The Unfortunate Fursey

By Mervyn Wall

Hailed by critic E. F. Bleiler as a “landmark book in the history of fantasy,” Mervyn Wall's classic The Unfortunate Fursey (1946) is set in 11th century Ireland, where the forces of evil have launched an assault on the monastery of Clonmacnoise. Their task is made easier by the fact that one hapless monk, the simple-minded Brother Fursey, cannot manage to pronounce the necessary words of exorcism. When the other monks discover this, the unfortunate Fursey is expelled and sets forth on the first stage of his travels, accompanied by a fantastic procession of cacodemons, hippogriffs, imps, furies, and other dreadful creatures, not to mention the elegant gentleman in black who is their commander-in-chief.

This edition includes an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda.

“Wildly fantastic, intensely satirical, and wickedly comic” - Irish Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781943910915

Book preview

MERVYN WALL

The Unfortunate Fursey

with an introduction by

MICHAEL DIRDA

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Dedication: To Denis Devlin, remembering many a lively evening

The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall

First published by The Pilot Press, London, in 1946

First Valancourt Books edition 2017

Copyright © 1946 by Mervyn Wall

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Michael Dirda

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

Cover by Stephanie Hofmann

INTRODUCTION

Many readers who purchase this new edition of The Unfortunate Fursey are likely to be familiar with the book already—and doubtless know that it is worth every penny of its asking price. Some may even have once owned a copy of the 1946 first edition from Pilot Press or the 1947 Crown reprint published in America or The Complete Fursey brought out in 1985 by Wolfhound Press, which also included The Return of Fursey (1948). But where are those books now? Mervyn Wall’s linked masterpieces of modern fantasy are the sort of novels one treasures, reads to pieces, and passes along to friends, who probably never return them. I know I wouldn’t. The wise might want to acquire two sets of this new edition—one to keep and one to lend.

The plot of The Unfortunate Fursey is simple enough. One day in tenth-century Ireland, the Devil lays siege to the monastery of Clonmacnoise, intending to corrupt and seduce its saintly brothers. Demons begin to haunt the shadowy passageways; every night provocative succubi whisper sweet nothings to the most austere of the holy recluses. The serene life of Clonmacnoise is turned upside down.

Eventually, the Abbot Marcus succeeds in driving away the forces of evil. Or so he believes. In fact, all the demons, elementals and succubi take refuge in the cell of the most innocent of the lay brothers, the middle-aged, white-haired Fursey. Why his cell? Because Fursey’s stutter prevents him from pronouncing the proper formula for expelling his distressing roommates. A kind-hearted simpleton, he is adept at nothing more complicated than cutting up root vegetables, and he isn’t really very good at that. Nonetheless, with reluctance, Abbot Marcus concludes that the only way to scourge the monastery of Satan and his minions is to expel the unfortunate Fursey.

From this point on, Mervyn Wall’s novel becomes the story—half picaresque romance, half Bildungsroman—of its protagonist’s education in the ways of the world. Like Don Quixote or Candide, a downcast Fursey finds himself sorely beset by one misfortune after another as he travels the open road. He ends up marrying (briefly and against his will) an elderly witch, acquires a familiar named Albert, enters into apprenticeship with a jovially evil sorcerer, and is even condemned by a churchly tribunal to be burnt at the stake. But there is worse: He also falls in love with a flower of Irish maidenhood named Maeve.

But, to risk sounding blasphemous, what a friend he has in Satan!

If The Unfortunate Fursey were a movie, the Devil would be played by one of those urbane character actors who steal every scene in which they appear. Had the novel been cast in the 1940s the archfiend would be a suavely evil George Sanders or Basil Rathbone; today the role might be taken by Jeremy Irons or Anthony Hopkins. Wall’s Satan is cordial, obviously well-­educated, and eminently reasonable. He first introduces himself in the cell of the terrified Fursey when the monk is trying to enunciate the proper phrases to ward off the Evil One. I beg of you, says the latter graciously, to give over your attempts at prayer. You know well that your fright is such as to render you incapable of the formation of a single syllable. We are both men of the world, and a ready acceptance of the position will do much credit to your commonsense and make for mutual respect.

As a guest, even an uninvited one, Satan comports himself with unassailable courtesy and even deference. The Prince of Darkness is, in short, a gentleman (which is more than can be said of Brother Crustaceous, Father Placidus and the other senior fellows of Clonmacnoise). Still, the social niceties don’t preclude a little diabolical business:

" ‘To show you that I am not ungenerous,’ the Devil tells Fursey, ‘but am willing to repay your hospitality, I should like to do something for you. Purely as a matter of accounting and to keep my books straight, I shall, of course, require your soul in exchange. It’s not a very valuable soul, its market value would be small; but you won’t find me haggling over the price. Are you perhaps a lover of beauty?’

The demon waved his hand, and a queue of desirable females began to move monotonously across the cell from the door to the far wall, where they disappeared through the plaster. The monk gave vent to a deep groan and closed his eyes tightly . . .

Poor Fursey. In the end, the virtuous lay brother, now suffering from a broken leg, is hurried out the monastery’s front door. At the end of chapter one Satan joins the outcast and the two journey together toward the metropolis of Cashel:

"The ex-monk groaned as he placed his crutches beneath his aching armpits and painfully made his way to the road, while the Devil strolled beside him discoursing affably on the beauty of the countryside, the gentle greenness of field and tree, the flaming yellow gorse and the hawthorn in pink and white blossom. As they walked along the crooked road toward the bend where it curled over the hill, the vast sky, wooly with cloud, shed its mild sunlight down upon them.

‘It’s the first day of May,’ said the Devil. ‘I must admit that it’s good to be alive.’

The Archfiend, it turns out, is himself en route to Cashel because a villainous oaf of a bishop, a most uninviting fellow, gaunt and hungry-looking, with a smell of grave-mould off his breath that would turn your stomach is persecuting an acquaintance of mine for witchcraft. She’s an elderly crone and honor demands that he see if something cannot be done to alleviate her distress. As the Devil tells Fursey, with a hard note in his voice: If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s superstition.

Mervyn Wall (1908-1997) was born into a well-to-do Dublin family and educated at Belvedere College—an institution memorably depicted in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—and then University College Dublin. At the latter he became friends with the poets Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey, while also heading up the university’s dramatic society. After receiving a B.A., Wall took up a clerkship in the Agricultural Credit Corporation, where he worked from 1930 to 1932. As Robert Hogan writes in his brief monograph on Wall (Bucknell University Press, 1972), these years of stultifying routine, of dealings with boorish and uneducated officials, of martinetish protocol quite as rigorous as that of any army, left a mark upon Wall and upon practically all his work.

That mark initially revealed itself in Wall’s first major piece of writing, a play entitled Alarm Among the Clerks. Set in a Dublin bank, this serio-comic drama depicts the grey monotony of office life and its soul-killing routine. Its third act takes place in the mind of a clerk, who in his drunkenness imagines that he returns to the office and kills his boss. Wall would hardly be the first low-level employee to nurse such murderous fantasies. Alarm Among the Clerks was staged in 1937 by the Abbey Experimental Theater and ran for a week.

Three other plays followed in the 1940s, even as Wall contributed short stories to Irish and American magazines. In 1946 he brought out The Unfortunate Fursey. Many years later, in a talk to the Bram Stoker Society, Wall explained the novel’s origins. He had fallen ill with pleurisy and was forced to spend four and a half months convalescing at his mother’s house:

"One fine day my sister was going down to Dún Laoghaire Library, and she asked me if I wanted any books back. So I had got through the stage of reading detective stories as a young man, and now I liked ghost stories. They appealed to me somewhat, so I said, ‘Anything about ghosts.’ So she brought me back a book, from which the title page was missing, and I never knew the name of the author, nor did I know the name of the translator. But the note at the back said that it was the work of a French abbé, published in Paris in 1600. And apparently it had some title like Ghosts, Demons, and Sundry Matters."

In Unauthorized Versions, her study of modern Irish Menippean satire, José Lanters has identified the book read by Wall as the work of a French Benedictine named Augustin Calmet (1672-1757). "The English version of this work was published in London in 1850; it was edited with an introduction and notes by the Rev. Henry Christmas as The Phantom World, or, The Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions, etc." Lanters adds that Wall extensively drew on the material found in Calmet’s study for both The Unfortunate Fursey and The Return of Fursey.

The book, as Wall recalled, "included all these absurd medieval beliefs about witchcraft. And I was so amused, I laughed heartily throughout at the ridiculousness of their beliefs and at the language in which it was couched. To amuse myself I sat down and I wrote a short story for The Bell, which is in effect the first chapter of The Unfortunate Fursey with the final page changed. Seán Ó Faoláin refused it—he regretted it afterwards, he said—it wasn’t the sort of thing he published. And then a friend of mine, the novelist Francis MacManus, read it, and he said: Why don’t you make a novel of it? So I just sat down, and wrote and wrote and wrote, without any planning particularly; one thing followed on another; and when I had it finished somebody put me in touch with a publishing house in England called the Pilot Press, who published it."

Reviews of The Unfortunate Fursey extolled its wit, ingenuity and satirical power. The poet Austin Clarke summed up the novel’s­ protagonist as simple, affectionate, somewhat stupid, fearful of all that comes from thought or experience of life, anxious only to regain the safety of mental obedience and blissful ignorance. Wall’s hero, he concluded, epitomised Ireland’s virtues and failings. An Irish Times columnist, who published under the pseudonym Nichevo (and who was actually the paper’s editor R.M. Smyllie), went even further in his praise for Wall’s book: "I am prepared to stand by my opinion that his delightful satire, The Unfortunate Fursey, is the best thing that has been written or, at any rate, published in this country since James Stephens produced his Crock of Gold."

Still, the novel didn’t win the acclaim it deserved, perhaps because of its pokes at Irish orthodoxies and bureaucracies, secular as well as religious. Only later would critics describe The Unfortunate Fursey as a landmark book in the history of fantasy (the judgment of the formidably learned E.F. Bleiler in his Guide to Supernatural Fiction) or call Wall an Irish T.H. White, as did critic Darrell Schweitzer in likening the novel’s comedy to that of The Sword in the Stone and its sequels.

In fact, Wall himself never seems to have fully appreciated his own achievement. As he said in that talk to the Stoker society:

"I was amazed when I read that I had made very good use of irony, and also that it was a satire: I just wrote it for fun. That’s all. And I put into Clonmacnoise—Irish monastic life—continental witchcraft. Vivian Mercier, the academic, has complained recently, in some book in which I’m mentioned, that Mr. Wall, unfortunately, apparently knows nothing about Irish monastic life, and that this is continental. Of course, it’s continental! I don’t see why I should write within the ghetto, as it were . . .

"Anyway I didn’t see anything wrong with attributing continental witchcraft to the Irish scene. I suppose that the monastery at Clonmacnoise which I envisaged was more like a monastery with corridors, instead of being a number of beehive huts, after the Irish fashion . . . I would tend to regard that book, The Unfortunate Fursey, and its successor, as a satire on medieval witchcraft and medieval beliefs. That’s what it really is, you see. And also a bit of fun, as I saw it."

Shortly after the publication of The Return of Fursey in 1948, Wall met and married Fanny Feehan, a violinist and music critic. At that time Wall was working for Radio Éireann as a program officer and broadcaster, but in 1957 he accepted the secretaryship of Ireland’s Arts Council, a position he held until his retirement in the mid 1970s.

He never wrote anything as sprightly as the two Fursey novels again. Wall’s later fiction, though ambitious, is invariably described as dour and pessimistic. The best known of these books, Leaves for the Burning (1952)—which did win a prize in Denmark as the year’s best European novel—chronicles the rather drunken pilgrimage of four middle-aged men from a depressing Irish village who decide to visit Yeats’s grave. They never make it. The main character finally returns home to his dreary, dead-end job as a very minor County Council official.

Wall’s other novels—No Trophies Raise (1956) and Hermitage (1982)—continue these gloomy social critiques of post-war Irish life and culture. On a visit to America, Wall was asked why he wrote these bleak later novels rather than another comedy comparable to The Unfortunate Fursey. He gave a rambling answer:

"I think I had just exhausted my desire to do anything in the same line. I think it would have been a strain to try and continue that, you know . . . Somebody pointed out to me recently, an American professor, that I have a very sad view of humanity. Well, I have—I have a very poor view of humanity, and feel saddened about the whole thing. My wife, I think, never read Hermitage—she said to me, it’s too depressing . . . I don’t have any faith in humanity at all. I really believe they’re going to blow themselves up any minute now—and the sooner the better!"

At the end of his life Wall was working on a book called The Odious Generation, reportedly a satire on the present-day world of threatened nuclear destruction, destruction of the environment, the selfishness of youth and all the horrors we live with. Again, hardly what you’d call sunny or lighthearted. Still, before his death in 1997, Wall did publish an odd novella-length fairy tale for children: In The Garden of Echoes (1982) two sisters enter fairyland pursued by their babysitter who wants to shoot Santa Claus. To one critic this downbeat story called to mind Ambrose Bierce more than Lewis Carroll.

As a matter of fact, The Unfortunate Fursey itself exhibits an understated black humor, though more in the vein of Evelyn Waugh than Bierce. Like the author of Decline and Fall and Scoop, Wall writes with easy elegance, a slightly tongue-in-cheek tone and absolute clarity. Consider the scene when the repulsive Bishop Flanagan of Cashel recounts some of the untoward happenings which gave rise to the conviction that there were sorcerers in the neighborhood. As he explains to the wandering friar Father Furiosus:

For many nights King Cormac Silkenbeard had been deprived of his rest by the hideous caterwauling of a platoon of cats, who mustered on the roofs surrounding the royal dwelling, and there raised a clamour so uncouth and deformed that it was speedily doubted whether their behaviour did not proceed from the oper­ation of a powerful spell.

After many hours of continuous drinking, says the Bishop, an incensed Cormac finally decides to attack the cats with his sword. To his horror he beheld several felines engaged in what appeared to be animated conversation, while on the wall sat a brindled tom of monstrous size, with gleaming eyes and large white eyeballs, who grinned sarcastically at the King and waved his paw in derision. There could be no further doubt but that these were enchanted cats; and on my advice, two conjurors and a ventriloquist who had come to the town for the annual fair, were immediately seized. As they persisted obstinately in denial, they were put to the question.

Following the administration of the best available monkish tortures, the results, we are told, were entirely favourable. " ‘Unfortunately,’ said the Bishop, ‘the two conjurors and the ventriloquist, having been crippled in the course of the judicial examination, had to be carried to the stake. The burning was a colourful ceremony, but I should have wished that they could have walked.’

‘It’s more impressive certainly,’ agreed the friar.

The Unfortunate Fursey, in other words, is no piece of Wodehousian whimsy. The light and the dark mingle throughout (and the dark grows much stronger in The Return of Fursey). The less amiable aspects of medieval Christianity are very much in evidence, especially since most of the action turns on Fursey’s efforts to escape his own immolation.

Among the memorable characters the ex-monk encounters during his various misadventures and narrow escapes is Cuthbert, a master sorcerer who passes himself off as a devout church sexton. To Fursey, who has recently acquired some witchy powers of his own, Cuthbert extols the glories of the fatal arts. In his youth, he recalls nostalgically, he once managed to trick a cross-eyed basilisk into turning itself into stone. More recently Cuthbert has been conducting experiments on a gargoyle: It was swarthy in hue and had two sharply pointed ears. Its mouth hung open in a permanent grin, and from the tip of its tongue there was a steady drip of yellowish liquid. Cuthbert’s aim is to make this creature at least half-human: I hope to pass him off as a minor man of letters. He has many of the qualities. Observe the cute narrowly-spaced eyes and the steady dribble of venom from the tongue. He will make a very passable man of letters, or rather one who imagines himself to be a man of letters.

" ‘He doesn’t look very human to me,’ observed Fursey.

‘He’s not supposed to be very human,’ rejoined Cuthbert. ‘Didn’t I tell you he’s to be a minor literary man?’

Eventually, Fursey—with his friend Satan’s invaluable assistance—eludes the inquisitional authorities and retreats to a quiet vale called The Gap. Here Wall, a city-boy ignorant of country life, engages in some pretty, Gerty MacDowellish picture-­writing:

When evening comes and the beginning of twilight, the road and countryside become charged with a peculiar opalescent atmosphere as if a faery world had been superimposed upon our own, so that one almost doubts the reality of tree and field; and, according as temperament dictates, either hurries on in terror of what one may meet, or else lingers filled with a sense of wonder and a content that seems to belong to another existence.

At The Gap Fursey falls in love with Maeve, who is affianced to the rough and somewhat brutish soldier Magnus. But before long he’s on the run again, taking temporary refuge with the Gentle Anchorite. This holy man rather proudly declares that he has been a hermit nigh on forty years, and I can boast that never once have I indulged in the sensuous practice of washing. When Fursey shares the Gentle Anchorite’s cave, he is sorely tried: Hour after hour Fursey tossed on the straw unable to sleep. When a man of determined sanctity has lived in a small cave for forty years the insect life is apt to assume alarming proportions. Bugs, resigned for many years to the thin diet which the hermit’s skinny frame provided, after one nip at Fursey scuttled off to tell their friends, and soon all the game in the cavern were making in his direction.

As should be evident, The Unfortunate Fursey is—as Wall himself has said—a loosely constructed fantasia on witchcraft and religion in the Middle Ages, but also, implicitly, a critique of contemporary Irish mores and provincialities. Still, comedy predominates, even if it is sometimes a rather despairing comedy, and myriad pleasures await the new or returning reader of Wall’s masterpiece. As the Abbot Marcus wisely says: A lifetime’s study and observance has convinced me that in the land of Ireland anything may happen to anyone anywhere and at any time and that it usually does.

Michael Dirda

Michael Dirda, a longtime reviewer for the Washington Post, is the author of the 2012 Edgar Award-winning On Conan Doyle. His other books include the memoir An Open Book and several collections of essays, including Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, Classics for Pleasure and Browsings. In 1993 Dirda received the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. He is currently at work on a book about late 19th and early 20th-century popular fiction, tentatively titled The Great Age of Storytelling.

CHAPTER I

It is related in the Annals that for the first four centuries after its foundation by the blessed Kieran the monastic settlement of Clonmacnoise enjoyed a singular immunity from the visitation of imps and ghouls, night fiends, goblins and all sorts of hellish phantoms which not unseldom appear to men. Within the sound of its bells the dark operations of magic were unknown, for no witch, sorcerer or charmer could abide the sanctified air. Other religious settlements were sadly plagued by disembodied spirits, demons, lemuses and fauns snorting and snuffling most fiendishly in the darker corners of the corridors and cells, and it was not unusual for a monk to be seriously injured or lamed as a result of their mischiefs and devilments. Philomaths of the profoundest erudition century after century poring over the great elephant folios in the library, shook their heads and warned their brethren that they could not expect to be always immune from such visitants, and that if the Prince of Darkness did but once gain a footing, he would be aflame with the thwarted malice of centuries. But the monks put their trust in the blessed Kieran and in their own sanctity, and it may have been their presumption in this regard that at last opened the door to the pestilential demons which towards the close of the tenth century thronged to Clonmacnoise from their horrible and shadowy dens.

The holy place had its first indication that its defences had been breached when one evening in early April Father Killian, who had the care of the monastery brewery, emerged from his place of work to take the air for a few minutes before returning to the main building for vespers. He had worked diligently all day, and the night air was pleasing to his heated face. It was a dark night, and he experienced some difficulty in finding his way between the cells and huts to the palisade which surrounded the settlement. When he reached it at last he stood for a time looking across the fields towards the river invisible in the darkness. It was very quiet: nothing was to be heard but the regular grunting of a monk in a nearby cell, who was plying his discipline with more than usual determination. Suddenly the moon came from behind a cloud, the river flashed silver, there was a blast of pestilential wind, and Father Killian became aware of a huge swarthy caco­demon sitting on the palisade some paces from where he stood. The face of this hideous spectre was turned back to front, and it was crunching and eating red hot coals and other dangerous matters with its teeth.

Father Killian, knowing that it was always ominous to see such a creature and that it was best not curiously to meddle, would have taken to his heels if only his legs had obeyed him, but they were paralysed with terror, which was by no means allayed when the hellish goblin, swinging itself suddenly from the palisade, took up a position beside him, and in an ingratiating manner began to tempt him to deny God and curse the Abbot. When the startled monk found his voice it was to begin a devout recitation of the psalms, whereupon the demon seized him by the throat in a fearful grip and well-nigh throttled him. He