The Listener Library: Recent Episodes
Tony Walker
Another masterfully told wander along a North Cumbrian river. In this case it’s the River Gelt, the mad river.
Gary wades over rapids and communes with skinny trout while reminiscing about his youthful love for this ever-green, ever-rushing, never-restful river.
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Tales from the Riverbank with Gary Johnston (The River Petteril)
Listen to Gary’s musings on nature and history as he wades down the Petteril.
Please share!
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Another easy one. Steve was kind enough to let me have the use of his podcast episode from the 28 Dales Later podcast. You can check out that admirable selection of podcasts about different parts of the North of England here.
If you have any audio mumblings or masterly recitations and reminiscences to submit to the Listener Library, they would be gratefully received
Tony
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This is our first proper post! Gary has done a wonderful piece about his wanderings along, through and over the rivers of Carlisle: the Eden, Caldew and Petteril. There’s even a cheeky trip over to the River Gelt!
It’s lovely to hear Gary’s musings, recollections and pointers to history, architecture and fishing as he meanders along these lovely, powerful and misunderstood rivers.
And as a reminder to you, please get in touch if you have anything you’d like to talk about and we’ll post it up here on the Listener Library!
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The famous Victorian Children’s Story.
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Robert Louis Stevenson
R L Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He died aged only 44 in Samoa. He was phenomenally successful in his time and is still remembered for such classics as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and of course The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Robert Louis (he changed his name from Robert Lewis Balfour when he was around 18) was an only child. His father Thomas Stevenson was a famous lighthouse engineer, from a line of lighthouse designers. His grandfather Robert Stevenson and his uncles were in the same line of work. R L Stevenson's mother Margaret Balfour came from a line of landowners from Fife, but her father was a Church of Scotland minister.
Stevenson suffered from respiratory problems as a child, an ailment he shared with his mother and maternal grandfather. He never fully recovered from his chest problems.
After school, he went to Edinburgh University to study engineering. He used to go to the family engineering works in the summer and accompanied his father on a tour of lighthouses in Orkney and Shetland on 1868.
By 1871, Robert Louis told his father he didn't want to be an engineer but wanted to pursue a career as a writer. His family took it relatively well but suggested he change to studying Law at University to give him some security.
He was 21, and in common with many 21 year olds, he became more Bohemian, taking to wearing his hair long and sporting a velveteen jacket.
In 1873, he went to stay on the French Riviera for the good of his health for a year but came back to Edinburgh and was admitted to the Scottish Bar in 1875.
He met and fell in love with an American woman called Fanny Van de Grift Osborne from Indianopolis who had come with her children to study art in France. She was married but her husband was multiply unfaithful so they separated.
She retured to the USA after they had spent over a year together and eventually in 1878, he travelled to meet her in San Francisco. He wrote about his journey across America, but it ruined his health. He was reputedly almost dead when he arrived in Monterey, California. By December 1879, he was well enough to travel on to San Francisco. He described the time as being 'All alone on forty-five cents a day and sometimes less'
He met up again with Fanny in San Francisco. She was divorced by that time, but by the winter of 1879, he was at death's door again and Fanny came to nurse him. They married in 1840 and travelled to the Napa Valley for their honeymoon in an abandoned mining camp on Mouth Saint Helena. In August that year, he sailed back to Liverpool in England.
Because of his failing health, Stevenson looked for suitable places to live, staying on the south coast of England, to France and in places in Scotland.
After Stevenson's father died, he went to live in Colorado. By 1888 he chartered a yacht in San Francisco and decided to set ail for the east and central Pacific, stopping in Hawaii, Tahiti, the Gilbert Island and New Zealand. He ended up in Sydney, Australia, and in 1890 set out on another voyage and arrived at Vailima in Samoa where he bought land and became part of the local community. He was to die of a stroke in 1894 while opening a bottle of wine.
The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde
'Jekyll and Hyde' was published in 1886. Stevenson finished it in six days during a period of illness and gave it to his wife who didn't like it.
It is written a little like a mystery where Mr Utterson the lawyer is the detective. The truth of what happens is actually more or less laid out in the first section for those who have eyes to see. We see the evil Mr Hyde draw a cheque in Jekyll's name, and Mr Utterson wonders how one man could go early in the morning and come out with a signed cheque in the name of another. With hindsight it is obvious and that is of course the technique of the crime novel: the aha! that comes when you re-evaluate information you were given at the beginning and see it for what it is for the first time.
Stevenson borrowed the name Jekyll, but Hyde seems to be a a play on 'hide and seek'. In fact Utterson makes that joke in the course of the novel as he goes to seek Mr Hyde.
The theme of the evil deeds of a good man may also probably arise from Stevenson's youth in a good Scottish Calvinistic home where his childhood nurse terrified him with her mix of strict Calvinism and peasant supersitions.
Is a man responsible for his bad deeds? I think the message is, yes, no matter how he tries to wriggle out of them by blaming them on his wicked side. But there is no salvation for Henry Jekyll in this book.
Jekyll's ambition was to have a separate self that he could go and indulge his sinful desires with, certainly of violence, but others are also hinted at. What a wonderful thing it would be to have your sinful cake and eat it too? He tries to find a potion that will allow this, but as with all addicts, he finds that ultimately, the potion lets him down.
Vocabulary
In general, Stevenson adheres to the Victorian tradition of using uncommon words. The Victorian reader gloried in his or her ability to understand a wider vocabulary and the Victorian author delighted in throwing in obscure words. Hemmingway hated it and it's due to Hemmingway that modern authors eschew ornate lines. It'll swing back the other way eventually.
Cabinet: means a room, a chamber
Press: means a cabinet!
A Cheval Glass: this is a mirror in a frame that can be tilted. They used to have them in dress shops. Presumably needed here so Jekyll could view his transformation into Hyde.
Solution: Stevenson uses this in its original sense: a dissolving.
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Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Ireland in 1814. He was highly regarded both in his time and afterwards as a master of the ghost story genre. He wrote many wonderful stories, but here we focus on his #Vampires story Carmilla.
I think it's very interesting and a little amusing, that Joseph's father, in common with many writers of ghost stories as it happens was a strict Protestant churchman.
I wonder whether Joseph Sheridan — or JT as I'm calling him — ever showed Carmilla , or read it aloud to his dad.
Le Fanu
was a master of Gothic description, and in Carmilla his abilities are at their height.
For me one of the most engaging descriptions is that of the castle in the deep and inaccessible forest in Styria in Austria. It is almost poetic. We also have great descriptions of the graveyard at Castle Karnstein towards the end of the story and the masked ball scene which is related to us by the general also sounds splendid.
The masked ball from Carmilla was borrowed and done very lushly in the movie Van Helsing where Kate Beckinsale, one of my favourite female vampires, looks lush indeed.
Some of the sensuality between Camilla and the protagonist is described in almost erotic detail. I think that Le Fanu was not naive about this and , of course, he had to sell stories to make a living and he did this very well..
The stock characters such as the woodsman and the bizarre Baron Vordenburg who acts as a Van Helsing type vampire expert that comes in to solve all the problems towards the end, are both fun.
In terms of the structure of this novella, I feel it could actually have been a novel. The ending to me was a little bit rushed. Camilla disappears and then it's sorted and fixed within minutes it seems.
As I was reading it my imagination extended it to
Being said there is a nice structure to the story in that almost the first thing that happens is that the expected female guest is now tragic tragic not coming giving a great disappointment to our Laura the protagonist.
The general in his letter is very disturbed but we are not told why and so kept in suspense until the end when the General neatly appears, closing the circle of the story. I guess we anticipate something like this happening
Next time I'm going to do something shorter and American I have in mind doing one of Russell Kirk stories. Although Kirk was an American writer and he set a lot of his ghost stories in England and there is one I want to do around Christmas so I'm debating whether to do that in an English or American accent.
In terms of podcast business, we had a lovely review on iTunes from Gabby which I was delighted to read, so thank you Gabby for that.
Reviews likes and shares are the lifeblood of the podcast and enable it to surge forward to ever increasing popularity which is my aim — obviously.
I therefore politely but wholeheartedly encourage you to like, share and support the podcast. I think reading so much wordy Victorian stuff, influences one’s vocabulary!
If you listen to podcasts in general you will be aware that the podcasters always make a play for you to join up and subscribe and support the podcast. I put the link down below just in case you fancy doing that.
You may notice that I changed the podcast music; because I actually lost the original MP3 of the other so this is a royalty free one called Ben sounds scary music.
Case I'm rambling again. I’ll have a story for you again next week.
The podcast has a twitter handle and an Instagram Account of its very own now with lots of spooky pictures!
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The Fall of The House of Usher
Classic Ghost Stories Podcast has done a Poe story before: [The Tell-Tale Heart (Episode 12)] (https://player.captivate.fm/episode/08a6766c-18ad-4ec7-9c1c-a6918e7306a6) , and that was fine, but the Fall of the House of Usher is, in my humble opinion, finer.
Poe was an American writer born in 1809 in Boston who died aged only forty in Baltimore in 1849. He is one of the best-known American writers of his generation and famed all over the world for his Gothic and macabre tales. It was long overdue that we did another of his stories
The Fall of the House of Usher was published in 1839, when grave-robbing was still a thing. He makes a play on the word 'house' which can mean both a lineage and a building. This is a rhetorical usage known as a syllepsis.
The story is a fine Gothic thing. We have dismal setting with the rotting trees and the stagnant tarn (which is a small lake) the gloomy castle, the sickly and neurotic hero, the storm and generally dreadful weather, the mysterious and sinister chatelaine, Madeline. It is quasi-Medieval also, though not set in Medieval times, it might as well be and at the end they read from some Arthurian legend to make even more Medieval.
The remoteness of the house, the lack of modern communications (even for the 1830s), the terrible weather and the vague dream time of no specific location and no specific time trap us in the legend. The house haunts the characters as much as their wraith-like dream forms haunt its halls. Roderick never leaves the house and I doubt Madeline of Usher was much of a gad-about either.
Poe never says anything clearly in a few words when he can draw it out over several obscure sentences with multiple clauses and hints rather than statements. We love him for it, indeed that's why we read him.
Old Roderick decides to entomb Madeline in the deep dungeon, because it is hinted that the medical men would seek to dig her up and use her for research, given the obscurity of her illness. This was a thing in Poe's days or just before.
The hint of the blush on dead Madeline's face is suggestive that she may be a vampire, and Poe, I think was encouraging this, but it is in fact, as it later transpires in a nice twist (nice?) that poor Madeline was not in fact dead, and furthermore, her brother suspected this.
Poe's stories are populated by the deeply neurotic and this, for me, is his masterpiece. I love the Gothic prolixity of it, I love the funereal sombreness and I am struck how much influence Poe had on Lovecraft in his vocabulary. Now, it may be an American usage, but, outside these two, I've never come across the word "litten" for "lit" as in red-litten, for red-lit, and my autocorrect dislikes it also. Also reminiscent of Lovecraft, is the long list of obscure books, mostly not in English; a favourite device of the Cthulhu Mythos.
What Poe does wonderfully in this story, I think, is identify the building with the family themselves and make the house a living thing. The fortunes of the House of Usher, as he says, is reflected in both the fabric of the ancient castle and the health of the living line. When the people die, the house dies also.
Shirley Jackson does this in her story, [The Visit (Episode 52)] (https://player.captivate.fm/episode/902d0d32-2fe8-4951-a7e4-dbbf2f8a89d8)
The co-mingling of story and actuality happens in the reading of the Arthurian legend where the breaking in of Ethelred, has its counterpart in the breaking out of the dying Madeline. In a sense this also mirrors the identity of the living Ushers with the symbol of the ancient building.
The purpose of the narrator is merely to give us a window into the goings on, for he does nothing active in the story. I love the image of the blood-red moon rising over the tarn at the end as the house (and its inhabitants) fall into the dark waters. We are reminded that the first image (nearly) is of the House of Usher reflected upside down in the waters of the tarn, and now at the end the tarn swallows it up forever.
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