by Rhys Hughes
Stories from a Lost Anthology
by Rhys Hughes
Tartarus Press
Copyright Information
The Smell of Telescopes by Rhys Hughes
First published by Tartarus Press 2002
This edition is published by Tartarus Press, 2014 at
Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn,
North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY
to
Eber Marcela Soler
the most beautiful woman in Argentina
(and therefore the world)
Esas perlas que tu guardas con cuidado
en tan lindo estuche de peluche rojo
me provocan, nena mía, loco antojo
de contarlas beso a beso, enamorado
quiero verlas como chocan con tu risa
quiero verlas alegrar con ansias locas
para luego arodillarme ante tu boca
y pedirle de limosna una sonrisa
ELISEO GRENET
CONTENTS
The Welsh Raree by Michael Moorcock
Portrait Of An Artist As A Rusty Bus
The Lute And The Lamp
Toastmaster, Buttermistress
Journey Through A Wall
The Marsh Callow
Story From A Lost Anthology
Less Is More
Jellydämmerung!
The Macroscopic Teapot
Fallow
The Crab
Pyramid And Thisbe
The Lover And The Grave
The Evil Side Of Reginald Burke
Asparagus On The Tooth
A Languid Elagabalus Of The Tombs
Owlbeast
Tin In The Soul
Cockatrice At The Door
Robin Hood’s New Mother
The New Giraldus
The Welsh Raree
Language peaked too early in Swansea,
therefore civilisation stopped.
“Portrait of the Artist as a Rusty Bus”
THERE’S A massive body of criticism extolling the literature of Ireland. There’s a well-established modern school of Scottish fiction. The Welsh for some reason get a lot of points for poetry, singing, rugger, politics and coal-mining. They rival the English in their reputation for being excellent pirates and highwaymen, pickpockets and con-artists. There are even Welsh theme pubs, so I hear, although it might be me who invented the Owen Glendower chain purveying Daffodil Bitter and Tiger Bay Lager. I have the same difficulties with dividing hard truth from romantic wish-fulfilment as my St David’s relatives. The Welsh are stereotyped as charming liars and smooth parliamentarians. They use several consonants when one vowel will do. They gave Britain a famous line of kings whom Shakespeare, himself no mean politician, sometimes characterised unfairly. Yet, for all the considerable publicity afforded to recreated druids and bardic poets (real and invented), their national genius for fiction is rarely celebrated. Admittedly two of my favourite Welsh writers, George Meredith and John Cowper Powys were only Welsh by declaration and their own private need for Celtic authority, but Mervyn Peake was half-Welsh, Langdon Jones looks and speaks Welsh and Iain Sinclair is that fairly common thing, a Welshman posing as a Scotsman. Thomas Love Peacock had at least an affinity for Wales. Edgar Rice Burroughs, who first turned me on to reading fantasy, has to be a bit Welsh with that middle name. Aidan Dunn, author of Vale Royal, is insistently Welsh, though he thinks London Wales’s capital. Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Machen and Ruthven Todd were pretty convincingly Welsh, if not altogether Celtic (Dylan is a Norman French name as in De Lyon). Not every Hughes came barefoot over the border and somehow Tom Brown’s Schooldays lacks the lyricism and flare you might hope for from someone with that name, though Thomas Hughes had the identification with the working man often found in great Welshmen. Ted Hughes was nothing but a Hebden Bridge Yorkshireman, but Richard Hughes was of definite Welsh descent and his Fox In The Attic opens in Wales, while Martin Amis, half-Welsh, died a satisfactory death in the film version of Hughes’ High Wind in Jamaica. But there is absolutely no doubt that Rhys Hughes is thoroughly, wonderfully, even aggressively Welsh. His name was added to my personal pantheon of favourite Taffies a few years ago after I read some reviews of his work and bought the handsome The Smell of Telescopes from the publisher of this new book.
That early collection displayed a rare talent. It went off like a box of fireworks. I was soon impressed by Hughes’s pastiches of Maurice Richardson’s Engelbrecht stories, especially since I’d done my own pastiches and knew how hard Richardson was to follow. Since then various stories and articles, some of which we have asked to publish on Fantastic Metropolis, the web magazine I help to edit, have added to my admiration. As they have brought the admiration of our readers, for whom Hughes is a favourite contributor.
This collection shows an increasing maturity, both of language and structure, and displays most of Hughes’ exceptional gifts.
Rhys Hughes is, as you’ll opine from the very first of these, absurdly Welsh. As well as being drunk on language and wild imagery, he is also sober on the essentials of thought. He has something of Peake’s glorious invention, something of Cowper Powys’s contemplative, almost disdainful existentialism, a sensuality, a relish, an addiction to the delicious. He’s as tricky as his own characters, like Zimara of “Journey Through A Wall,” and as knowing, and as likely to find himself tricked by his own trickiness, delighting in saving himself through quick-witted ingenuity and a set of literary references anyone would envy. He creates anti-vampires. His suicides stuff their noses with gunpowder and light a match. He speaks of wistful homunculii, of tin in the soul. He toys with convention. He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible and the comic hints at subtle pain. His people make impossible journeys. His characters are disturbed, confident, uncertain.
In fact certainty is a rare quality in Hughes. He sees too many angles, a plethora of arguments, slippery truths, many-named horrors, unpassable tests, as in the strong, darkly playful “A Languid Elagabalus of the Tombs.” His timeless geography is malleable as it is vivid, even when he speaks of familiar Welsh landmarks. “Your time is limited? How has this happened?”
His characters are deafened by their own language, blinded by their own visions, but rarely dumbstruck. They almost all have tongues to answer back to devils, temptresses, adventurers, visitations, professors and even threatening barmen. It makes you wonder if he’s been thrown out of as many pubs as Dylan Thomas or as Thomas’s impoverished doppelgänger, that self-made boyo, Behan. Is there a stone circle left from which he’s not been barred for his lifetime? Can there be an internal rhyme remaining which hasn’t felt his irreverent fist? He is many fine things but he is rarely laconic.
A daffy Dunsany, full of knowing favours, canny to the calls of a thousand rarees, this modern original is as eccentric as the great eighteenth-century mavericks he sometimes resembles. Few living fictioneers approach this chef’s sardonic confections, certainly not in English. Perhaps Calvino comes to mind and The Misfortunes of Elphin offers a few echoes, to mention Meredith’s father-in-law again. For me Shagpat and Farina itch at his references, but I suspect he’s unfamiliar with Meredith in that droll, un-moral mode. If he’s unfamiliar with any work of fiction at all, of course. He has clearly at some point swallowed a library.
Because, when all’s said and some’s done, Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet’s literature, a knowing voice, an almost jaded eye, an ear for all there is to hear. He’ll make you rich if you read him right. He might make you reluctant to take another’s word for quite some time. His easy, Welsh harping will, I promise, stay with you, infectious, charming, oddly persuasive. Be warned: His images will inform
your dreams.
Michael Moorcock,
June 2002
Portrait Of The Artist As A Rusty Bus
It wasn’t my idea to kidnap Dylan Thomas and hold the poet for ransom in a garage. My wife physically forced me into it. That’s not true. We were drunk at the time, on a very murky beer. I wanted nothing to do with the project, deeming it squalid and impractical, but Rhiannon is persuasive. Not that her words are smooth: she’s all edges and stubble when it comes to vocabulary. Also to chin. I often claim her banter is abrasive enough to sand a door, or scour a saucepan. Then I remember our kitchen and the unwashed pots crammed into cupboards which don’t shut properly. But even without such domestic applications, the thorny melody in her voice can’t be resisted. She’s a mesmerist.
“Are you really serious?” I hissed.
Draining her pint, she allowed a foam moustache to dismay her upper lip. The lower shaved it clean.
“Any objections to kidnapping him?”
“Only one. He’s been dead for fifty years.”
“Does that raise difficulties?”
“I should say so. We’ll need shovels. And he’ll have no ear to post as proof. Not in solid form, at any rate. Waxing lyrical on paper is one thing: in a jar quite another.”
My wife blinked slowly. “You’re not thinking sideways. Naturally, a Dylan Thomas poet is hard to come by, these days, which are fine days in every other way, but a Dylan Thomas bus? One for the taking in the local depot! The symbol is what we’ll truss and bundle, not the cadaver. We’ve both ridden it. Double decker.”
I appreciated the nostalgia. Buses are more dependable victims than poets, having destinations which may be reached without fuss. Less prone to breakdowns also. Rhiannon beckoned me closer: “And safer than a human hostage. A bus won’t attempt to escape.”
“Will you concoct a fiendish plan?”
“Already have. First, buy a ticket and pull a pistol on the driver. Second, order him out and steer the bus to our lockup on Rhondda Street. Third, deliver hubcap to a local paper.”
“We have no gun, license or stamp.”
She applied immoderate pressure to my elbow. I apologised. Her cold breath misted up my spectacles. “We’ll improvise. Don’t be so defeatist, Glyn. Always forgetting the paramount law of successful terrorism: never let the pessimist convince you things can’t get worse. They can! This is an excellent opportunity to protect unborn generations from the agony we endured. It is our moral duty.”
“Endless recitations of Under Milk Wood? Yes, I know what you mean. But what if the paper refuses to publish our demands? And what precisely are those demands, by the way?”
“The expulsion of Dylan Thomas from the pantheon of Swansea culture and his replacement with alternatives. The burning of all his books. The uprooting of his grotesque statue from the Marina and its sinking in the Bristol Channel. The banning of curly hair, chubby chins, alcoholism and cowardice. Also, the removal of the plaque on his house with a dentist’s drill. The village of Laugharne must be destroyed. Possibly the whole of the Gower Peninsula. Rationing of the words ‘rage’, ‘lovely’, ‘time’ and ‘rubbery’. Confiscation of photographs of mad wives. Bursting of peaches and other titular soft fruits.”
I heaved a heavy sigh of relief. I had feared Rhiannon was going to ask for something unreasonable.
It was time for another round of drinks. A decaying wallet under my chin, an empty glass balanced on each palm, I stood and staggered like a tosspot Figure of Justice to the bar, squinting through a brume of cigar smoke more oppressive than any blindfold, marvelling at myself, Glyn the Dreamer, direct descendant of the Gerladines of Pembroke, a beautiful fool with a spear wound in his thigh, earned in Aberystwyth. Reaching the wet environs of the pump-handles, I ordered another porter for me and turned to my wife: “Same again, dear?”
While I awaited her answer, I glanced around the pub, attempting to commit its details to memory. Already I was sure I would have to make an official statement at some point, either to police or press, and I don’t care to waste a chance to demonstrate my descriptive skills. Brass rails glimmered in firelight. Bald heads at the bar gleamed in brasslight. All other reflections were rare: the big mirror was too choked by commercial lettering to return images, preferring to keep them netted for itself. A dog in a kennel constructed from bottles slumbered in the nook. Barmaids picked at the geology of their mascara, unearthing adolescent fossils. A standard Welsh drunk afternoon.
Rhiannon called from her corner: “Make mine a pint of white lather. It ought to have bold bright depths, sudden worlds through the wet brown walls of the glass, tilted rush to lips, slow swallowing down to lapping belly, and salt on the tongue.”
“With or without foam at the corners?”
“Just a packet of crisps.”
And thus we schemed with booze and cholesterol.
One problem I have with relating this story is that all the conventional rules of fiction must be violated if I am to get close to the truth. For example, it is not usual to include the reader as a major participant in the action, but the fact of the matter is that you are there, sitting in that chair, trying to look harmless, and without you the ending would be quite different. I won’t blame you for what happens next: you don’t mean to meddle with the development of the plot. It’s simply a consequence of your existence. But at the same time, I won’t have you playing innocent, pretending to be elsewhere. Now you are aboard, be open about it: let me check the validity of your ticket.
All seems in order. Comfortable? I can blow hot air across the text when my wit becomes too chilly, and most of my metaphors recline. Here a description of the two main bus stations in Wales should be offered, but condensed into a paragraph which local readers can skip, without feeling they have abandoned foreign visitors to this yarn. It is a filthy chore, whipped by dust and litter, but apparently necessary to set a believable background for my narrative. Otherwise you might think I’m making it all up to show off. Not that I’m an expert in the design of bus stations. By no means! But I’ve wasted enough hours in both to have gained an insight into their hideousness. Here goes!
Cardiff station first. Shaped like a spice-rack, a square without a centre, filled with powdered destinations, most quite nasty, loomed over by the deceitful clock of the Great Western Railway on one side, and a giant stadium on the other, both behind time, impressive in an anxious sort of way and haunted by ghosts: the former by poisoned pigeons, the latter by excellence in rugby. Now Swansea. Much more Welsh in ambience and vomit, with a snapped design to trick newcomers, a gloomy tunnel to pummel them and newspaper stands crewed by childhood monsters. The shuttle bus which runs between these hells is a master of disguise. Or so I thought before I learned there was more than one.
Welsh readers should wait at this point for the others to catch up. Twiddle thumbs or digits of your choice. All here? Then I’ll proceed. My wife and myself often travelled from Swansea to Cardiff, and back again, on the shuttle. Two older buses had names: Harry Secombe, a bass buffoon with a humorous squint and a whine on steep gradients which resembled an irritating giggle, and Dylan Thomas, our victim. I heard from one driver that a third vehicle called after Saunders Lewis had a tendency to catch fire and was withdrawn from service. Very disenchanting to ride inside a celebrity, with attendant tantrums! The naming of buses, like the naming of swords, is a barbaric practice.
What happened to the future I was promised as a child? On offer was a cityscape of crystal buildings; monorails and hovertrains high over my head. Holidays on the moon. The disappointment still bitters the back of my tongue, like Felinfoel dregs. I expected a single world-state, robots to perform all the menial tasks. Instead, we slave harder than ever, and our sense of security declines. The birth of the Leisure Age was a cruel lie: there are no fusion reactors, solar yachts, anti-gravity boots, time machines, protein pills, matter transmitters. The streets of Cardiff and Swansea are still dirty. But while the first hams up love for what is to come,
the other doesn’t even care.
It’s Dylan, of course. He’s keeping us back. Technical progress and culture are fundamentally linked. And culture is a pyramid, not a tower. When the capstone has been settled, further ambition ceases. Cardiff has no single figure to cap its monument, so it continues to pile on upward, its potential summit lost in the grey clouds which scroll from City Hall to Norwegian Church like council tax reminders. But Swansea has finished with all culture: it has packed away its pulleys and chains. Nothing can balance on the curly head of the Cwmdonkin Bard, so there is no need for anything to try. The pyramid is up and plastered, and has become its own mausoleum —an ugly, lovely tomb.
Only two answers to this dilemma. Either we find an equal to Dylan, to broaden our cultural foundations and create new building space above, or else we reduce his status. I am a talented fellow, sure enough, but I don’t feel ready to attempt to out-rhyme the rascal. Better to compel the people of Swansea to shun him, to erase traces of his influence! That is what my wife and I hoped to achieve. If our demands were obeyed, culture would start ascending again, and with it the realisation of my technical dreams: a thousand sparkling towers between Port Talbot and Mumbles. Now comes a description of guns. Responsible readers might like to disembark here and join me at the next stop.
Obtaining a firearm proved impossible, as neither Rhiannon nor I had any contacts in the underworld, though I did own a pair of spats. Nor had we much success with the Legal trade, possibly because of the wording of my application for a license, which explained that we needed a gun to “kill a poet”, a wildly inaccurate statement, of course, but the truth was too convoluted to fit on the form. Rhiannon did add an extra sheet insisting that the poet was a bus and we had no real intention of shooting it, but the damage was done and our application was rejected. So the only choice left was to make our own weapon.