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.