T S Eliot, page 1 of 3

After the first three Books of Blood came out, both Barker and his publishers knew he needed to present the world with a novel. His initial idea was for something Sphere thought too fantasy-ish for a man they were intent on marketing as a horror writer, so he put that idea to one side (it would eventually become Weaveworld), and set about writing something more traditionally in the horror mould. Initially titled Mamoulian’s Game, it came out in 1985 as The Damnation Game.

The novel opens in war-ravaged Warsaw, in which “the thief” hears about a legendary man who never loses at cards. Seeking him out among the rubble and destruction proves tricky, but it seems this man has been waiting for him… The story then leaps forward to the present day, where Marty Strauss is serving time for robbery in Wandsworth Prison. He’s offered the chance of an early release, if he goes to work for Joseph Whitehead, the super-rich head of a worldwide pharmaceutical empire. Whitehead, it seems, is expecting trouble, and needs a bodyguard he can trust — and a man with gambling debts (which is what drove Marty to crime), is just the sort of person he needs. But when the trouble comes, it’s in the form of Mamoulian, a man possessed of supernatural power, including the ability to raise and control the dead. This is the card-player that Whitehead (“the thief”) met and played in Warsaw, in a moment that started him on the path to being the head of a massive corporate empire. But Mamoulian considers there’s a debt to be repaid, and has come to claim it.

The first thing to say about Barker’s first novel, I think, is how naturally he seems to have taken to novel-writing after the (admittedly long) short stories of the Books of Blood. Barker is focused in every scene, taking time to bring out of every character and situation some special detail, as though he’s relishing each moment like a fine wine. That said, this is a long novel, with surprisingly few characters. Perhaps an ingrained habit from short stories and plays with a limited troupe of players kept him from sprawling into the sort of large cast you’d expect in a longer book?

Whenever he’s spoken or written about The Damnation Game, Barker has made it clear what its core inspiration was: “At the heart of the novel is the story of Faust.” In particular, it seems what fascinated him was how a modern version of the Faust story, shorn of its religious underpinnings (he characterised the original Faust as being a Renaissance man punished by a Medieval world) would play out.

I have to admit, though, I’m not so sure the Faust aspect really stands out for me. There are two things you really need for a Faust story: a Devil, and a Pact. As the novel goes on, instead of, for instance, Mamoulian developing into a truly Mephistophelean figure, he gets watered down. Initially threatening and mysterious, the more we learn about him, the more merely human he’s revealed to be. He’s no Devil, just a man who has some magician’s tricks, and what’s more is a very old man, with “depleted energies”. He’s not some all-powerful archetypal Evil come to claim a soul, he’s tired and he doesn’t make it clear for a long time exactly what he wants. Because, it turns out, there’s also no real pact, either. Whatever Mamoulian has turned up to claim, it wasn’t agreed by him and Whitehead. (It certainly wasn’t signed in blood.) It turns out, in fact, more to be something Mamoulian assumed he’d be getting but didn’t, so he starts to come across as more petulant and resentful than full of the sort of Judgement of Hell you’d get in a Faust story. Barker has said his modern version of Faust is about a world in which “Every man is his own Mephistopheles”, but I don’t really see how that works with this narrative. Perhaps it’s simply because Barker would go on to create a far more effective and powerful Faustian story in The Hellbound Heart/Hellraiser.

The strongest theme in The Damnation Game, for me, was something quite different. It popped up in the first paragraph, with a sentence describing war-torn Warsaw:

“Mountains of rubble — still nurturing the dead like bulbs ready to sprout as the spring weather warmed…”

This struck me as evoking the first section of T S Eliot’s The Waste-Land, which is shot through with the contrast between plant-life reviving in the Spring, and the un-reviving dead of the Great War, most explicitly in the lines:

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

The novel focuses on Marty, brought out of prison (a kind of death) into the new life of the outside world once more. He even thinks, at one point: “I’ve been dead, and I’m coming back to life.” But The Damnation Game is dealing not in the dead coming back to life, but a sort of false resurrection of various kinds. Marty is not fully alive again, because his job for Whitehead keeps him for the most part in Whitehead’s (luxurious, but fenced-in) estate. (Whose most telling feature, perhaps, is an abandoned dovecote: an empty space abandoned by love.) It’s made clear Marty isn’t his own man, merely a living body there for Whitehead’s use:

“You’re my property, Strauss. You concern yourself with me, or you get the Hell out of here tomorrow morning. Me! … Not yourself. Forget yourself.”

The novel is full of characters existing in states of living death. Sometimes literally, as in the case of Breer, whom Mamoulian claims from a death by suicide so as to use him as his agent in the world. Others more figuratively, as in Whitehead’s daughter Carys, with her addiction to heroin, or Whitehead himself, retreating from the world out of fear of Mamoulian, and Mamoulian as well, fastidious and nihilistic, a walking emptiness, yet too afraid of death to leave this life he seems to despise. Marty at one point finds himself infused with “unwelcome thoughts of lying face up in the ground, dead perhaps, but anticipating resurrection.” But this isn’t a resurrection type of world, not with Mamoulian and Whitehead in charge. It’s a living-death world, always holding off the first step towards a true resurrection.

Although it’s unfailing readable, I felt The Damnation Game began to lose its initial focus from the mid-point on, and I place the blame firmly with the character of Mamoulian. It’s at the halfway point the much-anticipated meeting between Whitehead and Mamoulian occurs — the moment Whitehead has been dreading, because he knows it will lead to his death. Only, it doesn’t. Mamoulian turns up, says he will come again, and leaves. Later, he comes again, kills a few secondary characters, and leaves again. The second half of the novel is a series of confrontations with Mamoulian where nothing gets resolved, and for no clear reason. And perhaps nothing gets resolved because it’s not clear for a long time just what Mamoulian wants.

Mamoulian lacks the sort of clearly-defined meaning Barker is usually so good at giving his antagonists. He’s wonderful at creating larger-than-life, loquacious monsters who expound their philosophies of excess — of experience, pain, power. (Or, as in the case of, say, Rawhead Rex, are so blatantly symbolic they don’t have to explain themselves.) Mamoulian never does this. It’s only after a while we get a glimpse of what his inner world is like, and it turns out to be a foggy world of nihilism, asceticism, and absence. It’s not even a fierce nihilism, it’s all rather tired. Mamoulian is clearly at the end of his life, fed up with it all, and doesn’t make for a very powerful figure — he just keeps lingering. Even his title — he calls himself “the Last European” — comes across more as writerly bravura on Barker’s part than having any real meaning. This makes confrontations with Mamoulian difficult — just what is it you’re confronting? What’s the ideological battle that needs to be fought while the supernatural shenanigans are going on?

I think you can find an opposite to Mamoulian in the novel, but it’s not spelled out. There’s an intensity of living, a relishing of experience, as with Marty when he’s finally let out on his own for a night from Whitehead’s estate:

“He felt real. God in Heaven, that was it. At last he was able to operate in the world again, affect it, shape it.”

The “game” of the novel’s title, perhaps, isn’t so much about the rules of what’s going on, as the feeling of being a player in the world, being part of it all, taking your chances, getting your hands dirty. (Something the fastidious Mamoulian doesn’t want to do. This, perhaps, is at the root of his ability to always win at cards — that chance-phobic ultra-control of his smacks more of anxiety than a Devil’s power.)

And the one power Marty and Carys can wield against Mamoulian, it turns out, is the connection they feel. Both Whitehead and Mamoulian are powerful figures, locked by their very power into their own solipsistic worlds, able to hold off what they fear, and so become all the more imprisoned by that fear. It’s the more human characters, with their vulnerability and need to connect, that overcome the powerful, in their own small way.

As I say, The Damnation Game remains readable, but I don’t think it has the sort of lasting meaning it might have had if Mamoulian had been a figure who really stood for something — as, say, “the Hell Priest” (whom we all know as Pinhead) does in Barker’s next piece of long-form fiction.

Mary Butts’s second novel (published in 1928, and so before her first novel had its UK first edition), went under a number of working titles, including “In the Wood”, “People Among Trees”, “The Egg and the Cup”, “Landscape with Birds”, “Bees Under the Roof”, and even “The Waste Land”, before settling on Armed With Madness — which comes from a quote, “Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage”, though the quote seems to be from Butts herself. Of these titles, “The Waste Land” is the most intriguing, because like Eliot’s poem (already out by the time Butts began her novel, so she probably wasn’t serious about using it), Armed With Madness combines Modernistic concerns about the spiritual wasteland of the post-First World War 20th century with a powerful symbol of redemption and healing, the Holy Grail.

The story begins in the country house (“in which they could not afford to live”) of the Taverner siblings in Cornwall. Drusilla, known to everyone as Scylla, “ash-fair and tree-tall”, “sometimes a witch, and sometimes a bitch”, is the older, and Felix (to whom, we’re told, “love and death were one”, though entirely unconvincingly) is the younger. With them is a painter called Ross (who is mostly ignored throughout the rest of the narrative), and, soon, an American, Dudley Carston, who comes for the weekend. As he arrives, Felix is out visiting a local pair of similarly artistic souls living, like the Taverners, “in a chaos of elegant poverty”, the painter and sculptor Clarence Lake, and his companion Picus Tracy. (Whose name, meaning “woodpecker”, apparently has all sorts of mythological connections, tying him to “Zeus the Woodpecker”, though they are lost on me.) While there, Picus gets Felix to help him clear out the well at his cottage property, as it has run dry and hedgehogs have a tendency to fall into it in their search for water. Hauling the dead creatures out with a fishing spear, Felix finds a jade cup with “Keltic twiddles… round the rim”. He, Picus, and Clarence come to the Taverners and everyone gathers round the dining table to look at the cup.

Their modern defences are up. This “Keltic” cup, fished out of a well with a spear — “Good old Freud”, someone says — of course can’t be the Holy Grail. They talk about Tennyson, Wagner, and the “Keltic Twilight”, of which these proto-Modernists are all highly disapproving (“those awful pre-Raphaelite pictures”, “I hate the Keltic Twilight… Responsible for the world’s worst art”). But they can’t help feeling something — or perhaps trying not to long for something.

The next day, the cup is gone. After a long search, Carston finds it in his room, where he knows it wasn’t, and accuses everyone of playing a trick on him. He leaves in a huff, and in a nearby village bumps into Picus’s father, a disapproving patriarch who’s come in search of his son for stealing an item from his collection of antiquities, a jade cup he claims to have been a “poison-cup” from India (jade having the power to reveal poison), and after that a “spitting-cup” for a tubercular lady. (Both, notably, images of unhealthiness.) Carston begins to feel that the cup turning up in his room wasn’t the only trick played on him.

But there’s no doubt this is a world desperately in need of the Holy Grail:

“There was something wrong with all of them, or with their world. A moment missed, a moment to come. Or not coming. Or either or both. Shove it off on the war; but that did not help.”

Scylla, Felix, and friends, are distinctly jaded: “We know between us pretty well all there is to know.” And Scylla at one point lays out the age’s malaise:

“If the materialists’ universe is true… we are a set of blind factors in a machine. And no passion has any validity… They are just little tricks of the machine… If you stick to the facts as we have them, life is a horror and an insult.”

They have the feeling, these no-longer-bright young things, of having run through the gamut:

“…we tried the bad to see if it might be good. But the new lot aren’t interested. Don’t give a button for the good any more.”

And Carston, tricked though he has been, feels this, at least, to be genuine:

“They strike me as people who have loved and suffered a great deal. That purifies.”

But whereas King Arthur’s knights split up to search for the Grail, it’s when this “Grail” appears that these “knights” split up. After Carston’s exit, Felix goes to Paris — and this is an interesting sequence, as we move from the tatty poverty of a run-down country house in Cornwall (dead hedgehogs and all) to the vibrancy of roaring 20s Paris, where, overwhelmed by his return to glitz and glamour, parties and young folk, Felix at first struggles to connect. Scylla goes to visit an old girlfriend in London, only to find her married and exceptionally conventional. (Butts gets playful here, presenting part of their conversation as an opera libretto.) Picus goes to weep on his mother’s grave. She, we learn, killed herself after discovering her husband, Picus’s father, was having an affair, with the “tubercular lady” to whom Picus’s father gave the jade cup, giving that “Holy Grail” even more of a Freudian significance for this young man. Clarence, meanwhile, goes back to the dry-welled cottage to try to forget about his longing for Picus, but soon descends into dangerous madness.

And this, I think, is the key to the book’s title. The actual Grail knights — those who succeeded, anyway — were armed with righteousness and purity, but Butts’s “knights”, Scylla & co., have madness as their only resort. They have a self-conscious inability to relate to the Grail (real or not) as a symbol of transcendence and healing, but only as a symbol of reductive Freudian unconscious processes. They just don’t exist in a world where they can handle the Holy Grail’s holiness. So, it doesn’t matter if the cup (which is later revealed to actually be a “Keltic cup”, not the poison-cup and spitting-cup Picus’s father pretends it is) is the real Grail or not, or whether even if not real it still might offer some symbolic connection to a transcendent reality. To these jaded young things, there’s no possibility of transcendence except (perhaps) through art, (temporarily) through the disorientation of drink and drugs, or through fruitless and dangerous madness.

And so, they go through the pangs of loneliness, jealousy, longing, and so on, which ought to be the start of their healing journeys, only they have no way to go on from there, no transcendent state to aspire to.

The Grail myth becomes less important in the second half of the novel. Instead, the presiding image is of arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian, which is something Ted Hughes identified as a key figure throughout T S Eliot’s work, too (in his essay, “The Poetic Self”, in Winter Pollen).

Butts’ style, which I found driven by a sort of impatience with language in her first novel, is now clipped, dismissive, languid, broken — again, jaded — meaning the whole thing is quite laconic, exactly the sort of language her decadent, over-experienced, no-longer-bright young things use with one another. The result is that Armed With Madness really feels like it’s presenting something of the reality of its times. The heady, overwhelming glamour of Paris, and the too-sudden descents into sordid poverty and petty jealousy that run alongside it, all feel authentic. At the same time, Butts is aware of the malaise of her age:

“But notice what is happening now people have become used to the idea. Any little boy in a Paris bar, who never heard of physics knows. Everyone gets the age’s temper.”

To me, the characters are, as with her first novel, unequal to their self-dramatising pronouncements, but the novel itself feels like a far more on-the-ground and authentic document of its age than, say, Eliot’s highly intellectualised Waste Land, even though both draw from the same sources (Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, to which Butts adds A E Waite, Arthur Machen, and Jane Harrison). But both books share a theme of how the modern age doesn’t know how to deal with sacredness, and so loses out on awe, transcendence, and the deeper sort of healing it so desperately needs.

Butts’s next novel was a sequel of sorts to this one — or it features some of the same characters, anyway — though it doesn’t seem to have continued with the Grail theme. The Death of Felicity Taverner (1932) seems to be about land-developers seeking to despoil the Cornish countryside, and doesn’t tempt me quite as much as this novel did.

It’s also harder to get hold of. Armed With Madness seems to have been the only one of Butts’s novels to have had a paperback edition (in 2001 from Penguin Classics). I would like to try some of her short stories, if I can find them in a cheap enough edition. But Armed With Madness seems to be generally considered her best novel, and I suspect it might be more rewarding on a second go.

This 2006 book from Wordsworth Editions reprints May Sinclair’s 1923 collection of the same name, plus one other long story, “The Intercessor” (from The English Review, July 1911), the first ghost story Sinclair wrote, and certainly the best included here.

Sinclair (1863–1946) was already an established novelist when she brought out Uncanny Stories, having been writing since 1891. She combined an interest in psychology (being a founding supporter of the first medical institute in Britain to offer psychoanalysis as a treatment) with parapsychology (joining the Society for Psychical Research in 1914), as well as being a suffragist and an early proponent of Modernism (she was the first to use the phrase “stream of consciousness” to describe the literary technique). Her grisly murder story “The Victim” (included in Uncanny Stories) was published by T S Eliot in the first edition of his magazine, The Criterion (in October 1922), alongside “The Waste Land”.

“The Intercessor” is a powerful story of a household in rural Yorkshire haunted by the death of a child. The narrator, Garvin, is in the area writing a county history, and his one stipulation is lodgings without children. Directed to the Falshaw farmhouse, he’s annoyed on the first night to hear a child’s sobs:

“…it was hardly a crying, a sobbing, a whimpering rather, muffled by closed doors. The wonder was how it could have waked him; the sound was so distant, so smothered, so inarticulate.”

The Falshaws — a stoic farmer, his pregnant wife, and their grown-up niece — are a grim, closemouthed bunch, with Mrs Falshaw in particular treating their paying guest as though it’s predetermined he’ll soon want to leave. Garvin at first assumes the cries are from a child who has been locked into the small room opposite his own in an effort to comply with his not wanting any children about. It cries every night at the same time:

“There was no petulance in it and no anger; it had all the qualities of a young child’s cry, except the carnal dissonances and violences. The grief it uttered was too profound and too persistent, and, as it were, too pure; it knew none of the hot-blooded throes, the strangulated pauses, the lacerating resurgences of passion. At times it was shrill, unbroken, irremediable; at times it was no more than a sad sobbing and whimpering, stifled…”

In contrast to the Falshaws’ dour uncommunicativeness, this crying feels like a desperate expression of all the sad coldness at the heart of this tragic but inarticulate household. Soon, Garvin sees the “child”, and even feels it climbing into his bed to sleep at night.

In contrast to, say, M R James’s ghost stories, which are all about the horror of the spook, and revel in its weird and demonic nature, Sinclair’s ghosts are human things, giving voice as much to the anguish of the living as the tragedy of their own demise. They return not for revenge, or to punish the living, but often simply to be acknowledged, even listened to (at least one of Sinclair’s ghosts delivers a lecture on how the afterlife works, but the more powerful, like the Falshaw child, are pure emotion). Sinclair takes her ghost stories beyond the point where James would end them (the moment the thing is revealed), into having her characters understand and resolve the ghost’s torment (and, usually, their own).

In a very un-Jamesian way, that torment is mostly about love. Sinclair’s fiction, though, isn’t generally sentimental. Love, in these tales, is tangled with guilt (over the transference of love from a dead wife to her successor, for instance, in “The Nature of the Evidence”), or control (a mother’s smothering influence in “If the Dead Knew”), or is stifled, unrequited or poorly expressed (as in “The Token”, where a young wife lingers after death for a sign that her stoic husband truly loved her). And sex, in Sinclair’s stories, just complicates things (as in “Where their Fire is not Quenched”, a bleak vision of an afterlife in which a woman whose one consummated affair was with a man she soon found boring, but she has to live and relive that affair forever after death).

The longest tale here, “The Flaw in the Crystal” (originally published as a separate novella in 1912), is not a ghost story, but a tale of psychic powers. Agatha Verrall has moved to a house in the remote countryside so she can receive weekend visits from her lover, the married Rodney Lanyon. She has an inner link to a “Power”, a gift that allows her, somehow, to extend a circle of psychic protection around people, and to heal them, or at least keep them free of illness (mental illness, anyway) while she holds them in this way. She knows, though, that this gift works best with a very light touch, and an assumed indifference, even though it’s the people she loves that she uses it on — at first, anyway. But when the Powells, a couple she’s acquainted with, move near because of the husband Harding Powell’s bouts of paranoia, Agatha extends her gift to include him. At first it works, and she makes the mistake of telling the wife, Milly, what she’s done. Milly tells Harding, and he, though a staunch non-believer, comes to expect Agatha’s protection. When Agatha realises that the protection she’s so far been giving her lover, Rodney, is waning because of this, she finds herself having to fight for control of her gift from the strong-willed Harding.

Sinclair herself was an atheist, but there’s an evident belief in some sort of afterlife in these stories, as well as, in “The Flaw in the Crystal”, a “Power” behind it all. In this novella, Harding Powell’s utterly unbelieving worldview starts to seep into Agatha’s own:

“Harding’s abominable vision of the world, that vision from which the resplendent divinity had perished…”

It’s quite a heavy going story at times, being tangled so much in the abstractions of Agatha’s inner world, and the mental battles she has with Harding for control of her “gift”. Sinclair’s writing is at its best, perhaps, in “The Victim”, whose protagonist (a thick-accented chauffeur with an uncontrollable temper) is mostly seen from the outside rather than (as with Agatha Verrell) so intensely from within. Some of her stories rely on someone coming forward to explain the reason for the haunting and so resolve it (“The Token”, “If the Dead Knew”, “The Victim”), but the more powerful ones dramatise the emotion behind it rather than the reason (“Where their Fire is not Quenched”, for instance), while “The Intercessor” attains the best balance between these approaches, to deliver an emotional wallop of an ending, which feels, oddly, at once redemptive and bleak.

For someone writing supernatural fiction at a time when Freud’s ideas were beginning to be known (which, as Julia Briggs suggested in Night Visitors, marked the beginning of the end for the popularity the ghost story had been enjoying since Dickens’s day), there’s a real feeling of psychological depth to Sinclair’s tales, and although they may have been influenced to some degree by Freud (the title of Uncanny Stories, for instance), I feel, reading them, that her understanding is definitely her own, and far more nuanced than a merely derivative take on Freud’s ideas could have served up. The most successful tales, dealing with the inequality of love in relationships, or of the very human horrors of emotional neglect, certainly transcend any merely psychological reading to become powerful dramas.

“The Intercessor” is the must-read story here. It was adapted (very faithfully) by Alan Plater (who I mostly know for his quirky comedy The Beiderbecke Affair from 1985) for the ITV Shades of Darkness anthology series (in 1983). (Which is how I first heard about May Sinclair, via a post on the Wyrd Britain blog, which has a link to the Shades of Darkness episode on YouTube.)

You can read “The Flaw in the Crystal” at Gutenberg, and I have “The Intercessor” as an ebook on my free ebooks page. You can learn more about May Sinclair herself at the May Sinclair Society’s site.