Post No. 14—Skipping to the Beginnings: On the Roof of the World

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

 Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas (Thos.) Kent Miller

All rights reserved

   [Note: These posts are sequential, each building on the previous. 

I suggest beginning at the beginning by scrolling down and clicking on "older posts" or by using the Blog Archive to the right to locate 

Post No. 1 .]

Leo Vincey (left) and Horace Holly at the

    beginning of their search for Ayesha.

Leo (right) and Horace twenty years later near

  the end of their quest. Drawings by Maurice

Greiffenhagen.

Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World

It's been four years since I added to this blog. And now that I am, I realize that I've given short shrift to the book to which The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life is a sequel—Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World. Therefore, before I continue with the main task at hand of discussing Crucible, I will finally give Roof its due. I mentioned Roof briefly in Posts numbers 1 and 2, but I really didn't say much. However, there really are some interesting things about the birth and development of the book.

  First off, the date was September 10, 1983. I had graduated from university the year before and I was working as an editor/proofreader for a nearby textbook publisher. Recall now that I’d already had a great fondness for Sherlock Holmes for at least a decade, so much so that I named my first gray-tabby kitten Doyle. When Jayne and I married, Doyle was part of the package (especially since his name proved to be the ice-beaker by which Jayne I first connected [“Oh, is your cat named after Arthur Conan or Doyle Drive”]). Sherlock was never far from my mind, and this night I was remembering that a few years before a fellow and I were talking while working at the college newspaper, and our discussion turned toward the notion that Jesus is said, in some quarters, to have traveled to India with his brother Thomas after his seeming death on the cross. So on this night, I was also remembering Nicholas Meyers’ ground-breaking novel The Seven Percent Solution and I realized that the Canon recognizes that Holmes traveled to Tibet in the guise a Norwegian named Sigerson during his Great Hiatus. So I asked myself the natural question under those circumstances: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if Holmes discovered in Tibet that Jesus had in fact visited there?” But then I realized that such a tale could not be set down by Watson, as Watson was under the impression his friend was dead. Who then? Well, by then I was also long under the strong influence of adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard, and I remembered that at the end of his epic novel She: An Adventure, he set his two heroes, Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, off to Asia to search for the reborn Ayesha. It was merely a matter of figuring out a way for them to meet. That was about as far as this idea went. Bringing together all these threads took only a moment in time, and I probably wrote myself a note so as to not forget the idea. Later that night my wife and I retired and went to sleep.

            That night, I had a vivid dream, it was as follows: I am standing on a sidewalk. A big white limousine pulls up in front of me, and James Michener, the best-selling author, gets out of the car and shakes my hand, saying “Tom, let me give you this advice: Whatever else you do with it, finish your novel.” Upon awakening, this impressed me so much that I found a small photo of Michener, typed his dream advice as a small caption, glued it together, and framed it as a reminder that I had no choice but to write the novel that I had conceived the night before. Here is a scan of that very framed picture; it’s yellowed over these 33 years.

          

Shortly afterward, I needed to decide if the narrator would be Horace or Leo. Thus I began to write the book with Horace relating the events, mainly because he was by far the more literate of the two and besides he matched Watson’s age more closely than Leo. Sometime after I had finished the first couple of chapters, I had a dental appointment. My dentist was in downtown San Francisco; my father’s second wife had recommended him to me years before. His office was high in an office building that presented a great view of the bay. The next day, my supervisor came to work after lunch and arbitrarily mentioned that she’d been to the dentist and, also arbitrarily, described the view from the dentist chair. Well, she was describing the exact view seen from my dentist’s chair, so I asked who her dentist was…and he was the same as mine…and his first name was Leo. This coincidence struck me hard. Here I was trying to choose between Horace and Leo when fate stepped in and pressed hard on me the name “Leo”. I took this very seriously and rewrote the first couple of chapters, and it turned out that doing so opened up new possibilities.

            My life was very busy back then and it took me four years to write what turned out to be a fairly slim book, a novella rather than a novel. Sometime during that period—probably later than earlier—another couple and my wife and I took a train up the coast of California for the specific purposes of enjoying a train ride and viewing the rugged coastline. It had been years since any of us had ridden a train. Naturally I brought writing materials, and there came a time when I was hard at work composing the numbered sentences that would comprise “The Gospel of Issa”. I was concentrating and not aware of my surroundings, when someone jostled my elbow and said “Excuse me.” I looked up…and looked right into the face of Sherlock Holmes!  It turned out that the particular train on which we were riding was a “Mystery Train” whereon the local mystery club or clubs staged a mystery, and it was the job of its members to find planted “clues” and eventually the “murderer”. At these events, many club members often dressed as their favorite literary detectives to amp up the fun.

An example of a Mystery Train ad

(found via a Google search on the Internet).

            Because I was anxious to finish the book once and for all and also to maintain control over it, I published the book myself as Rosemill House publishers. I’d been involved in the publishing field for a decade by then and knew my way around typesetting, design, layout, wax, printers and their antics, and so forth, and felt I could do the job well myself, and in fact I did, successfully bringing it out at Christmas time 1987, exactly 100 years after Sherlock Holmes first appeared in A Study in Scarlet in Beeton's Christmas Annual magazine 1887. The First Edition of Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World sold for $4.95 and is a nice little trade paperback that I’m very proud of. However, I found that distribution wasn't (and still isn’t) my forté. When in due course, the respected academic/library press, Borgo Press based in San Bernardino, California, contacted me and asked if they could distribute the book to libraries with library casing, i.e., hardcover, I was delighted. In fact, it sold well enough that Borgo deemed it a “best-seller”. Not long after this, both Rosemill House and Borgo Press published and distributed a second "corrected printing," which Rosemill sold for $5.95. In subsequent years, the owners of Borgo closed shop, and I did not have the energy to sell the book voluminously, only by onesies and twosies, and eventually Roof became a valuable collectors’ item (despite my having hundreds of copies in my garage!). In 2002, Wildside Press asked to publish both Crucible (as then unpublished) and Roof.  Right around that same time Wildside Press bought Borgo Press, and in 2007 Roof was reissued by Wildside as a Second Edition with a new cover (nothing I would have chosen) and professional distribution (far better than my own meager attempts). It sold well again for a while, until it’s small market became saturated.

            Since then, I’ve reissued it as a Kindle book and also in combination with various releases of Crucible.

The 2007 Second Edition trade paperback.

The next post will again feature a discussion of the writing of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life.

Find used copies of CRUCIBLE at https://www.amazon.com/Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507 .

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

Post No. 13—Fifth Chapter, Part 2

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

 Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

Copyright © 2012 by Thos. Kent Miller

All rights reserved

   [Note: These posts are sequential, each building on the previous. 

I suggest beginning at the beginning by scrolling down and clicking on "older posts" or by using the Blog Archive to the right to locate 

Post No. 1 .]

From "A Case of Identity"

—Sidney Paget

From The Ivory Child

—Hookway Cowles

The Fifth Chapter, Part Two

.
Post No. 13 continues my discussion of the fifth chapter, "Introduction As Told By Allan Quatermain," of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire. The focus now is on Zikali, the dwarf witch doctor known as "The Opener of Roads," or, as King Shaka named him, "The Thing That Never Should Have Been Born." But first, I need to make this long aside.

Back in 1973, I chanced to read a paperback edition of H. Rider Haggard’s The People of the Mist.  It suffices to say now that that book affected me deeply. This is because on some level, I noticed an attitude that permeated the book. Frankly, in a lifetime of reading (up until that time, of course), I had never encountered that attitude in fiction before and I found it both refreshing and illuminating. It seemed to me that Haggard clearly recognized an implicit spiritual side of life, while at the same time recognizing that, in the words of Glen St John Barclay (Anatomy of Horror), “precise statements were necessarily inappropriate in an area not subject to the limitations of the physical universe.”

In other words, Haggard didn’t let dogma obscure his observation; and his observation bolstered what he knew intuitively, that it was doubtful that anyone could say anything definite about anything. The People of the Mist reflected this by presenting fate as a joker, and I soon learned that much of his fiction—especially the She novels and the Allan Quatermain books—highlighted this indecisiveness of  reality. 

Much of this attitude, which was fundamental to Haggard's world view long before he began writing fiction, was the result of a blow he suffered at age 19 from which he never recovered. Haggard biographer D.S. Higgins explains in his essay "Rider Haggard's Secret Love" (Kindle):

"When Rider Haggard was nineteen he fell in love, as young men often do, with a beautiful young woman. Unlike most other men, however, Haggard was to remain in love with her throughout his life, even though they were soon separated and subsequently married other partners. His idealistic love for this untouched, untouchable woman influenced much of his writing and was in part responsible for the brooding melancholia that so often overtook him . . . .  Haggard continued to believe that his love for Lilly was eternal and that in an after-life they would, in some way or other, be united. This belief in eternal love is a central theme that he constantly returns to in his fiction."

Mary Elizabeth Archer (Lilly)
The woman who haunted Haggard
and whose unattainability stoked both his
imagination and his sense of reality.

—From Rider Haggard: A Biography
By D.S. Higgins

It was this love and this loss that fueled the ironic, fatalistic tone so central to so many of Haggard's novels up until 1891, She, Nada the Lily, Allan's Wife among them. The grief resulting from this loss of love (via a "dear John" letter, no less!) absolutely colored his views on the nature of reality. How could a love so profound and real be yanked from him so callously? Where was the sense in that? If such a thing could happen, what other universal laws could be swept aside in a heartbeat by whatever power or powers? How could he trust anything at all? How could he rely on anything? Thus we have Ayesha's endless and contradictory claims, which had no way of being verified or refuted. Thus we have Allan Quatermain's wife being senselessly killed through the agency of one who worshipped her above all else. This view of the poor allotment parceled out to us humans remained with him throughout his life.

Yet there was worse to come. In 1891, six years after Rider Haggard had indisputably attained the position of one of the world's most successful writers, his only son tragically died of measles at the age of 11 when his parents were in Mexico. One can only imagine Haggard's grief and reactions on every level. Where was the sense there? What was the point of attaining the pinnacle of success only to have all joy extinguished forever? And, naturally, all this only underscored how he perceived the universe and how he became convinced of the underlying likely futility of it all. Two years later, he wrote The People of the Mist, thus it is no wonder that I sensed something visceral about the book, noticed some commentary between the lines about the worth of destiny. I knew that the book was not merely a well-crafted story, such as the works of Alistair MacLean that I had a fondness for in those days. My reaction was to immediately begin reading and collecting virtually everything Haggard ever wrote.

-->

Thus, not to put too fine a point on it, as one reads Haggard, it is not difficult to read into his works the sense that concrete evidence doesn’t really mean a thing, that contradiction abounded, that there was no such thing as certainty, that irony and fuzziness was the coin of the realm.  Nevertheless you also learned that there was, indeed, a puppet master, without doubt real, who could, and frequently did, produce miracles, and reveled, too, in phenomena that was to a person’s life like peripheral vision was to sight or whispers were to hearing. To experience life was to understand that there was much you couldn’t put your finger on, much that you could not rely on, much that could be interpreted in multifarious ways. It was all well and good to label and categorize and define and limit, but, when push came to shove, there were rules and events that defied logic, yet were nonetheless real. Of course, later on, some of these sorts of notions would be applied to quantum mechanics.

Which brings me to the wonderful character of Zikali the Zulu wizard. Here is how I, or rather Quatermain, described the character in CRUCIBLE: 
 

"I should say here that my acquaintance with Zikali began when I was quite young, hardly a boy, but even then he looked much the same as he did during this encounter, a shriveled dwarf with eyes of fire and an enormous head from which granite white hair fell in lavish braids. I have often thought that this particular posture of his, which I dare say is the only one that I can recall seeing, made him look much like an evil, aberrant toad."

In Haggard's Quatermain novels, regardless of whatever else he was, Zikali was the embodiment of uncertainty. In virtually any conversation with Quatermain, Zikali is always contradicting himself, stating outright that whatever he may have just said was not true, or whatever he did or seemed to do didn’t quite happen as it seemed. With Zikali, there was no such thing as cause and effect, nothing that could logically be relied on.

Zikali from She and Allan

—Maurice Greiffenhagen

Zikali from Child of Storm

—A. C. Michael

It's interesting to note that Hans and Zikali, both sarcastic to a fault, came into being in 1909, the former in the novel Marie and the latter in the novel Child of Storm, the first two novels of Haggard's important Zulu trilogy (concluding with Finished, written six years later in 1915). Apparently, according to Haggard biographer D.S. Higgins, though Marie is chronologically the first volume of the trilogy, it was written second, that is after Child of Storm. 

Thus Haggard needed to create Zikali the Zulu wizard a little time before Hans the Hottentot servant. But once created, both these characters permeated Haggard's work well beyond the author's demise in 1925. It turns out that 1909 was a difficult year for many reasons, financial troubles and family deaths, among them, but perhaps the incident that primarily inspired a need in him to develop two such eccentric characters who were impossible to pin down—who, in fact, would be central to the rest of his fiction career—was the death, by syphilis, of Lilly.

All of which is prefatory, I fear, to the point of this post.  When composing the fifth chapter of CRUCIBLE I wanted the principal characters to be Quatermain, Hans, and Zikali. Furthermore I knew that I was leading Quatermain and Hans to an eventual rendezvous with the Virgin Mary (as mentioned in earlier posts), and I wanted Zikali to presage that meeting for Quatermain. To effect that unveiling, so to speak, I added to Zikali's wizard kit of knucklebones and powders a small prehistoric statuette that, so it is believed, symbolized for early humans The Great Mother (or perhaps a fertility goddess) and was an object of veneration or worship.

From Erich Neumann's
The Great Mother
(Princeton University Press)

So we see that in Chapter Five of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire, which is titled "The Introduction As Told By Allan Quatermain," I introduced Hans and Zikali. Hans is essential to my plot and Zikali's spirit is implicitly conjoined to Quatermain throughout.

In Post No. 14, I will discuss the sixth chapter of my novel, which is titled, oddly enough, "Chapter One: Allan's Unwanted Guests." And it is in this chapter that I finally introduce Sherlock Holmes! Some readers of this blog that is titled "Sherlock Holmes Meets Allan Quatermain" have doubtlessly wondered about his apparent absence in this discussion, but I hope to offer some explanation of Holmes role in my novel in my next post.

Post No. 12—Fifth Chapter, Part 1

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

 Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

Copyright © 2012 by Thos. Kent Miller

All rights reserved

   [Note: These posts are sequential, each building on the previous. 

I suggest beginning at the beginning by scrolling down and clicking on "older posts" or by using the Blog Archive to the right to locate 

Post No. 1 in July.]

From The Ivory Child

—Hookway Cowles

From "Silver Blaze"

—Sidney Paget

 







The Fifth Chapter,
Part One

Post No. 12 focuses on the fifth chapter of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire, which is titled "Introduction by Allan Quatermain." This chapter is the first to be written in the voice of Allan Quatermain, whose memoir comprises the principal part of this book. Actually it is a tale told to Dr. Watson and Frederick Church and which Watson (nimble as he was in such matters) sets down on paper. It is also in this chapter that Quatermain introduces his man-servant,  Hans.

My assumption is that that readers of this blog have some background on Quatermain, just as they would have some on Sherlock Holmes. However, I include a few basic Quatermain facts in Note No. 1 below. Also it has been my intent that the assortment of Quatermain drawings I've included in these posts ought to convey a sense of the man.

My favorite character in the whole Quatermain universe is Hans the Hottentot. In fact, whatever else my novel is (and it is lots of things), it was a reason to resurrect the little Hottentot and throw a spotlight on this vastly important but vastly neglected literary character.

An Aside in the Form of Some Historical Perspective
Hans was of the indigenous ethnic group generally identified today as the Khoikhol [who were pastoralists, as opposed to the related group known as Bushmen who were hunter-gatherers—both groups speaking Khoi, a clicking language]. However, in Haggard's novels Hans was identified as a Hottentot [which some now consider a pejorative] and he was introduced in Marie in 1912 [actually written in 1909].  However, we can rest assured, I think, that Haggard didn't write the word "Hottentot" as a pejorative. Quatermain's respect for Hans [thus Haggard's] was far too detailed and important to allow for any intentionally dismissive or racially derogative appellations [see Note 2 below]. Furthermore, despite a number of illogical accusations of racism by uninformed critics, H. Rider Haggard was not in any way a bigot [see Note 3 below]. By the way, I imagine this drawing from the New York Public Library conveys an idea of Hans' appearance when he was aide-de-camp to Allan's father—when Allan was but a child.)

Drawing of a "Hottentot" 
carrying a gun. (1853)
New York Public Library

A Bit of Background Pertaining to the Birth of Hans

H. Rider Haggard began Allan Quatermain's career in 1885 with King Solomon's Mines . . . and then killed him off two years later in 1887 in Allan Quatermain. 1888 saw the publication of the first of the many "found" manuscripts that would constitute the remainder of Allan's opus—the novella Maiwa's Revenge, which was followed the next year (1889) by another novella Allan's Wife. (There were also three short stories published in this period.)

Then Haggard put Allan Quatermain on a shelf for 23 years!  During that period, Haggard wrote around 40 books (both fiction and nonfiction), but nothing involving Quatermain.

Then, from 1912 until his death in 1925, of his 18 published books, 10 were Allan Quatermain chapters. There was an excellent reason why Haggard resurrected Quatermain just then. Haggard's popularity (once immense) by 1910 had been in decline and his new books didn't sell nearly as well as his first romances. Thus, according to Haggard's biographers, his publishers began clamoring for more Quatermain books, as they felt that they were assured profits from such novels. Also, Haggard, whose financial obligations had been mounting for years at the same time his publishing royalties had been significantly declining, complied.

Of those ten new Quatermain books, six featured Hans: Marie, The Holy Flower (1915), The Ivory Child (1916), She and Allan (1921), Heu-Heu, or the Monster (1924), and The Treasure of the Lake (1926).

In any case, we see that Allan Quatermain as a character existed for a quarter of a century before Haggard found it necessary to invent Hans. (Actually, Haggard wrote Marie in 1909, though it was published three years later.) (And, yes, while it is true that a Hottentot named Hans did appear in the short story "Hunter Quatermain's Story" in 1885, that particular Hans died a terrible death in that story, and therefore could not have been the same Hans.)

Why, then, did Haggard create Hans? Foil, in the dramatic sense? Foil, in the design sense? Comic sidekick? Conscience? Voice of wisdom? Perhaps all of these. Here it is worth noting that, as a rule, artists have seemed to have avoided portraying Hans, and the topmost drawing above from The Ivory Child (with detail here) is the only illustration of the little Hottentot that I can locate.

Detail from The Ivory Child

—Hookway Cowles

Certainly, Hans was likely modeled on Haggard's South African Zulu servant Mazzoku during Haggard's attachment to the colonial government in the 1870s, which servant was devoted to Haggard and who saved Haggard's life by doggedly seeking the injured man in the wilderness when all others had given up the search as a lost cause.

From Diary of an African Journey: The Return of Rider Haggard
(New York University Press), edited by Stephen Coan

The fact remains, when Haggard created Hans for the novel Marie in 1909, whether he knew it or not, the bulk of Quatermain's adventures were still ahead of the great adventurer. That is, prior to 1909, Quatermain had had only four known adventures (as novels), but from 1909 on the character had 10 more adventures, six of which featured or "co-starred" Hans. In my view, by the time Haggard was writing Marie, he was aware (probably after thinking about it for a quarter of a century) that Quatermain's natural hard-edged pragmatism and skepticism needed to be tempered—in lieu of such other regulars as Captain Good and Henry Curtis whom he wouldn't even meet for decades. By giving Quatermain an apparently small, disreputable, no-account, profoundly superstitious, drunken, old companion, but one whom he'd known and loved since childhood, then every comment that the skeptic Quatermain made could in itself be questioned and commented on by a voice closer to the earth, that is, a voice closer to the conduit of fickle spiritual forces that Haggard knew all to well to be real. 

Furthermore, it was inevitably Hans who saved Quatermain, coaxed Quatermain, taught Quatermain, cajoled Quatermain, reasoned with him, humored him, prepared him, anticipated for him, loved him, tested him, reminded him . . . who was in all ways a shadow extension of Quatermain's personality . . . and without whom, Quatermain may not have survived the endless scrapes he got himself into.  In this light, Hans, in a literary sense, was just as important to Quatermain as Samwise Gamgee was to Frodo, as Frodo would never have succeeded in his mission if Sam hadn't propelled his friend forward over and over and kept him on his course, to the extent of carrying Frodo on his back up the side of Mount Doom!

In this spirit, I wanted to bring Hans back in my novel to explore this complicated relationship, and, frankly, I am more proud of my recreation of Hans than I am of any of my other writing. Naturally, then he is positively central to my follow-up novel Sherlock Holmes at the Dawn of Time; Or, The Adventure of the Star of Wonder, which I hope to publish in time for Christmas 2012, or shortly thereafter.

Post No. 13 will continue my discussion of the fifth chapter, "Introduction by Allan Quatermain"—focusing on Zikali, the dwarf witch doctor known as "The Opener of Roads," or, as King Shaka named him, "The Thing That Never Should Have Been Born."

[Note 1: H. Rider Haggard wrote in his autobiography The Days of My Life:  “ . . . I always find it easy to write of Allan Quatermain, who, after all, is only myself set in a variety of imagined situations, thinking my thoughts and looking at life through my eyes.” That said, Allan Quatermain was the prototype “great white hunter,” who in the early 1880s wrote the enduring memoir King Solomon’s Mines (published in 1885). It is his self-portrayal in that classic that propagated the likes of Jungle Jim, Ramar of the Jungle, and all those rifle-toting, safari-leading heroes such as Clark Gable in Mogambo, Gregory Peck in The Macomber Affair, John Wayne in Hatari, and even Pete Postlethwaite in The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Ernie Hudson in Congo. During the period 1881 to 1884, mostly during his retirement at his estate, the Grange, in Yorkshire, England, he wrote and subsequently left behind (all except the last), the following works that constitute an informal autobiography: Allan’s Wife, Marie, Child of Storm, “A Tale of Three Lions,” Maiwa’s Revenge, “Hunter Quatermain’s Story,” “Long Odds,” The Holy Flower, Heu-Heu or the Monster, She and Allan, The Treasure of the Lake, The Ivory Child, Finished, “Megepa the Buck,” King Solomon’s Mines, The Ancient Allan, Allan and the Ice Gods, and Allan Quatermain.]

[Note 2: I have chosen to place here passages from two works that feature Hans, She and Allan and The Ivory Child, and which describe Hans in some detail not only in a physical manner but also in terms of his relationship to Quatermain.

She and Allan: “Hans, I should say, was that same Hottentot who had been the companion of most of my journeyings since my father’s day. He was with me when as a young fellow I accompanied Retief to Dingaan’s kraal, and like myself, escaped the massacre . . . .

“One good quality he had, however; no man was ever more faithful, and perhaps it would be true to say that neither man nor woman ever loved me, unworthy, quite so well.

“In appearance he rather resembled an antique and dilapidated baboon; his face was wrinkled like a dried nut and his quick little eyes were bloodshot. I never knew what his age was, any more than he did himself, but the years had left him tough as whipcord and absolutely untiring. Lastly he was perhaps the best hand at following a spoor that ever I knew and up to a hundred and fifty yards or so, a very deadly shot with a rifle . . . .”

The Ivory Child: “The truth is that after the death of Hans . . . there was no more spirit in me. For quite a long while I did not seem to care at all what happened to me or to anybody else. We buried him with honor and when the earth was thrown over his little yellow face I felt as though half my past had departed with him into that hole. Poor drunken old Hans, where in the world shall I find such another man as you were? Where in the world shall I find so much love as filled the cup of that strange heart of yours?

“I dare say it is a form of selfishness, but what everyman desires is something that cares for him alone, which is just why we are so fond of dogs. Now Hans was a dog with a human brain and he cared for me alone . . . . Now Hans never cared for any living creature, or for any human hope or object, as he cared for me. There was no man or woman whom he would not have cheated, or even murdered for my sake. There was no earthly advantage, down to that of life itself, that he  would  not . . . forgo for my sake . . . . That is love in excelsis, and the man who has succeeded in inspiring it in any creature, even in a low, bibulous, old Hottentot, may feel proud indeed. At least I am proud and as the years go by the pride  increases, as  the hope  grows  that  somewhere . . . I may find the light of Hans’s love burning like a beacon in the darkness, as he promised I should do, and that it may guide and warm my shivering, new-born soul before I dare the adventure of the Infinite.”]

[Note 3:  H. Rider Haggard in many of his African novels, especially in his Allan Quatermain stories and in NADA THE LILY (1892) conveys a sense of the Zulu empire in the early 1800s. Many readers and critics today may harp on perceived "PC" indiscretions, but that is hardly fair, as Haggard's works need to be viewed in the light and lens of the Victorian era when most of his stories were composed. Also his fiction was written in an era of the British Empire in transition, and there was much political passion both pro and con on the subject in the air at the time. Beyond that, Haggard was about as fair minded as a Victorian male could be at that time. One cannot in all fairness call him racist or sexist or imperialist or anti-imperialist. He was an entertainer who. like Arthur Conan Doyle, often also tried to present the sense of places far off in time and space. NADA THE LILY was notable because Haggard tried to recreate the rise and fall of the Zulu Empire completely from the point of view of a Zulu warrior—without a single European character in the main narrative.]

Post No. 11—Fourth Chapter, Part 2

The Writing of One Novel 

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

 Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

Copyright © 2012 by Thos. Kent Miller

All rights reserved

   [Note: These posts are sequential, each building on the previous. 

I suggest beginning at the beginning by scrolling down and clicking on "older posts" or by using the Blog Archive to the right to locate 

Post No. 1 in July.]

From "The Speckled Band"

—Sidney Paget

From The Ivory Child

—Hookway Cowles

The Fourth Chapter,
Part Two

This post is a continuation of Post No. 10 and offers a bit more insight into the fourth chapter of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire, which is entitled "Foreword by John H. Watson, M.D." 

Since the entire chapter occurs in the sitting room of Frederic Church's ornate hilltop home that he named Olana, it would be worthwhile to say a few words about Olana. After more than two decades of standing in the limelight and being considered amongst the finest landscape painters in America, by the mid-1870s two things happened that resulted in Church's career winding down. On one hand, fickle public taste had moved on and the Hudson River School was no longer in vogue or respected. On the other, Church became afflicted with rheumatism to the degree that it was difficult to hold a paintbrush. It was around this time that he designed and built his home that overlooked the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains, locales that had inspired many of the practitioners of the Hudson River School. He went out of his way to give Olana a Persian character, as you can see here. The first snapshot is taken from Google Earth and offers a unique perspective. The second and third photos are ones that I took while visiting Olana in 1995. As we reside in California and I seldom get to the east coast, while my wife was attending a business conference in Providence, Rhode Island, I took a side trip—virtually a pilgrimage!—to Olana, which wasn't too far distant.

Olana as seen in Google Earth.

The entrance to Olana

(Photo by Thos. Kent Miller.)

Olana's broad balcony overlooking the Hudson River.

(Photo by Thos. Kent Miller.)

I explained in the last post that two of Frederic Church's classic Hudson River School paintings inspired Allan Quatermain to recall an adventure he had in Ethiopia exactly nine years earlier. It should be noted that the painting of Petra was permanently installed above the fireplace in Church's sitting room. Here is the very room in which Quatermain enraptured Church and Watson in January 1981 during an all-night marathon recounting of his Ethiopian adventure.

 The sitting room of the Church home.
 (Photo from the brochure 
 "Treasures from Olana")

The other painting, that of Constantinople, was in a back corner of the room just then so that Church could observe it in different lighting than his studio. It was Quatermain's catching site of this second painting in juxtaposition with the Petra scene that resulted in his telling his tale that constitutes CRUCIBLE.

Church built his home in a particular orientation relative to his grounds and gardens to literally frame the real-life views of the river and mountains rather as though they were landscape paintings. When he was alive, he maintained those framed views carefully for maximum effect. Even today, the view from the broad balcony gives an idea of what it must have been like in Church's day. Here I have pieced together two snapshots to clumsily approximate the view from the balcony of the winding Hudson River:

View to the Hudson River from Olana.

(Photos by Thos. Kent Miller.)

AN UNPARDONABLE ASIDE: Insofar as I had never visited Providence before, wild horses couldn't keep me from seeking out H.P. Lovecraft's home at 598 Angell Street, where he wrote his early stories.

Thos. Kent Miller at the front door of 598 Angell Street. How many thousands of times did HPL
stride up and down those stairs and pass through that door? (Photo by Jayne Miller.)

And, naturally, since we were in the neighbourhood, my family paid a visit to Swan Point Cemetery:

Photo by Thos. Kent Miller

Post No. 12 will focus on the fifth chapter, titled "Introduction as Told by Allan Quatermain." This chapter is written in the voice of Allan Quatermain and introduces his man-servant, the Hottentot Hans, who I believe plays much the same sort of role in half a dozen Quatermain novels as Sam does in The Lord of the Rings.