Artemis Fowl and the demon cult leader: Part II

The other demon of interest in Eoin Colfer's Lost Colony is called Leon Abbot. He is one of the worst of the demons and the secret enemy of our cute little friend Number One. He is the cult leader type; many of the things he says and does are familiar from personal experience.

Leon Abbott the cult leader
Leon Abbot is the demon pride leader; he makes all the big decisions and has ways of bringing Council members round to his way of thinking.

He is the demons' self-proclaimed saviour and their hero. 

Leon Abbot is a liar and a manipulator. The truth means nothing to him.

Number One sees through him, but the other imps lap up his self-glorifying legends. Number One sees him as a loudmouth braggart, but the other imps and demons worship him, giving him the attention, adulation and total trust and obedience that he demands. 

He may have scales, horns and a tail, but Leon Abbot is  a classic, textbook case. Many of the things he says and does can be found in the list in the cult overview: for example, he has a superiority complex, sometimes behaves like an attack dog and presents himself as the sole supplier.

He is just the type to lead his followers to disaster.

The Demonic Bible
Leon Abbot brought a book back from the old world, a book that would save them all according to Abbot.

The book is called Lady Heatherington Smythe's Hedgerow. The demons treat it as their bible and use it not only as the source of all their knowledge about humans but also as a source of names:

“They didn't have real names, not until after they warped. Then they would be given a name from the sacred text.”

This explains the unusual names that demons have, names such as Leon Abbot for example. However, surely the book doesn’t contain nearly enough names to go round!

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: some miscellaneous thoughts

This final article in the series inspired by Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel includes some more connections and a few miscellaneous points of interest.

Angel Deverell and Esmé Scarron the sorcerer

These two people have generated many articles between them; it would be very easy to produce some more, but enough is enough!

By coincidence, Esmé is the name of Angel’s debt-ridden wastrel of a husband, but she bears more resemblance to Stella Gibbons’s villain Esmé Scarron from The Shadow of a Sorcerer than he does!

Angel shares Scarron’s arrogance and preference for having admiring followers or even worshippers rather than real friends.

She too has a bad effect on the people around her, her mother and husband in particular.

Angel could have improved her inner state and become a better person, but just like Scarron she lacks the necessary humility.

Brothers and sisters

Angel’s husband’s full name is Esmé Howe-Nevinson. He is the brother of Nora Howe-Nevinson, Angel’s companion and assistant.

It is not just Esmé’s name that has a connection to Stella Gibbons: his personality and behaviour resemble those of her younger brother Lewis.

As mentioned in the first article in the series, the novelist Marie Corelli was one of the inspirations for Angel. Corelli’s half-brother Eric was a wastrel who was always demanding money from her; Elizabeth Taylor probably created Esmé from what she knew of Eric, but he is also a classic, textbook case.

Many of us will encounter people like Esmé, who go through life leaving a trail of failures, debt and destruction behind them and who are forever taking on new initiatives without the resources and reserves to back them up. They make life hell for anyone they can get a hold over.

Both Stella and the fictional Nora kept house for their brothers;

Both Stella Gibbon’s brother Lewis and the fictional Esmé were unstable; they got into financial and other messes and left it to their sisters to sort it all out.

Same game, different players yet again.

Benjamin Disraeli: clothes, debts and a very happy marriage

I have been looking at more information about Benjamin Disraeli’s life, personality and political career. He is still a man of mystery to me. Perhaps describing and contemplating the aspects, good and bad, that have interested and affected me the most will help me to decide what sort of man he really was and how sincere his views were.

This article describes some personal aspects that caught my attention.

Disraeli the dashing dandy

Benjamin Disraeli’s exotic appearance was a major factor in his life.

I have noticed many references in Victorian writings to coal-black eyes. This is odd; I have never seen anyone like that. Perhaps it was just a convention for describing very dark brown eyes. It is also possible that the dim lights they used enlarged people’s pupils so their eyes appeared black.

Disraeli too was described as having coal-black eyes, and he had glossy black hair too. His family was of Italian origin – just like Marie Corelli, he claimed Venetian ancestry - so perhaps this was where the dark colouring came from.

His appearance meant that he could never pass as typically English, so he exploited his looks and went to the other extreme. He became an exhibitionist. He cultivated a flamboyant and exotic image, when he was a young man at least. He modelled himself on Lord Byron and developed a very colourful, striking and outrageous style of dressing in order to attract attention.

For example, he was seen in -

“…a black velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles, falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves with several brilliant rings outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulders.”

Another notably ostentatious outfit consisted of green velvet trousers with a yellow waistcoat, shoes with silver buckles and lace at his wrists again.

He is said to have worn rouge, powder and perfume too.

He caused a big sensation when walking in central London:

"He came up Regent Street when it was crowded wearing his blue surtout, a pair of military light blue trousers, black stockings with red stripes, and shoes! 'The people,' he said, 'quite made way for me as I passed. It was like the opening of the Red Sea...Even well-dressed people stopped to look at me. I should think so!'"

Men usually wore boots not shoes at the time, which explains why his footwear was mentioned.

Perhaps he was acting a part; perhaps he was making his presence felt; perhaps he just enjoyed the attention.

Other people’s descriptions are better than nothing, but I wish that I could have seen Disraeli in all his glory for myself. He would have been a sight well worth seeing.

Disraeli and the ideal marriage

His critics alleged that Disraeli had no genuine feelings. His well-documented attachment to his wife Mary Anne, formerly Mrs Wyndham Lewis, proves them wrong. He just does not seem like a user or manipulator where she is concerned.

There was a lot of good feeling on both sides; they were devoted to each other. She was exactly what he needed; she provided the financial, emotional and practical support necessary for his political career.

Mary Anne Disraeli has been described as a loud, talkative, over-painted, over-dressed, social-climbing oddity whose speech and behaviour were often bizarre.

Many people disliked her, and Queen Victoria said that she was very vulgar. Disraeli would not permit any criticism of his wife, and when someone once asked him in effect how he could stand it, replied, “Gratitude”.

This sounds sincere, and anyone who can feel genuine gratitude can’t be all bad.

Disraeli had good reason to feel grateful towards Mary Anne. She had rescued him, settled his debts and promoted his political career. He might never have achieved his goal of becoming Prime Minister and a great statesman without her.

She took care of her Dizzy. In return, she got his loyalty and devotion, not to mention a lot of very romantic letters and speeches. 

She was 12 years his senior and 47 when they married, but throughout the 33 years they were together he behaved as if she were young and beautiful. He wouldn’t hear a word against her.

It is a very touching and enviable relationship. They may have seemed a very odd couple to outsiders, but they brought out the best in each other and had something that many people do not, something that enabled Disraeli to say this after Mary Anne had died:

"Marriage is the greatest earthly happiness when founded on mutual sympathy.”

It is good to learn that he had some personal happiness in his life.

Disraeli and his dreadful debts

Benjamin Disraeli’s behaviour towards his wife may have shown him at his best; his attitude towards borrowing money and getting into debt is for me the worst element in his personality. 

He was very good at persuading people to lend him money and invest in his business enterprises.

He had borrowed and lost a fortune by the age of 21. His South American mining investment venture and the publishing enterprise both failed to bring in the huge amounts of money he had hoped to make for himself and his supporters.

Not doing everything possible to support oneself, not living within one’s means, having feelings of entitlement to other people’s resources, sponging off friends and acquaintances and asking to borrow more instead of paying back the original loan all seem very horrific to me.

Perhaps Disraeli would have asked what else could someone with expensive tastes, great ambition and little money of his own do. He said, “As a general rule, nobody has money who ought to have it.”

Perhaps he thought that living within one’s means was all very well for ordinary people, but such rules should not apply to a great but unrecognised genius. Some scruples were luxuries that he could not afford, and the end justified the means.

As Lord Stanley explained to Queen Victoria, “Mr Disraeli has had to make his position, and men who make their positions will say and do things which are not necessarily to be said or done by those for whom positions are made.”

This is very true!

Benjamin Disraeli and some more unseen influences

Benjamin Disraeli the eminent Victorian, the prime minister of what was at the time the greatest power on earth, the statesman and superb orator who was also a novelist, essayist and supreme letter writer, has been extensively studied and written about.

I can’t compete with or add anything to the coverage of many aspects of his life, his brilliant political career in particular, but in any case my main interest is in the unseen influences that I believe were operating behind the scenes.

Curses, cursing and convenient deaths

I have already written about some deaths that were very convenient for Mr Disraeli. I have just read something in a review of the biography Disraeli: a Personal History by Christopher Hibbert that gives further support to my suspicions:

"There was a streak of icy vengefulness in his temperament; even as a young man he had written down and filed away the names of those who crossed him. 'Something usually happens to them.'"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/13/featuresreviews.guardianreview8

So Disraeli had a little list! So it was not only innocent people who happened to be in his way who suffered the consequences of his feelings towards them. So in the case of his enemies, the ill-wishing was deliberate.

This discovery has made me want to do a full investigation.

In the meantime, a little research exercise has found some familiar features.  It seems to me that his unsatisfactory (to Disraeli) starting position in life, his inordinate ambition combined with his creative personality and the setbacks he experienced made him someone who might well have attracted the attention of whatever it is that operates below the surface in the lives of selected people.

The childhood of Marie Corelli

I described some painful events in the life of the Queen of Victorian Best-sellers Marie Corelli recently. Writing about an episode in Rudyard Kipling's childhood gave me the idea of investigating Marie Corelli's childhood.

There is little information available and much confusion about her parentage. She deliberately muddied the water herself; she obscured her past with a fog of lies and deceit. We will never know for sure whether the Scottish poet, scholar and journalist Charles Mackay was her real father or, as she insisted, her adopted father. It is likely that her mother was a servant and Marie was born illegitimate. She would have seen this as a terrible disgrace, something to be ashamed of and kept hidden; she claimed Venetian blood and gave herself an Italian name in compensation and to hide her real parentage.

What we do know is that despite having a kind man as her official father, she was very unhappy as a child.

Rudyard Kipling and the House of Desolation: Part I

There is an episode in Rudyard Kipling's childhood that is of great interest to me: the miserable years of torment spent in what he later called ‘The House of Desolation’.

He endured five and a half years of calculated neglect, persecution, punishment and humiliation at the hands of a horrible, cruel, religious fanatic of a woman called Mrs Holloway and her awful bully of a son. Some of the damage that this prolonged and constant torture caused was permanent.

He wrote about his ordeal in the short story Baa Baa, Black Sheep, in his novel The Light that Failed and in his autobiographical work Something of Myself. It makes very painful reading, at least for people who have experienced something similar.

This nightmare interlude in Kipling's childhood has also been described and discussed extensively in many biographies, reviews, essays and articles; there is no need to reproduce all the details and cover the same ground here. I just want to concentrate on a few aspects of this case, on some unseen but familiar influences and some connections that I have noticed.

First, a few questions.

Exploitation and unfinished business in the life of Marie Corelli

There are some lessons to be learned from the financially successful but personally sad life of best-selling Victorian novelist Marie Corelli. 

One of these lessons is about taking responsibility where appropriate, as opposed to blaming someone else. It particularly involves learning to be a good judge of character and not being influenced by factors such as self-interest, self-deception and wishful thinking - as opposed to blaming the other party for not being what we thought they were or wanted them to be.

Blaming people for deceiving us and letting us down seems to be the default. We need to learn to look after our side of things; we need to learn from experience what to look for in people. In particular, we need to learn to recognise warning signals.

This extract from Marie Corelli's book The Silver Domino shows that she knew, in theory at least, that people should take responsibility and blame themselves for their own poor judgement when they feel that they have been deceived by someone:

"Remember that if you do persuade yourself into thinking that I am a Somebody, and if I turn out after all to be a Nobody, it is not my fault. Don't blame me, blame your own self deception."

This is admirable; it is spot on. However, she talked a better game than she played; she didn't apply her wise words to herself. The Silver Domino was published in 1892; here is an extract from The Young Diana, first published in 1918:

"I asked for love – now I ask for vengeance. I gave all my heart and soul to a man whose only god was Self, and I got nothing back…So I have a long score to settle, and I shall try to have some of my spent joys returned to me – with heavy interest."

This is Marie Corelli speaking for herself, and from bitter experience. She was raging at a man she had been infatuated with, because she felt that he had deceived her; he was not what she thought he was and wanted him to be. She had become disappointed and disillusioned. The expression 'Hell hath no greater fury than a women scorned' very much applies in her case.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: witches and writers

Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has inspired two previous articles:

Angel’s Imagination covers the ways in which a very strong, active imagination can be a liability in everyday life.

Angel’s Life and Personality describes Angel and her life mainly in modern-day, this-world terms.

Much of Angel is familiar not only because I have read the biographies of Ouida and Marie Corelli that were the source of some of the material in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, but also because it reminds me of what I have read, and sometimes written, about other people of interest.

Angel Deverell has many characteristics and events in her life in common with both fictional witches and real-life creative writers.

Angel and some fictional witches

I had read only a few pages of the book when Diana Wynne Jones’s young witch Gwendolen Chant came to mind. They have selfishness, an abrupt manner and single-mindedness in common. Gwendolen wants to rule the world; Angel wants to dominate the world.

There is a scene in Angel where she visits her publisher at his home; she ignores his wife. This reminds me of something I quoted about C. S. Lewis’s witch Jadis in the article about Gwendolen Chant: 

“In Charn she [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical." 
From The Magician’s Nephew

Both Gwendolen and Angel are quick to take offence and become furious when thwarted. Both hate to see others in possession of things they want for themselves. Both are outraged when they don’t get the recognition they think they deserve.

Neither girl is interested in academic achievement; they just concentrate on their one obsession to the exclusion of everything else, with Angel exercising her imagination and Gwendolen her magical powers.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: her life and personality

Angel Deverell is the main character in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel.  She has provided much more article material than I was expecting. After describing how she lives in her imagination rather than in the real world, we will now cover something of her life, personality and behaviour.

We left Angel at the point where her lies have been exposed and she escapes into illness and her imagination.

Angel Deverell becomes a romance writer

When her mother confronts her, Angel faces blankness and despair and longs for death, seeing no other way out.

When certain people feel that all avenues are closed and cry out on the inside for a miraculous deliverance, something may hear them and come to their rescue, offering what seems like a possible way out…for a price. It may even be that the avenues were deliberately closed, so that the victim chooses the path that they were intended to take all along.

Angel remembers something that for once made her feel happy: it was when she wrote an essay. She decides to write a book. It comes easily: the words flow effortlessly because she just gets some of her fantasies down on paper. Angel’s imaginings are all very visual, pictures seen in the mind’s eye. The words and narrative are not important to her.

Angel has never grieved over any human beings and doesn’t care that a neighbour’s daughter might be dying, but she cries over the funeral she writes about. Seeing real life as unreal, treating the inner world as the real world and the outer world as just a dream is yet another occupational hazard for people with very strong imaginations and unsatisfactory lives.

Angel refuses to return to school; she won’t look for work either: she disdains the suggestion that she could get an office job. She will write books and become rich and famous!

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: her imagination

I first heard about Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel when it turned up in the results of a Google Search for “Marie Corelli”. 

I had never read any of Taylor’s books, but I got a copy from my library after reading in reviews that Angel was based in part on the lives of the Victorian romance writers Marie Corelli and Ouida. I had read biographies of both of these best-selling writers and was curious to see how much of their biographical material had been used in Angel.

Much of the book is very familiar; I recognised many elements from the biographies. Angel Deverell, the main character, is obviously a composite of Marie Corelli and Ouida. Some of the descriptions of her personality, behaviour and events in her life were taken directly from the biographies.

Angel Deverell is a classic textbook case. She is a type of person who appears in the human race from time to time. I see them as a kind of witch. They may get what they wish for, but the price may be very high and it may all turn to dust and ashes.

Reading about Marie Corelli’s, Ouida’s and now Angel’s life has confirmed some of my ideas about sinister unseen influences that might be at work in people’s lives. There is a lot of material of interest in the book; it will take more than one article to cover it.

Angel Deverell and the dangers of too much imagination

We first meet Angel when she is a schoolgirl of 15. Her colouring is striking, but she is not beautiful. She is not very good at her lessons either, although she can fool people who know much less than she does into thinking that she is a good student.

The only attribute Angel has that is above average is her imagination, and she uses it all the time. It plays a much greater part in her life than her senses do. To Angel, her experiences are a makeshift substitute for her imagination.

She concentrates very hard and visualises her ideal life, one of nobility, glamour and splendour, very clearly. She daydreams whenever she can, as she dislikes the people around her and the environment she lives in. She wants, and feels entitled to, something much better.

Angela Brazil, her brother, and the child prodigy pianist

Reading about J. M. Barrie and his infiltration of the Llewelyn Davies family has reminded me of a chilling little story that I read in The Schoolgirl Ethic: Life and Work of Angela Brazil by Gillian Freeman. 

The victim in the case was a boy called Gilbert Morris; the villains were the schoolgirls’ fiction writer Angela Brazil and her brother Walter.  Angela appears to have been the main driving force, decision maker and giver of orders in this affair; it is likely that Walter just followed her lead and went along with her wishes.

Gilbert Allan Morris was a child prodigy, a professional pianist who made his first public appearance at the age of six. He was born in 1901 and came to the attention of the Brazils when he was 12 years old; Angela was in her 45th year at the time and Walter in his 52nd.

The Brazils took Gilbert up, railroaded him towards a career that they believed would bathe them in reflected glory, raised his hopes then pulled the rug out from under him. They gave with one hand and took with the other; they made plans and arrangements on his behalf without informing him. He became enmeshed in the tentacles of their household and was driven by their pressure to the edge of destruction.