My eyes are doors. The moon walks through them

[sovay]

Commended to the attention of my friendlist: Forrest Reid's Denis Bracknel (1947). Technically a revision of Reid's third novel The Bracknels (1911), although so thoroughly rewritten both structurally and stylistically that Reid's prefatory note accurately describes it as "practically a new book," it is a queer Gothic that reads like the love child of Arthur Machen and Henry James. The house belongs to the Bracknels, a dysfunctionally upper-middle-class family in the countryside of Northern Ireland; the boy who meets it is the sturdy, sensible Hubert Rusk, engaged fresh out of Cambridge as a tutor for the youngest son of the family, the physically delicate and mentally sensitive Denis, whose experience of public school was memorably brief and disastrous. Despite the five or six years between them and their sharply different worldviews, the tutor and his pupil rapidly form a romantic friendship, while all around them the tensions of the Bracknel family boil to the surface with the arrival of the stranger, who not being Terence Stamp in Teorema (1968) is horribly embarrassed to find himself witness to and object of so many emotional scenes. The father is a bully, the mother self-renouncing, the elder son a wastrel, the sisters stifled and rivalrous: and Denis Bracknel worships the moon. "I don't think of any particular god or goddess . . . I mean I don't think of names. There is something behind them all." He does it honor at a hollow stone beside a well beside a hawthorn which he found after dreaming of it. He has made sacrifice to it there. Other fragments of strangeness shift beyond the lights of the story, a pattern that never quite settles where the reader or the characters can see it in full: a suicide, a nightmare, an incomplete allusion to something that happened at school. "It sounds like a fairy tale, and it was before he took ill, before all the row—" Every time the novel begins to behave like a mimetic chronicle of an Edwardian family, of which it would have made a good example if the author had felt like it, there's the title character who looks like a changeling or Dionysos—slight, dark, Eastern-eyed—knowing himself haunted and safe by his altar, feeling a pale cold figure bend down out of the night and kiss him full on the mouth. Just in case the reader isn't sure how far to trust the mood of supernatural ambiguity, the narrative name-checks James and Le Fanu. If it is going to end badly, though, human failure as much as any haunting will have to play a part. It annoys me that it was Reid's last novel—finished just in time to be published posthumously—because it looks as though most of his others, although queer, were also realist, and Denis Bracknel decidedly is not. I read it over two nights, on either side of ashlyme linking me the excellent impromptu soundtrack of Belbury Poly's The Gone Away (2020). Also I slept for five hours, which is not enough, but I still feel better.

P.S. For e-book-reading people, selkie points out that this novel is in fact "cheap as chips on Kindle," which I hope makes it easier to get hold of.

Comments

[gwynnega]

This sounds wonderful.

[sovay]

This sounds wonderful.

It was one of my birthday presents. I really liked it!

[skygiants]

You had me at "queer Gothic" and 1947!

[sovay]

You had me at "queer Gothic" and 1947!

I know that everything is earlier than I think it is, but I honestly didn't know there were any written rather than set at that time, and just the fact of its existence makes me happy. Also, it's good.

[selkie]

That sounds delightful. You sure you didn't write it at the time and you're just remembering it now? There might be royalties.
Edit: You may wish to edit your post to reflect that it is cheap as chips on Kindle, which I know pains you. But barriers to entry!

[sovay]

That sounds delightful. You sure you didn't write it at the time and you're just remembering it now? There might be royalties.

I would have used the moon-myth differently (and perhaps ended it differently, too), but it is rather at ground zero of several of my interests, and I was indeed delighted.

Edit: You may wish to edit your post to reflect that it is cheap as chips on Kindle, which I know pains you. But barriers to entry!

I didn't know it was cheap as chips on Kindle! I'm pleased to hear it. I'll append a note.

[kestrell]

I discovered Reid's "A Garden God" a number of years ago by way of Walter de la Mare--I am a complete sucker for supernatural fiction written in this time period, with all its preoccupation with queerness in all its guises. Mike Flanagan's reinterpretation of "The House of Bly" strikes a similar note in its ending: it's all about lost love and lost innocence and the wild music of a half-shadowed Pan who beckons from a distant wood.

[sovay]

I discovered Reid's "A Garden God" a number of years ago by way of Walter de la Mare--I am a complete sucker for supernatural fiction written in this time period, with all its preoccupation with queerness in all its guises.

You should definitely check out Denis Bracknel, then. I had an ambivalent recommendation of The Garden God elsenet, but yours sounds stronger.

Mike Flanagan's reinterpretation of "The House of Bly" strikes a similar note in its ending: it's all about lost love and lost innocence and the wild music of a half-shadowed Pan who beckons from a distant wood.

handful_ofdust mentioned the liminality! It made me think of Britten's The Turn of the Screw, where the ghost of Peter Quint names himself "all things strange and bold . . . the riderless horse . . . the hero-highwayman":

I am the smooth world's double face,
Mercury's heels
feather'd with mischief and a god's deceit.
The brittle blandishment of counterfeit.
In me secrets, half-formed desires meet.
I am the hidden life that stirs
when the candle is out;
upstairs and down, the footsteps barely heard,
the unknown gesture, the soft persistent word,
the long sighing flight of the night-wing'd bird.

—with all the trickster's ambiguity that implies. The children loved him and Miss Jessel, and "he liked them pretty," the housekeeper says, "and he had his will, morning and night," and we never see the living man, only the echo and memory and fantasy of him playing out in the twelve-note spindle of endlessly re-running time, and we never know what's true.

[kore]

(that's gorgeous)

[sovay]

(that's gorgeous)

I really like Britten's The Turn of the Screw. I saw a terrific version by the Boston Lyric Opera in 2010.

[kore]

I really need to watch that. The original Haunting of Hill House adaptation made me run screaming for the hills.

[kestrell]

In many ways, Bly is a very different animal, but I will say that I am more in love with Mike Flanagan than ever. I am also extremely impressed by how much Henry James he read to produce this series.

[sovay]

I am also extremely impressed by how much Henry James he read to produce this series.

It's intertextual with more than The Turn of the Screw?

[kestrell]

Oh, yes! Every episode title refers to a different one of James's "ghost"stories, though not every story referred to has an actual ghost. The penultimate episode, for example, is titled "The Romance of Old Clothes."

[sovay]

Every episode title refers to a different one of James's "ghost"stories, though not every story referred to has an actual ghost.

That's cool.

[asakiyume]

Is it the sort of thing where I'd be going, "But I wanted more magic!"?

[sovay]

Is it the sort of thing where I'd be going, "But I wanted more magic!"?

I liked it a lot, but it might be. (Alternately, I wonder if it confused readers of the term who were expecting a metaphorical Gothic, not a literal haunted house.)

[asakiyume]

You know what: upon reflection, I bet it wouldn't be. It sounds like if you can like the tutor and like the tutee, then it doesn't matter so much how far into Other you go or how close to home you stay.

[kore]

Three bucks? Sold!

I wondered why the name sounded familiar and then remembered ohhh yeah, he wrote Uncle Stephen, altho my copy of that seems to have disappeared, and I still have his volume of Yeats criticism I read in grad school.

[sovay]

Three bucks? Sold!

Enjoy!

I wondered why the name sounded familiar and then remembered ohhh yeah, he wrote Uncle Stephen, altho my copy of that seems to have disappeared, and I still have his volume of Yeats criticism I read in grad school.

Oh, that's neat. Did you like either his earlier novel or his Yeats criticism?

[kore]

I think I liked his Yeats book quite a bit! altho the last time I read it was probably in 1998. I remember Uncle Stephen as being more a queer lit classic than supernatural, altho it's been a long time since I read that too....hmmmm....the Valancourt edition looks really nice. Kind of boggling at the contemporary reviews they quote that compare it to Mark Twain's beloved portrayals of boyhood (Tom Sawyer, I still loathe you) and an escape from "iron realism" tho! But I guess that was 1931 for you, I remember Tender is the Night getting crushing reviews in 1934 because the rich glamorous people weren't hung at the end. I am boggled at the claim that he was repulsed by Maurice.

https://www.valancourtbooks.com/uncle-stephen-1931.html

[ethelmay]

Apparently Forrest Reid, though a good deal older, was friends with Arthur Greeves, who was C.S. Lewis's best friend growing up.

[ethelmay]

And C.S.L. wrote an appreciation of Reid for Time & Tide. Don't think that has been reprinted.

[sovay]

And C.S.L. wrote an appreciation of Reid for Time & Tide. Don't think that has been reprinted.

I'd love to read that.

[ethelmay]

I checked Lewis's letters and Reid turns up several times. He helped out when CSL was sorting out the books after his father died, telling him which ones were worth trying to sell. I think possibly the thing I saw that said Lewis wrote an appreciation of him may have been an exaggeration, actually meaning a passing reference in an essay about something else.

I have been reading the three Tom Barber books (now on Uncle Stephen, first written, last in terms of Tom's history - I am breaking my usual practice of Publication Order First), and am enjoying them. They are on fadedpage.com but I think out of copyright in the US as well, as it's more than 70 years since Reid's death.

[sovay]

They are on fadedpage.com but I think out of copyright in the US as well, as it's more than 70 years since Reid's death.

Oh, cool! Thank you for the pointer.