Introduction (to All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s, by Hugh Edwards, 1963)
By Ian Fleming
An essential item in my ‘Desert Island’ library would be The Times Literary Supplement, dropped to me each Friday by a well-trained albatross. If forced to produce some reason for my affection for the journal, I would lamely say that I am nearly always interested by its front page article, by the letters, although there are not enough of them, and, being myself a book collector, by its back page of bibliophily. But, less lamely, I would praise the anonymity of its writers and reviewers which surely lies at the root of the unshackled verdicts that are, sometimes to the point of splendidly savage denunciation, to be found in the T.L.S.
Not long ago I was flying over the Nevada Desert on my way from Los Angeles to Chicago. It was one leg of a lunatic journey round the world in thirty days writing about its thrilling cities for the Sunday Times. My mail had caught up with me at Los Angeles and it included two issues of The Times Literary Supplement. In contrast with the mushy infant food of the American newspapers and magazines that had been my daily fare since arriving in America, I cannot describe the thrill of excitement with which I read a particularly devastating review of Miss Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed: I remember that the slashing broadside made me almost lightheaded with pleasure.
All this is to explain the sequence of events leading up to the republication of this forgotten little book which would not have occurred had I not, as a matter of course, read a leading article which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of April 14th, 1961, and some of which, by permission, I now reprint.
OUT OF PRINT
It is cheering when a book of real quality seems to break through a barrier of indifference and bad luck. Ten years ago Mr. Christopher Burney wrote a short work called Solitary Confinement which is one of the classics both of the last war and of that long process of imprisonment, brutality and sudden death in which the war itself was only one extra acute and well publicized stage. The publisher went out of business, the book out of print. The public soon forgot it in favour of the simpler and more immediate, but also more trivial jottings of Anne Frank. Yesterday it was reissued in a new edition by another publisher (Macmillan, 173 pp., 13s. 6d.), and here it is once more…
But how often are books raised from the dead in this way? Nowadays a work of fiction or autobiography or any other non-specialized, non-utilitarian type of literature has only a short time in which to sell or die—sometimes as little as three months. Less than ever, it seems, can publishers afford to keep unprofitable works in print, and in the restless search for new titles it is most uncommon for a publisher, as here, to turn to a more or less unsuccessful work of the past. Why the backward look should be so short-sighted it is difficult to say…Probably everyone has his own mental list of similarly neglected works which he is always pressing on his friends. What happens then? He lends his out-of-print copy; somehow it disappears; he cannot replace it; and within a few months he too has half forgotten what the book was like.
And yet it may be that a book of this kind has merely been published before its time. To take an example from across the page, the English translation of Brecht’s Threepenny Novel was being remaindered in 1939; today it is published by Penguins as a modern foreign classic. Similarly Mr. Beckett’s Murphy, one of a remarkable batch of novels issued by Routledge in the 1930s, quickly dropped into the same limbo, where only word of mouth kept a few worn copies in circulation…
Does this then mean that merit will win through in the end ? It is not at all certain that it will, and for every sleeping beauty that is awakened by a publisher’s kiss there are others that slumber on. Admittedly kisses of this sort are not encouraged by the fact that reprints are so seldom reviewed. But it is a pity if every generation in turn has to treat the more difficult and original works of the past as undiscovered territory. We stagnate if we do not absorb them into our literature and evaluate them; we waste time and energy repeating the same experiments only to arrive, twenty or thirty years too late, at much the same point…
Several times since Jonathan Cape became my own publishers I have urged them to reprint my choice among ‘lost’ books, this short novel by the shadowy, unsung Hugh Edwards, and now, fortified by The Times Literary Supplement, I returned to the attack. The reply was unexpected. Yes, they would do it—if I would write an introduction. I will not discuss here my mixed reactions to this suggestion, but one thing was clear the rebirth of this book now lay, rightly or wrongly, with me. I had only to say “Fly again, little bird”, and it would fly. So, of course, I accepted and asked Capes for any material they had about the book and the author. The result was extremely meagre, but among the yellowing scraps, mostly ecstatic reviews, there was one treasure—an introduction by James Agate to the author’s next book Helen Between Cupids. I cannot remember much of this or any other of Hugh Edwards’s books, but what Agate has to say about All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s is so apt to the theme of what I now write that, risking the criticism that all my words are other people’s, I must repeat here some of what Mr. Agate had to say twenty-five years ago.
I am not going to pretend that Mr. Hugh Edwards’s All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s is the one good story which the readers of today have missed; I can think of half a dozen in the last three or four years over which public apathy began to silt even on the morning of publication. But I also know that on the day when Mr. Stanyhurst appeared we, meaning the Daily Express and me, came out pretty strong. We said: “The word 'masterpiece; is over-used, and one is wise to be shy of it. But I will maintain that here is probably a little masterpiece and certainly a tour de force. So far as my reading goes, it is the best long story or short novel since Conrad.”
I did more than review Mr. Edwards’s book; I even went to the length of buying a copy or two and sending them to friends. Taking advantage of the fact that I was in communication about something else, I sent a copy to Mr. Max Beerbohm, although I have never set eyes on him. I wrote: “It has been on my mind for some time that I have never answered your last critical and appreciative letter. To repair this I have sent you a novel published this week which has delighted me greatly. I do not know anybody except you who could have written it, and very few other people who are entitled to read it. I know nothing of the author except that he writes and writes and writes. There is no arrière pensée behind this gift except the desire to while away one of your evenings.” Max—who has no superior in the art of living, and this includes refraining from unnecessary correspondence—made no allusion to the book for another eighteen months, when, taking advantage of the fact that he was in communication with me about something else, he said he had read it twice, on each occasion with the liveliest pleasure. And surely if agreement is reached by two doctors of letters as dissimilar as the exquisite Max and the burly me, it can matter little who differs? But that’s the whole point! I shouldn’t mind if people differed. What I do mind is that they just don’t take any notice.
The rest of the introduction to Helen need not concern us. Suffice it to say that, despite rave reviews when All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s was first published in 1933, and despite Mr. Agate’s powerful reminder in 1935, it took more than four years for the modest edition of fifteen hundred to be sold. The author earned £31.3s. and the publisher barely covered his costs, having rashly spent over £50 on advertising.
In 1937 the book was reset and republished in the “New Library” edition at 2s. 6d. (Edwards was in good company here. “The New Library” included Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and O’Flaherty’s The Informer) and this edition of a further three thousand sold out in seven years, earning £43.17s.9d. for the author. Edwards’s total reward for his “little masterpiece” thus amounted to just under £7 a year over eleven years, to which was later to be added a modest windfall of ten guineas when the little book was published in a Services paperback edition by Guild Books in 1943…
Hugh Edwards died in 1952 at the age of 74. At first I could find out nothing about him except, from his elderly sister, the widow of an Admiral, the following bare bones. He was born in Gibraltar in 1878 of a Naval family, was educated privately and then at Sandhurst whence he joined the West India Regiment and saw service mostly in the West Indies and West Africa. After twelve years in the army, he was invalided out and retired to his sister’s cottage in East Prawle in Devon. A forlorn attempt to render service in the First World War resulted only in a brief spell as an officer of the garrison of Cork. His health proved quite unequal to military duty and he returned to seclusion.
Encouraged by the success of former contributions to his regimental magazine (for which, incidentally, he had designed the cover) he had set about writing professionally, but it was some twenty years before Capes accepted his first novel, Sangoree. This was followed by the present book, then by Crack of Doom (Jonathan Cape, 1934), Helen Between Cupids (Jonathan Cape, 1935), and Macaroni (Geoffrey Bles, 1938). After that, silence! Hobbies: painting, polo, bridge and chess.
With these scraps of biography my researches had come to a full stop when, by chance, Commander and Mrs. E. J. King-Bull heard of my interest in Edwards and swam into my ken.
Commander E. J. King-Bull (who is, incidentally, a descendant of the character said to be the original ‘John Bull’ of old England) is a well-known writer and producer for the B.B.C. and has, with his wife, close connections with members of the Edwards family, notably the Leonards who, as children, sat at the feet of Hugh Edwards and listened to their uncle’s stories.
King-Bull was a great admirer of Edwards and, enjoying All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s as much as I do, turned the book into a radio play and persuaded the B.B.C. to allow him to produce it in the Third Programme in 1950. The play was conceived as a tribute not only to the memory of Hugh Edwards but also to the memory of King-Bull’s friend, the late Captain R. F. Leonard, D.S.C., R.N., from whom King-Bull had heard so much about Edwards. The play was a tremendous success, and was broadcast four times.
From what King-Bull told me it is clear that a whole book could be written about Hugh Edwards, but I have insufficient space here to do more than mortar together a few of the loose stones I have already put on display.
Having been at Sandhurst myself, and being thus able to imagine the regimental snobbery that must have permeated the place around about 1900, I was surprised that Edwards had joined the West India Regiment. But apparently about that time his parents lost most of their money and he had to accept a commission in an unfashionable regiment to protect his shallow purse. He was rewarded by seeing the West Indies in their last rip-roaring days, and his memories of the barbaric splendor—a compound of blood, champagne and pretty quadroons— were to inspire all he wrote, culminating in the Kingston earthquake which features in his Crack of Doom. To Hugh Edwards the cataclysm may well have seemed to presage the vanishing of the only era in which he was to live any other than a kind of ghostly existence.
It was the custom in those days for one battalion of the regiment to alternate between the Caribbean and Sierra Leone, and it was while exploring the hinterland of Sierra Leone that Edwards contracted blackwater fever, as a result of which he was invalided out of the army with a meagre pension.
With this, and with his sister to keep house, he retired to the tiny fisherman’s cottage in East Prawle in which he lived the life of an eighteenth-century recluse, confining himself to one attic in which there was nothing but a large bed and hundreds of books. It was at about this time that he inherited from a relative, who had been in his day a West Indian planter, a stack of old documents and diaries of the eighteenth century in which Edwards immersed himself to that extent of total rapport that emerges almost supernaturally in the story from which I am holding you.
It is interesting, perhaps, that he should have been stationed for a while at Cork, that fair Atlantic seaport which, in the heyday of eighteenth-century trade, had had long associations with the West Indies, and which forms part of the back-cloth to more than one of the novels.
At Prawle he lived the remote life of his imagination for many years, reading, writing and composing albums of illustrated nonsense rhymes for the numerous nephews and nieces and cousins who came there for the holidays. One catches a glimpse of the man from the fact that, as I am told, he began the draft of an autobiography, never to see the light of day, by addressing in affectionate gallantry a bevy of his charming nieces and their friends.
In his Edwardian youth he had been, by all accounts, a young blade of tremendous dash and virility and with a zest for all the wine of life, but one of the terrible side-effects of blackwater fever is that it rids a man of all appetite for these things, and there is no doubt that the romantic sexuality and the background of high life to All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s are sentimental memories of the young rake-hell he had once been.
Perhaps also the poignancies of this story, which so pierce the heart, are in part tears shed for his brief youth. But these and other secrets of this strange and in some curious sense ghostly figure have gone to his grave with him and will, I fancy, never be disturbed.
I, at any rate, have come to the end of my brief researches into the story of the man who wrote All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s and it is now time for him to speak in his own strange and beautiful words.
Note: I read All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s several years ago and must confess that it didn’t make much of an impression on me. But you can decide its merits for yourself, since the book is available for free online at the Internet Archive.