Hodgson - The Sea Fiction (1)
When Hodgson’s School of Physical Culture closed in 1902 he took to writing for popular magazines. The pay was not always great but there were hundreds of magazines and more or less anything written with a dash of gusto by a literate person was always going to warrant publication. Hodgson was certainly literate; he had been educated to a high standard and had, to an extent, stepped down a class by taking an apprenticeship, let alone going to sea. The last thing he lacked was gusto. His articles sold. By 1904 he had added fiction to his repertoire with the story ‘The Goddess of Death’ in the April issue of the Royal Magazine. Literally dozens more stories followed, often set at sea. His first novel, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), epitomised the genre – shipwrecked sailors terrorised by bizarre marine life forms. Genre fiction it certainly was but it should always be remembered that this was Hodgson’s genre. No one else had written anything quite like it before.
Like many first-time novelists Hodgson made the mistake of combining something he knew very well – sailing ships – with something about which he knew next to nothing, namely history. The result brought sarcasm from the reviewer of the Manchester Courier (Friday March 6 1908, page 9):
“To judge by The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ the earth has lost some mysterious regions during the last century and a half. In the year 1757, according to Mr William Hope Hodgson, one John Winterstraw was shipwrecked ‘in the unknown seas to the southward,’ seas so entirely unknown that no chart can identify them. The flora and fauna of the region are equally irreconcilable with anything known to modern biology, and it is a pity that no specimens were brought back to give a clue to the affinities. In Homer such tales have a fascination all their own, and in the mendacious journals of early travellers they can be read with amusement, but only a double portion of humour or art – both of which are lacking in the present instance – can justify an author in harking back to the methods of bygone days.”
The Aberdeen Journal (Wednesday October 3, page 3) was much more supportive, concluding: “The old style of narration is well sustained, but fails a little towards the end. The method greatly deepens the realistic impression made by the story. It is a weird and fascinating novel, ingeniously conceived and written. We found it quite impossible to leave the book unfinished after we had commenced it.”
Adopting the archaic narrative voice had worked well for Poe and would work again for Lovecraft, but the truth is Hodgson always struggled to find a persuasive voice in his long form fiction. The stilted and artificial can be effective in a short story; in a full-length novel it soon becomes irksome. Again, Poe is the example. The master of the short story failed dismally with his solitary novel, ironically enough another first-person story of the sea. Even the author tired of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) and left it unfinished. The voice of “John Winterstraw, Gent” is nowhere near so tiresome or prolix, yet it still fails to convince.
“Now, it being day, the bo’sun bade us make such sparse breakfast as our provender allowed; after which, having first scanned the banks to discern if any fearful thing were visible, we took again to our oars, and proceeded on our upward journey.” (The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’. London, Chapman and Hall, 1907, Chapter I ‘The Land of Lonesomeness’)
Even Lovecraft, who considered Hodgson “second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality,” had to admit that “an inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.” (H P Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927))
