ULRIC DAUBENY: SUMACH FOR THE WEEKEND

There was once a time when many well-known authors—be they primarily romance, detective, historical adventure, or ‘literary’ writers—dabbled in supernatural fiction. A sideline, a quick sale, a whim — even yarns for the amusement of a small circle of friends. From Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, to name a couple of scribblers who most will know, these folk produced a scattering of weird or ghostly tales, but such pieces often remained unimportant (even to them) in comparison to their bread-and-butter zones.

Robert W Chambers [1865-1933], for example, wrote a huge number of now-forgotten non-supernatural novels, very few of which are worth the effort — and yet his handful of ‘King in Yellow’ stories had a major impact on subsequent weird fiction. Jerome K Jerome, far better known for his essays and humorous works, produced a handful of supernatural stories, but also left behind him one of the greatest deconstructions of the period ghost story in his slim collection Told After Supper.

And then there are those we hardly know at all, because they veered for one moment from whatever other work interested or employed them, releasing a single collection and no more. Bessie Kyffin-Taylor (d.1922), is a good example here, with her collection From Out of the Silence (1920) — which contains a few stories well worth reading. Details here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/out-of-the-silence-with-bessie-kyffin-taylor/

Today’s Author of Interest, Ulric Daubeny [1888-1922] falls into this latter group. Little is known about his brief life, and he is usually remembered, if he is at all, for his writings on more antiquarian subjects such as Cotswold churches and the history of orchestral wind instruments. Like Kyffin-Taylor, he released just one collection, The Elemental, in 1919. If supernaturalists do know of him, it is probably because a lone story of his, ‘The Sumach’, occasionally cropped in later anthologies, due to its vampiric elements.

The Elemental has occasionally been available in the past, but mostly if you hunted it down, as we tend to do, and has been largely forgotten until recently.And now Solar Press have produced a nice looking, affordable edition, and our guest review Victoria Day, herself a writer of supernatural fiction, gives us her view…

The Elemental. Tales of the Supernormal and the Inexplicable by Ulric Daubeny

Published by Solar Books, 2023

Review by Victoria Day

A new and most welcome reprint by Solar Press of the previously sadly neglected collection of supernatural short stories by Ulric Daubeny [1888-1922] is reviewed here, but first a caveat! I absolutely love Victorian and Edwardian supernatural tales in all their glorious incarnations. I am aware that some don’t and so perhaps this short volume of stories may not be for them. If, however, you enjoy the interaction of the British upper middle classes and upper classes of that period with various ghosts, spirits and of course elementals, then you simply must invest in this volume. That is not to say that any tale here is dull or tedious. Many a delicious hour by your fireside awaits. Certainly, we who regularly indulge in the reading of supernatural writings of the late Victorian to Edwardian periods and through to the Georgian [the volume was initially published in 1919] will no doubt savour Daubeny’s exquisite use of the English language which, despite its very correct usage, is never dry.

He has moments of humour, as seen in The Serpent which despite its chill subject still manages a bit of witty joshing between two young students. The Saki-like tale H.F tells of a writer of slushy love stories who is convinced of the brilliance of his work, despite them never being published. His comical lack of self-awareness is not displaced even after an unknown supernatural force steps in to vastly improve his work. The dictates of propriety, however, force him to lapse back into his Mr Pooter-like mediocrity; mundanity rejects the brilliant and unsettling.

Although there are moments of such light wit, which can both leaven the unpleasantness of the supernatural and highlight it by contrast, Daubeny does provide some genuinely horrid episodes. This is best seen in the longest story The Elemental and in the only one I have previously encountered, The Sumach. The first could be seen as rather Lovecraftian in its use of horror of the physical kind wrought by an unknown and unasked for supernatural force. However, the horror here is handled with Daubeny’s quiet use of language and never becomes too much, even in its bloodier moments. The nastiness is both of the physical senses, especially smell and touch, and also of the psychological; the misery caused by human loneliness and nervousness. I found this particularly well handled and effective.

This is further explored in the story The Hand of Glory, where the weather, as in many of Daubeny’s stories, adds to the feeling of sadness and depression in its characters. The cold and wild weather in quite a few of these tales is the summoner of the supernatural, which is also chaotic and unsettling. In The Elemental, storms and floods bring a possessing spirit of beastliness that subsumes the civilised and socially acceptable with an urge for cruelty. In The Garden That Was Desolate a storm adds to the violent climax of the story with an unleashing of rage and hatred. Sometimes Nature itself can be subverted as well as being an agent of horror. This happens in The Sumach with a tree which is out of tune with the seasons. Nature can become unnatural.

The strictures of the era’s societal rules run though Daubeny’s tales. There is in many of the stories the presence of a rather self-satisfied and comfortable upper middle-class existence into which the supernatural steps, usually without being invited or wiping its feet. I sense a delight in Daubeny’s handling of these moments, especially when a pompous and foolish character like Lord Berrington, a collector of object d’art, acts with more than a touch of racism in his modern Western condescension. Ignore or insult the traditions of cultures you don’t understand at your peril! However, even the innocent, like the much-loved grandmother in Winds of Memory, can experience things of a tragic and horrible nature.

Another theme in his stories is that of the fear of the loss of a loved person, which usually adds another layer of horror to a supernatural tale. As with the grandmother just mentioned in Winds of Change, in The Sumach an innocent person can quite easily be in danger, this time of their lives. Whether those who want to protect a person will succeed in doing so drives these stories along and involves the reader in the anxiety for the characters’ safety. Sometimes there is a happy ending, sometimes not, and Daubeny usually dangles us in pleasant suspense.

Daubeny’s story structure is often of the time-honoured kind for supernatural tales, which is how one would expect them to be in this era. That is not to say that they are always predictable, rather they are pleasingly laid out, in my view anyway. I particularly enjoyed how, in some stories he brings in the weirdness of a situation with a phrase which in isolation would be quite innocent, but in the context of the story is not so. In The Garden Which Was Desolate the householder shows a “…noticeable hesitation…” before answering a perfectly innocuous question. We later find out why. Sometimes these phrases actually start a story so we can be straight into it with little padding. Also, most of the stories, with the exception of The Elemental itself, are ten pages or under. I must admit to approving of this brevity. Those who are fans of the era will perhaps agree that some tales can go on rather longer than they ought! Not so here, of course, and Daubeny serves up some which get right to the oddness straight away; sometimes in the first sentence, as in The Bronze Devil, where the unusualness of an unexpected caller leads immediately into both the plot and the sense of the uncanny.

Daubeny makes use of a few traditional tropes throughout the collection. There are out of body experiences, time shifts, possession, witches and the weak getting their revenge via the supernatural. Dreams and sleep as windows into the subconscious and as agents of unease and foreboding I particularly liked. There are also haunted rooms, the delight of characters seeing things which are odd, but which others cannot see as they lack the requisite supernatural insight. There are images of the dead, cursed objects, and traditional hauntings. This is in no way meant to be a criticism. It would be rank hypocrisy of me to say so as my own tales have made use of such ideas, as have those of better writers than I! Rather, I found the stories in this collection to be a very well written and readable collection of traditional supernatural tales. Those who may prefer more outré ideas or structures to their weird fiction may not enjoy this collection- however, I certainly did.