47. M.R. James - 'The Ash Tree' (1903)

'there is also this passage, which I transcribe for the sake of the light it throws upon the course of events, and also upon the common beliefs of the time: [...]'
M.R. James, Collected Ghost Stories (Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Classics, 1992, p.33)

'The Ash Tree' is a mixture of historical investigation, travelogue and drama: 'And so ends the first act of the Castringham tragedy'. (p.34)

The oddly Italianate Suffolk is perfectly evoked in a lengthy, digressive opening. Past misdeeds, learnedness and loneliness seem intrinsic to this adventurous county of Benjamin Britten and Brian Eno. There are few landscapes as odd in blighty: the juxtaposition of purplish Dunwich Heath with beach and apocalyptic Sizewell Nuclear Power Plant. Time-frozen parish churches that reminded me of Dad's Army, secretive WW2 and Cold War radar sites, villages of 17th century timber housing oddly familiar from Lovejoy; genteel seaside resorts like the becalmed Aldeburgh and the slightly more bustling Southwold, both with distinctively pastel coloured beach huts and houses. Strong, dark Adnams Broadside ale. Weird examples of architectural planning, such as in Thorpeness.

The dating of the different occupants of the house is typically precise: 'Those who are interested in the details will find a statistical account in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine of 1772, which draws the facts from the Baronet's own papers.' (p.35)

M.R. James ploughs the most English of furrows, in playing upon the mythical and historical exactitude, and their discordance. There is the antiquarian's concern with old books and libraries, inevitably worked into the opening reverie on Suffolk: 'I like the library, too, where you may find anything from a Psalter of the thirteenth century to a Shakespeare quatro.' (p.30) Several of the protagonists have scholarly leanings, as is usual in James; for example, William Crome, the grandson of the erstwhile vicar.

The Michael Reeves film Witchfinder General (1968), almost exclusively filmed in Jamesian Suffolk, comes to mind in Sir Richard's foolhardy burning of Mrs Mothersole's empty coffin, reviving 'for a time all the stories of witch-trials and of the exploits of the witches, dormant for forty years.' (p.35) History will not relinquish its grip, its fascination; James's characters and landscape (from whatever stage in time) resound with the past. It seems natural for James to set the climactic part of his story in 1754 and then have characters who have never previously met striking up an acquaintance based upon familial history: upon meeting William Crome, Sir Richard says, 'the name of Crome is always a passport to Castringham. I am glad to renew a friendship of two generations' standing.' (p.37)

The 'Castringham sickness'. Matter-of-fact, localised tragedy. There is an unknowable quality to the sequence of events which is chronologically related; as ever in MRJ, there is no visible violence, but rather the suggestion of malevolence; no marks of violence, but a window left open. The initial suggestion that it might a squirrel running up and down the stem of the ash seems plausible enough, and even when we get clearer elucidation of the threat, it is left opaque, mystical almost: 'Such a nest of catarrhs and agues was never seen.' (p.37) Ultimately, as is the case in other good weird fiction - and indeed pure cinema - 'the reader must judge for himself.' (p.31)

The topography of the house and its grounds is methodically set out, James creating an eerie atmosphere. It will be interesting to see whether David Rudkin's Ghost Story for Christmas version (TX: BBC1, 23/12/1975) manages to capture the subtle dread of the Jamesian prose. From watching Rudkin's previous Play for Today, Penda's Fen (TX: 21/03/1974), it would seem Rudkin would be an ideal adaptor of this sort of English piece, which is so much about the pull of landscape and ghosts of the past.

9/10

45. L.P. Hartley - 'A Change of Ownership' (1948)

'Laid back, I'll give you laid back'
(Hot Chip, 'Over and Over', The Warning, 2006)

'What fun for him, after these constricted years, to come home to a big house of his own, where he has three or four sitting-rooms to choose from, each of which he may occupy by himself!'

(L.P. Hartley, The Complete Short Stories, Hamish Hamilton, 1973, p.167)

It can never be 'his' front door.

'It was locked all right; but who had locked if?' (p.169)

A real oddity this one, of English gothic vintage. This side of Hartley was discernible in the Belladonna episode of The Go Between, with all its shattering symbolism of innocence and experience, but this is a fully fledged dalliance with the Weird. Making sense of 'A Change of Ownership' is harder than most; it is in many ways a refreshingly recalcitrant read - the sort of short-story where you do have to go back at several points to grasp the underlying narrative of the main character.

Hartley establishes the rather splintered, paranoid personality of 'Mr' Ernest carefully; first, he is seen partly through the eyes of a companion, Hubert - an old friend who gives him a lift back home after they have been to the theatre. Ernest's home is 'semi-rural', a large suburban house overlooking a field on one side. (p.163) His friend's conversation illustrates Ernest's isolation, living alone in this big house (his servants are apparently away), where previously he has lived in shared accommodation: when Ernest says that he is alone 'in a sense', Hubert understandably queries, 'Queer devil you are, Ernest; you must either be alone or not alone. Do I scent a romance?' (p.164)

Hardly so, as once his friend has departed, Ernest slips into thinking about himself in the third-person, a trend that marks the rest of the narrative. He imagines himself in a strange array of guises and roles while attempting to get to grips with being locked out of his house - which has been done by mysterious means. Internal dialogues convey an authentic sense of madness, and Hartley displays an unerring command of using the present-tense to embroil the reader. The status of the narrative voice is deliberately unclear - at times, as in the epigraph above, it seems as if it is mocking Ernest.

His learning to live alone, 'like other people', is shown to involve a splintering of - or at least, an uncertainty within - his personality. Stithies Court, the house, is a forbidding place and becomes literally inaccessible to him, its presumptive owner. The word presumptive being operative there. Stithies - evocatively, choicely, named - is something of an impregnable, infernal fortress: 'it looked like a large black hat-box, crowned at one corner by a smaller hat-box that was, in fact, a tower', the only certainty and constant in this unreliable narrative. (p.164)

LPH delves into the uncanny, and this can be said to fit in very nicely in the English Weird continuum, linking M.R. James and Christopher Priest; I, Haruspex is indeed the short-story covered so far which this most resembles. It is revealed that the figure in the house, keeping down the window with his fingers when Ernest tries to get in that way, initially has a Sapphire and Steel anticipating blankness - its face 'a featureless oval, dimly phosphorescent'. (p.173) This 'simulacrum', it is eventually made clear, is no less than Ernest himself: 'This time the face did not alter. It was Ernest's own face, a hateful face, and the face of a murderer.'

It is, overall, a continually discomfitting, confounding tale, written in an unusual, intriguing style; another fine advertisement for home ownership! Hartley, often facilely bracketed as English Heritage, is indeed, far from that; this is anti-heritage in almost all senses, being concerned with deeper things. As with his great 1953 novel, tradition and hierarchies are destructive; in this case, the old English house itself takes on particular malignance:

'In an old house like this, of course, the floor-boards do contract and expand; they have seen a great deal; they have something to say, and they want to get it off their chests.' (p.168)

8/10

6. Robert E. Howard - 'The Phoenix of the Sword' (1932)

'But this one is a different,

He knows the pinches of an older hunger,

A greater storm than yours

In his heart rages'

(Jake Thackray, 'The Rain on the Mountainside', 1976)

'the lack of any clear political direction - and who could expect that? - prevents the ballad-outlaw from being a revolutionary; he remains simply a champion of insubordination, and that is already much.'

(A.L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England, Panther Arts, 1967, p.150)

'[...] to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in the formless chaos that was growing about him and engulfing all life and sanity.' (Robert E. Howard, The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition, Gollancz, 2006, p.40)

As his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft states in the inner cover of the leatherbound hardback edition, Howard's stories are 'pure adventure yarns with a touch of weirdness'. This proves to be an intriguing combination, with Howard creating an engaging, semi-Dark Ages world, based around a Europe from time immemorial, establishing political intrigues and rival power centres - and injecting moments of much more inexplicable oddity. Where Atwood's elderly protagonist mirrors nature in his decay, Howard's Conan is instead akin to nature as life-force: 'He seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands.' (p.27) He uncomfortable dealing with 'statecraft'.

There is an interesting reflection upon Conan being at ease battling to gain power, but being almost at a loss now that he has it, installed as King of Aquilonia; a theme that resonates with many leaders past and present in our reality. Conan is not cut out for the machinations and subtleties that go with wielding power, and is an easy target for enemy plotters, as the story relates; for example, the dissident minstrel, Rinaldo in 'jester's garb'. This motleyed japester may not be any different from Conan in being an idealist who dislikes the compromises of the present: 'Poets always hate those in power [...] They escape the present in dreams of the past and future.' (p.25) There is an astuteness also in how the dead King Namedides, defeated by Conan, hardly beloved during his actual reign, is now a rallying point for many on the fringes of Aquilonia.

The key passage which takes this tale into the realms of the Weird is on p.39 where, after the fairly prosaic dispatching of southern dissidents, Conan (and before him his rival Ascalante) is confronted by an unspeakable 'thing', a more physical manifestation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror - although it its form is flexible and hardly solid: 'he twisted his head about and stared into the face of Nightmare and lunacy. Upon him crouched a great black thing which he knew was born in no sane or human world.' This thing is beyond the bestial, and leaves a much more unsettling undercurrent behind at the end of the story than I was expecting.

Conan is strongly drawn as a formidable 'primordial', his great reserves and limitations drawn from his barbarian background. He comes from 'reaver' stock, clearly drawn from the northern border country, along whose borders there was 'continual war' - Howard clearly making some associations with the lawless Northumbrian border reivers, as depicted in the Border Ballads. (p.28)* There is a hint of the Viking and a British northern kind in these decriptions of the northmen: 'They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night.' Geographically, they are shaped: 'A gloomier land never was - all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys. / 'Little wonder men grow moody there'. (p.29)

'The Phoenix...' does not allow me to draw specific political links with 1932 , but, like a strong seventies Dr Who story (penned by Robert Holmes, say) the internal politics are concisely, entertainingly conceived and achieve a simplicity in their complexity, if such a thing can be envisaged. I cannot help but bring to mind Holmes's medieval robber baron Irongron (David Daker) and Bloodaxe (John J. Carney) from 1974's The Time Warrior - real blood and thunder types, melodramatic but played with real feeling and intensity. That sense is evoked by this story; some of the happenings and the descriptions ratchet things up to a nearly absurd level, but you are carried along by the conviction and verve of REH's style: 'The red ax lurched up and crashed down and a crimson caricature of a man catapulted back against the legs of the attackers.' (p.39)

There are no female characters who play any significant part in the Conan saga at this early stage; this story seems to share this gender imbalance with the M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft I have read - no sense of The New Woman, or indeed, women at all for the most part. It will be interesting to see how further tales in this lineage, from the nineteenth-century to the present-day project women. One certainly imagines the New Wave (Moorcock, Le Guin etc.) of Science Fiction will redress this.

Notwithstanding this, 'The Phoenix of the Sword' is a pleasing mix of what was old and new; from archaism - 'quoth Prospero' indeed - and Border Ballads to the Lovecraftian abyss, befitting its inclusion in the pages of the pulp magazine, Weird Tales.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_ballads

8/10