Marghanita Laski’s Nightmares

Grove Koger

Born in Manchester, England, on October 24, 1915, Marghanita Laski is remembered in some circles as having contributed something like a quarter of a million (!) illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Others, a few others, may be aware that Laski published several literary studies, including one devoted to Jane Austen, and a book about intense religious experiences, Everyday Ecstasy (1974). She also wrote a handful of novels, one of which has recently been the subject of an essay by Sue Kennedy titled “’The Lure of Pleasure’: Sex and the Married Girl in Marghanita Laski’s To Bed with Grand Music (1946),” which appeared in British Women’s Writing, 1930 to 1960: Between the Waves (Liverpool University Press, 2020).

However, Laski’s chief claims to fame are her short novel The Victorian Chaise Longue (1953) and a somewhat similar short story, “The Tower,” the latter of which appeared in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s Third Ghost Book (1955, below). Both are supernatural, and they’re nightmares to boot—the literary equivalents of slowly closing a vise on one of your fingers.

The novel concerns Melanie Langdon, a twentieth-century woman who’s been troubled with symptoms of tuberculosis after childbirth. As her doctor tells her, she’s had “what might have been a very nasty little flare-up,” but if she lets herself “get perfectly well” and he keeps a steady eye on her, “there’s no reason why anything of the sort should ever occur again.” Subsequently, Melanie falls asleep on a crimson chaise longue, a late Victorian one that she and her husband had bought on impulse in an antique store.

The novel’s second section opens with Melanie awakening on the same long, low chair a century earlier in the body of the chair’s previous owner, a far sicker young woman.

“The Tower” follows another young woman’s visit to an abandoned sixteenth-century tower in the Tuscan countryside and the attack of vertigo that she suffers after a foolish decision to climb the tower’s narrow stone staircase. She counts her steps as she heads up the staircase and, in a panic, she does the same thing when she eventually finds the courage to descend. Now here’s where you should pay attention …

As Stefan Dziemianowicz concludes in his entry for Laski in Supernatural Literature of the World, the novel and the story “are such polished works of weird fiction that it is regrettable the author did not write more.”

Note, by the way, the spelling of the piece of furniture in Laski’s novel. It’s definitely not a “chaise lounge,” the annoying American misreading and mispronunciation of the French term. Chaise longue is pronounced shaze long, and if Laski were still with us, I’m sure she’d appreciate it if you said it that way.

Note also that some editions, including the first, hyphenate the name of the chair, although my 1968 Ballantine Bal-Hi paperback (which you see at the top of today’s post) doesn’t.

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A. Samler Brown & Macaronesia

Grove Koger

A few individuals stand out among the authors and publishers of early travel guidebooks, particularly Karl Baedeker (1801-1859), whose name became practically synonymous with such works.

Unlike Baedeker, A(lfred) Samler Brown is now almost forgotten, but he pioneered English-language guidebooks covering Macaronesia—the Canary Islands (which are part of Spain) and Madeira and the Azores (which are part of Portugal).

According to what little information I’ve been able to track down, Brown was born in 1859. At some point, he moved to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, perhaps for his health, and built a house in the capital city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. He’s said to have become the first resident to travel on the island in an automobile.

Brown’s book was titled Madeira and the Canary Islands, with the subtitle A Practical and Complete Guide for the Use of Invalids and Tourists, and was published in 1889. The fourth edition (1896) included several pages on the Azores, and the sixth (1901), with the number of those pages significantly increased, was published as Madeira and Canary Islands, with the Azores. The guides included discussions of climatic conditions, lodging, food, and every other aspect of life on the islands that might be of interest to English-speaking travelers.

So influential was Brown that he was nominated Caballero de Merito Militar by King Alfonso XIII of Spain for his work in popularizing the Canaries.

By the time of Brown’s death on July 17, 1936, his guide had run through 14 editions—an accomplishment that he seems to have been quite proud of. I own a copy of the twelfth (1922) edition, whose title has become Brown’s Madeira, Canary Islands, and Azores. Brown notes that the “First Edition of this Guide consisted of 111 pages and included 10 maps in one colour, but no plans, diagrams, sketches or meteorological tables. The present volume contains 496 pages, 22 maps and plans in three colours, 2 diagrams, 12 sketches and 11 meteorological tables in addition to many other tables of shipping, public coaches, etc.”

Brown seems to have been one of the first authors to include advertisements in his guidebooks, and my 1922 edition contains quite a few pages of them, including intriguing ones for Olsen’s Alexandra Hotel and Pension in Santa Cruz (“English, French and German Spoken”) and the Société Anonyme des Tramways Électriques de Tenerife. For anyone studying the social life of the islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his guides are indispensable.

Brown notes in one of his guide’s introductory pages that “the article on the ‘Sunken Continent of Atlantis’ has been re-written.” In the article itself, he explains that it had been “highly imaginative, purposely so, for which reason the author’s knuckles have more than once been rapped. The reader who studies it as it is will take notice that it confines itself strictly to scientific data and that the task of imagining things is left to him and—to Plato.”

I should add that, in 1893, Brown began publication of another series of guidebooks, one devoted to Southern and (over time) East Africa. The series, which used much the same cover image of palm trees as Brown’s earlier guides, seems to have been a family affair, because through 1936, G.G. Brown is listed as co-author with A.S. Brown. After the latter’s death, the authorship is credited solely to G.G. Brown, while A. Gordon-Brown is identified as author beginning in 1940. (I haven’t been able to find out where A. Samler Brown was born, but I wonder whether he might have been South African.) The series was published under the sponsorship of the Union Castle Mail Steamship Company, which ran passenger and cargo ships between Europe and Africa.

(For much of the information in today’s post, I’m indebted to an entry in John Reid Young’s blog Travel Stories in Tenerife and the Canary Islands and the entry for Brown in the Portuguese version of Wikipedia.)

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Driving to St. George Island

Grove Koger

If you want to visit Florida’s St. George Island but you don’t happen to have a boat handy, you’ll have to cross Apalachicola Bay over the St. George Island Bridge from the little community of Eastpoint.

Known officially as the Bryant Patton Memorial Bridge, a reference to an influential resident of nearby Apalachicola who died in 1954, the structure replaced two older bridges and a short causeway on little Bird Island. When construction was completed in 2004, the new bridge became the third-longest in the state, running to slightly more 4 miles. At one point (which you see above in Maggie’s photograph) it rises for a clearance of 65 feet to allow the passage of boats. The bridge and its approaches are also known, very officially, as State Road 300, although if you asked around the area about that designation, I suspect that few would recognize it.

I don’t normally give a lot of thought to bridges, but they’re a fact of life in the Florida Panhandle, a region that Maggie and I have been visiting for years. It’s one of those magical parts of the world where water and sky predominate, and land seems like an afterthought.

Now that I’ve become familiar with it, I’ve realized that the St. George Island Bridge is an elegant structure that combines beauty with utility. What’s more, two sections of the abandoned Bird Island causeway (above, in a photograph reproduced courtesy of Taylor Engineering) have been shored up and declared a Critical Wildlife Area where seabirds can nest undisturbed.

Hurricanes threaten the Apalachicola Bay region from time to time, and authorities close the bridge when winds reach a sustained 45 miles-per-hour. Should you miss the warnings while you’re on the island, you’re there for the duration. If you’re a resident, you presumably know what you’re doing, but if you’re a visitor, you’ll want to keep an eye on the forecasts.

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Arnold Bax at Tintagel

Grove Koger

October 3 is the anniversary of the death of British composer Arnold Bax, who died on this day in 1953. Bax’s music describes a personal landscape, one so personal that, despite the sheer beauty and listenability of his works, he’s practically unknown, even among classical music audiences.

Bax was much taken with the Celtic World and Ireland in particular, where he lived for several years before World War I. Later in life, his interests shifted to Scotland, on whose western coast he spent many winters, and Scandinavia. Given these geographical affinities, it’s perhaps ironic that his best-known work is devoted to Tintagel, a site on the rugged coast of Cornwall—but there’s a personal dimension to the situation.

In legend, the ruined castle is said to be the birthplace of King Arthur and is associated with the legend of Tristan and Isolde as well. But as Lewis Foreman reveals in the third revised and expanded edition of Bax: A Composer and His Times (Boydell, 2007), its attraction for Bax involved the presence there in the late summer of 1917 of pianist Harriet Cohen, the woman he had fallen in love with.

The problem was that Bax had been married since 1911, and he and his wife had two children. The Baxes were staying in nearby St Merryn, allowing Bax an occasional opportunity to slip away to be with Cohen.

Bax occasionally wrote verse and fiction, and his poem “Tintagel Castle” dates from that troubled time on the Cornish coast. “While these old walls were crumbling,” the poem begins, “Fair countless maids and men / Have cried and kissed and whispered, / And never come again.”

But the tone poem Tintagel, with its tempestuous sweep and anguished longing, encapsulates Bax’s personal situation far more successfully. In an impersonal program note accompanying the published score, he refers to “a great climax suddenly subsiding, followed by a passage which will perhaps convey the impression of immense waves slowly gathering force until they smash themselves upon the impregnable rocks. The theme of the sea is heard again, and the piece ends as it began with a picture of the castle still proudly fronting the sun and wind of centuries.”

By the way, Bax left his wife, Elsita, in 1918, but she refused to grant him a divorce, and they remained married until her death in 1947. The relationship between Bax and Harriet Cohen eventually cooled, but she remained his close friend and the major exponent of his piano works.

The atmospheric painting of Tintagel you see at the top of today’s post is by William Trost Richards. The photograph of Bax is by Paul Corder and that of Cohen is by E. O. Hoppé. I understand that the photograph of Cohen and Bax together dates from 1920, but I haven’t been able to identify the photographer.

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