Another Arkham Sampler has arrived on Archive.org as a crisp scan. The Arkham Sampler #5 (Winter 1949) was a big science-fiction special. The first 28 pages or so consist of a dense round-table by-mail to determine the most essential starter science-fiction to 1949, novels or anthologies.
I see high praise there for The Amphibians / The World Below (1929) by S. Fowler Wright. On looking him up I was amazed to find him a local lad from the West Midlands. Somehow I had missed learning that fact, over the years.
S. Fowler Wright was born in Holly Street, Smethwick, an industrial town jammed between Birmingham and the even more industrial Black Country, in my own West Midlands of England. He would have come of age in Smethwick and Birmingham in circa 1890, at age 16, and amid the bustle of Empire he took up a mundane but lucrative career as an accountant. Like Tolkien he went to King Edward’s School in New Street, Birmingham. Like Tolkien he loathed the growing car-culture in England, and its many deleterious effects. He was a conservative activist, in the staunchly pro civil-liberties, pro procreation and anti big-business mould which might be pithily summed up as “freedom, family, and fuck off” and which today would more politely referred to as old-school libertarian. From what I read, intellectually he appears to have been one of those rare ‘conservative anarchs’ that so puzzle the pigeon-holers.
A fine verse translator of Dante and erotic verse, and writer of a vast Arthurian poem (lost in a bombing raid, rewritten in old age), he was a founder of the Empire Poetry League, the editor of its journal Poetry and The Play from 1917-1932, and operator of its press. Accounts of his life are scarce and very patchy, but one account says he founded the League, possibly with the support of Chesterton who was a member. He edited a large number of anthologies, including one for children, several for the League, and The County Series of Contemporary Poetry.
He turned to self-publishing his novels from 1927, which paid off when he sold his disaster book Deluge (1927) to Hollywood for a 1933 movie version. J.E. Clare Mcfarlane (linked above) states the book sold one hundred thousand copies via book clubs, and thus “earned him the active animosity of established publishers” and that these publishers were instrumental in the demise of the Empire Poetry League.
He passed away in 1965 and is thus not public domain in the UK. But all his works are now all online for free in good HTML, presumably from one of his descendants who holds the rights. On this site one can find his son talking of Empire League meetings held at “our home in Handsworth Wood” in the early 1920s. In which case his accountancy work must have enabled him to escape grimy Smethwick. Nearby Handsworth Wood is in suburban north-west Birmingham. Although at that time Handsworth Wood was said to be almost as grimy as Smethwick and, long-since denuded of its wood, it would only become leafy again many decades later. This new home appears to have been a product of his second marriage to a young wife in 1920, and once settled in he started writing some wild science fiction with The Amphibians (1924). This became the first part of The World Below.
After 1930, as the Great Depression took hold, he produced a long string of popular crime mysteries under a pen name. These are said to be pot-boilers but it would be interesting to know to what extent he might have used Birmingham as a backdrop. He appears to have had some national fame toward the end of the 1930s, and the list of his books suggests he may have been a part of the debates about the divestment of the British colonies, and perhaps about the state of traditional British liberties. He doesn’t seem to have been the sort of man who would hold back on robust ‘letters to the editor’ or ‘op-eds’, either, of the type found leavening the poetry in his journal Poetry and The Play. He broadcast on the radio, and visited Germany in 1934 to write a series of newspaper articles for The Sunday Despatch. He also wrote for the London Evening Standard and The Daily Mirror. Brian Stapleford noted that The Daily Express called him one of “the ten best brains in Britain” in the 30s, and that was back when the Express was worth something and not the vile gutter-rag it is today.
In 1965 Sam Moskowitz surveyed his long out-of-print works and compared him to Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged), though presumably for the libertarian sentiments expressed his fiction rather than for his outright political writing. Moskowitz’s essay can’t be obtained online, but apparently he frowned on Wright’s 1930s concerns about easy birth-control and cars. Though this seems exactly the right analysis of the coming forces that would, in short order, fundamentally change traditional society. That Wright became something of a bore about such matters, and that such forces were triumphant by the time Moskowitz was writing, doesn’t mean that Wright wasn’t both prescient and correct.
What of Lovecraft? Despite Lovecraft’s awareness of the British scene it seems the master only became aware of Wright’s novels in 1933, when he writes in a letter that…
Another gift was the fairly recent scientifictional novel The World Below, by S. Fowler Wright.
Lovecraft would, however, have seen stories like “Automata” and “The Rat” in Weird Tales in 1929, and possibly others elsewhere, and thus must have been aware of him as a story writer. There’s slight later evidence that Lovecraft considered him one of only three ‘masters’ still writing, but I can find no more precise evaluation that that. What posterity would give, to have a few in-depth book reviews of such authors from Lovecraft.
Like most Chestertonian conservative thinkers of the 1930s, as an intellectual Wright appears to have been swept away by the war and forgotten by the late 1950s. Though his key fiction lasted a little longer, with affordable Galaxy Novel reprints in the USA in 1950 for The Amphibians / The World Below, followed by a Panther paperback reprint in the UK in 1954.
An article by his son recalls that during the war his father ran a literary and distribution agency in Fetter Lane, London, but it was soon bombed out and he then opened a large bookshop selling new books, opposite the British Museum. In 1951 this moved to Kensington High Street and lasted until 1954, closed by a fog of post-war restrictions and the mass takeup of television.
After the war he was largely known as a prolific crime mystery novelist. But it seems quite possible he was not entirely forgotten by some as a historical novelist. After the science-fiction classic The World Below (1929) he had published Elfwin: A Novel of Anglo-Saxon Times (1930, re-subtitled ‘A Romance of History’ in the U.S.), a stirring novel of Ethelflaeda of Mercia. Apparently this was his first historical novel, and he drew on his own locality and its most famous female warrior — ancient Mercia more or less maps onto the modern West Midlands, albeit with an extension to Northumbria. The 1930 date suggests a novel written at the height of his powers, and probably side-by-side with The World Below, but the couple of science fiction historians who have considered his works focus on his Wellsian scientific romances and Elfwin goes unmentioned.
Yet a couple of asides suggest Elfwin once gave him the most acclaim from the mainstream, before such books went out of fashion in the 1960s, as a quality and brisk historical novel with what are said to be many heroic supporting characters. Though the central heroine is apparently rather annoying to modern readers for much of the novel. At least Elfwin is also said to lack most of the author’s usual digressive asides and hobby-horse speeches. One thus wonders if the new breed of sword & sorcery historians might find something of interest in this novel, even though it lacks the required sorcery? Also, it seems difficult to imagine that Tolkien did not read the novel circa 1930-33, as he was likewise fascinated by ancient Mercia. Admittedly it had no reprint after 1930, but presumably it must have sold well and could thus be found in used bookshops and public libraries into the 1950s. There is also some evidence that he continued to self-publish his best works as reprints after the war, since Silverberg states he had his signed copy of The World Below direct from England that way.
His authentic Biblical epic novel David (1934), which includes military campaigns and is said to be the best of his historical novels, may also bear some investigation by sword and sorcery historians.
There may be yet another local aspect to his work. Sampling a few fragments of his more local satirical fiction, one immediately catches the wry tone of Arnold Bennett. We might assume that this south Staffordshire author read and admired the best local work of north Staffordshire’s Bennett (Five Towns series, The Card, “Simon Fuge”, etc), as well as the early H.G. Wells. Arnold Bennett was on The Evening Standard, a paper with which Wright was associated and for which he wrote, so there could be a personal connection there.
The only book on Fowler Wright appears to be the short survey monograph that forms #51 in the Milford Series, 1994, and which is not yet on Archive.org. His entry on the Science Fiction Encyclopedia usefully boxes up and signposts his imaginative and detective series for potential readers, though largely steers clear of specifying the politics.
Brian Stapleford published a late novel, The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below (2009), forming a third part after The Amphibians and The World Below. There are hints that this is based on a loose outline by Wright himself, though I can’t find any reviews of The World Beyond that might confirm this. Audible also has The World Below: A Novel of the Far Future as a 9-hour audiobook released in 2012, read from an edition “edited by Brian Stableford”. One thus assumes Stableford went through the text and created a definitive error-free version for the 2012 reading.
Good Kindle .mobi versions of the 1950 Galaxy Novel reprints of The Amphibians / The World Below are free here.
