103 years of John Buchan’s Greenmantle

Last year was the 103rd anniversary of the publication of John Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps; 2019 is the 103rd anniversary of the first appearance of the sequel, the classic spy thriller Greenmantle.

This book was written partly as propaganda and in the hope that it would help to bring America into the First World War.

The first instalment of this exciting adventure story with a wonderful title and a ‘man with a mission on the run in enemy territory’ scenario appeared in the magazine Land and Water in July 1916, and the entire story was published in book form later that year.

Greenmantle was a great success. It is still very popular, all the more because of current events in the Middle East. However, a radio dramatisation was dropped from the BBC’s schedule in 2005 for containing ‘unsuitable and sensitive material’.

Greenmantle is my favourite John Buchan book. It is an old friend. I have already mentioned it briefly in an article about Robert. A. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, and I covered the spying aspect in articles about energy vampires and John Buchan's fellow author of exciting adventure stories, Rafael Sabatini.

The best of Greenmantle

It is difficult to think of anything more or something new and original to say about this enthralling story with its excitement, adventure, danger and double dealing.

Greenmantle has much to offer its readers. It has educational background information; it has moving scenes and amusing scenes, and there is some material that has a wider application.

L. M. Montgomery and the compulsion to read and write

I have found some more significant quotations from Lucy Maud Montgomery. What she has to say about reading and writing, both as herself and through her characters, is of particular interest. She could be speaking for many people of her kind.

Compulsive reading

 “I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.” 

From L.M. Montgomery’s personal journals 1899

“We have sent for a lot of new books for our Literary Society library here and when they come I’m simply going on a spree. I shall read all night and all day. I’m a book-drunkard, sad to say, and though I earnestly try to curb my appetite for reading I never met with much success.”

From L.M. Montgomery’s letter of March 1905

Me too. All my life I have been unable to resist this temptation.

‘Book addict’ or ‘reading addict’ is another way of putting it, although there is nothing of the need to take more and more to achieve less and less.

“I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.”

From The Selected Journals Of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 3: 1921-1929

This is all spot on.

Not only are there not enough hours in the day to do all the reading some of us would like, there are not enough years in our lives. We are even more spoiled for choice now than L. M. Montgomery was then.

The two worlds of L. M. Montgomery

Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, best known for her Anne of Green Gables series, has recently become a person of interest.

She will eventually be the subject of a longer article. In the meantime, here are two quotations from her that describe the two worlds that some people live in. It was these quotations that made me decide to investigate L. M. Montgomery, her life and her works: 

“I grew up out of that strange, dreamy childhood of mine and went into the world of reality. I met with experiences that bruised my spirit - but they never harmed my ideal world. That was always mine to retreat into at will. I learned that that world and the real world clashed hopelessly and irreconcilably; and I learned to keep them apart so that the former might remain for me unspoiled.

I learned to meet other people on their own ground since there seemed to be no meeting place on mine. I learned to hide the thoughts and dreams and fancies that had no place in the strife and clash of the market place.

I found that it was useless to look for kindred souls in the multitude; one might stumble on such here and there, but as a rule it seemed to me that the majority of people lived for the things of time and sense alone and could not understand my other life. So I piped and danced to other people's piping - and held fast to my own soul as best I could.” 

From My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. Macmillan from L.M. Montgomery

So she too was faced with an unaccommodating, often incomprehensible and sometimes unbearable real world, and she too was able to escape to the inner world of the imagination.

A few words about some fictional elves and ghosts

There are a few similarities between the elves in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books and the ghosts in fantasy writer Jonathan Stroud’s wonderful Lockwood & Co. series.

Terry Pratchett’s elves have no redeeming qualities; they are vicious, cruel, malevolent and dangerous to humans. I have quoted some of the things that he says about them in an article featuring energy vampires .

Jonathan Stroud says similar things about his ghosts. They are malevolent and dangerous to the living. There is nothing good to say about them.

Terry Pratchett’s elves enter the world through gaps in the defences, through what could be described as weak points in the barrier between Fairyland and the Discworld; the ghosts too enter via windows or portals, spots where the barrier between this world and the next has grown thin.

Both the elves and the ghosts cause their victims to experience terrible feelings; they may even lose the will to live.

It takes the Discworld witches to deal successfully with the elves; in the alternative London of the Lockwood series, only children and teenagers with certain psychic talents are able to detect, deal with and destroy the ghosts.

Strindberg and his cult-pushing secret friend: Part III

There is more than one way of looking at the story of August Strindberg and his secret friend.

Not only can we see it as a falling out between a cult member and the person he targeted for cultivation and recruitment, we can also treat it as an occult war between two black magicians. Either way, we have two men quarrelling in a very uncivilised and low-class way.

These scenarios or interpretations of events are not mutually exclusive; they all have relevance to the case. This final article in the series will cover these different dimensions of Strindberg’s story.

The cult member and the target

The secret friend’s persistence is sinister. Surely a normal, decent person would have realised long ago that Strindberg was just not buying Madame Blavatsky and her ideology and given up trying to sell to and recruit him.  He sounds just like one of those Multi-level Marketers who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer! 

Strindberg says that this man was very anxious for him to give a good opinion of Blavatsky’s book. His reaction to Strindberg’s criticism is a classic, textbook example of a cult member’s behaviour when the cult leader or the ideology is criticised or someone refuses to join after being targeted.

So why exactly was this man so determined to recruit Strindberg and why did he react the way he did when he finally failed?

I get the impression that some cult members are controlled - or even possessed - and under orders; I sense fear in addition to anger: they behave as if they will be terribly punished if they don’t complete their assignments successfully. They will pay for it if the targeted prey escapes.

Strindberg and his cult-pushing secret friend: Part II

The story in his autobiographical novel Inferno of August Strindberg’s relationship with his ‘secret friend’ has few original elements; much of it is depressingly familiar, even when read for the first time.

While Inferno was an unexpected place to find independent confirmation of some of my ideas about games cult members play, I was not at all surprised to find yet another example of the ‘falling for a false image and going from worship to total disillusionment' syndrome or to see that Strindberg’s ‘friends’ usually turned into what he called false friends, faithless friends, former friends and enemies!

Feuding occultists are nothing new either.

Part I ended with the start of what Strindberg called a ‘paper war’, with Strindberg’s secret friend and benefactor revealing his true intentions and threatening to call on occult powers to force Strindberg to accept the theosophist Madame Blavatsky as his teacher.

So what did Strindberg do next?

Strindberg’s counter-threat

Strindberg’s response to the threat shows that the two men deserved each other! Like really does attract like.

Strindberg replied that he would call on occult powers of his own if the secret friend tried to interfere with his destiny! As a warning, he told his secret friend about what had happened ten years earlier to a man who tried to influence him against his will. This man sounds rather like the secret friend:

“This man...in spite of his display of sympathy, was not really my well-wisher. An absolute tyrant, he wanted to interfere with my destiny, to tame and subdue me, in order to show me his superiority.”

Same game, different player it seems. This man received some severe, family-related blows; Strindberg suggests that he brought this trouble on himself because he played with fire when he tried to interfere in Strindberg’s life.

The secret friend did not give up easily; he was not deterred by this implied threat.

Strindberg and his cult-pushing secret friend: Part I

Previous articles cover August Strindberg’s ‘friendships’ with the man he called the ‘Danish painter’ and with the ‘mystery man’; now it is time to look at Strindberg’s relationship with someone he called his ‘secret friend’.

Strindberg had a history of falling out with people and breaking off relationships. He tells us in Inferno that the Danish painter became his enemy and that he and the down-and-out mystery man cooled off and never saw or heard from each other again. Then there was the correspondence with Nietzsche that lasted for only a short time.

It is easy to deduce from this what would eventually happen in the case of the secret friend. According to Strindberg, this man turned not just from a friend into an enemy but from an angel into a demon! 

My guess is that the secret friend was a demon all along but for a while concealed his real nature behind a mask of benevolence.

This case is of interest not only because of what it says about Strindberg’s pattern of relationships and the sort of people he became involved with, but also because this secret friend behaved like a cult member. I was surprised to recognise in this story some elements previously featured in articles about cults. I detected the Sole Supplier Syndrome for example; the infuriating  Superiority Syndrome is much in evidence, and so is the dreaded Attack-dog Syndrome!

Strindberg’s ‘secret friend’

Stella Benson had her imaginary Secret Friends; Strindberg had someone he called his ‘secret friend’ who offered financial and other support, playing, as he said, “...a decisive rôle in my life as mentor, counsellor, comforter, judge, and, not least, as a reliable helper in various times of need.”

So why would this man do all that for someone he had never met? Did he have ulterior motives and a hidden agenda, or was he just a benefactor, a patron who recognised Strindberg’s talents and wanted to encourage and assist him?

The answer seems obvious to me: the secret friend cultivated the relationship with Strindberg because he was after something. I have highlighted some key statements that give the game away.