R. MURRAY GILCHRIST. I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales. Edited by Daniel Pietersen. London: British Library, 2021. 320 pp. £8.99 tpb. ISBN: 978-0-7123-5400-4.
1.
“I walked in pain, as though giant spiders had woven about my body. On the terrace strange beasts—dogs and pigs with human limbs—tore ravenously at something that lay beside the balustrade…the monsters dispersed hurriedly among the dropping blossoms of the pleasaunce, and where they had swarmed I saw naught but a steaming sanguine pool…”
Not in Kadath, nor a Hodgsonian nightmare, we are in equally dark dreamlands here.
Tragical romances as stylistically rich as those of Robert Murray Gilchrist (1867-1917), like old acquaintances, ought not be forgot and always brought to print. The British Library Tales of The Weird series and Dead Reckonings contributor Daniel Pietersen raise a cup of kindness to share with us all.
In 1975, Hugh Lamb’s Terror by Gaslight reprinted Gilchrist’s “The Basilisk”. Other selections followed in further anthologies by Lamb. Collections of the writer unfortunately have been out of print for more than a decade. A Night on the Moor, the Wordsworth paperback edition and the earlier Ash-Tree Press hardcover, The Basilisk and Other Tales of Dread (2003), contained the bulk of the material in this present volume. The latter’s cover by Ash-Tree stalwart Paul Lowe is gorgeous (well, to those of us with predilection for venomous mythopoeic taxonomies) but somewhat misleading to its contents overall. Lowe’s painting for Frances Oliver’s Dancing On Air (Ash-Tree Press, 2004) could rather more accurately represent one of Gilchrist’s tales for example.
Two women artists lend a truer feel to this current imprint that will hopefully have a lengthier availability. I Am Stone cover artist Sandra Gómez also contributes a frontispiece sharing a time-warped synchronicity with the plate “St. George” by the occult artist W. T. Horton (The Book of Images, 1898). Photography by Fay Godwin introduces each section of the tales, perfectly documenting the genius loci of Gilchrist’s moody Peak District. In one case, there is evidence of what appears to be a basilisk skeleton…
2.
Among more than a half dozen scholarly essays, Dan has written about RMG in this journal before: “Bestarred with Fainting Flowers: Symbolism and Myth in the Work of R. Murray Gilchrist” (DR #21) and “I No longer Live in This House: The Liminality of Undeath in the Works of R. Murray Gilchrist” (DR #26).
Pietersen postulates that Gilchrist is a liminal writer, that is, his work falls through the cracks between Gothic, Decadent and Weird genres. It would be a mistake to adhere to the writings of the author any of these labels, albeit a majority of the stories here are Gothic in tone. The Decadent category, let alone Weird, can only truly apply to a handful of Gilchrist’s more ornate fictions, including the aforementioned “Basilisk” and “The Crimson Weaver”. One might classify some other stories as Folk Horror, such as “The Panicle” and the greatest revelation in this volume, “My Friend”. All labels aside, his writing sets an alluring bejeweled snare for the reader’s interest despite the frameworks of melodrama in these narratives. The Spectator said of Gilchrist’s writing in his first novel Passion and Plaything (1890) that it was “and unpleasant book containing far too much in the way of sensuous description”. We will always assent to more of that, please. Several stories of his do have abrupt endings (“The Stone Dragon”), sometimes not quite clear in their resolution à la Frank Stockton.
In some of his later writing, however, Gilchrist developed a clearer, more direct style which does add to the telling. The tragic “The Madness of Betty Hooton” and the darkly comic “Sir Toby’s Wife” (which Pietersen dug up for this collection from The British Library vaults) are examples. The giggling sexton in the second tale could have been a role for that splendid ham barnstormer of the last century, Tod Slaughter.
Pietersen ascribes greater agency to Gilchrist’s female characters as opposed to the ofttimes weak, passive male narrators. But this may be just wishful thinking. Female antagonists such as “The Crimson Weaver” fall easily into the Fin de Siècle trope of La Belle Dame Sans Merci:
“Stooping, with sidelong motions of the head, she approached: bringing with her the smell of such an incense as when amidst Eastern herbs burns the corpse…She was perfect as the Diana, but her skin was deathly white…”
The protagonist Marina in “The Basilisk” is no less objectified:
“Her beauty… was pale and reposeful, the loveliness of a marble image… I had found her laden with flaming tendrils in the thinned woods of my heritage. A very Dryad, robed in grass colour, she was chanting to the sylvan deities. The invisible web took me, and I became her slave.”
3.
Gilchrist wrote twenty-two novels, six short story collections and four regional guidebooks. He must have been somewhat successful, but who was he writing for? Robert was something of a country dandy, who periodically appeared in his local parish wearing a cassock and girdle (predating Montague Summers stylistically). Existing photos of him show a sweaty tousle-headed Scot with physiognomy of a Highland Jean Lorrain, on closer inspection a sly gleam betrayed in the eye of the author posing for Decadent.
Gilchrist’s apprenticeship to the cutlery business until he was twenty-one might have been where he met George Alfred Garfill, who worked in his own family’s scythe works. The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances was dedicated to Garfill who would be Robert’s companion from 1895 until his death.
“My Friend” might be the one story especially written for George. And himself:
“…the friend I had won (the first and the last) loved me so dearly that he would be unhappy unless his hand were clasping mine…”
Parts of this story reads like actual biographical entry:
“Circumstances had bound him to a profession that chafed his very core: but Nature had given him aspirations, and miraged him a future as great (if as worthless) as my own. How daring I grew! Farther and farther I had ventured down the heretical abyss”
The narrator and his friend journey to the countryside and come to a set of Druid stones. What follows is—a meditation? Or is it a flashback to an ancestral memory?
“A sacrificial hymn was beginning at the Circle—a naked and bleeding victim was bound to the altar…the long bearded priests shook their white robes—the sharp knife glittered—and my own stiletto waxed heavy, as it strove to draw me downwards…Again the skies opened, but with only a momentary gleam; one glance of the Almighty Eye. But it was not so swift as
to prevent me from seeing the face of the Sacrifice.”
“My Friend” is worth the cost of admission to this ceremony and this volume alone.
4.
Pietersen states that there are a mere eight copies of Gilchrist’s novel The Labyrinth (1902) on public loan to the entire world. The Spectator review of it upon release as “a book with an atmosphere of nightmare” whets one’s interest. Friend and critic, Arnold Bennett said:
“Murray Gilchrist’s best work lies in his short stories, some of which are merely and quite simply perfect…[but] The Labyrinth…is astounding. The Labyrinth is like a rich, mellow naïve eighteenth century tapestry; whenever I think of it, I think of it as the one truly original modern English novel…Perhaps in about twenty years it will be the correct thing to have read him.” [“Books and Persons”, The New Age, 21 March 1908, p.412]
A humble plea then.
After immersing ourselves in the language (A fourteen page “Notes on the text” with glossary is included) and revelations of I Am Stone, we need a reprint now of this—possibly tragic? romance of The House of The Eleven Staircases. With, of course, no one less than Daniel Pietersen at the helm editorially, brought to print by some canny independent publisher…
After more than one hundred years it would be the correct thing.