mewsings in October 2022

After his first novel, Last and First Men, Stapledon published Last Men in London (1932) and Odd John (1935), but it was 1937’s Star Maker that was the true successor to his first book.

Like that debut, Star Maker isn’t so much a story as a trip through time (and, in this case, the entirety of space as well, before moving outside both space and time in the final chapters). It starts with its narrator leaving his family home one night in a state of bitterness, to sit on a hill and regard “our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world”. Soon, it is not his own little house he’s regarding from the outside, but his world, Earth, as some force takes him up on the start of this novel’s journey:

“The Earth appeared now as a great bright orb hundreds of times larger than the full moon. In its centre a dazzling patch of light was the sun’s image reflected in the ocean. The planet’s circumference was an indefinite breadth of luminous haze, fading into the surrounding blackness of space… The spectacle before me was strangely moving. Personal anxiety was blotted out by wonder and admiration; for the sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony.”

This makes me think of the famous “Blue Marble” photograph of the Earth seen from space, taken in 1972, and how it and other Earth photos (Wikipedia has a timeline of them) brought out the preciousness of this speck of rock that we call home, thinly coated with a life-preserving environment, an island in a vast, harsh vacuum — just as Stapledon describes it — and how that fed into the burgeoning environmental movement. (And this makes me wonder who was the first writer to properly see the Earth as such a “Blue Marble” in fiction.)

The narrator becomes “a disembodied, wandering view-point”, capable of inhabiting the minds he encounters, and sharing their experiences. He finds he can enter into dialogue with these beings, and that they can even become fellow travellers. Soon, the narrator is at once the Earthman experiencing all the wonders and mysteries of the cosmos, and a conglomerate of disparate beings, all journeying, like him, by mind, experiencing the many worlds they encounter, learning their stories. In their quest, this narrator becomes aware that he and his fellow travellers can move through both time and space, the only limit to their travels being that they can’t connect with — even become aware of — planets whose inhabitants have evolved to a level of consciousness too far beyond their own. They have to advance their own awareness and understanding before they can experience these more realised beings, or even perceive them as more advanced. There is, for Stapledon, no way to be a purely passive viewpoint and genuinely perceive the truth; you have to be altered by what you see.

As he/they range on this cosmological quest, the narrator becomes aware that “every world that we entered turned out to be in the throes of the same spiritual crisis as that which we knew so well on our native planets”:

“…in which the ideals of the masses are without the guidance of any well-established tradition, and in which natural science is enslaved to individualistic industry…”

This, to me, sounds so much like the modernist crisis of the early 20th century, as found in the likes of T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf: an existential crisis of meaning, driven in part by the First and Second World Wars (themselves perfect metaphors for “natural science… enslaved to individualistic industry” and taken to mass-murderous extremes), but also by the destabilisation of so many ideas and ideals thanks to the revolutions in thought brought about by Darwin, Einstein, and others. As Stapledon’s narrator sums it up at the start: “horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only at the world’s delirium”. But whereas the emphasis in the literary moderns, who were often staunchly elitist, is on the sensitive individual suffering from angst and despair, Stapledon sees this as a worldwide crisis, whose roots lie in the clash between the lone individual and the community:

“This crisis I came to regard as having two aspects. It was at once a moment in the spirit’s struggle to become capable of true community on a world-wide scale; and it was a stage in the age-long task of achieving the right, the finally appropriate, the spiritual attitude toward the universe.”

Star Maker, then, is an attempt to understand this early 20th century moment by stepping outside it and asking: “What if this weren’t just our own dark moment, but a stage that all intelligent races in the universe go through — what if it has a million variations throughout the cosmos? Why might it be necessary?” The answers, for Stapledon, lie in the reason for all of this — life, the universe, everything — and so in the nature of its creator, the Star Maker.

First, though, he has to confront the fundamental question of whether there is a Star Maker. There are certainly moments of cosmic despair as the narrator ranges through the universe:

“The appalling desert of darkness and barren fire, the huge emptiness so sparsely pricked with scintillations, the colossal futility of the whole universe, hideously oppressed me.”

I fully expected Stapledon to leave the question of whether there was a Star Maker hanging till the end — in the classic Lovecraftian style of ending with the moment of overwhelming confrontation — or perhaps to never answer it at all. But no, Stapledon wants to examine what such a Star Maker would be like, so he has to have one and bring it on stage. At first, his narrator becomes aware of the Star Maker through its many aspects. One moment it’s “sheer Power”, another it’s “pure Reason”, or “Love”, or “unreasoning Creativity”. But these are just the trunk, tusks, tail and legs of an elephant too vast for him to perceive as a whole. All the time:

“The felt presence of the Star Maker remained unintelligible, even though it increasingly illuminated the cosmos, like the splendour of the unseen sun at dawn.”

Even at the end the Star Maker remains — has to remain, if Stapledon is to be intellectually honest — “a dread mystery”. It’s interesting that one of the books that influenced Stapledon in his writing of Star Maker was Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1934), which was about the essentially incomprehensible, alien, or inhuman aspects of divinity, and how the holy is so often associated with darkness — interesting because Otto’s book was also a key influence on C S Lewis, and fed into the shadowy aspect of the primitive goddess Ungit and the not-to-be-looked-on Mountain God in Till We Have Faces. Both Star Maker and Till We Have Faces are about how we cannot even begin to perceive the nature of the divine (or of that level of reality we might call divine) until we ourselves have changed. (Lewis, though admiring Stapledon’s book, thought it “ends in sheer devil worship”.)

Stapledon’s approach (or his narrator’s), in this novel, has been to try to understand the crisis early 20th century Earth is going through by rising above it and putting it into a new and wider perspective. At first, that perspective is to learn that other worlds are going through the same crisis — in fact, have to go through it. Then, rising above that level, he discovers that not only species go through this crisis, but stars too — stars, in Star Maker, are conscious entities, and one of Stapledon’s most inventive moments is to reveal that what we think of as the universal laws of gravitation that dictate how the stars must move in their galactic orbits are, to the stars themselves, closer to social rules or aesthetics. They have no need to obey them — they are, then, not laws — but the stars do obey them, because not to do so would bring them shame and a kind of aesthetic pain.

The ultimate end of this rising-above approach is to see humankind — and the many created races that inhabit our universe with us — from the viewpoint of their creator. What, then, are we, to the Star Maker?

“And at once I knew that the Star Maker had made me not to be his bride, nor yet his treasured child, but for some other end… It seemed to me that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his finished work; calmly rejoicing in its achievement, but recognising at last the irrevocable flaws in its initial conception, and already lusting for fresh creation.”

The Star Maker, it turns out, has a dual nature. It is at once outside and (when engaged in creation) inside time, evolving in response to what it has created. Stapledon’s cosmos is not an entirely top-down hierarchy. Humankind, and the other races, are not just there to be the playthings of their creator, but to teach that creator how to better create. Which could be a harsh sort of idea — our purpose, it seems, is to be flawed, and to try but fail, so the next iteration of creation might be less flawed — but it comes, for Stapledon’s narrator, as a kind of consolation:

“The incalculable potency of the cosmos mysteriously enhanced the brightness of our brief spark of community, and of mankind’s brief, uncertain venture. And these in turn quickened the cosmos.”

What, for me, sets Stapledon’s cosmicism apart from, say, Lovecraft’s (who reveals what I take to be his own longing to be a “disembodied, wandering view-point” in the universe in The Whisperer in Darkness), is that Stapledon is always aware of — insists on — there being both a plus and a minus. At every stage in his narrative, an intelligent race of beings triumphs only to realise its limits, or to find there is more striving to be done; or it fails and learns and starts again. Ultimately, even the tragedies have a purpose. This can make reading Stapledon, particularly as a piece of sense-of-wonder science fiction rather than of philosophy, a mite frustrating, as every payoff is tempered, every revelation is not quite the last. (Another comparison is with Clark Ashton Smith’s The Hashish Eater, whose narrator indulges in a superficially similar experiential tour of the universe, though unlike Stapledon’s narrator he tries very much not to become involved or changed by the wonders he sees — until the final confrontation with that “huge white eyeless Face”, which is where Smith leaves it. Stapledon pushes on, still asking questions.)

Is there a final answer, then, to the modernist crisis that kicked this novel off, and those questions the narrator asked at the start:

“Had we, perhaps, misconceived our whole existence? Were we, as it were, living from false premises?”

The response Stapledon gives is a typically Stapledonian one, in that it isn’t any sort of final answer, but is, rather, an opening up of new questions. Returning to Earth, at the end, the narrator is struck by “The littleness, but the intensity, of earthly events!” He sees his own situation, then, from not a new perspective, but from two perspectives: not just that of the human being caught up in his own troubles and all the intensity of a contingent, mortal life, but also from the cosmic viewpoint, from which his suffering is really quite a minor thing, but nevertheless part of a much larger, ultimately hopeful, project of creating something better.

This is perhaps the key thing that prevents Stapledon from writing Lovecraftian cosmic horror. He does see and acknowledge the horror, but also acknowledges that it is, however true to the one perceiving it, only one perspective among others. The point is not to be caught in one viewpoint — not that of the suffering mortal, nor that of the vastly removed Star Maker — but to move between them, to step outside or inside as required.

(Which is what I’ve always thought is one of the main benefits of “escapist”and imaginative fiction: the ability to step outside of it all, get a new and expanded, or at least refreshed, perspective, then return.)

Is Star Maker fiction or philosophy? Reviewing it in The Sketch when it first came out, L P Hartley called it “the most ambitious novel, if novel it can be called, that I ever read”. It’s certainly not a story, as most novels are. It uses the techniques of fiction to present a philosophical idea of how the cosmos might be ordered, of how the crisis of 1937 might be faced. If Stapledon had written about the nature of his Star Maker as philosophy, he’d have been dismissed as a fantasist; but by writing it as fantasy, he can say something that feels like a sort of truth, even if it doesn’t have to be taken as literally true.

At the same time, it’s a difficult read — far more abstract, and (literally) disembodied, than his Last and First Men. One of those monuments of imaginative literature, Star Maker is a book that, for me, has grown the more I’ve thought about it.

Fellstones, a village “up near the lakes” named for the seven stones standing in its green, is where Michael Dunstan spent most of his childhood, living with his adoptive parents, music teachers Rafe and Winifred Staveley, and their (unmusical) daughter Adele. Michael was adopted by the couple when, at the age of five, his parents were killed in a car accident — an accident he has felt guilty about ever since, as they were coming to collect him (from the Staveleys) at the time. The couple, though, were only too glad to take him in, because Michael is a musical prodigy, with a pitch-perfect singing voice and a flawless memory for music. But Michael never liked the performance aspect of his gift, and came to resent the pressure from his adoptive parents to devote himself entirely to music. After getting into university to study English (rather than the College of Music the Staveleys expected him to go to), he cut himself off from them altogether, reverting his name to Paul Dunstan (Paul being his middle name), to avoid their finding him.

As Ramsey Campbell’s latest novel opens, Paul is running the music department at a branch of the chain bookshop Texts, and in a relationship with a fellow employee, Caren. It’s here Adele approaches him suddenly one day, asking him to put differences aside and visit the Staveleys once more. They’re getting old, and (she implies) perhaps haven’t much longer to live — but of course, when he gets there they’re in perfect health. It was a subtle ruse, the first of many to draw him back to Fellstones.

The Staveleys want him to attend the Fellstones festival, an event he doesn’t recall from the time he grew up there. The festival, though, was never an annual event — it aligns with a somewhat more obscure cycle — and, the Staveleys tell him, the festival did occur in his childhood. Or, rather, it almost did. It was due to occur, but his refusal to sing in it meant, for some reason, it had to be cancelled. It was shortly after this his parents died.

Paul (whom the Staveleys continue to call “Michael”, meaning the novel is shot through with a subtle tug-of-war over his identity) allows himself to be persuaded — first out of politeness, but increasingly because of a series of events that conspire to keep him in, or returning to, Fellstones as the day of the festival approaches. Meanwhile, he comes to learn about the nearby ruin of Starward Hall, and the 17th century magus Bartholomew Kingseen who once lived there, and who dreamed of using a power from the darker reaches of the heavens to grant himself immortality.

Family, in both its positive and negative aspects, has always been one of Campbell’s most enduring themes, as has that teetering point between longing to be part of something and fear of the loss of one’s individuality. That latter theme is often presented, in Campbell’s fiction, in terms of the draw of some personality-absorbing supernatural entity (in the concluding volume of his Three Births of Daoloth trilogy, for instance) or a cult (as in his early novel The Nameless), but here cult and family are at their most indistinguishable. The techniques the Staveleys use to bring Paul back into the fold — a combination of lovebombing and guilt-tripping — are straight out of the cult recruitment playbook, as is their need to cut him off from all other relationships, such as with his girlfriend Caren. All done subtly, of course.

Subtly, so Paul won’t just walk away. But the question of why he doesn’t consider walking away — at least until it’s too late for him to do so — remains a bit of a puzzle. Although he is the only point-of-view character, we never really get a glimpse of how he feels about the situation of reuniting with his adoptive parents — who, we know, he left because they “were too determined to turn me into one of them… Too much like them and not enough like me.” But there isn’t really much of that “enough like me” in Paul’s current life to enable him to resist them. His job at Texts (which verges, really, on another sort of cult, with its morning sales mantras of “Boost your books… Books must boom… Goods are good”) is clearly a battle to retain some sort of self-expression in a world of commercialised dumbing-down, while his relationship with Caren is far too easily relinquished for it ever to have meant anything. (Underlined by her complete lack of understanding for what Paul must be going through when his adoptive family make contact with him again after many years.)

It’s only near the end, I think, that (in a moment that relies on context, so hopefully this isn’t a spoiler) we get a glimpse of the deeper reaches of Paul’s inner life and why he has allowed himself to be so easily taken in again:

“How could he be any more powerless? All his life since early childhood has led here; it’s what he has always been for.”

And this, for me, is the height of horror in a novel that certainly has its fair share of the cosmic weird — Adele’s tales of “Mr Jellyfingers” and his friends not least among them.

Music as a source of contact with the supernatural has featured in Campbell’s work before (in one of my favourite of his short stories, “Never to be Heard”), as well as in works of the classic writers of the genre, such as Algernon Blackwood’s The Human Chord. The mix of Michael/Paul’s being adopted, alongside an air of folk horror about this novel, chimes in with Campbell’s The Kind Folk, while the theme of loss of identity, and in particular having one’s creative talent taken over by forces from one’s past, was a significant element in Campbell’s 2021 novel, the non-supernatural, dark anxiety-comedy Somebody’s Voice.

But, I have to say, the one cultural connection that kept popping into my head throughout the novel was my favourite line from (in my opinion) Christopher Guest’s best mockumentary, A Mighty Wind:

“I have come to understand as an adult… that there had been abuse in my family. But it was mostly musical in nature.”

Although The Travelling Grave was first published by Arkham House in 1948, most of the stories it collects had already appeared in LP Hartley’s British collections Night Fears (1924) and The Killing Bottle and Other Stories (1932). It was reviewed (if that’s the right word for a piece in the publisher’s own magazine) in the Arkham Sampler for Spring 1924:

“Mr. Hartley’s book can be recommended especially to those readers who like to be led casually into a setting and story and brought up short, face to face with terror and horror. Mr Hartley succeeds in doing this time after time, and doing it so well that I cannot offhand think of any other contemporary writer who managed this effect quite so memorably.”

I came to The Travelling Grave thinking of it as a collection of ghost stories, but they’re not ghost stories — even those with ghosts in them (or, really, walking corpses) — so much as contes cruels, whose focus is on the method of delivering each tale’s particular moment of comeuppance or revelation. Hartley plays an artful game of laying out everything a reader needs to anticipate what’s coming — all, that is, but the final detail, the who-it-happens-to, or how-it-happens.

The perfect example is the lead tale, “The Travelling Grave”, which introduces what I like to think of as a literal plot device, in the shape of a mobile, mechanical coffin that is not only self-burying, but will also gather up and kill — snatch and despatch — its occupant. As its owner Munt, a collector of unusual coffins, says:

“But it’s very quick, and it has that funny gift of anticipation. If it got a fellow up against a wall, I don’t think he’d stand much chance. I didn’t show you here, because I value my floors, but it can bury itself in wood in three minutes and in newly turned earth, say a flower-bed, in one.”

The tale begins by introducing us to Hugh Curtis — “a vague man with an unretentive mind”, making him sound like perfect victim material — who’s persuaded by an acquaintance to spend the weekend at Munt’s house. When Munt realises Curtis hasn’t told anyone else he’s come, and is unlikely to be missed for some time if he disappears, it of course sets this collector thinking about fully testing this latest addition to his collection. But, of course, things don’t quite work out the way Munt — or the reader — expects.

Those tales that do have ghosts — and the supernatural impinges on the majority of these tales — don’t look too deeply into the nature of the supernatural. Hartley’s walking corpses are there to exact retribution, sometimes deserved — as in “A Visitor from Down Under”, whose protagonist learns you can’t escape a crime committed on the other side of the world, especially if your revenger is (a) dead and (b) capable of using public transport — sometimes not deserved — as in “Feet Foremost”, where the new owners of an old haunted house inadvertently re-activate its ghost (despite the house having been redesigned long ago to prevent such an occurrence) simply because they neglected to inform the servants — but don’t really betray much of the metaphysical workings behind these revenants’ ability to linger beyond death as they do.

Hartley’s tales can’t help sounding comical in summary, but this, and the humour evident in this stories — he’s a witty stylist — do nothing to ameliorate their horror. As Jack Sullivan in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural says: “humour in Hartley’s work is not so much a relief from horror as another dimension of it.” And the humour (like the horror) is there at the verbal level, too, in Hartley’s way with macabre word-play. To give an example, the speaker here is one of his revenants, a masked walking corpse who (the reader will have already guessed) only a short time before put a bullet through his brain:

“I was always an empty-headed fellow,” he went on, tapping the waxed covering with his gloved forefinger, so that it gave out a wooden hollow sound — “there’s nothing much behind this. No brains to speak of, I mean. Less than I used to have, in fact.”

This mix of humour and terror — in particular, the way it’s both at once — and the way such double meanings create an air of intense anxiety in the very substance of the narrative, reminds me most of all of Ramsey Campbell. Both writers use language to create an all-pervading sense of unreliability in the world around their protagonists, creating an air of anything — and most likely any scary thing — being about to happen.

The thing that most stood out for me, in fact, is Hartley’s inventiveness at revealing the inner state of his (often highly anxious, though just about managing to keep it contained) protagonist’s psyches. In “A Change of Ownership”, for instance, Ernest, approaching his own house in the dark, starts imagining all sorts of inventive situations, conversations and meetings, all of them fanciful and designed to distract him from his fear of entering this empty house, but all of them somehow working their way round to latch onto the reasons for that fear. It’s Ernest’s effort not to think about what scares him that lays it bare.

Early on in another tale, “The Cotillon”, we learn that the protagonist, Marion Lane, is preoccupied by guilt about a recent relationship she only pretended to take seriously. Rather than simply saying she feels guilty, Hartley gives us this:

“She extinguished the light, but the gramophone within her went on more persistently than ever. It was a familiar record; she knew every word of it: it might have been called The Witness for the Defence.”

It might seem a commonplace nowadays to liken worrying thoughts to having a record playing in one’s head, but I can’t help feeling it was new when Hartley wrote it, and its inventiveness brings home both the force of Marion’s worry, and the very modern (when Hartley was writing it) world in which this scary story is about to play out.

I note this aspect of modernity because Julia Briggs, in her history of the ghost story, Night Visitors, criticises Hartley for this very reason:

“Hartley showed courage in introducing motor cars, a radio broadcast and a plane crash into his ghost stores, but they also created further problems for him.”

But, to me, Hartley’s use of the (to him) modern world just highlights the unfairness, cruelty, and horror of the horrors, when they turn up. Everyone else in, for instance, “The Cotillon” with its “brightly-lit modern urban scene” (as Briggs puts it), is having fun at a masked ball, and this just isolates Marion all the more, as well as making Hartley’s skill at introducing his walking corpse all the more notable, for it’s against this air of fun and modernity that things come to seem so very unfunny.

But the modernity of the “internal gramophone” idea also brings home Marion’s very real worries. This isn’t a distanced character like, say, Professor Parkins in M R James’s “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You”; this is someone I, at least, can relate to. And I suspect Hartley’s ability to evoke characters with obsessive anxious worries is too widespread in his stories — and too inventively and effectively evoked — not to have been based on his own inner life. Time and again we get characters struggling with worries before the supernatural element even hints at turning up. Henry Greenstream in “The Thought”, for instance, begins his tale with a habit of counting the number of times his latest worry intrudes into his thoughts when he goes for a daily walk. Jack Sullivan, again from his entry on Hartley in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror, notes that “The technique here of intensifying fears into actual supernatural visitations became, in later stories like ‘The Thought’ and ‘A Change of Ownership’, a Hartley trademark.”

Before reading The Travelling Grave, I mostly knew Hartley from the 1971 film (by Joseph Losey, who also did The Damned) of his most well-known novel, The Go-Between, and as a respected reviewer who was thoroughly capable of intelligently reviewing both the literary and the fantastic (writing positively on Stapledon’s Star Maker, for instance, and an insightful and mostly positive review of Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor). But I’d been meaning to read him for a while, and I’m glad I finally did.