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!