by Beech, Mark
The Little Grey Men was immediately popular, winning the Carnegie Medal. Written in the midst of the Second World War, it would be easy to read the victory of the little people over the terrible giant as an allegory of the defeat of Nazism, but nowadays its ecological message comes across far more powerfully—ironically, the stream which inspired the story is today bounded by concrete. Rather than passing through in a lyrical set-piece as he does in the famous chapter of The Wind in the Willows Grahame entitled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,’ this Pan is a god who answers a very precise plea for help, but he is also one who intervenes in human affairs through his gnomish intermediaries, perhaps because humans have lost their faith in him, or because he is too weak to act without assistance. The killing of the gamekeeper would seem to be his last act, although in the sequel, Down the Bright Stream (1948), the gnomes retain their faith in the god, and mention on several occasions that he continues to help them.
The Little Grey Men succeeds in blending Grahame’s Edwardiana with a more down-to-earth sensibility rooted in ecological realism—there are no toad motorists or washerwomen here. All of ‘B.B.’’s books were prefaced with lines his father had copied from a nineteenth-century tombstone exhorting readers to look upon “the wonder of the world” while life lasts, and stress the place of man within a wider natural context, and in this sense, he was slightly different from the authors who wrote about Pan earlier in the century. Pan was not, for ‘B.B.’, the agent of transformation for human consciousness, the liberating figure who suddenly makes Forster’s Eustace realise the central facts of his own nature, but an embodiment of the natural world whose power waned as nature was itself contained and violated. In that sense, ‘B.B.’ looks back to older conceptions of the deity, though in a fantasy novel for children, it is hardly surprising that Pan’s sexual aspects should be neither invoked nor dramatised.
Dancing in the Moonlight: ‘Roman Remains’
The same could not, however, be said of another appearance Pan made during the 1940s. In 1946, the philosopher and ‘Brains Trust’ personality C.E.M. Joad published The Untutored Townsman’s Invasion of the Country. The frontispiece, by Thomas Derrick, depicted Pan and a woodland retinue of deer, rabbits, foxes, squirrels and hedgehogs in desperate flight: Pan looks over his shoulder as the background fills with flames. Derrick used Pan as a symbolic embodiment of the countryside; Joad was at this point a Shavian atheist with little time for deities, pagan or otherwise, but the image of the old god in retreat before the forces of technology and modernity was a potent one, and was developed a year or so later in Algernon Blackwood’s ambiguously titled short story, ‘Roman Remains,’ a work which looks at another collision between man and nature, but which also depicts the god’s influence over a young woman.
Blackwood’s story appeared in the American magazine Weird Tales in March 1948: no comparable magazine then existed in Britain. Set during the Second World War, it concerns Anthony Breddle, a young pilot convalescing at his stepbrother’s remote cottage in North Wales in the company of Dr Leidenheim, a refugee Austrian classicist and friend of Breddle’s step brother, and a distant cousin, Nora Ashwell, a young nurse. Nora possesses “a kind of hard, wild beauty,” raises eyebrows by wearing shorts and seems distant and preoccupied. She is unaccountably drawn to the nearby Goat Valley, a place Leidenheim describes as “God-forsaken” although it possesses a Roman temple to Silvanus, the protector of forests. When Breddle follows her, he is haunted by mysterious whistling and feels he is being watched. Gradually, fear overcomes him, an experience all the more terrifying for occurring amidst “smiling, innocent woodland.” The whistling turns into a ravishing and lovely lilt that enraptures him, and seized with panic yet desperate to encounter the piper, he plunges through the undergrowth, only to find Nora, “obviously unaware of his presence.” She is dancing a wild yet graceful dance and playing some sort of pipe, “her clothes in such disorder that she seemed half naked” and her hair bedecked with flowers. The entranced yet fearful Breddle deduces that she is in “an ecstasy of love” and, overwhelmed by a “flood of energy” and a “lust for intense living,” he feels “the frontiers of his normal self” trembling and threatening to dissolve. Refusing to submit to the awful, yet enticing valley, he flees back to the cottage. There Nora is quiet, her inner transformation suggested only by the starry shining of her eyes.
That night, a German plane returning from a raid on Liverpool bombs the valley, waking the two men. A knotted sheet and an empty bed reveal that Nora has gone out into the darkness. The night is lit up by exploding bombs, and the following morning her corpse is discovered near the ruined temple alongside “something else,” the body of a satyr. Leidenheim turns to a volume of Pausanias in order to identify what he calls “one of the retinue of Pan.” Breddle burns and buries the satyr’s body, but mysteries remain.
‘Roman Remains’ was the last story Blackwood published. It is a minor affair compared with the tales of his heyday, but is important for an understanding of paganism’s evolution during the 1940s, not least because it represents a last gasp of certain late Victorian conventions—the image of the young woman abandoning herself to the dance is a familiar one in the literature and poetry of the fin de siècle, and had been the centrepiece of Barry Pain’s regularly-anthologised tale, ‘The Moon Slave’ (1901). It shows too how Pan worship, in literature at least, had yet to be supplanted or augmented by other forms of pagan practice. Blackwood had written stories about Pan and pantheism throughout his career, and had been nicknamed ‘Pan’ by his friends on account of his fondness for wild, lonely places. Now he juxtaposed classicism and ecstatic nature worship with the violence of modern military technology, but while this showed that, to an extent, older ‘fashions’ in pagan writing could be updated for the post-war world, it is difficult to read the story’s conclusion with much optimism. Nora and the satyr are both killed by the Luftwaffe’s explosives, and Breddle systematically erases the evidence of the strange happenings in Goat Valley. Pan had inhabited the Welsh woods in Machen’s novella, and now he returned to those margins, a last wild redoubt away from the city but not, unfortunately, from the weapons it manufactures.
Blackwood’s story implies that the late-Victorian/Edwardian Pan is incompatible with the brave new world of aerial bombardment and ‘total war’. Intentionally or otherwise, its falling bombs also limit the implications of Nora’s ecstasies. Blackwood was never comfortable when writing about sexuality, and the exact nature of the encounter between the woman and the satyr is left vague. It would be the altogether more daring John William Wall, better known as ‘Sarban’, who would explore such ideas further.
Frank: ‘Capra’
Like ‘Roman Remains’, Sarban’s ‘Capra’, published in Ring-stones (1951) begins during the Second World War. Its frame story is narrated by an English diplomat, a version of the author, perhaps, but its core narrative is recounted by Uncle Bentham, a veteran shipping agent with an impressive knowledge of the Near East and the Mediterranean. In the years following the First World War, Bentham lives in Greece and is invited to a party in the little village of Skantros, somewhere “across the Gulf of Corinth”. Here he encounters an old army friend, Tommy Lobeck, battered by a serious war wound and incipient alcoholism but newly married to the lovely and symbolically named Diana. Unfortunately for Tommy, Diana has a determined admirer in the shape of, the sun-bronzed and sexually alluring Yves Falzon. As devious as he is charismatic, Falzon lures Tommy into a hunting trip and then humiliates him by tricking him into shooting a stuffed goat. Meanwhile, he pays court to Diana who has been visiting an ancient temple to Pan, a “romantic spot” which strongly appeals to her.
Bentham has only a partial view of the unfolding intrigue, but as the title of the story suggests, his account is shot through with references to goats, here a symbol of lust and cuckoldry, and he has no doubts as to what Falzon is plotting. At the same time, however, he notes the presence of tracks in the sand near the temple, which his host
’s frightened gardener claims cannot have been made by a mountain goat. More ominously still, an old woman warns Diana to stay clear of the woods and to refrain from bathing near the temple. Greece is, she says, “a country for the savant.” It is clearly dangerous for those sensitive to its power, and Diana, like Nora Ashwell, cannot resist its summons.
Matters come to a head at a fancy-dress parry hosted by Stav-roulou, a wealthy businessman. Diana attends as a provocatively-costumed Artemis—again, like Nora, she is all but naked—while Falzon takes the role of Pan, complete with shaggy goatskin breeches, a pair of horns and an impressively hairy chest. “With those sly, dark eyes and his hot, lascivious look,” Bentham says, “he was a satyr straight from the wood and ripe for revels.” Drunk and jealous, Tommy has murder on his mind, and tracks the couple to the temple where Falzon, whose disguise seems more convincing than ever, capers about in “a dance of pure exultation, desire itself exulting at the gateway of gratification.” The satyr seizes the goddess, a shot rings out, and Falzon, “screaming like a hurt child”, flees up the hill into the pines. Only then does the horrified Bentham discover that Falzon is still in the house. On who, or what, has Tommy taken his revenge? A trail of blood runs through the asphodel before stopping at the steep cliffs of the Corinthian Gulf.
Sarban himself felt ‘Capra’ was the weakest story in Ring-stones, and Rebecca West, who edited Argosy, the magazine in which it first appeared, found it ‘trite’, but her judgement is a harsh one. Influenced by Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, Sarban excelled in creating wholly believable storytellers, and his clever use of the frame narrative here gives the tale’s outlandish events a surprising degree of credibility. Perhaps the feminist West objected to Diana’s lack of agency—she is, after all, more a token men fight for than a character in her own right—but the story’s atmospheric descriptions and well observed local colour have much to commend them. With the obvious exception of Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ and the Welsh scenes of The Great God Pan, most Victorian and Edwardian writers set their Pan stories in England, but Sarban evokes the old gods in their ancient homeland, dramatising a clash between that world and a more modern one of playboys, parties and hunting-rifles. As in ‘Roman Remains’, it is the modern world which emerges victorious, even if that victory epitomises Clute’s notion of ‘thinning’.
Afterword
‘B.B.’, Blackwood, and Sarban are all indebted in some ways to their Victorian and Edwardian literary forebears, and throughout their stories there are plentiful echoes of Pan’s ‘golden age’. However, their mood is altogether more sombre than that of their predecessors, for war has unleashed previously unknown horrors. Satyrs are bombed and shot, and Pan himself fades from the world like his faint music, leaving it altogether poorer for his passing. Why then might these writers have been so keen to resurrect the god only to banish him again? Perhaps Blackwood and Sarban recognised the fundamentally ambivalent relationship between Pan and modern civilisation, in which impulse, desire and sexuality must all too often be repressed in the interests of social cohesion but without which society itself stultifies. It is this ingrained compulsion to self censorship which causes Breddle to flee Goat Valley. Blackwood is coy as to whether Breddle is aroused by Nora’s dancing, but the combination of music, sunlight, woodland and the close proximity of a beautiful woman all conspire to capsize his precious sense of decorum. Nora, however, would seem to be a lost cause. Being a woman, she is traditionally aligned more closely with nature, the emotions and the body, whereas Breddle clings to his rationality and, terrified of the valley’s seductive power, flees. Tellingly, Breddle is a pilot, a scientifically-minded warrior, whereas Nora is a nurse who is “on sick leave of sorts”. He definitely does not want a “flirtation,” but she longs for the companionship of someone her own age. All of these things make her susceptible to Pan’s influence, but whether that power represents liberation or some sort of moral destruction is left unaddressed. Nora’s death, likes Breddle’s desperate flight from Goat Valley, allows Blackwood to avoid having to explore the full import of her encounter with the satyr.
In William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven & Hell (1790), one of the devilish proverbs claims “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.” Yves Falzon seems somehow to appreciate this when costuming himself as a satyr, so at home is he in the creature’s guise. Diana, the virgin huntress, is also able to respond to the transgressive promptings of Pan’s pipes, but the story’s Englishmen block their ears to such music. Tommy is wedded less to Diana than to patriarchal codes of honour, for it is essentially his pride and masculinity which are injured by Falzon’s pursuit of his wife. As is so often shown in the imperial fictions of the early twentieth century, the white Englishman lived in terror of ‘going native’, losing his reserve and his obedience to the unwritten codes of the colonial project. Better to shoot first and ask questions later than to surrender to the erotic charms of the Mediterranean or the Levant. We might see ‘Capra’ therefore as a bleak rejoinder to Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’; one in which the liberating excitement of sexual transgression and self abandonment is cut short by gunshots and the reassertion of the very English propriety that Forster’s young hero delights in flouting.
Unsurprisingly, sexual questions do not trouble the little grey men, but ‘B.B.’ nonetheless insists that a world without Pan is one of guns, gamekeepers and barbed-wire in which man is fatally detached from nature itself. Written during the Second World War, or in its immediate aftermath, all three stories reflect the war’s privileging of masculine technology and violence over Mother Nature; though the gnomes manage to turn such technology against itself, its presence is unavoidable. Blackwood and Sarban also raise questions of sexuality, and while issues could, of course, be explored in conventional realist fiction, and often were, their references to the goat-god bring an extra dimension to their stories. As Rosemary Jackson argues in her influential Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981), fantasy can go further than realism in exploring taboo ideas because it can manifest or expel desire, the latter being the case when those desires represent a threat to “cultural order and continuity.” “Fantastic literature points to or suggests the basis upon which cultural order rests,” she continues, “for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems.” Pan embodies all of these threats to the accepted norms, whether they are conventions of sexuality, behaviour, property ownership or land management. For this reason, he remained a mouthpiece for provocative questions even after his Edwardian heyday has passed and to judge from the international success of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and the growing popularity of pagan practices in Britain and the U.S., continues to do so today.
REFERENCES
B.B7 [Denys Watkins-Pitchford], The Little Grey Men (1942; London: Magnet, 1978).
Blake, William, The Marriage of Heaven Sr Hell (1790).
Blackwood, Algernon, ‘Roman Remains’ in The Magic Mirror: Lost Supernatural and Mystery Stories by Algernon Blackwood, ed. Mike Ashley (Wellingborough: Equation, 1989).
Clute, John, ‘Thinning’, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Clute and John Grant (London: Orbis, 1997).
Graves, Robert, ‘Outlaws’ in Country Sentiment (London: Martin Seeker, 1920). Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1981).
Sarban [John William Wall], Ringstones and Other Curious Tales (1951; Carlton: Tartarus, 2000).
A Puzzling Affair
Ivar Campbell
(1914)
From childhood up to the present day I have been a coward, physically and, I think, morally, too; though of moral bravery I have had little need, living quietly. I shall not give instances of this, nor of what I believe to be the causes of it, although I may mention as two chief origins hereditary, my father having been a very nervous man, and a youth spent in the most terrible loneliness and without outward signs of love (an
d before my parents died I was too young to recognise love in the clothes of sternness); but shall relate at once and without further preliminaries the recent occurrences of my life, and how through and with the aid of my fear I have overcome a force which threatened to destroy me body and soul, as the pious say. Among my fears, then, was a fear of woods, of woods as a crowd of trees, though when this particular fear was not present I had a great love for their colour, and the long shapes of their boughs and the movement of their leaves, having been sensitive to all kinds of beauty from the time I was a child; but in woods I felt enclosed, and I remember in my youth this fear became a terrible expectation of wicked men hiding behind the trunks.
I must make it clear that at that time I did not fear any tree individually, but only the general influence of the wood as locality, nor did I look on the trees as sentient things; in fact, there were then no superstitions or mythological ideas in my mind about woods; I had no story of them; and yet they had an uneasy power over me I did not explain nor indeed particularly wonder at, since many things in my life hitherto had so affected me. Also, as I have said, with a companion or a dog I was at ease, for then I was able to see and admire the beauty about me, and consequently my fears of the unknown did not arise. But as this feeling of discomfort grew upon me, the more I lived alone in the rich country I had chosen for my home, I noticed that my cowardness increased and my fears began to grow articulate in my brain; I began to ask myself the reason and the cause of my cowardice, and to look about for its begetter. And although I still went among trees—for I have always loved the exercise of walking, because my brain is thus made clearer and more able to work to a solution the problems I am interested in solving—I found that I began to avoid certain spots where, as my fanciful superstition quite unconsciously grew, I imagined things took place: Pan, Fauns, Satyrs were of course the words I used, though not making clear to myself their meaning, but merely as accepted titles for phenomena mentioned in folk-lore and even in modern country tales. And writing of it I remember Robinson Crusoe’s fear when he had seen the mysterious footprint and, having been long solitary, went home to his castle in trembling, fearing the mere presence of man.