books, page 12 of 133

I’ve long been meaning to read something by Leopold Hamilton Myers (1881–1944), one of David Lindsay’s few literary friends. Unlike Lindsay, Myers seems to have achieved both popular and critical success in his own lifetime; again unlike Lindsay, he’s almost entirely forgotten today. The Orissers was his first novel (though he’d published a verse-play, Arvat, in 1908). He started working on it around 1909, and it was published in 1922, initially in a large-format limited edition, which was, ironically, easier for me to find and buy than its standard first edition. So, I’ve ended up with a signed copy, little smaller than a shoe-box, with a letter from Myers to the owner pasted in (see below).

The titular Orisser family have lived on the country estate of Eamor for generations. At the opening of the novel their latest patriarch, the archaeologist Sir Charles Orisser, has given in to impulse and taken a new, young wife, Lilian (a cousin, so also an Orisser). After this he feels the need to amass more money, makes bad investments, ends up broke and kills himself. Lilian, now penniless and living in an enormous house, receives an offer of marriage from a former admirer, another much older man, the business tycoon John Mayne. Mayne promises to pay off all her husband’s debts if she marries him, and to bequeath Eamor back to her when he dies, so it will remain in the hands of the Orissers. But the marriage doesn’t go well. Lilian continues to live in Eamor — away from her husband — and when Mayne becomes ill, the family start to doubt he really is going to will the house back to them, considering how Lilian failed to live up to his expectations as a wife.

It’s easy to see from this summary why the novel attracted comparisons with E M Forster, as both The Orissers and Howards End are about the ownership of a beloved house, fought over by two families, one worldly and business-wise, the other artistic or unworldly in some way. (Forster met Myers just once, and found him “chilly”.) It’s perhaps less easy to see why the novel was also compared by at least one reviewer to Wuthering Heights, but I suspect this comes about because of a rather odd character, Cosmo Orisser, who is surely the most interesting in the book — or would be, if he was allowed to actually appear on the page, rather than having his exploits mostly related secondhand, before finally turning up only to drop dead.

Cosmo seems like just the sort of character who’d have appeared in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (and Wilson did write about Myers in his essay collection Eagle & Earwig, saying “there are few novelists who make such an excellent impression”, but probably referring here to his later books). Here’s Cosmo — “the world abhorring and by the world abhorred”:

“Cosmo was a magnificent creature. His great physical vitality was matched by the fire of his spirit. One felt that his body with all its energies was subjugated to his imperious mind. What, then, was the reason of his failure in life?”

What indeed? Cosmo is a mystery Myers doesn’t provide us with enough clues to solve. (There’s one incident early in the novel — related secondhand, of course, and not once but twice — where Cosmo, on holiday in a foreign country, stabs his rich host, only to nurse him back to health and part on seemingly good terms. Lilian walks in on the scene, but refuses to say something key about it, which only makes me wonder what we’re meant to understand about what really happened. Was Cosmo involved in a homosexual affair with his host, for instance? It’s the only thing I can think, but despite having two separate characters relate the incident, Myers evades the slightest hint for both the stabbing and the parting on good terms.) Cosmo then spends the rest of the novel either fevered, mad, or just plain dangerous to know:

“Every hour spent in Cosmo’s company added to his wonder at the strange combination of wisdom and folly, insight and blindness, that his companion presented. Unreasonable as Cosmo was, there was yet much to admire in his extreme sensitiveness to all that was unlovely and mean in the spiritual as well as in the material life…”

Cosmo, though, feels like a character from another novel — perhaps one by Dostoevsky — who’s occasionally glimpsed from this far more sedate and Englishly-reserved one.

John Mayne is the other impressive character, though more of the George Bernard Shaw than the Colin Wilson Outsider type, justifying his money-making with no apologies about being so rich. Like Cosmo, though, he spends most of the novel off-page, even when he’s in the same house as the other characters. I can’t really remember if he makes an actual appearance before his death near the end, which finally precipitates the events the previous pages have been building towards.

I say “building”, but really, there’s an awful lot of novel before things start doing even that. This is a long book, and I have to say I found the first three quarters, if not more, often quite tedious. Myers brought on his characters — apart from those interesting two, who we only hear about — and just seemed to shift them about like a chess player trying to decide which move to make. The main characters are one Allen Allen — and any other novelist, surely, would have explained why his main character has the same name twice, or even make a joke about it, but not Myers — and the young Nicholas Orisser. Much time is spent on Nicholas’s existential pains, and his agonising over an affair he proceeds to have, then break off. None of which I cared about. Nicholas, I couldn’t help feeling, was something of a first-novel repository of his author’s pent-up feelings about his young self, but lacks the sort of distance that might hone such a mess of adolescent angst into something interesting. It all felt a little squalid and self-directed.

At other points, Myers seemed to be struggling with what to do with his characters. At one stage, young Nicholas even reads Allen Allen an essay he’s written on the meaning of the other characters in the novel, with no irony or postmodernism intended. (And this brings out another flaw in the book. Myers likes to tell us things about his characters, but doesn’t actually make those characters live up to what he tells us about them. It’s as though he’s desperately flinging depth at them, but it refuses to stick.)

I kept reading because I’d glimpsed a discussion near the end in which Nicholas and Allen talk about “the Great Mother”, and wondered if this might have been read by David Lindsay — who surely must have read his friend’s novel — and in some way influenced Devil’s Tor. But Myers’ characters have none of Lindsay’s mystical feelings. To Nicholas, the Great Mother is the force of nature that drives men to find a mate and reproduce, nothing more. Allen Allen has a slightly deeper view:

“Yes, in you it is Venus, not Isis—not Isis, the sacred mother of life, upon whose statue was engraved the words: ‘I am that which is, has been, and shall be.’”

But still it’s not Lindsay’s cosmic quest for a meaning behind it all.

The one thing I will say about The Orissers, though, is that it ended well. Suddenly, in the last quarter (or probably less), with John Mayne newly dead and the other characters manoeuvring around some wills and other documents, things build to a genuinely tense and dramatic confrontation. All taking place in one room, with a small cast of characters, it could have made a good short play, or a taut novella — though how much of the previous bagginess was required as a build-up, I don’t know.

Myers is an intriguing man. The one fact always brought up in every biographical summary of him, however short, is that his father was F W H Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. (It’s thanks to L H Myers that his father’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was compiled, abridged, and published, after its author’s death — and, it has to be said, that same author’s failure to turn up at his appointed return from said death.) Myers himself made some interesting friendships — with Olaf Stapledon, David Lindsay, and L P Hartley, to name but three who have appeared on this blog — but towards the end of his life rejected them all. (Apparently, he wrote to his wealthy friends, saying that, despite his affection for them, he never wished to set eyes on them again.) Born into wealth and taking full advantage of it, Myers nevertheless considered financial inequality to be one of the main sources of the world’s ills. (Frances Partridge, in her diary, writes of him: “Once when lunching at Claridges I couldn’t help commenting on the contrast between our surroundings (oozing money and privilege) with the theories he was propounding. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said, ‘but that has absolutely no bearing on their validity.’”)

Despite The Orissers being something of a stodgy read, that ending made me wonder if he hadn’t burned away all the first-novel dross most writers get done with in their unpublished works. (Myers, being rich and well-connected, was perhaps denied the sort of publisher’s rejection he needed to make him try again and do better. I’m pretty sure his first novel’s publication was at least partly paid for by Myers himself, and some of its good reviews came about through friendship rather than literary judgement.) So, I also read his next and much shorter novel, The Clio. And, it turned out, Myers had learned something after all…

After The Haunted Island (1910) and Medusa (1929), E H Visiak’s only other substantial work of weird fiction was the novella The Shadow, which was published in 1936 as part of a fat, budget volume (560 pages for 2 shillings and 6 pence) called Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (“Forty-Five New Stories of Detection, Horror and Adventure by Eminent Modern Authors”), with no listed editor, but online sources have John Gawsworth in that role. (And he is the co-author of two tales in the book under his own name, and one under his real name Fytton Armstrong, which feels like confirmation.)

The Shadow is a departure from Visiak’s previous two novels, in that it’s contemporary, and not a sea adventure. It’s told in two parts. In the first, the main character Edmund Shear is fourteen years old, and is spending his school holiday at the house of a fellow pupil, Anthony Layton. The two aren’t exactly friends, as Anthony’s main means of relating to people seems to be mockery and contempt, with the occasional retreat into self-pity when things go wrong. Edmund’s father is a painter of seascapes, and Edmund himself is obsessed with the sea (“His mind ran much upon nautical imaginations”), making him possibly a stand-in for Visiak himself.

In the room where Edmund sleeps is a portrait of one of Anthony’s ancestors, Hamond Layton, who was “a sort of pirate—a smuggler, anyway”, and was hanged for it. The portrait affects Edmund profoundly, as though the long-dead Hamond has perhaps, at moments, started to possess him.

An initially confusing array of other characters is introduced, including an old sailor known as “Jerusalem John” who actually knew Hamond Layton, a ship-owner called Archie Anderson, a Mr Jervons who spends a lot of his time at Anthony’s home (Anthony’s mother is a widow) and is the main male influence — though “an embittering, belittling, restraining influence” — on the young Anthony’s life, a “prophetess” of the New Idealism called Mrs Evans, her granddaughter Margaret Conyers who writes poetry, and finally a painter, Reginald Rudderford Thurston, who is described by one of the other characters as “a monster in human habit, a psychological octopus”, a vivacious but violent, sly and domineering and perhaps supernaturally-possessed man, “thrilling with ravening spite”.

So many of the relationships between these characters are about various forms of domination. Anthony tries to bully those he perceives as within his range (Edmund and Margaret, neither of whom gives in). Anthony in turn is domineered by the sarcastic Mr Jervons, who has clearly installed himself in the Laytons’ home and is living off it. Mrs Evans so believes in the truths of her New Idealism (whose main tenet is that there is no such thing as evil, only ignorance) that she bosses everyone around (“a look of complacent domination in her eyes”), assuming they’ll come round to her way of thinking and thank her for it. But worst of all is the almost Devil-like Thurston, who seems to have a supernatural insight into others’ secrets, and revels in manipulation, bullying, and generally being extremely unpleasant, and whose one redeeming virtue is that he does it so excessively he is clearly the villain of the piece, even if it’s never clear what he’s up to and why.

The second half of The Shadow leaps forward to Edmund as a young man, having just inherited Mr Anderson’s shipping firm. He returns to the scene of the first half of the book (near Lowestoft) and experiences some sort of breakdown. Ever since encountering the portrait of Hamond Layton (which he now owns), he has moments when the old pirate/smuggler seems to take him over, turning him angry and domineering. In the midst of his breakdown, he’s taken in by his old headmaster, Mr Atwell, who speculates on what might be going on with the young man, and so provides the story’s only lucid explanation. It seems that the smuggler Hamond Layton was, at one point, presented with a choice, either to continue his life of crime, or marry a woman who loved him. He made the wrong choice and was hanged for it, but perhaps his lingering essence is seeking redemption through the young Edmund. But to do this, Edmund has to learn to tame the angry, domineering aspect of Hamond-the-pirate, before he can find love (with poetess Margaret). This makes a sort of sense of most of what’s going on in the novella.

But it raises the question of what the villainous Thurston’s role is. At one point, Thurston is said to be “a representation, in some way, of Hamond Layton”, but if so it’s only of his darker nature. However, Edmund is already battling that darker nature within himself, so why have another character represent the same aspect? It seems more that Thurston is a (or even the) Devil, taking it on himself to try and drive Edmund to the same fate as Hamond — a life of crime, followed by hanging. And certainly Thurston takes a Devil-like joy in sowing discord and misery all around him. Anthony Layton has fallen particularly under his spell, and Thurston urges him to seduce Margaret, to take her potentially redeeming influence away from Edmund.

If one of the story’s main themes is the dominance of some people over others — as well as all those domineering types such as Mr Jervons, Thurston and Mrs Evans, there’s the “shadow” of Hamond Layton’s supernatural dominance over Edmund — a secondary theme is how this domineering impulse, in the male characters at least, is tied to sex.

We’re told early on that the boy “Edmund’s absorbing interest in nautical things had kept his thoughts away from sexual aspects.” At one point, after having met Margaret for the first time, he has a particularly troubling dream, which implies that “nautical imaginations” are, for him, a sublimation of his adolescent sexuality:

“…a woman had changed into a ship; and the ship — which was such a fine one! — had to be sunk for it to become a woman again…”

(Which is perhaps also linked to Hamond Layton, who named his ship Barbara, after the woman who loved him.)

Mr Jervons and the adult Anthony Layton are both casually predatory on women. It all seems to tie in with Visiak’s belief that the Eden-like state of childhood comes to an end with adolescence purely because of the introduction of sexuality — though, here, it seems to be redeemable by love. (Mr Anderson, the main adult male character who isn’t domineering, was in love with a woman who died before they could marry. Edmund and Margaret’s love, when it’s admitted, seems to be the redemption both for Edmund and the shadow of Hamond Layton.)

Mrs Evans’ New Idealism, though probably satirising many beliefs both then and now, is perhaps most notable for its idea that there is no such thing as evil. But Visiak is clearly presenting us with evil in the form of the barely-human Thurston. Visiak, I’d say, believes in real evil.

The Shadow is quite a confusing novel. The opening introduces a lot of characters, all of whom seem to be basically unpleasant and domineering in various ways, painting a very dour picture of the world of human relations. Even by the end, things aren’t very clear, and if it wasn’t for that one chapter where Mr Atwell speculates to himself on what might be going on, I’d probably have no clue as to what Visiak had intended. Take out the supernatural influence of the “shadow” of Hamond Layton, and you’d have the story of a young man with troubled moments of dark, almost hallucinatory depression and bouts of anger, perhaps rooted in a sexuality that can no longer safely be sublimated into boyish thoughts about boats. Perhaps another read might make it all clear… But perhaps not.

However, further clues might be gleaned from Edmund’s speculations at one point, which strays into the territory of cosmic horror. Is it being put forward as a valid interpretation of Visiak’s supernatural world, or is it just a throwaway — if frightening — thought?:

“Perhaps superhuman beings used us as we used animals, for food and work — a different sort of food and work.”

Visiak had another tale in the same anthology, a collaboration with John Gawsworth called “The Uncharted Islands”, that is, again, a sea-adventure, but with no supernatural element.

The Claw (first published simply as Claw in 1983, as by Jay Ramsey, for Richard Bachman-like reasons) could be said to form the middle of a thematic trilogy of early novels from Campbell, about parenthood: The Nameless (1981) is about the sheer anxiety of what, out there in the world, might prey on a child (mad cults, kidnappers and killers); The Influence (1988) is about the generational influences within a family that might prey on a child (mental illness and passed-on cycles of psychological abuse); The Claw, meanwhile, is about the physical abuse a child might suffer from their own parents. Like The Nameless, The Claw employs a zero-subtlety approach in using the supernatural to enact its theme. In the former novel, an evil cult kidnaps the main character’s child and inducts her into a life of ritualised, nihilistic murder; in The Claw, meanwhile, there’s an evil artefact (which belongs to an evil cult) that causes parents to have murderous impulses towards their child. The Claw of the title, then, is like a supernatural version of Hitchcock’s maguffin. For Hitchcock, the maguffin was the thing — the secret formula, the microfilm, whatever — that both the baddies and the goodies want and the protagonist has, which causes a lot of chasing around. Here, the Claw is the thing that unleashes in its main characters what, in some real people, doesn’t need any supernatural cause at all. The advantage of a supernatural maguffin, though, is it doesn’t require any deeper motivation for that behaviour — and, when it gets destroyed, the behaviour goes away. Not so in real life.

The story opens in rare territory for Campbell: overseas. In Nigeria to research his latest spy thriller, Alan Knight meets a British anthropologist, David Marlowe, who offers to drive him to the airport when he returns home. Once there, he asks a favour. The post from Lagos being what it was, he wants Alan to take a parcel back to England, and deliver it to the Foundation for African Studies. Alan agrees, and (he’s a bit of an idiot, considering he writes spy novels) only finds out when he’s passing through UK customs that it contains a potential weapon: a four-taloned metal claw. Fortunately, he’s let through, and that weekend, the Claw remains at the coastal Norfolk home he shares with his wife Liz and six-year-old daughter Anna. But he soon makes the trip to the Foundation in London — only to find he’s unaccountably left the thing at home. There’s worse to come, though. The Foundation’s Dr Hetherington tells him that David Marlowe has brutally, and for no apparent reason, murdered his wife and daughter — and that the Claw is an artefact belonging to a cult known as the Leopard Men, whose initiation rite requires its members to murder a young girl of their own blood. Incensed he was duped into letting such a repugnant thing into his home, Alan goes back, only to find it has been stolen. But its influence has started to take hold: suddenly unable to write, he starts getting tetchy with Anna…

The Claw’s effect isn’t only limited to the Knight family. A local man with a childlike mentality is found having killed, with his bare hands, one of the goats that graze the cliff near the Knights’ house. (Which inevitably sets up the idea of victims as scapegoats, but this doesn’t seem to have been developed.) Meanwhile in the Knight household itself, Alan’s growing hostility towards his daughter gets worse until he receives a phone call from Nigeria. Isaac Banjo, a translator at the University of Lagos who helped Marlowe in his researches into the Leopard Men, knows what’s going on, feels guilty about his part in it, and wants to help. Alan, though, has to come to Nigeria to put an end to things. This he does, but that leaves Liz alone with Anna, and Liz is also beginning to fall under the influence of the still-missing Claw.

I have to say that, though Ramsey Campbell is one of my favourite writers, this is not a book of his I’d recommend, unless (like me) you’re intent on reading all of his novels. And usually, with a writer whose work I know, I can still get something out of a lesser novel by considering it in terms of the development of their themes, or of their craft, and so on. And perhaps part of the problem is that I couldn’t do that for most of The Claw. The characters just don’t have the sort of depth Campbell usually endows them with. And this is particularly notable in a novel which deals with such a difficult central theme. Parents with violent impulses towards their children are repugnant as characters, and a lot has to be done to make it worth spending time with them. When Alan and Liz begin looking on their very young and vulnerable daughter with irritation and worse — “Liz watched her, loathing her babyishness. How could she once have loved and been proud of this child?” — they become very thin as characters, with no self-examination or awareness (necessarily so, I suppose, because of the demands of the plot). And there are too many chapters, it seems, in the middle of The Claw where we’re in the presence of Liz and Anna, and Liz is on the verge of violence towards Anna, and Anna is terrified, and nothing much else is going on. There’s one moment where I thought the novel was going to start engaging with its own themes in a more explicit way, when the hippie-ish barman, Jimmy, at one points says: “The absolute authority of parents is fascism in the home.” But this line isn’t examined any further, and that’s the last we hear of Jimmy as a character.

The strand of the story where Alan is out there in Nigeria investigating the cult — and investigations like that would normally make a novel, for me — are sketchy and unconvincing. (Campbell’s chapters set in Lagos are excellent evocations, I think — though I’ve never been there, and, it turns out, neither had Campbell. But when Alan and Isaac head into the jungle, it all starts to feel like low-budget scenery.) To top it all, the Leopard Men aren’t that interesting as a cult (certainly not as nihilistically evocative as the previous book’s Nameless). They feel a bit under-thought out, even generic, a bit obvious. Africa — Leopard Men. Marlowe — Heart of Darkness. Evil, cursed artefact from foreign shores. Even worse: “There is a legend told throughout Africa that the last Leopard Man will come from a far land and destroy the power of the claw.”

There may be a reason for this. (There are probably many — such as how difficult the subject must have been to write about.) Campbell says in his afterword (appended in 1992, when the novel was reissued under his own name) that after it was initially submitted, the manuscript went through some revisions. One of these was to add chapters from young Anna’s point of view, something he says he didn’t include in the first version. And these are the chapters where the book really comes alive. Faced with suddenly hostile, even alienating parents, Anna is the character in this novel who is allowed depth, and of course it’s a depth that’s all about sheer terror:

“She couldn’t tell anyone about mummy, it was too horrible a thing to say, so much so that it paralysed her mouth. The more she tried to say it, the less able she was… She was trapped inside herself.”

Or, my favourite line:

“The stranger who pretended to be mummy was made up of teeth and nails.”

When it came out in the US as Night of the Claw, Kirkus Reviews said it was “an overlong but steady, creepy, discomforting chiller—thanks to a subdued style, shifting viewpoints (including that of confused, terrified Anna), and richly detailed backgrounds.” Perhaps my own reaction is down to knowing Campbell could do so much better, as he does in Incarnate (where parental abuse isn’t a major theme, but is part of at least one of the characters’ stories), The Influence, and his later novel The House on Nazareth Hill. I can’t help wondering if his adding chapters from Anna’s point of view aren’t something of a breakthrough moment in his craft (even though he’d written short stories from a child’s point of view before, in Dark Companions — though that collection only came out the previous year.) Certainly, the final chapters, where Anna escapes from her increasingly hostile mother and flees across a confusing coastal landscape at night to take refuge in a house that proves to have been the scene of an even worse Claw-inspired act of parental violence, is pure Campbell: the nightmare journey, and in particular the nightmare exploration of an empty-but-not-empty house.