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Jim Lamb covers Charles Williams

A boxed set of novels published by Eerdmans in 1981. Not something I own, unfortunately.

A couple of years ago I decided to read in order all seven of Charles Williams’ supernatural thrillers: War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1930), The Place of the Lion (1931), The Greater Trumps (1932), Shadows of Ecstasy (1933), Descent into Hell (1937) and All Hallows’ Eve (1945). The plan foundered at the end of Shadows of Ecstasy when I felt in need of a break from Williams’ fiction but this week I’m reading Descent into Hell and feeling the opposite, happy to be back in Williams’ world. This in turn gives me an opportunity to draw attention to Jim Lamb’s covers for the books, created in the late 1970s when they were reprinted in the USA by Eerdmans as a set of matching paperback editions.

Charles Williams occupies a curious position today, often referred to as “the third Inkling” along with JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis while being utterly eclipsed by the celebrity which has accrued to his friends and their works. Williams doesn’t write about fantastic lands but about a very particular time and place—Britain in the 1930s, either London or “the home counties“—and a variety of metaphysical intrusions into this world. The Narnia novels by CS Lewis have connections to the same time and place but are generally removed from it. If Lewis had only written his three science fiction novels—which few people seem to read today—he might be joining Williams in posthumous obscurity. Williams’ obscurity is such that his novels have had few reprints, which makes the Jim Lamb covers not only the best to date but also one of the few sets given over to a talented illustrator. You’d think novels which have been praised by (among others) TS Eliot, William Lindsay Gresham, M. John Harrison and Tim Powers might warrant a little more attention, but readers and publishers prefer Narnia and Middle Earth.

The Holy Grail surfaces in an obscure country parish and becomes variously a sacramental object to protect or a vessel of power to exploit.

(All the story descriptions have been lifted from Wikipedia.)

The first one I read after it turned up as one of the paperback reprints that Sphere were publishing in the 1970s as the “Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult”. Wheatley provided an introduction for each book, and this one is close enough to his own supernatural fiction that I wonder whether it was an influence. The novel itself is actually more like a story by Arthur Machen—who also wrote about the Holy Grail—or HG Wells, the latter in its conjunction of miraculous events and very mundane London settings. Where Wheatley has the agents of Satanic Powers living in well-heeled splendour, here they make their plans in the back rooms of a chemist’s shop off the Finchley Road.

An evil antiquarian illegally purchases the fabled Stone of Suleiman from its Islamic guardian and returns to England to discover not only that the Stone can multiply itself infinitely without diminishing the original, but that it also allows its possessor to transcend the barriers of space and time.

The second one I read, and a book I’ve read three times so far. I wouldn’t mind paying another visit, it’s a fantastic novel in every sense, and the closest that Williams gets to science fiction. It’s also a surprise to find Muslim mysticism given a sympathetic presentation after the overtly Christian mysticism of War in Heaven.

Platonic archetypes begin to appear around an English country town, wreaking havoc and drawing to the surface the spiritual strengths and flaws of individual characters.

The original Tarot deck is used to unlock enormous metaphysical powers by allowing the possessors to see across space and time, create matter, and raise powerful natural storms.

Another novel which was part of the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult, The Great Trumps promises much but doesn’t really deliver despite dealing with the richly symbolic world of the Tarot. Tim Powers’ Last Call would seem to owe something to this, and to The Place of the Lion in its staging of a Tarot-related metaphysical conflict which takes place in and around Las Vegas.

A humanistic adept has discovered that by focusing his energies inward he can extend his life almost indefinitely. He undertakes an experiment using African lore to die and resurrect his own body thereby assuring his immortality. His followers begin a revolutionary movement to supplant European civilisation.

Since I’ve read this it comes to mind any time there’s a mention of one of those wealthy men who believes he can live forever by swallowing pills or having regular blood transfusions. Jim Lamb seems to have used Anton Diffring as a model for the man on the left. And is the central figure based on Marlon Brando?

…deals with various forms of selfishness, and how the cycle of sin brings about the necessity for redemptive acts. In it, an academic becomes so far removed from the world that he fetishises a woman to the extent that his perversion takes the form of a succubus. Other characters include a doppelgänger, the ghost of a suicidal Victorian labourer, and a playwright modelled in some ways on the author.

Follows the fortunes of two women after death and their interactions with those they knew before, contrasting the results of action based either on selfishness or an accepting love.

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• Nightmare Alleys

Lynd Ward’s Haunted Omnibus

“The Haunted Omnibus” is a title that suggests some form of public transport filled with spooks, but all the spectres here are lodged in the pages of a story collection from 1937, edited by Alexander Laing and later reprinted in a truncated edition as Great Ghost Stories of the World. Both books were collections for American readers, with at least half the stories in The Haunted Omnibus originating in Europe. Many of the selections feature no ghosts at all; “weird tales” would be a better descriptor for any collection that includes entries as diverse as Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla, Arthur Machen’s The White People, Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo and an extract from Beowulf.

Grendel aside, if you’re familiar with 20th-century weird fiction there are few surprises, the main attraction is Lynd Ward’s copious illustrations which, for the longer stories, run to two illustrations a piece: a title vignette and a full page. With 42 stories in total that’s a lot of artwork; what you see here is a necessary selection. The ISFDB page for the book links to a PDF scan of the entire collection if you’d like to see how well the illustrations suit the stories; alternatively, this old blog post has nearly all of Ward’s interior illustrations. Laing’s collection wasn’t Ward’s first engagement with horror, his superb edition of Frankenstein was published in 1934. This was followed by covers and a frontispiece for two of Alexander Laing’s novels, The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (1934) and The Motives of Nicholas Holtz, Being the Weird Tale of the Ironville Virus (1936), which no doubt led in turn to The Haunted Omnibus. Ward’s Frankenstein illustrations are all wood engravings, a medium at which he excelled, and one which gives his drawings a precise definition that’s lacking in the story collection. I can’t say for sure what medium he used here but they look like lithograph drawings. The textural roughness is useful for conveying a nebulous atmosphere but Ward’s predilection for Expressionist distortion makes some of his depictions difficult to read at first glance. On the plus side it’s good to see how he deals with something like The White People which was being reprinted for the first time outside Machen’s own The House of Souls collection. This makes Ward the first illustrator of the story, as he was with The Wendigo and (I’m guessing) several more of these pieces.

(Note: At the time of writing ISFDB is suffering problems with bots overloading its server resources but the PDF link directs to Alexander Laing’s entry on this page.)

The Half-Pint Flask by DuBose Heyward.

The Treasure of Abbot Thomas by MR James.

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Percy Billinghurst’s fables

These are actually La Fontaine’s fables illustrated by a British artist, Percy J. Billinghurst, but I try to avoid unwieldly post titles that mix artist and writer. There isn’t much of a biographical record for Percy Billinghurst, and what records there are don’t agree about his birth and death dates which are generally given as 1871—1933. One thing that is certain is Billinghurst’s fondness for drawing animals. In addition to this volume he illustrated a book of his own, A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals in 1901, and an edition of Aesop’s fables in 1910.

The La Fontaine book dates from 1900, and has the French text translated into clumsy English verse. Whoever did this isn’t credited but the translations by Walter Thornbury for one of the Doré editions are far better. Billinghurst’s illustrations are typical of a graphic style much favoured at the time by The Studio magazine: clear lines with heavy outlines and little shading, and with the captions hand-lettered and incorporated into the drawing itself. Those dots separating the words are another Studio hallmark. A bookplate by Billinghurst was featured in an ex libris collection published by The Studio in 1898 which suggests there may be more of his early drawings to be found inside the magazine.

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Boris Artzybasheff’s Myths of the World

Boris Artzybasheff’s art was rediscovered in the 1980s by a new generation of American cartoonists who were delighted by his illustrations of anthropomorphic machinery and other technological artefacts. These were the illustrations which made Artzybasheff popular with advertisers and the commissioners of magazine covers in the 1940s and 50s, and their continued popularity today has tended to overshadow his earlier book illustrations, in the same way that W. Heath Robinson’s drawings of improbable inventions overshadow his own illustrated books.

Anthropomorphic machines were still in Artzybasheff’s future when he produced twenty wood engravings for Orpheus: Myths of the World in 1930, one of several books by Padraic Colum which retell mythological stories. In the introduction Colum explains why he named a book about world mythology after a Greek icon:

I have called the collection “Orpheus,” naming it after the minstrel who, according to the poet of the Argonautica, sang “how the earth, the heaven, and the sea once mingled together in one form, after deadly strife were separated each from the other; and how the stars and the moon and the paths of the sun ever keep their fixed place in the sky; and how the mountains rose, and how the resounding rivers with their nymphs came into being, and all creeping things.”

The art from Artzybasheff’s first decade of published illustration is so different to his later humourous drawings that it might be the work of another artist altogether. The Colum engravings are all very Deco-styled: bold, stylised, and generally flat, reminding me of some of the illustrations the Radio Times used to run. They’re also almost entirely serious until you spot the expression on Eve’s face when the Serpent offers her the forbidden apple. As with Heath Robinson, the humour crept in slowly until it became the dominant mode.

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Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Six years ago I put together a post of links to online sources for all of Harry Clarke’s major works of illustration. His first illustrated book, Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, was among these but the best link I could find at the time was to a set of scans at Flickr which didn’t include things like the board illustrations. (And Flickr is a generally unstable host for anything.) The images here are from this page which was added recently to Wikimedia Commons, and are taken in turn from a collection of book scans at Maastricht University.

Clarke’s book of fairy tales was published by Harrap in 1916 but wasn’t intended to be his first illustrated edition. Harrap’s first commission had been for an edition of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner but the project was abandoned when most of the art was destroyed during Ireland’s Easter Uprising. Further plans for an edition of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock were also abandoned. Harrap’s decision to launch a new artist with yet another collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories seems surprising when there were already many fine editions for British book-buyers to choose from. The Robinson brothers—Thomas, Charles and William—had collaborated on a huge story collection published in 1899, with their individual contributions being subsequently repackaged as separate volumes. The same year saw another edition for which Helen Stratton provided over 400 illustrations. Edmund Dulac and Dugald Stewart Walker had produced books of their own by the time Clarke’s edition was being prepared, and there were others besides these.

Clarke’s collection has more stories than some of those illustrated by his contemporaries but his art is also a little less assured than it would be in his later books. As a fairy-tale collection it lacks the delicate touch he brought to his illustrated edition of Perrault’s tales. There are many excellent compositions, especially among the black and white drawings but also a few pieces which aren’t so much composed as filled with competing areas of decoration that overwhelm the subject of the picture. Clarke never abandoned his fondness for minute details but in his later books his arrangements of tiny circles and baroque curlicues are much more successful.

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