Rockwell Kent's THE JEWEL: A ROMANCE OF FAIRYLAND

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) worked in many areas as an artist, and is probably best-remembered as a painter and illustrator. Among the many books he illustrated were Beowulf (1932), translated by William Ellery Leonard; The Canterbury Tales (1934), in modern English by J.U. Nicolson; and The Saga of Gisli (1936), translated by Ralph Allen.  Oddly, the one item by which I remember Kent best is the colophon for a publishing firm founded in 1925 by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheimer, who had planned to call their new firm Half Moon Press, using explorer Henry Hudson's ship (the Halve Maen, i.e., the Half Moon) as the symbol.  But Kent's design was of a Viking ship, and thus the Viking Press was born. 

Ten years after Kent's death it was discovered that he had written and illustrated a small book, The Jewel: A Romance of Fairyland, for an extramarital lover. The story was finally published in 1990 in a slip-cased form (limited to 500 copies) by The Baxter Society of Portland, Maine. The Kent facsimile story is in hardcover, and a Companion Booklet to the Facsimile Edition, edited by Eliot H. Stanley, accompanied it in trade paperback. I kept a review of the book for decades before I finally acquired a copy at a moderate  price.  

Kent's tale is reproduced in his own handwriting, with half a dozen small illustrations throughout the thirteen page story. It was presented as a book to Hildegarde Hirsch on 6 November 1917. The story tells of a prince who in youth had questioned God and was thereafter doomed to be alone until he might find love in the heart of a woman. Much later, in a far land, he meets a beautiful young girl. He shows her a crystal globe in which she can see the lovely land from which he came. They plan to move there, and as they save up, they watch a tiny house growing within the globe. But the maiden has doubts, and wants to use their savings to buy a jewel. After the crystal globe is shattered, the wreckage becomes a jewel. The maiden looks radiant wearing the jewel, and becomes self-absorbed. The prince's madness returns to him. The jewel is thus named Broken Faith. The means for undoing the effects of the jewel, we are told, will come in another tale. 

But there was no further tale, and the affair soon ended, as the tale had foreshadowed, leaving a wistful melancholy for the reader, as well as a sadness that Kent wrote no other fiction. 

The Guide: A Collection of Rare & Unknown Work by Arthur Machen

 

Darkly Bright Press's new Arthur Machen collection, The Guide, is a 260+ page compilation of "eighty-two works originally published across twenty-seven periodicals and spanning nearly three decades," to quote from editor Christopher Tompkins's "A Brief Introduction."  It is subtitled "A Collection of Rare & Unknown Work"--for "rare" we can read it to mean as uncollected from periodicals, and for "unknown" we note that eighteen items are recent discoveries, and not referenced in the standard Bibliography of Arthur Machen (1965) by Adrian Goldstone and Wesley D. Sweetser. 

The titular essay, "The Guide," is one of the previously unknown pieces, and it appears second in the new volume, following "Thou Shalt Not Eat", a polemic against the "pompous twaddle written by . . . scientific people about meat and drink." "The Guide" (from The Daily News, 1918) is a curious rumination upon a country man's view of the city, and the city man's view of the country, both needing a kind of guide. 

And from there we find many disparate but interesting essays, reviews, etc. Some favorites include Machen's essays on some nineteenth-century literary figures from The Daily Herald in the 1920s. (Machen confesses:  "I do not like Balzac. I know that this is heresy according to the Church of Letters. I have made my confession; I am ready for the faggots and the stake.")  For The Morning Post in 1930 he wrote on the "Literary Merit of the Bible" ("It is noble vision, noble in expression."). There is a 1933 review of a volume by Richard Middleton. There are two reviews of Edgar Jepson's Memories of a Victorian (1933), and a review of Jepson's follow-up, Memories of an Edwardian (1937). The volume closes with a number of Machen's letters, including some 1936 exchanges on "folk memory" with Lord Raglan, after Machen had reviewed his book The Hero in John O'London's Weekly. .

I still have much to read in this volume, and I look forward to it. One may not always agree with Machen, but one revels in his ability with words. 

In an appendix there is an example of the shifting title and wordage of a tale from Machen's Ornaments in Jade, known variously as "Nature" or "The Splendid Holiday" or "Romance in Gwent: A Fantasia".  In another appendix is a short piece of "Notes on Arthur Machen's ''Sanfarian'" by Michael Fogus ("Sanfarian" conveniently appears earlier in the volume.)

Published in June in a limited edition hardcover, there are still some copies remaining, but if interested act one should soon to avoid disappointment.  Ordering details are available at the Darkly Bright Press website, here.  

Announcing a New Journal: A Weird Occasional

 cover art by Johnny Mains

A Weird Occasional is just what it sounds like it should be. An occasional publication devoted to the weird, particularly the older and unknown stuff. Edited by Douglas A. Anderson and Christopher Tompkins, the first issue is now available. It includes three essays, and five obscure short stories. The contents are:

2 * Editorial * Douglas A. Anderson and Christopher Tompkins * ed 
5 * M.P. Dare: Beyond the Veil * Johnny Mains * ar 
19 * The Man Who Shot Cassius Crisp * Christopher Tompkins * ar
29 * Ballantine's Chamber of Horrors: A History and Bibliography * Douglas A. Anderson * ar
43 * Introduction to The Crooked Man * Christopher Tompkins * in
43 * The Crooked Man * A. M. Burrage * ss, 1919
49 * Introduction to Our Lost "Others" * Douglas A. Anderson * in
49 * Our Lost "Others": A Toltec Legend * Kenneth Morris * ss, 1933 
55 * Introduction to As a Fly in Amber * Christopher Tompkins * in
55 * As a Fly in Amber * Bernard Capes * ss, 1905
63 * Introduction to The Hut * Johnny Mains * in
63 * The Hut * Elim Henry D'Avigdor * ss, Whims (1889)
87 * Introduction to A Were-Wolf * Christopher Tompkins * in
87 * A Were-Wolf * Arlo Bates * ss, 1882

This oversize issue is about one hundred pages, and is solely available at Lulu (link here for issue one). It is done in color, which looks great, especially for my article on the  "Ballantine's Chamber of Horrors: A History and Bibliography," which includes full cover scans of all the titles in the series. The price is around $8--this is set at the cost of printing.

Comments and submission queries are welcome at aweirdoccasional@gmail.com 

The journal has a new website here.    

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.