Monday 23 May 2016

Whom the Gods Destroyed by Josephine Daskam Bacon (1902)



Josephine Dodge Daskam, later Josephine Daskam Bascon, authored more then forty books, was a pioneer in the Girl's Scouts movement. She also wrote and published in 1915 a seemingly anti-war play in which Jehovah's argues with Wotan and Hercules who is God so that's deserving of a more direct examination.

Her collection of Whom the Gods Destroyed is an interesting one. A selection of the stories focus on the destruction of gifted or free thinking people by their vices or gifts. Two of the stories, "A Little Brother of the Books" and "The Twilight Guests" will probably have the reader feel a bit melancholy. "The Maid of the Mill" meanwhile is a very good ghost story of it's kind, although it is the only supernatural tale of the lot, if one excuses the symbolism in "The Twilight Guests" as nothing more and if one disregards it in "The Backsliding of Harriet Blake", a story, by no means written badly, but which does focus on a rather puzzling fact to the modern reader: namely the universal horror with which the inhabitants of a poor house respond to an old woman declaring her lack of belief in the Holy Ghost, at which point the entire house starts to heckel her and sends for ministers to give her long sermons to logically convince her to believe. That the story is written to support their point of view rather does strike a modern reader as a bit odd, but the book is well over a hundred years old and the writing in it is very fine. It reminds me somewhat of the stories in J.S.Fletcher's "God's Failures", covered on here previously but though none of the tales have a conventionally happy end, one feels somewhat uplifted by the end regardless.

Saturday 21 May 2016

Wolf, the Memoirs of a Cave-Dweller by Peter B. McCord (1908)



Peter B. McCord was a watercolourist and newspaper illustrator and a close friend of Theodore Dreiser who died shortly before Wolf, the Memoirs of a Cave-Dweller, his only published book as far as I can tell, could be released. When McCord died of pneumonia he was only thirty eight years old, right when his talent appears to have become recognised. As consequence I couldn't find a photo of his, and so I added as heading to this review one of his own illustrations he drew for the book.

I am rather inclined to almost doubt that McCord never wrote anything before Wolf, as the strength of the book, though obscure it may be nowadays, strikes me as not at all what one would expect from someone publishing for the first time. McCord's prose does not have any of the clumsiness one would expect and even forgive a first-time author to exhibit. Not only that but both halves of the book are written competently, the first part not being a mere clumsy segue into the second.

The first part deals with the family history of the fictional author/presenter of the second part which is the "meat" of the book, including the coming and settling down of his grandparents in a remote and but sparsely settled area of the rugged frontier of the United States in the late years of the first half of the 19th century. The author's grandfather meets and befriends a Jesuit priest who, after many years of their acquaitance, when death is at his door, bestows into their keeping a mysterious packet which he means to give to his nephew Honoré, and assures that that though to find Honoré the whole world would doubtless need be searched, he will come to claim his inheritance, as he "always knew" the priest "meant it all for him". After he dies, many many years pass until eventually the author's grandmother grants him the package on her deathbed, still unopened, bidding him to wait for several months until he opens it to have a taste of what it felt to keep it sealed for fifty years. Inside, the author discovers a letter from the Jesuit meant for his nephew, and a bundle of manuscript which deals with a translated account of a prehistoric tribesman, who is apparently from a tribe linking the Chinese and Native Americans.

The second part deals in an autobiographical way with the life and trials of Wolf, a member of an unnamed tribe. Now Wolf does not really know the concept of shame, and the book does shy away from romanticising life among the primitive tribes, instead showing it as sometimes a very rough, bloody business where the strong man of the tribe can do as he will and no one really cares to differ, but eventually old age claims him and when he no longer has power in the tribe he writes the record of his life, deeds and the things he had seen and learned, for the sake of the tribe.

The book is written in a very brisk way with no deep effort at moralising, though one could maybe infer a moral from the proceedings if one so wishes, and the events which are narrated are all exciting or interesting and move the plot along nicely. The only minor point to make is that based on the Jesuit's comments in the first part, you would assume he was reffering to the map to some hidden treasure by some ancient American civilisation, which may not be prefferable to what we get but it is a bit misleading. And also the mystery of what happened to Honoré and what he was hiding from for so many years that his uncle never could catch his trail is really left up in the air and it does make you wonder. Still, the book stands on it's own two legs and it is trully a shame that McCord passed away so early and we were denied any more of his fine prose.

Thursday 19 May 2016

Jadoo, a Tale by Nathaniel Newnham-Davis (1898)



Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, a soldier and food critic, may have written from his experience when he wrote Jadoo as he served in the locales described in the book. Sadly he doesn't seem to have cared to go much outside of the circle of fellow British expatriates if that was the case and is reflected in his writing.

Jadoo starts out very promisingly. With a terrible heatwave gripping the Indian country side and a mad dash, all too late for the sake of one of a pair of street urchins, to put a stop to a human sacrifice which seems to bring an end to the dry season. Unfortunately after two chapters, all interesting things largely stop happening as we descend into the purgatory that is the life and petty enjoyments of British Colonial administrative in the British Raj. The wonders and charms of mystical India are almost wholly ignored and instead the novel is an endless parade of dances, picknicks, balls, plays and the wholly uninteresting exploits of Colonial belladonnas. Dita, the main character, occasionally shows up and though we are told she is suffering from living with a cruel husband we honestly barely focus on it at all. Every seventy pages or so the Fakir who sacrficed her brother to Kali and keeps telling her to "fullfil her purpose" shows up to remind us that he still exists and then we're back to wandering around Simla.

The novel does end with the degradation and death of the main character and her rebuked, ruined lover, but this comes at the very tail end of so much claptrap that I can't honestly recommend it. The idea of the woman being stalked by the ghost of the husband she more or less let drown to be free of him is little more then hinted at and does seem to be the result of nerves and opium abuse. I can honestly not recommend it, I found myself finishing the book more out of obligation than anything.

Monday 16 May 2016

Among the Cranks by James Greenwood (1905)

The portrait of Greenwood is taken from spartacus-educational as well


James Greenwood (b. 1832 as claimed by http://spartacus-educational.com, d. 1927) was probably one of the pioneers of investigative journalism, making a sensation in 1865 when he, nepotistically employed by his brother in the Pall Mall Gazette, spent a night dressed as a vagrant in the casual ward of a London workhouse, which fancy terminology denoted a filthy room wherein homeless people could spend the night in a shelter designated for that purpose.

His article of the lowly conditions he experienced there let to a major outcry. Greenwood would go on to investigate the conditions of Railway workers and in 1874 he claimed to have witnessed an organised fight between a dog and a dwarf, though it was later not conclusively proven in investigation by the authorites.

I cannot say much concerning Greenwood's literary career outside of journalism, aside from his first book co-authored by his brother and future employer Frederick Greendoow, called Under a Cloud (1860), him having authored two books in defense of the working class and their plight, namely  Unsentimental Journeys, or, Byways of Modern Babylon (1867) and Seven Curses of London (1869) and the fact that his last book, the subject of this review, came out in 1905. I do not know if he published anything between 1869 and 1905.

The book in question is an odd one. A collection of the stories of the inmates of an insane asylum seems a very interesting idea, and reminescent of a story I'd read years ago which I cannot remember exactly, except that it may have been one of the Gothics, or perhaps a Russian work. Either way, the issue is that the stories presented herein, while possibly accurate to real stories Greenwood may have heard, as this does seem to be the sort of thing he would be all gun-ho about, aren't the most exciting and that's just such a shame, if you can draw entertainment from the mental delusions of people long since dead. Putting that aside, the stories narrated by the inmates aren't as fantastical as you would hope for. One includes a lady obsessed with post-mortem soul migration into cats, a tale of soul exchange in dreams, or a story where a man is convinced he has seen a vision of his utter ruin inside of a pool and goes around hunting to shoot a man he "recognises" from his vision in order to "break the spell", but most of the content is rather dry, and it almost sounds like a plot of a story that someone could have made a book out of, like the story of a man who accidentally becomes a member of an anarchist group that sponges him for money, of a worker who almost gets framed by the accountant of the company for fraud, the tale of a disfigured youth whom circumstances have lead to be wrongly pronounced dead and denied his rightful inheritance by greedy relatives, all these do seem like plots that are starting to get somewhere and then the interview ends and the usually unnamed Doctor, who has the annoying habbit of summing up the patients' story before they tell it so one is forced to hear it twice, will dismiss the whole thing.

The one truly fascinating story is that of a man convinced his old uncle had turned into a bluebottle fly he keeps around in a glass bottle.

Though Greenwood would write no more fiction after this he would carry on until his death at the age of 96.

I must express thanks to John Simkin of http://spartacus-educational.com/ for providing information about Greenwood including confirmation that he authored "Among the Cranks", the only source to definitely say so.

Tuesday 10 May 2016

The voice in the rice, by Gouverneur Morris (1910)

Morris on the left here, with Pola Negri, Charles Chaplin and Ruth Wightman, his wife


Gouverneur Morris (1876-1953) was once a novelist of some fame, however he seems to be solely remembered now for the great grandfather after whom he was named. He wrote books and published serials in the pulps, including the not-hard-to-research-at-all title Adventure (in print 1910-1971). The only other tidbit I could find out about Morris was that he divorced his wife, married his secretary Ruth Wightman in secret in Mexico and then married her again because of Californian divorce laws. And he apparently knew Chaplin and the Viscount Hastings.

The book in question is a short little novel from 1910. Now when I first heard the summary, about a man being found washed up on the shore after he falls off his ship, and coming across a hunchback who brings him to his secret community where they never liberated their slaves, I assumed this one would be rather interesting. And but for one point I would be disappointed. As Richard, the main character seems to care very little about the blacks in the Santee still being enslaved, nor about locals telling him should the US scatter them all they would still come back and re-enslave the blacks anyway. He only ever makes one remark about all this, and that only to piss off someone he doesn't like. The whole rest of the novel is mostly concerned with him getting along with everyone at the Santee, which presents a slave owning society which threatened to kill him rather then let him escape to tell the tale, like an ideal place for endless society visits and tennis games. The ease with which the main character slips into going about making social calls among these people is rather alarming. Worse yet, the novel is presented as a love story between him and the hunchback's niece....except she's fallen in love with him when she found him unconscious from a snake bite and he after having just heard her talking to him over growing rice, without having seen her ! In fact the novel conspires to invent ways to prolong the time until he gets to see her, which is three pages before the novel ends.

The one real saving grace the novel has is Lord Nairn, the humongously corpulent, tyrannical ruler of the Santee, who is real fun to watch. The man immunises himself to snake bites by getting himself bitten on purpose since childhood, thinks about swallowing snakes whole and looked rather too intently at a young girl, the eventual main character's sweetheart, with the remark that he is waiting for her to "ripen". There's a few more twists and turns that do showcase his villainous character, but I don't wish to spoil them. The only problem is that he doesn't figure in the book more, and that once a skirmish happens which allows for the Richard and his Mary's escape, it largely happens offscreen, with everyone on the main character's side emigrating peacefully offscreen as well just before the afterword. It seems Morris could have written more about the internal power struggle in the community but maybe he did not know how to do so and prolong the meeting between Richard and Mary for another hundred or so pages.

Monday 2 May 2016

The Tyrants of Kool-Sim by James Maclaren Cobban (1896)


James Maclaren Cobban joins the ranks of British authors on whom I can find virtually no information beyond a list of their books and their date of birth and death.

The Tyrants of Kool-Sim seems to be the most outrageous work of Cobban's and is a sequel to a seemingly pure adventure novel with no supernatural or fantastical trimmings called "The White Kaid". It deals with a rescue operation of notorious adventurer Tom Malleson by his sister and her friends. Though the book starts out written in a rather simplistic way and focuses on a pair of schoolboys trying to mount their own, hopelessly naive expedition to save Tom Malleson, after a chapter or two the two boys mostly retreat backwards to the status of background characters and the principal focus is directed elsewhere. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or if Cobban decided to abandon his primary focus on the boys as main leads as he wrote, but one does notice an increase in the quality of writing once the attention is focused on adult characters.

The leader of these, Captain Betterton, follows the trail of Tom Malleson to Algeria and discovers him in an almost inaccessible country whose only entrance is a deadly gorge full of poisonous flowers, a land populated by pygmies, called Kool-Sim. There Tom has been relegated to playing the role of a statue of the Sun God.

All is well and good until the party meet the aristocracy and King, the jewish features of which are noted by Betterton, along with their love of counting, lacking any culture and having acquired control of the land via loans. Worse these Jews inbred with the local pygmies have blood that is so toxic it literally became lethal poison.

The implications are not in any way outweighed when Betterton says:

" They are Jews, of course ; and, like Jews everywhere, they come to trade and stay to rule."

Later still, after the local arabs and pygmies have managed to overthrow the King they replace him with Abdallah, the son of the only man to have previously escaped the land of Kool-Sim. Tom Malleson then tells Abdallah to exterminate every last one of the nobles related to the King he can find, because "however humble to begin with, they will arise again, with as much destructive  power as ever. It is the way of all their kind. Therefore spare them not, wherever thou findest them."

Oh and when they English party run into the survivors of the court who try and kill them with poison darts, they drown them in the lake like rats.

Finally, the image of the King on the title doesn't bode well in hindsight either.

It's rather a shame that Cobban had to basically marinade the text in racist overtones because as an adventure novel dealing with the fantastic, it's actually fairly well written and readable.