Haunted by Books

Haunted by Books by Mark Valentine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How could a true bibliophile resist such a title as Haunted by Books? Add the fact that it was written by Mark Valentine and the siren's lure was irresistible. Having recently read Valentine's stellar collection The Nightfarers, I was altogether hypnotized by the prospect. One might say "possessed".

But, like all unrealistic expectations, some aspect of anticipated pleasures are bound to disappoint. Thankfully, the disappointments here are few.

For example, the chapter on Aickman I found to be a bit of a stretch. The exposition on a couple of lines of Aickman's writing, lauding the complexity hidden beneath so few words, just wasn't very convincing to me. Aickman's a great writer, but looking at the same text as Valentine, I think he's stretching the evidence to the breaking point.

And if Valentine was hoping to encourage me to read Vernon Knowles' work, his attempt was a spectacular failure. If he was warning me away from it, mission accomplished! Still, a poignant story.

I also had a hard time seeing the influence of hermeticism in Vansittart's work, judging purely from Valentine's essay. I'm sure he is a fine writer, but how can you title an essay "Secret Names: The Hermetic Fiction of Peter Vansittart" and not have a hint of hermeticism in the essay? I felt a little cheated by the title, though it did spawn in me a number of thoughts which I shall be taking down in my writing notebook. So it's not all a loss.

These disappointments did not last long, however. I found much to like in this volume. Heart-rending stories about writers who nearly rose to prominence, then faded to obscurity, abounded. As it a bevy of accounts regarding anonymous writers or well-known writers whose works have been lost to time. And not a few books were added to my "must read someday" list: Mary Butts' Armed with Madness, Morris' Bretherton, The London Mercury (which I should like to see resurrected), and the lost volume A Book of Whimsies - lost to me, anyway, as I can't find any reference to it outside of Valentine's essay. I am haunted by the absence of these books.

Valentine is at his best when he is digging through the layers of creation, showing how a writer does what they do. Valentine's analysis of Walter de la Mare's Seaton's Aunt is the sort of essay that makes me want to be a better writer and reader and gives me the tools to do so. It is a careful unpacking of a subtly horrific story that gives a peek behind the panels at the gears that make the story move. Fantastic stuff.

Valentine uses Sax Rohmer's The Orchard of Tears as a digging tool to uncover the shadowed trends and hidden interstices of occult movement happening at, or just before, the writing of the novel. I am fond of these socio-intellectual archaeologies. They are so rare and so rarely done well. I could stand to read a book filled with such insightful essays.

Digging among the dead stirs up ghosts. And there are ghosts of all different kinds here.

The essay on Charles Welsh Mason was everything I hoped for: a thoroughgoing assessment of an extremely interesting writer whose career faded into the mists of time under most mysterious circumstances. This sort of essay was what I thought of when I first saw the title Haunted by Books. Fascinating and eerie.

As a young man growing up in the time of James Leslie Mitchell, I might have loved his fiction, particularly his shorter works. Alas, I was born to late and am probably too jaded to fully appreciate his work. But maybe not. There is a certain wistful longing for simpler times in me. I am a haunter out of time, it seems.

Valentine's premise of the inverse relationship between the amount of esoteric/occult content in a book and the book's popularity (at least among mid-twentieth-century readers) is interesting. Readers want a glimpse of the occult, but they don't want to read a text that might imply that they have actually learned something of esoteric teachings. Interesting fiction/non-fiction dynamic there. These readers are haunted by longing, but unable to receive revelation, in a sort of limbo of faith. A literary purgatory.

I should give a copy of The Fifth of November to my daughter and see if she can figure out it isn't Shakespeare. I constantly tease her about Shakespeare being Francis Bacon or Robert Marlowe. She has acted in several Shakespeare productions and actually been paid professionally to do so on a couple of occasions, and I'm a Dad, so I can't help teasing her about Shakespeare's reality or lack thereof. I suppose I am, in some strange way, haunting her with my own notions of literature. Poor woman!

"Or Opaline Algol" is a sweet, sweet mystery - an anonymous poet of significant talent remains, somehow, completely anonymous. The texts drop hints of the author, but never enough to reveal them. This is what I anticipated when I first read the title Haunted by Books: The identity of the poet is just around the corner, but when you spin around it to look down the hall, you only catch faint, ectoplasmic wisps dissolving up into the ceiling.

The story of the Johnsonians is poignant and possibly the most well-written essay in this entire book, so far. Valentine's personal anecdotes of his childhood are creepy and insightful into his mode of thinking. Haunted by books, indeed!

"What Became of Dr. Ludovicus" is a fascinating archaeology of creativity and the vain quest to seek publication, only to later become lost to the sands of time - except for the correspondence between the two authors who were working on it. It's like an epistolary novel that might or might not have ever existed. A little eerie by reason of omission. What is not seen is usually much more terrifying than what is perceived directly.

"Wraiths," the long-lost poetry of some fin-de-siecle would-be-writers which have been utterly lost to the sands of time, are the perfect haunters for this book. Beautiful words like a vapor, or so it is rumored.

"The Piccadilly Goat" was the most entertaining, whimsical essay of the book. It reads like a turn-of-the-(20th)-Century Harpers article and hits all the right notes. Absolute perfection.

The final essay sends the reader off into the atmosphere of what might have been. A wonderful way to end this eclectic, but intellectually-upward-spiraling work. The reader finishes the book with a sense of awe, as of watching spirits rise from a graveyard through the illuminated fog on a moonlit moor.

footnote: Special thanks to Acep Hale for his generous loan of the book to me.

View all my reviews

________________________

If you like my writing and want to help my creative endeavors, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Rule Dementia!

Rule Dementia! by Quentin S. Crisp
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I admit it: sometimes I will take an author's introduction as a challenge to see if they live up to their own assessment of their work. But given that Crisp has here included two introductions: one from 2004 - a somewhat trite and generous assessment of his own work, and one from 2016 - an apologia, of sorts, for the former; I am stuck between the two Crisps. At times, the work in this volume seems naive (as hinted at in his 2016 forward), but I believe that this naivete is intentional, that Crisp wants at least some of his protagonists to be so full of innocence that their loss of the same is all the more tragic. The feelings that I felt the strongest while reading this volume were sympathy, pathos, sadness, and pity. All of this, of course, was set against the foil of "happiness", and by that I mean "self satisfaction" of the characters, some of whom are unwholesome chaps.

"Jellyfish Joe" is a beautifully-written story of a messiah, of sorts, who forms a cult based on the metaphysical philosophies of the jellyfish. It is an interesting meditation on the interface between naivete and faith and the reactions to the ultimate test of one's deeply held beliefs and spiritual experiences. What if miracles happen in spite of the miracle-worker, where the Messiah considers himself a complete fraud, but his followers do not? This story digs deeply at the very nature of faith. It gets in your heart and brain and is extremely poignant, especially for those of us who have equal doses of religious faith and incredulity warring within us. Four stars.

Remember those episodes of the X-Files that were intentionally self-effacing, goofy as heck and, yet, somehow sinister? That's what "The Haunted Bicyle" "feels" like. And more on the goofy side, with an intellectually-clumsy narrator and some weird characters and situations he encounters. I'm having a hard time describing this story, and that's good! There is one little self-referential slip regarding surrealism. Nothing is less surreal than saying you're surreal. And I don't know that the character meant it in jest.

Despite this slip, Crisp is very good at portraying whimsical awkwardness. Or is it awkward whimsy? In either case, it is strange and playful and I like it in a twisted sort of way.

"The Haunted Bicycle" has one foot in Bizarro-land, one foot in the old English ghost story, and one foot firmly planted ankle-deep in William S. Burroughs' grave. Lurking behind it is a veil (eventually rent) of cosmic horror and more than a touch of insanity. And, yes, the story is about a haunted bicycle. Five crazed stars to this unclassifiable, yet utterly delightful story.

"Zugzwang" is one of the most effective stories of paranoia I've ever read. A relative of mine (through marriage) was once clinically diagnosed with paranoia. I've spoken with him about it a couple of times, and it's a scary, helpless twisting of reality. This story is a fair fictional approximation of the disorder, with a touch of cosmic horror, which makes it truly disturbing. Four stars, only because of the unlikelihood of the relationship that begins it all, which is rather jarring and requires a self-conscious suspension of disbelief.

"The Tao of Petite Beige" is an esoteric story about pornography addiction, if nothing else. The occult journey, a sort of sublimation from banality to heaven to hell, portrayed therein is compelling, the ending predictable. It is a beautifully written story, as evidenced here in the paragraph before the very final moments of the story:

Paul floated, seemingly without volition, closer to the mouth of the alley, the two celebrants still holding his arms. The crowd slowed in its approach, like backed-up water, the trickle that passed through picking up speed again. As Paul observed the movement of bodies at this bottleneck, a word rose inexplicably to the surface of his mind to describe it - 'fulfilment'. His life was narrowing down to this single channel. Soon he would be sucked in. All the wide, glittering detail he had come to think of as his very life would be jettisoned as redundant. When he thought about 'life' becoming 'fulfilment', about an aimless ocean becoming a stream, he could not suppress a sharp sense of loss, something like the dizzying panic he had been feeling of late just walking the streets of the wide world. Here in the eddying before the final entrance to that fulfilment, the sad waters of the ocean he was to leave forever seemed to toss and pitch, like water about to run away through a crack in the earth's surface. In those waters he saw so much, he never realised his life had contained such heartbreaking detail - his long years of failure, Mother, drunken conversations with friends that had to end somewhere and yet still seemed to be going on, relationships that never started, loves and lusts never told (just count them), studies that were never made use of, clothes worn and thrown away, music listened to and tired o, places seen from the window of a moving train and never visited, letters lost or gathering dust, days wasted - all this was running away down a crack in the ocean floor. And though there was panic and sadness attached to this wide world, that too was running away. Paul was feeling more and more detached. Fulfilment!

Four stars, with a warning that this story is for adults only!

"The Waiting" is the kind of story that you read and the bottom drops right out from under you. A cosmic conspiracy on a grand scale. There are strong echoes of Thomas Ligotti here, but Crisp's own peculiar voice is always in the background. Four stars

Crisp certainly knows how to tug at the heartstrings, then rip them clean out. "Unimaginable Joy" is an ironic title, a double-entendre. You cannot imagine joy, and there is a conspiracy afoot to ensure that this is the case. It is beyond you. Any joy you think you might have grasped was only a hazy mirage. Only those who embrace the void know true joy, but it is not joy as you think of it! A heart-rending story of innocence lost and the victory of debauchery. Don't read this on a down day. It will not help your mood. Five depressing stars.

When you hear the name Quentin S. Crisp associated regularly with the names Reggie Oliver and Mark Valentine, you can bet that the work is going to be of excellent quality. And so it is. It's not as dignified as Oliver or as intellectually suave as Valentine's work, but Crisp does fit in with them like the somewhat awkward kid at the back of the smart-kid crowd, the one who laughs a bit more than the rest, but you know has a wicked brain brewing up schemes in there that no one else will - or ought to - see in public.

View all my reviews