Imelda

By John Herdman

John Herdman's masterpiece of the modern Scottish Gothic appears in print from Leamington Books, with a new introduction from the author.Black humour and even blacker lives collide in a tale of love and murder on an old Borders family estate. In a grotesque story told from two perfectly contrasting angles we find the arrogant genius, Frank, known as 'Superbo', and his hated brother Hubert.Raw and immoral, Imelda is a puzzle, mocking the reader in its quest for answers. Murder and madness this way lie―but who if anyone is to be believed in unpicking the deadly secrets behind the birth of cousin Imelda's child?An assured masterpiece from Scotland's greatest living chronicler of the dark side, Imelda, first published in 1993 became an instant classic of Scottish letters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gothic World Literature Editions
• Release date: Jul 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781914090080

Book preview

Imelda

John Herdman

GOTHIC WORLD LITERATURE EDITIONS

IMELDA

by John Herdman

Publishing History

Polygon

(21 June 1993)

Language: English

ISBN: 978-0748661404

QUIDAM

(15 May 2006)

Language: French

ISBN: 978-2915018165

Aracne editrice

(2017)

Language: Italian and English, dual text

ISBN: 978-88255039606

Gothic World Literature Editions

(23 June 2020)

Language: English

ISBN: 978-0993227257

Contents

Title Page

Author’s Introduction to Imelda

Mrs Janice Moodie to Major Rufus G. Agnew

Major Rufus G. Agnew to Mrs Janice Moodie

Memoir Of Frank Agnew, Otherwise Known As Superbo

Memoir Of Sir Robert Affleck

Major Rufus G. Agnew to Mrs Janice Moodie

Mrs Janice Moodie to Major Rufus G. Agnew

Author’s Note

Lorenz Stöer

By John Herdman

Copyright

Author’s Introduction to Imelda

by John Herdman

The earliest origin of Imelda I can trace back to some sketched-out ideas for a novel about a romantic rivalry between two antagonistic brothers dating to the autumn of 1965, when I was twenty-four. I was no doubt aware that this was initially suggested by the relationship of the (half-) brothers in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, on which I was planning a doctoral dissertation, never to be written. So far as I can remember I abandoned the idea of this novel because I felt the theme was too well-worn, having also in mind, no doubt, Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. Unfortunately I have no surviving notes relating to this first idea, as in those days I tended to destroy any material I had written which I didn’t feel satisfied with. The germ was there, however, and was to bear fruit exactly a quarter of a century later.

The theme must have run deep with me (perhaps oddly, as I have no brother myself), for it appears marginally in Pagan’s Pilgrimage (1978) and (after Imelda) more substantially in Ghostwriting (1996). However that may be, the true moment of genesis for this short novel arose not from any plan or idea but from words. In the autumn of 1990 I had been reacquainting myself with the poems of my friend D.M. Black, whom I was helping in his choice of material for a Collected Poems. In a poem entitled Under the Plane Trees I came across these words which considerably tickled my fancy:

…… May even the gross

colicky lout lumbering under the plane trees,

(track-suited), in

misty October

thin;

Some time not long after this I quickly wrote down (not in a work notebook as I would have done if I had been planning anything substantial, but in a small memorandum book crammed with this and that), a few sentences beginning with the words, My brother Ambrose was a great, slobbering lout and describing the character finally designated Hubert. This was followed by the question What could it have been in the lovely Imelda, our second cousin, which made her prefer this monster to myself? I must then have set myself to imagining what sort of person would write in this way about his brother, for a couple of days later I sketched out, in the same notebook, Frank / Superbo’s vainglorious self-description which occurs, expanded but otherwise almost unchanged, about a third of the way through his narrative in the finished novel.

Soon after this I recorded in my dream journal a complex dream which included this: At some stage a sinister figure appears in a pony-trap. I can see only his back, but the driver, dressed in an eighteenth-century frock coat, speaks to me. He is malevolent, black or very dark, and brandishes at me his black stump of an arm, cut off above the wrist. ‘What do you think of that?’ he asks mockingly. Here is the origin of the character Restorick, and these are his very gesture and words on his first appearance in the narrative.

It was the coming-together of these two elements — the relationship of the two brothers, hingeing on their rivalry for their second cousin, and the dark force represented by Restorick — which provided the catalyst necessary for the composition of the novel, written quickly at the beginning of 1991. At this time I was steeped in the Gothic literature of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, in which, a couple of years before, I had immersed myself for a critical project. In Imelda there is a strong element of respectful parody of this literature, as well, clearly, as marked influence, especially from Hoffmann and Hogg; and the use of grand guignol can be referred to the same source. A number of readers and commentators who have remarked on the incongruity of the use of nineteenth-century diction in a work set in the mid-twentieth century seem not to have been aware of this parodic aspect, by which the incongruity is part of the point. But it is worth noting that the social milieu in which the novel is set was an extremely traditional and conservative one, in which habits of speech from an earlier epoch would not have disappeared from usage to the degree that might be assumed.

The novel is constructed as a puzzle. The structure embraces not only two narratives which, compared against each other, must without doubt be regarded as unreliable — though not wholly so, as in many particulars they agree; but also framing documents which may be thought to lay claim to greater truth and objectivity, though not of necessity infallibly. In this labyrinth readers are invited to pick their way; the prize offered at the end of the skein being, perhaps, the truth. And here a word of caution is necessary. At the end of the novel a solution to the dual mystery (who is the father of Imelda’s child, and who murdered Hubert) is obliquely offered, a solution which may be regarded as probable but not certain. This has sometimes been taken as advancing the post-modern project of asserting the relativity of truth. Nothing could have been further from the author’s intention. No attack on the claim that truth exists as something objective and conforming to reality is propagated here. Rather, what is suggested is that the search towards discovery of what is true and what is not is a thorny endeavour, that truth is or can be tortuous, complicated and obscure, and so ensnared in the nets of human subjectivity as to be, in some instances, beyond final determination. Whether this is the case with the facts related in this fiction (the paradox is intended) is for the reader to decide.

Imelda

Increpasti superbos;

   maledicti qui errant a praeceptis tuis.

Psalmus 118, III Ghimel

(Psalterium Monasticum)

MRS JANICE MOODIE TO MAJOR RUFUS G. AGNEW

7/35 Burnside Quadrant,

Bellshill,

Lanarkshire

26 April 1986

Dear Major Agnew,

I hope you will forgive me writing to you out of the blue. My parents, Mr and Mrs Dan Johnstone who used to live in Berwickshire, were given your name and address by a friend Mrs Lambie who stays near you. My Dad at one time used to work on the Lemington estate as a tractorman, but we moved here in 1964.

I was adopted when I was two months old, and ever since my parents told me about it when I was twelve, there has never been any secret that I belonged to the Agnew family of Lemington. I believe my father’s name was Hubert Agnew and my mother was Imelda Cranstoun. They were engaged to be married but my father died shortly before I was born and that is why I was adopted. Now that I am married myself and soon to be a mother, I would really like to know more about my original family and if possible make contact with my real mother. Mrs Lambie thought that you would be the person who would know most about the family.

I worked as a nurse until recently and my husband David is in computers. I do hope that I am not intruding on your privacy by writing to you like this, if you feel I am being cheeky please just ignore my letter.

Yours sincerely,

Janice Moodie (Mrs)

MAJOR RUFUS G. AGNEW TO MRS JANICE MOODIE

Fingleton Den Cottage,

Lemington

Berwickshire

30 April 1986

Dear Mrs Moodie,

How very pleased I was to receive your letter. Needless to say I was aware of your existence, but I knew nothing of your present whereabouts, and it is better, I always feel, not to pry into these things, and rather to let life take its own course until something happens to make one act otherwise. I am looking at it from my own end of the wicket, of course: I fully understand why you should wish at this time to learn something of your true background, and I am only too happy to be of any assistance to you, though what I can offer by way of direct information is limited.

As to your main line of enquiry, the possibility of making contact with your mother, I had best not beat about the bush. I am sorry to have to tell you that your mother died in London in 1981. I know very little about the circumstances. I must explain that most of my life has been spent far from Berwickshire as my career was that of a professional soldier, and my contacts with the family during those years were tenuous. I retired at the age of fifty in 1980 and returned to Berwickshire, since when I have been taking a considerable interest in family history and family affairs — one of those interests that grows on one as one gets older and has time on one’s hands. I am first cousin to your late father, being of the cadet branch of the family although quite a number of years older than Hubert; my uncle (your grandfather) having married comparatively late in life.

Although I have very little personal, first-hand knowledge of your parents’ youth and the circumstances surrounding your birth, I have in my possession two extraordinary documents relating to those years, photocopies of which I am sending to you herewith. The first was written by your uncle Frank, your father’s younger brother, of whom you probably know nothing. He is, I am afraid, a paranoid schizophrenic, and has been a patient at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital ever since suffering a complete mental breakdown early in 1963. He sent this autobiographical essay, if that is the right term for it, to me five years ago in response to the news of your mother’s death, which it had been my sad duty to communicate to him by letter.

Frank lives in a little world of his own, as you will see when you read the piece, and his motives in writing it and sending it to me are best known to himself. But he is not completely crazy; indeed they let him out of hospital sometimes, on probation as it were; but he feels highly insecure in the outside world and always quickly becomes sufficiently unwell again to be able to retreat once more within the protecting walls. As a nurse, you will no doubt understand. The story he tells is so amazing, both in style and in content, and in many respects so inherently improbable, that I felt I really must try to have some light cast on the whole business from some more balanced and objective source. Accordingly I made contact with the sole surviving independent witness of the events related in Frank’s narrative, Sir Robert Affleck. Sir Robert was the brother of Hubert and Frank’s mother, and a cousin of Imelda’s mother. When Imelda was orphaned he became her guardian, and in the early 1950s came to live with her at Lemington. That is how Hubert, Frank and your mother came to be brought up together.

At the time when Frank’s memoir reached me, Sir Robert was living in an old people’s home in Kelso. Although well over eighty he still had his wits very much about him. Without any mention whatever of Frank, whom Sir Robert had not seen for eighteen years, I asked the old man to furnish me with an account of the Agnew family during the years when he lived at Lemington. I did not want him to be replying to Frank, or refuting the version of events provided by that unfortunate individual, I wanted his own unbiased recollections (if such a thing is ever possible). He knew of my interest in family history and my request seemed to him in no way odd; he responded readily and promptly. It is as well that I asked him when I did, for writing that account was the old fellow’s last significant act