We offer a rare treat today, listeners. As far as we know, the detailed article which follows has not been reprinted since it was first published in 1977, to mark the centennial of the birth of William Hope Hodgson. It was written by the prolific author and historian Peter Berresford Ellis (aka Peter Tremayne, author of ninety plus books including the Sister Fidelma mysteries), and published in Essex Countryside Magazine (now succeeded by Essex Life).
Regular listeners will know that we are enormous Hope Hodgson enthusiasts, and publish a range of articles on him every year – plus John Linwood Grant’s own linked series of stories ‘Tales of the Last Edwardian’ spring in no small part from Hodgsonian roots. His astounding works remain; his life and his tragic death one hundred years ago this April, at the age of 41, still fascinate.
So we were delighted to obtain permission from Essex Life to revisit the article, and also to receive the direct blessing of Peter Berresford Ellis himself, who wrote:
“I knew Hope Hodgson’s niece, Betty, in Canada for a number of years at that period and I edited Masters of Terror Vol 1: William Hope Hodgson (Corgi paperbacks, November, 1977), a series Transworld launched. I edited this as one of the first Tremayne’s.”
Thanks also to Jo Thompson at the A M Heath Literary Agency, and to Sue Condon of the Folk Horror Revival Group who we think first alerted us, and posted the original scans. Any mistakes below are the result of us fighting with OCR technology and word-processing packages, and all our fault. As usual.
The Essex-born Master of Horror
by Peter Berresford Ellis
Born in Blackmore End, near Finchingfield, in 1877, William Hope Hodgson achieved a high reputation as a writer of the horror fantasy tale. On the centenary year of his birth, many lesser known works and new anthologies of his short stories are being published in this country and in the United States where he has always had a large following.
“The supreme master of imaginative horror in science fiction,” and “a writer on whom the mantle of Poe has fallen,” were two of the accolades given to the Essex born writer William Hope Hodgson (1877 – 1918) during his lifetime. No other writer, except the American Edgar Allan Poe, has achieved such a literary reputation through the media of the horror-fantasy tale nor influenced as many modern fantasy writers as Hodgson has. His major works have never been out of print either here or in America. This year is the centenary of his birth and the Americans, always to the fore in such matters, are already issuing his lesser known works and new anthologies of his short stories.
William Hope Hodgson was born on November 15 1877 in Blackmore End, near Finchingfield, where his father was an Anglican clergyman. The Rev. Samuel Hodgson was a strong-minded man with radical ideas on the interpretation of the Bible which often brought him into conflict with his own hierarchy. William was the second of twelve children, three of whom died in infancy. His education was sketchy, and at the age of thirteen he was finally sent to a boarding school. But the year following, Mr. Hodgson died of cancer of the throat and William’s education was cut short.
There was a large family to support. On August 28, 1891, young William signed on as a cabin boy on an ocean-going wind-jammer. It was a hard life and some years later, in an interview with a newspaper, he recalled, “Being a little chap with a very ordinary physique, (I) had the misfortune to serve under a second mate of the worst possible type. He was brutal and although I can truthfully say I never gave him just cause, he singled me out for ill-treatment. He made my life so miserable that in the end I summoned sufficient courage to retaliate and ‘went for him’. It was all the world like a fight between a mastiff and a terrier, for he was powerful and knew how to punish. Of course. I took a merciless thrashing…”
The incident launched young William on his greatest hobby. He became a student of judo and was obsessed with body development, studying the science of the interaction of muscles. This was to win him some notoriety when he became the only man to be able to bind the ‘Great Houdini’ for a lengthy period. Hodgson took out the escapologist’s challenge for a member of the audience to bind him, undertaking to pay £50 if he could not effect an escape. Hodgson used his knowledge to ‘scientifically’ bind Houdini.
Hodgson also took up photography. still in its infancy, becoming a recognised master of the art, photographing cyclones and storms at sea. Later, his photographs and lectures were to make him almost as much money as his fiction work.
After eight years at sea Hodgson decided it was ‘a dog’s life’. He had, by then, received his third mate’s certificate. He had also been awarded the Royal Humane Society’s award for heroism when, off New Zealand, he had dived into shark infested waters to rescue the first mate of his ship from drowning.
At the age of twenty two, Hodgson ‘retired from the sea’ and decided to set up a School of Physical Culture in Blackburn. In 1903 he made his first writing attempts, articles on physical culture and on photography which were successful. Then, in 1904 Hodgson turned to fiction and wrote a short story entitled ‘The Goddess of Death’ concerning a Hindu statue which comes alive to kill. The Royal Magazine published the story in April 1904. It was his second short story that gained Hodgson a reputation and respect from professional writers and editors. It was called ‘A Tropical Horror’ and published in The Grand Magazine (set up as a rival to the more popular Strand Magazine). J Greenhough Smith, the editor, wrote of the story, “Though this story, a terrible tale of the sea, may be too gruesome for some tastes, it is written in a masterly manner and with an air of reality that holds and rivets the attention of the reader in a way that recalls the best efforts of Poe.”
Hodgson had now given up his School of Physical Culture and was earning his living by journalism, writing articles on his hobbies and lecturing on them. He also wrote some hard hitting exposes of conditions in the merchant navy. He summed up his attitude in an article “Why I am Not at Sea” (The Grand Magazine, September 1905) in these words “I am not at sea because I object to bad treatment, poor food, poor wages, and worse prospects. I am not at sea because very early I discovered that it is a comfortless. weariful and thankless life — a life compact of hardness and sordidness such as shore people can scarcely conceive. I am not at sea because I dislike being a pawn with the sea for a board and the ship owners for players.”
Nevertheless, it was from the sea that Hodgson drew his inspiration to write his finest and most chilling tales of the macabre. In April 1906, an American magazine, The Monthly Story Magazine, published Hodgson’s short story ‘From the Tideless Sea’. It was to prove a landmark in his career because it was his first story creating his Sargasso Sea Mythos. A major portion of his horrific sea tales would be concentrated on the legendary Sargasso, and with it Hodgson evolved an imaginary world of terror as vivid as any ever created.
The story was a resounding success. A critic wrote: “A short story that will fascinate every reader by reason of its simple narrative interest and unusual dramatic power. The young author is an Englishman who ‘has followed the sea’ and this is his finest effort in fiction.” Sequels were immediately demanded and Hodgson willingly supplied them.
He had reached the point in his literary career where he felt it was time to embark on a novel. The Boats of the Glen Carrig was published by Chapman & Hall, London in October, 1907. It is a tale about the crew of the shipwrecked ‘Glen Carrig’ who land on a deserted island which is riddled with terrifying monstrosities. Critical acclaim for what is regarded as one of the world’s most horrifying books, ranking after Dracula and Frankenstein, was immediate. The Daily Telegraph said “A book which should achieve a rapid and distinct success. With an imagination presenting us with things as fearsome as some of the imaginings of Mr. H. G. Wells,” The Daily Chronicle said “Our author can write; he has the literary touch in fine measure and no doubt we shall meet him again.”
The month after its publication the American magazine The Blue Book published what was to be Hodgson’s greatest and most reprinted masterpiece, a short story entitled ‘The Voice in the Night’. This story influenced scores of similar stories and films.
A ship is becalmed at night in the Pacific. It is hailed by a man in a small rowing boat who refuses to come near the ship where he can be seen. He begs for food for himself and a woman. The man and the woman have been stranded on an island after their ship was sunk The island is covered in fungus. Their food runs out. They begin to eat the fungus and find they are turning into it! They try to slow down the process by eating anything but the grey mass around them. They know they must never return to civilisation because they might infect all mankind. His story told, the man begins to row away but as he does so a light from the rising sun catches the boat: “Indistinctly I saw something nodding between the oars. I thought of a sponge, a great, grey nodding sponge. The oars continued to ply. They were grey, as was the boat, and my eyes searched a moment vainly for the conjunction of hand and oar.”
Now Hodgson followed up his success with a second novel, The House on the Borderland. published in May 1908, The great fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft wrote of it that it was the greatest of all Hodgson’s works. A shorter novel called The Ghost Pirates followed in September 1909. The Bookman, October 1909, raved: “We know of nothing like the author’s work in the whole of present day literature.”
But the novels were not selling all that well and Hodgson turned to detective fiction at a time when scores of writers were trying to imitate the success of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. In the magazine The ldler, Hodgson invented a new type of detective named Carnacki — an ‘occult detective’, tales of a psychic sleuth fighting against sinister forces from the ‘other world’. The Gateway of the Monster, the first tale, appeared January 1910 and the last story appeared in 1912. In 1910 a publisher put out a few Carnacki stories in a small volume, but it was not until March 1913 that Nash of London published all the Carnacki stories as Carnacki The Ghost Finder. The volume is still in print as a Sphere paperback (40p).
Between 1910 and 1911, Hodgson wrote what he considered his greatest work, The Night Land. It was a 200,000 word apocalyptical novel set millions of years in the future when our sun is dead and night is eternal. The remains of humanity are gathered in the Last Redoubt, an oasis of sanity in a nightmare world. H. P. Lovecraft described it as “One of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.”
The critics were unanimous in their praise. The London Magazine said it was “The most notable book that has seen the light of day for many years. Only Hodgson could have written it…”. The Morning Leader claimed it as “a tour de force”. Vanity Fair said “In every sense remarkable… once it has been taken up one cannot leave it for any length of time.”
Yet The Night Land did have its faults, especially in the use of style, for it is a difficult book to read because Hodgson insists on using a type of narrative in a quasi-17th century style. Nevertheless, it has remained his most profound work and is still available in paperback from Pan books.
That year of 1911 Hodgson married Betty Farnworth. who wrote the ‘agony’ column on Home Notes magazines. Both Hodgson and Betty were thirty-five years of age Because of the lack of money to be made from novels, Hodgson concentrated more on short stories. In fact, according to a letter dated June 14 1914, Hodgson told his brother, Frank, that “I’ve not made one single penny piece out of my last books ” In 1914 Men of Deep Waters, a collection of his short stories, was issued. The Bookman applauded them. “They grip you as Poe’s grim stories do, by their subtle artistry and sheer imaginative power.” The Times went further. “A serious contribution to literature.”
With the outbreak of World War One, Hodgson, in spite of being in his late thirties and considered over military age, volunteered for service. He rejected a commission in the Navy and instead became a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery. In 1916 he was thrown from a horse, broke his jaw and seriously injured his head, and was discharged from the service on medical grounds.
His injuries did not prevent his continued work. Luck of the Strong, a further collection of stories, was published in May, 1916. The Daily Telegraph commented: “Mr. Hodgson more than once has been paid the compliment of being likened to Poe. It is a compliment not carelessly paid.” In September 1917 another collection Captain Gault was published.
Hodgson, that great master of the horror tale, was a victim of World War One — killed in an artillery bombardment near Ypres on April 19, 1918.
That year, having recovered from his injuries, Hodgson demanded that he be reinstated in the army and sent back to the front in France. Early in April 1918, Hodgson successfully stemmed an enemy attack, aided by a few NCOs, and fought a stubborn rear guard action under a hail of machine gun fire across three miles of country. A few days later, on April 19 1918, Hodgson was killed in an artillery bombardment near Ypres.
Throughout his life he had written poetry but, strangely enough, he had only few poems published. In 1920, Selwyn & Blount published two collections of his verse, The Calling of the Sea and The Voice of the Ocean. In one of his poems Hodgson wrote:
I am dying and my work is all before me;
As a pencil that doth break beneath the knife
So have I broke before the bitter sharpening
Of the grim blades of thought that shaped my life.
And made me fit and keen to speak before Thee.
And now I die, just trained enough to sing.
Just before his death, Hodgson had written to his mother from the trenches: “The sun was pretty low as I came back and far off across that desolation, here and there they showed – just formless, squarish, formless masses erected by man against the infernal Storm that sweeps for ever, night and day, day and night, across that most atrocious Plain of Destruction. My God! talk about a Lost World, talk about the end of the world, talk about the Night Land — it is all here, not more than two hundred odd miles from where you sit infinitely remote. And the infinite, monstrous, dreadful pathos of the things one sees — the great shell hole with over thirty crosses sticking in it; some just up out of the water – and the dead below them, submerged. If I live and come somehow out of this (and certainly please God. I shall and hope to), what a book I shall write if my old ‘ability’ with the pen has not forsaken me.”
Alas, that book was never written. Today, William Hope Hodgson remains one of the great literary phenomenon of the turn of the century.
(Copyright 2018 Essex Life/greydogtales.com)
Other William Hope Hodgson Resources
Since this article was written, in 1977, various new aspects of Hope Hodgson’s writing and life have surfaced (including fresh information on the writing of The Night Land). Much is covered at Sam Gafford’s dedicated site here: https://williamhopehodgson.wordpress.com/
There are numberous articles about William Hope Hodgson and his works here on greydogtales.com. As part of our centennial recognition of WHH, you may also like recent pieces such as poet Frank Coffman on William Hope Hodgson’s poetry:
http://greydogtales.com/blog/william-hope-hodgson-unuttered-word/
And writer and publisher Sam Gafford on Hodgson and his writing:
http://greydogtales.com/blog/roots-weird-william-hope-hodgson-discussed/
Sam also allowed us to use his powerful short story on the death of Hope Hodgson:
http://greydogtales.com/blog/the-land-of-lonesomeness/
We wrote somewhat earlier about the strange case of Carnacki and those authors who continue the legacy, including Willie Meikle, Brandon Barrows, Joshua M Reynolds and old greydog himself.
http://greydogtales.com/blog/carnacki-the-second-great-detective/
And we had an unusual article by James Bojaciuk which was very popular as well:
http://greydogtales.com/blog/the-woman-who-drew-william-hope-hodgson/
Phew. Back in a day or two with something… well, probably non-Hodgsonian, we imagine, though we might squeeze one more WHH post in before the end of the year…
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