Stenbock has, perhaps, confused Mary's title with a phrase in the Holy Mass referring to the chalice holding the blessed wine, “calicem salutis perpetuae”, “the Chalice of everlasting salvation”. Later on, in the same story, Gabriel hears the Requiem Mass being spoken, “for the repose of his soul”; the words he hears are “Libera me a portâ inferi”. But Stenbock has mixed up words from one phrase in the Mass, “Libera me, Domine, de morte æterna”, “Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death”, with another phrase from the same Mass, “Libera me Domine de viis inferni, qui portas aereas confregisti”, “Deliver me, O Lord, from the ways of hell, who hast broken the brazen gates”. Finally, in “La Girandola”, he quotes a line from the Requiem Mass as being “Libera me de ore leonis” although the phrase is in fact “De ore leonis libera me”. I considered whether to correct these but, perhaps as a result of the approach I was advised to take when studying, transcribing, and translating Coptic and Akkadian “manuscripts”, I believe strongly that it is not the editor's job to correct the author's text or grammar, unless it is evidently a spelling mistake which may have been made (in this specific, Stenbockian, case) as a result of a typist mishearing Stenbock's spoken words, or misreading Stenbock's original holograph.
Those who have read either the original version of “The Other Side” in The Spirit Lamp, or that reprinted in my expanded version of Studies of Death, will notice that in the version of the tale in this volume there are a great many more italicised words and phrases. This has occurred as I returned to the original manuscript, in Stenbock's hand, of the story, which has many corrections and rewritings. Whilst I haven't changed the actual text of the story, I have been guided by the numerous uses of italics marked in the manuscript, which The Spirit Lamp may have been unable, or unwilling, to include, and have consequently added them, as Stenbock evidently saw them as an essential aspect of the story. And, indeed, those italicised words and phrases do add a much greater sense of urgency, and unreality, to this wonderful story.
I have used the David Nutt 1894 edition of Studies of Death (within Stenbock's works, though not within my own writings for this volume!) as my model for the usage of quotation marks, in which single quotation marks are used first, and double quotation marks for anything that is quoted, or titled, within the initial quoted text (subject, again, to Stenbock's preferred usage). In Stenbock's manuscripts and typescripts, generally one finds double quotation marks used first, and single quotation marks within them; but I had to make a decision to choose one of these two options and, as Studies of Death was the first original edition by Stenbock I acquired, I have honoured it, and its beautifully clear typography, by following its style.
All errors that are not the Count's, or his typist's, may thus—perhaps—be mine.
For bibliographical details of the books from which the items below are taken, please see the Bibliography.
1) “The Myth of Punch” is taken from a typescript held at I Tatti.
2) “Hylas”; “Narcissus”; “The Death of a Vocation”; “The Egg of the Albatross”; “The True Story of a Vampire”; “The Worm of Luck” are taken from Studies of Death.
3) “The Other Side” is taken from The Spirit Lamp.
4) “Faust” is taken from a typescript held at I Tatti.
5) “The Story of a Scapular”; “A Modern St. Venantius”; “La Girandola (A Study in Morbid Pathology)”; “The Child of the Soul” are taken from typescripts in the collection of David Tibet.
6) “The King's Bastard (Or, The Triumph of Evil)”; “A Secret Kept”; “La Mazurka des Revenants” are taken from typescripts held at I Tatti.
7) “εἰς τὸν ἐρώμενον Or, A Decade Of Sighs On A Lost Love: Prelude, VII, Finale, The Ballad of the Dead Sea Fruit”; “The Song of the Unwept Tear”; “Cradle Song”; “Child Grief”; “The Two Sleepers And One That Watcheth;” “From Ζιγάνια”; “Dedication: To My Unknown Ideal” are taken from Love, Sleep, And Dreams.
8) “Song I (Preludium)”; “Song III”; “Valse des Bacchantes”; “A Dream”; “The White Rose”; “Sonnet V (On a Dream)”; “The Lunatic Lover”; “Sonnet VII”; “Insomnia”; “The Vampyre”; “The Singing Sisters”; “Song XIII (To a Boy)” are taken from from Myrtle, Rue, and Cypress.
9) “Gabriel”; “Viol d’Amor”; “The Death Watch”; “Autumn Song I (Nocturne)”; “Autumn Song II (Vespertine)”; “May Blossom (A Vision)”; “Fragment”; “Sonnet II”; “Sonnet VI”; “Sonnet VII” are taken from The Shadow Of Death.
10) “Nocturne, A Prose Poem”; “Sonnet V”; “On a Picture by Simeon Solomon”; “Song”; “Night and Her Twin Children Sleep and Death”; “The Lunatic Lover (A Fantastic Ditty to J. H*****S)” are taken from a holograph notebook, dated 1881, in Stenbock's hand in the collection of Andreas and David Oxenstierna.
h) “London Bridge Is Broken Down” is taken from Cradle Songs and Nursery Rhymes.
Note: The author gave his name as Stanislaus Eric Stenbock on the front covers and title pages of 1a and 2a; as S.E. Stenbock on the front cover, and Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock on the title page, of 3a; and as Eric, Count Stenbock on the title page, and as S.E. Stenbock on the spine, of 4a. Books 1a,
2a, and 3a have blank spines.
1a. Love, Sleep, & Dreams, A Volume of Verse, A. Thomas Shrimpton & Son, Oxford/Simpkin, Marshall & Co., London, [1881?]. Poetry.
1b. reprinted, Hermitage Books, Harleston, 1992.
2a. Myrtle, Rue, and Cypress, A Book of Poems, Songs and Sonnets, printed for the author by Hatchards, London, 1883. Poetry.
2b. reprinted, Hermitage Books, Harleston, 1992.
3a. The Shadow of Death, A Collection of Poems, Songs and Sonnets, The Leadenhall Press, London, 1893. Poetry.
3b. reprinted, Garland, New York, 1984. Also contains 4b.
4a. Studies of Death, Romantic Tales, David Nutt, London, 1894. Short stories. Twenty large paper copies were also printed on Japanese vellum.
4b. reprinted, Garland, New York, 1984. Also contains 3b.
4c. reprinted, Durtro Press, London, 1996. Introduction by David Tibet. Adds story “The Other Side” from 17a and translations by Stenbock of two stories by Honoré de Balzac, “Christ in Flanders” and “A Passion in the Desert”, both from 16a.
5a. Christ in Flanders, A Legend of the Middle Ages, Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Chicago, 1910. Story by Honoré de Balzac translated by Count Stenbock, from 16a.
6a. On the Freezing of the Baltic Sea, privately printed for Timothy d’Arch Smith, London, 1961. Single sheet, printed both sides. Poem from 3a.
7a. The True Story of a Vampire, Tragara Press, Edinburgh, 1989. Short story from 4a, with an Introduction by John Adlard.
8a. The Myth of Punch, Durtro, London, 1999. Essay, with an Afterword by David Tibet.
9a. The Child of the Soul, Durtro, London, 1999. Short stories edited and with an Introduction by David Tibet.
Of Kings and Things Page 28