I Am Jonathan Scrivener Read online

  Also Available By Claude Houghton

  Neighbours (1926)

  A Hair Divides (1930)

  Julian Grant Loses His Way (1933)

  This Was Ivor Trent (1935)

  I AM JONATHAN SCRIVENER

  CLAUDE HOUGHTON

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  I Am Jonathan Scrivener by Claude Houghton

  First published London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930

  First Valancourt Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 1930 by Claude Houghton Oldfield

  “A Note on the Novels of Claude Houghton” © 1934 by Hugh Walpole

  “The Quest for Scrivener” © 1997, 2013 by Michael Dirda

  Note: An earlier version of “The Quest for Scrivener” appeared in the Washington Post on February 16, 1997.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  THE QUEST FOR SCRIVENER

  Thirty or so years ago, I was sleepily turning the pages of E. F. Bleiler’s stupendous Guide to Supernatural Fiction—no home is complete without a copy—when the entry for Claude Houghton (1889-1961) caught my at­tention: “British author of psychological romances, often embodying per­sonal mysticism and a remote allegory. . . . Best-known work the fine psy­chological-mystical-mystery story I Am Jonathan Scrivener.” At that time I had never heard of Houghton, but this brief description made Scrivener sound intriguing. I read on. While discussing one of Houghton’s out-and-out fantasies, Bleiler commented that “like other of Houghton’s novels, notably I Am Jonathan Scrivener, This Was Ivor Trent is essentially a descrip­tion of the hollow man of the 1930s—a person who is seemingly a success­ful, well-adjusted person, but is internally empty, shattered and abysmally lonely.” Houghton sounded better and better. According to Bleiler, the writer had even won the praise of Graham Greene for his craftsmanship. I made a mental note to look out for I Am Jonathan Scrivener when browsing through the fiction shelves of secondhand bookstores.

  Several years then passed without my ever seeing a copy of Scrivener. Not that I made any strenuous effort to track down the novel. People who frequent used bookshops know that sooner or later a wanted title will magi­cally appear: One need only bide one’s time. Ivor Trent did turn up occa­sionally—for $10 or $15, often in a handsome jacket—but I wanted Houghton’s alleged masterpiece. Why start with the second-best?

  Sometime in the late ’80s, I traveled to Philadelphia on business but naturally allocated Saturday afternoon for a little booking. I duly visited antiquarian dealers, used-book emporiums, and even one or two dingy paperback exchanges. In the rattiest of these last I paused, just before leav­ing, to spin a revolving wire rack next to the front door. And there it was, right at the top: I Am Jonathan Scrivener. Begrudgingly, I plunked down $2.95, convinced that in a just world the price should have been 50 cents.

  Back home in Silver Spring, I studied my newly acquired treasure more carefully. Beneath the title was a woodcut of a Millet-like sower, backed by a rising sun. At the base of the front cover appeared the words “The Inner Sanctum Novels: New Fiction at $1.” Though printed in 1930, the 382 thickish pages weren’t brown or brittle in the least; the binding was actually sewn, though loose between a couple of the gatherings. Typically, the back cover outlined the action of the novel and listed other Inner Sanctum of­ferings. I recognized almost none of the authors or titles, many of which struck me as endearingly dated, even campy: The Earth Told Me, by Thames Williamson; Beloved, O Mon Goye, by Sarah Levy; Denny and the Dumb Cluck, by J. P. McEvoy; Fifteen Rabbits, by Felix Salten. Could this last, by the author of Bambi, be another children’s classic? Perhaps a history of Thumper’s offspring?

  When I finally opened Scrivener, I discovered an unexpected notice, headed “To the Buyer of this Book”: “The Inner Sanctum Novels are an experiment in book publishing. It is the thought of the publishers that the buying of new fiction has been seriously handicapped in recent years by two chief causes:

  “1) The Price. Whereas many non-fiction books are bought not only to read but to reread and refer to, most fiction is bought for one reading only.” (Such refreshing honesty, I thought.) “The price of fiction has re­mained relatively high because it has not been bought in quantities suffi­cient to enable a publisher to make use of the savings concomitant with large production.” (Concomitant! You couldn’t get away with that today.) “Meanwhile, unless the reader were certain he wanted to retain a book in his library, he has been content to borrow the book from a library or from a friend (whenever the occasion might arise) or else he has decided not to read the book at all.”

  “2) Library Space. This has in recent years become a serious problem.” (Hoo, boy!) “More and more people live in relatively small apartments in which the area of library shelves is limited.” (Nowadays that last word would be “nonexistent.”) “Where to put the books once they are read has become a real question. The book has been bought, but who wants to throw away a bound book? To meet these two factors, the publishers of this series of books have brought the price of all fiction . . . down to a dollar. You have now bought this book. If you do not wish to keep it, lend it to a friend, or send it to a hospital. Or, if you are clearing your shelves, throw it out with magazines.” (!!!) “If, on the other hand, this is a book that you wish to keep bound in permanent form, take it to any bookbinder or send it back to the publisher with a remittance of one dollar, and it will be bound in cloth and returned to you postpaid.” The notice ends by assuring the reader that this is “a first edition copy.”

  Needless to say, I found this announcement extremely ingratiating, from the unsentimental method of book disposal to the pleasing tentativeness and lack of hype. I also wondered if Simon and Schuster would still honor their contract and bind the book for a dollar. And then return it postpaid.

  Despite these winsome enticements, I didn’t immediately find a sofa and settle back with I Am Jonathan Scrivener. I did read the first few sentences: “This book is an invitation to share an adventure. It is necessary for me to introduce myself as I am the only person in the world who can tell this story, but you will be wise to regard me simply as a mechanism for the narration of certain events. It is not necessary to know much about me, but it is essential to know something, since the adventure I am inviting you to share was the result of a dramatic and mysterious change which totally transformed the whole manner of my life.” All this sounded cozily sinister and the invitation to share an adventure was . . . inviting. Nevertheless, I laid the book aside. I was pleased finally to own a copy, but there were other claims on my reading time.

  For several more years I Am Jonathan Scrivener sat on a shelf in a little storage room for books, papers, and office supplies. Every so often I would pick it up and turn the pages. Once I had occasion to telephone E. F. Bleiler and mentioned Houghton’s novel: He assured me it was a book that merited rediscovery. More and more I thought about actually reading it, but somehow the moment never seemed quite right. Then, in the mid 1990s, I began to pack the book along with the mysteries and classics I usually take on vacation. Scrivener traveled to a house on Ocracoke Island, even visited Ohio a time or two. I moved the Inner Sanctum paperback to a mound of must-read books piled near my bedside. And finally, on the Sat­urday before Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1997, I casually picked up the novel, leaned back against the pillows on my bed, and read for three hours. Being a slow reader, I later finished the book on Inauguration night, just about the time the Clintons went toddling off to bed.

  I Am Jonathan Scrivener proved to have been worth the twelve-year wait. In some ways it resembles a novel by Paul Auster, City of Glass per­haps, or Moon Palace, a blend of the spooky and the philosophi
cal, with a twisty, slightly artificial structure. There are also flashes of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, early Evelyn Waugh, and the religious supernatu­ral tales of Charles Williams. I liked it a lot.

  Here’s the plot: James Wrexham, 39 years old, has been living a life of demoralizing loneliness. Orphaned at 19, he has passed two decades work­ing for a vulgarian entrepreneur, and gradually come to regard himself as one of life’s spectators. Sitting in a barber shop one afternoon, he suddenly feels the overwhelming wretchedness of his existence—just as his eye no­tices an advertisement in the Times: “A gentleman of independent means who is leaving England requires a secretary to attend to his correspondence during his absence and to catalogue his library. The individuality of the applicant is of greater importance than his technical qualifications for the position.” Wrexham immediately determines to apply for the job and sends in a rambling autobiographical epistle.

  Rather to his surprise, he is invited to visit a prominent lawyer, who explains that Mr. Jonathan Scrivener desires him to begin employment at once. Mr. Scrivener himself has recently left for parts unknown. In due course Wrexham discovers that he has the run of spacious rooms in Pall Mall, a servant who cooks the best meals he has ever eaten, an exception­ally generous salary, and a written request from Scrivener to make himself comfortable, take a box at the theater, and in general follow his own incli­nations. Not surprisingly, Wrexham tries to puzzle out the personality of his unseen employer. The books in Scrivener’s library have obviously been read, but they reveal an improbable range of tastes and interests, from phi­losophy to pornography. Then one night, as Wrexham sits daydreaming among the books, he turns around to discover that a beautiful young woman has quietly let herself into the apartment with a latchkey.

  The ethereal Pauline Mandeville claims to be a “friend” of Scrivener’s, but then so does the vampirically glamorous Fran­cesca Bellamy, whose millionaire husband committed suicide in Paris under dubious circum­stances. As the novel proceeds, Wrexham encounters other friends of his elusive employer—the disillusioned, alcoholic Middleton, the playboy Riv­ers, the apelike Denvers. Each appears to have known a distinctly different Scrivener, and each is oddly obsessed with the man. Weeks go by. Wrexham grows increasingly convinced that Scrivener has embarked on some kind of bizarre experiment, using himself and this motley collection of humanity as guinea pigs. But to what end?

  Throughout his story Houghton creates a sense of foreboding and psy­chological unease, even in his wittiest turns of phrase. “I’ve met a number of people who had endured agonies in their determination not to suffer.” The soup in a Japanese restaurant “was neither hot nor cold, clean nor dirty, thick nor clear, and it had long weeds in it which looked rather like serpents who had died in youth.” Says the desperate pleasure-seeker Rivers, “All people who are decent want to give. You have only to ask in the right way. . . . Here’s an example. I met a marvellous girl at supper three nights ago. I drove her home. Naturally, I suggested that we should become lov­ers. That is, I gave her the opportunity of collaborating with me in the creation of beautiful memories. She’s thinking it over. She’s intelligent. She’ll see that I’m right.” “Most of us,” says another character, “commit suicide, but the fact is only recognized if we blow our brains out.” When Wrexham encounters the seductive Mrs. Bellamy for the second time, she appears to him “in evening dress and her beauty suggested a sword half drawn from its scabbard.”

  A biographical note at the end of my copy of Scrivener indicates that by 1930 Claude Houghton had already written a couple of volumes of poetry, a book of essays, two plays, and four novels. He’d been praised by Arnold Bennett for his dialogue and been called a genius. To little avail: Houghton is now almost completely forgotten. Nonetheless, I Am Jonathan Scrivener remains a tantalizing, highly diverting philosophical novel of rare elegance and wit. Given such merits, its disappearance for so many years invites mild despair. For the most part, we all read the same authors, the same old novels and stories, the same approved masterworks taught in school. Yet how many other really good books lie moribund, awaiting a reader to restore them to life? Happily, you now hold in your hands Claude Houghton’s masterpiece and, thanks to Valancourt Books, you didn’t have to spend years searching for a copy, as I once did. In fact, at this point all you need to do is settle yourself in a favorite chair and begin: “This book is an invitation to an adventure. . . .”

  Michael Dirda

  Silver Spring, Maryland, 2013

  Michael Dirda, a weekly book columnist for The Washington Post, received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book and Classics for Pleasure. His latest book, On Conan Doyle, won the 2012 Edgar Award—for best critical/biographical work of the year—from the Mystery Writers of America. He is a regular contributor to several literary periodicals, including The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, as well as an occasional lecturer and college teacher.

  A NOTE ON THE NOVELS OF CLAUDE HOUGHTON*

  * This introductory note by Hugh Walpole originally appeared in the 1935 Doubleday Doran edition.

  It is often said that in these days of awareness it is extremely unlikely that any novelists of real individuality and vigour will remain for long unrecognized.

  Claude Houghton is, I think, an interesting example to the contrary. It is not true to say that he is unrecognized—everyone who is really interested in the contem­porary English novel must know his work; but it is true that he has not had, as yet, the public acclaim and popularity that he deserves.

  He has written seven novels and all of them are re­markable and, what is more important, they are all novels that could have been written by no other man alive. It must be further said of them that they are all extremely courageous both in theme and treatment. They would be courageous books in any time and in any country, but they are especially so just now because they have been written and published in an atmosphere op­posed to their spirit. Houghton is a romantic and a mystic and his seven novels have appeared in what is the most realistic and unmystical period of the last hundred and fifty years. When I use romantic I mean of course none of the cloak-and-sword romance of the English novel of forty years ago. I mean something very much more important. I mean that attitude to life which in­sists that there are more spiritual worlds than this one in which we live and that it is man’s chief business to discover his relation to these worlds.

  This theme is implicit in every one of Houghton’s novels. It is the whole subject of his first and most immature, Neighbours, which is the story (a very bold and remarkable one for a first novel) of a man who, living in an attic, conceives a hatred for the occupant of the next room. This occupant he never sees but always over­hears. At last, when, in a frenzy of rage, he breaks down the door and rushes in to slay his enemy he finds that this hated neighbour is himself.

  Now it has been the creed of almost every important novelist in the last twenty years in England and America that facts are the only things of which we can be sure, the only things of which it is manly and sensible to treat. So facts we have been given—amusing, social ones by the women, hard, unpleasant ones by the men. Facts, however—material ones at least—are of minor interest to Houghton. That is not to say that he cannot give them us if he wants to. I know for instance no contemporary novelist who can give us so actual and peculiar a Lon­don as he. The flat in which Jonathan Scrivener’s secre­tary lives, the little restaurant of A Hair Divides, the opening Piccadilly chapter of Chaos Is Come Again—these, and many more, are markably accurate, vivid and contemporary. His characters also are living human be­ings, not, as they almost always are in fantasy, shadows. It is not his business to transplant us altogether to an­other world—no, precisely the opposite, his object is to bring the other world into this one, a purpose in which he has now several companions—Charles Morgan, Geoffrey Dennis, Margaret Urwin and, i
ncidentally, my­self.

  His method is, in fact, quite clear. He makes his back­grounds and his dialogue as real as the backgrounds of Theodore Dreiser or Somerset Maugham. His people talk as men and women of to-day do talk. But the things that his people perceive and the emotions that they feel are concerned always with their souls rather than with their bodies. Because this is so he is able to choose violent and even melodramatic plots, as one of his truest forbears, Henry James, did before him. The story of A Hair Divides for instance might well have been used by Conan Doyle or the author of Raffles. A man, jealous of his friend, murders him, remains undiscovered for twenty years and is exposed finally by the murdered man’s lover. The murder itself however is of little ac­count, and although the details of the story are perfectly realistic it is the soul of the murderer that matters, not his body.

  This is still more true of the most remarkable of all Houghton’s novels up to the present—I Am Jonathan Scrivener. So remarkable in truth is this novel that I cannot understand why it is not universally known and admired. It may be that it is one of those books like Maurice Guest or Forster’s early stories that needs time for its full discovery. It is certainly true that, although it was published four years ago, I am constantly meeting people who have only just read and appreciated it. It is also true that I meet people who say: “It’s all nonsense. I don’t know what it is about”—but this is, of course, bound to happen often to novelists of the modern ro­mantic school who write, very dangerously, of worlds that must seem unreal to those who are only conscious of this one.

  This does not mean that Jonathan Scrivener is not a highly exciting story. Houghton has always, most re­markably, the gift of narrative and suspense. And this is the best of his novels up to the present for the very reason that he has not here yielded to one of his weak­nesses, namely, the confusing of the issue. The theme is clear, the motive, the characters and the climax; the ring­ing final sentence is triumphant.