’Twixt Dog and Wolf

By C.F. Keary

C. F. Keary’s collection of stories and sketches, ’Twixt Dog and Wolf (1901), is one of the rarest and most sought-after volumes in the annals of weird fiction. Collected here are ‘The Message from the God’, a decadent paean to the Great God Pan; ‘Elizabeth’, a tale of witchcraft in medieval Germany that John Buchan called ‘one of the finest witch tales I know’; ‘The Four Students’, a story of black magic and alchemy in the bloody days of the French Reign of Terror; and a series of ten ‘Phantasies’, bizarre and hallucinatory nightmares in prose.

This first-ever reissue includes the unabridged text of the original edition, plus a new introduction and notes by James Machin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781943910755

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C. F. KEARY

’TWIXT DOG AND WOLF

Edited with an introduction and notes by

JAMES MACHIN

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Originally published by R. Brimley Johnson, London, 1901

First Valancourt Books edition 2017

This edition © 2017 by Valancourt Books

Introduction and notes © 2017 by James Machin

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any copyrighted part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

INTRODUCTION

‘This huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print—how intolerably it weighed upon the spirit!’ So despairs a character in New Grub Street, George Gissing’s celebrated novel of those languishing unsuccessfully at the coalface of literature in the 1880s. The sheer quantity of printed material at the time was the result of a confluence of factors including the cheapening costs of publishing and the expanding literacy of the general public. Inevitably, many unique voices have been almost lost to perpetuity in that ‘trackless desert of print’, Charles Francis Keary’s among them.

Keary was born in 1848, the nephew of the children’s author Annie Keary, who had enjoyed considerable success with her 1875 novel Castle Daly: The Story of an Irish Home Thirty Years Ago. In its obituary, The Times described Keary as a ‘novelist’ who was ‘educated at Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge, and was for some years in the Department of Coins at the British Museum.’ A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, he published non-fictional works on numismatics, history, and comparative mythology, before turning his hand to what the Bookman described as ‘lighter literature’ after ending his tenure at the British Museum. He also produced travelogues, including a semi-fictional work called The Wanderer (1888), which appeared under the rather splendid pseudonym H. Ogram Matuce. That he was a typical late-Victorian polymath is suggested by the titles of just two of his books from the early 1890s: The Vikings in Western Christendom A.D. 789 to A.D. 888 (1891) and A Mariage de Convenance (1893). Among his friends was the composer Frederick Delius, for whom he had discussed producing a libretto for an opera, a project which never came to fruition. The poet and critic John Bailey refers to Keary ‘already being an invalid’ by the time Bailey became acquainted with him in 1916, the year before his death at the age of 69. The Spink Numismatic Circular gives his address at this time as 5 Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park, London.

The Times obituary said of Keary’s novels that they aim ‘at depicting life, after the manner of the great Russian writers, in its chaotic reality and avoiding conventional selection and arrangement’, adding that while they ‘never had a large popular circulation’ they were ‘very highly thought of within the limited literary set’. By the 1890s, the Bookman also regarded Keary as a ‘diligent contributor to periodical literature’, listing among the venues for his stories the Contemporary, Nineteenth Century, Mind, Macmillan’s Magazine, the National Review, Saturday Review, Athenæum, and the St. James’s Gazette. It is from the pages of such magazines that much of the content of ’Twixt Dog and Wolf was compiled.

The stories which constitute ’Twixt Dog and Wolf are of distinct contrast to his novels, the latter being exercises in what the Speaker described as ‘the modern political and social sphere’ of fiction. The title comes from the French expression for twilight, ‘Entre chien et loup’, which conveys so poetically the eerie crepuscular shift from the prosaic and familiar to the baleful and unknown. ’Twixt Dog and Wolf collects work that is unmistakably tinged with the yellow hue of the era, and expertly evokes an oneiric, vesperal realm of disconcerting shadows and dark forces moving unseen, yet tangible, in tandem with our own.

Both John Buchan and Richard Le Gallienne were voluble in their praise in their reader’s reports for the collection of short stories and sketches first submitted by Keary to John Lane in 1897 under the title ’Twixt Dog and Wolf. At least some of the contents of the collection were already familiar to both since they had already recently appeared in the New Review (under W. E. Henley’s editorship) and Macmillan’s. Buchan had ‘read some of them in the New Review and admired them greatly’ while Le Gallienne knew of Keary at least by reputation: ‘I happen to know that Mr Henley thought [Elizabeth] an extraordinarily fine piece of work.’ As well as short stories, the volume contained some prose poems or fables (‘Phantasies’), of which Le Gallienne opined, ‘some are very pretty and quasi-symbolical, some are weird and horrible—all are worth reprinting.’ He continued:

I do not think you need have any hesitation in publishing this book. It is a collection of stories—in the case of ‘Phantasies’ of course something slighter—each with an element of the weird, the uncanny, the mystical. Such an element, well managed, will always attract readers, and Mr. Keary’s management of it is one of the best I have ever seen.

Buchan’s endorsement of ’Twixt Dog and Wolf was similarly effusive:

He writes carefully and exquisitely, without the vice of artifice which spoils so much of modern work. His sketches are stories of diablerie of the strange sights and sounds which follow on the twilight, between the dog barking and the appearance of the grey wolf. The first is a tale of the conflict between the ordinary Greek religion and the old wild nature worship—of Pan and the nymphs—which it displaced. The second Elizabeth is a story of medieval Germany—one of the finest witch-tales I know. The Four Students is a tale of the Paris of the Revolution. Phantasies are slightly different: I am not sure that I always catch Keary’s meaning; but they seem to me in the whole to be nearly as good work in metaphysics as Stevenson’s Fables.

Mr Keary has wide knowledge, a great gift of style, and a wonderful power of suggesting vague mystery. His work is in every way admirable and I gladly recommend you to take the book.

Despite their enthusiasm, the book was not published by John Lane, who perhaps was still too chary after the Wilde trial to involve himself with material that exuded the pungent, and now tainted, aroma of decadence. ’Twixt Dog and Wolf did not in fact see publication until 1901. It received mention in Keary’s Times obituary as ‘a series of short sketches in the weird and macabre […] excellently done.’

The contents of ’Twixt Dog and Wolf are not immediately resolvable into a coherent theme, but are rather each distinct in their foray into this ‘weird and macabre’ territory. ‘The Message from the God’ may remind the reader of Heinrich Heine’s ‘Gods in Exile’ (1854) or Pater’s Marius the Epicurian (1885), and has numerous analogues among the myriad cultural expressions of the late nineteenth century enthusiasm for Pan-­worship and classical paganism.

‘Elizabeth’ is the longest story in the collection, originally published in two parts in the New Review in 1896. It is unmistakably informed by the early nineteenth century German Romanticism of Joseph von Eichendorff, and the full subtleties of its imagery may perhaps only be parsed by someone with a thorough grounding in alchemical allegory and symbolism. It shares with ‘The Four Students’ a beautifully executed elision of the rational with the subconscious; the mundane world being in­eluctably superseded by shadowy chthonic forces. In the latter tale, Keary starkly evokes the queasy paranoia of the Terror and conjures a chilling geographical association between the site of the Jacobins’ mass executions and that of the hideous rites of antique pagan ritual, suggesting that the influence of the same maleficent genius loci is responsible for both.

Keary’s series of ‘Phantasies’, some of which could be described as prose poems, share a similar, inexorable dream logic, suggestive of Marcel Schwob’s shorter sketches, with which Keary may well have been familiar. Despite the accuracy of Buchan’s comparison to Stevenson’s Fables above, they all have a sinister implication of a nebulous angst usually lacking in Stevenson’s rather jauntier affairs, although both share the same sardonic edge.

The question remains whether Keary’s failure to find enduring traction as a writer was a result of this new abundance of competition or his own limitations. While recognising Keary’s facility as a writer, Bailey thought that Keary ‘had neither the power which compels recognition nor the assured faith which can go on confidently without it.’ G. K. Chesterton was less equivocal in his praise, remarking of The Wanderer that of ‘the singularly beautiful style in which the book is written it is unnecessary, to any reader of Mr. Keary, to speak.’ Another admirer was James Joyce, who mentions Keary in a 1905 letter to his brother Stanislaus, and perhaps took inspiration for Dubliners from Keary’s 1905 novel of variegated London life Bloomsbury. The Academy went so far as to laud Keary as one whose failures were ‘more interesting than the successes of most people’.

Keary’s writing, therefore, was not short of admirers. Bailey remarked that Keary ‘might, perhaps, have been greater if fate had been kinder’, going on to say, perspicaciously, that ‘there is in most of his work a suggestion of disappointment and heaviness of spirit, of a journey which is always uphill.’ Indeed, one can certainly find an ubiquitous sense of underlying pessimism throughout the pages of ’Twixt Dog and Wolf. However, as Chesterton suggests, Keary’s mastery of style means that the writing is never overburdened by the gloom of its subject matter. Rather, Keary’s accomplishment is such that these stories and sketches delight and entertain, even as they contemplate some vague and dismal abyss.

James Machin

James Machin is a London-based scholar with an interest in weird and supernatural fiction, especially of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He is co-editor of Faunus, the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen.

The extracts from the John Lane readers’ reports are used by kind permission of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. James Machin would like to thank the Center, as well as the Creekmore and Adele Fath Charitable Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies for supporting his visiting fellowship in 2014. He would also like to thank Joseph Brooker, Lionel Carley, and Bernard McGinley for their help in finding information about Keary.

ENTRE CHIEN ET LOUP

A dog is howling at the court-yard door;

Within, the horses drag their halter-chains;

Behold! the world is full of misty rains;

And the old Shepherd knows the twilight frore.1

The sea of Night will soon the Vale engulf,

With waves of dimness washing to the height;

And now from a near pinewood into sight

Steals one grey wolf.

1 frore: frozen or frosty.

I

THE MESSAGE FROM THE GOD

‘But what did the Thracian soothsayer command you to do?’ said Lysias.

‘That,’ answered Glaucon, ‘I am forbidden to say.’

‘Some act of worship, I doubt not,’ rejoined the other, ‘and in behalf of the gods, not on thine own behalf. For ever wast thou the most pious of men.’

But he spoke half mockingly.

‘What we do for the gods we do for ourselves,’ said the young priest with gravity.

And he looked up at the temple beside them. It rose above its platform, the steps of which bathed their feet in the blue sea. Behind nodded the dark pine-trees in the temenos2 of the god, and on the other hand Titanus flowed hardly among its reeds and lost itself in the salt water.

But Lysias answered him.

‘Ourselves? What can we do for ourselves?’ he cried. ‘See here, Glaucon! Are we not Hellenes, you and I? You boast,