INTRODUCTION

When Sir Hugh Walpole died in June 1941 (he had been knighted in 1937, reflecting in his journal ‘I must confess that since Scott I can’t think of a good novelist who accepted a knighthood . . . Besides I shall like being a knight . . . ’) his old friend and antagonist the critic and essayist James Agate devoted a long entry to him in the fifth volume of Ego, his diary-­autobiography. ‘Heart of gold, soul of loyalty, tried and trusty friend . . . His tragedy was that his fine qualities have nothing to do with being a great novelist . . . His steady blue eyes, his willing smile, his resonant voice, his high scorn, his skill in banter, his sense of fun – all these things had become part of the fabric of literary life in London.’ Agate wished to express his affection for the man whose hospitality and company he had enjoyed (and whose money he had borrowed) even as they had frequently locked horns over the ‘plaguey business of [Agate’s] disliking his handling of words.’

Although Agate, in common with many critics, was far from convinced of Hugh Walpole’s eventual place in English literature, no one could have disputed his popularity – and sales figures. At the time of his death at the age of 57, Walpole was probably best known as a prolific writer, having published over thirty full-length (and often substantial) novels in about the same number of years. Several works of criticism and belles-lettres must be added to this reckoning – as well as a sizeable number of short stories. During his lifetime Walpole wrote enough short stories for them to be gathered into five volumes, with a further collection appearing after his death. Walpole’s biographer Rupert Hart-Davis stated that ‘he was never greatly interested in his own short stories, even when he was writing them. They were useful means of filling up gaps between novels and of adding to his income, but little else.’ While this may well have been true, that casual ‘little else’ is deserving of some closer scrutiny.

Walpole’s novels were usually expansive and rich works, full of colour and incident. In many cases they chronicled the lives of a large cast of characters whose stories were sometimes unfolded over periods of time. In contrast, the necessarily brief compass that generally typifies short fiction provided Walpole with opportunities to match. His short stories proved him to be as skilled within the limits of that form as he was with the novel. Walpole was consistently able to create encounters with the uncanny and unexpected; to crystallise impressions of people and places, providing mood studies and vignettes of characters or experiences – all within the space of a few thousand words.

The narrators of Walpole’s stories are often apparently rather like the author himself. Sometimes portrayed as a writer, he is artistic, knowledgeable, and a collector. He is often rather gauche, insecure, anxious, and above all single – and seeking that one special (male) friendship. Settings recur, and are often places that Walpole knew and loved: especially Cornwall, and above all Cumberland. His protagonists are always very English, often innocents abroad. And whether they are at home or abroad they experience the unexpected breaking into their lives. Something or someone has a powerful impact on them and leaves them profoundly changed. Of course it is a grievous mistake to assume that a story (especially if narrated in the first person) contains a projection of the author or is otherwise autobiographical. Nevertheless, because Walpole did seem to put himself so transparently into his short stories, that temptation is not easy to dismiss. It is as if all his characters put together could result in Hugh Walpole – yet something would still not be there, would remain secret. There would still be a trace of mystery to the man.

Throughout his career as a novelist Walpole wrote what he termed ‘macabres’ – as he once stated, ‘I have been unable to keep fantasy out of my books’. The Killer and the Slain (1942) – the last novel he lived to complete – was probably his darkest and most personal ‘macabre’. So it was only natural for Walpole, a lover of fantastic and macabre fiction, also to write numerous short stories in this vein. These can be found scattered like shards of black glass in the collections The Silver Thorn, All Souls’ Night, Head in Green Bronze, and Mr Huffam. And like broken glass, they can draw blood.

The stories in Walpole’s first collection The Golden Scarecrow (1915) were not so sharp as to cause too much hurt, yet they proved to share characteristics with what he was to write in later years. A series of connected stories about a child called Hugh Seymour (Walpole’s middle name was Seymour), they are perhaps rather too sentimental in places for all tastes. But Walpole was able to capture the breathless wonder – and terror – of a child’s experience of life, when each day brings something new and numinous, and friends and foes alike wait around every corner. Events are recounted with a child’s sense of proportion. It was as if the adult Walpole were still intimately familiar with the small realm of childhood, and the sense of that larger world just beyond immediate experience: the house beyond the nursery door, the leafy square and city streets on the other side of the front door, all immense and uncharted spaces but terrifying to a little boy. Walpole’s evocation of his near-namesake’s milieu is affecting and credible because he seems never to have forgotten what it was like to be a lonely child.

In many later stories, too, the presumably mature protagonist or narrator will still find himself in much the same position as Hugh Seymour: having to venture into unknown territory and meet other people who might not have his best interests at heart. But there is no way to tell, to find out, except through experience – alarming, yet alluring. Walpole went on to write three novels about another child, Jeremy Cole, and his dog Hamlet. The pair also turned up in ‘The Ruby Glass’, reprinted here. Years afterwards Walpole could still recover memories of his early years and articulate them with vividness and immediacy. Among his friends he was notorious for frequently acting with a child-like impetuosity and over-sensitivity: throughout his life he was quick to anger and as quick to abjectly regret it, seeking forgiveness and the resumption of a friendship which the other party had tolerantly probably never considered imperilled.

A second collection, The Thirteen Travellers (1920) also made use of a linking theme, which Hart-Davis summarised as ‘the effect of the [First World War] on the leisured classes and the “new poor” ’. With The Silver Thorn (1928) Walpole moved in a different direction. The stories become more personal and conversational, pieces in which, through his narrators and characters, he made greater use of his own experiences and concerns, and into which he became willing to invest more of his adult self, in its varied aspects: ‘some of the bits about other people are amusing, but all the parts about myself are priggish and silly.’

All Souls’ Night was first published in 1933. The sixteen stories it collected were subtitled, simply, ‘A Book of Stories’. Despite a title laden with atmospheric associations taken from W.B. Yeats’s poem of the same name, not all the stories involve ghosts or other manifestations of the supernatural, although they do come. The reader is given fair warning. At the beginning of the book Walpole reprints the first few lines of the poem, where they lie across the page – the reader’s point of entry to the stories within – and sit like a manifesto. The last line reproduced is ‘For it is a ghost’s right . . .’ So we have to watch out and be on our guard. We will not be having everything our way from now on. Here, others – other things – the Other – also have their rights.*

* The remainder of the Introduction reveals plot elements of some of the stories. Readers may wish to return to it after they have finished reading the collection.

Three of Walpole’s best known and most anthologised macabre stories are here. ‘Tarnhelm’ is subtitled ‘The Death of my Uncle Robert’. Looking back over forty years to the events leading up to that death, the narrator recalls how he was sent as a child to live in Cumberland with his two elderly uncles, who thoroughly loathe each other. Liking his Uncle Constance as much as he dislikes his Uncle Robert, the boy makes friends with Armstrong, one of the servants, who consoles him when he suffers from a vivid nightmare of a particularly evil and repulsive dog. Eventually it seems that the terrible dog is in fact a real creature and has some sort of connection with Uncle Robert. The child witnesses Uncle Constance shoot the creature. Following the trail of blood, they find the body of Robert.

‘Mrs. Lunt’ is set in Cornwall. The narrator, Runciman, travels there to stay for Christmas with Robert Lunt, a writer of good but obscure novels, who is a recent widower. Almost as soon as Runciman arrives he sees an old woman standing just inside his bedroom, by the door. Lunt flies into a rage when the woman is mentioned, insisting that there is no one else in the house. But he quickly breaks down and begs his visitor to forgive him and stay. While out for a walk, Runciman sees the woman again – and Lunt seems to see her as well, although he angrily denies it. Seeking to help, Runciman finds out from Lunt that he is depressed over the death of his wife, which happened exactly a year before. The couple had hated each other, and Lunt had showed no sorrow at her death. On the anniversary of her death, he is obsessed with the idea that she would return. That same night Lunt falls prey to hallucinations, and dies of a seizure. There were also some marks on his neck and chest that were hard to explain . . .

Winter in Cornwall is also the background for ‘The Snow’. The story is set in Polchester, Walpole’s fictional tribute to the city of Truro where his father had been on the staff of its first bishop, the headstrong Edward White Benson (himself father of three sons destined to embrace the supernatural and occult in their fiction). Walpole also set other stories and several novels in Polchester, including The Old Ladies, a brooding study of obsession and fear, and The Cathedral and The Inquisitor – two entries in his ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ sequence in which he revisited the clerical intrigues of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester, stirring them in with measures of modernised gothic melodrama and displaying his partiality for abnormal character psychology. Walpole’s strong sense of place gives Polchester a vibrant life of its own. It is a picturesque city, yet one in which the grotesque and violent are never far beneath the apparently placid surface.

‘The Snow’ symbolises the intrusion of the past into the lives of a seemingly ordinary couple, the Ryders, and their slowly cooling marriage – Herbert Ryder’s second. But although the ‘second Mrs. Ryder was a young woman not easily frightened’, as Christmas approaches she has started to glimpse a female figure, someone who brings her terror and a growing irritation with her husband that she seems unable to control. Her behaviour drives them further apart: their present is in irredeemable danger due to the breakdown of communication. As the temperature drops and the snow falls, the apparition of the woman retains the power to provoke and divide – and to remove the unwanted newcomer in the relationship.

The stories in All Souls’ Night are transactions with the transitory, with something glimpsed, with the inward and spiritual in counterpoint with the outward and solidly physical. Walpole tries to comprehend the living as much as the dead and their revenants. While not innovative, his short stories gain power and impact from their sources deep in the author’s memories and experiences, together with his narrative drive and skill at mood-building and description. His material is of the rawest: the powers of sexuality, love and the fear of love, betrayal and loss, the void concealed behind the façade of the ordinary. New experiences bring new confrontations – and the loss of innocence. There can be no going back. Nowhere is safe. So it is well always to remember that whether or not wine is served, a ghost may come, for it is a ghost’s right . . . And while remaining in Hugh Walpole’s company, to ignore or forget this basic point can carry a terrible price.

John Howard

March 16, 2016

John Howard was born in London. He is the author of The Defeat of Grief, Numbered as Sand or the Stars, and The Lustre of Time, as well as the short story collections The Silver Voices, Written by Daylight, and Cities and Thrones and Powers. He has published essays on various aspects of the science fiction and horror fields, and especially on the work of classic authors such as Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, August Derleth, M.R. James, and writers of the pulp era. Many of these have been collected in Touchstones: Essays on the Fantastic.