Loe raamatut: «The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes»

INTRODUCTION

Literary fame seems almost like a lottery; ghost story writers in particular seem to pick losing tickets more than any other kind of author. It is an interesting exercise to ponder why certain authors and their works in this vein, just as well equipped to stand the test of time as their contemporaries, fall into speedy obscurity, while others stay in the public eye. The Victorian era is a fine example of this – for every tale of terror that has survived in print today, there are a hundred languishing in undeserved obscurity.

Bernard Capes is a case in point. During his writing career, he published forty-one books, contributed to all the leading Victorian magazines, and left behind some of the most imaginative tales of terror of his era – yet within ten years of his death, he had slipped down the familiar slope into total neglect. Until the early 1980s, Capes seldom appeared in reference works in this (or any other) field of literature, and even histories of Victorian writers published in his lifetime give him scant mention. He was overlooked by every anthologist in this genre from his death in 1918 right up until 1978: sixty years of lingering in the dark while many of his contemporaries were brought back to light.

I would place Capes among the most imaginative writers of his day. He turned out plot after plot worthy of the recognition accorded to such contemporaries as Stevenson, Haggard, and Conan Doyle, all of whom are still in print today. I hope this selection of his stories will help put Capes in his deserved position with the leading talents of Victorian fantasy.

Bernard Edward Joseph Capes was born in London on 30 August 1854, a nephew of John Moore Capes, a prominent figure in the Oxford Movement. He was educated at Beaumont College and brought up as a Catholic. His elder sister, Harriet Capes (1849–1936), was to become a noted translator and writer of children’s books, publishing a dozen or more up to 1932.

As we will see, a very awkward angel perched on Capes’s shoulder all his life, and made its presence felt at an early stage of his career. He was meant to go into the army; but somehow there was an almighty bureaucratic tangle, and his intended commission was not granted due to some mistake about the age he should have been when presenting himself for examination. There is no record as to why he did not pursue the matter further but the army career came to nothing.

Capes’s awkward angel then accompanied him on the long string of ventures that he made into the world at large. After the army fiasco, he started work in a tea-broker’s office. It must have been dreadfully dull – the tea business in the 1870s was not the most exciting field of human activity, and the young Capes must have endured it in silence until, after a few years, he packed it in and went to study art at the Slade School. What he did about an art career is not recorded; but we do know that in 1888 he went to work for the publishers Eglington and Co., and succeeded Clement Scott as editor of the journal The Theatre.

At this point in his career, he made his first attempts at novel writing, publishing two under the pseudonym ‘Bevis Cane’: The Haunted Tower (1888) and The Missing Man (1889), the latter being issued by Eglington. Presumably neither novel won him success, as ‘Bevis Cane’ never appeared again; and what was generally thought to have been his first novel – under his own name – did not appear for another eight years.

Capes must have thought he had found his niche at last; this foray into writing was to spark off his final (and successful) career. But the angel was not finished yet. Eglington and Co. went out of business in 1892, and Capes must have been really stuck for an occupation to follow his editorship of The Theatre, for he is next discovered making an unsuccessful attempt at, of all things, rabbit farming. There is a dreadful black humour in the thought of a man who cannot successfully breed rabbits.

At long last, however, Capes, aged forty-three, found his true vocation. In 1897 he entered a competition for new authors organised by the Chicago Record. Capes came second with his novel The Mill of Silence, published in Chicago that year by Rand, McNally.

Obviously heartened by this turn of events, Capes entered the competition in 1898 when the Chicago Record repeated it. This time he hit the jackpot. His entry, The Lake of Wine – a long, sometimes quite macabre tale of a fabulous ruby bearing the title of the book – won the competition. It was published by Heinemann the same year, and Capes was a writer from then on.

And write he did. Out flooded short stories, articles, newspaper editorials, reviews, and novels. He published a further two in 1898 (including the book bearing one of the most unappetising titles of all time: The Adventures of the Comte de la Muette During the Reign of Terror). All through the early 1900s, with a four-book bulge in 1910, and right up through the First World War, Capes knocked out a couple of books every year.

Each novel took three months to write, working six hours a day, and Capes would take a month’s holiday after finishing the book. He also played the piano and made games for his children. Another great interest was painting and illustrating.

When I met Ian Burns and Helen Capes in October 2002, they honoured me by showing me (and letting me hold!) a precious family heirloom – the only copy of Bernard’s The Book Of The Beasts. Subtitled ‘Being certain animals which through their own perversity or ill temper have become extinct’, the book had been hand-made by Capes, written and illustrated with his own watercolours, for his children. It was fascinating. No wonder Renalt said of his father in 1982: ‘Bernard was the nicest, kindest man I have ever known, and never had anything nasty to say about anybody at all.’

He wrote mainly novels, but every so often he issued a book of his stories collected from their various magazine appearances. The list of magazines he contributed to is impressive, and includes Blackwood’s, Cassell’s, Cornhill, The Idler, Illustrated London News, Lippincott’s, Macmillan’s, Pall Mall and Pearson’s: a roll of honour of the finest magazines of the era.

In 1889, Bernard Capes married Rosalie Amos (1865–1949) and they moved from Streatham to Winchester, where he spent the rest of his life. Rosalie appears to have been something of a domestic tyrant, handling the finances and running the household (vigorously, so it seems). Bernard must have been quite happy to concentrate on his writing. They had three children: Gareth (1893–1921), Nerine (1897–1967), and Renalt (1905–1983). Gareth had an army career (perhaps to make up for the one his father never had), while Renalt Capes (1905–1983) became, like his father, a writer late in life. He published three books in the late 1940s, including studies on Lord Nelson and Alexandre Dumas. He also wrote short stories, one of which was filmed as Dual Alibi (1946) with Herbert Lom. Nerine married Graham Burns and had an eventful time in the Second World War; Graham was later to be the last European killed in the Malayan emergency in 1952. Their son, Ian Burns, lives in Australia and carries on the Capes’s writing tradition, as the author of the children’s book Scratcher (1987) and many more since.

Bernard was very popular in Winchester and Renalt recalled one incident which indicates why. He remembered the First Army, the ‘contemptible little army’ according to the Kaiser, on its way from Winchester to Southampton, there to go to France, at the beginning of the first world war. The soldiers marched past Bernard’s house (for three days) and he set up tables outside, with coffee, sandwiches and cigarettes for the troops.

Even during his period of literary success, Bernard Capes’s angel was never far away. With a new novel on the stocks (The Skeleton Key, published posthumously), Capes was struck down by the influenza epidemic which swept Europe at the end of the First World War. A short illness was followed by heart failure, and he died in Winchester on 1 November 1918. He was sixty-four, and had had only twenty years at writing. Capes’s luck, as always, ran out at the wrong time.

Rosalie organised a plaque for him in Winchester Cathedral, among the likes of Izaak Walton and Jane Austen. It can still be seen, next to the entrance to the crypt.

He had earned enough of a reputation to merit an obituary in The Times on 4 November 1918. It called him a ‘busy writer, and always a readable one … as he grew older, his style mellowed, for gifted as he was he took some time to find himself’; then added, in typically sniffy fashion, ‘Nor were his The Fabulists, a collection of eerie tales, unworthy of him.’ This fastidious approach to tales of terror is very familiar, even now; Capes probably had to bear his share of literary snobbery in his lifetime. Ghost stories are always treated as a poor relation by literary thinkers, although heaven knows why – they are one of the longest surviving branches of literature.

Capes received a less snooty obituary from The New Witness, which called him ‘one of our most brilliant contributors’. It said of him that ‘He had a very real genius for the supernatural, his ghost stories are among the best in the language. He had an eerie gift for touching on the very quick of horror and never spoilt a supernatural situation by the suggestion of materialism.’

Capes had also earned the enthusiasm of G.K. Chesterton, who wrote an introduction for Capes’s posthumous The Skeleton Key (a fine detective novel). Chesterton said of Capes; ‘It may seem a paradox to say that he was insufficiently appreciated because he did popular things well. But it is true to say that he always gave a touch of distinction to a detective story or a tale of adventure; and so gave it where it was not valued, because it was not expected.’ Chesterton obviously knew about the sniffy tones of the day as well. He praised Capes’s ‘technical liberality of writing a penny-dreadful so as to make it worth a pound. In his short stories … he did indeed permit himself to be poetic in a more direct and serious fashion.’ And it is those stories which concern us now.

Capes’s imagination soared. He imagined the moon being the repository of lost souls (‘The Moon Stricken’); the soul of a dead glassblower trapped in a bottle and released to terrorise a foolish investigator (‘The Green Bottle’); a smuggler brought down by the man whose death he caused twenty years earlier (‘Dark Dignum’); a werewolf priest in a grisly variation of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (‘The Thing in the Forest’); a prison cell haunted by a dead man who makes the dust swirl constantly (‘An Eddy on the Floor’); a suicide returning to teach his ne’er-do-well nephew a grisly lesson (‘The Closed Door’); and a wicked ancestor who steps down from his portrait to give visitors a guided tour (‘A Queer Cicerone’). He ranged from Napoleonic terrors to haunted typewriters; from marble hands which come to life to plague-stricken villagers haunted by a scythe-wielding ghost; from werewolves to the Wandering Jew. Bernard Capes rang the changes on tales of terror like very few writers of his day. It makes his neglect all the more surprising.

Of the tales in this book, nearly all appeared first in magazine form and were then collected into various books of short stories as Capes published them. Those from The Fabulists need some explanation. The shorter stories first appeared in The New Witness, and were tales told by four young men who decide to journey from village to village telling stories to earn their keep. They merely narrate the tales, without necessarily appearing in them; but the stories all bear the marks of a camp-fire yarn. As for the others, they stand up superbly on their own. Capes could hit the mark better than most.

We must never forget the sardonic angel on Capes’s shoulder. When I reprinted a couple of these stories in Tales from a Gas-Lit Graveyard in 1979, I sent a copy of the volume to Robert Aickman, one of our foremost ghost story writers (his grandfather, Richard Marsh, was in the book as well). Aickman wrote back, commenting on the stories, and said this of Capes: ‘His stories reveal the author’s desperate frustration, an all too familiar property of the trade. He also uses words in a curious way at many places; as if he were writing under the influence of drink, as perhaps he was, when one considers his basic attitude.’

Intrigued by Aickman’s insight (I had not told him of Capes’s long record of failure), I asked him to elaborate for the benefit of this book when it finally appeared. His reply deserves reprinting:

Consider the opening paragraph and second paragraph in ‘The Green Bottle’. When Capes describes himself as ‘happening to be grinding his literary barrel organ – always adaptable to the popular need’, this is not character drawing but an expression of rueful awareness that the words are largely true. Similarly, the contempt expressed for Sewell is partly self contempt and partly contempt for the awful people one has to mix with in the awful trade of popular authorship. Thus again with the first paragraph of ‘An Eddy on the Floor’; these words do not even pretend to be in character. They are Capes speaking. No man who sees himself as even reasonably content or fulfilled writes like this. The entire atmosphere is saturated with disappointment, disillusionment, and despair. None of this means that Capes’s stories are without good qualities. Still less does it mean that Capes was necessarily justified in his apparent estimate of his powers and deserts. Least of all does it mean that you have to accept a word I say on the subject.

Anyone who knew Robert Aickman would accept his word on this like a shot. Aickman did his fair share of research into ghost stories and knew his authors well.

If you examine Capes’s tales, you won’t find any conventional heroes or conventional happy endings. His protagonists wander into situations or are obliged to take action almost by default, while suffering humanity gets short shrift as well. He also seems to reserve harsh fates for gentlemen of the press – consider ‘The Green Bottle’, ‘An Eddy on the Floor’, or ‘William Tyrwhitt’s “Copy”’. Capes hardly needed to populate the moon with lost souls – he sends them wandering blindly through the pages of his stories down here on earth.

Perhaps it is his basic pessimism that gives Capes’s stories their undoubted power. Few authors from the time conjured up such dark canvasses as he paints in ‘A Gallows-bird’ or ‘The Sword of Corporal Lacoste’. However, this dark vision never seemed to extend to his novels, which are often lighter, less grim, historical follies. The Pot of Basil (1913), for instance, is an airy, whimsical piece about eighteenth century court life in Italy – a long way from the grinding horror of ‘A Gallows-bird’. And the lovers in The Story of Fifine (1914) are in a world far removed from the blossoming courtship we see outlined in ‘The Accursed Cordonnier’.

Capes soon passed into the neglect so common in this field. After The Skeleton Key was published in 1919, nothing more appeared in Britain until a couple of re-issues in 1928 and 1929 – and then that was it. His neglect over the years is strange indeed, especially when other authors from the same era are reprinted mercilessly.

I hope that this new edition of The Black Reaper will bring Bernard Capes back into the eye of the ghost story enthusiast, and a wider public. He deserves reprinting and a second chance. We must hope that his usual bad luck died with him.

Hugh Lamb

Sutton, Surrey

February 2017