Favourite Children's Authors: William Mayne

William Mayne: Low Tide (1993)

William Mayne's Low Tide interested me a lot when I first read it in the 1990s. It's set in New Zealand - which always tends to pique the interest of locals such as myself, and while I'm not sure that he does a great job of reproducing our manners and mores, the story itself is an arresting one. This is how Google Books describes it:

Set in New Zealand at the turn of the century, this exhilarating story of survival and adventure finds Charlie Snelling, his sister, and his Māori best friend swept up in a giant green tidal wave that carries them up high in the mountains to the old wild man called Koroua. What must they do to survive and find the way home?

Spoiler alert: They do eventually make their way down to the shore, only to find their town completely deserted and filled with sand and silt. But there's something just a little bit ... off about it. It looks similar, but not exactly the same.

To make a long story short, it turns out that there are two virtually identical towns set on different inlets. The one they live in was built after the other one was abandoned for various safety reasons. The new town was constructed on precisely the same model as the old one, though, which explains that strange moment of déjà vu when they stumbled into the latter by mistake, and found all their friends gone and the buildings half-buried by the tsunami.

It's a typically tricksy and laconically narrated William Mayne story: quite demanding even for its intended audience of older children, but also satisfactory in that he doesn't talk down to his readers.

William Mayne (1928-2010)

He looks harmless enough in the picture above, doesn't he? Almost like an old basset hound, with those two white sidelocks for ears. However:

In 2004, Mayne was charged with eleven counts of indecent assaults of "young girl fans" aged between eight and sixteen. At trial one victim gave evidence of events some forty years in the past. According to The Guardian, the prosecutor said Mayne had "treated young visitors as adults". He was described in the courtroom as "the greatest living writer of children's books in English". Mayne had pleaded guilty to the charges, but his solicitor said he had done so while under huge stress and would try to clear his name. On conviction, Mayne was imprisoned for two and a half years and was placed on the sex offenders register for life. According to The Guardian, "Mayne's books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards", as a result of his conviction.

- Wikipedia: William Mayne

It's rather like Low Tide: two towns, side by side on almost identical inlets, one full of bustle and life, the other completely deserted and left to the mercy of wind and weather. The first is his stellar reputation before the scandal; the second his status as a cancelled individual afterwards.

Trying to reread William Mayne now forces you to shift from that lively village of swift empathetic insights and strange, sometimes supernatural, fun, to the other town: the one where you have to hang your head in shame and watch armfuls of books being plucked from the shelves before being sent off to the nearest landfill for composting.

As for Mayne himself, he was "found dead at his home in Thornton Rust, North Yorkshire, on the morning of 24 March 2010." There were, we're informed, no suspicious circumstances; in other words, no reason to suspect suicide or foul play.

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William Mayne: All the King's Men (1982)

I think that the first book I ever read by William Mayne was All the King's Men. It's a very odd book indeed, a collection of three longish short stories. The first, title story concerns the doings of a group of dwarfs who feel more and more oppressed by the lack of respect they're shown at court, despite being known as the "King's Men." When they're shifted to a nearby hunting lodge, they're not even fed and housed properly, but are forced to fend for themselves.

Unlike the hero of Edgar Allan Poe's grand guignol classic "Hop-Frog," Mayne's protagonists are eventually helped out by the kindly Archbishop, who makes time to listen to their grievances and share them with the king.

The mockery and neglect they suffer is certainly very real, but there seems some slight prospect of betterment by the end of the story. The story gripped me at the time because of Mayne's obvious empathy with his characters and sympathy for their dilemma. Like Jack London's equally moving "Told in the Drooling Ward," it's never really left my mind since.

It convinced me, among other things, that Mayne was a man of strange understandings and considerable delicacy of mind: another reason that the news of his conviction for indecent assault hit me and his other readers so hard.

About a year ago I wrote a piece, "Must We Burn Alice Munro?", about this same dilemma of whether or not we can continue in good conscience to read authors who've been outed in such a way. Can I, for instance, keep on enjoying Neil Gaiman's work after all the allegations of sexual misconduct which have surfaced recently?

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Neil Gaiman: The Sandman (2025)

Clearly no simple, off-the-cuff answer to so loaded a question can be expected to apply to every situation. I was forced instead to conclude my piece with a series of further questions:

Did Dickens lose any readers over the revelation of his cruel, public rejection of his wife in order to pursue an affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan? Nelly, it seems, had little choice in the matter - neither did Mrs. Dickens. His saccharine morality showed its pinchbeck quality once and for all in his later life. And yet we continue to pore over the complexities of his last fictions, full of young heroines sacrificing themselves for self-pitying older men.

In other words, while "there may be a few temporary blips in sales ... more readers are drawn to turbulent, demon-ridden souls such as Dostoyevsky and Dickens than they are to the sanity and order of better-balanced authors."

Maybe it shouldn't be so - but it is. Whatever (for instance) your opinion of J. K. Rowling's views on tne inviolability of gender roles, Harry Potter remains a fixture on our shelves and our streaming services.

Neil Gaiman (2013)

The interesting thing about Gaiman, in particular, is that these details about his private life have given me a number of new insights into his work. He sounds like a pretty sick bastard to me - in particular, if the accusations about his conduct with a young New Zealand nanny are accurate: "Call me Master" indeed! But then so is Dream, the protagonist of his Sandman stories, both as he appears in the the late 80s / early 90s comics and in the more recent 2022-25 TV series.

Dream (or Morpheus, as I suppose we should call him) sends a woman who rejects him to hell for ten thousand years as revenge for her presumption. Another of his ex-lovers, the muse Calliope, is repeatedly raped by a young writer in order to help him gain inspiration. She remarks, when Dream eventually decides to save her from this fate, that he must have changed over the past century or so. The older version would have refused to help her on principle.

The more closely you look, the more obvious it is that Gaiman has been half-condemning, half-defending his own sexual peccadilloes throughout his whole career. The disguise, now, seems as paper-thin as Dickens' series of late novels defending the idea of young women becoming enamoured of older men.

Whether or not Gaiman manages to extricate himself from his present difficulties concerns only him and his publicist, I would say. But, if anything, his work has become more interesting now it's revealed to have been so profoundly personal all along. I find I can continue to read it - mainly because Gaiman the writer is superior to Gaiman the man. The ugly face of libertinism, its callous cruelty, is shown in his fiction - not, I think, because Gaiman is a lying hypocrite, but because the logic of the story and the reality of his characters forces him to do so.

Neil Gaiman: A Game of You (1991)

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William Mayne: A Game of Dark (1971)

There's an interesting attempt to summarise the case against Mayne in John Clute's Encyclopedia of SF:

Soon after [the success of his "pared to the bone and fantasticated" later work], Mayne's life and work were tragically darkened – a tragedy first and foremost for his victims – when he was charged with child abuse in 2004 and imprisoned for two and one half years. His oeuvre went out of print, his books were removed from libraries, which was expectable; but his name was also conspicuously cancelled from the influential 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up (2009) edited by Julia Ecclestone, an erasure with grave implications. His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again.

As usual with this most fascinatingly layered of reference works, there's a lot going on in this short paragraph. There's a (parenthetical) acknowledgment that Mayne's abuse was "a tragedy first and foremost for his victims," but the burden of the piece seems, nevertheless, to be on the cost to him and his oeuvre. That last sentence sounds far more heartfelt: "His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again."

There's also a sideswipe at Julia "Ecclestone" (a misprint for Eccleshare), and her decision to "cancel" Mayne so conspicuously "from the influential 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up (2009)", which the authors of the entry describe as "an erasure with grave implications."

Interestingly enough, this same Julia Eccleshare wrote the Guardian obituary for Mayne roughly a year after the publication of 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up. Like most such long and well-considered assessments, it shows signs of having been written long before the eruption of the scandal, then recast in a hurry with a eye to those details:

William Mayne, who has died aged 82, was one of the most highly regarded writers of the postwar "golden age" of children's literature. His output was huge – well over 100 titles, encompassing novels and latterly picture books, rich in a sense of place and feel for the magical, and beautifully written. He wrote several books a year in a career that spanned more than half a century and won him the Carnegie medal and the Guardian children's fiction prize.

That first paragraph could have been written at any time; the next one, however, shows signs of having been hastily supplemented with new details to undermine any notion of a Mayne "comeback":

Although never widely popular and sometimes thought of as inaccessible for his young readers, his distinctive, allusive and spare writing had considerable influence and, despite being sometimes out of fashion, his books were often thought due for a comeback. That was never to happen. Instead, Mayne's books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards following his conviction and prison sentence for indecent assault on children.

William Mayne: A Swarm in May (1955)

The rest of the obituary runs through his career more or less chronologically, from his early choir school stories, "based on his own experiences as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral from 1937 until 1942, the only part of his education he valued," to the more fantastic and supernatural themes he explored from the mid-1960s onwards.

William Mayne: Chorister's Cake (1956)

Numerous encomia are quoted along the way:

A Swarm in May was hailed as a "minor masterpiece ... one of the 20th-century's best children's books" by Frank Eyre in British Children's Books in the Twentieth Century (1971).
... Mayne also received great praise for Choristers' Cake. A review in the Times Literary Supplement highlighted the already clearly recognisable qualities of Mayne's writing while also pointing out the difficulties:

Its virtuosity and verbal richness, as well as the undoubted oddness of many of its characters, put it beyond the range of the average reader. But for the child who can meet its demands it will be a deep and memorable experience. In insight, in gaiety, in exuberance of idea and language, it is in a class apart. Mr Mayne is certainly the most interesting, as the most unpredictable, figure in children's books today.

William Mayne: Cathedral Wednesday (1960)

He's also described as "a master – the master in contemporary English writing for children – of setting". At length, though, the scandal must be faced again:

In 2004, Mayne was convicted of 11 charges of sexual abuse with young girls and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and placed on the sex offenders' register for life. It was a death knell for his books, but it did not stop Mayne from writing and he was still doing so at the time of his death. Print on demand had recently helped Mayne, with reprints of some of his titles due to become available on Faber Finds.

How different is the tone of that "It was a death knell for his books" from the SF Encyclopedia's "His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again" ...

Eccleshare's obituary concludes as follows:

The son of a doctor, Mayne was born in Hull and lived in the Yorkshire Dales for most of his life. He was famously reclusive. When asked if he would be interviewed for a children's books magazine, Mayne replied: "I am sure this sort of thing never works. I shall go nowhere to accomplish it and I'm sure others would find it unrewarding to come here. I have not sensed the lack of my not appearing in your neologies ... but if you find it necessary to molest my ancient solitary peace for the sake of your new, maddening piece, I am prepared to tolerate for a short time some person guaranteed not to be strident."

While the obituary as a whole was presumably composed for The Guardian's file of pre-cooked celebrity obituaries sometime before 2004, the choice of this particular quotation for its last paragraph does sound a bit pointed: the term "molest", in particular, seems a strange one for Mayne to have chosen, and given that it was a series of young fans and visitors "guaranteed not to be strident" he was eventually convicted of abusing, the irony is probably intentional.

Clearly the omission of Mayne from Julia Eccleshare's 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up wasn't accidental.

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William Mayne: Earthfasts (1966)

Which leaves us where, exactly? This is certainly not the piece I would like to write about William Mayne, teasing out the subtleties and constant spirit of experiment to be found in his fiction, old and new. As Julia Eccleshare puts it:

in general in Mayne's books, the characters are quiet and gentle. There are no heroics. If there is power, it usually lies within the land and its past; it can temporarily be used by humans passing through. This absence of heroes and the lack of major dramatic focus, combined with increasing obliqueness, caused Mayne to become less popular with children by the mid-1960s as his slower-paced stories failed to chime with the expectations of his readers. But, even before then, Mayne was always admired more by adults than children.

Different children have different expectations. I, too, found Mayne's books and elliptical dialogue difficult to follow at times, but for me that was a refreshing change from the "chosen one" action-hero fantasies which were the norm even then.

Nor did Mayne seem to have a distinct ideological axe to grind:

A recurrent theme of Mayne's stories was how children could see and accept magic and magical explanations, while the adults around them create rational stories to explain the same outcome. There was no sentimentality around Mayne's sense of children's belief. Instead he simply posited that children are as at home with unreality as reality, while adults take a different view. Mayne somehow seemed able to take both views himself, perhaps because he described his writing by saying: "All I am doing is looking at things now and showing them to myself when young."

He may have been - was, in fact - a flawed, childish man, but that is one of the reasons he was able to write so well from a child's perspective, without sentimentality, as Eccleshare admits above.

That trait of being able to take two views at once is crucial to understanding and appreciating his books. They're not action-packed - the land is more of an actor than the characters most of the time, as Eccleshare reminds us.

Like her, I doubt that there'll ever be a full-fledged Mayne revival. He never really was a bestseller, and his books were "always admired more by adults than children." I gather, though, that he's already finding his way back to a quiet vogue as a concocter of subtle and psychologically acute supernatural stories.

If the Weird Tales community can forgive H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard their multiple personal and stylistic transgressions, I can't foresee William Mayne having too much trouble.

BBC: Earthfasts (1994)

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William Mayne

William James Carter Mayne
(1928-2010)

Novels:


1. Follow the Footprints (1953)
   • Follow the Footprints. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. 1953. Oxford Children’s Library. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.
2. The World Upside Down (1954)
   • The World Upside Down. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege / Oxford University Press, 1954.
3. Choir School Series (1955-1963)
   1. A Swarm in May (1955)
      • A Swarm in May. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. 1955. Oxford Children’s Library. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
   2. Choristers' Cake (1956)
      • Chorister’s Cake. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. 1956. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.
   3. Cathedral Wednesday (1960)
      • Cathedral Wednesday. 1960. Leicester: Brockhampton Press, 1972.
   4. Words and Music (1963)
4. The Member for the Marsh (1956)
   • The Member for the Marsh. Illustrated by Lynton Lamb. 1956. London: The Children’s Book Club, 1956.
5. The Blue Boat (1957)
6. A Grass Rope (1957)
7. Underground Alley (1958)
8. [as 'Dynely James'] The Gobbling Billy (1959)
   • [with Dick Caesar] The Gobbling Billy. 1959. Knight Books. Leicester: Brockhampton, 1969.
9. The Rolling Season (1960)
10. The Changeling (1961)
11. The Glass Ball. Illustrated by Janet Duchesne (1961)
12. The Twelve Dancers (1962)
    • The Twelve Dancers. Illustrated by Lynton Lamb. 1962. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
13. Sand (1962)
    • Sand. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1964. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
14. Plot Night (1963)
15. The Changeling (1963)
16. A Parcel of Trees (1963)
    • A Parcel of Trees. Illustrated by Margery Gill. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
17. Underground Alley (1963)
18. Whistling Rufus (1964)
19. No More School (1965)
    • No More School. Illustrated by Peter Warner. 1965. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
20. Pig in the Middle (1965)
21. Earthfasts Series (1966-2000)
    1. Earthfasts (1966)
       • Earthfasts. 1966. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
    2. Cradlefasts (1995)
    3. Candlefasts (2000)
       • Candlefasts. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2000.
22. The Battlefield (1967)
    • The Battlefield. Illustrated by Mary Russon. 1967. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
23. The Old Zion (1967)
24. Over the Hills and Far Away [aka 'The Hill Road']. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska (1968)
25. The House on Fairmount (1968)
26. The Hill Road (1969)
27. Ravensgill (1970)
    • Ravensgill. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970.
28. A Game of Dark (1971)
    • A Game of Dark. 1971. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
29. Royal Harry (1971)
30. The Incline (1972)
31. [as 'Martin Cobalt'] The Swallows [aka 'The Pool of Swallows'] (1972)
32. Skiffy Series (1972-1982)
    1. Skiffy (1972)
       • Skiffy. Illustrated by Nicholas Fisk. 1972. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
    2. Skiffy and the Twin Planets (1982)
33. The Jersey Shore (1973)
34. A Year and a Day. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska (1976)
35. It (1977)
    • It. 1977. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
36. Max's Dream. Illustrated by Laszlo Acs (1977)
37. While the Bells Ring. Illustrated by Janet Rawlins (1979)
38. The Patchwork Cat. Illustrated by Nicola Bayley (1981)
39. Winter Quarters (1982)
    • Winter Quarters. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1982. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
40. Salt River Times. Illustrated by Elizabeth Honey (1982)
    • Salt River Times. Illustrated by Elizabeth Honey. 1980. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
41. The Mouldy. Illustrated by Nicola Bayley (1983)
42. Hob Series (1984-1997)
    1. The Blue Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
    2. The Green Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
    3. The Red Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
    4. The Yellow Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
    5. The Book of Hob Stories. [Omnibus]. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1991)
    6. Hob and the Goblins. Illustrated by Norman Messenger (1993)
    7. Hob and the Peddler. Illustrated by Norman Messenger (1997)
43. Drift (1985)
44. Gideon Ahoy! (1987)
    • Gideon Ahoy! Illustrated by Chris Molan. 1987. Plus Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
45. Kelpie (1987)
    • Kelpie. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.
46. Tiger’s Railway (1987)
    • Tiger’s Railway. Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard. London: Walker Books, 1987.
47. Antar and the Eagles (1989)
    • Antar and the Eagles. London: Walker Books, 1989.
48. The Farm that Ran out of Names (1990)
    • The Farm that Ran out of Names. 1990. A Red Fox Book. London: Random Century Children’s Books, 1991.
49. The Men of the House. Illustrated by Michaela Stewart (1990)
50. Low Tide (1992)
    • Low Tide. 1992. A Red Fox Book. London: Random Century Children’s Books, 1993.
51. Oh Grandmama. Illustrated by Maureen Bradley (1993)
52. Cuddy (1994)
53. Bells on her Toes. Illustrated by Maureen Bradley (1994)
54. Fairy Tales of London Town Series (1995-1996)
    1. The Fairy Tales of London Town: Upon Paul's Steeple. Illustrated by Peter Melnyczuk (1995)
    2. The Fairy Tales of London Town: See-Saw Sacradown. Illustrated by Peter Melnyczuk (1996)
55. Lady Muck. Illustrated by Jonathan Heale (1997)
56. Midnight Fair (1997)
57. Captain Ming and the Mermaid (1999)
58. Imogen and the Ark (1999)
59. The Worm in the Well (2002)
    • The Worm in the Well. Hodder Silver Series. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2002.
60. The Animal Garden (2003)
61. Emily Goes To Market. Illustrated by Sophy Williams (2004)
62. Jubilee's Pups (2004)
63. Every Dog (2009)

Short Stories:


64. All the King's Men (1982)
    1. All the King's Men
    2. Boy to Island
    3. Stony Ray
    • All the King’s Men. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.
65. A Small Pudding for Wee Gowry; and Other Stories of Underground Creatures. Illustrated by Martin Cottam (1983)
66. The Blemyah Stories. Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard (1987)
67. The Second Hand Horse (1990)
    • The Second Hand Horse and Other Stories. 1990. Mammoth. London: Mandarin Books, 1992.
68. The Fox Gate and Other Stories. Illustrated by William Geldart (1996)

Edited:


69. Book of Kings (1964)
    • [with Eleanor Farjeon] The Hamish Hamilton Book of Kings. Illustrated by Victor Ambrus. London: Hamish Hamilton Children's Books Ltd., 1964.
70. Book of Queens (1965)
    • [with Eleanor Farjeon] The Hamish Hamilton Book of Queens. Illustrated by Victor Ambrus. London: Hamish Hamilton Children's Books Ltd., 1965.
71. Book of Heroes (1967)
    • A Book of Heroes. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska. 1967. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
72. Book of Giants (1968)
    • A Book of Giants. Illustrated by Raymond Briggs. 1968. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

William Mayne (16 March 1928 - 24 March 2010)

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The (Daft) Afterlife of Doctor Dee

Dr John Dee (1527-1609)

When local poet James Norcliffe published the collection Letters to Dr Dee in 1993, he thought it necessary to add the following explanatory note about his title:

Despite the oriental sounding name, the Dee I write to in these sequences is not Van Gulik's Chinese Magistrate of the Tang Dynasty, but John Dee, the Elizabethan magus. Dee was a man who straddled the medieval and modern worlds, a true alchemist of the crystal ball gazing type, a searcher of the philosopher's stone, the astrologer for Elizabeth I; and yet probably the foremost mathematician of his day, the man whose navigational assistance helped Frobisher in his search for the North-West Passage. Dee was reported to have had the largest personal library of any contemporary European at his home in Mortlake. I had been reading about this odd combination of mystic and rational man and I found it interesting to address my notes to him.

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura: James Norcliffe (1946- )

James Norcliffe. Letters to Dr Dee. Hazard Poets. Christchurch: Hazard Press, 1993.

I'm not sure if Norcliffe would run into the same difficulties with name recognition now as he did then. I've already had my say on the subject of "Van Gulik's Chinese Magistrate of the Tang Dynasty," Judge Dee, so I thought this might be the moment to extend the same courtesy to Dr John Dee, Norcliffe's "Elizabethan magus."

Or rather, what interests me here is not so much Dr Dee himself, fascinating - albeit distinctly dodgy - figure though he undoubtedly was, but the various roles he's been allotted in popular culture since his death in penury, a forgotten man, in 1609 (or was it toward the end of 1608? Nobody seems to be quite sure).

Peter French: John Dee (1972)

Peter French. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. 1972. New York: Dorset Press, 1989.

One of the most vital building blocks in Dee's posthumous reputation is the book above, which I was fortunate enough to find a second-hand copy of the other day (though I'd known of its existence for many years). It's referred to repeatedly in the later works of Frances Yates, undoubtedly one of the most influential modern historians of the Hermetic and esoteric strains in Renaissance thought.

Frances Yates: Theatre of the World (1969)

Frances Yates. Theatre of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.

The last paper Yates gave in her lifetime was on, in fact, on John Dee, and he played an increasingly important (some would say deleterious) role in her thinking from the 1970s onwards. In brief, her contention was that his acknowledged skill as a mathematician and scientist should not be overshadowed by his popular reputation as a kind of Doctor Faustus, consorting with demons and spirits for dubious ends.

Frances Yates: The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979)

Frances Yates. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. 1979. Ark Paperbacks. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

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Méric Casaubon: A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits (1659)

Meric Casaubon. A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. 1659. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing LLC, n.d.

The tone of the earlier writing about Dr Dee was largely set by the book above, Méric Casaubon's rather sensationalist tome recording the experiments Dee performed with his personal medium Edward Kelley, a dubious con-man who persuaded Dee that he could not only establish contact with spirits, but that this knowledge could be used to achieve the Philosopher's Stone.

Dr John Dee and Edward Kelly call up a spirit (1825)

The two scholars did a kind of European tour through the lands of the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-1580s, during which:

They had audiences with Emperor Rudolf II in Prague Castle and King Stephen Báthory of Poland, whom they attempted to convince of the importance of angelic communication.

They were suspected, however - probably justifiably - as passing on information to Queen Elizabeth's spymaster Francis Walsingham at the same time as pursuing their alchemical researches, which may explain some of the suspicion with which they were treated.

In 1587, at a spiritual conference in Bohemia, Kelley told Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered the men to share all their possessions, including their wives ... The order for wife-sharing caused Dee anguish, but he apparently did not doubt it was genuine and they apparently shared wives. However, Dee broke off the conferences immediately afterwards. He returned to England in 1589, while Kelley went on to be the alchemist to Emperor Rudolf II.

Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612)

Kelley eventually fell from grace when he failed, despite all his grandiose promises to the Emperor, to produce gold from base metal. He died trying to escape from prison sometime around 1597-98.

Dee, too, had a rather unfortunate time of it in his later years:

Dee returned to Mortlake after six years abroad to find his home vandalised, his library ruined and many of his prized books and instruments stolen. Furthermore, he found that increasing criticism of occult practices had made England still less hospitable to his magical practices and natural philosophy.

The accession of the rabid witchhunter and demonologist King James to the throne in 1603 was not good news for Dee. While Elizabeth had continued to back her old astrologer and adviser to some extent, even when he fell from favour everywhere else, James did not feel similarly inclined.

Dee was, it seems, forced to sell off most of the remainder of his once awe-inspiring library to provide for daily necessities for himself and his daughter Katherine.

John Dee memorial plaque (Mortlake, 2013)

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Colin Wilson: The Occult (1971)

Colin Wilson. The Occult: A History. 1971. Occult Trilogy #1. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

For a spirited (if somewhat sensationalist) account of all these doings, you could do worse than read the relevant section in Colin Wilson's bestselling page-turner The Occult. Nobody ever accused Wilson of not knowing a good story when he ran across it, and much of the subsequent palaver about Doctor Dee is probably based on the information included in his book.

Benjamin Woolley: The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee (2001)

Benjamin Woolley. The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee. 2001. A Flamingo Book. London: HarperCollins, 2002.

If, however, you'd like to read something a bit more reliable about the life and times of this extraordinary man, the book above might be a better place to go. If you'd like even more detail than that, however, I'd recommend a perusal of his surviving diaries.

Edward Fenton, ed.: The Diaries of John Dee (1998)

Edward Fenton, ed. The Diaries of John Dee. Charlbury, Oxfordshire: Day Books, 1998.

There's an edition of Halliwell's nineteenth-century edition of Dee's private diary available online, also well worth a look:

James Halliwell: The Private Diary of Dr John Dee (1842)

The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, and the Catalogue of His Library of Manuscripts. Ed James Orchard Halliwell. London: Printed for the camden Society, 1842.

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Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (1594)

Dee's credibility problems began pretty early. Already, in his own lifetime, he was popularly regarded as a sinister occultist, and there are many reasons to suppose that Doctor Faustus in Marlowe's play is at least partly based on him and his jaunts with Edward Kelley - his Mephistopheles - around Central Europe.

Elizabeth appointed Dee Warden of the sternly Protestant Christ's College, Manchester in 1595, shortly after the first performances of Marlowe's masterpiece, and it's tempting to conjecture that this may be one of the reasons "he could not exert much control over its fellows, who despised or cheated him."

William Shakespeare: The Tempest (1610-11)

Was the magician Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, in Shakespeare's penultimate play The Tempest similarly based on Dee? The answer is probably yes. The latter had, after all, recently died, which made him fair game for an enterprising playwright. And, after all, what other models for a old-school Renaissance Magus were to be found in Jacobean Britain?

After that the trail went cold for a bit until the appearance of Méric Casaubon's immensely damaging account of Dee's séances with Edward Kelley (mentioned above) in 1659. This may not have been Casaubon's intention, but it did mean that Dee was now considered just one more name on a long list of credulous alchemists and occultists (Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Ficino, Cagliostro) whose ideas had been swept into oblivion by the new experimental science of the Enlightenment.

Dee was, accordingly, the obvious suspect to have formerly owned the famously indecipherable Voynich manuscript:

The Voynich Manuscript (c. 15th century)

Dee has often been associated with the Voynich manuscript. Wilfrid Michael Voynich, who bought the manuscript in 1912, suggested that Dee may have owned it and sold it to Rudolph II. Dee's contacts with Rudolph were less extensive than had been thought, however, and Dee's diaries show no evidence of a sale.

Similarly, H. P. Lovecraft felt no qualms about dubbing him translator of the English version of his imaginary forbidden tome, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred's Kitab al-Azif, or Necronomicon:

Dr. John Dee, trans.: The Necronomicon (1596)

It wasn't until later in the twentieth century that scholars began to pay him serious attention again. But the appearance of various studies of his influence on the English Renaissance by by Frances Yates and her successors was, unfortunately, accompanied by some rather less flattering portrayals.

Sandman fandom wiki: John Dee

The character John Dee (aka Doctor Destiny), for instance, appeared in the first, 1988-1989 story-arc of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman as a psychopathic killer, the son of Aleister Crowley-like Magus Roderick Burgess and his absconding lover Ethel Cripps. At the end of his rampage in the comic he's returned to a cell in Arkham Asylum.

Sandman fandom wiki: David Thewliss as John Dee (Netflix, 2022)

Neil Gaiman. The Sandman Library I: Preludes & Nocturnes. [Issues #1–8, 1988–1989]. 1991. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 1995.

Peter Ackroyd's contribution to this thriving sub-genre is not really much better. His House of Dr Dee lacks the dramatic energy and interest of previous efforts such as Hawksmoor (1985) or Chatterton (1987). It's almost as if he expects the famous house at Mortlake to supply the plotting for him. Even Wikipedia is hard put to it to sum up the point of it all:

The novel is a mix of the two men's stories as Palmer continues to find out more about the doctor. As the investigation continues, it is revealed that both men are similar in that they are both selfish and would rather be left to themselves.

A little like their author, one is tempted to add.

Peter Ackroyd: The House of Dr Dee (1993)

I won't go into all the other movies, fictions and video games inspired by - or including - Dr Dee. Some of the brighter spots are John Crowley's four-volume novel-sequence Ægypt (1987-2007); Michael Scott's six-volume fantasy series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (2007-12); and Phil Rickman's The Bones of Avalon (2010), where Dee plays an undercover secret agent turned detective.

You can find a more comprehensive list here.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the bunch to date is Blur-alumnus Damon Albarn's 2011 opera Dr Dee:

Damon Albarn: Dr Dee: An English Opera (2011)

There was once an Englishman so influential that he defined how we measure years, so quintessential that he lives on in Shakespeare’s words; yet so shrouded in mystery that he’s fallen from the very pages of history itself.
That man was Dr Dee – astrologer, courtier, alchemist, and spy.

The opera was originally conceived as a collaboration with comics-maestro (and self-styled modern Magus) Alan Moore, who initially suggested this choice of subject. The collaboration soon broke down, but Albarn persevered with the project.

Not having seen it, I can't comment further, but:

The Guardian gave the Manchester production four stars, saying that it "reaches to the heart of the tragedy of an overreaching intellect destroyed by a deal with a second-rate Mephistopheles". The Independent also awarded four stars, saying that the production was "mostly a triumph ... Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph gave the same star-rating, describing the opera as "fresh, original and heartfelt". The NME described it as "visually sumptuous and musically haunting".

Mind you, there's a rather amusing rant on a blog called The Renaissance Mathematicus entitled "Mythologizing John Dee" which sets out to unpack all the half-truths and false assumptions in the blurb above, sent out by the Manchester Festival.

Let’s take a look at how many of the facts ... are correct. John Dee did not define how we measure the years. He was consulted by the court on the possibility of introducing the Gregorian Calendar into England ... Far from being so shrouded in mystery that he’s fallen from the pages of history I can think of no other minor figure from the Elizabethan Age, and let us not fool ourselves in comparison to many others Dee in a very minor figure, who is so present in the pages of history. In not just British but European literature Dee is THE Renaissance Magus, minor and major figure in novels, films and theatre.
The list, astrologer, courtier, alchemist and spy, leaves out his principle [sic. - for "principal"] occupation: mathematician. Dee was one of the leading mathematical practitioners of the age known and respected throughout Europe. Also calling him a courtier is not strictly correct as although he was often consulted by the court as an expert on a wide range of topics he never succeeded in his aim of receiving an official appointment at court, Elizabeth and her advisors preferring to keep him at arms [sic] length ...
Lastly we turn to his supposed inspiration of Shakespeare and Marlow [sic]. The claim that he was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero is a rather dubious supposition with no proven basis in fact. This claim seems to have been fuelled by Peter Greenaway basing his Prospero, in the film Prospero’s Books, at least partially on Dee.

Peter Greenaway, dir. : Prospero’s Books (1991)

Peter Greenaway. Prospero’s Books: A Film of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1991.

It's somehow comforting to know that Dr Dee can still rouse such passions after all these years! (And no doubt few of my own blogposts are free from typos, either ...) Is that true about Prospero’s Books, though? Did it really suggest the Dee-as-Prospero theory? It may have popularised it, but it certainly didn't start it:

In an analysis of The Tempest, Frances Yates writes: “It is inevitable and unavoidable in thinking of Prospero to bring in the name of John Dee, the great mathematical magus of whom Shakespeare must have known, the teacher of Philip Sidney, and deeply in the confidence of Queen Elizabeth I."

Yates's book Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach was first published in 1975, long before Greenaway's film.

Another blogger sums up the present situation as follows:

It is popular to run to the historical visage of the famous physician, astrologer, and scrier, John Dee, as a probable influence whenever the stereotype of the bearded, crystal gazing, and be-robed wizard appears in literature or mythology. Dee has been suggested for Soloman of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Prospero of the Tempest, Faust of the Faust legends, and many other similar wizard-like personages over the centuries.

Why can't we just give the poor guy a rest? "You were silly like us," as Auden said of W. B. Yeats, another inveterate Occultist:

ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
[In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming]

- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)

"In his house at Mortlake dead Dee waits dreaming." All he ever wanted, apparently, was just to read his books in peace and quiet, whilst conferring with angels or spirits from time to time by means of his Enochian tablets ...

John Dee: Enochian tablets

The "Red Flag" Bookshelf Revisited

Jess McHugh: "Top 7 Warning Signs in a Man's Bookshelf"
[@MchughJess, Twitter, 24 August 2020]

In his fascinating essay "Unpacking the 'Red Flag' Bookshelf: Negotiating Literary Value on Twitter." [English Studies. 103:5 (2022): 706-731], my friend - and former collaborator on the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive - Edmund King expertly breaks down the context and larger implications of the list above.

In particular, he reveals - to ignorant ol' cellphoneless me, at any rate - the existence of a personage known as the "lit-bro":

The “Lit-Bro,” according to Geoff Baillie [in his article "Bro, Do You Even Lit?” The Strand (2015)] was “that guy in your English course: loquacious” and “eager to impress,” but chauvinistic towards women and ultimately utilitarian in his approach to literature. “Rather than reading for enjoyment or enlightenment,” Baillie suggested, “Lit-Bros treat reading as a means to show off how smart and cultured they are.”

King goes on to suggest that the consequent wide take-up of the term "indicates that the lit-bro resonated with a much wider audience than students in graduate-level American creative writing courses."

That's putting it mildly! I've certainly run into more than my fair share of lit-bros myself ... Alas, I always lacked the poise and savoir-faire to aspire to that lofty perch myself.

But Jess McHugh's list presumably exists more as an early warning system for the detection of potential stalkers and serial killers than of the lesser menace of mansplaining pseuds. There'd be a lot more lit theory and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry on the latter's shelves, I would imagine.

Before we begin to break down the reasoning behind McHugh's particular selections, though, it might be as well to point out (as King does) the complex prehistory of such lists:

The title selections in McHugh’s tweet ... resonated with already existing expressions of the “problematic male bookshelf” theme (such as the contents of Dana Schwartz’s 2019 satire, The White Man’s Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon). Although this was not a deliberate reference on McHugh's part, the seemingly metatextual quality generated by these resemblances may have especially appealed to Twitter users already familiar with the genre.

Long before the rise of Twitter, it would appear, lists of “dating red flags” were "an established publishing and advice column phenomenon." In particular:

the most visible application of the “red flag” meme format to bookshelves in the context of dating lay in a series of list-format online articles that appeared in the early 2010s. In a June 2012 Flavorwire article, Emily Temple sought to identify which “books might send a potential mate running for the hills should they be spotted on your nightstand or peeking out from your back pocket.” Based on anonymous contributions from readers and other Flavorwire writers, her article listed J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Ayn Rand, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Hemingway, and “Anything — I don’t care if it’s Infinite Jest or Lolita or Moby-Dick — if it’s on an e-reader.”

This article gave rise to a good deal of correspondence about just why these particular texts were so problematic:

Thompson readers were suspected of straightforwardly identifying with the author, one interviewee commenting that “I have never met a dude who was super-into Hunter S. Thompson who didn’t also wish he were Hunter S. Thompson.” A similar collapse of boundaries between book and reader also applied to Catcher in the Rye. “In my personal experience, any man over a certain age who still idolizes this book also still acts like a child,” one respondent noted.

And so, brick by brick, the "red flag" canon was built:

A 2014 BuzzFeed article took the idea of identifying books with their male readers as an explicit conceit. Structured as a series of short, quick-fire conversations among six female contributors, the piece made humorous predictions about what various books would be like if they were reimagined as dating prospects. Infinite Jest would be “a self-identified feminist who mansplains feminism at you” and tells you “race isn’t real,” while A Farewell to Arms would be “So hot you don’t know why he’s single … until you do.”

Dr. Kit Bryson, Jean-Luc Legris & Selina Fitzherbert: The Complete Naff Guide (1984)

I have to say that all this puts me in mind of such would-be side-splitting self-help manuals of the past as The Complete Naff Guide (which did admittedly while away many a weary hour for me in the 1980s); or - to go back even further - to Nancy Mitford's snobbish nonsense about "U and Non-U" English; or (for that matter) to Stephen Potter's comprehensive guide for social climbers, One-Upmanship (1952).

Richard Buckle, ed.: U and Non-U Revisited (1978)

So it's not by any means that I'm blind to the attraction of such lists. I guess their appeal is two-fold, really. On the one hand, we want to laugh at other people's bad taste; on the other hand, we want to confirm our own superior acumen (if only by avoiding the texts so handily identified for us in advance) ...

Since McHugh's original tweet in 2020, King informs us, her list has inspired a number of other viral tweets on the “red flag bookshelf” meme:

These included one posted by the American comedian Michele Wojciechowski ... on 10 May 2021 that asked, “You’re on a first date with someone and they tell you the name of their favorite book. You immediately leave. What’s the book?” and received nearly 26,000 replies, 27,500 quote tweets (many of which nominated suggested titles), and 37,800 likes.

•

Kat Rosenfield: "top warning signs in a woman’s bookshelf"
[@katrosenfield, Twitter, 24 August 2020]

The next step in the response to McHugh's tweet was, naturally enough, a series of speculations on the possible “warning signs in a woman’s bookshelf”:

A diverse range of female- and male-coded accounts produced parody ... sub-tweeted lists that consciously appropriated and redirected the negative potential of these stereotypes, featuring Anais Nin, Camille Paglia, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen’s Emma, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, “a dog-eared copy of Rebecca,” The SCUM Manifesto, and the assertion that “Wuthering Heights is my favourite book.”

This sub-branch of the meme probably requires its own separate commentary - though I certainly appreciate that detail about the shrunken human head shelved behind a copy of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu ... What I can't quite work out, though, is whether this constitutes a critique or an endorsement of the French writer's somewhat fluid gender identity. Or neither. It's still pretty funny, though.

No, I think I'd better just stick to the straight and narrow and continue to speculate just why Jess McHugh's original group of authors have ended up in the dogbox. To recapitulate, then, her not-so-magnificent seven are (in alphabetical order):

1. Charles Bukowski
2. Johann Wolgang von Goethe
3. Ernest Hemingway
4. Vladimir Nabokov
5. Ayn Rand
6. Ivan Turgenev
7. David Foster Wallace

To these we should probably add the two further writers in Emily Temple's 2012 Flavorwire article (she also mentions Moby-Dick in passing, but only if it's "on an e-reader", so I think we can absolve Herman Melville from inclusion - for now, at least):


8. J. D. Salinger
9. Hunter S. Thompson

But the roll of dishonour doesn't really end there. King mentions that a large number of the responses to McHugh's original tweet listed:

additional “warning sign” authors and titles. The most commonly suggested titles were J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, with five nominations each. Other titles and authors suggested by more than one user were Robert Greene’s 1998 self-help book, The 48 Laws of Power (three nominations), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (two nominations), and Friedrich Nietzsche (two nominations) ...

My own simple strategy of comparing my book collection to the "warning signs" list "and then simply tallying how many of its seven items they owned or had read" was also (unsurprisingly) anticipated by a number of the male respondents.

Several users suggested that their ownership of titles by William S. Burroughs, Mark Danielewski, Bret Easton Ellis, H. P. Lovecraft, and Mark Twain might also be “problematic.”

So where does that leave us? With a lot more candidates for inclusion, obviously:


10. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)
11. Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power (1998)
12. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996)

along with the following authors:


13. William S. Burroughs
14. Mark Danielewski
15. Fyodor Dostoevsky
16. Bret Easton Ellis
17. H. P. Lovecraft
18. Friedrich Nietzsche
19. Mark Twain

It's all a bit messy, since sometimes a particular book is specified, and sometimes the entire tenor of an author's work is in question, but I'd suggest that a master-list of all of these "red flag" authors, each with a "representative" title, could easily be compiled along the following lines:

[NB: If I own any books by the author in question, I've put the name in bold;
if I own that particular title, I've put that in bold, too].

•

Charles Bukowski


Henry Charles Bukowski
(1920-1994)



1. Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973. 1974. Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1989.

There is something a little cultish about Bukowski's admirers. He's generally the only poet they read, and the blunt reductiveness of his style is seen by them as a kind of guarantee of integrity. And yet, having said that, there must be a reason that I still own a number of his books - as well as a copy of Howard Sounes' biography Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (1998). His horror and despair resulted in some terrifyingly effective poems - not to mention the blank, Beckettian neurosis of his "novels". I wouldn't want to meet him, but I do think he has something unique to say. He shows no sign of fading on the page, as so many modish authors do.
Edmund King records in his essay that one of the tweets prompted by McHugh's list "suggested that stigmatising Bukowski readers could be regarded as 'classist'.” Whether or not one accepts that contention, King also mentions a tweet thread:

by the American screenwriter Melissa Turkington ... [which] posted (with her own affirming commentary) photographs of an anonymous female reader’s disparaging marginalia that she had discovered in a second-hand copy of Charles Bukowski’s Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977).

So the battle-lines have certainly been drawn.


•

William S. Burroughs


William Seward Burroughs
(1914-1997)



2. Naked Lunch. 1959. Introduction by J. G. Ballard. Flamingo Modern Classics. London: Flamingo, 1993.

I feel a lot less equivocal about owning Naked Lunch - along with most of Burrough's other works - than those few books by Bukowski. As for reading him: well, many of his texts - particularly during the 'cut-ups' era - are admittedly a bit of a chore. There is, however, a central core of terrifyingly visceral work saying some things about modern society which could only have come from so complete an outsider as Burroughs.
Does he still have fans? Maybe. I've never met any. For the most part, like so many counter-culture authors, he seems to be read now mostly by aging hippies and literature professors (not that these categories are mutually exclusive).


•

Mark Z. Danielewski


Mark Zbigniew Danielewski
(1966- )



3. House of Leaves. 2000. London: Doubleday, 2001.

I did enjoy House of Leaves - but then, I'm rather keen on odd layouts for books, and Danielewski must have driven his printers mad with all those blocks of differently-sized text leaking into marginalia and other acts of graphic bravado. The story was solid, though - if a little over-elaborated in parts - and it was a certain feeling of anticipation that I opened the copy of his follow-up novel, Only Revolutions (2006), which I'd purchased from a local second-hand bookshop. They had a stack of them there, oddly enough. I wonder why?
I don't know who his target audience was - "lit-bros", perhaps - but this new book was unfortunately a long way outside my comfort zone. The article about it on Wikipedia does its best to explain it as follows:

By reading both stories some sense can be made from this poetic styled puzzle. The words written are a vague mix of poetry and stream of consciousness prose. Both Hailey and Sam depict their feelings as well as ideas and thoughts towards one another.

Is that enough to sustain interest through all those hundreds of tightly-packed pages, though? Not for me, alas. His projected 27-part epic The Familiar (2015-2017) appears to have bogged down after a mere five volumes. He's certainly a talented writer, and perhaps future ages will hail him as a genius, but (for now, at least) I fear my interest peaked with House of Leaves.


•

Fyodor Dostoevsky


Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
(1821-1882)



4. Crime and Punishment. 1866. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1914. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 4 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1964.

I first came across a link to Edmund King's intriguing essay in the replies below a May 1, 2025 facebook post by David Hering, entitled "The absolute worst cultural trend of the last decade staggers on." Hering went on to add, with the caption "What the hell, sure":



Zachary Norwood replied to this: "This is sad. Lolita and Crime and Punishment are necessary reads, imho."
While he isn't included in King's analysis of the responses to McHugh's tweet, Dostoevsky does seem a natural candidate for the list, given the notorious gloominess and psychological intensity of many of his plots. Whether or not it's true that his work appeals more to adolescents than to "mature" adults, there's no doubt that it contains a good deal of tortured introspection.
What's more, like most nineteenth-century Russian novels, his later works (in particular) are very long, and therefore somewhat time-consuming to read. They certainly match the paradigm of being exceptionally difficult and demanding common to many of the other items included here. For myself, I'd gladly reread The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot, but it's been a long time since I felt the impulse to revisit Crime and Punishment or The Possessed.


•

Bret Easton Ellis


Bret Easton Ellis
(1964- )



5. American Psycho (1991)

I do remember seeing the ugly-looking paperback version of this book for sale in local bookshops - in a clingfilm wrapper so that children wouldn't pick it up and chance upon some appallingly gruesome scene which might scar them for life. It was the first time I'd seen such an extreme reaction to a novel in these parts, but I fear that even that didn't tempt me to read it. I've never been a big fan of splatter-movies and gore in general.
Of course, the book is far more sophisticated than that (as we were told ad nauseam by various wiseacres at the time): a satire on the shallowness and consumerism of the 1980s. I did eventually watch the movie, but - dare I say it? - found it more boring than anything else. The murder scenes were nasty, but it was all the stuff about business cards and ties and so on which was really yawn-making. I understand that that was the point Ellis was making, but there's always a certain risk in underlining just how boring some things are by portraying them boringly.
Again, I've never met anyone who seemed to admire the book or to have enjoyed reading it, but it certainly made Bret Easton Ellis a mountain of moola and confirmed his status as an "edgy" star author.


•

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)



6. The Sufferings of Young Werther. 1774. Trans. Bayard Quincy Morgan. 1957. London: John Calder, 1976.

The question "Why Goethe?" is a pretty obvious one, and it's one which came up repeatedly in the response to McHugh's original tweet:

A representative example of these tweets asked, “What’s wrong with Goethe? Wilhelm Meister is wonderful.”

Goethe's numerous love affairs might be regarded as somewhat problematic, I suppose, though hardly affecting his status as a "classic" author. Luckily King is able to tell us why he's there:

The large number of users puzzled by Goethe’s presence in the list ... were presumably unaware of Goethe’s inclusion in earlier iterations of “problematic male bookshelf” discourse, such as Dana Schwartz’s White Man’s Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon. The specific pushback against Goethe’s inclusion also, perhaps, illustrates the highly US-centric nature of the “red-flag bookshelf” meme. A German Twitter user would likely have a very different response to Goethe’s presence on the list than an American user familiar with Schwartz’s book and, perhaps, with Goethe’s recent appropriation by certain platform-based micro-celebrities associated with “incel” (involuntary-celibate) American internet subcultures.

I'm assuming that it's his early novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers which inspired the interest of these "micro-celebrities." It's useful, too, to be informed what "incel" (mentioned in Kat Rosenfield's tweet above) means - as well as being reminded how "US-centric" all this palaver actually is.


•

Robert Greene


Robert Greene
(1959- )



7. The 48 Laws of Power (1998)

I hadn't previously heard of this book, so it's been quite interesting to read up on it. In the Reviews section of the Wikipedia article devoted to Greene, I note the following reactions:

People's Magazine has referred to it as "a wry primer for people who desperately want to be on top." Allure described the book as “satisfyingly dense", and "literary", and continued that it is filled "with fantastic examples of genius power-game players" ... Jerry Adler, writing in Newsweek, lists ways the laws contradict one another and states, "Intending the opposite, Greene has actually produced one of the best arguments since the New Testament for humility and obscurity." Kirkus Reviews said Greene offers no evidence to support his world view, that his laws contradict each other, and that the book is "simply nonsense".

Still, it so impressed the rapper 50 Cent that he proposed a collaboration between Greene and himself to produce a sequel. The result, The Fiftieth Law, became, in due course, another bestseller.
The 48 Laws of Power does sound as if it's earned its place on any respectable "red flag" list, but perhaps I'm just biassed against self-help books in general ...


•

Ernest Hemingway


Ernest Miller Hemingway
(1899-1961)



8. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

I haven't read it for many years, but this novel affected me greatly when I was a teenager. I still recall many passages from it, and it's hard for me to see it as constituting any kind of disgrace either to its author or its many admirers.
It's important to note that what McHugh actually says is: "Too Much Hemingway", rather than citing any particular text (or texts). So the question then becomes, how much is too much? And, as usual, I fear the answer may be: "If you have to ask, then you're already in trouble."
My own obsession with literary completism means that collecting Hemingway involves all of Hemingway: novels, stories, travelogues, biographies and memoirs included. But then that's probably a problem of a different stripe from the one envisaged by McHugh.


•

Jack Kerouac


Jack Kerouac
(1922-1969)



9. On the Road. 1957. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.

This one, too, I read as a teenager, but I'm afraid that even then I found it a bit difficult to understand what all the fuss was about. I'd been expecting something considerably more revolutionary and mind-bending, I suppose.
I suppose a generalised fear of hippiedom in general is not entirely unreasonable, but otherwise I would see this as a fairly innocuous addition to any respectable bookshelf.


•

H. P. Lovecraft


Howard Phillips Lovecraft
(1890–1937)



10. "The Horror at Red Hook" (1925). In Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. Ed. August Derleth. 1965. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1975.

The thing to note about Lovecraft is that he wore his prejudices on his sleeve to such an extent that they're impossible to ignore. His phobias included (according to a blogpost by David Haden):

• Gelatinous seafood and the smell of fish (severe).
• Unfamilar types of human faces that deviated from his ethnic norm (severe).
• Doctors and hospitals (mild).
• Large enclosed spaces - subway systems, large caves etc. (mild).
• He also seems to have had a mild phobia about tall buildings and the possibility of being trapped under one after a collapse.
• Very cold weather (probably justifiable, since he tended to faint in it).

He was, to be quite honest, one sick puppy. And yet ... there's something endearing about him, nevertheless. He was such a simple soul - so fond of writing to his friends about his latest antiquarian and literary discoveries, so keen on travelling to strange cities and examining every architectural detail of their buildings.
If you read through the five volumes of his Selected Letters (as I have) you begin to feel to know the man - and I have to say that a lot of the appallingly racist and sexist comments he made on a regular basis seem, in context, more like listening to a South Islander slag off Aucklanders than manifestations of a violent Ku Klux Klan-style mania. He was just as prone to look down on anyone who wasn't fortunate enough to have been born in Providence, Rhode Island as on people of other ethnicities. His wife, who was Jewish, asked him once how he could be such an antisemite in theory and still be married to her. "Oh, you're different," he replied. "You're civilised."
I don't say this to excuse him (Heaven forbid!) but if you can get past your immediate sense of recoil at his racist rantings - generally in the context of fictional recreations of New York, which seems to have appalled and alienated him to an extraordinary degree during the 18 months or so he lived there - you may find the sheer gothic power of his writing and the acuteness of his intellect not without interest.


•

Vladimir Nabokov


Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
(1899-1977)



11. Lolita. 1955. A Corgi Book. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1965.

King mentions that five of the tweets prompted by McHugh's list "defended Lolita’s literary value".

One user judged it “brilliant” despite her having avoided reading it for many years due to its subject matter. Another female poster claimed that the book had a feminist message about the male domination of women and that any man who understood it in that way was “a keeper.”

I used to tutor a university paper on the modern novel which included lectures on Lolita by Professor Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer. Any critical distance between author and biographer had long since evaporated during all his years of researching the great genius (whom, interestingly, he never met). To hear Brian talk, you'd think Lolita was a pure morality tale: a horror story told from the point of view of the monster. And there's something to be said for this view. I should know. Brian said it all - at length.
Nabokov's own comments about the inspiration for the novel are interesting in this respect:

As as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.

But is the ape to be identified with Humbert, confined in the cage of his own intricately self-justified perversion? Or is it "Lolita" (Dolores Haze herself) - warped by his remorseless abuse into the proud but damaged young woman we encounter briefly towards the end - who can see nothing beyond these manifestations of her own imprisonment?
It's hard to imagine anyone actually being sexually aroused by the intricate logorrhoea of Nabokov's strange novel, but I suppose anything is possible. As a study in morbid psychology, it certainly does run the risk of encouraging readers to identify with the solipsistic Humbert rather than with his (carefully muted) victims, but that is the risk of fiction: no matter how ironic your intent, someone can always be found who will take it all literally.
Did Nabokov himself share Humbert's proclivities? He does such an excellent job of portraying the mentality of such a man, that it does make one wonder. But then, if you did have such urges, would writing a confessional novel about them be such a wise procedure? And Nabokov was nothing if not canny.
All in all, while he was clearly able to imagine a Humbert, there's really no reason to suspect that there was any more to what he was doing in the novel than that.


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Friedrich Nietzsche


Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(1844-1900)



12. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. 1883-1885. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. 1961. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.

In a way I envy those who can sit down and read through the works of Nietzsche. I have to say that I tend to nod off pretty quickly - but then that applies to my experience of the writings of most other Germanic metaphysicians. Dare I suggest that many of his staunchest admirers base their enthusiasm on a few stock aphorisms, plus some dim recollections of a first-year philosophy course?

Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!

"Goest thou to women? Forget not thy whip!" Certainly this particular piece of wisdom, from Also sprach Zarathustra, has not exactly endeared him to posterity. An interesting discussion on the Philosophy Forum suggests that, in context, Zarathustra may be referring here to "life" and "wisdom" as female personifications - thus implying that you should impose yourself upon life rather than simply submitting to it.
Unfortunately for this reading, however, there are plenty of other misogynistic passages in Zarathustra's long rant which leave rather less room for manoeuvre:

Surface is woman's soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.
Man's soul, however, is deep, its current gusheth in subterranean caverns: woman surmiseth its force, but comprehendeth it not.

It does appear to be true that Nietzsche's final work The Will to Power was edited for posthumous publication by his enthusiastically Nazi sister in order to align it more with the Führer's views. Nevertheless, I can see the justification in seeing copies of any of his works in pride of place as a danger sign in a potential partner.
The most endearing thing about the man seems, in retrospect, to be his (alleged) sympathy for carthorses.


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Chuck Palahniuk


Chuck Palahniuk
(1962- )



13. Fight Club (1996)

I do own one novel by Chuck Palahniuk. I had some discussions with a graduate student in our department who was studying his work, during which she did her best to convince me that it constituted some great Balzacian Comédie humaine of interlocking fictions.
I didn't much like the film of Fight Club - though the book may well be better for all I know. It was impossible for me to persuade myself that a bunch of guys who saw Edward Norton beating himself up in a parking lot would immediately adopt him as their guru. Having a fist-fight with Brad Pitt, yes, maybe - but punching himself? Nah. They'd either laugh and move on, or give him a kicking themselves on general principles.
The book of his I did end up buying was called Haunted: A Novel of Stories (2005). I'd hoped for something ghostly, but the first story concerned a boy who tried to use a vacuum cleaner for various nefarious purposes and ended up doing permanent damage to his insides. It just didn't seem either: 1/ life-enhancing; or 2/ plausible enough for me to take much of an interest in it.
So I guess I'd have to see some justification for this one's red flag status, though our quondam PhD student would certainly demur.


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Ayn Rand


Ayn Rand
(1905-1982)



14. Atlas Shrugged (1957)

Well, I haven't read any of her books, so I don't really have a right to an opinion. Certainly the overall tenor of her views - as expounded in the various articles about her I have read - does sound a little on the reactionary side. Nor has the critical reponse to her work been particularly encouraging:

Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote that "reviewers [of Atlas Shrugged] seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the cleverest put-downs", with reviews including comments that it was "written out of hate" and showed "remorseless hectoring and prolixity". Whittaker Chambers wrote what was later called the novel's most "notorious" review for the conservative magazine National Review. He accused Rand of supporting a godless system (which he related to that of the Soviets), claiming, "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard ... commanding: 'To a gas chamber—go!'".

In 2019, Lisa Duggan described Rand's fiction as popular and influential on many readers, despite being easy to criticize for

her cartoonish characters and melodramatic plots, her rigid moralizing, her middle-to-lowbrow aesthetic preferences ... and philosophical strivings.

All in all, beyond her immediate magic circle of "Objectivist" disciples, it's hard to find anyone much who seems to rate her either as a novelist or a philosopher.


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J. D. Salinger


Jerome David Salinger
(1919–2010)



15. The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

Well, yes, like everyone else, I read this book as a teenager. I did enjoy it, but it didn't impress me as much as his short stories, to be honest. Franny and Zooey is probably my favourite book of his.
The reason why Salinger came up in the correspondence caused by Emily Temple's 2012 Flavorwire article was apparently because of a "collapse of boundaries between book and reader" in the case of The Catcher in the Rye specifically:

“In my personal experience, any man over a certain age who still idolizes this book also still acts like a child,” one respondent noted.

Certainly a recent viewing of the 2013 Salinger documentary revealed just how many earnest seekers would try and hunt down the author in order to receive personal wisdom from him, so there could be something to be said for this point of view. It's a little extreme to equate everyone who "idolizes" the book with those who simply read it, though.


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Hunter S. Thompson


Hunter Stockton Thompson
(1937-2005)



16. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman. 1971. London: Paladin, 1972.

The responses to Emily Temple's 2012 Flavorwire article also contained the following aperçu about the apostle of gonzo journalism:

Thompson readers were suspected of straightforwardly identifying with the author, one interviewee commenting that “I have never met a dude who was super-into Hunter S. Thompson who didn’t also wish he were Hunter S. Thompson.”

I must confess to having myself read most of Thompson's works, including his collected letters. I've never felt any particular mission to become a gonzo journalist myself - I doubt I lack the stamina, for one thing - but Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, in particular, was very informative about the true nature of American politics. The same could be said of his other major works of reportage: Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in their very different ways.
And yes, his super-fans can be a bit of a pain, but Thompson himself seems to me to have had more in common with the equally self-destructive F. Scott Fitzgerald than with most of the other coke-fuelled obsessives of his time. Like Jay Gatsby, Raoul Duke now feels like a figure locked in amber, lost in the dark backwards and abysm of the 1960s.


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Ivan Turgenev


Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
(1818-1883)



17. Fathers and Children: A Novel. 1862. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 4. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1895. London: William Heinemann, 1926.

Nabokov and Nietzsche, yes, I get it - even, perhaps, Goethe. But why has poor old Turgenev - or, rather, more specifically, his most celebrated novel, Fathers and Sons - ended up on this list?
The rather dodgy Gateway to Russia website attempts an answer to the question "why iconic Russian novel 'Fathers and Sons' is still controversial today":

Ivan Turgenev was ... the first author in Russian literature who openly raised the topic of the generational divide. “Aristocracy, liberalism, principles… Just think what a lot of foreign and useless words! To a Russian, they’re no good for anything!” This is what the young nihilist Bazarov thinks about the older generation and its conservative way of living. The novel’s title in Russian is “Otsyidety,” which has become a catchphrase still widely used today.

Bazarov is certainly a bit of a pill, and meeting someone who admired him intensely might be rather a buzz-kill. The main problem Turgenev had with the novel, however, was that it simultaneously offended both the left and the right in Russia: the left because it failed to endorse Bazarov's nihilism; the right because it dared to air such questions at all in a non-judgemental context. ""Oh, those Russians", as Boney M. once put it. You just can't win.


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Mark Twain


Samuel Langhorne Clemens
['Mark Twain']
(1835-1910)



18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884. Ed. Peter Coveney. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Mark Twain had a good deal to say on a great many subjects throughout the course of his chequered career. I don't quite know why anybody should feel ashamed to have his books on their shelves. True, Huck's companion on his raft-trip ("Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!", in Leslie Fiedler's famous phrase) has a name which can no longer be repeated in polite society - a little like the title of Joseph Conrad's third novel - but is that really of consequence?
For myself, Twain's strident denunciations of European colonial aggression in the Congo, coupled with his even more eloquent account of the attempts at genocide by the American government in the Philippines, would be sufficient in themselves be enough to place him on the side of the angels.
"He was the Lincoln of our literature," stated William Dean Howells. Like Lincoln, his complex views on race and freedom have received almost as much criticism as praise in recent years. In the end, though, if you're blind to the merits of the great emancipator, then I suspect that you may have set your bar impossibly high.
The same applies to Mark Twain. He never created a flawless book - but at his best, as in certain chapters of Huckleberry Finn, he wrote in letters of fire. As Hemingway said in The Green Hills of Africa: “It's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."


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David Foster Wallace


David Foster Wallace
(1962-2008)



19. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996.

Edmund King explains helpfully that: "Revelations of domestic violence by David Foster Wallace made in the context of the #MeToo movement in 2018 ... moved journalist Julius Taranto to publicly re-evaluate his youthful Wallace fandom":

[Wallace’s] work reads differently to me now than it did then. I’m a little ashamed of how much I once loved it. It … seems sort of juvenile and aggressive in a way I didn’t sense before. It feels infected by postmortem evidence of his real-life moral failings, including his pretty shameful treatment of women.

I did try to read Infinite Jest. After a few hundred pages, though, I found that my interest in the Canadian mafia and the intricacies of tennis was insufficient to motivate me to continue. Various friends reassured me of his brilliance, though, so I purchased a copy of the equally immense David Foster Wallace Reader, which included many of his short stories and other work.
Alas, even there I found myself unable to proceed beyond a certain point. Wallace seemed to expend so many words to get to his objective that the subject matter itself began to buckle under the strain. How does Prince Hal put it while reading Falstaff's grocery list? "But one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!"
I'm quite prepared to believe that this failure to finish is mine, not his - but I suppose the point I'm cranking around to, is that the presence of a book on a shelf may mean far less than it seems. The fact that it's still there could be an indication that its owner (or borrower) has not yet managed to get beyond the first page ...

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Red Flag Bookshelf

When you see them en masse, I have to agree that there is something a little grim and depressing about this particular rogue's gallery of authors - but then, while there are many reasons for shutting yourself up in a small room and writing obsessively, the fact that you've been blessed by nature with extravagantly good looks isn't one of them.

As the rather sheepish owner of some 20,000 books, I have to say that that fact alone is more likely to form a lasting impression on any chance visitor than the presence (or absence) of any particular tome.

Some of those who tweeted in response to McHugh's original list

suggested that owning no books, using bookshelves for any purpose other than housing books, or not being able to specify a favourite author when asked should also qualify as potential “red flags.”

That's certainly not my problem. Naming a single "favourite author" might be a little more challenging, however - given the bewildering catholicity of my tastes.

The strategies embodied in these tweets resemble the “I know perfectly well, but still … ” formula ... [In] this way, readers either strategically disavow their own literary tastes (but in ambivalent ways that enable them to maintain emotional distance), or, via absurdist humour or provocative self-implication, seek to undermine the logic of the meme itself.

Yep, that pretty much sums up the purpose of this post, I'd say. I didn't think I'd get away with it unscathed - but it's nice to know that King had my type of would-be smart-arse pegged in advance.

The [2014 BuzzFeed] piece ends by straightforwardly offering market intelligence to the (single) male reader. The types of dating partner most in demand, it asserts, are men who read diverse authors (“NOT JUST DEAD STRAIGHT WHITE DUDES”) but not in a too-obvious or tokenistic way (by, for instance, claiming to like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth simply in order to “shout,” unconvincingly, that “‘I RESPECT WOMEN!’”).

I don't know about America, but certainly in New Zealand it'd be rare to find many books at all in most of the flats and apartments one enters - so I doubt it's a comparably major determinant in mating rituals in these parts.

Otago Daily Times: Brittany McKinnel and Natasha Pelham in their Brown St flat
Photography: Peter McIntosh (28/9/2011)