Dream Fox

— Rosalie Parker. Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories. [vi], 239 pp.  Tartarus Press, [2023]. Pictorial boards, dust jacket.
A new collection of 18 stories from this talented author, presenting a variety of modes and settings, plus a fabulous book-within-a-book, “Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences”. The stories also display a remarkable range of voices and a change of register from one story to the next, the oppressive tone of “Home Comforts”is followed by the quiet austerity and sense of the inescapable at the heart of “The Decision”. “Pebble” is a dark fable of modern slavery; it takes a sudden, darker turn that speaks of liberation.

The first story, “Beguiled”, starts as a glimpse of an aristocratic young lady’s privilege and confinement in Imperial Russia, with a flavor of some of the tales of Saki. The narrative moves with concision and perfect pitch to an icy conclusion and a devastating last line. The effect is breathtaking ! and all in eight pages of the most lucid prose.

The title story, “Dream Fox”, a variation on the Reynard tales, is deeply subversive of the patriarchy and the county landholding class. It is the rebellious imagination of the adolescent girl that powers the transformation. The outcome is utterly that of “Kitty” by Paul Bowles.

“Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences” is a collection of nine stories of ghosts and uncanny experiences in contemporary Britain, a book “chanced upon in  a remainder outlet or a charity shop, rather than a bona fide bookstore”, published by a vanity press for “the crazy old woman who own all those millions in the National Lottery” and who wants to share her belief in the paranormal. The frame story is told in an introduction and the headnotes to each account. It is hilarious (is it a cameo self-portrait of the author?): in “The Dating Game”, Mary Belgrove tells Scott, “Perhaps we need to recognise that in this case  ‘Alive’ and ‘Dead’ may be relative terms.” The experiences (each narrated in a distinct voice) are dislocating and defy reductive explanation.

A beautiful book and a notable collection.

R. B. Russell, Fifty Forgotten Books

— R. B. Russell. Fifty Forgotten Books. With numerous illustrations. 255 pp. Sheffield : And Other Stories, 2022.

Sometimes, all it takes is one book. When Mr. Brookes, who kept a bookshop in Brighton, gave handsome young Ray Russell a Corgi paperback copy of Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907), how could Mr. Brookes have known where it would lead? Not perhaps where he thought. As proprietor (with Rosalie Parker) of Tartarus Press, Russell has championed and published Arthur Machen, Robert Aickman, Sarban, and other early authors of supernatural fiction, and developed a consistently excellent list of new authors in the field.  Fifty Forgotten Books is Russell’s engaging memoir of how that came to be, in a braided succession of chapters  (and discussing many more than 50 books).

The two best qualities of Ray Russell’s memoir are the eclectic nature of his list of titles and the delight a reader has in walking around in his library as the collector pulls volumes from shelves to tell stories of books, and of the booksellers, friends, and authors summoned in memory in the telling.  First things first: this is an eclectic chronicle of a curious reader from his teenage years to the present, so after a bit of second-hand existentialism by way of Colin Wilson, we get to it. The Hill of Dreams, “better written than anything I had previously read. [. . .] When I went back to Brighton two weeks later, it was to hunt for more Machen, but I was sorely disappointed. Machen’s books were hard to find at the time.” Another early stage in his reading was French literature in translation, with Baudelaire, André Gide, and Raymond Radiguet, and Le Grand Meaulnes (which Russell would himself translate from the original in 1999). Learning of Oscar Wilde and the 1890s led to Ernest Dowson’s Dilemmas (1895) and M. P. Shiel. Russell writes of his quests in used and antiquarian bookshops up and down England and Wales, on an architecture student’s budget. The intellectual generosity of some booksellers is sometimes exceeded by the wiliness of others, such as the late  George Locke.

It always comes back to Machen: a copy of the Knopf compendium, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, bought on his American trip to see buildings and the manuscripts of H. P. Lovecraft, reaffirms his esteem for the Welsh author. Things really get going when Russell attends a meeting of the Arthur Machen Society and meets enthusiasts who become lifelong friends. The delight of Fifty Forgotten Books is in the stories of convivial encounters — a certain amount of drinking is sometimes involved — and in seeing the life of these communities of readers and writers described: books and friends* and landscapes to ramble in, what more could one ask?  Russell’s first publication was a stapled pamphlet, but two years toil in a dodgy local vanity press schooled him in the logistics of book production, and Tartarus books have since then had both a consistent design style and a pleasing feel in the hand.

Russells recounts the enthusiasms for Machen and Robert Aickman that shaped the early output of Tartarus, and how these led to other interests. Through Janet Machen, Russell became interested in the writings of Sylvia Townsend Warner, and eventually founded a literary society devoted to her. After his friend Mark Valentine, suggested reading Sarban, their researches led to a genuine rediscovery and to the preservation of that author’s archive. The accounts of visits to the author’s daughter are great fun.

Russell’s earlier collection of essays, Past Lives of Old Books (2020) touched upon many of the same authors, but here he is telling of his own life and his friends and the tone is different. I note that 13 of the 50 chapters in Russell’s memoir are about books by women authors. I mention this as the early history of the literature of the supernatural is pretty much a men’s club, but during the past several decades, editors in the supernatural (as in science fiction and fantasy), have opened up the field to a greater diversity of authors. In writing of The Old Knowledge  (2010) by Rosalie Parker, Russell makes it clear that his partner’s editorial vision has shaped the contemporary list published by Tartarus Press, which includes N. A. Subway’s Rupetta (2013) and Rebecca Lloyd’s The Child Cephalina (2019).

In Fifty Forgotten Books Russell is not defining a canon, rather issuing a good-natured challenge to the reader ‘to determine how many of these works they remember’. While you may have read many of these books, some of which are hardly forgotten (The Quest for Corvo, for example), you won’t have read all of them: my own tally was 16, with two or three more that I have handled but not read.  Like two other recent stellar examples, Godine at Fifty (2021), and Bill Reese’s Narratives of Personal Experience (2016), Russell’s memoir earns a place on the shelf and suggests future reading: I am looking forward to The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s (1931) by Rachel Ferguson, and several others. Pick up a copy of Fifty Forgotten Books and see for yourself.

——
* I first met Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker in person at the inaugural Halifax Ghost Story Festival in 2010, but I had known of their Tartarus Press ever since I came across an irresistible title,  The Smell of Telescopes, in Ev Bleiler’s essay on Rhys Hughes a decade before; I had bought a copy the Tartarus Press re-issue of The Hill of Dreams from an American specialty dealer’s list when it appeared. At that same festival, I met Mark Valentine, a longtime penpal, and several other of their friends.

 

recent reading (march through august 2022)

current reading :

— Marcel Proust. La Prisonnière [1923]. À la recherche du temps perdu III. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. [still climbing the mountain].

— R.B. Russell. Fifty Forgotten Books. Sheffield : And Other Stories, [forthcoming, 13 September 2022].

recent reading :

— Marcel Proust. Sodome et Gomorrhe [1921-2]. À la recherche du temps perdu III. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
This was tough going at times, but there was always a remarkable passage or narrative surprise to quicken interest — and what a crack of the whip at end, rooted in earliest beginnings. 
Deep in volume III of the Pléiade edition, an aside points ahead to something I should perhaps have inferred and now the full arc of this whiny wallowing hilarious satiric narration comes clear. Proust is sufficient argument against fleeting worries over “spoilers”. He gives the game away himself a few times (from the outset, in fact); but more importantly, reading Proust affirms that literature is experiential. The dance of words performs itself upon the page and in the reader’s awareness, each time new, or else it’s nothing.
— — —
— Tom Lecky. Quarrying [Cover title]. One story and fifteen photographs. Understory Books, [2021]. Edition of 100 copies.
The story, “A Walk”, is subtle and minimalist, oblique and suggestive of the long consequences of family traumas.
— — —
— Ivy Compton-Burnett. Manservant and Maidservant. Gollancz, [1947]. Late Victorian household drama, in the conversations of a family and their servants, on the surface a very small world but the novel presents, unspoken but apparent, a dispassionate and clear-eyed indictment of the British class system and economic structure. An unexpected pleasure.
— The Herman Melville Collection of William S. Reese. Christie’s, [August 2022]. Illustrated auction catalogue, 100 lots, including many rarities, up at auction on 14 September.

Ngaio Marsh. Night at the Vulcan [1951]. Pyramid Books, [Second printing, December 1974].

— — —

— Robert Scoble. Raven. The Turbulent World of Baron Corvo. Strange Attractor Press, 2013.
— —. The Corvo Cult. The History of an Obsession. Strange Attractor Press, 2014.
Two well written, engaging, and thoroughly documented overviews of the Frederick Rolfe phenomenon: the people surrounding him and the evolution of the cult of the author.
— Guy Davenport. The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard [1967]. [Jordan Davies, 1982].
.  .  . and everyone is there, in this kinetic Blakean procession, to be animated from Stanley Spencer’s giant painting .
— — —
— Eileen Gunn. Night Shift plus Usual and the Author plus Promised Land and much more. PM Press, [2022].
A volume in the excellent Outspoken Authors series, with Terry Bisson’s  interview of Eileen Gunn, “I Did, and I Didn’t, and I Won’t”, including this observation about an early job as a advertising copywriter :
“They taught me how to understand subjects I’d never studied and how to work with capitalists without becoming one.”
— Julian Symons. The Immaterial Murder Case [1945]. Penguin Books, [1954].
— Corina Bardoff. Food Restrictions. 2020.
Nimble, funny, literate Oulipian explorations of food and words. [Gift of WW].
— — —
— Michael Swanwick and Gardner Dozois. In His Own Words. Dragonstairs, [2022].  Edition of 60 copies.
Legendary editor Gardner Dozois interviewed by his friend.
— — —

Elizabeth Hand. Hokuloa Road. Mulholland Books. Little, Brown, [2022]. Another unsettling and gripping book, and a new place in our psychic geography (just maybe you can get there from Kamensic). This reader trusts Elizabeth Hand with his life and readerly attention, and is always rewarded Wherever her books lead, the narrative path is fascinating and the destination is beautiful and often frightening : that is to say, the classical elements of the sublime. Also notable for having a decent working class guy as protagonist.
— Undefined Boundary. The Journal of Psychick Albion. Volume One / Issue One. Edited by Cormac Pentecost. Temporal Boundary Press, 2022.
Reading this, one has the sense that somehow England will find a way through the present mess.
— — —

— Alice Elliott Dark. Fellowship Point. A Novel. Mary Sue Rucci Books | Scribner, [2022].
Rich, beautiful exploration of friendship, place, and time (the Maine setting is  deeply rooted), with turns and surprises worthy of Dickens ; a notable feminist interrogation of privilege and expectations.
— — —
— John Clute. Sticking to the End. Beccon, 2022.
Essays and addresses, with book reviews from Strange Horizons and New York Review of Science Fiction; memorials of Gene Wolfe, David G Hartwell; and more.
— Hervé Le Tellier. L’Anomalie. Roman. NRF Gallimard, [2020].
Science fiction à l’Oulipo, witty and nimble.
— — —
—[Margaret Cavendish,] Duchess of Newcastle. The Description of a New World called the Blazing World. 1666.
— — —
— Mark Valentine. The Fig Garden and other stories. Tartarus, [2022].
Excellent new collection, with several original stories.
— — —
— Nicholas Daly. Ruritania. A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to The Princess Diaries. Oxford University Press, [2020].
Interesting fun, with some odd gaps or omissions (such as John Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds and Avram Davidson’s Doctor Eszterhazy stories).
— — —
— Marius Kociejowski. A Factotum in the Book Trade. A Memoir. Biblioasis, [2022].
When the Romanian singer started in on « Un dimanche après la fin du monde » I was engaged ; and then the first pages of Chapter 13, The Man Collecting Names is a remarkable sequence of reflections. [Gift of DS].
— — —
— Eric G. Wilson. Dream Child. A Life of Charles Lamb. Yale University Press, [2022].
Read with great interest, Wilson is excellent on Lamb’s connections to the main literary figures of the day (Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others), and on the tragedies of his life.
[Bought in March but misshelved and only found in early June.]
— — —
— Michael Swanwick. The Once and Future Rye. The Whiskey That Was America. [At head of title:] The Proceedings of the American Martini Institute. A Report of the American Martini Laboratory. [Dragonstairs, 21 May 2022]. Edition of 80 copies.
— — —
— Christelle Téa. Bibliothèques. Dessins 2018-2021. Librarie Métamorphoses, [2022]. Exhibition catalogue, with introduction by Michel Scognamillo, “Christelle Téa, ou la stratégie de l’araignée”.
/ above : in the Bibliothèque Mazarine
— — —
— This World and That Other. [Stories by] John Howard [and] Mark Valentine. Sarob Press, 2022.
— Algernon Blackwood. The Lure of the Unknown. Essays on the Strange. [Edited with an introduction by Mike Ashley]. Swan River Press, 2022.
Collection of nearly two dozen essays, talks, and vignettes about the uncanny, spanning almost the entire career of supernatural writer Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). The earliest, “The Psychology of Places” (Westminster Gazette, 30 April 1910), seems almost a gloss on his story “The Willows”; the majority of the pieces are from the late 1940s and were often delivered as radio or television broadcasts. Ashley notes Blackwood’s general reticence about any of his own psychic experiences. The essays “collected here reveal his views on the world and the occult, show his diverse reading and experiences, and his appreciation of the experiences of others.”
— Bruce Barker-Benfield. The Glossed Luke with the Letter A. A manuscript from St. Augustine’s Abbey Canterbury with an essay on the binding by Andrew Honey  and an introduction by William Zachs. Blackie House, 2020.
Illustrated history of a notable twelfth-century manuscript Gospel which survives in its original binding.
— — —

— Mark Tewfik. The Pirate King. Illustrated by Josh Grotto. Full color illustrations throughout. [40] pp. Chicago : Lanterne Rouge Press, 2022. Edition of 100 copies.
The text of The Pirate King resembles a children’s bedtime tale, while the collage illustrations suggest a very different story. A remarkable tension arises between the visual and verbal references.