A Romance of the Sea-Serpent: A Review

A fine and funny review of the Whisky Priest edtion of Eugene Batchelder's  A Romance of the Sea-Serpent, or the Icthyosaurus. Stolen from Amazon, (buy the book here or here, or here).

From William Mahoney:

5 Stars: The Critics are Wrong

The description for this book cites from "Beneath the American Renaissance" by David S. Reynolds. Reynolds, like many others, considers "Moby Dick" a great American novel. He discusses Batchelder's work in passing. He sees this as one of many books which told tales of sea-monsters, and thus potentially influenced Melville. Unfortunately, his appreciation of great literature is clearly distorted: "A Romance of the Sea-Serpent" is by far the better work. Consider:

*Melville writes in everyday prose. Batchelder is a poet. Nearly every paragraph in this masterpiece contains at least one rhyme. These aren't forced, either. None of his contemporaries could pull of a clause that bests "out on the sea, out on the sea, the fleet is dashing merrily!" The best part of his verse is the way he mixes it up. The various rhyme structures - ABAB, AABB, ABCABC - come at you unexpectedly. They're often placed in the middle of paragraphs written in standard prose. Batchelder seems to be making a statement about the unpredictability of life: you never know what his next rhyme will be, just like you never know when a sea monster might walk onto land and eat you from behind.

*Romance: Females are only mentioned in passing in Moby Dick. Most of the time that they come up, it's in regards to how awful their love life is: Ahab or some other sailor has abandoned them for a life on the sea. This work includes well-rounded women doing all the things typical women do: they have strapping young lads sing for them, they attend balls, and they get eaten by sea monsters.

*If romance isn't your thing, don't worry. This book is too powerful for one genre, and can easily be described as an action tale as well. In Moby Dick, one needs to wait over 200,000 words before the sea monster starts tossing sailors around. Here, you don't even have to wait 10 pages, and the body count never stops adding up.

*The difference in ferocity is probably due to this monster's superiority over the white whale. Moby Dick is 100 feet at most. His Snakeship is over 600. He is the king of the sea - other sea-serpents, sharks, kraken, and whales (presumably white one as well) - do his bidding. At one point, he sics 40 serpents on one yacht. Also, I don't believe Moby Dick could walk on land or talk to people, and was certainly never offered a Harvard degree.

*Speaking of degrees, Melville's highest level of education was high school. Batchelder, like his monster, graduated Harvard. Ergo, Batchelder is clearly smarter and a better writer. This shows in passages possessing incredible metaphors and puns, such as this one, when a character doesn't feel like singing: "I feel, like the indigo, somewhat blue, but Sue will sing without much suing."

*"Call me Ishmael." I'm pretty sure I've been offered similar introductions on Greyhounds before. Batchelder opens up with the following, adequately setting up the thrillfest to follow: "unless you've strong nerves, just throw down the book, and never dare in its pages to look."

In short, don't waste your money or time on the overrated Moby Dick.

Arnold Bennett: A Great Man

Finally, a new book!

Arnold Bennett was extraordinarily prolific, which has probably one of the reasons he's no longer seen as the giant of literature he once was. But that's not entirely fair, because his best books really are great. He could also be very funny, and as someone who knew the Victorian and Edwardian literary worlds intimately, he was ideally placed to write A Great Man, a wonderful satire on writers and publishing.

It's a satire that still holds true for today: the financial and artistic wranglings between writers, publishers and agents; the sheer mass of books being produced every day; literary fiction versus commercial fiction... it's all there.

The hero, a sentimental novelist who views himself as the enemy of  what he calls 'the Stream of Trashy Novels Constantly Poured Forth by the Press', is also the owner of a delicate digestive system. Here, in an extract that will give you an idea of the style of the novel, is perhaps the finest description of an attack of vomiting ever given in an Edwardian novel:

It proved to be the worst dyspeptic visitation that Henry had ever had. It was not a mere ‘attack’—it was a revolution, beginning with slight insurrections, but culminating in universal upheaval, the overthrowing of dynasties, the establishment of committees of public safety, and a reign of terror. As a series of phenomena it was immense, variegated, and splendid, and was remembered for months afterwards.

A Great Man can be viewed and bought here.

Revivification

I know it's been a long time, but I have been working away behind the scenes at producing the next set of Whisky Priest Books. Coming soon... the long-promised science-fiction of Anthony Trollope! The autobiographical writings of Ambrose Bierce! The piss-take of Victorian literature by Arnold Bennett! And more...

Karin Michaëlis: The Dangerous Age

I first came across mention of this Danish masterpiece in 500 Great Books by Women, one of those big round-ups of somewhat neglected literature that have made me haemorrhage money in second-hand bookshops. Critic Erica Bauermeister had this to say: “At forty-two, approaching that ‘dangerous age’ and determined to eliminate the hypocrisy in her life, Elsie divorces her husband, leaves behind a young potential lover, and retreats to an isolated villa on an island... First published in 1910, [this] is still a shockingly forthright and provocative book."

And it's a bloody good one, too: one of those freakishly modern Scandinavian novels (see also Amalie Skram, Hjalmar Söderberg and the like). Elsie's bitterly honest letters to friends, her ex-husband, and to a potential lover, and her diary entries recording her tumultuous thoughts, her encounters with servants and her failing plans, are quite compelling.

For the cover I used an evocative photo by Olof Werngren: this picture of a woman about to plunge naked into the cold Scandinavian seas reminded me very strongly of Elsie and the evening bathing she does off the shore of her isolated island.

You can get the book at Lulu, Amazon UK and Amazon US (ISBN 978-1445793566). And thus Whisky Priest Scandinavia is off the ground!

And coming soon from Whisky Priest: Anthony Trollope's forgotten science-fiction novel...

Kálmán Mikszáth: Saint Peter's Umbrella

I'm very pleased to announce the first in an irregular but ongoing series of Hungarian classic revivals at Whisky Priest: Kálmán Mikszáth's Saint Peter's Umbrella.

More than a century after his death, Kálmán Mikszáth remains one of Hungary’s most popular writers, but is almost unknown in English translation. Saint Peter’s Umbrella is the most successful and popular of his earlier novels: a tale of two umbrellas—one containing a family fortune hidden in the handle, and the other a venerated relic said to have been used by Saint Peter to protect an abandoned young girl. Or maybe they're the same umbrella? But how could that be?

From Lóránt Czigány's A History of Hungarian Literature (an invaluable companion, originally published by Oxford University Press, but now available online in its entirety here):


[Mikszáth] never missed the latent potential of a good story which fired his imagination ... Of his early novels, St. Peter’s Umbrella (1895) was the most popular and perhaps the best. (Theodore Roosevelt was said to have admired the novel, and visited Mikszáth during his European trip in 1910 solely to express his admiration.) The novel illustrated well the working of Mikszáth’s craft. The umbrella of the title may have been the subject of an anecdote in Upper Hungary, in which it was claimed to have a supernatural origin – St. Peter himself left it behind to protect an abandoned little girl. Thus the local peasants held the object in great veneration. The main line of the story – concerning the treasure-hunt of Gyuri Wibra, whose eccentric father put his fortune in an open bank-draft and hid it in the handle of an umbrella – is welded to the anecdote concerning the ‘celestial umbrella’. The complications arising out of the search for the umbrella provide Mikszáth with an opportunity to work on two different levels – devising an exciting hunt for the inheritance, and at the same time observing the significance, in terms of mass-psychology, of a seemingly worthless object ... Mikszáth excels in creating the background: his countryside is full of well-observed characters, drawn with warm humour.


The cover makes use of an image from an old postcard (the man with the brolley and the suitcase), as well as scans of Hungarian currency from the time of the book.

Get the book at Lulu, Amazon UK or Amazon US. Amazon being amazon, their database shits bricks at the accent marks, rendering him as K·lm·n Miksz·th.

Catalogue

For ease of browsing, the first Whisky Priest catalogue is now available:

Whisky Priest Catalogue 01

Download it here.

Jerome K Jerome: On the Stage-And Off & Stage-Land

Jerome K Jerome is one of the great English humourists, best known for Three Men in a Boat and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. He wrote many novels, stories, essays and plays; the latter grew from his youthful determination to be an actor. For three years he slaved at the lowest rung of the acting world, in a threadbare repertory company in England. Success was elusive, though he encountered numerous peculiar characters, and fell victim to almost every form of scam and con going in the theatrical world.

Fortunately for his readers, in 1885 he was able to turn this experience into a book, On the Stage--And Off, a very funny memoir of these miserable years. It was his first successful book. Several years later, he followed it with Stage-Land, a hilarious guide to the clichés of late-Victorian theatre, with cynical commentary on all of the character types and situations that plagued most plays of the era.

The books can be read online here and here, or you can buy the shiny new Whisky Priest edition, containing both books, here.



The cover of this edition makes use of photos from old turn-of-the-century theatrical magazines. The main photo, of the actors on stage, seemed apt since it looks like a performance of an extremely muddled, ill-conceived play. The Whisky Priest edition also includes the original Stage-Land illustrations, by J. Bernard Partridge. Click for bigger versions.