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

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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.

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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.