A couple of months ago, I wrote about a TLS piece from 1961 (“Out of Print”) that discussed what led to one book being neglected and another discovered. What I didn’t realize at the time was the connection between this article and the subsequent reissue of a book that’s been mentioned on numerous occasions as an unjustly neglected minor classic: All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s (1933).
In his introduction to the 1963 reissue of the book, Ian Fleming wrote:
… the sequence of events leading up to the republication of this forgotten little book … 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 i4th, 1961, titled “Out of Print.”
Several times since Jonathan Cape became my own publishers I have urged them to reprint my choice among “lost 5 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.
When the book first appeared in 1933, James Agate, reviewing in the Daily Express, wrote, “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.” Despite this and over enthusiastic reviews, the book took years to sell out its initial run of 1500 copies and a 1937 republication of 3000 copies took a full seven years to sell out. There was a further Forces edition issued in 1943. And even with Fleming’s introduction and name on the cover, the 1963 Jonathan Cape edition did not lead to any further publications.
All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s is a bit like one night out of The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales. It’s the story of a group of people sitting around a fire one evening listening to another telling them a story. In this case, the group is Mr Cluny Stanyhurst, a ne’er-do-well younger son, his sixteen year-old mistress Lucy, and a French abbé exiled by the Revolution. The abbé introduces the tale:
There was a great ship, my daughter — a noble ship the boast of the merchants that once, on a wild coast, in wild weather, foundered. Some of the passengers and crew escaped, and came, destitute, ashore. Some many perished in the seas. That was a desolate, strange, wicked strand, forbidden, by reason of unusual currents and whirlpools, very powerful in their action, and weather, and cruel rocks, and continuous heavy surges, and breakers rolling and thundering, to ships. And here the vessel struck, and was broken, and went down. She was called the Blanchefleur.
He then brings in Thomas Pigeon, a young sailor, the sole survivor of the shipwreck, who proceeds to tell of the shipwreck somewhere along the coast of what is now Namibia, and how hunger, disease, and attacks by native people whittle the small band of survivors down to just two — Thomas and a young girl, also named Lucy. They encounter further hardships and, in the end, Thomas buries Lucy in the African sands.
Thomas’s story is a strong straightforward narrative, the sort of thing you take in one long gulp. And on that count, you can argue a place for All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s alongside Treasure Island or The Call of the Wild.
Except.
Remember that Lucy is described as Stanyhurst’s sixteen year-old mistress. We learn that he first met Lucy at the age of fourteen, when she was the mistress of his uncle, Lord Cluny, and that he eventually steals the girl away from him. At the start of the evening, before the abbé and the sailor make their appearances, Mr Stanyhurst comes upon Lucy in her boudoir:
Taking a fondant between unblemished teeth, the girl went, crunching the frozen honey, to a couch upholstered in pale silk, on which she swung her pliant young body in a careless abandon, that, lifting the slippers upon the chair while she lounged, not only exposed slender silken legs, and buckled garters, but white glimpses of seducing bare skin beneath the sprawled skirt, Lucy with a writhing stretch of her body, arched the supple back, and deliberately pulled by this movement the little breasts out of the bodice.
To my eyes, this is just slightly more sophisticated than a letter in Penthouse. And the girl is sixteen. Perhaps to James Agate and Ian Fleming (who displayed a seriously misogynistic streak in the Bond books), this seemed delightful. To me, the father of a teenage daughter about the same age as Lucy when I first read the book, it’s creepy. No matter how elegantly the topic might be introduced into a book, looking past it and appreciating a good story on its own merits is a bit like trying to watch a movie while the fire alarm is going off in the theater.
When Marghanita Laski reviewed the 1963 reissue for the TLS, she wrote, “It has been said that women dream of the ideal husband, men of the ideal mistress; and if so this is a man’s dream.” To which I can only add, Touché! Sorry, James and Ian — I have to put All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s in the Justly Neglected pile.
Oh, absolutely, Lucy is as much property as person in Stanyhurst’s eyes. I didn’t pick up on a transformation in Lucy as much as just her letting down of the act of sophistication and showing real empathy with Thomas. But as these comments show, three readers can often discover three different things in the same book.
It’s plain in the book that this is Lucy meeeting Stanyhurst’s requirements of her: that he regards her as his property and that she is his to do with as he pleases. Equally, she depends on pleasing him, on fulfilling his dream. In fact, it’s suggested that he may get rid of her soon. It is creepy, but we know it is creepy. In fact, in the course of the book, Lucy’s attitudes and perceptions change as she and Thomas identify her with the Lucy of the ship. Lucy loses the sophistication Stanyhurst and his uncle have imposed on her and begins to grow up.
Let me also add that adolescence as a category did not exist 200 years ago, or earlier. Adulthood was pretty much straight out of puberty. There was no TIME for adolescence. Life expectancies were short.
Even in recent times, our attitudes about adolescent sexuality change frequently. In the 1970s, there was a big push to lower ages of consent; now, there would probably be a push to raise them. The wind shifts. It will shift again.
Thank you for your kind and reasonable response! We can certainly agree to disagree on some of the substantive points. I like the novel very much, and feel that read in the context of when it was written and when it is set, there is nothing particularly offensive there.
Note to Marghanita Laski: Of course it’s a “man’s dream”. It was written by a man!
My reaction has nothing to do with political correctness: it’s my personal reaction, which keeps me from enjoying the book to the same extent that others have. But I accept the hit for my parenthetical remark about Agate. That was unfair.
Except.
There was nothing very exceptional about fourteen or sixteen-year-old girls being married or having involvements at the time the book describes (early 19th Century). You may not LIKE that this was the case, from your present perspective, but it was the case. So I’m not sure what the issue is (but that is often the situation for me, these days). If we want to start getting huffy and “politically correct”, your dig at James Agate is clearly homophobic.