Up to Eleven
“Shiel is probably a kind of genius,” wrote Eudora Welty in the New York Times in 1944, reviewing an anthology of Weird fiction edited by August Derleth.[1] Unlike other authors included in Derleth’s volume, such as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Robert Bloch, however, the literary career of Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865 – 1947) was not initially connected with American pulp magazines, but rather with the Weird’s fin-de-siècle British origins. Shiel’s early writings were serialized in British magazines and some were released in book form by the publisher of the Decadent Yellow Book quarterly. Shiel’s extreme style and apocalyptic themes, as well as the whiff of mystery that clung to his person during his life and after, have endeared him to select literary cognoscenti from Welty to Lovecraft.[2]
Yet, even among the writers associated with the Weird, Shiel achieves a distinctive intensity of style, almost to the point of self-mockery or mental breakdown. Part of the pathos—and bathos—of the Weird is its juxtaposition of supernatural experiences that are said to induce wordless terror beyond the capacity of the human mind to process, and the delight of its writers in words—elaborate, baroque outpourings of words. Shiel offers a limit case in the particular pleasures of this contradiction.
For instance, one of his most highly regarded stories, “Vaila,” takes place in a cursed, centuries old mansion that is really a single, enormous brass bell rung to the limit of endurable sound by a once-in-a-lifetime hurricane. This bizarre architectural folly works as a figure for the story’s style and vocabulary. Shiel relates that “rags of the storm, irrageous by way of the orifice in the shattered dome, now blustered with hoiden wantonness through the house,” and “tapestries flapped and trailed wildly out after the flying house like the streaming hair of some ranting fakeer stung gyratory by the gadflies and tarantulas of distraction.” “This is jaunting on the scoriac tempests and reeling bullions of hell!” cries the narrator. Shiel may remind one of Poe here, but, to quote Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, it is Poe taken up to eleven.[3]
In the 1890s, while publishing short stories in the mode of “Vaila” and the cases of a fin-de-siecle detective named Zalesky, Shiel also responded to the British demand for serial fiction focusing on current events and extrapolating sensationally from developments in politics, finance, industry, military technology, the clash of empires and peoples—sometimes in the form of the “future war” genre. This included Shiel’s adventure tale about a military invasion from Asia, serialized in Pearson’s Weekly and published in book form in 1899 as The Yellow Danger: The Story of the World’s Greatest War.
From these efforts he would move on to his most famous work, The Purple Cloud, serialized and then published in book form in 1901. This tale begins with an expedition to discover the North Pole (“that insidious habit,” as Chesterton once put it). Yet it is typical of Shiel to take one extreme sort of narrative—the polar journey—and then take it “up to eleven” by turning it into an even more extreme sort of narrative, here what many consider the pinnacle of the “last man” genre. Because Shiel’s narrator is at the pole, he is spared from an eruption of volcanic gas that kills everyone else on the planet. He returns to England to find it overrun with foreigners who had sought to escape the poison, all now as dead as the English natives—the corpse-choked streets an uncanny vision of both foreign invasion and mass extinction through gas. He goes to the house of Shiel’s real-life friend Arthur Machen and finds the writer dead at his escritoire.
Yet even this turn of events does not capture the progressively more megalomaniacal imagination of the book and its Adamic narrator. (His name is Adam, in fact.) Untethered from all social context and equipped with a state-of-the-art military ship, Adam amuses himself by burning down cities. Nagasaki is incinerated in Shiel’s mind a half century before the Fat Man was dropped, along with San Francisco, Constantinople, Calcutta, Peking, Paris. Adam’s utter solitude inspires at times a wild religiosity, and he constructs an elaborate golden temple to a God only he can worship. And, when he discovers the only other survivor, he must decide whether to repropagate the species with his Eve, or give humanity the final burial he is sure it deserves.
The Purple Cloud was published with a framing device that presents the novel as one of four notebooks containing transcriptions of the apocalyptic visions of a hypnotist’s patient. This serves to link The Purple Cloud—described in the frame story as notebook number three—with two of Shiel’s other novels: The Last Miracle, published in 1906 and listed here as notebook one, and The Lord of the Sea, first published in book form in 1901 and listed here as notebook two. The frame narrator also mentions a fourth notebook, “judged unsuitable to publication.”[4]
A Fantasia on the Jewish Question
The Lord of the Sea is a political fantasia on what writers of the time called the Jewish Question, the debate over what, if any, ought to be the place of the Jews in the modern world. Shiel’s book is both prescient and ridiculous, by turns antisemitic, philosemitic, and messianic, sometimes all at once. It promotes the conspiratorial idea of Jews as the sinister and powerful manipulators of international politics and finance—and also as exiles, victims, and pariahs. Reimagining major international events of the time concerning the Jews—above all the project of Zionism under the political leadership of Theodor Herzl, as well as the ongoing success of antisemitism as a mass political movement—the book is a grotesque funhouse mirror distortion of Zionist landmarks such as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Herzl’s The Jewish State. It is an extraordinary resume of English literary antisemitism and philosemitism, all in the form of an improbable, frenetic cliffhanger serial. In what follows, I offer an analytical summary of the novel, and then attempt to place it in the context of, first, its time, and second, its author’s life and oeuvre.[5]
From the start, the novel registers, at times even celebrates, the reality of modern antisemitism in terms of both mass violence and mass politics. Though, historically speaking, the second modern wave of mass violence against Jews in Russia would not begin until 1903 (the first having occurred in the 1880s), Shiel’s novel begins with popular anti-Jewish uprisings leading to the massacres of the Jews of Prague and Budapest. This is followed by a decision on the part of Austria to expel its entire Jewish population, which accurately reflects the real-life strength of antisemitism as a mass political movement in that country, though Shiel notably finds the Jews responsible for the hatred directed against them, writing that “the Jews had gradually acquired one half of the land of the Empire, and had mortgages on the other half” (15). Europe is swept by the passage of “Anti-Semite laws” (15)—“It was like hosts of terriers let loose into a thousand Ghettos of rats” (15)—and expels its Jews, who all pour into England.
No resistance can be mounted to this invasion, “for in a jiffy nearly every British newspaper was in the ownership, or the pay, of Jews” (16). Shiel again imagines the Jews as the ultimate landowners, real estate passing into Jewish hands with magical swiftness, while the suddenly impoverished English “people could not get at the land to make things: they had only sea and air” (17). The two main political parties in Britain, Liberal and Tory, become known respectively as the “Jewish and Anti-Jewish” (49) parties, reflecting their stance on this Jewish domination of England, and the extent of each party’s control by Jews.[6]
Shiel’s Jews are predatory, conniving, and outlandishly alien. Absurdly, they walk around in phylacteries and use knives for kosher slaughtering as weapons. The epitome of Shiel’s Jewish invasion is the character of Baruch Frankl, a villain who reprises English literature’s Jewish monsters from Shylock to Svengali. Frankl destests “these Goyim vermin” (81), and of himself says: “I can twist like an eel, I am deep, I am tricky. I never yet met the man that I couldn’t hoodwink. Ninety-nine per cent of what I say is a lie: even when it is the truth, it is a lie just the same” (97). Frankl purchases an extensive tract of ancestral English farmland, and decrees that all its male inhabitants must now wear a tasseled fez, thus orientalizing and humiliating the English yeomanry. Police and banks do his bidding, though he is a whining coward when personally threatened.[7]
Frankl has carnal designs on the lovely Margaret Hogarth. Margaret’s brother Richard, the novel’s hero who has already challenged Frankl by refusing to wear the fez, thrashes the Jewish landlord with a riding crop (on the Jewish sabbath to boot) for making advances to his sister. What is more, Richard has fallen in love with Frankl’s daughter Rebekah. A paragon of exotic and bejeweled Jewish femininity, Rebekah is described as one of those “half-mythical queens of Egypt and Babylon, resplendent with a rather barbarous superfluity of diamonds” (32), and later as looking “like a Nubian woman, with that retreat of the Israelitish, balanced hips. Her ears stretched with their weight of diamond, and all her neck and bosom blazed with pendants” (104). Her presence “suggested the gaudy heat of the Orient, ancient rites, Baal and Astarté, and orgies of Hindoo women in temples of Parvati, with Phoenician Queens, Sidon and Alexandria, and the pale passion of Bacchantes” (104).
The vengeful Frankl is determined to destroy Richard. After pronouncing a Jewish curse on him (“In a fireplace were some old ashes: [Frankl] took up a pinch, and cast it into the air” (32), the same practice H. Rider Haggard attributes to the Jews in the novel Red Eve), Frankl withdraws an enormous amount from the county bank in order to create a liquidity problem that freezes Richard’s life savings, and then frames Richard for murder by depositing a corpse in his vicinity. Richard is thus reduced to penury and sent to prison. Shiel, having enlisted in his plot both Jewish control of banking and a kind of blood libel (the discovery of a corpse was historically used as a pretext to accuse local Jews of ritual murder), further extends his imagination of Jewish perfidy by having Frankl kidnap Margaret and commit her to a Jewish-run mental institution where she is brainwashed into thinking she is a Jew named Rachel Oppenheimer. The novel thus blends antisemitic stereotypes from Shakespeare to du Maurier with a particular fascination with non-Jews being turned into Jews—or revealed as Jews, as it turns out.
For Richard Hogarth is an unusual individual. Though still young, he has already had several careers, running away from school as a boy to work as a blacksmith, then becoming a sailor, more recently a preacher, and (with a mysterious power) a healer. He is able to grasp the most difficult philosophies as well as higher mathematics as soon as he turns his attention to them. His friend Loveday, an English writer in love with Margaret, finds that Richard’s physique “hints of adventurous Columbuses, Drakes, nimble Achilles” while his presence conjures “images of Moses, blind old Homers—prophet, lawgiver, poet” (62). Notably, Richard’s racial physiognomy is un-English. He has brown skin “almost as an Oriental,” lips “almost negroid in their thick pout,” and, “very beautiful and strange” brown eyes (28).
Though the fact has been kept secret from him, Richard is a Jew. Raised by the elder Hogarth, his mother was a Jew who had an affair with “a great Jew millionaire” (35) named Sir Solomon Spinoza, leading to his birth. But Richard is the “good” kind of Jew, the only unambiguous one in the book, in fact. With its secret Jewish parentage plot, Shiel adds George Eliot’s sentimentally philosemitic Daniel Deronda to his list of referents, typically pushing his source material to even further extremes. Richard is a super-Deronda, preternaturally talented and charismatic; Loveday tells him, “you could become the King of any world you chose” (63).
As he is unaware of his Jewish parentage, there is irony in Richard’s speech at a local political meeting. Richard proclaims himself sympathetic to the Anti-Jew party, and tells the audience “I really shouldn’t send any Jew into Parliament, if I were you” (52). As it reprises so much in fin-de-siècle discourse on the Jews, I will quote at length from Richard’s speech and its diagnosis of and solution to the “Jewish Question,” with audience reactions in parentheses.
I don’t forget who wrote the Bible, friends, nor that the Jews have certainly been the noblest people that ever breathed. (Cheers, and Oh, Oh!) Have been—but are not. And why are they not? Because, friends, they are not at the present day natural, spontaneous products of the world—they are tropical trees growing in a polar climate, Asiatics growing in Europe, and not growing prettily. They are shepherds doing money-lending, and not doing it with that natural grace which natural products have. That they do it so successfully is proof of their immense racial worth. But they have got spoiled by Europe; and they have spoiled Europe. (Uproar.) I don’t know if I make myself clear. Last year, friends, I was up in London, and in a place called Piccadilly I saw a black man. He was dressed up, I won’t say like a lord, but much more so. He had more collar than throat, more eyeglass than insight, more shirt than bosom. (Laughter.) Friends, he was not a pretty fellow. I said to myself: “How much nicer he would look, if he wore a scarlet robe, or somehow made himself look a natural, instead of an unnatural product!” But no—he must put on European dress, and, in his straining effort to be European, he went beyond, and put on more than the Europeans themselves! Very repulsive! Well, the same thing has happened to the Jews. Under the stress of circumstances, these agriculturalists have put on European commercial ideas—but more so than the Europeans themselves, owing to their innate powers of mind, and their straining effort. Most repulsive, unnatural, like the Piccadilly black man! And Europe, feeling this acquired repulsiveness of their race, without knowing its secret, has for ages hated them—each persecution only causing an increase of their straining effort to be European, and, as a consequence, of their repulsiveness. (52-53)
This speech reflects Zionist analyses of the modern Jewish condition, including Herzl’s The Jewish State, along with both antisemitic and philosemitic writings purporting to diagnose the reasons for Jewish difference and anti-Jewish hatred. In the book’s biggest foreshadowing of its ending, Richard continues: “If I were King of England to-morrow, one of my first acts would be to send the whole congregated race packing out of our country into a land by themselves—why not into Palestine, their own land?” (53)
In his speech, Richard also emphasizes that “the Jews are the least part of our trouble,” a trouble that “was here before the Jews came” (53). What he means is the state of affairs in which land and resources are so unevenly dispersed, so that a country like England with all its space and abundance of nourishment, is still witness to hunger, suffering, and simmering class resentment. This is not the fault of the Jews, he observes. Richard discovers his chief and burning mission in the course of his reflections while in prison: a system of collective land-ownership that he believes will end world poverty, inequality, and exploitation. But to impose this on England and the world he will need more power than has ever before been available to a single individual.
After a fantastically complicated prison escape, Richard arrives in London and makes to disguise himself, thus continuing Shiel’s theme of racial and cultural disguise, the Judaizing of the English and the Anglicizing of the Jews. Richard goes to Whitechapel and “his dark brown skin gave him the idea of orientalising himself” (199); he purchases, from a Jewish shop, sandals, a caftan, and Bedouin kaffiye. In his Jewish disguise he fools Frankl and retrieves a fallen meteorite composed entirely of diamond, mentioned earlier in the book. With this, he quickly assumes control of the world’s diamond trade, not by selling his meteorite but by threatening the owners of the world’s largest diamond mines that he will flood the market and ruin them unless they assist him. Indeed, he reveals himself as a genius of world finance. A business associate reports to Frankl: “what you or I learned in a year he learns in an hour” (258).[8]
Richard also sends a series of letters to the governments of the world claiming rights to the ocean as his private property, thereby creating a record of “Priority of Claim,” that is, “the same basis as the title of any private owner to any particular area of the earth’s crust” (251). Though understandably disregarded, these letters provide the legal justification for what he soon makes military and political reality.
With the wealth he has amassed, and using the nation of Ecuador as a front, he commissions the construction of a dozen “sea-forts,” the largest sea vessels ever built, each something like a floating city, impregnable to naval attack and possessing unprecedented firepower. Though at first laughed at as a rich man’s folly—after all, like the Jews, he has no nation of his own and therefore his floating cities can be no military threat—and then enjoyed for the elaborate parties Richard hosts thereon, these sea-forts are soon anchored along the world’s major trade routes. Producing copies of his legal notifications, Richard informs the great powers that their ships are trespassing on his rightful territory—the sea—and will henceforth need to pay him custom tax. The seemingly extra-territorial Richard is actually the ultimate holder of territory on the planet.
As Richard anticipates, the great powers are incapable of coordinating an attack on him, since they are suspicious of any one nation subsequently coming into possession of the most powerful vessels on the planet. England decides to go it alone against Richard, but its attack is a failure as the sea-forts not only have superior gunpower but all the advantage of coastlines in terms of defensive sea mines. Germany, France, and Russia meanwhile take advantage of England’s naval failure in order to combine their forces for the invasion of an undefended England. Richard stops this invasion, both through military power and through his now-supreme control of the world economy, “easily ousting the Rothschilds from old financial kingship” via his genius for currency speculation (333). From England to Japan, Richard “could observe no nation which he could not, by blowing through a tube, or by scribbling a telegram, crush out of recognition” (334).
He imposes a peace on the great powers, and a revolutionary new economic charter in which ownership of territory is held in common by each nation and a “Central Council of the World” (337) will collect land rents and distribute them equitably. Richard believes that, with this new system, war and economic misery will come to an end. Riding a wave of popular support, and with the encouragement of his friend, the Prince of Wales, Richard is even appointed Regent of Britain—effectively becoming the King of England.[9]
Shiel’s Jewish State
The only serious obstacle Richard now faces is the Jews, who oppose what they ironically decry as his violation of British sovereignty, i.e., their economic control of England. Allied with the Tories, the Jews block Richard’s land redistribution bill in parliament. Richard wonders what to do about the Jews, “an alien race in Britain opposing thus daringly not my will only, but the plain will of the people” (399). He spends a sleepless night reflecting on the history and nature of the Jews, his thoughts of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of Abdul the Damned; of tendencies, histories, soils, ports, railways, possibilities, race-genius, analogies, destinies; of Rothschild and Solomon; of Hirsch and Y’hudah Hanassi; of the Jewish Board of Guardians, Rab Asa, and the Targum on the Babylonish Talmud; of the Barbary Jews, the Samaritans, and Y’hudah Halevi; of the Colonial Bank, and the Karaite Jews. (400)
The next day, Richard’s edict of expulsion is announced from Buckingham Palace. Henceforth, “No Jew might own, or work land, or teach in any Cheder or school, or be entered at any Public School or University, or sign any stamped document, or carry on certain trades, or vote, or officiate at any public service, and so on. . .parentage, not religion, constituting a ‘Jew’” (404-405). Though Shiel calls the edict a “piece of Russian despotism,” he notes the “quiet gladness” with which it is received by the English, the mocking shouts of “You hurry up–to Jericho!” that “became the workman’s answer to a Jew” (405).
Yet Richard also provides an old-new home for the exiles: Palestine and Mesopotamia, purchased from the Ottoman Empire. Shiel explains:
The then population of this area was only 200,000 (Arabs, Turks, Jews and Greeks) in the Palestine-finger, omitting the Russian pilgrims to Jerusalem; while in the Mesopotamia-finger—that vast Hinterland of Palestine called “Turkish Armenia”—not 220,000 Armenians had been left by Khurdish rapine and Turkish atrocity. We may therefore say that the whole was an uninhabited land, as it were reserved, ordained, and waiting for inhabitants. (402)
That is, a land without a people for a people without a land, as some proponents of Jewish national restoration in Ottoman Palestine said at the time. Shiel continues his not-altogether-parodic representation of Zionism by having Richard act as a kind of Herzl, even arranging for the necessary economic development of the new Israel, the building of “roads and railways” (402) and the provision of resettlement assistance.
The Jews are not yet cut out for self-governance, however. Although Richard has commanded that the new Jewish state be run with his system of common land ownership, Jewish greed takes over, the few dispossessing the many. The Jews “being not yet a nation, but an unarmed mob” (425), their political situation in greater Palestine deteriorates into violent conflict.
Richard is meanwhile betrayed by his erstwhile associate, a former Catholic priest named O’Hara, who connives with Frankl to sink the sea-forts and reveal Richard’s convict past to the nation. Interestingly, it is not the near simultaneous revelation of Richard’s Jewishness that brings about his political displacement from England, but the news that he is a former criminal. England is convulsed with unrest, and her rivals rattle their sabers. Rather than bring dissension and danger to England, Richard decides that he will leave the land of his birth and join his fellow Jews in their country.
Richard—or Raphael, as he was named at birth—is welcomed by the Jews as their prophesied messiah, and rules the Jewish state as “Shophet” (judge) for sixty years. Under Richard’s rule, and with his political and economic reforms in place, the Jewish state quickly becomes a paradise and the Jews uplifted from their morally fallen condition. Shiel writes that Jewish greed and perfidy were something imposed externally on them by Europe, and that in their own, properly governed country, they return to their ancient, virtuous condition:
Necessity only, like some Circe, had bewitched them into fierce and bestial shapes, ‘sharks’, and ‘bulls’, and ‘bears.’ Mediæval Jews, for example, were barred from all pursuits save commerce. Shylock thus became a Venetian, and ceased to be a Jew: and he was only more Venetian than the Venetians because he had so much more brains, ready to beat them at any game they cared to mention. The real nobler self of Shylock was a vine-dresser or sandal-maker, as the great Hillel was a wood-chopper, David a shepherd, Amos a fig-gatherer, Saul an ass-driver, Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai a silk-maker, Paul a tent-maker, Jesus a carpenter, Spinoza a farmer, and so on. The return to simplicity and and an honest life was, therefore, readily accomplished. (469)
Jewish creativity, prosperity, humanity are truly unleashed now, an even more profound, because sovereign, extension of an already impressive diasporic “succession of wits, Heines, of sages, saints, savants, of inspired mouths, long-lasting pens of iridium, and brushes from the seraph’s wing. . . .For the nation—each man—had a country, secure domain, not hovering uncertain on the weary wing, all landless, harassed by the one effort to keep from pitching headlong into Nowhere” (469-70).[10]
The Jewish state accomplishes extraordinary feats of construction, arts and culture, trade: “ports, irrigation of deserts, resurrection of the Dead Sea, passionate temples piled to the lower clouds around the Perpetual Lamp, and that excessive Orient Art, which, at the Judge’s triennial progresses through all his cone-shaped land, drew world-multitudes to gape at so much pomp” (470). Jerusalem becomes the world’s great cosmopolitan city and Jewish Tyre the world’s largest port. Although in real life the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was not founded until 1918, Shiel describes here how “the University of Jerusalem had already become the chief ganglion of the world’s thought and upward effort” (468).
The humane and moral culture of Israel radiates outward into the world as a whole. “In the Jewish race—the fibre of its soul—was an innate genius for righteousness” (469), writes Shiel. With their own country and the right leader, the civilizational influence of the Jews now brings the entire world to righteousness, Christians finally “abandoning the blood-stained path of Rome” in favor of a truly Christian “mildness and pleasaunce” (471). Through their example, the Jews, as Shiel puts it, effectively “convert Christendom to Christianity” (471).
Shiel ends this messianic vision, and the novel, with the aged Richard standing upon the reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem with its biblical inscription—rendered in the text in actual Hebrew characters: “The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth” (472). It is the festival of “Simcath Torah” (472), the celebration marking the completion of the annual cycle of reading the Pentateuch. Rebekah watches her beloved Richard dance in joy, including a bit of belly dancing (since this is the Orient), and she smirks a bit like Michal did watching King David. She is in the company of Richard’s sister Margaret, who is now married to Loveday. Loveday reflects that Richard is indeed a messiah, by which he means one of those periodic incarnations of humanity’s heavenly genius, a list including King David, King Arthur, Moses, and “Jesus the Oft-Born” (474).
Reading The Lord of the Sea
The Lord of the Sea was at the center of a blistering assessment of Shiel by science fiction critic and historian Sam Moskowitz, first published in his 1963 study Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction. “The Lord of the Sea,” said Moskowitz, “reaches an intensity of anti-Semitism that provokes comparison with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, for which it could have served as an inspiration.” He continues, “Only in his prediction that Palestine would flourish under the Jews does Shiel’s novel show any merit, either in prophecy, prose, or decency.” Reviewing anti-Jewish elements in other works by Shiel, Moskowitz, who was Jewish, judges him to have had a “tendency to a Nazi-like anti-Semitism.”[11]
The antisemitic elements in Shiel’s writing are evident enough, yet as a number of other writers have argued, Moskowitz’s ascription of proto-Nazism to the novel seems crude, ignoring the extent to which the novel draws on a whole host of positions on and notions about the Jews, as well as the intentionally sensationalist and satirical aspects of its narrative. It may be that Moskowitz is in part reacting against what, in a follow-up essay on Shiel, he notes is a surprising inattention to Shiel’s antisemitism and racism in the extant criticism he reviewed. Nevertheless, Moskowitz insists that Shiel is irredeemably “anti-semitic, anti-Christ, anti-Negro, pro-war, anti-oriental, and pro-fascist.” Moskowitz further accuses some Shiel admirers, such as writer James Blish, of themselves being fascist in political orientation.[12]
In general, Moskowitz’s two essays on Shiel are situated, not in the context of turn of the century England, but rather through a post-Holocaust, American perspective. This is not to say that all of Moskowitz’s charges are without foundation, and, as we will see, he was the first critic to see that a key aspect of Shiel’s treatment of Jews was possibly displaced autobiography. Yet Moskowitz is mistaken to see the fin-de-siècle Shiel as out of the ordinary in his hideous depictions—or, we should add, his idealized ones—of the Jews.
The Lord of the Sea is very much a novel of its time. Jews were on the mind of the British Empire: as immigrants swelling the poor population of London’s East End, in the persons of wealthy financiers in Europe and some of the rand lords of South Africa, as victims of shocking mass violence in Czarist Russia, as reminders to Christians of millenarian hopes, and as one of the world’s national minorities seeking independence and sovereignty through the recently launched Zionist movement. Shiel’s novel was contemporary with anti-Jewish polemics such as Joseph Banister’s England Under The Jews (1901), and the claims by economist J. A. Hobson in War in South Africa (1900) that Jews were behind England’s involvement in the Boer War that had broken out in 1899. It was also contemporary with evangelical Christian hopes for Jewish conversion, growing British sympathy for the Zionist movement, and the 1903 proposal to create a Jewish homeland in British Africa. What is most notable about Shiel’s novel is its packing in such extremes of Jewish representation, from the bestial to the messianic, in one place.[13]
The general ambivalence—by which I mean the range of different views as well as no small amount of indifference—regarding Jews in turn-of-the-century England can be seen in the very magazines in which Shiel published. Lord of the Sea was originally to have appeared in serial form in 1900 in the popular Pearson’s Weekly. It was bumped, however, so as to make room for a new serial by Shiel’s former writing partner Louis Tracy (whose different speculative war plot has England distracted by the Boer War while France and Germany attack). Though it first appeared in book form, Lord of the Sea nevertheless includes a meta-fictional touch, as its protagonist Richard at one point seeks to enlist Pearson’s Weekly as a brainstorming forum to solve the socio-economic problems facing England.
Perusing Pearson’s Weekly in those years, one might read the slaveringly anti-Jewish article “How the Jews Rule France,” which told readers that the French “are children in the hands of the Jews, who for all practical purposes control the affairs of the country,” that state employment policy and nationalization of business are part of a Jewish plot, and that French colonial policy is “something to divert the attention of the populace from the iniquities of their friends the Jews.”[14] Or a grotesque installment of Victor Whitechurch’s railway story series that gives us uniformly miserly Jews, one of whom complains about the cost of his dead wife’s funeral, the exact tally of which he recalls. Business, he says, is “the getting the better of another” and “one should use every means in one’s power” to do so. His own son is “ever ready to turn love into money if it were possible”—he willingly connives with his father to cheat his prospective father-in-law, but first haggles with his father over his price. “A man who feels he can’t trust even his own father is bound to get on,” says the Jew proudly.[15]
On the other hand, one might also read the article “How Jews Keep Christmas,” a genially demystifying treatment of the subject, noting that Jews love feasting and holidays, often take part in Christmas celebrations, but that some have the custom of playing cards on Christmas in order to distinguish the day from a Jewish religious festival.[16] Pearson’s also published the serialized Biblical romance “The Rose of Judah: A Tale of the Captivity,” with the prophet Daniel and the beautiful Miriam as the heroes, thwarting the vile and cruel Prince Belshazzar.[17] Another relevant item states that when blacks are given the same opportunities as whites they are able to succeed, and that to think otherwise is mere “prejudice.”[18]
Another source for views of the time is The Review of Reviews, the periodical founded by journalistic giant W. T. Stead, who also commissioned one of Shiel’s early novels. In The Review of Reviews we read about developments in the Zionist movement, including Herzl’s recent talks with the Ottoman sultan. The writer tells us that the idea of Zionism
is a splendid one, which appeals to Christians as much as to Jews, and the fascination which it appears to have for the higher minds of the Jews must be accounted among the most reassuring signs of the time. . . . What the English race would be if England were overrun by a Chinese horde, who swept the country after the fashion of Kitchener, that the Jews are to-day. What wonder, then, if they desire to get back their old country, and make it a rallying-ground and fatherland of a race which has made the whole world its debtor, but which is scattered abroad throughout all the nations of the earth?[19]
A column later that year calls Zionism “the greatest Jewish movement since the foundation of Christianity.”[20]
In another number of Stead’s journal we get a review of the first published volume in the Jewish Encyclopedia, a scholarly milestone that first appeared in 1901. The reviewer lavishes praise on the project, and furthermore refers to the Jews as
the race which may claim in some respects to have been a veritable Christ among the nations. No Christian pen can ever adequately describe the indebtedness of Christendom to the Jew, nor can any Christian pen make adequate atonement for the age-long martyrdom to which this nationality has been subjected. . . . the religion of Christendom is in its essential fundamental elements the religion of Judaism. . . . The Jews deny that He was incarnate God; they cannot deny that He was the incarnation and the soul of their race.[21]
That same issue contains a review (by Stead, presumably) of Shiel’s Lord of the Sea. “There is enough matter in ‘The Lord of the Sea’ to furnish half a dozen ordinary novels,” writes the reviewer, “and yet it is somewhat a waste of good material. It is like a basket full of diamonds, none of which are adequately polished and cut. Nevertheless, the reader who wants something thrilling on a holiday will have to go far before he finds any stronger meat.” While treating the plot, which it finds far-fetched, the review makes no statements, positive or negative, on the Jews. The villain of the book, for instance, is identified as “one particular evil Jew of the name of Frankl,” not as a representative type. Other reviews of the time make no reference at all to the Jewish subject matter of the novel. Continuing with the organizing motif, the reviewer judges: “Mr. Shiel is a man of genius with a great imagination, but he is somewhat of a rough diamond.”
Lord of the Sea was published in book form by Grant Richards, who worked for Stead on The Review of Reviews. Richards tells us in his memoirs that he likes to quote Hillaire Belloc’s snide quatrain “How odd / of God / to choose / the Jews,” and records many friendships with English and American literary figures who were openly antisemitic. Yet he also happily published Jewish authors and admired fellow publishers who were Jews.[22]
English attitudes and standards of accepted behavior towards Jews involve a mix of often contrary tendencies. The long span of English literature has of course produced memorably monstrous representations of Jews in the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and others, exercising an outsized influence on the demonization of Jews in literary culture and beyond. In general, however, modern English literary culture featured a range of anti-Jewish prejudices and malicious expressions, sometimes taking extreme verbal or written form, but usually leavened by an English sense of decorum or notion of “fair play,” and in some cases counterbalanced by pronounced philosemitism or at least social sanctions against stark expressions of anti-Jewish hostility. Shiel’s novel reflects the extreme ends, pro- and anti-Jewish, of British attitudes in its messianic, conspiratorial fantasy, to a great extent reflecting the particular socio-political moment in which it was written, when anti-Jewish expressions were at a pitch.
Moskowitz is mistaken, then, to filter Shiel’s writing, even when it is repugnant, through Nazism. Nevertheless, Moskowitz also opens up a line of inquiry that bears more consideration, and this is the possible relationship between Shiel’s portrayal of Jews and his sense of his own identity.
Moskowitz observes at the start of his 1963 essay that “Shiel speaks at some length and with affection of his Irish father in biographical reminiscences, but for some reason he never makes a direct reference to his mother.”[23] He also makes a further connection between the protagonist of The Lord of Sea and Shiel himself, writing:
Descriptively, Richard Hogarth in The Lord of the Sea comes very close to being a replica of Shiel down to the three moles on the cheek and the Irish father. Somewhere along the line did Shiel learn something about his ancestry that he could not reconcile with his early religious training? Is there a link between this information and a mother of whom he never speaks? Was it really the ubiquitous Jewish villain, Dinka, speaking in [Shiel’s novel] The Young Men Are Coming, “If I am a bit of a Hebrew inside, isn’t my coat as Christian as they make ’em?”—or is it Shiel?[24]
Without biographical information to go on—yet with knowledge of Shiel’s physical description (though I do not know where Shiel’s three moles are referenced)—Moskowitz in 1963 can only speculate that perhaps there is something in Shiel’s racial background that inspired what Moskowitz sees as Shiel’s hatred of Jews and non-whites.
In his follow-up essay, twenty years later, Moskowitz is even more determined to prosecute what he calls Shiel’s “litany of racism, inhumanity, reaction to democratic procedures, high intolerance and blood lust.” Moreover, although the work of later biographers and archivists is still unavailable to him, Moskowitz has acquired some second-hand evidence suggesting that, as he had suspected in his earlier essay, Shiel was of mixed race—easily possible given his Caribbean birth. Ironically, this leads Moskowitz to argue that Shiel’s anti-Jewish writings are to be seen as an example of “black antisemitism” of the kind Moskowitz had witnessed growing up in Newark, New Jersey, and that he diagnoses as the attempt of blacks “to show that they were the equals of the white majority power structure—the Protestants and the Catholics—whom they observed discriminate against the Jew and revile the Jew,” and that he worries has become more virulent over time.[25]
Moskowitz’s second essay especially might best be seen as one expression of the crisis felt by many Jewish liberals during and after the break-up of the civil rights coalition of the 1950s and early 1960s, and which often found American Jews and blacks in political conflict rather than partnership. In this, Moskowitz’s essay is interesting in its own right as a cultural and autobiographical statement. His frameworks of reference are entirely American, and he talks about his youthful interactions with black customers at his father’s Newark store, as well as witnessing the Newark riots of the 1960s.
Similarly interesting in this regard is the editor’s note following Moskowitz’s second essay, and that cautions against proceeding with judgements about Shiel in the absence of sufficient biographical data. “For 35 years I have lived in a suburb which is 85-87% Jewish,” writes the editor. “For four decades I have watched Cleveland decline from a prosperous city of happy ethnic communities to something perhaps less civilized than an African kraal. Over the same years I have toyed philosophically with Shiel’s vigorous stereotypes of Jews and other races.” Such a confession would today be an invitation to cancellation, but the point the editor wants to make is that Moskowitz’s speculations are unfounded without biographical data about Shiel. “I have at times entertained anti-Jewish and anti-black notions and I am not black or mixed-race, therefore it is questionable to attribute Shiel’s negative stereotypes of Jews to what may or may not be his racial heritage,” I would paraphrase the editor as saying.[26]
The Lord of Redonda
As it happens, Moskowitz’s surmise about Shiel’s mixed-race parentage has been borne out by subsequent research, above all in literary scholar Harold Billings’s two volumes, M. P. Shiel: A Biography of His Early Years and M. P. Shiel: The Middle Years 1897-1923, published respectively in 2005 and 2010.
Shiel was born in 1965 on the island of Montserrat in the Lesser Antilles. He attended boarding school in England, college in Barbados, and then, in 1885, moved permanently to England. His father, writes Billings, “was a ship-owner, trader, shopkeeper, and lay Methodist minister.” His mother “was identified as ‘free’ on her birth record,” which “indicated that she was, at least to some degree, a descendant of slaves.” Billings goes on to note that Shiel’s father too “may have been of a mixed racial heritage, although there is not enough evidence regarding his father to be certain of this.” During his youth on Montserrat, Shiel “apparently thought of himself as ‘white,’” though his racial ambiguity would be noted by friends and acquaintances in England.[27] A 1901 article on Shiel observed that “his race is as great a mystery as his birthplace.”[28]
Though not directly relevant to our subject, it is necessary to mention the even greater bombshell about Shiel, set off by the scholar Kirsten McLeod in 2008, between the publication of the first and second volume of Billings’s study—namely, that Shiel served a jail sentence for the sexual assault of a minor.
As Billings had already recounted in the first volume of his Shiel biography, Shiel married a “lovely Parisian-Spaniard” named Carolina Garcia-Gomez in 1898. Fellow writer Arthur Machen and his wife attended the wedding. Shiel’s courtship of Garcia-Gomez began when she was 16, which was then legal. In 1885, the year Shiel moved permanently to England, the legal age of consent for girls was raised from thirteen (it had been twelve until 1875) to sixteen, in part due to a public pressure campaign brought to bear, coincidentally, by Shiel’s later literary supporter, W. T. Stead. Whatever his devotion to Garcia-Gomez, Billings also informs us that the wedding took place a few weeks before the birth of Shiel’s out-of-wedlock daughter by another woman. Garcia-Gomez died around 1903.
McLeod explains that, by 1904, Shiel was an intimate of the Sircar family, originally of Gloucestershire, and residing in London after 1908. Elizabeth Sircar, née Price, was still involved with her India-born husband, when she bore Shiel’s out-of-wedlock son in 1914. Shiel had already had some sort of romantic relationship with Elizabeth’s younger sister Mary when the latter was in her teens. In the fall of 1914, Shiel, who was in financial straits and had been living with the Sircar family, was arrested and convicted of assault and “carnal knowledge” of Elizabeth’s daughter Dorothy, effectively Shiel’s step-daughter, and who was then twelve years old. Sentenced to sixteen months hard labor, Shiel complained in an undated letter to his publisher Grant Richards that the court had made “mountains out of molehills and crimes out of love-toyings,” justifying his behavior by saying that Dorothy was past puberty, that sex and child-bearing at young ages is healthy for girls, and that “I have copulated, as a matter of course, from the age of two or three with ladies of a similar age in lands where that is not considered at all extraordinary.”[29]
On his release from prison, Shiel lived with the political activist, feminist, and socialist Lydia Furley, with whom he had been romantically involved since 1908, while she was still in a common-law marriage with her husband who died in 1914. Shiel and Furley were married in 1919, and separated in 1929. I will let a comment about Shiel by his friend Arthur Machen serve here as a last word on Shiel’s personal life: “I honestly think that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ were words entirely without meaning to him.”[30]
Little of this is relevant to The Lord of the Sea, in which the biographical elements concern, not race and not sex, but what seems to me to be Shiel’s imagination of himself as a kind of Jewish messiah. It was Moskowitz who first pointed out the striking physical resemblance between the author and his Jewish messiah in The Lord of the Sea. This is not the only Jewish character in Shiel’s books who in some way resembles the author. There is also the “half Jew, half Cockney” Sam Abrahams in the 1909 novel This Knot of Life, who, as Shiel did on several occasions, gets a young woman pregnant but abandons her for another woman (who is, in this novel, Jewish too).
As Billings points out, Shiel was fascinated with messiah figures, especially Jesus, in a way that may be connected with the author’s amoral megalomania. “The obsession of Phipps with the man Jesus would continue to dominate his thinking over the years,” writes Billings. “He continually frustrates readers by insisting that his characters seek some form of Christ-like immolation rather than a ‘happy’ conclusion to his novels.” In The Last Miracle, one of the four “notebooks” that includes The Lord of the Sea and The Purple Cloud, Shiel imagines the destruction of traditional Christianity and its supersession by a new religion with vitalistic elements and yogic practices included. He portrays one of the new houses of worship with “a prodigious fresco of Jesus,” which, says the narrator, “was rather a revelation to me, for then first I seemed to see Jesus, a brown peasant in a turban. . . .the Man, the dusky Lily.”[31] As in The Lord of the Sea, we have a brown-skinned, Jewish messiah. Billings also mentions that Shiel wrote to his sister in 1895, a few years before he started work on The Lord of the Sea, that he was learning Hebrew. “It is easy and pleasant,” he says.[32]
A final parallel between The Lord of the Sea and Shiel’s own life—or, at least, his self-romanticizing account of his own life—is worth noting. One of the most enduring legends Shiel told about his youth in the West Indies was that, at the age of fifteen, his father had Shiel formally crowned as king of the uninhabited Caribbean island of Redonda, a rock less than a mile long. Shiel maintained that the coronation and possession were valid, as no other nation had claimed the island, and he passed the title of king to his literary executor on his death.
Similarly, no other nation had claimed the seas when Richard Hogarth did so in Shiel’s novel. From an island—a floating one—Richard eventually became lord of the sea, king of England, and master of the world. The Lord of the Sea may be, then, not only a fantasia on the Jews, but a reflection of Shiel’s fantasies about himself.
[1] Eudora Welty, “Ghoulies, Ghosties and Jumbees,” New York Times, 24 September 1944, book review 5.
[2] See James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939 (Palgrave, 2018) for the literary history situating Shiel in the context of British Decadence and Weird fiction. I discuss the Weird as a literary mode and its connection with the modern Occult as well as literary representations of Jews in an earlier post.
[3] Shiel, Shapes in the Fire, John Lane, 1896, pp. 118, 119. Sam Moskowitz, less impressed, calls the story “berserk Poe with all genius spent,” though he also writes of Shiel: “His mad literary rhythms, seemingly improvised, like a jazz artist’s at a jam session, were a bubbling fountain at which new techniques of phrasing could be drunk” (Moskowitz, Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction, Hyperion reprint edition, 1974, pp. 144, 149-50).
[4] Concerning the “notebooks,” while I would not take too seriously what is most likely a cross-promotional gimmick on Shiel’s part, if we are inclined to see these three novels as a set, then the broadest possible rubric for describing each might be: religion (The Last Miracle, about an elaborate plan to destroy organized religion that results in the emergence of a new religion), economics (The Lord of the Sea), and humanity (The Purple Cloud). I would then guess that the broad theme of the untitled and unpublishable notebook four is sexuality, though, again, it is not clear that Shiel had an actual work, extant or planned, in mind.
[5] All references therein to M. P. Shiel, Lord of the Sea, New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1901. A slightly revised and much abridged version of about half the length was published in 1924.
[6] Shiel’s consideration of both popular antisemitic movements and the threat of Jewish immigration and influence predate The Lord of the Sea, albeit passingly. He refers in The Yellow Danger to violent demonstrations in France over the Dreyfus Affair, writing somewhat misleadingly that “Monsieur Zola had been the scapegoat.” In The Purple Cloud, the mongrel deluge of (now dead) foreigners that overran England includes Jews, as when “the car-lamp shewed me a young man who seemed a Jew, sitting as if in sleep with dropped head, a back tilted silk-hat pressed down upon his head to the ears; and lying on face, or back, or side, six more, one a girl with Arlesienne head-dress, one a negress, one a Deal lifeboat’s man, and three of uncertain race.” As Earth’s last man, the protagonist of The Purple Cloud also goes through a sudden and curious “tendency toward Orientalism.” He bedecks his hands and feet with “gold and silver ornaments” and on his head wears a “skull-cap, covered by a high crimson cap with deep-blue tassel.”
[7] The novel’s preoccupation with oriental dress reflects modern English discourse about Jews, as I have noted elsewhere in connection with writers such as G. K. Chesterton and Edith Nesbit.
[8] The interest in diamonds and their association with Jews reflects contemporary events concerning war and finance in South Africa. See Adrienne Munich, “Jews and Jewels: A Symbolic Economy on the South African Diamond Fields” and Nadia Valman, “Little Jew Boys Made Good: Immigration, the South African War, and Anglo-Jewish Fiction” in “The Jew” in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa, eds. Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 28-44, 45-64; Colin Holmes, “J. A. Hobson and the Jews” in Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, ed. Colin Holmes, George Allen & Unwin, 1978, pp. 125-57, and Heidi Kaufman’s discussion of Jews, diamonds, and the adventure fiction of H. Rider Haggard in her English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Penn State UP, 2009, pp. 163-92. I have proposed that J. R. R. Tolkien draws on this nexus of associations in The Hobbit.
[9] This outdoes even Britain’s (baptized) Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli.
[10] The shortened 1924 version of the novel adds Einstein to the list of diasporic Jewish geniuses.
[11] Moskowitz, op. cit., 146, 148, 151.
[12] Moskowitz, “The Dark Plots of One Shiel” in Shiel in Diverse Hands, ed. A. Reynolds Morse (1983), pp. 57-67. For some of the alternative readings and criticisms of Moskowitz’s see, in the same volume, Paul Spencer’s “Shiel Versus Shiel,” Malcolm Ferguson’s “On Digging Shiel,” and Morse’s editor’s note following Moskowitz’s essay, as well as Brian Stableford’s “The Politics of Evolution: Philosophical Themes in the Speculative Fiction of M. P. Shiel,” in Brian Stableford, Algebraic Fantasies and Realistic Romances: More Masters of Science Fiction, Borgo Press, 1995, pp. 73-98.
[13] For literary and historical context (and exceptionally cogent moral context too), see Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Oxford UP 2012, chapters 5 and 6. See, also, “Between the East End and East Africa: Rethinking Images of ‘the Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture” by Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman, the introductory essay to their edited volume “The Jew” in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa, cited above, pp. 1-27.
[14] June 25, 1898.
[15] January 15, 1898.
[16] January 1, 1898.
[17] George Griffith’s The Rose of Judah: A Tale of the Captivity begins serialization in the October 8, 1898 issue, and was published in book form in 1899. The character of Daniel in the Babylonian captivity prays “for the restoration of Zion.”
[18] March 19, 1898.
[19] July 1901.
[20] December 1901.
[21] August 1901. The reviewer also notes that the publisher’s notice includes “a portrait of all the lady stenographers employed in the work.”
[22] Grant Richards, Author Hunting by an Old Literary Sports Man, New York: Coward-McCann, 1934.
[23] Moskowitz, Explorers of the Infinite, 142.
[24] Op. cit., 156.
[25] Moskowitz, “The Dark Plots of One Shiel,” pp. 66, 65.
[26] “Editor’s Note,” Shiel in Diverse Hands, p. 67. It is worth noting that Moskowitz’s first essay on Shiel came out the same year as Norman Podhoretz’s still controversial essay “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” another document of the fissures in American liberalism and ethnic politics.
[27] Harold Billings, M. P. Shiel: A Biography of His Early Years, Austin, TX: Roger Beacham, 2005, pp. 12, 13, 41.
[28] Harold Billings, M. P. Shiel: The Middle Years 1897-1923. Austin, TX: Roger Beacham, 2010, qtd. p. 123.
[29] See Kirsten MacLeod, “M. P. Shiel and the Love of Pubescent Girls: The Other ‘Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name,’” English Literature in Translation, 1880-1920, vol. 51, 4 (2008), pp. 355-80. Quotations from Shiel’s letter to Richards are on p. 358, emphasis in original.
[30] See Billings, 2010 for information on Shiel’s relationship with Furley, and for the Machen comment (qtd. pp. 49-50).
[31] Shiel, The Last Miracle, London, T. Werner Laurie, 1906, pp. 309-310.
[32] Billings, 2005, p. 145.
investigations and fantasies 