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August 2021
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SUNDIAL
SUPERNATURAL
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LIFE, BE STILL!
And Other Stories
H. A. MANHOOD
With an Introduction
by Mark Valentine
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UNACCOUNTABLY OVERLOOKED
A writer who has undeservedly and
inexplicably achieved a level of utter obscurity. Manhood’s stories are long overdue
for discovery, rehabilitation and enjoyment.
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Harold Alfred Manhood (1904-91), was a prolific
writer of short stories whose work was acclaimed alongside peers such as Graham
Greene and Dylan Thomas. However, while Greene and Thomas went on to become
literary legends, Manhood gave it all up at the height of his success and
disappeared into the Sussex countryside to live in a railway carriage and brew
cider. Writer and auctioneer Frank Herrmann, paying tribute to Manhood in the
Bookdealer in 1997 and issue 27 (Autumn 2010) of Slightly Foxed, said after
the war he began to resent growing editorial interference with his writing and
was appalled by the tiny payments he received for his output. In 1953 he
stopped writing, bought more land, started brewing cider and never wrote
another word. Shortly before his death aged 87, Manhood sold his life’s work to
the British Library.
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“My greatest personal discovery since Lovecraft and Aickman.”
Des Lewis reviews all twenty-nine of the stories in Life, Be Still! here
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H. A. Manhood was one of the most highly
regarded short story writers of the 1930s. His work was praised by John
Galsworthy, Henry Williamson, Hugh Walpole and H. E. Bates, who was to become a
good friend. His British and American publishers, Jonathan Cape and Viking
respectively, thought so highly of him that they paid him a salary to give him
the time and space just to write, a most unusual arrangement which demonstrated
their respect for his work. His stories were in demand both from popular papers
such as the Evening News and John O’London’s Weekly, and from
more literary periodicals such as the London Mercury and the Adelphi.
They were included in annual ‘best short story’ anthologies and in
retrospectives of the masterpieces of English Literature.
Yet thirty years later he had all but stopped
writing, and had become largely forgotten. This selection of some of his finest
stories aims to reintroduce readers to a craftsman-writer with the skill to
surprise and delight even the most jaded of readers through the freshness and
succinct aptness of his phrasing, and the human insight to present the tenor of
entire lives in miniature, in the telling of a single incident.
It was A. E. Coppard who noted that the short story
should not be seen as a cut-down version of the novel: it was a different (and
older) form with its origins in the folk tale and fairy tale, the fireside
yarn, the pub anecdote. These sources influence our expectations: we look for
evidence of the universal in the local, of the general lot in the particular
fate. At the same time, we also seek to hear of the exception – the curious,
the strange, the untoward – because they are an inevitable part of our
existence too and perhaps what gives it spice. Coppard understood all this
perfectly well in his own work, and so did Manhood. Their themes are ancient
and everlasting: love, revenge, lust, peace, envy, generosity. These are seen
at work in the lives of well-characterised individuals of the sort we might
meet in a country inn, or by the wayside, yet there is still a sense of the
timeless and immortal in the telling of these particular incidents.
(From
the Introduction by Mark Valentine)
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Price:
£14.50 ~ Limited
edition of 500 copies ~ Softback ~ ISBN-13: 978-1-908274-06-4 ~
Book
Dimensions: 210×148m ~ page extent: 340 + xi
Publication: September 2018
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| This
new selection
contains twenty-nine of Manhood’s finest stories: |
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NIGHTSEED
| BROTHERHOOD
| A
SIMPLE TALE | THE
UNBELIEVER | THE
COUGH | APPLES
BY NIGHT | BREAD
AND VINEGAR | DEVIL
IN CHURCH | SEAHOUSES
| CRACK
OF WHIPS | THREE
NAILS | FISH
FOR FRIDAY | GOD
CAME RUNNING | APPLE
WOMEN | THE ROCKING STONE | THIRTY-TWO TEETH | LIFE,
BE STILL! | WORM
IN OAK | THE
WOODEN UNCLE | THE
UNCOOKED GOOSE | STARS
IN DAYLIGHT | NO
GHOSTS | THE
BLACK ANGEL |THE
HUMAN IMPOSSIBILITY | FINE
CIDER | SHALL
WE GHOST | BONNY
CHARLEY’S ROOM | MIDGET
ON HORSEBACK | FIFTY
YEARS DEAD |
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‘I
think it would be fair to say that in all my reading and book collecting I have
rarely come across so individual, so curious and so enigmatic a writer as H A
Manhood. Much praised by his mid 20th century contemporaries for his piquant
tales, he eschewed the literary life and lived in a railway carriage in a field
in Sussex, growing his own food and brewing his own cider. His tales usually
have rural settings and characters, yet they also have a strong folkloric and
semi-mythic aspect. Most of all, their style, vocabulary and in particular
imagery are like those of no other writer.’
Posted on Wormwoodiana where you can read
the remainder of the article.
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July 2021: IN STOCK
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LIFE, BE STILL!
And Other Stories
by H. A. MANHOOD
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“To labour with such
quaint precision seeking patterns of behaviour where only drab muddle exists is
certain evidence of gentle lunacy, a state deplorable at all times because it
offers romantic excuse for self-deception and cupidity.” H.A. MANHOOD
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 “I
CAME upon the cottage quite unexpectedly, as one might a picture in a
book. It
was set in the curve of the Bay like an uncut and solitary gem in a
crescent
brooch. Approach was possible either by way of the beach, or along a
blackberry-beaded path which had split on reaching the crumbling garden
walls
to branch on either side and unite again, as would two bent bows laid
string by
string, a divergence suggesting that perhaps half of the few wayfarers
had
lacked either courage or desire to pass the cockle-roofed porch. Three
tall
chimneys projected from the roof like the legs of an upturned stool, a
viny
wisp of smoke wavering above one of them and bird-sown oats sprouting
from
another, the tall stems nodding as if marking the rhythm of a divine
waltz. The
slates seemed to have ripened in sympathy with the few apples yet
clinging to
the two trees crouched together at the rear. A great iron X supported
the blind
and flaking side wall; rusty tears had dripped from its two lowermost
points
with such persistency as to make it seem as though the X was fitted
with stilts
and simply propped against the wall. A single poppy and a clump of
mallow, St. John’s Wort and flowering currant shrubs sheltered as best
they could behind the
breached walls, the poppy leading a futile prayer against the wind that
never
ceased to rake them with scalding sand.”
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A SIMPLE TALE
“It could not be said that the cottage faced the sea; rather did
it look sideways at it, a little patronizingly, it seemed, …”
‘Dafternoon, I said. Or someone said it, later in the tale. You know, I already knew I had discovered for myself a new classic fiction writer in this HA Manhood, and this story clinches it! Yet another story about seeking wayside refreshment, a cup of tea, perhaps, and this a tale about the woman in this sea-girt cottage who has herself a tale to tell to the narrator, a simple tale of poignant loss. And her husband — separately — has the same tale to tell. Both tales identical but utterly different.
A simple gem of a tale of
these tales, one that should often be anthologised, I say. Plus a glimpse of 33
pairs of eyes and talk of what spiders’ webs can be likened to.
You can read more on
the nullimmortalis website
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Mark Valentine is the author of biographies of Arthur Machen and Time, A Falconer: A Study of Sarban plus several volumes of short stories, including The Mascarons of the
Late Empire & Other Studies, The Collected
Connoisseur (with John Howard), The Peacock
Escritoire and, most recently, Seventeen
Tales. He was a regular contributor to Book &
Magazine Collector on neglected authors. Valentine also edits Wormwood,
a journal dedicated to fantastic, supernatural and decadent literature.
He has been an admirer of H.A. Manhood’s work for over 25 years. He
lives in North Yorkshire with his wife Jo.
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All seven original volumes of Manhood’s short stories
from which
the twenty-nine featured in LIFE, BE STILL!
have been selected.
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A
prolific writer of short stories, Manhood was widely acclaimed and admired in
the thirties and forties. Since then, he has fallen into almost complete and
undeserved obscurity. A short storyist who is individual, quirky and utterly
unique, this selection of some of his best work makes the strongest case
possible for his rediscovery and reappraisal.
“Mr. Manhood is a poet forced by his own time and
circumstances to write in prose. This could be said of a dozen other short
story writers of to-day, but it seems pointedly true of Manhood, who treats the
writing of prose as a tortured process of distillation or, more aptly, as the
evolution of a pattern in verbal mosaic. All who know him are aware of the
tortures that prose inflicts on him; those who know only his stories must be
aware that deep embryonic struggles precede the birth of his beautifully
plumaged sentences. His work is consistent in its rare oddity and flamboyance,
its prolific use of startling metaphor and violent climax, his method of using
the fantastic to illustrate the ordinary, the ordinary to illustrate the
fantastic. His stories are so full of the kind of conceits that embroider the
work of seventeenth-century poets that I feel he would have been happier in an
age where the rich uses of imagination were not looked on with suspicion. He
sports rather too fine a doublet in this age of pin-stripes and umbrellas.”
H.E. Bates who dedicated his 1937 collection of short stories Something Short and Sweet “To H.A. Manhood”
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Sundial, silent
herald of
Time’s silent flight!
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2021
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