Two Glamorous Novelists

These two gloriously glamorous dames are from a small collection of author photographs I bought recently. They are both from the Eileen Clarke Agency and photographed by Clayton Evans. Both have an affinity with us here at Callum James Books, touching on two of our specialities. Audrey Erskine Lindop (above) is a little known novelist, and indeed, little is known about her today. Her most famous work was probably The Singer Not the Song, the film of which was known for what Wikipedia describes as its "homosexual undertones" but she also wrote a much more full-on gay novel, Details of Jeremy Stretton, so full-on in fact that the publishers in 1955 felt the need not only to get a Forward written by a "Consultant in Psychiatry" but also to print that forward again on the flaps of the jacket. I haven't read it: the Forward or the novel. I can't bring myself to. The alternative names that the novel was later published under included The Outer Ring and The Tormented. Nonetheless, she was a fine-looking woman.

Another fine-looking woman from the collection is featured below. Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was born in Dublin but her father's illness meant she spent a great deal of her childhood in England with relatives there. Many think that this unhappy start was what prompted and fed the recurring themes of isolation and family breakdown in her writing. She wrote both novels and short stories and, for our purposes becomes interesting for her Ghost stories. She wasn't a prolific writer of supernatural fiction but, to quote critic Neil Wilson, they were "of such a high standard that she has gained a reputation as one of the most sophisticated and mature writers in the genre". 

Although both photographs were probably taken in the 1960s I feel they retain that 30s film-star look somehow...

Dutch Gilt Patterned Papers

If it's alright with all of you, can we just skip over the fact that I haven't posted anything here for ten days and move on...? Thank you...

This is a little outside my comfort zone when it comes to collecting and dealing but it was so achingly beautiful. These patterned papers use a process called Dutch Gilt to decorate patterned paper with gold. The papers are on the inside of vellum covered boards, pastedown only, this is before endpapers were two pages facing each other. The paper and the binding probably dates from the early 18th century and is on a volume of Italian poetry printed before Galileo started discovering stuff... the book these papers enclose was created nearly 430 years ago. It's a humbling thought and age has only made this paper more beautiful.

Callum James Books - Cards

A bumper postbag today, including this new set of promotional material for Callum James Books. Two different business cards for different occasions and a two sided postcard with details of what I buy, to shower on the world at appropriate moments and in appropriate places. The card on the right is double sided with an image of lots of marbled paper and the CJ logo over the top: makes it look like I'm inviting someone to join a secret society... Maybe I am!

Postal frustration though, to miss a delivery from DHL yesterday from Australia of a very exciting consignment of books that cost more to send than the price of a return air fare. So I know they are waiting at a depot about ten miles from here but it is closed all weekend and I won't get them until Monday now!

Two Drawings

Sometimes, you go out buying and come home, look at what you've bought and realise that in the heat of the moment you might have spent money on something doesn't grip you in the same way after cool reflection. That's the not the case today. The more I look at these two pencil drawings by Elizabeth Hammond, (an art student in the late 1930s, early 40s), the happier I am that I bought them. They may not be perfect in their draftsmanship but they both have a certain charm and freshness that I find really appealing.

Frederick Rolfe and Mar Jacobus

In the course of his life, the novelist Frederick Rolfe became involved in some truly bizarre shenanigans from time to time, but there was one occasion which stands out as what Donald Weeks described as "one of the wisest moves of his life" in which he managed to avoid entering into a world so ridden with baroque conspiracy and fantasy that it would make medieval Venice look uncomplicated: the world of the auto-cephalus Catholic churches, the world of the Episcopi Vagantes. If you are already mystified, prepare to be tortured with complexity...

Rolfe's best known novel is Hadrian the Seventh, and upon its publication it attracted the attention of two people who wrote to Rolfe expressing admiration for the novel and proposing friendship. The first was Robert Hugh Benson who did indeed become close to Rolfe for a time, but eventually attained near-nemesis status in Rolfe's eyes. The second was a chap whose given names were Ulric Vernon Herford (pictured above) but who introduced himself to Rolfe, by letter, as Mar Jacobus, Bishop of Mercia and Middlesex, Administrator of the Metropolitan See of India, Ceylon, Milapur etc., of the Syro-Chaldean Church, and of the Patriarchate of Babylon and the East, and Founder of the Evangelical Catholic Communion. And in this letter, attracted by the "Fr. Rolfe" on the title page of Hadrian, Mar Jacobus all but offered Rolfe a bishopric over 25,000 Christians and twenty churches. 

This must have been something of a shock for Rolfe and probably more of a temptation than he would have liked to admit. Herford was one of a large number of "Bishops" at that time who claimed to be the heads of various independent Catholic churches not under the jurisdiction of Rome, (hence auto-cephalous: one's own boss). Rolfe's response was uncharacteristically measured and sensible, he wrote to his solicitors and asked them to make enquiries about the bona fides of Mar Jacobus's orders. Rolfe wrote: "he practically offers a bishoprick over the Christians of St Thomas on the Malabar coast! ! ! I am inquiring: for the validity of orders is all-important."

And the validity of orders is absolutely where this world becomes incomprehensible to the uninitiated. The catholic doctrine of Apostolic Succession is the cornerstone of the church's authority. That the church as it is constituted today has a firm continuity with the church at the time of the Apostles is not really in dispute and this is the source of the Catholic church's claim to be the One, True Church. But Apostolic Succession does not just require a kind of institutional continuity whereby the Pope can claim to be the successor of St Peter. Whenever the church has been split by disagreement (not an uncommon occurrence in the last 2000 years) the question of who is most in communion with those original Apostles became more and more important and so the doctrine of Apostolic Succession has been refined over the centuries to include an element of physical continuity. A priest ordained today in the Catholic Church has to be able to believe that the hands laid on his head at his ordination belong to a man who in turn had hands laid on him, who in turn, who in turn... and so on back to the earliest times and to the Apostles themselves. That is what Rolfe meant by 'validity of orders'. No matter what the administrative situation of the Syro-Chaldean Church and the Evangelical Catholic Communion, what was important was, "is this man a proper bishop". 

Well, was he? Actually, Herford was a not insignificant figure in an interesting movement but was he proper and validly ordained? His answer, and this is par for the course with the such independent churches goes something like this:

"Luis Mariano Soares (or Suares) or Mar Basilius, was the Roman Catholic cleric of Goa, of Brahmin descent. He was ordained priest by Mar Julius (Alvares) of the Independent Catholics of Ceylon, who was consecrated by the (majority) Jacobite 'Thomas Christians'. Mgr. Soares was then elected by a body of Christians in the Madura district - who had revolted from the hard and exacting rule of the Jesuit Mission - to preside over them and was consecrated by Mar Abd-Tshu, who, in the words of the late Mar Benjamin Shimun, de jure Patriarch of the Historic Catholic Church of India (East Syrian of Syro-Chaldean) 'had full power and authority by the consecration which he received from the Patriarch, to bind and to loose, and to ordain and consecrate Bishops and priests and other clergy as he might find necessary for the work of the Church."

...and our Mar Jacobus claims he was ordained and consecrated by Mar Basilius. This kind of pedigree delineation is commonplace among this kind of church group but we can take it from more informed sources than ourselves that the answer, in amongst all that, to 'was he proper' was 'No!' In later life, Herford could only produce a three documents in English, sealed with an English rubber stamp as 'proof' of his orders. One of them is reproduced below. He admitted that he had, in others, written his own name in the blanks of certificates and signed Mar Basilius's name.

Rolfe turned him down. One can't help feeling that he really dodged a bullet there. With Rolfe's temperament and level of devotion, involvement with such a group could only have been disastrous in the extreme. This entire rambling excursion into this story has been occasioned by the fact that a poem was pointed out to me that, with both humour and insight, imaginatively extends the story into something which enables the poet, perhaps with his tongue firmly in cheek, to suggest that despite its ridiculousness, there was also something wonderful about the eccentricity and baroque curlicues of religion as it used to be and rarely is in 'this century'. I am particularly taken by the description of Rolfe's "panther-skinned gondola/diapered with crabs and ravens..." recalling Wilde's description of his dangerous sexual encounters as "feasting with panthers", and also by the "lagoon-eyed fauns" - wonderful stuff. 

ARCHBISHOP MAR JACOBUS REMEMBERS THE BARON

Even the Syro-Chaldean bishopric I offered
on the strength of Hadrian VII
did not tempt Corvo. As mere Provost
to the Lieutenant of Grandmagistracy
of Sanctissima Sophia he fled
to Venice, convinced the Rhodes Trustees
were plotting his assassination.
Where else should provide a home
to the inventor of submarine photography?
I missed his inch-thick cigarettes,
gigantic Waterman fountain pens
and Graecocorvine vocabulary.
We played duets but kissed only once.
At last he denounced me as a fraud
and schismatic. I said he played the spinet
like a lobster trying to escape its pot –
after that, my overtures were useless.
For all his violence and absurdity
I warm to think of him now,
his cropped grey hair dyed with henna,
his white hand, wearing the spur-rowel ring
I gave him as defence against Jesuits,
closed round the oar of his panther-skinned gondola
diapered with crabs and ravens and flying
St George and the red-and-gold Vesilla
of the Bucintoro Rowing Club.
I think less of the lagoon-eyed fauns
he photographs and masturbates.
Does he think of me in Godless Middlesex,
where it either rains or they’re playing cricket?
The Syro-Chaldean Church is not doing well
despite my sigils, blazons, banners
and the undeniable splendour of our ritual.
The landlord’s wife is singing Auld Lang Syne.
This is going to be a Godless century.

© 1991, Ian Duhig, reproduced by kind permission of the poet.

Things That Fall From Books #13: Erotic Quotes

Of all the things that have fallen from books and been featured on this blog I think this may be my favourite so far. From between the pages of Black Spring by Henry Miller in a rather scruffy paperback edition fell a single index card on which, in the same hand are written two quotes - I assume from the book although I haven't read it - which someone obviously felt strongly enough about that they wanted to record them, or perhaps learn them by heart.

Quick 1890s Quiz: Sidney Sime

A quick Eighteen-Nineties quiz for you... We are after the name of an artist.

He was described by Frank Harris thus:

"A strongly built man of about five feet seven or eight with a cliff-like, overhanging, tyrannous forehead. His eyes are superlative, greyish blue looking our under heavy brows, eyes with a pathetic patience in them as of one who had lived with sorrow; and realises - "The weary weight of all the unintelligible world." From time to time humorous gleams light up the eyes and the whole face; mirth on melancholy - a modern combination."

And in a reasonably recent biographical monograph we are told:

"He started as a pit-boy, became a celebrity in the Nineties, collaborated with and became a close friend of two talented noblemen, and died poor and forgotten"

Suggest your answers in the comments if you feel so inclined... until tomorrow when this post will be updated with an image of the Max Beerbohm caricature of our subject...

UPDATE: Well, this is 'tomorrow' and as promised, at the top of the post now is Max Beerbohm's caricature of Sydney Sime, (well done to both EJC and Anonymous in the comments below for being so epic in their knowledge of the Eighteen-Nineties illustration scene - there's no prize but then, you don't need one when you're as cool as you both are!). Personally, the caricature seems cruel, even by Max's standards, but you can judge for yourselves by comparison with this much more flattering image of Sime, a photographic portrait by that great underrated photographer of the early 20th Century, Emil Otto Hoppé. The more of Sime's work I peruse, the more I wonder if he wasn't rather fond of the grotesque self-portrait and may even have revelled in Max's cruelty. Hoppé appears to have captured Sime in front of a a piece of his own work which looks rather like an exaggerated self-portrait/caricature and there seems to be round, beady-eyed, mustachioed faces like that all the way through his work...

Aubade from Kenneth Martin and Valancourt Books

Valancourt Books is on something of a roll this year with an incredible schedule of releases and today on Twitter they were highlighting the soon to be released editions of Kenneth Martin's Aubade, written at the tender age of 16, and Waiting for the Sky to Fall by the same author just two years later. Aubade is something of a classic of gay fiction, indeed the Gay Mens' Press published it as a 'classic' in the 1980s.

What's interesting about this new release of the two books is that they are accompanied first by James Jenkins's story about how he discovered the two books and tracked down their author, and also by a blog which is still in progress by Kenneth Martin himself, now in his 70s, in which he has been recording his feelings about revisiting these two novels so long after the event.

Frank Prewett, Poet, by Dorothy Brett

If you're a regular reader of this blog you may thank that this sultry looking young man looks familiar. He has, in fact, featured before in portrait form, back in September last year. He is Frank Prewett, a Canadian war poet, nicked-named Toronto by Siegfried Sassoon who had something of a crush on him (and I'm with Siegfried on this one). This is a previously unknown portrait of him by Dorothy Brett, daughter of Lord Esher, and a figure on the periphery of the Bloomsbury Group. I think it's a nice touch that there is an attribution written on the back identifying both sitter and painter in Sassoon's hand. Everything I know about him is in the previous post but this portrait is being offered for sale in Part III of the Roy Davids sale by Bonham's in May. As with the other parts of the collection this is a quite astonishing sale full of manuscript and portrait material relating to poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This part of the sale includes the Ws so there's some Wilde and some Whitman as well to get you truly foaming at the mouth.

UPADTE: I'm indebted to Brian Busby for providing this link http://www.idbury.com/prewitt.shtml to more information about Prewett in the comments below, and since I realise that not everyone bothers to click on the comments on a post I am elevating it, with my thanks, to the post itself.