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HAUNTINGS by Vernon Lee Edited by David G. Rowlands
Review by Alexis Lykiard
In
the Introduction to her still stimulating and very worthwhile book The
Handling Of Words (1923), ‘Vernon Lee’ notes that “the efficacy of all
writing depends not more on the Writer than on the Reader, without whose active
response, whose output of experience, feeling and imagination, the living
phenomenon, the only reality, of Literary Art cannot take place.”But if ever
anyone deserved good (empathetic rather than just appreciative) readers, it is
this profoundly evocative, prodigiously erudite author, so widely praised by her
contemporaries yet so unfairly neglected by ours.
Who
was this writer who, like so many Victorian women, felt constrained to adopt a
male pseudonym, and why should we read her today? Such questions are amply
answered by this superb, comprehensive new publication, so excellently and
enthusiastically edited by David Rowlands. All a reviewer can do in this
instance is underline, for those needing to be convinced, that this is in every
respect an essential book!
Violet Paget (1856-1935) had a highly cultured, aristocratic, European
background. Of Anglo-French parentage, she was born in France and died in Italy
– that country she seems to have known and loved best, and where she spent most
of her long and productive writing life. During her frequent visits to England
she associated with the British intelligentsia of the day; her friends and
admirers included Rossetti, Browning, Wilde, Whistler, James, Hardy, Gosse,
Pater and H.G.Wells. A friend from childhood, John Singer Sargent, painted a
captivating portrait of the twenty five year old author, who had recently
published Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy – work
acclaimed then and still influential now.
Sargent depicts an imaginative, scholarly yet amused and amusing personality,
whose rather androgynous features finely suggest the wittily sociable Lesbian
she seems to have been. Not, of course, that her more intimate relationships
(then by necessity discreet), nor our latterday speculations thereon, now
matter. For as David Rowlands sensibly remarks: she was an exceptional writer,
one of the greatest in the field of the macabre. Certainly she was sensitive
enough to write convincingly from both male or female viewpoints. During her
lifetime she was esteemed, and towards the end of it Montague Summers could
write (in his terrific anthology The Supernatural Omnibus, 1931): “even
LeFanu and M.R.James cannot be ranked above the genius of this lady.” I’d agree
with Rowlands that, seventy years on, this still appears a shrewd and perceptive
assessment. In a handful of classic stories, you hear (to quote her own words
from one of Rowlands’s personal favourite tales, ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’), “the
notes of a strange, exquisite voice”.
The eponymous protagonist of that fine story “cared too much for all kinds of
art to devote himself exclusively to any one” and “had too ungovernable a fancy,
and too uncontrollable a love of detail”. This may sound a bit like harsh
authorial self-analysis, since Lee herself wrote so much and in so many forms
and genres! She was cultural and social historian, poet, essayist, novelist,
travel and short story writer, aesthetician and literary critic, art expert and
grammarian; she relished classical mythology, the civilisation of the
Renaissance and of 18th century Italy. Yet she was no ‘ivory tower’
type: her later political and pacifist writings were praised by none other than
the contentious G.B. Shaw, and her interests and achievements remained
remarkably multifaceted.
This isn’t to suggest she was too formidably cerebral, however, for that very
‘love of detail’ is one of her main delights. ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’, for
instance, has a casual aside about the old nobleman who had “rather a contempt
for singers… since they left nothing behind them that could be collected, except
indeed in the case of Madame Banti, one of whose lungs he possessed in spirits
of wine.” Lee’s tone, her flavour and wit are unique. E.F. Bleiler, astute as
always, notes how “Lee’s stories are really in a category by themselves.
Intelligent, amusingly ironic, imaginative, original…” A splendid, if
lesser-known story, ‘St.Eudaemon and his Orange-Tree’, reveals that uncommon
quality of charm – as when the unassuming saint gently deflates the
pretensions of his learned colleagues: “He stated drily that he had undergone no
temptations of an unusual sort, and no persecutions worth considering.” The same
rare quality is present in the witty ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, while
‘Pope Jacynth’, with its lapidary prose and entertainingly sardonic view of
ecclesiastical mythology outdoes Corvo. In such stories Lee shows herself to be
a marvellous fabulist, a fabler of marvels in every sense, but the charm can be
double-edged: she’s a true spellbinder. “Together with this charm” (as Winthrop
narrates) “a terrible cold seemed to sink into my heart”.
Certainly that terrible chill of the genuine macabre is present also in some of
her best and best-known narratives. That brilliant and gruesome tale ‘Amour Dure’,
for example, remains unsettling and resonant on each re-reading. David Rowlands
in one illuminating footnote directs readers towards Graham Greene’s own
admiration for this story, and a later significant link with the film of The
Third Man. Finest of all, for me, is ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (originally, ‘A
Phantom Lover’), a most ambiguous yet inexorably grim story, whose
artist-narrator is based on Lee’s old friend Sargent. But readers will have many
treats in store here: ‘Dionea’, the tale of a foundling with the evil eye, who
becomes a fully-fledged femme fatale, is another such. Its narrator, Dr
Alessandro declares: “Reality… is always prosaic: at least when investigated
into by bald old gentlemen like me. And yet, it does not look so. The world, at
times, seems to be playing at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and
romance.”
“Playing at being poetic” was not anything Lee herself did, though she must
fully have understood the implications of the phrase: her half-brother was that
now neglected Victorian poet and sonneteer Eugene Lee-Hamilton. The late George
MacBeth, himself a specialist in the poetic macabre, described how Eugene’s
poetry, “first undertaken as a palliative for his sufferings, soon became the
image of his disease in all its nightmare horror.” The lyrical monologues of
Lee-Hamilton (1845-1907), an invalid from his twenties, “earn him the rank of
Webster to Browning’s Shakespeare”. Indeed, in his best sonnets, like ‘Lost
Years’, a poignant yearning for the remembered past transcends indulgence or
nostalgia: “And now my manhood goes where goes the song/Of captive birds, the
cry of crippled things…” This mournful note of physical or emotional loss and
deprivation creeps into his half-sister’s prose too, although her
toughmindedness and sense of humour always preserved her and her superior
talent.
While a deeply serious artist, Lee was also an unpretentious and playful one who
seldom took her hypercivilised self too seriously. In the midst of some
aesthetic discussion – such as that thought-provoking rarity the ‘Introduction:
For Maurice’, very properly included in full here – she’s able to break off and
add in brackets: “(Full stop, because people complain of the length of my
sentences.)”! Here she reveals, too, how close she came to becoming a French
rather than English writer; “the loss and the gain which may come from mastering
one’s business as a writer”, and “the shocking prosaic practicality in the
vocation of a writer, something… warranted to kill off any emotion, no matter
how genuine, in the attempt to communicate it to readers.”
Her
present-day readers may reckon Vernon Lee an unusually allusive – and therefore
elusive – sort of writer: good classical educations, reference-books and
polymaths alike are all in shorter supply than they once were! But such readers
should persevere with this original, atmospheric and poetic author for they will
be well-rewarded. Lee may occasionally seem dated, but only in the best way;
generally, her impeccable tales of artists, musicians, scholars and clerics, of
pagan survivals and Christian superstitions, are fascinating and resonant. The
only tale I found hard going was ‘The Gods and Ritter Tannhûser’, and once again
I’m in agreement with Rowlands, who notes in all fairness that even this
prolonged whimsical piece has its admirers, the distinguished Everett Bleiler
for one.
True, her prose can be complex, but its detail is apposite as well as exquisite,
precise rather than merely precious; Lee works by subtle suggestion to render a
very vivid atmosphere of times past, of horrors either actual or imagined. She
creates an extraordinary world of the fantastic, though rarely does she ever
indulge in elaboration for its own sake. She’s a brainy but far from dotty
writer, and her curious imagination, unlike for example Corvo’s, is not of the
over-ornate, fussily camp variety. Lee most oddly resembles some exotic Jamesian
hybrid – a splendid unholy trinity, combining Henry’s passionate intelligence,
his aesthetic preoccupations with form and stylistic experiment; William’s
philosophic rigour, and M.R.’s sly wit and ghoulish scholarly fancies. The above should be recommendation enough, but congratulations are in order to all those concerned with the production of this voluminous collection. Superbly produced and finely edited, it’s altogether one of the two or three absolutely outstanding books that Ash-Tree have so far published.
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