'Of the Devil's party without knowing it'

Andrew Wall, dir. & writ.: The Fantasy Makers (2018)

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

- William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Recently Bronwyn and I watched the documentary "The Fantasy Makers", hoping for some insights into the work of George MacDonald and his successors J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I have to say that it was a somewhat disappointing experience. A succession of non-entities - obscure Academics and writers, none of whom I'd ever heard of - came on screen to proclaim the vital significance of the Christian faith to the works of these three authors, and the various ways in which that old-time religion had jump-started their imaginations.

One of the hairier contributors to The Fantasy Makers:
Rev Dr A Malcolm Guite of Girton College, Cambridge

Don't get me wrong. This is certainly a defensible proposition: indeed a pretty obvious one, given the tendency of MacDonald and Lewis in particular to incorporate a good deal of Christian allegory and even straightout preaching in their respective fantasy worlds. There's no doubt, either, about the significance of his Catholic faith to J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Fantasy Makers

Where I part company with this documentary is in its selective - and thus quite misleading - account of the growth of the modern Fantasy genre. It's strongly implied in context that reading MacDonald had a decisive effect on Tolkien - whereas it's really Lewis who was more influenced by him. It's true that The Hobbit is deeply indebted to MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, but William Morris's series of heroic romances were the real catalyst for Tolkien's own peculiar fusion of mythology and folktale.

William Morris: The House of the Wolfings (1889)

So why leave out Morris? There were, of course - there always are - limitations of space. You can't put in everyone. In this case, though, there was a simpler reason: he wasn't a Christian. He was, admittedly, brought up as one, but in later life he espoused atheism, along with a very militant form of Communism. He was as independent a thinker as he was a writer and artist.

William Morris: William Morris (1834-1896)

It puts me in mind of an account I once heard of a Children's TV programme which one of my school friends inadvertently found himself watching one idle afternoon. The kids were all sitting around in a circle while the house band, called (I think) the Certain Sounds, performed various uplifting numbers.

This led to a "discussion" (i.e. harangue) where the hosts of the show denounced the excesses of contemporary Rock music - this was, admittedly, the era of Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath - and stressed how wholesome, by contrast, were the songs they'd just been listening to. Those confirmed degenerates the Rolling Stones came in for a bit of a tongue-lashing, too.

All of a sudden a youth leapt up from the floor and shouted "The Rolling Stones are great - and the Certain Sounds are sh ..." They cut to commercial before he could finish what he was saying - but I think the audience got the message. Ah me, the perils of live TV!

When the programme resumed the lone rebel had, of course, been removed - and no doubt taken backstage for indoctrination. But, as the poet Horace once observed: "you can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but still she'll come back" [naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret]. His work there was done.

Top 50 Christian Rock Bands (2015)

The more the speakers in The Fantasy Makers stressed how hip-hop-happening the Bible was, and how deeply it had influenced the whole course of storytelling through the ages, the more I could hear the voice of my sister-in-law trying to persuade the rest of us at one extended-family gathering that Christian Rock was cool, and it was we who were the fuddy-duddies in sticking to more conventional forms of Rock 'n' Roll.

The Bible is undoubtedly a great source of stories, and Tolkien and his friends were very religious, but the intense vehemence with which the assorted talking heads in the documentary asserted these simple truths was in itself enough to make one feel suspicious.

J. R. R. Tolkien: On Fairy-stories (2008)

It was, after all, Tolkien himself who stressed the vital need to make a distinction between the realm of Faerie and its two nearest neighbours, Heaven and Hell. In his classic 1939 essay "On Fairy-Stories", he quotes from the old Border Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer:

O see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset wi' thorns and briers?
That is the path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.

And see ye not yon braid, braid road
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.

And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about yon fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.

Having first mistaken her for Mary Mother of God, Thomas is inveigled into accompanying the Fairy Queen down the third of these paths, and so:

Till seven long years were gone and done
True Thomas on earth was never seen.

He brings nothing back with him from this mysterious realm except the ability to make rhymes and music.

Mind you, it isn't all good - and there's certainly nothing safe about it. Thomas was lucky to get back home at all: centuries can easily go by in the blink of an eye for those who've been taken away to Faerie. And there is, of course, the little matter of the Devil's teind (or tithe) - a tax of souls enforced by Hell in exchange for allowing this realm to exist independently.

Henry Fuseli: The Faerie Queene (1788)

'Of the Devil's party without knowing it' - well, no, not quite. Tolkien, Lewis, and MacDonald were quite clear in their opposition to that gentleman, witness their respective portraits of him as Morgoth in the Silmarillion (along with his chief lieutenant Sauron in The Lord of the Rings); the Infernal Minister served by civil servant Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters; not to mention the gloomy landlord depicted in MacDonald's introduction to Valdemar Adolph Thisted's Letters from Hell.

It is undeniable, though, that - as a reader - you feel a certain sense of excitement in Tolkien whenever he allows himself to revel in the imagery and atmosphere of the pre-Christian Teutonic heroic age. The story comes to life. In Lewis, too, when he allows his English children entry to a country where fauns and centaurs and the other nature spirits of Classical Paganism are permitted to roam freely.

Milton, according to Blake, "wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell" - Tolkien, too, could write freely enough of both Middle-earth and Mordor, but when it comes to Valinor and the Blessed Realms, it all just fades off into sunlight and singing.

Pauline Baynes: Father Christmas (1950)

Think, too, of how embarrassing is the sudden appearance of Father Christmas in Lewis's first Narnia book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It just seems so jarringly wrong to drag St. Nick into the midst of all these talking animals and powerful magicians. Not even the superbly imaginative Pauline Baynes can do much with this intrusion. But Lewis must have learned from the experience, because he never did anything quite so crass again.

Tolkien detested Lewis's Narnia books precisely because of their imbalance of tone and seriousness. Nymphs and Their Ways: The Love Life of a Faun, the title of one of the raunchier books on Mr. Tumnus's bookshelf, exemplified for Tolkien everything that was wrong about this mish-mash of pagan and contemporary themes.

Ludovico Ariosto: Orlando Furioso (1516-32)

If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still lack its heroic seriousness. No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its own inner laws; none so seemingly objective, so disinfected from the taint of an author’s merely individual psychology; none so relevant to the actual human situation yet so free from allegory. And what fine shading there is in the variations of style to meet the almost endless diversity of scenes and characters – comic, homely, epic, monstrous, or diabolic!

- C. S. Lewis, Blurb for The Lord of the Rings (1954)

Lewis, by contrast, was careful to praise Tolkien's "heroic seriousness", but suggested that his inventiveness might find a parallel (if not a rival) in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Tolkien, characteristically, bristled at the comparison, but one suspects that it was not made idly.

Lewis felt, it would seem, that Tolkien was at risk of starting to believe his own ideas about 'sub-creation' - that he was, in effect, within a hair of setting himself up as the god of his own creation. And there is certainly little that's ostensibly Christian about Tolkien's world: its values seem far more firmly based on Old Norse stoicism and blind courage.

Whatever bargain these writers may have struck with their own consciences, it seems clear to me whenever I read them that both Lewis and Tolkien were more in love imaginatively with the Queen of Faerie than they could ever could be with the minutiae of their own religion. That was theology; this was fantasy.

I don't question (or doubt) the sincerity of their faith, just as I don't doubt that of Milton - or Blake, for that matter. I may not share it myself, but I did in my younger days, so have at least some understanding of the mind-set involved.

The creative instinct, however, is an unruly thing: once you start to discipline it and push it in the directions demanded by dogma, you end up with (at best) Hymns Ancient and Modern; at worst, Socialist Realism.

C. S. Lewis: The Cosmic Trilogy (1938-45)

The reason, I suspect, that none of the more distinguished commentators on Lewis, Tolkien, and their fellow Inklings - the ones you might actually have heard of - could be persuaded to appear in this rather tin-eared documentary, is that they could see at once that it was attempting to shrink them to the size of mere Christian propagandists.

And yes, on one level, that is what they were - C. S. Lewis, in particular. But you don't have to be a Christian to delight in Out of the Silent Planet or Perelandra, just as The Lord of the Rings cuts across creeds and cultures to engage with real human truths.

Both of them took the road to fair Elf-land, and both paid a certain price for doing so. George MacDonald is a more complex case - his guilt over such lapses from the party-line threatens time and again to overturn his fantasies in mid-course. But the greatness of his narrative gift keeps us reading At the Back of the North Wind and the 'Curdie' books despite any failures of taste or consistency within them.

The Marion E. Wade Center Museum (Wheaton College, Illinois)

There's a reason why this particular set of seven British authors have been granted their own research centre at a major American university, and it's not because of the orthodoxy of their belief systems:

1. George MacDonald (1824-1905)
2. G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
3. Charles Williams (1886-1945)
4. J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
5. Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
6. Owen Barfield (1898-1997)
7. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Barfield was an Anthroposophist, Chesterton and Tolkien were Catholics, Lewis and Sayers were Anglicans, MacDonald was probably more of a Unitarian than anything else, and it's very hard to say just what precisely Charles Williams was: he certainly dabbled in magic and occultism more than any of the others.

Where they stand together is in the superreal vividness of their imaginations. Their respective versions of Christian faith may well have been a help in this, but all seven of them had to cast their nets wider than that to write anything worth reading. The details of their individual bargains with Faerie remain sealed up with their bones.

George MacDonald: Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858)

•

George MacDonald (1860)

George MacDonald
(1824-1905)

Fantasy:


1. Phantastes & Lilith. 1858 & 1895. Introduction by C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964.
2. At the Back of the North Wind / The Princess and the Goblin / The Princess and Curdie. 1870, 1871, 1882. London : Octopus Books, 1979.
3. The Princess and the Goblin. 1871. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
4. The Princess and Curdie. 1882. Illustrated by Helen Stratton. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
5. The Gifts of the Child Christ: Fairy Tales and Stories for the Childlike. 1882. Ed. Glenn Edward Sadler. 2 vols. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1973.
6. The Light Princess and Other Tales: Being the Complete Fairy Tales. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. Introduction by Roger Lancelyn Green. 1961. Kelpies. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1987.
7. The Complete Fairy Tales. Ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

Novels:


8. The Marquis of Lossie. 1877. London: Cassell & Co., 1927.

Non-fiction:


9. 'Preface' to Valdemar Adolph Thisted. Letters from Hell. 1866. Trans. Julie Sutter. 1884. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1911.
10. George MacDonald: An Anthology. Ed. C. S. Lewis. 1946. London: Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1947.

Poetry:


11. MacDonald, George. The Poetical Works. 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1911.

Secondary:


12. Raeper, William. George MacDonald. 1987. Herts, England: A Lion Book, 1988.

•

George MacDonald: The Gifts of the Child Christ (1882)

The Many Faces of Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)

When my mother left her hometown of Sydney, Australia in 1953 to take up her very first job as a house surgeon in a little country hospital in Waimate, New Zealand, among the very few things she brought with her was her collection of books by Dorothy Sayers.

Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. : Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928)

I suppose that might be where I got it from: this persistent taste for the occult and the macabre - not so much the detection bit, but certainly the mystery and horror.

I've read all the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories many times, but - more to the point - have found perhaps even more to admire in the acumen with which Sayers mapped the whole field of the mysterious in three soup-to-nuts anthologies, issued over a period of seven years, from 1928 to 1934.

Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. : Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928)

Originally published in three large volumes, these collections were subsequently subdivided into six separate sections: three confined to detective stories, and another three devoted to ghost and horror stories.

This has made things far easier for fans of both genres, as the rationalists don't have to be bothered with all the supernatural stuff, and occultists such as myself don't have to pretend interest in the creaky mechanics of whodunnits.

Sombrero Island

It was there that I first encountered Le Fanu's 'Green Tea' and 'Carmilla', Bram Stoker's 'The Judge's House', and a host of more recent luminaries of the macabre. And it was there that I first read one of my very favourite short stories of all time, Martin Armstrong's 'Sombrero' (which you can read about it in more detail in Bronwyn Lloyd's brilliant essay here).

Carl Barks: The Many Faces of Magica de Spell (1964)

But who exactly was Dorothy Sayers, and why do her various sets of fans still maintain such devotion to her memory? Why, in particular, do those fans seem content to remain in such mutually exclusive groups?

The Many Faces of Dorothy Sayers, then, would have to include:

• her dazzling contribution to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, as a contemporary (and rival) of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Josephine Tey, amongst others.
• her work as a translator - and commentator - on Dante, which resulted in one of the most widely read versions of the Divine Comedy published in modern times.
• her status as a visiting member of the Inklings, with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, due mainly to her extensive contributions to the field of Christian apologetics.
• and, last but not least, her work as a critic and anthologist of mystery and ghost stories, which rivals even that of such industrious successors as Edmund Crispin and Peter Haining.

Let's take them one by one:

The Dorothy L. Sayers Crime Collection (Folio Society: 1998)


Detective Story Writer


Lord Peter Wimsey novels:


1. Whose Body? (1923)
2. Clouds of Witness (1926)
3. Unnatural Death (1927)
4. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)
5. Strong Poison (1930) [with Harriet Vane]
6. The Five Red Herrings (1931)
7. Have His Carcase (1932) [with Harriet Vane]
8. Murder Must Advertise (1933)
9. The Nine Tailors (1934)
10. Gaudy Night (1935) [with Harriet Vane]
11. Busman's Honeymoon (1937) [with Harriet Vane]




Jill Paton Walsh & Dorothy L. Sayers: A Presumption of Death (2002)


I recently came across an interesting paperback in a local vintage shop. It purports to be a collaboration between children's-book and detective-story writer Jill Paton Walsh and the long defunct Dorothy Sayers.



Dorothy L. Sayers & Jill Paton Walsh: Thrones, Dominations (1998)


Further research revealed the existence of an earlier volume which actually was based on some unpublished chapters of an unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey novel started by Sayers sometime in 1936, after the completion of Busman's Honeymoon, the last published Wimsey mystery.

Busman's Honeymoon was written as a stage play before being repackaged as a novel, an interesting change of gear which might lead one to argue that the last bona fide Sayers crime novel was in fact Gaudy Night (1935), which ends with her (at least partial) alter ego, crime novelist Harriet Vane, falling at last into the faithful arms of aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey.

I enjoyed both of these Walsh / Sayers novels, though perhaps not sufficiently to hunt out the further instalments in the series. Jill Paton Walsh died in 2020, so there are unlikely to be any more beyond the four already completed by her - unless, that is, some enterprising fan-fiction writer discovers unpublished chapters or plot outlines for further such books, and so ad infinitum ...

Walsh certainly manages a pretty seamless join between her chapters and Sayers' chapters in the 1936-37 abdication era saga of Thrones, Dominations. She is also pretty good on the atmosphere of wartime Britain in A Presumption of Death. What one misses in both books, though, is the relentlessly circumstantial detail of the canonical Wimsey stories.



Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey in Murder Must Advertise (BBC: 1973)


What was it like to work in an advertising agency in the 1930s? Sayers had done so, and she paints a vivid picture of the minutiae of the trade in Murder Must Advertise (1933). In fact, so absorbing is her account that one's interest - never strong - in solving the murder mystery the novel is purportedly about begins to shrink into nothingness.

The same could be said in even stronger terms about the apprenticeship in Campanology (or bell-ringing) offered by The Nine Tailors (1934). Painting in oils is exhaustively canvassed in The Five Red Herrings (1931), and any questions one may have had about the functioning of Oxford women's colleges before the war are very fully answered by Gaudy Night (1935).



Harriet Walters as Harriet Vane / Edward Petherbridge as Wimsey in Gaudy Night (BBC: 1987)


This tendency on Sayers' part to go off into a disquisition on the collecting of incunabula (books printed before 1500 - one of wealthy Lord Peter's principal passions), or some other esoteric topic, instead of sticking to the grimier details of blood-stains and alibis did not go unremarked at the time. Detective story purists decried this lack of focus on the usual content of such stories.

It is, however, one of the main reasons why they remain so readable almost a century after the Wimsey series began in 1923. She wrote them, at least initially, for money. As time went by, and her sources of income diversified, she continued them as a vehicle for her other passions: old books, and scholarship, and medieval pageantry.

I mentioned in an earlier post certain problems some readers have had with Whose Body? (1923), the first of the Wimsey novels. The fact that the victim is Jewish and his murderer overtly anti-semitic does not, in my view, add up to evidence that Sayers herself shared these views - on the contrary, in fact. There are admittedly certain parts of the book which read oddly today, but no more so than any other thriller of the time, I would argue.

This may be one reason why her subsequent books stick to subjects of more Academic interest. I can see how this might irritate fans of (say) Agatha Christie or the American hard-boiled tradition, but the long, languorous descriptions of Lord Peter's bookshelves with which Sayers occasionally indulges herself have probably drawn in more readers than they've driven away. Bookish folk are a clannish tribe, and the great thing about Sayers - like her near-contemporary M. R. James - is that she does know what she's talking about.

It's easy enough to plaster together a few Latin tags and booktitles from the likes of Wikipedia if you want to feign close knowledge of some esoteric field. Sayers never does that. It's not just that she fleshes out her account of such things from her own wide reading and classical education. It's also clear that she's speaking from the heart. Feigned enthusiasm can generally be distinguished from the real thing.



Jill Paton Walsh (1937-2020)


Jill Paton Walsh was a very well-informed and experienced writer. When, however, she attempts to emulate Sayers' expositions of esoteric areas of learning (the short account of the lost rivers of London in Thrones, Dominations, for instance - or the details of code-breaking and spycraft generally in A Presumption of Death), the results fall too far short of the original to satisfy.

I see no harm in what she's done - and wish her publishers well in continuing to market these four novels - but the Sayers canon will remain eleven novels and a number of short stories. Unsurprisingly, Walsh channels Harriet Vane far more convincingly than she does Lord Peter. The latter is a pallid shade of his jazz-era self. Harriet, by contrast, seems almost as self-involved and incompetent a detective as she was in the original books.

The fact that the process of fleshing out Lord Peter's genealogy and post-war career began during Sayers' own lifetime, and that she even collaborated with some of these attempts, can presumably be attributed to her passion for the so-called 'higher criticism' (a term coined by Monsignor Ronald Knox) of Sherlock Holmes.

There are many Holmes ephemera and sequels also. As long as they don't draw away too much attention from the parent tree, they're as pleasant a way of wasting one's time as any, I'd say.



Jill Paton Walsh: The Late Scholar (2013)




•

Dorothy L. Sayers, trans. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri (Penguin Classics: 1949-62)


Verse Translator


I've already had a bit to say on this subject, too, in a post on Dante's Divine Comedy where I compare a number of translations - including Dorothy Sayers' - of the opening lines of the poem.

There's no need to repeat all that here, but I should perhaps mention Sayers' own comments on what she'd been trying to do in her own version of this much-English'd poem, which she seems almost alone in regarding as a 'comedy' in the modern sense:

the pervading favour of Dante's humour is ... dry and delicate and satirical; in particular his portrait of himself is tinged throughout with a charming self-mockery which has no parallel that I know of outside the pages of Jane Austen. ... The easiest way to show what I have done is to lay a few passages side by side with other translations; for example:

Inf. xi. 76:

"What error has seduced thy reason, pray?"
Said he; "thou art not wont to be so dull;
Or are thy wits woolgathering miles away?"

Where Cary has:

He answer thus returned: "Wherefore in dotage wanders thus thy mind,
Not so accustomed? Or what other thoughts
Possess it?

Inf. xvi. 124:

When truth looks like a lie, a man's to blame
Not to sit still, if he can, and hold his tongue,
Or he'll only cover his innocent head with shame.

Where Wright has:

That truth which bears the semblance of a lie
To pass the lips man never should allow:
Though crime be absent - still disgrace is nigh.

Inf. xvii. 91:

So I climbed to those dread shoulders obediently;
"Only do" (I meant to say, but my voice somehow
Wouldn't come out right) "please catch hold of me."

Where Binyon has:

On those dread shoulders did I then get hold.
I wished to say, only the voice came not
As I had meant: "Thy arms about me fold."

In this last case, it is a question, not only of translating, but of choosing between two possible meanings of the Italian; which one chooses - the unbroken phrase or the broken, gasping one - will depend, precisely, on whether one thinks Dante is laughing at himself or not. I believe that he is, and that his treatment of his own character is suffused throughout with a delicate spirit of comedy, which no reverence should tempt the translator to obscure by dignified phrases.

- The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica I: Hell [L’Inferno]. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. 1949. Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): 62-64.

Whether or not she was right to emphasise this feature of Dante's poem is a matter of opinion. Myself, I have certain doubts. Her more relaxed and informal way of translating one of the great monuments of world poetry certainly hit a nerve at a time, though.

Like the other volumes in the new Penguin Classics series, it was very much in tune with the zeitgeist, the increased suspicion of the 'culture machine' expressed in its most extreme form by Adorno's famous adage about the impossibility of continuing to write traditional lyric poetry after the fact of Auschwitz.

If there was still to be poetry, it could - at the very least - not keep on being so smugly self-satisfied about the nature of its mode of expression. Hence E. V. Rieu's colloquial, almost novelistic translation of Homer's Odyssey (1946). Hence, too, Sayers' Hell (1949) - the avoidance of the more conventional "Inferno" for her title makes a statement in itself.

According to her friend and biographer Barbara Reynolds, who completed the final few cantos of the translation after Sayers' death, that first volume sold 50,000 copies "almost at once" - the set of three went on to sell a million and a quarter copies over the next half century.

There have been many, many English translations of Dante. Gilbert Cunningham's two-volume The Dvine Comedy in English: A Critical Bibliography (1965-66) lists no fewer than 83 between 1782 and 1966. In my 2012 blogpost on the subject, I added a further ten which had appeared since then. There's been no let-up in the last decade, though - even one by self-appointed antidote to 'cultural amnesia' Clive James. Who's next? Stephen Fry? me?

There are not so many which could actually be said to matter, though - Cary's pioneering 1814 version, composed in Miltonic blank verse, certainly; Longfellow's 1867 American translation, for its fluent readability; Philip Wicksteed's dual-text Temple Classics crib (1899-1901), as it was the edition read by Eliot and most of the other Modernists; possibly Laurence Binyon's 1933-43 rhyming terza rima translation, praised so highly by Ezra Pound ...

Among these latter you would have to include Dorothy Sayers', though. It's still not a bad place to start on your Dantean journey. It's readable and easy to follow, and while she certainly struggles to match the pictorial grace of Dante's extended metaphors, who doesn't? I'd certainly argue that it's better to enjoy her exceptional facility as a storyteller than to criticise her for failing to provide us with yet another piece of pretentious bombast.



Barbara Reynolds: Fifty Years On: Dorothy L. Sayers and Dante (1999)




•

Dorothy L. Sayers: The Man Born to be King (BBC: 1942-43)


Christian Apologist


It was, according to Barbara Reynolds' article pictured above, Charles Williams' 1943 book The Figure of Beatrice which got Dorothy Sayers started on Dante in the first place. By then she was already well-known for her popular expositions of Christian doctrine - something of a boom industry during the dark days of the Second World War.

This brought her into close contact with the group of Christian writers and friends known informally as the Inklings, whose principal members were C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Williams himself.

There are a number of snide and rather misogynistic references to her in (especially) Tolkien's letters, but the others accepted her with a better grace. It's worth emphasising just how much greater than any of theirs her sales and influence were at the time. They may have far outdistanced her now, but then they were simply a small group of Oxford Dons whose following was largely due to Lewis's wartime broadcasts - subsequently collected as Mere Christianity (1952).

A massive amount of her time post-Wimsey was spent on composing such spiritual propaganda (I use the term advisedly): some of the highlights being her dramatised life of Christ, pictured above, her book of essays The Mind of the Maker, and the various studies necessitated by her all-consuming work on Dante.



Dorothy L. Sayers: The Mind of the Maker (1941)




•

Dorothy L. Sayers, ed.: Great Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (Second Series: 1931)


Anthologist


I think that I've probably said enough above, in the first part of this post, to give you an idea of the effect that these three, brilliantly curated collections of the macabre have had on me, at least. Sayers also wrote a study of sensation novelist Wilkie Collins, which remained unpublished till long after her death, and there are enough references to occult maestro Sheridan Le Fanu in the Wimsey corpus to make it clear that he, too, was a subject of deep interest to her.

I guess that the overall point I wanted to make by piecing together these various disparate aspects of Sayers' ongoing influence was to point out how protean and fascinating her work remains. The same must, I suppose, be admitted of her life also, given the number of biographies and collections of letters which continue to appear.

Dismissing her as a detective writer with pretensions - or, worse, a thwarted scholar diverted into popular writing by poverty and circumstances - fails to explain why her books retain their vigour. Why, in short, do people continue to read them?

Part of it may be nostalgia for the (so-called) golden age of the detective genre, but Sayers' appeal goes far beyond that. Her characters are alive in a way that (say) Agatha Christie's or Edmund Crispin's - for all their technical ingenuity - are not.

Dorothy Sayers is, it appears, here to stay - and I, for one, am overjoyed to hear it.

•

John Doubleday: Dorothy L. Sayers (2015)

Dorothy Leigh Sayers
(1893-1957)

Novels:


1. Whose Body? (1923)
   • Included in: The Second Gollancz Detective Omnibus: Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers / The Weight of the Evidence, by Michael Innes / Holy Disorders, by Edmund Crispin. 1923, 1943 & 1945. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1952.
   • Whose Body? 1923. NEL Books. London: New English Library Limited, 1977.
2. Clouds of Witness (1926)
   • Included in: The Lord Peter Omnibus: Clouds of Witness / Unnatural Death / The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. 1926, 1927, 1928 & 1935. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1964.
3. Unnatural Death [aka The Dawson Pedigree] (1927)
   • Included in: The Gollancz Detective Omnibus: The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin / Appleby’s End, by Michael Innes / Unnatural Death, by Dorothy L. Sayers. 1946, 1945 & 1927. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1951.
   • Included in: The Lord Peter Omnibus: Clouds of Witness / Unnatural Death / The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. 1926, 1927, 1928 & 1935. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1964.
4. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)
   • Included in: The Lord Peter Omnibus: Clouds of Witness / Unnatural Death / The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. 1926, 1927, 1928 & 1935. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1964.
5. Strong Poison (1930)
   • Included in: Three Great Lord Peter Novels: Strong Poison / Murder Must Advertise / The Nine Tailors. 1930, 1933 & 1934. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1978.
6. [with Robert Eustace] The Documents in the Case (1930)
   • [with Robert Eustace] The Documents in the Case. 1930. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1949.
7. The Five Red Herrings [aka Suspicious Characters] (1931)
   • The Five Red Herrings. 1931. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1937.
8. [with Members of The Detection Club: Canon Victor Whitechurch, George and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane, Anthony Berkeley & G. K. Chesterton] The Floating Admiral (1931)
9. Have His Carcase (1932)
   • Have His Carcase. 1932. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1935.
10. Murder Must Advertise (1933)
    • Murder Must Advertise: A Detective Story. 1933. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1953.
    • Included in: Three Great Lord Peter Novels: Strong Poison / Murder Must Advertise / The Nine Tailors. 1930, 1933 & 1934. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1978.
11. [With Members of The Detection Club: Anthony Berkeley, Milward Kennedy, Gladys Mitchell, John Rhode, Sayers & Helen Simpson] Ask a Policeman (1933)
12. The Nine Tailors (1934)
    • The Nine Tailors: Changes Rung on an Old Theme in Two Short Touches and Two Full Peals. 1934. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1942.
    • Included in: Three Great Lord Peter Novels: Strong Poison / Murder Must Advertise / The Nine Tailors. 1930, 1933 & 1934. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1978.
13. Gaudy Night (1935)
    • Gaudy Night. 1935. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1935.
14. [With Members of The Detection Club: Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Father Ronald Knox, Sayers & Russell Thorndike] Six against the Yard (1936)
15. Busman's Honeymoon: A Love Story With Detective Interruptions (1937)
    • Busman's Honeymoon: A Love Story with Detective Interruptions. 1937. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1949.
16. [With Members of The Detection Club] Double Death: a Murder Story (1939)

Short Story Collections:


17. Lord Peter Views the Body (1928)
    • Lord Peter Views the Body. 1928. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1949.
18. Hangman's Holiday (1933)
    • Hangman's Holiday. 1933. NEL Books. London: New English Library Limited, 1978.
19. [As Matthew Wimsey: with others] Papers Relating to the Family of Wimsey (1936)
20. An Account of Lord Mortimer Wimsey, the Hermit of the Wash (1937)
21. In the Teeth of the Evidence and Other Mysteries (1939)
    • In the Teeth of the Evidence. 1939. NEL Books. London: New English Library Limited, 1973.
22. The Wimsey Papers (1939-40)
23. A Treasury of Sayers Stories (1958)
24. Talboys [aka Striding Folly] (1972)
    • Striding Folly: Including Three Final Lord Peter Wimsey Stories. Introduction by Janet Hitchman. 1972. NEL Books. London: New English Library Limited, n.d.
25. Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories (1972)
26. The Wimsey Family: A Fragmentary History Compiled from Correspondence With Dorothy L. Sayers. Ed. C. W. Scott-Giles (1977)
    • Scott-Giles, C. W. The Wimsey Family: A Fragmentary History Compiled from Correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers. 1977. NEL Books. London: New English Library Limited, 1979.
27. [With Members of The Detection Club] The Scoop and Behind the Screen [Radio playscripts, 1930 & 1931] (1983)
28. [With Members of The Detection Club] Crime on the Coast and No Flowers by Request [Detective serials, 1953] (1984)
29. The Complete Stories (2002)

Jill Paton Walsh (1937-2020) - Authorised Sequels:


30. [with Dorothy L. Sayers] Thrones, Dominations (1998)
    • [with Dorothy L. Sayers] Thrones, Dominations. 1998. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998.
31. [with Dorothy L. Sayers] A Presumption of Death (2002)
    • [with Dorothy L. Sayers] A Presumption of Death: The New Lord Peter Wimsey Novel. 2002. A New English Library Paperback. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003.
32. The Attenbury Emeralds (2010)
33. The Late Scholar (2013)

Drama:


34. [with Basil Mason] The Silent Passenger [Screenplay] (1935)
35. [with Muriel St. Clare Byrne] Busman's Honeymoon: A Detective Comedy in Three Acts (1936)
36. The Zeal of Thy House (1938)
    • Included in: Four Sacred Plays: The Devil to Pay / The Just Vengeance / He That Should Come / The Zeal of Thy House. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1948.
37. He That Should Come: A Nativity Play in One Act [Radio play] (1938)
    • Included in: Four Sacred Plays: The Devil to Pay / The Just Vengeance / He That Should Come / The Zeal of Thy House. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1948.
38. The Devil to Pay: Being the Famous History of John Faustus, the Conjurer of Wittenberg in Germany: How He Sold His Immortal Soul to the Enemy of Mankind, and Was Served Twenty-four Years by Mephistopheles, and Obtained Helen of Troy to His Paramour, With Many Other Marvels; and How God Dealt With Him at the Last (1939)
    • Included in: Four Sacred Plays: The Devil to Pay / The Just Vengeance / He That Should Come / The Zeal of Thy House. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1948.
39. Love All (1940)
40. The Golden Cockerel: Adapted from Alexander Pushkin [Radio play] (1941)
41. The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ [Radio play] (1941-42)
    • The Man Born to be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Presented by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Dec. 1941–Oct. 1942. Producer: Val Gielgud. 1943. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1946.
42. The Just Vengeance (1946)
    • Included in: Four Sacred Plays: The Devil to Pay / The Just Vengeance / He That Should Come / The Zeal of Thy House. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1948.
43. [With Members of The Detection Club] Where Do We Go From Here? [Radio play] (1948)
44. The Emperor Constantine: A Chronicle (1951)

Non-fiction:


45. The Murder of Julia Wallace. In The Anatomy of Murder, by The Detection Club (1936)
46. The Greatest Drama Ever Staged: Essays (1938)
47. Strong Meat: Essays (1939)
48. Begin Here: A War-Time Essay (1940)
49. Creed or Chaos? and Other Essays in Popular Theology (1940)
50. The Mind of the Maker: Essays (1941)
    • The Mind of the Maker. 1941. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1946.
51. The Mysterious English (1941)
52. Why Work? An Address Delivered at Eastbourne, April 23rd, 1942 (1942)
53. The Other Six Deadly Sins: An Address Given to the Public Morality Council at Caxton Hall, Westminster, on October 23rd, 1941 (1943)
54. Even the Parrot: Exemplary Conversations for Enlightened Children (1944)
55. Making Sense of the Universe: An Address Given at the Kingsway Hall on Ash Wednesday, March 6th, 1946 (1946)
56. Unpopular Opinions: Essays (1946)
57. The Lost Tools of Learning (1948)
58. The Days of Christ's Coming (1953)
59. Introductory Papers on Dante (1954)
60. The Story of Easter (1955)
61. The Story of Noah's Ark (1956)
62. Further Papers on Dante (1957)
63. [with others] The Great Mystery of Life Hereafter (1957)
64. The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, and Other Posthumous Essays on Literature, Religion, and Language (1963)
65. Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World: A Selection of Essays. Ed. Roderick Jellema (1969)
66. Are Women Human? Essays (1971)
67. A Matter of Eternity: Selections From the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers (1973)
68. Wilkie Collins: A Critical and Biographical Study (1977)
69. Spiritual Writings (1993)

Poetry:


70. Op. I (1916)
71. Catholic Tales and Christian Songs (1918)
72. Lord, I Thank Thee (1943)
73. The Story of Adam and Christ (1955)

Translation:


74. Tristan in Brittany, Being Fragments of the Romance of Tristan, Written in the Twelfth Century by Thomas the Anglo-Norman (1929)
75. The Heart of Stone, Being the Four Canzoni of the "Pietra" Group by Dante (1946)
76. The "Comedy" of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica I: Hell (1949)
    • Alighieri, Dante. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica I: Hell [L’Inferno]. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. 1949. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
77. The "Comedy" of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica II: Purgatory (1955)
    • Alighieri, Dante. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica II: Purgatory [Il Purgatorio]. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. 1955. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
78. The Song of Roland (1957)
    • The Song of Roland. 1957. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959.
79. [with Barbara Reynolds] The "Comedy" of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica III: Paradise (1962)
    • Alighieri, Dante. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica III: Paradise [Il Paradiso]. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers & Barbara Reynolds. 1962. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

Edited:


80. [with Wilfred Rowland Childe & T. W. Earp] Oxford Poetry, 1917 (1918)
81. [with T. W. Earp & E. F. A. Geach] Oxford Poetry, 1918 (1919)
82. [with T. W. Earp & Siegfried Sassoon] Oxford Poetry, 1919 (1920)
83. [with the Editorial Committee] The Quorum (1920)
84. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928)
    • Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Part I: Detection and Mystery. 1928. London: Victor Gollancz, 1950.
    • Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Part II: Mystery and Horror. 1928. London: Victor Gollancz, 1951.
85. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror — Second Series (1931)
    • Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Part III: Detection and Mystery. 1931. London: Victor Gollancz, 1952.
    • Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Part IV: Mystery and Horror. 1931. London: Victor Gollancz, 1952.
86. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror — Third Series (1934)
    • Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Part V: Detection and Mystery. 1934. London: Victor Gollancz, 1952.
    • Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Part VI: Mystery and Horror. 1934. London: Victor Gollancz, 1952.
87. Tales of Detection. Everyman's Library (1936)

Letters:


88. The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899–1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist (1995)
    • Reynolds, Barbara, ed. The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist. Preface by P. D. James. Foreword by P. D. James. 1995. A Sceptre Paperback. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.
89. The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1937–1943, From Novelist to Playwright (1998)
90. The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1944–1950, A Noble Daring (1999)
91. The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1951–1957, In the Midst of Life (2000)
92. The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: Child and Woman of Her Time - A Supplement to the Letters (2002)

Secondary:


93. Hitchman, Janet. ‘Such a Strange Lady’: An Introduction to Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). 1975. NEL Books. London: New English Library Limited, 1979.
94. Brabazon, James. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography. Preface by Anthony Fleming. Foreword by P. D. James. 1981. A Discus Book. New York: Avon Books, 1982.
95. Dale, Alzina Stone. Maker and Craftsman: The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers (1993)
96. Reynolds, Barbara. Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (1993)
97. Duriez, Colin. Dorothy L Sayers: A Biography - Death, Dante and Lord Peter Wimsey (2021)

•

English Heritage Blue Plaque: 23 & 24 Great James Street, WC1 (London)

Classic Ghost Story Writers: Margaret Irwin

Lafayette: Margaret Irwin (1928)

I suppose that this one is a bit of a stretch. While two of the finest ghost stories I've ever read - "The Book" and "The Earlier Service" - were written by Margaret Irwin, there's no denying that her real fame stems (not unreasonably) from her work as an historical novelist.

Dorothy Sayers, ed.: Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (3 vols: 1928-34)

I first encountered these two stories in the multi-volume anthology above. As for her novels, I collected those gradually from various secondhand bookshops.

The four set in the seventeenth century, around about the time of what we used to refer to as the English Civil War (and would now have to call the British Wars), are probably my favourites. I've read each of them a number of times, and they've been a great help to me in disentangling many of the political complexities of the era.

They are, in order of publication (though not chronology):

Margaret Irwin: Royal Flush (1932)

• Royal Flush: The Story of Minette. 1932. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.
• The Proud Servant: The Story of Montrose. 1934. London: Pan Books, Ltd., 1966.
• The Stranger Prince: The Story of Rupert of the Rhine. 1937. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.
• The Bride: The Story of Louise and Montrose. London: Chatto & Windus, 1939.

Margaret Irwin: The Proud Servant (1934)

The best of these, I suppose, is The Proud Servant - about that super-romantic figure the Marquis of Montrose, and his one-man war against the Covenanters in Scotland. But all of them are interesting. In particular, the portrait given of the Dutch household of the 'Winter Queen,' the exiled Queen of Bohemia, daughter of the British monarch James 1st and mother of Prince Rupert, in both The Stranger Prince and The Bride, retains a certain fascination.

Margaret Irwin: The Stranger Prince (1937)

She followed up these triumphs with another group of novels set in the sixteenth century: one rather disappointing one about Mary Queen of Scots, followed by a brilliant trilogy about Queen Elizabeth the First:

Margaret Irwin: The Gay Galliard (1941)

• The Gay Galliard: The Love Story of Mary Queen of Scots. London: Chatto & Windus, 1941.
• The Queen Elizabeth Trilogy:
  1. Young Bess. 1944. Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books, Ltd., 1960.
  2. Elizabeth, Captive Princess. 1948. London: The Reprint Society, 1950.
  3. Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain. London: Chatto & Windus, 1953.

George Sidney, dir.: Young Bess (1953)

The most famous of these is undoubtedly Young Bess. It was even used as the basis of a film starring Jean Simmons and Deborah Kerr (not to mention Charles Laughton as Henry the Eighth!).

Besides that, there are a number of other novels. She started off in the fantasy genre, in the gentler, pre-Tolkien, early twentieth century mode of Stella Benson and Robin Hyde:

Margaret Irwin: Still She Wished for Company (1924)

• Still She Wished for Company. 1924. A Peacock Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
• These Mortals. 1925. Uniform Edition. 1952. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968.
• Knock Four Times. 1927. Uniform Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1951.
• Fire Down Below. London: Chatto & Windus, 1928.
• None So Pretty. 1930. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.

Margaret Irwin: None So Pretty (1930)

Still She Wished for Company is an intricately told ghost story, and None So Pretty a tautly written period piece. Both show her already developing the skills which would lead to her mature historical novels a few years later.

The middle three are rather twee fantasy novels, which don't quite work for me, but which were certainly very popular at the time - hence the need for a 'uniform edition' of her works in the 1950s. I should note, though, that Rob Maslen mounts a spirited defence of These Mortals in the third of three posts about "Margaret Irwin between the wars" on his City of Lost Books blog.

A number of the online bibliographies for Irwin list another couple of late novels which I can't find available for sale anywhere, on Amazon or elsewhere, and whose existence I've therefore begun to doubt.

• The Heart's Memory (1951)
• Hidden Splendour (1952)

The fact that those same bibliographies (on Wikipedia, the Fiction Database, Fantastic Fiction and Agora Books) significantly misdate a number of her books, and - what's more - repeat the same errors from list to list, suggests to me that they're based on a comparison with each other, rather than independent library research.

The dates in my own listings are based on my own copies of each of the books in question (with the exception of Fire Down Below and her two, fabulously rare, early volumes of short stories, Madame Fears the Dark and Mrs. Oliver Cromwell, all of which I'm still searching for).

Margaret Irwin: That Great Lucifer (1960)

Irwin also published one work of non-fiction - a spirited biography of Sir Walter Ralegh.

[NB: The Featherstones and Halls: Gleanings from Old Family Matters, Letters and Manuscripts (1890, reprinted 2018), is not hers, though it's listed under her name in several bibliographies]

My main interest here, however, is in her short stories. Here are her three collections (with the stories I don't have access to marked in italics):

Margaret Irwin: Madame Fears the Dark (1935)

Madame Fears the Dark: Seven Stories and a Play. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935:

1. The Book
2. Mr Cork
3. The Earlier Service
4. Madame Fears the Dark
5. Monsieur Seeks a Wife
6. Time Will Tell
7. The Curate and the Rake
8. "Where Beauty Lies"

Margaret Irwin: Mrs. Oliver Cromwell (1940)

Mrs. Oliver Cromwell and Other Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1940:

1. Courage
2. Breaking-Point
3. The Doctor
4. Mayfly
5. Mrs. Oliver Cromwell
6. The Country Gentleman
7. Bloodstock
8. 'I See You'
9. The Collar
10. The Cocktail Bar

Margaret Irwin: Bloodstock (1953)

Bloodstock and Other Stories. 1935 & 1940. Uniform Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1953:

Stories from Ireland
1. Courage
2. The Country Gentleman
3. The Doctor
4. Bloodstock
5. The Collar
Uncanny Stories
6. The Book
7. Monsieur Seeks a Wife
8. Mistletoe
9. The Earlier Service
Mrs. Oliver Cromwell and Where Beauty Lies
10. Mrs. Oliver Cromwell
11. Where Beauty Lies

So, after all that preamble, what are the two ghost stories I mentioned above actually about? [Warning: plot spoilers ahead ...]

Margaret Irwin: The Book (1930)

The first one, "The Book," is concerned with that favourite theme of the ghost story writer, the haunted book. In this case the early, sound financial advice given by the book to the hapless Mr. Corbett becomes rapidly more sinister as he becomes more and more dependent upon it.

I guess what's really stuck in my mind about this story are the 'tainted' literary opinions - presumably conveyed by the book itself - which gradually poison his favourite authors for Corbett. Having taken out The Old Curiosity Shop and Marius the Epicurean from his shelves for some late night reading, since "Reading was the best thing to calm the nerves, and Dickens a pleasant, wholesome and robust author."

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author's sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he sensed a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank's illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls.

George Cruikshank: Illustration for Oliver Twist (1838)

"What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two old favourites, he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit."

But presently he wondered if this spirit was not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. "I have often thought," he said to himself, "that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.” He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep.

However, his sleep is plagued with dreams "of these blameless Victorian works."

Sprightly devils in whiskers and peg-top trouses tortured a lovely maiden and leered in delight at her anguish; the gods and heroes of classic fable acted deeds whose naked crime and shame Mr. Corbett had never appreciated in Latin and Greek Unseens. When he had woken in a cold sweat from the spectacle of the ravished Philomel’s torn and bleeding tongue, he decided there was nothing for it but to go down and get another book that would turn his thoughts in some more pleasant direction.

He can't quite nerve himself up to do so, though. Instead, in the days that follow, he finds that, like his children, who have started to detect cruelty and cynicism in such works as Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, and even an expurgated Boy's Gulliver's Travels, he is "off reading":

Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his particular morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid's sickly attraction to brutality.

"This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and ... he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble."

He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else's flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth's love of nature to the monstrous egotism of an ancient bell-wether, isolated from the flock.

Well might Mr. Corbett conclude that "with a mind so acute and original he should have achieved greatness".

The interesting thing about these opinions is that they are extremely cogent. Commentators on the story find it difficult to explain just why we should reject these "jejune" or "prematurely cynical" conclusions on their own merits, and are forced to fall back on the fact that - in the context of the story, at least - they are portrayed as the emanations of a deceiving, unholy spirit.

That description of Wordsworth, in particular, is worthy of an F. R. Leavis or a Leslie Fiedler - but the "possessed" Corbett is pretty close to the mark on Dickens and Stevenson, also. Or so a Bloomsbury-inspired critic might well have thought. The date of the story, 1930, was, after all, the heyday of Lytton Strachey's influence.

J. C. Squire (1884-1958)

The London Mercury, where the story first appeared, was a notoriously reactionary literary monthly edited by the anti-modernist, "wholesome and hearty" J. C. Squire. The true cunning of "The Book," then, is to smuggle in such opinions in the guise of satire, leaving them to germinate secretly in unsuspecting readers.

Margaret Irwin's story is a masterpiece. It continues to provoke and nag at us to this day. Whether she shared any of these against-the-grain opinions of canonical British authors is impossible to say. Certainly she was capable of formulating them, which is proof that they must have existed somewhere within her.

She hasn't stopped me reading (and enjoying) any of the five authors she skewers - or, rather, whom her character challenges under the influence of an evil monk-turned-book - but she has made me think harder about each of them. The bleatings of Wordsworth, turned from love of the French Revolution to fulsome praise of his worthless patron Lord Lonsdale - the hypocritical sympathy of Dickens for oppressed young ladies while living under an assumed name with the powerless young Ellen Ternan - the gloating tone of Stevenson as he describes deaths and summary executions in The Black Arrow - the sheer weirdness of Charlotte Brontë's universe - the glaring omissions in Jane Austen's - all of these lend some weight to the insidious power of the story and of its ideas.

Who can say what it's really about? It enters the ranks of supernatural classics because it continues to tease and irritate us, like the very finest of the works of Poe or Hoffmann.

Margaret Irwin: The Earlier Service (1935)

The second of the two, "The Earlier Service," transfers the basic conceit of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" - a witch cult concealed under a facade of piety - to an English country church, with a time-shift element built in for good measure.

The extra turn of the screw this time comes from the presence of a crusader tomb in the church, which gives comfort to Jane, the young girl at the centre of the plot, as she finds herself increasingly drawn under the influence of these sinister past events. She finds herself repeatedly reciting - or rather, misquoting - Coleridge's lines:

The knight is dust.
His good sword rust.
His soul is with the saints we trust.

The young man York, an enthusiastic antiquarian, and the only one who takes her premonitions seriously, eventually unearths the reason for this shadowy presence hovering over the parish:

In the reports of certain trials for sorcery in the year 1474, one Giraldus atte Welle, priest of the parish of Cloud Martin in Somerset, confessed under torture to having held the Black Mass in his church at midnight on the very altar where he administered the Blessed Sacrament on Sundays. This was generally done on Wednesday or Thursday, the chief days of the Witches’ Sabbath when they happened to fall on the night of the full moon. The priest would then enter the church by the little side door, and from the darkness in the body of the church those villagers who had followed his example and sworn themselves to Satan, would come up and join him, one by one, hooded and masked, that none might recognize the other. He was charged with having secretly decoyed young children in order to kill them on the altar as a sacrifice to Satan, and he was finally charged with attempting to murder a young virgin for that purpose.

Jane, it seems, has been chosen to fill in for the young virgin, since Giraldus never succeeded in completing his ritual:

All the accused made free confessions towards the end of their trial, especially in as far as they implicated other people. All however were agreed on a certain strange incident. That just as the priest was about to cut the throat of the girl on the altar, the tomb of the Crusader opened, and the knight who had lain there for two centuries arose and came upon them with drawn sword, so that they scattered and fled through the church, leaving the girl unharmed on the altar.

York is too late to prevent Jane's abduction by the hungry ghosts.

He walked up to the little gate into the churchyard. There was a faint light from the chancel windows, and he thought he heard voices chanting. He paused to listen, and then he was certain of it, for he could hear the silence when they stopped. It might have been a minute or five minutes later that he heard the most terrible shriek he had ever imagined, though faint, coming as it did from the closed church; and knew it for Jane’s voice. He ran up to the little door and heard that scream again and again. As he broke through the door he heard it cry “Crusader! Crusader!” The church was in utter darkness, there was no light in the chancel, he had to fumble in his pockets for his electric torch. The screams had stopped and the whole place was silent. He flashed his torch right and left, and saw a figure lying huddled against the altar. He knew that it was Jane; in an instant he had reached her. Her eyes were open, looking at him, but they did not know him, and she did not seem to understand him when he spoke. In a strange, rough accent of broad Somerset that he could scarcely distinguish, she said, “It was my body on the altar.”

I guess one reason I like this story so much is the careful detailing of the backdrop - the shy attraction of Jane to York, and his own growing fascination with this intelligent but troubled young girl.

But I do have to admit that I also like that moment of what Tolkien would call Eucatastrophe (the opposite of catastrophe: the sudden lucky turn that saves everything) when the Crusader comes to life and hunts the devil worshippers from the church.

So much did I like it that I wrote a long poem about it when I was in my teens (now, luckily, long burnt to ashes). It completely failed to reproduce the atmosphere of Irwin's story. That may have been the first moment when I really started to understand how much skill and careful artifice went into the creation of such effects.

I don't have much to say about the rest of Irwin's short stories. Some of them are quite good of their kind, such as the one about Cromwell's nominee attempting to take over his new estate in Ireland, but none of them rise to the heights of the two discussed above. Irwin clearly had a fascination with the supernatural, but it was the deep romanticism of her nature which brought the historical novels so vividly to life.

J. R. R. Tolkien: Moments of Eucatastrophe (The Return of the King: 1955)

•


Bassano Ltd.: Margaret Irwin (1939)

Margaret Emma Faith Irwin
(1889–1967)

Novels:


1. Still She Wished for Company. 1924. A Peacock Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
2. These Mortals. 1925. Uniform Edition. 1952. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968.
3. Knock Four Times. 1927. Uniform Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1951.
4. Fire Down Below. London: Chatto & Windus, 1928.
5. None So Pretty. 1930. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.
6. Royal Flush: The Story of Minette. 1932. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.
7. The Proud Servant: The Story of Montrose. 1934. London: Pan Books, Ltd., 1966.
8. The Stranger Prince: The Story of Rupert of the Rhine. 1937. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.
9. The Bride: The Story of Louise and Montrose. London: Chatto & Windus, 1939.
10. The Gay Galliard: The Love Story of Mary Queen of Scots. London: Chatto & Windus, 1941.
11. The Queen Elizabeth Trilogy:
    1. Young Bess. 1944. Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books, Ltd., 1960.
    2. Elizabeth, Captive Princess. 1948. London: The Reprint Society, 1950.
    3. Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain. London: Chatto & Windus, 1953.
12. The Heart's Memory (1951) [?]
13. Hidden Splendour (1952) [?]

Short stories:


14. Madame Fears the Dark: Seven Stories and a Play. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.
15. Mrs. Oliver Cromwell and Other Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1940.
16. Bloodstock and Other Stories. 1935 & 1940. Uniform Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1953.

Biography:


17. That Great Lucifer: A Portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh. 1960. London: The Reprint Society, 1961.

Margaret Irwin: These Mortals (1925)