Lost Treasure. The Romances of Henry De Vere Stacpoole

By Richard Lung

The Blue Lagoon (1908): In recent years, this tale has re-appeared, in the movies, three times, at the rate of about once a decade. This story poses the possibility of modern children spontaneously returning to the lost innocence of the Garden of Eden. Perhaps this is the most irretrievably lost treasure of all. Such a resonant theme left its author in highly civilised comfort for the rest of his life. It is doubtful how much it did for his reputation as a writer.
The trouble with the mass medium of the movies is that subjective narrative is lost to objective on-looking, that I quickly found unwatchable. These romantic films don't convey the authors narrative skill. The authors name is a scarce foot-note on the credits.
Arnold Bennett suggested perhaps it was the book of 1908. The commentary of the author is that of a doctor, a classic recorder of events, objective, unsentimental, unsensational, timeless. He allows himself a mild irony, not imposed on the reader, as the childrens alcoholic guardian gets his wish.
Eventually, The Blue Lagoon was made into a play. Whereupon, a voyager, in the audience, had the uncanny experience of the scene of the play duplicating the circumstances of his own alighting on a desert island. Stacpoole relates this remarkable coincidence in his autobiography. Anyway, Stacpoole is one of those authors who is better known by a title, The Blue Lagoon, than as a name.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Lung
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224854691

Richard Lung

My later years acknowledge the decisive benefit of the internet and the web in allowing me the possibility of publication, therefore giving the incentive to learn subjects to write about them.While, from my youth, I acknowledge the intellectual debt that I owed a social science degree, while coming to radically disagree, even as a student, with its out-look and aims.Whereas from middle age, I acknowledge how much I owed to the friendship of Dorothy Cowlin, largely the subject of my e-book, Dates and Dorothy. This is the second in a series of five books of my collected verse. Her letters to me, and my comments came out, in: Echoes of a Friend.....Authors have played a big part in my life.Years ago, two women independently asked me: Richard, don't you ever read anything but serious books?But Dorothy was an author who influenced me personally, as well as from the written page. And that makes all the difference.I was the author of the Democracy Science website since 1999. This combined scientific research with democratic reform. It is now mainly used as an archive. Since 2014, I have written e-books.I have only become a book author myself, on retiring age, starting at stopping time!2014, slightly modified 2022.

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Table of Contents

Lost Treasure.

The Romances of Henry De Vere Stacpoole

The Blue Lagoon (1908)

The Garden of God (1923); The Gates of Morning (1925)

The Beach of Dreams. A story of the true world (1919)

The Pools of Silence (1909)

Why is Stacpoole not a name? Does it matter?

Joseph Conrad

James A Michener

William Golding

JB Priestley

The Worlds Best (editor Whit Burnett)

Men and Mice (1942)

The Doctor (1899)

Harley Street (1946)

Beginnings

The Intended (1894)

Death, the Knight, and the Lady (1897)

The Golden Astrolabe (1906)

Bird Cay (1913)

Poppyland (1914)

Patsy (1908)

Garryowen (1909)

French novels

Pierrot (1895)

The Rapin/Toto (1899)

The Bourgeois (1901)

The Order of Release (1912)

Monsieur De Rochefort/The Presentation (1914)

Corporal Jacques of the Foreign Legion (1916)

The Lost Caravan (1932)

The Drums of War (1910)

Poems of Francois Villon (1914)

The Street of the Flute-player. A Romance (1912)

HG Wells

My Religion (c 1925)

The New Optimism (1914)

Goblin Market (1927)

Mandarin Gardens (1933)

Assorted Reviews of Stacpoole Titles

The Vulture's Prey (1908)

The Crimson Azaleas (1908)

The Ship of Coral (1911)

The Children of the Sea (1913)

The Pearl Fishers (1915)

The Reef of Stars/The Gold Trail (1916)

Under Blue Skies (1919)

The Ghost Girl"/The Starlit Garden (1918)

Sea Plunder (1917)

In Blue Waters (1917)

The Blue Horizon (1915)

A Man of the Islands (1920)

Satan. A romance of the Bahamas (1921)

Vanderdecken. The story of a man (1922)

Golden Ballast (1924)

Ocean Tramps (1924)

The House of Crimson Shadows (1925)

The City In The Sea (1925)

Stories East and West. Tales of men and women (1926)

The Chank Shell / The Island of Lost Women (1930)

Tropic Love (1928)

Pacific Gold (1931)

Love On The Adriatic (1932)

The Naked Soul. The story of a modern knight. (1933)

The Longshore Girl (1935)

Ginger Adams (1937)

High Yaller (1938)

An American At Oxford (1941)

Oxford Goes to War (1943)

The Story of My Village (1947)

The Land of Little Horses (1949)

The Man In Armour (1949)

Envoy

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Lost treasure.

The Romances of Henry De Vere Stacpoole

Wikipedia lists about 95 books by this author. I obtained and read most of them. (At the time of writing, a hard-core of perhaps less than twenty volumes steadfastly resist discovery, at reasonable prices, for an author, who should now be -- but currently isn't -- out of copyright.) It also lists about a dozen film adaptations, half of them produced in the 1920s. And five of them around the theme of his best-known title,

The Blue Lagoon (1908)

Table of Contents

In recent years, this tale has re-appeared three times, at the rate of about once a decade. This story poses the possibility of modern children spontaneously returning to the lost innocence of the Garden of Eden. Perhaps this is the most irretrievably lost treasure of all. Such a resonant theme left its author in highly civilised comfort for the rest of his life. It is doubtful how much it did for his reputation as a writer.

The trouble with the mass medium of the movies is that subjective narrative is lost to objective on-looking, that I quickly found unwatchable. These romantic films don't convey the authors narrative skill. The authors name is a scarce foot-note on the credits.

Arnold Bennett suggested perhaps it was the book of 1908. The commentary of the author is that of a doctor, a classic recorder of events, objective, unsentimental, unsensational, timeless. He allows himself a mild irony, not imposed on the reader, as the childrens alcoholic guardian gets his wish.

Eventually, The Blue Lagoon was made into a play. Whereupon, a voyager, in the audience, had the uncanny experience of the scene of the play duplicating the circumstances of his own alighting on a desert island. Stacpoole relates this remarkable coincidence in his autobiography. Anyway, Stacpoole is one of those authors who is better known by a title, The Blue Lagoon, than as a name.

This is nicely illustrated by the appearance of the phrase, to a song, in the last Beatles album: She came in through the bathroom window. When I heard the lyric phrase, I sensed that the composer, Paul McCartney, had picked it up, from the drift (or drift-wood) of our cultural heritage, rather than invented it himself. But I did not know its origin and I guess few people do.

The book that monopolises the fame of Stacpoole does not monopolise his literary qualities of an informed and poetic intelligence undergoing adventures in remote and exotic locations.

Stacpoole brings to his writings, in The Blue Lagoon, and beyond, the scientific detachment of his doctors training, which gives them the timeless quality of classics, tho they may not be recognised as such, by contemporary reputation.

The author wrote two sequels to his great success story,

The Garden of God (1923); The Gates of Morning (1925).

Table of Contents

I remember little of the former. The children are found comatose, in an open boat, having determined to leave their paradise home. The latter book was more in the way of an attempt to return to the magical place. It was memorable not for the destination, however.

The journey revealed the sea was not just water but a source of fascinating diversity and beauty. You ocasionally come across the same wonderful sensitivity in the short stories. It has been commented that Stacpoole was not long at sea. Yet he seems profoundly knowledgeable. No doubt his training and intelligence contributed much to that effect.

When the narrator does at last arrive at the blue lagoon, it is no longer a place of pristine splendor. It is rather an early victim of industrial massacre of the environment. Of course, the oceans themselves have now fallen victim to lazy mass disposals of killing refuse. The exotic corners of the world, encountered by Stacpoole, in the breath-taking freshness of their innocence, read like a paradise lost.

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The Beach of Dreams (1918)

A story of the true world.

Table of Contents

In the 1920s, The Beach Of Dreams was also made into a movie. The authors contemporaries have hit on another masterpiece. The impression one gets, while reading it, is that this other island is an austere and terrible sister to the blue lagoon. The distinction between the two islands is as striking, as already made in another context, between Technicolor and black and white, or monochrome. The imposing cliffs, virtually unbroken across a stretch of beach, the sky and sea creatures themselves are largely black and white or grey.

Half a century or more, before David Attenborough lounged among the herds of walrus on South Georgia, Stacpoole characterises his tale with these behemoths.

The changeability and ferocity of the winds and waves and rains are impressive but clean, and safely observed from a good cave, if you make it in time. The elements are in all their pristine innocence. -- No plastic pollution; no human detritus, to this far-flung corner of the globe, to snare wild-life.

This is more than can be said for a reader, hapless