Cameron Carr – Gilded Clay
Herbert Jenkins, London, n.d. 1938
Copy consulted: first edition in pictorial dw.
January 2006.
Cameron Carr is better known to aficionados of weird fiction as “R.R.Ryan” under which byline seven novels of often disturbing content were written. He was a minor film star up until the point he began writing for Herbert Jenkins. Although there has been some unfounded speculation that “R.R.Ryan” was a woman, the adverts in the rear of Herbert Jenkins books from that period have always made it perfectly clear that “Ryan” was a man. Besides, most discerning readers should have been able to tell from the prose that the author was most likely a man, given the ever-present undercurrent of highly charged – and occasionally sadistic - sexuality.
I have always been a generous reader, allowing most writers to stray into regions that are taboo too many of us. For that reason I would not dissuade teenagers from reading William S. Burroughs: if a young mind is going to explore the darker side of life, better they do it at home, through a book, guided by an artist, rather than outside in the seedier and more dangerous real-life world.
And make no mistake, Carr has a very odd, twisted world view. His disturbing perspective is however mitigated by two things: occasionally brilliant prose, and the ever present hint that he himself may have suffered an abusive childhood, abuse that empowers his own work with a starling insight. In fact many of Carr’s novels read like revenge novel; the reader suspects that Carr may be avenging himself against childhood enemies via the prose.
Carr’s work is in many important respects similar to that of the neglected and under-rated novelist Phylliss Paul. Paul is by far the most stylish and competent author of the two, but Carr shares with Paul a biting, polarising and heavily judgmental insight into the psychological motivations of deeply unlikeable and untrustworthy people (as the authors are themselves). Both writers are obsessed with childhood trauma and both writers can freeze time and describe in minute, gothic detail an atmosphere, view or perspective with a chilling, often unsettling obsessiveness.
Gilded Clay is a non-supernatural novel which nevertheless possesses many menacing and disturbing ideas. Or rather, as with the work of Phylliss Paul, it hints at much that it is disturbing. In typical Paul fashion, the action is always narrated by the author, each character being analysed in minute detail under the authorial microscope. We are kept at arm’s length from the action, prevented from empathising fully with any party except the writer who acts as guide, voyeur and judge.
A brilliant young female doctor with childhood trauma issues falls in love with a brilliant middle-aged surgeon whose reputation and integrity is firmly established. She is immediately attracted to this virile, dominating genius of a surgeon, where in contrast he worries about the effect her career would have on their marriage, and whether or not she is sexually capable of satisfying his powerful sexual urges. His loins win out over his mind, and he snubs her to marry an extremely attractive and voluptuous but alas empty-headed young girl who promises to satisfy his every sexual whim. Unfortunately she also promises to satisfy the sexual whims of any man who expresses an interest in her, with the result that the brilliant surgeon becomes debased and enslaved to the sexual goddess he willingly entered into marriage with. Meanwhile, the young female doctor has trouble at home: eagerly encouraged by a malicious and unprincipled father, her younger and more sexually alluring sister embarks upon a life of wanton debauchery, gleefully cheered on by her creepy one remaining parent (their mother having died young). The girl falls pregnant and begs her older sister to conduct an illicit abortion at home. The doctor refuses, resolute in her ethical principles, and fearful for her medical career. But the sister and father mercilessly pressurise her, threatening suicide unless her she agrees to terminate the pregnancy. Eventually she succumbs and performs an ambiguous operation at the girl’s home. She specifically warns her father and sister against interfering with the work she has done. The text is very ambiguous about this issue, but physical interference is clearly implied. However, someone does indeed interfere, and her sister dies as a result of this.
Although it is likely that the sister prompted her own death, Carr portrays the father in so malicious a manner that he leaves the precise accountability for this tampering unresolved. The father hates his older daughter more than he dotes upon his younger, and in typical R.R. Ryan fashion, we are treated to examples of his wicked malice. And in equally typical Ryan fashion, there is the ever present sexual threat, on this occasion one of incest. The father’s relationship with his younger, sexually wanton daughter is morally irresponsible, whereas his obsession with his older daughter – the offspring who most closely resembles her dead mother – is that of the thwarted, rejected lover. Hence the deeply unpleasant ambiguity linked to the younger daughter’s death. Did the father kill one of his daughters to strike at the other?
The doctor is condemned by her peers and the press. She is made outcast. Her biggest critic is the man she worships, the brilliant surgeon. She is sent to prison for several years but upon leaving opens up a clinic where she treats the poor and needy, dedicating herself to a life of penance. Meanwhile the brilliant surgeon is driven to distraction by his young wife’s shameless extra-marital escapades, but he is willing to turn a blind eye to her flagrant nymphomania provided she satisfies his own rapacious sexual appetite. However, she too falls pregnant, failing to take precautions after getting drunk. She begs her husband to betray every medical principle he holds dear by terminating the life of her unborn child, threatening him with social ruin unless he agrees. Eventually he too succumbs to the pressure, with exactly the same result: his wife inadvertently dies after tampering with herself subsequent to the sordid little home operation. He then goes to jail, is subjected to total social disgrace, but the woman who loves him – the rejected younger doctor – sympathises where he had not, and vows to wait for him. End of novel.
Like Phylliss Paul, Carr is withering in his judgment of his own characters, and of their sexual promiscuousness in particular. However, unlike Paul he appears to share a feverish excitement in the description of and allusion to sexual promiscuity; where Paul finds sex distasteful in all of its forms, only ever referring to sexuality in the obliquest of terms, Carr seems to share a love-hate relationship with the sexual urge. He is one of those writers who can’t help but get excited by the wantonness or depravity that he also seeks to condemn. This, coupled with trademark references to the childhood traumas that his heroines and villains suffer, suggests that Carr witnessed - or thought he witnessed - psychological and / or sexual abuse at an age when his own mind and sexuality was flowering.
I know nothing whatsoever about Carr’s childhood, but having read most of his novels, I am convinced that he had a traumatic childhood and that he despised his own father or stepfather, who was probably a doctor given Carr’s predilection for setting his novels in hospitals and asylums, and his obsession with crazed surgeons and scientists. I would also hazard a guess that his highly regarded and romanticized mother died young, or was else subjugated into powerlessness by a domineering patriarchal figure, and that he may have had a sister or step-mother who evoked curious sexual emotions in the young Carr. This possible background, combined with a sharp, obsessive and merciless eye for both detail and atmosphere, has resulted in a clutch of weird and disturbing novels unlike anything else that Herbert Jenkins – a long time publisher of such humorists as P.G. Wodehouse – ever issued. I can think of no other ‘pulp’ 1930s writer so deserving of deeper academic analysis, given the author’s dark exploration of the psyche along with his obvious literary knowledge.
In closing, I would like to correct the speculation by the Ghost Story Society in their magazine All Hallows that the term ‘Gilded Clay’ is attributable to Shakespeare. It actually hails from the play The Tragedy Of Pompey The Great [1910; revised 1914] by John Masefield [1878-1967], something that Carr himself may have appeared in given the fact that he was acting during the period following its publication. To quote directly:
PHILIP: …..I’ve seen all Rome out on the roofs to see my master, Pompey. There were horns blowing, you couldn’t hear. And forty kings marching in the streets. I’ve seen him grow to be the greatest man in the world.
ANTISTIA: Eh? The greatest man in the world? All through being with Sulla in the civil war. Supposing he were not great, Philip. Only a bit clay statue. A statue propped up by sticks. A clay thing, gilded. Rats gnawing at it. The wind shaking it. The sun cracking it. And dead men, Philip. Dead men underneath it in the dust, fumbling at it to bring it down.
The novel also features a stern quotation from the Bible which I take to be a reflection on both Carr’s odd world view and the book’s medical theme.
“If a man vows a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not break his word.” Numbers XXX.2.
Gilded Clay is a rare book by any standard but will not be of interest to the general reader nor the stalwart supernatural fan. However, R.R. Ryan completists would be recommended to track a copy down, as would those who appreciate a dark psychological edge to their fiction.
No Escape by R.R. Ryan. Published by Herbert Jenkins, n.d. [1939].
All seven of the published Ryan novels are psychological thrillers which veer into the realms of either the horrific or the supernatural. Ryan’s work is comparable with Phyllis Paul and Ruth Rendell (particularly Rendell's ‘Barbara Vine’ pseudonym) on many important levels. Admittedly Ryan's work is more pulpish than either Paul or Vine, but that may be explained by the fact that Ryan was writing for a different market in a different era. Despite this, Ryan's The Subjugated Beast - which I personally believe to be one of the best novels - undoubtedly possesses some highly memorable and artistic prose which is on a par with Paul's most evocative descriptions of landscape and nature. Additionally Ryan's occasional references to Shakespeare and the literary classics suggest that the writer is highly educated.
Useful comparisons between a typical Ryan novel and Le Fanu's Uncle Silas can also be made, this time in terms of plot, because both feature vulnerable and innocent heroines falling prey to evil and sadistic male villains. However, with Ryan the sadism is usually more explicitly stated, and this fascination with sexual domination poses a moral stumbling block for the responsible modern day reader: in Devil’s Shelter, for example, the beautiful actress who becomes imprisoned in an asylum taken over by the inmates is specifically threatened with rape as the culmination of her ordeal. In fact, the forceful and unwelcome seduction of women is often an explicit or implied undercurrent in much of Ryan's work; in all of the novels, the ever-present psychological torments inflicted upon the heroines could be seen to act as metaphors for escalating sexual threat. It is very difficult to know how to interpret this seemingly obsessive preoccupation. A similar conundrum exists in Jodie Foster’s The Accused; ostensibly a film condemning rape, it nevertheless teases its voyeuristic audience for most of the film before finally depicting the pivotal scene in a way that appears hypocritical. Perhaps only in Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer has sexual crime been depicted unemotionally and without intent to arouse or excite; certainly scenes from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs have been widely cited as gratuitously irresponsible for this very reason. In horrific and ghostly literature this issue has often been clumsily handled, particularly by American pulps which advocate sadism, but Le Fanu’s Schalken The Painter immediately springs to mind as being one of the few capable of exploring the issue in a sympathetic and responsible manner. (I reserve judgment on Arthur Machen, who appears to relish dark sexual innuendo a little too eagerly.)
I procured my well-worn copy of No Escape - in its typical orange cloth boards - a few weeks ago for the extremely attractive price of £6 from a Welsh bookshop. It doesn't have a dust wrapper; given that most of the Ryan books were produced for distribution in British libraries this is understandable; in fact, I have only heard of one copy of a Ryan in a complete dw, and I myself only possess a colour photocopy of the front cover of one other. Ryan books rarely surface but when they initially turn up, they usually appear in British bookshops or catalogues where they are invariably priced at circa £5-10. Mind you, a collector could spend a long time looking for them. They usually percolate upwards into the hands of specialist collectors and dealers who would pay circa £200-300 for a bright copy of the most desirable titles.
I approached No Escape with extreme trepidation. I knew it to be concerned with a man driven to murder his extremely dominating and mentally unstable wife whom he had married in error; I also knew Ryan's style, and expected the book to be a harrowing read. My nervousness was caused by the fact that I’d been there; I don’t mean the murder thing, I mean that I too have had experience of living with a psychotic person e.g.. a former girlfriend who cleverly hid her mental instability in the early days. She would head-butt the wall to try and knock herself unconscious if she didn’t get her own way, for example; on other occasions she would take aspirin, knowing herself to be allergic to the drug, whereupon her face would swell up like a grotesque caricature of itself, requiring hospital treatment. I too feared that there was ‘no escape’ until one day I very firmly ended the relationship, little realising that the worst was to come: she subsequently broke in to my home on numerous occasions, to either steal things or damage them. Then some mutual friends started acting oddly towards me; I later discovered that she had embarked upon a bizarre campaign of inventing lies about me. A message was pinned on my front door saying that she was going to ‘cut’ my new girlfriend’s ‘legs off’; a disturbing series of phone calls were made to some colleagues at work; and for a couple of years after the split she sent Valentine cards, pretending to be a secret lover, so as to unsettle my new girlfriend. Indeed, she may even still be up to her old tricks; as Ryan knew only too well, the seriously disturbed individual will go to quite staggering lengths to avenge a perceived wrong.
In No Escape a modestly wealthy bachelor stumbles ignorantly into a marriage he quickly regrets; not only does he find himself encumbered with a hypochondriacally frigid and agoraphobic wife, but with her dominating viper-tongued mother too. They swiftly invade his home, dismissing his servants, and impose their dominating will upon every aspect of his increasingly wretched existence. His beloved au naturelle garden gets dug up and replanted with inappropriate new shrubs; the house is fully redecorated at his expense; all the old furniture thrown away and replaced with new; and he is turfed out of his boyhood bedroom to make way for his new wife. Then the mother-in-law dies, which brings with it a whole new set of problems: now the hero has to attend exclusively to his ailing wife, staying within beck-and-call of her bell-ring. His thoughts turn to murder only after his attempts to forcefully consumate the marriage fail. After a chance meeting with a far more suitable female companion, he decides to poison his frigid wife with arsenic after she (the new woman in his life) agrees to marry him - if he can get the marriage annulled. Alas the ailing spouse knows when she is on to a good thing, and she refuses to discuss either divorce or annulment. He feels he is left with no choice, such is the toll of her peevish ill health on his quality of life. His plan works - her death is initially mistaken for a chronic stomach disease. But the woman he loves flees, suspicious of him. Then one morning comes a knock at the door - it is the long-lost twin sister of his dead wife. She has come to replace her sister.
If the novel had ended there it would have been a neat, sharp conclusion. But Ryan has more excruciatingly drawn out twists and turns to guide us through: the hero acts like a guilty murderer in front of the sister on numerous occasions and she intuitively guess that he has something terrible to concede. So she blackmails him: either he must accept her as his new wife or else she will go to the Police. He is by this stage at the end of his tether so he packs her off into a taxi and sends her to the local police station where she promptly shops him. An order for exhumation is given whereupon he blacks out and suffers a nervous breakdown. But all is not yet lost: the woman he has since fallen in love with informs him that he could not possibly have poisoned his late wife because she emptied the arsenic out from the tin and replaced it with something harmless, suspecting that he might be tempted to use it; the wife's death was therefore completely coincidental to his having administered the harmless white powder.
This novel has an unnecessary - correction, an annoying - number of twists. Throughout the story the narration is delivered in an amused, jolly upbeat style, which I found curiously at odds with earlier and more powerful Ryan novels. I prefer the carefully wrought tension which is tinged with the threat of real horror. Some of Ryan's novels are genuinely claustrophobic: the reader can quite literally feel suffocated by the slowly enveloping air of terror and oppression. This is not the case in No Escape, a story which, had it been favourably regarded, could have served as a useful template for an Ealing Comedy. This novel also panders to several annoying female clichés e.g.. the dragonish mother-in-law, the whingeing hypochondriac wife, the scheming sister, the dull-witted but dependable female servants. In other Ryan novels women are given important roles and they often triumph over evil and conspiratorial men; in fact, this feminist strength is one II’ve come to expect in a Ryan novel. LeFanu's heroine in Uncle Silas is truly heroic; women are usually victims or heroines in the average Barbara Vine tale; and PhyllisPaul's standard modus operandi is to place complex female characters in the clutches of dominant mysterious males. However, Ryan cheats by having a male hero in No Escape, and in making the prose unreasonably jolly.
In conclusion, No Escape is quite definitely a notch or two below Ryan's best. It possesses neither the horror nor the supernaturalism to make it essential reading for the genre aficionado. The novel would have benefited immensely from being a chapter or two shorter. The narration is consistently too cheerful and self-effacing, and the novel is singularly bereft of the more aspirational literature that Ryan is often capable of. Yet for all that it, it is a Ryan after all, and that makes it both a relative rarity and a valuable collectible.
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