Reading Fantasy in 1928-29: Part Two

May Lamberton Becker published a reply to W.S.'s query (from the 22 December 1928 issue of The Saturday Review) in her column "The Reader's Guide" for 26 January 1929. This time the writer gave his full name, Richard Ely Morse, and fans of H.P. Lovecraft may recognize the name as that of one of Lovecraft's correspondents. Richard Ely Morse (1909-1986) was 19 at the time his letter appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature. He wouldn't meet Lovecraft until the summer of 1932, and their correspondence would continue until Lovecraft's death in March 1937. Lovecraft's forty-odd letters have been published, and, like Morse's letter below, exemplify Morse's devotion to fantasy and weird literature. 

Richard Ely Morse, Princeton, N.J., sends the following additions to the list of fantasies:—

I was interested to see that W.S. is planning a study of fantasy, for with the exception of Robert Hillyer, the poet, and myself, I did not know there were any in this country who had made it their special study. Your list was one of the most complete I have ever seen in print, but I am venturing to append a list of my own, fill­ing in the gaps.

"Fantasy, of course, has various subdi­visions, such as the macabre, where we find Arthur Machen, Leonard Cline with his 'Dark Chamber,' Donald Douglas with 'The Grand Inquisitor,' and Ben Hecht with 'The Kingdom of Evil.' These are the only ones which may be strictly classed as fantasies; the bounds arc easy to overstep into the grotesque and horrible.

"Under sophisticated fantasy one might put the icy brilliance of Laforgue in 'Six Moral Tales,' Firbank's intricate wit, Vir­ginia Woolf's 'Orlando,' and Van Vechten's 'Peter Whiffle.' Aubrey Beardsley's unfin­ished 'Venus and Tannhauser' might also be included here.

"Sentimental and satirical are two other varieties. The first named is usually the poorest, the type which 'A Little Clown Lost' best represents. Of the latter class, you have already mentioned the best expo­nent—Stella Benson.

"The list which follows here below can­not pretend to be complete, but with the list published in the Saturday Review on December 21, it makes up the most complete I know of. If W. S. knows of others, I wish he would let me know of them.

"No one who is interested at all in fantasy can afford to overlook James Branch Cabell; Walter de la Mare; James Stephens; Ken­neth Grahame; Norman Douglas (especially his 'They Went'); Gerald Bullett with 'Mr. Godley Beside Himself' and 'The Baker's Cart'; and perhaps, Ernest Bramah with his 'Kai Lung' series. We have also 'Doodab' by Harold Loeb; 'These Mortals,' by Mar­garet Irwin; 'Flower Phantoms,' by Ron­ald Fraser; 'The Street of Queer Houses,' by Vernon Knowles; 'The Siamese Cat,' by Leon Underwood; 'A Mirror for Witches,' by Esther Forbes; 'The Early Adventures of Peachum Grew,' by Roy Helton; 'The Eternal Moment' and 'The Celestial Om­nibus,' by E. M. Forster; 'The Adven­tures of Harlequin,' by Francis Bickney; 'The Marionette,' by Edwin Muir; 'The Worm Ouroboros,' by E. R. Eddison; 'Lud-in-the-Mist,' by Hope Mirrlees, 'Gandle Follows his Nose,' by Heywood Broun; 'Messer Marco Polo,' by Donn Byrne; 'The House of Lost Identity,' by Donald Corley; 'A House of Pomegranates,' by Oscar Wilde; 'Flecker's Magic,' by Norman Matson ; 'Nomad,' by Paul Jordan Smith; 'Twilight of the Gods,' by Richard Garnet!; 'Green Mansions' and 'A Little Boy Lost,' by W. H. Hudson; 'The Man Who was Thursday,' by G. K. Chesterton; and 'The Horned Shepherd¹ by Edgar Jepson."

To this admirable collection let me [May Lamberton Becker]  add Marie Cher's "The Door Unlocked," [correctly "The Door Unlatched"] which has given me deep delight and will please any lover of old Paris.

In the same mail with the letter above-quoted arrived a copy of "A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles," by Andre Maurois (Appleton), a fantasy just put into Eng­lish by David Garnett and embellished with woodcuts by Edward Carrick in precisely the vein of the text. This demure record is of an adventurer (and a lady friend) cast away upon an island on which since 1861 the aristocracy and masters have been literary artists, Articoles—served and ad­mired by the local Beos, short for Beotians. The allegory is transparent, but however light its texture, it is sound. It must cer­tainly figure upon this list. The idea of a trans-Atlantic journey in a little boat occurred to M. Maurois from reading Alain Gerbault's story of his lone-hand cruise from east to west across the Atlantic, and it is appropriate that the jacket of this book should carry a notice of the English ver­sion of Gerbault's book, "The Fight of the Firecrest" (Appleton), as unusual an ad­venture as any voyager has brought through.

I've already read a large number of these titles, but will have to report back on The Early Adventures of Peacham Grew (1925) by Roy Helton.

 

Reading Fantasy in 1928-29: Part One

In the late 1920s, May Lamberton Becker hosted a column in The Saturday Review of Literature (NY). The column was called "The Reader's Guide," and readers were invited to send in questions related to books. In the 22 December 1928 issue the following query appeared from one W.S. of Philadelphia, who was interested in doing a study on fantasy. So far as I know, the study never appeared, and I do not know who W.S. was, or what else this person might have done. One significant response appeared in the column some weeks later, and I will reprint it in a follow-up blog post. Meanwhile, besides commonly known titles, there are some real obscurities referenced herein. Has any one read Barry Benefield's A Little Clown Lost (1928) or René  Thévenin's Barnabé and His Whale (translated into English in 1923)?  Mark Valentine just wrote last month on Wormwoodiana of the centenary of Helen Beauclerk's The Green Lacquer Pavilion. Barbara Follett's The House without Windows (1927) was written when she was twelve. (In 1939, at age twenty-five, she had a fight with her husband and left their Massachusetts apartment and was never seen or heard from again. For more of the story, see here.) Christopher Morley was quite prolific, and there are more books and stories of fantasy interest in his oeuvre than the two mentioned below.  

W.S., Philadelphia, is planning a study of the fantasy and its technique, and asks for a list of books of this nature. He suggests as examples "Thunder on the Left" and "A Little Clown Lost." [by Barry Benefield]

The Viking Press, started upon a career of fantasy-publishing by the works of Sylvia Townsend Warner, "Lolly Willowes" leading, followed with Bea Howe's "A Fairy Leapt upon my Knee," one of the most successful examples I know of the art of making the incredible happen under your eye, Edith Olivier's unforgettable "The Love Child," and as a climax, T. F. Powys's "Mr. Weston's Good Wine" which manages somehow to get the cosmos upon the canvas. Meanwhile Miss Warner sent us through this house her "Mr. Fortune's Maggot" and another that I hear is now in press.

The nearest I know to pure fantasy un­complicated by allegory, is Garnett's "Lady into Fox" (Knopf), into which well-mean­ing people often try to cram a protesting moral, but without making it stick. "A Man in the Zoo" and "The Sailor’s Return" are still in this manner, but "Go She Must" gave warning that a change in Mr. Garnett's methods was impending, as it was clear by the deeper note in Stella Benson's "Goodbye, Stranger" (Macmillan) that her art had come to a bend in the road. In this beautiful novel, it will be remembered, a fairy marries an American girl in China, a sufficiently fantastic situa­tion. "Seducers in Ecuador," V. Sackville-West, disingenuously titled tale of the ef­fect of colored spectacles (Doran), Helen Beauclerk's disturbing "Green Lacquer Pavilion" (Doran), Walter de la Mare's "Henry Brocken" (Knopf), the melodious romances of Dunsany, especially "The Char­woman's Shadow" (Putnam), Ronald Fraser's effort to transmute into literature images called up by Chinese art in "Land­scape with Figure." (Liveright), Margaret Irwin's gentle, ghostly "Who Will Remem­ber?" [UK title, “She Who Wished for Company”] that was published here by Seltzer— her recent "Fire. Down Below" (Harcourt, Brace) returns, after a successful ex­cursion info artistic society, to her earlier manner—Thévenin's rollicking "Barnabé and his Whale" (McBride), the scarcely veiled satire of Eimar O'Duffy's "King Goshawk and the Birds" (Macmillan)— these are some of the fantasies I can call back from a grateful memory without con­sulting a catalogue. Four writers in America match in this respect anyone who writes elsewhere: Elinor Wylie with the un­forgettable "Venetian Glass Nephew" (Doran), Robert Nathan with a shelf-ful [sic] of subtleties crowned by this new one, "The Bishop's Wife" (Bobbs-Merrill), Barbara Follett, for whose "The House Without Windows" (Knopf) I must dust off the set-away word unique, and Christopher Morley, whose "Thunder on the Left" is approached only by his own "Where the Blue Begins." It stands out against the sky in contemporary American literature; I should not be sur­prised if this and Stephen Benet's "John Brown's Body" (Doubleday) were the two books by which this literary generation in America would be remembered. Certainly it would be a good thing for our post­humous reputation if these were the two that lasted.

Men Only: The UK magazine, 1935-1963

Chris Harte has just published another of his comprehensive histories/bibliographies of a magazine. This time it is the UK magazine Men Only, which ran for 329 issues from 1935 to 1963. 

Contributors include  Michael Arlen, Hilaire Belloc, Ambrose Bierce, John Buchan, Karel Capek, Arthur C. Clarke, Rupert Croft-Cooke, Lord Dunsany, Negley Farson (Bram Stoker's nephew), Ronald Fraser, David Garnett, Louis Golding, James Hilton, Laurence Housman, Alan Hyder, Edgar Jepson, Gerald Kersh, Eric Linklater, Percy Lubbock, Andre Maurois, A. A. Milne, Christopher Morley, Eimar O'Duffy, J.B. Priestley, Maurice Richardson,  Rafael Sabatini, L.A.G. Strong, H.G. Wells, Charles Williams, Oscar Wilde, P.G, Wodehouse, Philip Wylie, and many others, famous or otherwise. (My list here is skewed towards authors that readers of Wormwoodiana might be interested in.) 

Of course a major item of interest is the long history of the magazine, which takes up twenty-some pages. Men Only Magazine 1935-1963: A History and Bibliography (Sports History Publishing, 2026), by Chris Harte, should be appearing shortly in the usual venues for ordering book.  The ISBN is: 9781898010234. Here is the cover:

Chris Harte has other magazine histories/bibliographies that I've written about before.

1.  The Captain

2.  The Badminton

3.  Fore's Sporting Notes & Sketches 

4.  Lilliput Magazine 

 

 

One New Book, One Forthcoming

In December, I was asked by the British Library "Tales of the Weird" imprint to write an Introduction to The Luck of the Town, by Marion Fox, scheduled for April 2026. The timing was short, but the introduction was finished in January and the book is now out.  The cover went through some variations, but the finished version, embossed, is quite nice. I copy it below, and also the rear cover, which gives a a good blurb for the book (written not by me, but by the editor at the British Library). Click on the images to make them larger. 

 

And another book to which I have contributed has just been announced for publication in January 2027, nicely in hardcover and a more affordable trade paperback. It's available for pre-order at the publisher's webpage. I've requested that they add a table of contents to the page.  My contribution is "A Checklist of the Published Writings of Richard Adams."  It is divided into five sections: Books; Stories; Nonfiction; Juvenilia; and Selected Interviews. I was surprised that no one had ever attempted such an Adams bibliography before. 

 

The Path to Reading

Often, but not always, there are external reasons as to why one might be reading any particular book. This story starts some ten years ago. I have attended the annual Medievalist's Congress in Kalamazoo since 2001, save for the covid years. One of the pleasures used to be a large winding room of booths for booksellers and publishers. Alas, a few years ago, the old building which housed the book room was razed, and the Exhibits Hall was moved into a smaller cramped and sterile place in a new building, with a doubling of prices for the booths. Many dealers and publishers ceased coming, to the detriment of the entire Congress.  

Around ten years ago, on one of my surveys of the book room, I found someone selling rare books and manuscripts, who also had some Ballantine Adult Fantasies and some early Tolkien paperbacks. We started chatting, and he saw my name tag and said:  "I quote you in my recent book!"  The book, it turns out, is called The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf to Maus (2014) by Thomas A. Bredehoft, and my “Note on the Text” to The Lord of the Rings is quoted with regard to a view of textual scholarship, and sources of textual errors, in the late twentieth century.

Since meeting, Tom and I usually chat and catch up at some point during each Congress.  Last year he gave me a copy of his newest venture as the author of a mystery with a twist.  It’s called Foote: A Mystery Novel, and is published by West Virginia University Press, out of  Morgantown, West Virginia, where Tom lived for years. Oddly, the blurbs on the rear refer to it as a hard-boiled thriller, but it’s not at all what I think of as hard-boiled. It concerns a private investigator in Morgantown who finds himself involved in two murder investigations. The tale mixes the small town life of Morgantown and the country life of the lands surrounding the town.  The first murder took place at a ramps festival—something I’d never heard of before.  “Ramps” are wild onions (or leeks) that are cooked in a wide array of ways that sound delicious. Other gatherings visited by the plot include an airstreamer group (airstreamers are aluminum travel campers), and a civil war reenactment.  

The twist (and I am not giving anything away here by mentioning it) is that the P.I. Jim Foote, known as “Big Jim,” is not human. He is a bigfoot, a long-lived sasquatch, who works in Morgantown to shield the nearby Homelands of his people from human meddling, and vice versa.  The questions surrounding the two murders make Foote wonder whether there might be bigfoot involvement.  Big Jim’s musings at the civil war reenactment gives an interesting perspective: “The whole idea of historical reenactment must be an exercise in imagination. It is one of the greatest differences, I have always thought, between bigfoot and humans: for most bigfoot, life in the forest is life in the present, in our minds and hearts it is a kind of unchanging and eternal present. For humans, as long as I’ve known them, and even longer, life in the forest is life in the past.”

The pace of the narrative is slow and easy, and the plot stretches over about ten days. The set-up is refreshingly different from many mysteries, which is of course part of the appeal. Even the Medievalist Congress makes a brief appearance, as one character describes the paper he is working on for it:  “about medieval wild-men: big, hair-covered guys, living outside of civilization, out in the woods,  The payoff will be where I look at the Middle English poem, Sir Orfeo as making use of the wild-man motif.” 

Tom has posted some small Jim Foote adventures at his substack, and a longer story, “Ghost in the Machine” (more comedic than the mystery novel, with more fantastical cryptids), came out this past Christmas at Booktimist, the official blog of West Virginia University Press.  I hope this bodes well for further “Big Jim” novels in the future. 

Mothra

As a youth I enjoyed the various Japanese monster films that showed up on late night television. We didn't then know to call the monsters kaiju. Godzilla was most frequently encountered, but the monster and film that intrigued me the most was Mothra, because of its very surreal nature. I mean: an island in a radiation zone near Japan is found to be inhabited by savages, overseen by a pair of diminutive women who speak and sing in unison. After the women are taken away from the island by an unscrupulous businessman, in order to exploit them in a carnival-type show, they sing for rescue by Mothra, who, back on the island, hatches from a large egg, and as a larva swims gallantly over the sea, cocoons itself in Tokyo, and emerges as a very large moth with very slow-moving wings, which nonetheless compel hugely destructive winds. That is the kernel of the plot of the film Mosura, released in July 1961, with an English version released the following year as Mothra. 

I learned recently that the original novella (three connected stories by three different writers), made as a preliminary film treatment, was published in January 1961 in a periodical whose title translates to Asian Weekly Supplement. The story was titled "Hakko yosei to Mosura," the three parts written successively by Shin'ichiro Nakamura, Takehiko Fukanaga, and Yoshie Hotta. It has now been translated into English for the first time, as The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. The slim book, published by the University of Minnesota Press, contains the translation (42 pages) and a Translator's Afterword, by Jeffrey Angles, which is almost twice as long as the original story. 

I picked this up to see if the original novella might have made more sense plot-wise, especially curious about the small singing women (played by twin sisters in the film). And there are interesting differences from the film. In the novella, the small singing women are two foot high, and four in number; in the film they are one foot high and two in number. In translation they are designated "luminous fairies" though no such terms are used in the film. An interesting back-story of the island savages ("dirt people") and their worship of the Mothra egg is given, but overall the plot of the novella follows the same trajectory as the plot of the film. 

The "Translator's Afterword: Hatching Mothra" tells much about the composition and cultural background to the novella and film, including the political aspects. It reveals an unexpected but fascinating relation to one of Hugh Lofting's Doctor Doolittle books. There is also a discussion of Mothra's shifting gender. 

In 2023, Angles published a volume Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, including new translations (the first into English) of the first two Godzilla novellas, coincident with the first two films.  Both are by Shiguru Kayama.  This looks as much fun as the Mothra book. I look forward to reading it.