Today’s post from my book When the Going Was Good describes the second in a series of five books about Mediterranean islands by Lawrence Durrell, who was born February 27, 1912.
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Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes (London: Faber & Faber, 1953)
After the end of World War II, Lawrence Durrell lived on Rhodes in the Dodecanese Islands, an archipelago in the eastern Aegean Sea that had passed through the hands of the Turks, the Italians and (briefly) the Germans before being united with Greece. Durrell’s job as Public Information Officer for the short-lived British administration allowed him to establish—much as he had on Corfu—a lively circle of erudite and often eccentric friends and acquaintances. It is one of these who, in the book’s oft-quoted opening passage, describes the affliction of islomania, suffered by those who find islands irresistible. Clearly an islomane himself, Durrell also visits the remainder of the archipelago during the Little Summer of St. Demetrius—the period of fine weather that usually falls during the middle of October.
Durrell named the memoir of his two years in the Dodecanese in reference to a third-century B.C. statue pulled up one afternoon by fishermen in their nets. The resulting volume recalls Prospero’s Cell, but the shadows of conflicts old and new sometimes darken its mood. Yet Durrell finds that in his new home “the days drop as softly as fruit from trees.” Of the Marine Venus herself, he concludes, “The wound she gives one must carry to the world’s end.”
The various editions of Reflections are actually about one-third shorter than Durrell’s manuscript, and the book’s pruning (by an editor) proved frustrating to the author. Last year, however, C.20: An International Journal printed a generous section of Durell’s longer version, a chapter entitled “Dreams, Divinations.” You can read it, along with David Roessel’s introduction, at http://www.durrelllibrarycorfu.org/.
The top image is the cover of my attractive little 1981 Penguin reprint, designed by Abner Graboff. The engraving of the fortress of Rhodes, which dates from 1580, is reproduced from the book. The bottom image reproduces the cover of the 1996 Marlowe edition, which includes an introduction by Roessel. The photograph it incorporates is by Christina Hope.
Today’s post from the project I’m calling “Sea Fever” deals with three stories by M.P. Shiel, who died February 17, 1947. Shiel wrote several works that deserve discussion in this guide to the literature of sailing, the sea, and island life, including his 1901 novel The Lord of the Sea. But rather than tackle it now, I’ll start with three of his most distinctive stories.
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“Huguenin’s Wife” (Pall Mall Magazine, 1895), “Vaila” (Shapes in the Fire, 1896; as “The House of Sounds,” The Pale Ape and Other Pulses, 1911); “Dark Lot of One Saul” (Here Comes the Lady, 1928)
Aside from one salient fact, it’s difficult to know just what to say about M.P. Shiel, but that fact is clear: He produced some of the strangest stories and novels in the English language.
Born July 21, 1865, on the West Indian island of Montserrat, Sheil began writing as a young man. According to his own account, he discovered Poe when he was seventeen, and, coupled with the discovery of tobacco at about the same time, was “transported … to Uranus, where [he] abode some time.” Inspired by Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin, Shiel published several stories in 1895 about one Prince Zaleski, a remarkably eccentric Russian nobleman who solves baffling crimes, in several cases without setting foot outside the ruined Welsh abbey he has made his home.
The doomed atmosphere of “Huguenin’s Wife” recalls Poe’s similarly obsessive concern with death and destruction, although Shiel’s language is even more madly ecstatic than his predecessor’s. Set in a labyrinthine structure on the Greek island of Delos, it concerns a man whose intellect has been “fettered and darkened” by the past, and who is in fatal thrall to a dead-but-alive creature far more loathsome than Medusa. Now a house is a common symbol of the human mind, and the bafflingly convoluted floor plan of this Greek structure is clearly a clue to its owner’s mental state. As writer Arthur Machen declared in a review of the groundbreaking 1896 collection Shapes in the Fire, in which “Huguenin’s Wife” was reprinted, “here is a wilder wonderland than Poe ever dreamt of.”
Shiel’s “Vaila” posits another frightening abode. It seems that our narrator has undertaken a voyage in aid of an old friend, Haco Harfager, who lives in a huge, circular “palace of brass” tethered to an island scoured almost bare by sea and wind, a rock lying in the stormy North Atlantic Ocean midway between Scotland and Norway. Here again, Shiel’s description provides a chilling evocation of a mind in great peril: “I could see that the house,” writes our narrator, “was to half its height more thickly bearded than an old hull with barnacles and every variety of brilliant seaweed; and—what was very surprising that from many points near the top of the brazen wall huge iron chains, slimily barbarous with the trailing tresses of ages, reached out in symmetrical divergent rays to points on the ground hidden by the flood: the fabric had thus the look of a many-anchored ark.”
Acutely, even painfully sensitive to sound, Harfager nevertheless has chosen to live within a veritable deluge. As the frightened narrator observes, “all sense seemed swallowed up and confounded in the one impression of sound. Water, water, was the world—nightmare on my chest, a horror in my ears, an intolerable tingling on my nerves.”
Some fifteen years after its initial publication, Shiel shortened and rewrote “Vaila” as “The House of Sounds,” and it’s this version that readers are more likely to encounter.
Published years later still, “Dark Lot of One Saul” marks an advance on its predecessors in that it finds a message of hope and salvation in the most unimaginably terrible of situations. Its narrator, Saul, is taken prisoner in the early seventeenth century in Mexico by agents of the Inquisition and dragged aboard ship to be taken (he assumes) to Europe or one of the Spanish West Indies to be tried for heresy. But when the ship is caught in a terrible storm (in what has since been dubbed the Bermuda Triangle), Saul is branded a Jonah and thrown overboard in a weighted barrel. Sinking deeper and deeper, the barrel is finally caught in an undersea current and thrown into a vast cavern on the ocean’s floor. Incredibly enough, Saul finds air and food there, along with the skeleton of a great beast and a measure of solace in his bizarre lot.
Among fellow writers and aficionados of weird fiction, opinions of Shiel and his works abound. August Derleth called him “the Grand Viscount of the Grotesque.” H.P. Lovecraft thought that “The House of Sounds” was his “undoubted masterpiece,” while critic John Squires argues that “Dark Lot of One Saul” is his “finest horror tale.”
The image at the top of today’s post is one of several versions of The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin, thought to have been inspired in part by an Aragonese castle standing on a rocky islet near the larger Italian island of Ischia. The second image is the title page of the first edition of Shapes in the Fire, which included “Vaila.” The dramatic book cover by Frank Utpatel at the bottom is from the first edition of Xelucha and Others, published by August Derleth’s Arkham House in 1975, and is from my personal library. The collection includes “Huguenin’s Wife,” “The House of Sounds,” and “Dark Lot of One Saul.” The image at the bottom is the cover of one of the first books devoted to Shiel and incorporates a detail from a painting by famed surrealist artist Salvador Dalí entitled Three Young Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra.
Today’s post from my book When the Going Was Good describes the most famous work by Elliot Paul, who was born February 10, 1891.
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The Last Time I Saw Paris. New York: Random House, 1942
Born in Massachusetts, Elliot Paul served in Europe during World War I in the Field Signal Corps. Returning to France in 1923, he worked as literary editor for the Paris editions of the New York Herald and the Chicago Tribune. He also helped found and edit the famous “little magazine” transition. The years 1931 to 1936 found him on the Spanish island of Ibiza (scene of his 1937 memoir Life and Death of a Spanish Town), after which the “prodigal” returned to Paris for four more years, driven out finally by the German invasion.
Paul recounts that he first “wandered into” the rue de la Huchette one summer evening in 1923. The 300-yard street lies on the Left Bank, virtually (and on many mornings literally) in the shadow of the cathedral of Notre Dame. Paul felt so enamored of the tiny working-class neighborhood that he made it his home for years, setting up his base of operations in the small Hôtel du Caveau.
Paul went on to immortalize the rue de la Huchette in The Last Time I Saw Paris. Its first and longest section, “The Post-War Twenties,” introduces the neighborhood and its denizens—the hotel keeper and his family, the staffs of the nearby cafes and shops, the clerks and gendarmes and priests and miscellaneous habitués, all helpfully identified in the book’s opening list of characters. In the book’s second section, “The Pre-War Years,” world events have begun to impinge ominously, while in the brief third section Paul recounts “The Death of a Nation.”
In his 1950 sequel, Springtime in Paris, Paul describes a happier post-war city.
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One of the features of When the Going Was Good was a list of works similar in setting or scope to the one under discussion. An updated version for Paul’s book would include Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London; (1933); Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934); Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others (1963); Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964); and Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930 (1968).
The cover of my Bantam paperback edition reproduces a detail from one of Maurice Utrillo’s typical paintings of Paris, while the panorama of rue de la Huchette comes from the book’s endpapers. The photograph, I admit, has nothing to do with the book, but was taken the last time we saw Paris.
Among the Moors’ many gifts to the Spanish is chufa, a grass-like plant known scientifically as Cyperus exdulantus and most commonly in English as the nutsedge plant. Originally native to North Africa, it’s now grown extensively in the moist soils of the eastern Spanish autonomous community of Valencia, where its sweet, nutty tubers are dried, ground, mixed with water and sugar and then seasoned with cinnamon. The result is a refreshing milky beverage known as horchata de chufa, or sometimes horchata Valencia.
Vendors once served horchata in the streets from big jugs, and refreshment stalls known as horchaterias specialized in the drink, but these days most Spanish cafés serve horchata in the hot summer months. My first wife had traveled to Spain as a high school student, and I learned about horchata from her. But out trips to the country in the 1970s were in the winter, and cold drinks were far from our minds. Nevertheless, horchata came to symbolize the glamour of Spain for me, as did the beguiling melodies of Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados, and for better or worse, the spell has never worn off. I’ve seldom caught a glimpse of the country that I imagined Spain to be, but I’ve discovered another that’s equally enchanting.
Maggie and I have been lucky enough to visit Spain in the late summer, allowing me to enjoy horchata from time to time, most recently in Reus, where Maggie spotted an horchata cooler in a sidewalk café alongside the city’s main square.
The color label recalls the days when chufa was dispensed on the street, while the post card shows harvested chufa tubers being sieved to remove dirt. The illustration of Cyperus exdulantus is reproduced courtesy of Auckland Museum. (See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.)
World Enough 
