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Damn you, Gore Vidal. Damn you for starting it all by
digging up Dawn Powell from Potter's Field, where she had been laid to her
placidly pickled rest in 1957. Your piece on "our best comic
writer" sparked a revival that sent a dozen titles that never earned
back their piddling advances in 1930s dollars cannonballing into the Library
of America. In short order, bidding wars broke out, biographies were written,
diaries footnoted, and Walking Down Broadway, the play Powell never could get produced during her lifetime,
packed them in on West 43rd St.
Looks like you're at it again with James Purdy. Once you got the ball rolling
and passed it to Jonathan Franzen, Eustache Chisolm and the Works was an easy
sell as a "forgotten classic". Actually, I have no opinion on
either writer; I just want to bring up literary exhumation as a phenomenon
before hauling up my candidate for forgotten classic of the month from the
brackish shoals of oblivion, where, I respectfully submit, it is much too good
to be suffered to remain.
Not that it's something I want make into a habit, though I'll admit to having
pestered publishers in the past to get them to consider a new edition of
Charles Plumb's English rendering of The Satires of Juvenal. Plumb did a remarkable job of channeling the
energy of the original in modern verse, including calypso - pity he was too
early for rap. At the same time, enough of the authentic Roman comes through
to prove that if you scratch a sneering cynic, underneath you'll find a layer
of despair too deep for tears. Which is why I think this version of Juvenal holds its own with the other great modern
recreations of classics by Robert Fitzgerald, David Slavitt and Robert
Fagles.
But now the disclosure: Charles Plumb was a lovely man and a friend long
departed, though my lobbying efforts are fueled by factors more
self-interested than a posthumous plug
for old times' sake. The Juvenal was published in 1968 by a cheapo British paperback house on paper
that has aged and brittled faster than Dime Detective and Thrilling Wonder
Stories pulps from a generation before. So come on, publishing people, get on
it. I'd like to be able to re-read this one without having it fall apart on
me. On this occasion, though, I have a different title in mind for special
pleading. Absolutely guaranteed: it's great stuff, and nobody has ever heard
of it, but you have to sit through some more preliminaries first.
Critics have found prospecting for neglected books or authors a sideline well
worth cultivating, a gambit guaranteed to heap merit on the discoverer as
well as the discoveree. How discerning, how well-read, to have lit on a
treasure buried so deep! Extra points awarded if the author died young, if
possible, in poverty or in the trenches of the Somme, or was stabbed by his
mistress, or banned in Beantown, proof that the book in question was ahead of
the zeitgeist curve and therefore genius-class. Edward Lewis Wallant
qualifies on account of the aneurysm that killed him before his 36th
birthday. The last time I read The Tenants of Moonbloom, it was as a 35-cent Signet paperback released in
the late sixties to cash in on the film of The Pawnbroker. Yet with no prompting from me, the NYRB Press has
propelled Moonbloom back into
print in its Classics series, with an introduction by Dave Eggars. Along with
the Dalkey Archive and the Harvill imprints, NYRB Classics appears to be
making money from diving and
salvage in the backlist and long may they keep at it.
But once our interest has been piqued, how often do we actually follow
through? I'm grateful to Alberto Manguel for his hot tip on Richard Outram,
whom he considers "one of the finest poets in the English
language". He might even be right, from his sample stanzas and comments
on where Outram's poetry is coming from, I have to say this sounds like
exactly the stuff for me: "robust joyfulness" combined with
intelligence and passion, expressed in a diction that brings Stevie Smith
immediately to mind. But how likely am I, really, to overcome nature's lethargy
and track down little-press chapbooks by a littler-known Canadian bard who
conceivably may claim a place in the ever-dwindling ranks of poets who
actually deliver the goods? Dubious, too, are my prospects of getting
acquainted with the writing of B.S. Johnson (an ugly suicide) and Hilary
Masters (still with us, I trust) whose work was brought to my attention via
George Garret's critical miscellanies and sounds like something I really
should have a look at.
The book that I know about and you don't is called All Night at Mr
Stanyhurst's, by a retired British Army
officer named Hugh Edwards. It was published in 1933, originally, and again
in 1963, after Ian Fleming, then at the height of his fame, prevailed upon
his publishers to reissue it. This they did, after cadging an introduction
out of him.
His midwifery done, Fleming's follow-up did not go very deep. Aping the
banter of his pal Noel Coward, he relates a few dull facts and one piece of
eyebrow-raising quasi-speculation regarding the author's life. More on that
later. One would have liked to find out more about the compulsion that the
book's "strange and beautiful words" exerted on the world's
then-best selling author of popular fiction. Instead, we hear that Max
Beerbohm "read it with the greatest pleasure", that James Agee
called it "the best long story or short novel since Conrad", and
that Fleming was flying over the Nevada desert en route to Chicago when it
occurred to him to twist some arms to drum up new readers for a book that
took four years to sell out its original 1500-copy print run.
The Mr. Stanyhurst of the title is a rake-hell, roue, profligate, a selfish,
immoral and not unintelligent eighteenth-century London libertine who returns
from his club one evening to dine with his child mistress, an addle-pated
little slut he filched from her former "protector", his old lech of
an uncle, when she was all of 14. Lovely Lucy, of course, is the dessert course. Not that she
particularly minds her lot in life. She considers what she gives out fair
return for the trinkets, favors and finery received, and her only qualm is
the fear of turning tricks down in docklands when Stanyhurst tires of her, as
they both know he will before too much longer.
Enter the Abbe, a mysterious figure who has been invited to dine with them
for no good reason at all. As the tobacco is passed around, the abbe reveals
that an East India Company ship called the Blanchefleur has sunk off the
coast of Africa, with the loss of a clandestine cargo worth millions and all
lives on board save one. Stanyhurst, who had a pile of money riding on the
venture, is naturally is keen when the abbe offers to produce the sole
survivor of the wreck to tell a tale that is "at once sad, tragic and
strange". With Lucy sitting in, the three of them stay up the rest of
the night listening to sixteen-year-old Thomas Pidgeon, steward aboard the
Blanchefleur, tells his tale of shipwreck and woe.
The new story-line takes up half of the book. Intermittent asides snap the
reader back to the original mis-en-scene
as the boy breaks down in tears or is interrupted by his listeners. Lucy
starts as a saucy tease, but soon is enthralled and deeply moved by the
ordeal that Tommy recounts in the period vernacular of the British tar (quite
different, incidentally, from the salty syntax of Patrick O'Brian's heroes.)
Tommy's account of how he shipped out to Ceylon introduces an interlude of
devoted, innocent puppy-love with a pretty 15-year-old passenger. She is, in
fact, an insufferable child (you wonder why nobody has heaved her overboard)
who hero-worships the kind-hearted, impressionable boy. Edwards' command of
detail is absorbing, the faux first-person voice convincing and his
minute-by-minute account of the ship going down is right up there with the
best descriptive narratives of what actually happens in a disaster at sea,
and what it feels like to be part of it.
The rest is disease, starvation, hardships and horror for the handful of
castaways who wash up on the West African coast. The natives they encounter
not so much hostile as indifferent to the survivors, whose plight they find
hilarious, until most of the adult males are massacred in an offstage
skirmish. As the ordeal drags on, women, children, Lucy's mother, are carried
off by disease, exhaustion or hyenas. Tommy staggers with his beloved airhead
towards a Dutch settlement down the coast, and comforts her with lies as she
dies in his arms. It ends as all these stories must end: "And only I am
escaped alone to tell thee" or "my ghastly tale
is told".
All this time, you feel the raw power of the "well-told story"
which Iris Murdoch took as being at the heart of the successful novel,
interestingly enough citing Treasure Island as the supreme
example of its kind. Mr Stanyhurst's is also a marvellous piece of writing. The tale that unfolds within
another tale, two stories joined together at the waist, like Cupid and Psyche
in The Golden Ass, rather than
interludes or sideshows spliced into a unitary narrative, like the bits
everyone skips over in Don Quixote. Borges was another fan of literary twofers and
noted that "Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are
the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to
leaf through them at random, to dream. Paintings within paintings and books
that branch into other books help us sense this oneness."
This dream-like effect here seems intentional. Tommy's beloved bears the same
name as the ship, Blanchefleur, but after she reveals that her father had
wanted to call her Lucy, Lucy she is to her young savior. The other Lucy, the
wanton saucepot, is actually her double, as Tommy intuits at once.
("'She was like you,' he resumed, looking gravely into the girl's face.
'I know it soon's I come into the room. But she was younger'") The
compelling power of the well-told tale has transformed the child-vixen and
caused her to experience the need to comfort and care for another.
("'Let me take her place, Tommy,' the girl said very quietly.")
Fleming tells us that after being invalided out of the British Army's West
India Regiment when he contracted blackwater fever in Sierra Leone, Hugh
Edwards (1874-1952) retired to a fisherman's cottage "in which he lived
the life of an eighteenth-century recluse, confining himself to one attic in
which there was nothing but a large bed and hundreds of books." If we
are to believe Fleming, none of the four other novels that came out of that
attic are much good, although Edwards "lived the remote life of his
imagination for many years, reading, writing and composing albums of nonsense
rhymes for the numerous nephews and nieces and cousins who came there for the
holidays."
Presumably it was from one of these relatives that Fleming got a notion of
what made Hugh Edwards'
imagination go rocketing like fireworks in just this one book. "In his
Edwardian youth, he had been by all accounts a young blade of tremendous dash
and virility with a zest for all the wine of life, but one of the terrible
side-effects of blackwater fever is that it rids a man of all appetite for
these things and there is no doubt that the romantic sexuality and the
background of high life to All Night
at Mr Stanyhurst's are sentimental
memories of the young rake-hell he had once been."
Oh, is that it? To me it sounds like just the sort of thing Fleming would
foist on his readers: purported inside dope combined with obscure expertise.
Remember, this was the writer that couldn't even get the caliber of James
Bond's Walther PPK right. This "forgotten classic" is one that would
be better served with a brand new introduction for the sake of the new
readers of the new edition that some prescient publisher is taking far too
long to bring to market.
© Robert
Latona 2007
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