Fifty Forgotten Books E-Book

R. B. Russell

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 296

Beschreibung

Fifty Forgotten Books is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bibliophile and for book-lovers of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty backrooms of long vanished used bookstores, a love letter to bookshops and bookselling, and a browser's dream wish list of often overlooked and unloved novels, short story collections, poetry collections and works of nonfiction. In these pages, R. B. Russell, publisher of Tartarus Press, doesn't only discuss the books of his life, but explains what they have meant to him over time, charting his progress as a writer and publisher for over thirty years, and a bibliophile for many more. Here is living proof of how literature, books, and book collecting can be an intrinsic part of one's personal, professional and imaginative life, and as not only a solitary act, but a social one, resulting in treasured friendships, experiences, and loves one might never, otherwise, have enjoyed. Filled with a lively nostalgia for the era when finding strange new books meant pounding the pavement and not just searching booksellers' websites, Fifty Forgotten Books is for anyone who wishes they could still browse the dusty bookshelves of their youth, and who can't wait to get back out into the world in quest of the next text liable to change their life.

Leseprobe

Also by R. B. Russell

Short Story Collections

Putting the Pieces in Place, 2009Literary Remains, 2010Leave Your Sleep, 2012Death Makes Strangers of Us All, 2018

Novellas

Bloody Baudelaire, 2009The Dark Return of Time, 2014The Stones are Singing, 2016

Novels

She Sleeps, 2017Waiting for the End of the World, 2020Heaven’s Hill, 2022

Collected Edition

Ghosts, 2012

Non-fiction

Occult Territory: An Arthur Machen Gazetteer, 2019Past Lives of Old Books and Other Essays, 2020Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Bibliography, 2020 (with J. Lawrence Mitchell)Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography, 2022

Translation

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, 1999 (with Miracles, translated by Adrian Eckersley)

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First published in 2022 by And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New York www.andotherstories.org

Copyright © R. B. Russell, 2022

All rights reserved. The right of R. B. Russell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505509 eBook ISBN: 9781913505516

Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Linden Lawson; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting, text design and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Holly Ovenden.

All photographs are the author's, save where noted.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Dedicated to Adrian Bott, Mark Valentine, Rosalie Parker, Iain Smith, Godfrey Brangham and David TibetAnd to the memories of Noel Brookes, Janet Machen, Roger Dobson, Richard Dalby, Dr Glen Cavaliero and Malcolm Henderson

Contents

IntroductionThe Outsider · Colin WilsonThe Hill of Dreams · Arthur MachenThe Most Haunted House in England · Harry PriceDiary of a Drug Fiend · Aleister CrowleyThe Other · Thomas TryonDevil in the Flesh · Raymond RadiguetThe Tenant · Roland ToporTwo Symphonies · André GideDilemmas · Ernest DowsonXélucha and Others · M. P. ShielTales of Horror and the Supernatural · Arthur MachenWiddershins · Oliver OnionsLunch on the Grass · John SewellLe Grand Meaulnes · Alain-FournierA Bibliography of Arthur Machen · Adrian Goldstone and Wesley D. SweetserFlowers of Evil · Charles BaudelaireThe Salutation · Sylvia Townsend WarnerIn Youth Is Pleasure · Denton WelchOn the Edge · Walter de la MareThe Quest for Corvo · A. J. A. SymonsThe Unspeakable Skipton · Pamela Hansford JohnsonThe Cry of a Gull · Alyse GregoryFlower Phantoms · Ronald FraserA Little Treachery · Phyllis PaulStenbock, Yeats and the Nineties · John AdlardThe Haunted Woman · David LindsayThe Attempted Rescue · Robert AickmanThe Doll Maker · SarbanDromenon · Gerald HeardJean Rhys Revisited · Alexis LykiardThe House of the Hidden Light · Arthur Machen and A. E. WaiteFireman Flower · William SansomMiss Hargreaves · Frank BakerSleep has his House · Anna KavanThe Brontës Went to Woolworth's · Rachel FergusonThe Fallen · Dave SimpsonThe Saint Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires · Eric Stener CarlsonThe Old Knowledge · Rosalie ParkerThe Beetle · Richard MarshAt Dusk · Mark ValentineRupetta · N. A. SulwayThe Loney · Andrew Michael HurleyCopsford · Walter J. C. MurrayThe Paris Notebooks · Quentin S. CrispSwastika Night · Murray ConstantineThe House of Silence · Avalon BrantleyShadows of the State · Lewis BushThe Military Orchid · Jocelyn BrookeThe Child Cephalina · Rebecca LloydThe Outsider · Richard WrightThe Hill of Dreams ·A Reprise

‌Introduction

Fifty Forgotten Books is intended to be a personal recommendation of often overlooked and unloved novels, short story collections, poetry and non-fiction. The idea is not just to discuss the books, but to explain what they have meant to me over time, thus forming an oblique, partial memoir of my life. I have been a writer and publisher for over thirty years, and a bibliophile for many more. I hope this volume provides an example of how literature, books and book-collecting have been an intrinsic part of my personal, professional and imaginative life, resulting in friendships and experiences I would otherwise never have had.

The first problem I encountered in my selection was that some of the books I wanted to discuss have never been well enough known for them to be subsequently ‘forgotten’ – while just as many have always been appreciated, if sometimes by connoisseurs of the less-frequented byways of literature. My title, then, is more a challenge or invitation to readers to determine how many of these works they remember. Familiarity with the fifty books I have selected depends not just on how widely read you are, but on simple serendipity, because no book lover can ever hope to work their way through anything other than a fraction of the books they would like to read. A few of my ‘forgotten’ books are now back in print with small publishers who revive obscure fiction, but at least two have been Penguin Modern Classics for decades (Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier and A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo). In my defence, it is often too easy to ignore the classics and assume they are already too well appreciated to be worthy of consideration. For all the prestige of a publisher’s ‘classic’ books, they are invariably heavily subsidised by fashionable contemporary publications.

I was tempted to exchange those better-known books for some that I know are really obscure, such as The Pepsi-Cola Addict by June Alison Gibbons (1982), and A Moving Experience by Edna Judd (1995). Both would have been examples of intriguing books that few people have heard of, but I thought better of it – in my opinion, they are not actually very good.

Every book discussed here is recommended without equivocation. I have reread many of them several times, and each subsequent reading has usually revealed something new about the book, and also about me as a reader.

It will be noted that I do not only discuss the texts and their authors, although these are obviously the primary consideration. The physical book has always been important to me, and I have mentioned the circumstances of discovering my copies and, where I can remember, who recommended them. A memorable edition of a book, suggested by a friend, discovered in an idiosyncratic bookshop, inevitably adds to the experience of taking it off the shelf again, perhaps decades later. In many ways my book collection today acts as an aide-memoire or diary of places I have lived in and visited, and of friends – even the booksellers who supplied them. Inevitably, in recent years, some of my books have their origins in recommendations online and have been bought from dealers I do not know, simply by pressing a virtual button on a commercial website. I invariably feel that something is lost by the lack of association, no matter how good the book.

I should explain that my book-collecting turned into a publishing hobby in my twenties, resulting in the formation of Tartarus Press in 1990. I continue to run this small publishing house, issuing approximately ten books a year, with my partner (in life and in business), Rosalie Parker. At every stage, our publishing has been inspired by our joint love of books and writing. It would therefore be odd if I did not include some Tartarus Press books here, although selecting just a few has been an invidious task – we are both passionate about everything we have published.

In my relationship with Rosalie, I am the collector. We ‘weed’ or ‘prune’ our bookshelves regularly, and although Rosalie can send books she has finished to a charity shop without a second thought, I always find this difficult. I might want to refer to them, or even reread them. I find that I have to keep the volumes I love, and even ‘upgrade’ copies for more interesting, often earlier editions. I occasionally find that I can justify owning multiple copies of the same book.

I would like to thank Jeremy M. Davies for commissioning this exercise in obscure books and nostalgia. He asked for a memoir of my ‘adventures uncovering rare, strange, obscure books in shops and church sales, etc. of the world’. I hope that I have gone some way to fulfilling the brief.

Perhaps I should say something here about second-hand bookshops today, lest this volume appear entirely backward-looking. Like many collectors, I do of course look back with a certain amount of nostalgia to those dusty emporia I visited over the years but which have now closed, remembering the many treasures unearthed in them, as well as the characters encountered. Collectors often assume that there are no longer as many bookshops as there once were, but the literary researcher Mark Valentine recently compared the number of shops in Driff’s Guides to All the Secondhand & Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain from the 1980s to those still trading today. Surprisingly, he found that, if anything, there are more second-hand bookshops now than there have ever been (if one includes charity shops that deal specifically in books). I can only assume that when I remember the bookshops of, say, the Brighton of my youth (and there were many), they were not all operating concurrently. There are still wonderful bookshops in business today. In the last few months I visited Lucius Books in York and came away with a first edition of Pierrot! by Henry de Vere Stacpoole, and at Westwood Books in Sedbergh I bought assorted hardbacks and paperbacks including two real gems (Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life and Alastair Bonnett’s Off The Map). At Scarthin Books in Derbyshire I found a paperback of Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach (I had been looking for a copy for ages), and in Camilla's Bookshop in Eastbourne (which still stands after many decades) a splendid Panther paperback of Cults of Unreason by Dr Christopher Evans.

Perhaps my most impressive haul was from the Oxfam Bookshop in Ilkley. The highlight there was a copy of Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin.

Fifty Forgotten Books

As a boy, I was a collector, but not, initially, of books. Like my friends, I collected the cards given away in packets of PG Tips tea, sticking them in albums, attempting to put together full sets. I also collected stamps, matchboxes and bus tickets (apparently). I liked to keep the books I read, just as I retained my old comics, but mainly so that I could dip back into them and re-experience the stories. Borrowing from the school library, or the library buried beneath the club rooms in our Sussex village, Horam, was fine, but if I found a really good book I would take it out multiple times for as long as it remained on their shelves (The Master Book of Spies, ‘written and advised’ by Donald McCormick, was a favourite). I could only afford to buy occasional paperbacks from the Scholastic Book Service – usually TV tie-ins like The Tomorrow People and later Blake’s 7. Otherwise, I relied on jumble sales and birthday presents, and books accumulated in the corner of my bedroom along with my comics.

And then I discovered Magpies at the bottom of the high street in our village. At the back of this junk shop, behind the abandoned furniture and unloved ornaments, past rails of musty clothing and boxes of worn but shiny shoes, there were several shelves of tatty books for sale. With my weekly pocket money of ten pence, and the paperbacks at two pence each, I first found books in Enid Blyton’s Mystery and Adventure series, then the Biggles books of Captain W. E. Johns. My teenage reading became quite wide and indiscriminate as I was tempted by exciting cover art, and I went down some unfortunate avenues (the science fiction of E. C. Tubb was one of many mistakes, along with Westerns). I took risks on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian novels, Samuel Delany’s Babel-17, and the low-key thrillers of P. M. Hubbard (Flush as May), as well as Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled detectives.

Magpies junk shop in Horam, 1977, from an old cine film

I also started to read some of my parents’ books, which were unceremoniously kept in a pile at the bottom of a wardrobe in their bedroom. These were popular blockbusters, from Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal to Alex Haley’s Roots, from Shout at the Devil by Wilbur Smith to Henri Charrière’s Papillon.

I was never aware that there was a point at which I started to ‘collect’ books. I was certainly a collector once I had discovered John Wyndham, Ian Fleming and the Saint books of Leslie Charteris. Wyndham I loved, buying the 1970s paperback editions with the atmospheric woodcuts by Harry Willock on the covers. I remember being annoyed when I read that Brian Aldiss had disparagingly called Wyndham’s novels ‘cosy catastrophes’, because, as Margaret Atwood later wrote, ‘One might as well call World War Two – of which Wyndham was a veteran – a “cosy” war because not everyone died in it.’ Wyndham is too well known to need my recommendation, but I always consider his books alongside the remarkable The Death of Grass by John Christopher, who ought to be better known. Both authors follow in the tradition of H. G. Wells by writing what should be recognised as a peculiarly British kind of science fiction. There is a certain reticence in the telling, and a focus on an individual’s practical attempts to cope with sensational situations. The story often appears quite understated, but this makes it no less effective.

John Wyndham paperbacks, and John Christopher’s The Death of Grass

The lure of the James Bond books was obvious – spies, violence and sex, set in various exotic locations around the world. I rather liked the already dated feel of the original books, which seemed to give them authenticity. The Saint books were just as exciting, although I was often wrong-footed by just how old-fashioned some of the earliest adventures were – Simon Templar had a tendency to jump on a car’s ‘running-board’ – a term that had to be explained to me by my grandfather.

These thrilling books were all very well, but after plundering the Magpies stock for a few years, I chanced upon Colin Wilson’s literary study, The Outsider. I am not sure what first attracted me to the dull-looking Pan paperback, but I think I was looking for direction in my reading. From the inside front cover, I can see that I bought the book in 1981, when I was fourteen years old.

1

‌The Outsider

Colin Wilson

First published by Gollancz, 1956. My copy: Pan paperback, 1963

Wilson’s book explores the concept of creative artists who feel alienated from society, using as examples characters from books such as Meursault in Camus’ L’Étranger (The Outsider) and Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Wilson defined The Outsider as an individual on the periphery of society, challenging its values, and living by a personal set of rules. The Outsider, for Wilson, was seeking truth amidst the pointlessness of everyday existence. As a teenager I was a willing existentialist, but I am not sure I ever understood whether Wilson believed alienation was a good thing (in that it enabled the observer to see the world more clearly), or something negative (he also highlighted the rare moments of lucidity and understanding that can occasionally cut through the gloom of existence). Positive, negative, or just inevitable, Wilson suggested that alienation made for some of the most vital and interesting literature, and he brought to my attention Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Hesse, Blake and Dostoyevsky, some of whom could be found in Pan, Penguin and Picador paperbacks in the same junk shop. I bought them up, and now I knew I was collecting books, keeping them arranged in alphabetical order (by author surname) in an alcove of my bedroom.

I began my first ‘wants’ list of authors, which I carried around inside Wilson’s book, which lived in my coat pocket, becoming progressively more dog-eared, as I trawled jumble sales, junk shops, and discovered for the first time the wonderful world of second-hand bookshops.

Wilson also discussed Barbusse, D. H. Lawrence, Nietzsche and Hemingway, all of whom I tried to read but failed to find of any interest. I was convinced I was an existentialist, but what I was really interested in was twentieth-century European literature.

What surprised me, when I talked to anyone who knew anything about books (mainly bookshop owners), was the low esteem in which Wilson was held. And this is still the view of most commentators today. The Outsider had originally been published to great acclaim, and the author was considered a prodigy (this was his first book, published when he was in his twenties, written in the British Museum during the day, as he slept rough on park benches at night). Wilson’s essential problem was that he quickly published a vast body of work, and his driven, open and enquiring mind sent him in too many directions, suggesting to his detractors that he gave none of his subjects enough attention. A more reasonable criticism is that he went in various directions that are just too unconventional to be taken seriously (see, for example, his huge The Occult: A History, 1971). Does his later work really devalue The Outsider? I think not, although I find the book more difficult to read today. I can see, now, that Wilson was no great prose stylist. Sometimes my mind wanders when I try to reread him. But for anyone starting out, wanting to be challenged to take in a wide variety of thought-provoking literature, the book is still well worth picking up and using as a guide.

* * *

I began going, every other Saturday, to Brighton with my father. He would drop me off at the railway station and continue on to Hove to watch the football. I would walk straight to the Odd Volume bookshop on Upper Gloucester Road, where I clearly remember buying a copy of The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs for a school friend, Bibi Lynch (who has since made a living writing about sex, which was not an option discussed in careers lessons). I was asked in the shop if I was really old enough to read the book (when I tried, I didn’t understand it). In 1984, Driff described the Odd Volume in his infamous bookshop guide as ‘Sml gen stk Lit & 1sts & leftish’.

I developed a route around Brighton, walking down to the Trafalgar Bookshop, which was rather intimidating, with too many books devoted to sport and multiple leather-bound matching sets. Further down Trafalgar Street was Wax Factor, a much more anarchic shop that sold, as well as books, vinyl records (even more competition for my limited funds). Wax Factor wasn’t a pure bookshop, so Driff refused to include it in his guide.

From there I would work my way along the North Lanes, visiting Two Way Books on Gardner Street (always making at least one purchase from the old couple who ran it), ending up on Duke Street. I occasionally found paperbacks in Holleyman and Treacher, but I have better memories of Colin Page’s bookshop, which was friendlier and with more accessible stock. The real treasures were to be found in the cellar room that was reached by a clanging metal spiral staircase.

If I had time, I would sometimes go along the Old Steine to a shop that was renamed Tall Storeys, but the only books I remember buying there were paperbacks of Kingsley Amis’s The James Bond Dossier and Robert Markham’s Colonel Sun. (I found out later that Markham was Amis’s pseudonym. I was pleased that Amis hit the right note – when I later read John Gardner’s Bond books, the tone was somehow wrong.)

Noel Brookes

But no matter what route I took around the town (it was not a city back then), I always ended up at Mr Brookes’s shop at 12 Queen’s Road. (My father would pick me up at a certain time outside the stamp shop a few doors up – he was a collector too.) A small, grainy photograph of Mr Brookes can be found in the furthest recesses of the internet, and it shows the man as I remember him: in a jacket and tie, cigarette in hand, looking wistfully past the photographer’s shoulder. His shop was tall and narrow, bursting at the seams, as though passageways had been hacked out from a solid mass of books. On all four floors, the shelves were stacked two or three books deep.

Inevitably, I asked for existentialist European literature and I was directed to the top floor, to shelves on the right-hand side of the window. I have fond memories of sitting in Mr Brookes’s old armchair chatting about books and authors with him while he shared a large bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate with me. By this time it was usually dark outside and pedestrians and cars would pass slowly outside in the rain. There was a dangerous two-bar electric fire providing warmth. It seemed to be a calm, cultured place, with violin or piano music playing in the background – never anything bombastic and orchestral, and certainly nothing modern.

I don’t know where I heard the rumour that Mr Brookes was ex-MI5 or MI6, and that he had retired on such a good pension that he did not have to make a living out of his business. The story probably came from other booksellers. I was fascinated by the idea of Brookes being a spy – the shabbiness of the man and his shop was reminiscent of down-at-heel characters from John le Carré or Graham Greene novels rather than anything by Ian Fleming or Leslie Charteris. A variant version of the spy rumour was that he was still employed by the security services and was undercover, but this was less convincing. He was believed to have had a knowledge of several Eastern European languages (he was certainly fluent in Polish).

2

‌The Hill of Dreams

Arthur Machen

First published by E. Grant Richards, 1907. My first copy: Corgi paperback, 1967

I shall always be thankful to Mr Brookes for introducing me to the writings of Arthur Machen. I was talking pretentiously of existentialism one afternoon, probably trying to make comparisons between Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, when he handed me a copy of The Hill of Dreams. I assumed Machen was another existentialist, but the book was so much better written than anything I had previously read. I still find the opening lines incredibly powerful, forty years later:

There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.

But all the afternoon his eyes had looked on glamour; he had strayed in fairyland. The holidays were nearly done, and Lucian Taylor had gone out resolved to lose himself, to discover strange hills and prospects that he had never seen before. The air was still, breathless, exhausted after heavy rain, and the clouds looked as if they had been moulded of lead. No breeze blew upon the hill, and down in the well of the valley not a dry leaf stirred, not a bough shook in all the dark January woods.

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.

On first reading The Hill of Dreams I considered Machen’s novel alongside such texts as Steppenwolf, and I was surprised when his other writing led me to the genial The London Adventure (1924) in the Village Press paperback, and to the sensational two-volume Panther paperbacks, Tales of Horror and The Supernatural (1948) (which I enjoyed, not least because Machen always writes so elegantly).

I ‘appreciated’ The Hill of Dreams when I first read it. I thought of it as a book about a young man who strives to write great literature, even at the expense of his love life, and who descends into madness. Lucian Taylor leaving the countryside, and his beloved Annie, for the suburbs of London seemed an exile from a land of dream, fantasy and wonder, in a harsh, soul-destroying city. I knew very little about Machen, but later discovered that he had been born Arthur Llewellyn Jones on 3 March 1863 in Caerleon, Gwent, and that he was best known for his horror fiction, which was described as usually of a mystical cast. The Great God Pan (1894) is considered a classic horror story of the decadent 1890s, and it led me to read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Machen’s other work is sometimes difficult to classify, such as the exquisite ‘The White People’ (1904), an apparent stream-of-consciousness report from a young girl who has strayed into fairyland. What makes Machen’s writing beguiling is that when he ‘lifts the veil’ to show readers what is just beyond our everyday perceptions, the results can be so strange that it is difficult to know if they are glorious or horrific. The discovery of Machen was to have a major influence not just on my reading, but on my career as a publisher. It also helped me make some of the most important friendships of my life.

* * *

I must have been visiting Mr Brookes’s shop for a couple of years when one day he showed me a collection of film posters he had bought. I looked through them, but was not tempted by any. It was then that he asked if I would like to go back to his flat in Hove for supper. He wanted to show me his favourite poster, which was pinned on his wall. Apparently it featured a strapping young man in a suggestive position under the tagline ‘I’m not feeling myself tonight.’ He took my refusal very well, and it didn’t affect our friendship, but after that I was scrupulous about paying for books rather than accepting them as gifts.

At school I was desperately trying not to be a swot, if not a ‘spod’, treading a fine line between trying to be cool (I was an existentialist, I was in a band) and being a librarian. A strange, older acquaintance, Michael Kew, persuaded me that volunteering to work in the school library involved very little effort and entitled me to stay indoors during breaks, jumping the horrendous lunch queue. I was put in charge of the ‘woodworking’ section, which was fine because nobody ever used it, and I could spend my time hidden away in the library office. The library was closed on Wednesdays, ostensibly so that we could tidy the shelves, but most of my time was spent with Mike, who ran Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games.

After reading The Hill of Dreams, I was asking for Arthur Machen in every bookshop I could find, to little avail. I even tried new bookshops, which informed me that Machen was out of print. Second-hand book dealers often advised me to look through the anthologies of horror stories that proliferated either in the darker corners of such establishments or outside on the pavement. In bookshops and junk shops in Brighton and Eastbourne, Heathfield and Hailsham I located odd stories by Machen, but by this means I also came across Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, M. P. Shiel, Algernon Blackwood, Edith Wharton, Walter de la Mare and William Hope Hodgson. I ended up owning many battered anthologies, usually with lurid covers. I preferred the collections of classic ghostly stories, edited by Robert Aickman and others, shunning the more modern books and especially the Pan Horror series. I found that I was able to switch, quite happily, between ghost and horror fiction and modern European classics, especially when writing like Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem seemed to straddle the two genres.

I have a specific memory of buying, one Saturday afternoon at the Two Way Exchange in Brighton, The Red Brain and Other Creepy Thrillers, selected by Dashiell Hammett. It cost me only a few pennies because it was such a fragile little paperback, but it had a great cover of a naked woman being assailed by crustaceans. The edges were stained yellow, and it smelt sweetly of what I now know to have been decaying, cheap paper. My father drove me home via Seaford, where he left me in the car while he went to visit a friend. By the yellowy interior light, I read H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ and I became a Lovecraft fan on the spot. The story commended itself to me because it was set in Paris, specifically on the rue d’Auseil, a street that the narrator could not later find on any map. Like many teenagers, I was seduced by Lovecraft’s elaborate language and the hints of forbidden knowledge. I later fell in love with New England, the setting for most of his stories.

Two Way Books, North Lanes, Brighton

An even more important find was the Dover Books paperback reprint of Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature, which now served as my guide, replacing Wilson’s The Outsider in my coat pocket. Following the recommendations in Supernatural Horror in Literature, I discovered in Two Way Books a fine seam of Four Square paperbacks with their green covers, and read Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and William Beckford’s Vathek, along with The Elixir of Life by W. Harrison Ainsworth and The Phantom Ship by Frederick Marryat. Over a few years the same shop yielded a large number of Lovecraft paperbacks, often in ‘exotic’ American editions. I don’t know why Driff never mentioned this shop.

At Wax Factor I bought 1960s Panther paperbacks of Hermann Hesse’s Demian and Lovecraft’s ‘The Tomb’, Sartre’s Intimacy and William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland.

For ten years, alongside Penguin Modern Classics, I collected both Machen and Lovecraft with equal zeal. Somewhere on Trafalgar Street in Brighton there was situated a business called London and Brighton Antiquarian Book and Prints. I remember nothing about their shop or stock, though I do recall an enigmatic character called Clive Ogden who undertook a ‘book search’ for me. My father helped me buy Lovecraft in the bright yellow-jacketed Gollancz hardbacks. However, I soon found that I could never reread Lovecraft’s work and recapture the power of that first reading; the overwrought language got in the way. He seemed to be striving too hard for his effects, whereas Machen was always a delight to read and I appreciated his use of language with each subsequent reread.

3

‌The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory

Harry Price

Longmans, 1940

I’ve never actually owned a copy of this, Harry Price’s first book about Borley Rectory. I borrowed it from a neighbour, Andrew Bowler, when I was about fourteen or fifteen, and I can still remember the effect it had on me – the atmosphere it created. Even though I instinctively knew it was all rubbish, Harry Price managed to frighten me. I understood Madame du Deffand when she was asked, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ and she replied, ‘No. But I fear them.’

I have always been on the lookout for the book. Andrew’s copy had an ugly, utilitarian blue library binding, but I later saw a first edition with its splendidly creepy dust jacket, and I developed the ambition to own that particular edition. It was for sale in Alan Shelley’s Bow Windows Bookshop in Lewes (in its old position halfway up the hill) and was priced at a premium because it was in mint condition. I have never come across one since that didn’t seem just too expensive.

But I have never seriously regretted not buying The Most Haunted House in England, because I seem to recall that it is actually a little dull and repetitious. It is a pseudoscientific account of investigations and events at Borley Rectory, and I may have been guilty of skipping whole chapters when I ‘read’ it. Not that the pedestrian, detailed, investigative tone made it any the less frightening – if anything, it gave the book a terrifying legitimacy. And the photos! The black-and-white plates of the ruinous building were compelling, not least because at the time my family were looking around some dilapidated old buildings with a view to moving house.

Harry Price is a frustrating character. Commentators since his death in 1948 have generally been critical of his various investigations depending on their own sympathies towards the supernatural. Most agree that he undertook valuable research when it came to debunking false mediums and their ilk, but there is some consensus that he was, at times, prone to bluffing, falsifying and faking. If he can be said to have unearthed any real evidence of ghosts, poltergeists, talking mongooses, etc., he undermined his good work by being guilty, at other times, of outright fraud. One of the most interesting commentators on Price was the author Robert Aickman, who attempted to set up a Trust to save Borley Rectory from demolition and so preserve it for ongoing investigation. (He failed, and the building no longer stands.) Aickman had his own eccentricities and was fascinated by the paranormal throughout his life, but he was too intelligent not to be sceptical of many claims made for the supernatural. Having contacted Price, Aickman visited Borley Rectory on two consecutive weekends, recording what might have been some very minor poltergeist activity. However, he was later suspicious when he discovered that Price had been in the immediate vicinity but had not made himself known. Aickman did not directly accuse Price of throwing a pebble at the investigators, but one can read between the lines. What hurt Aickman most was Price refusing to help with the Trust, only for the great ghost hunter to later lament that nothing was done to save the building.

I have had my own experience of a haunting – a musical ghost at Rosalie Parker’s family farm that played three notes on a piano in a recently vacated room. It was not frightening, although it was profoundly puzzling. One of the most important lessons Price’s book taught me was that literary ghost stories are invariably far more interesting, readable and thought-provoking than so-called ‘true’ accounts of the supernatural.

However, through The Most Haunted House in England, Borley Rectory lives on, not so much in stories of the ghost of a nun who was apparently buried alive there, or of the spectral coach drawn by two headless men, but in the black-and-white photographs of a very sad-looking Victorian building and its floor plans. The building is, itself, a ghost – continuing to haunt the imagination of believers and sceptics alike.

* * *

Apart from fantasies of becoming a pop star, I desperately wanted to be an author. I was writing stories, plays, poetry and lyrics, veering wildly between dour existentialism and purple Lovecraftiana. In the latter I was aided by Adrian Bott, a fellow enthusiast for Lovecraft. It was Adrian and his mother who introduced me to the music for the