Fifty Forgotten Books by R. B. Russell

Author:R. B. Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Books;bookstores;bookshops;second-hand;used books;book-hunting;antiquing;antiques;roadshow;publishing;small press;presses;Machen;Crowley;Ligotti;Aickman;Tartarus;Tartarus Press;Meaulnes;Alain-Fournier;supernatural;occult;Mark Valentine;Dirda;Colin Wilson;Townsend Warner;Radiguet;Baudelaire;Tryon;NYRB;readers;wishlist;browsing;collecting;The Loney;Andrew Michael Hurley
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2022-09-07T14:42:10+00:00

25

‌Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties

John Adlard

Cecil Woolf, 1969

I don’t know from whom I first heard of Count Stenbock, some time in the 1990s. It may have been Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson, although it was just as likely to have been the musician David Tibet. Stenbock’s books, at that period, were fabulously rare and unobtainable, and the few who had heard of him would recall W. B. Yeats’s oft-quoted description of him as a ‘scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men’. John Adlard’s biography of Stenbock, which was very difficult to obtain (or so I thought – I paid quite a lot for my copy), revealed that his subject was an 1890s decadent who knew Oscar Wilde, took industrial quantities of drugs, kept a menagerie and was accompanied by a life-size human doll that he considered his son and heir. It helped the Stenbock myth that his very few books had wonderfully evocative titles: Love, Sleep & Dreams (1881); Myrtle, Rue and Cypress (1883); The Shadow of Death (1893); Studies of Death (1894). It almost didn’t matter how good his writing was because one was never likely to read it. (He received, in his time, very few, usually lukewarm, reviews.)

As an antidote to my unhappiness at having to resign from the Arthur Machen Society, and my inability to start a Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, I decided to form the Stenbock Society, which was not entirely a spoof – we did issue one publication, bound with a peacock’s feather. To make the running of the Stenbock Society as easy as possible I decided to limit the membership, arbitrarily, to eleven. These were: myself, Rosalie, our son Tim, Mark Valentine, Roger Dobson, David Tibet, John Balance, Rhys Hughes, Timothy d’Arch Smith and the ghost of John Adlard. Mark Samuels was invited, although I can’t remember if he agreed to join. I later allowed a couple of additional members, including the poet Jeremy Reed, assuming that Rosalie, Tim and I had a joint family membership. So that nobody would ask what we did with the subscription money, I decided there would be no membership fee.

I was talking to the journalist Byron Rogers about Machen and the future of the Society (which appeared moribund at that point) when he told me he had just attended the annual meeting of the Alliance of Literary Societies, expecting the Machenians to have been there. He had been impressed that the Beddoes Society attended none of the programmed events because they never left the pub, and I, in a game of literary one-upmanship, pointed out that the Stenbock Society hadn’t even bothered to attend, due to ennui. He dutifully wrote about the Stenbockians in a long article in the Telegraph magazine.

I then discovered that John Adlard’s Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties was still in print, available at the cover price direct from the publisher. Cecil Woolf admitted that he still had one box remaining; Tibet and I jointly bought it and gave copies as gifts to members of the Stenbock Society and to others we hoped would be sympathetic.

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