Jane Frank

Sam Moskowitz on WHH

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I told you I wasn’t done with William Hope Hodgson, so this one got pushed to the front of the review queue.

Review: “William Hope Hodgson”, Sam Moskowitz, 1973. 

Cover by Stephen Fabian

So did I learn anything new about Hodgson from reading Moskowitz’s 108 page critical biography of Hodgson? (The book is small, the print is large, so it didn’t take that long.)

Yes.

Do I accept Moskowitz version of events? Mostly. We know, from Jane Frank, that Moskowitz had an archive of Hodgson material, and it appears that he talked to some of Hodgson’s family, two of his brothers.

But there is Moskowitz’s sloppiness. There are at least two occasions when a date has an obviously wrong year —  obvious even if you never heard of Hodgson before reading the essay. (Of course, these could have been the fault of Donald M. Grant, Publisher.)

And I’d like to know all the places where Moskowitz got his material. There’s not a footnote in the whole essay; however, it’s unfair for me to expect one in an introduction to a collection f Hodgson fiction.

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The Wandering Soul

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I told you I wasn’t done with William Hope Hodgson.

With this post, I think I can claim to have blogged more about William Hope Hodgson than anybody else in the English-speaking world. Whether any of it was useful you will have to judge. But, as Joe the Georgian said, “Quantity has a quality all its own”.

Review: The Wandering Soul: Glimpses of a Rare Life: A Compendium of Rare and Unpublished Works, ed. Jane Frank, 2005.

Since I spent about $50 for this book, something I rarely do unless it’s a reference work, I guess I can now be considered a hardcore Hodgson fan. Considering that was the list price for this book when it was published by Tartarus Press and I got it new, I got a good deal – and there must not be that many hardcore Hodgson fans.

So, what did I get for my money?

131 of the book’s 365 pages is Hodgson fiction, specifically for a collection entitled Coasts of Adventure which was never published in his lifetime. In 2005, that might have been significant (frankly, I didn’t do my blogger diligence and check how many were anthologized before showing up here). But, now, you can get every one of these stories in Night Shade Books’s five volume The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.

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WHH Short Fiction: “Diamond Cut Diamond with a Vengeance”

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Review: “Diamond Cut Diamond with a Vengeance”, William Hope Hodgson, 1918.

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Cover by Jason Van Hollander

This is another crime story from Hodgson though the crime isn’t perpetrated by the protagonist, but he foils an attempt to steal industrial secrets he and his fiancé, Miss Gwyn, developed.

Tony Harrison and Nell Gwyn are Americans in London. A Jew, Mr. Moss, agrees to finance their experiments in producing diamonds artificially. The process takes about six months and starts with subjecting carbon to explosive pressure and then keeping it in a “pressure-box” for six months where it is very slowly cooled.

The two set up a lab on Cheyne Walk (the street that Hodgson’s Carnacki lives on though that is the only link to that series). The pressure-box is never unsupervised. Nell watches with her sister when Tony is out.

Moss takes to hanging out at the place when Tony is gone. He has a sexual interest in Gwyn. He confesses he really doesn’t expect the experiment to work. He just paid for it to get closer to Gwyn. He then starts pumping her for information on the process which indicates he does expect it to work. (After all, the story opens with a small diamond already produced in the process that Moss sees.) Continue reading →

Sargasso #2

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Review: Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies #2, ed. Sam Gafford, 2014.

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Cover by Robert H. Knox

The first issue of this journal had lots of material. This one is thinner – whether from a lack of contributors or due to production costs, I don’t know.

“Andy Robertson R.I.P. (1955-2014)” remembers the man who sparked a mini-Hodgson revival with his creation of The Night Land website devoted to Hodgson’s eponymous novel, and Robertson also published and wrote stories set in the world of that work.

“Under the Skin: A Profile of William Hope Hodgson” by Jane Frank offers a brief look at Hodgson’s personality. By the age of five, three of Hodgson’s brothers had died. Hodgson’s unusual middle name – usually a female name – may have had theological implications for his clerical father and his wife. (They wanted a daughter.) Frank sees Hodgson as, from an early age, energetic, imaginative, and always wanting more. Part of the behavior that some saw as egotistical and self-centered (Frank quotes from editors who met him and letters Hodgson wrote) may have been the result of his desire for attention.

She sees Hodgson’s personality as shaped by the two ages he lived in: the “repressive” Victorian world of his youth where mores were important and the energetic Edwardian age of fortune-seeking and technology. Hence we see Hodgson as an early adopter of the typewriter and photography and his entrepreneurial streak and attempts to support himself after leaving the Mercantile Navy. Hodgson was in boarding school by age eight, and his family had moved five times by the time he was 13. He was a temperamental lad and, around his father, unruly and disobedient. Continue reading →

Sargasso #1

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Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies was an unfortunately short lived, project by Hodgson scholar Sam Gafford. Only three issues were produced.

Sam Gafford’s “Introduction” lays out his intention that this journal address the lack of a specific outlet for exploration, in nonfiction and fiction, of the themes and concepts in Hodgson’s work.

Review: Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies #1, ed. Sam Gafford, 2013.

Sargasso
Cover by Robert H. Knox

“Shadow Out of Hodgson” by John D. Haefele lays out a case, even though S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz do not mention in Hodgson in their annotated version of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time, for the influence of Hodgson’s The Night Land on that work. First, Lovecraft mentioned Hodgson’s novel in several letters when the story was being written between November 10, 1934 and February 22, 1935. Second, there are several similarities in the narratives. First, like humanity in the Last Redoubt, the Great Race is under siege. Second, the consciousness of both narrators is projected into the future. Both stories feature libraries of metal bound books that the narrators access. Less convincing is Haefele seeing similarities between X descending the gorge on his way to the Lesser Redoubt and the narrator of The Shadow Out of Time, in contemporary times, descending into the uncovered structures of the Great Race.

Phillip A. Ellis’ “A Reassessment of William Hope Hodgson’s Poetry”, Phillip A. Ellis looks at almost all of Hodgson’s poetry and finds Hodgson’s poetry full of vivid physical tales as well as a preoccupation with, as Hodgson scholar Jane Frank noted, “strange visions, supernatural phenomena, hallucinatory events”. Poetry seems to have been a lifelong literary outlet for Hodgson. He took it up earlier than fiction writing and wrote most of his poems between 1899 and 1906. He even wrote poetry when he was in the army and Ellis thinks that, if would have had the chance to develop his facility more, he might have been a noted war poet. Ellis thinks most of the weaknesses in Hodgson’s poetry came from him being a self-educated poet lacking the necessary technical training. I’ve read a lot, but by no means all, of Hodgson’s poetry. Frankly, little stuck in my brain (but, then, most poetry doesn’t) apart from the prose poem “Grey Seas Are Dreaming of My Death”. I do agree with Ellis that Hodgson is best when he takes inspiration and metaphors from the sea. Continue reading →

Hodgson: A Collection of Essays

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I will be reviewing more of William Hope Hodgson’s short fiction, but I’m now back to the usual posting procedure of taking things in the order I read them.

There’s a bit of morbid air about my posts on Hodgson.

Hodgson, of course, was dead more than a 100 years when I read most of him. But Andy W. Robertson, editor of The Night Land tribute anthologies, had been dead only a few years when I discovered him. Gafford was dead only a few weeks before I read this book.

Review: Hodgson: A Collection of Essays, Sam Gafford, 2013.Hodgson

There are two significant essays here that justify the Hodgson fan – or even those just curious about the man and his work – buying this 71 page book: “Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson” and “Houdini v Hodgson: The Blackburn Challenge” Both were first printed elsewhere in, respectively, Studies in Weird Fiction No. 11 and Weird Fiction Review No. 3.

“Writing Backwards” concludes, by looking at some letters of Hodgson’s, with the following composition dates of Hodgson’s novels: The Night Land (1903?), The House on the Borderland (1904), The Ghost Pirates, (1905), and The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1905). This contradicts Gafford’s statement in “Hodgson’s First Story”, another essay in the book, that, by 1904, Hodgson had already written all his novels. Gafford speculates that Hodgson’s novels became less strange and imaginative as Hodgson worked towards a style he thought more commercial.

“Houdini v Hodgson: The Blackburn Challenge” deals with the legendary meeting on October 24, 1902 between Harry Houdini and William Hope Hodgson and documented by several newspapers. Houdini, as was his usual practice, publicized a challenge to the locals that he would pay a £25 reward if he couldn’t escape from “regulation restraints used by the police of Europe and America”. Hodgson offered a counter challenge. He would bring his own restraints to Houdini’s performance and bind the escape artist himself. If no escape was performed, the reward would be paid to a local Blackburn charity. Hodgson hoped his challenge would publicize his flagging gym, and Houdini complacently responded to another local challenge to his ability as an escapologist. Continue reading →

WHH Non-Fiction: “Through the Vortex of a Cyclone”

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Essay: “Through the Vortex of a Cyclone”, William Hope Hodgson, 1909.

Back before William Hope Hodgson took up writing, he tried to make his money at other things after leaving the mercantile navy: running a gym and being a sort of personal trainer and giving photographic lectures.

Hodgson was one of the first people to take a camera to sea (as well as a typewriter) and he got some spectacular shots. Two, of stalk lightning (which ascends to the sky unlike the usual lightning) and the Aurora Borealis, were even purchased by the Meteorological Office of the Air Ministry from Hodgson’s widow.

This is the text of one of those lectures. Jane Frank’s compilation of rare Hodgson material, The Wandering Soul: Glimpses of a Life, Compendium of Rare and Unpublished Works actually has the photos Hodgson used.

Hodgson really did sail on a ship through a cyclone, and this is his account told like a thrilling story. It was published in Hodgson’s 1914 collection Men of the Deep Waters, but the lecture was given first in 1909. If the reproduction of the collection in The Complete Works of William Hope Hodgson is accurate, Hodgson doesn’t seem to have indicated it was a lecture about a real event. It reads like another of his stories. Continue reading →