The Burnaby Experiments Read online

  THE BURNABY EXPERIMENTS

  Stephen Gilbert was born in Newcastle, Co. Down in 1912. He was sent to England for boarding school from age 10 to 13 and afterwards to a Scottish public school, which he left without passing any exams or obtaining a leaving certificate. He returned to Belfast, where he worked briefly as a journalist before joining his father’s tea and seed business. In 1931, just before his nineteenth birthday, Gilbert met novelist Forrest Reid, by that time in his mid-fifties. Reid’s numerous novels reflect his lifelong fascination with teenage boys, and he was quickly drawn to Gilbert; the two commenced a sometimes turbulent friendship that lasted until Reid’s death in 1947. Reid acted as mentor to Gilbert, who had literary aspirations, and ultimately depicted an idealized version of their relationship in the novel Brian Westby (1934).

  Gilbert’s first novel, The Landslide (1943), a fantasy involving prehistoric creatures which appear in a remote part of Ireland after being uncovered by a landslide, appeared to generally positive reviews and was dedicated to Reid. A realistic novel, Bombardier (1944), followed, based on Gilbert’s experiences in the Second World War. Gilbert’s third novel, Monkeyface (1948), concerns what seems to be an ape, called “Bimbo,” discovered in South America and brought back to Belfast, where it learns to talk. The Burnaby Experiments appeared in 1952, five years after Reid’s death, and is a thinly disguised portrayal of their relationship from Gilbert’s point of view and a belated response to Brian Westby. His final novel, Ratman’s Notebooks (1968), the story of a loner who learns he can train rats to kill, would become his most famous, being twice filmed as Willard (1971; 2003).

  Gilbert married his wife Kathleen Stevenson in 1945; the two had four children, and Gilbert devoted most of his time from the 1950s onward to family life and his seed business. He died in Northern Ireland in 2010 at age 97.

  Berthold Wolpe (1905-1989) designed the jacket cover for The Burnaby Experiments. Wolpe was one of the best-known book designers of the twentieth century and was responsible for a number of typefaces, including Albertus, and designed more than 1,500 dust jackets and book covers for Faber and Faber between 1941 and 1975, many of which are considered classics.

  Other books by Stephen Gilbert

  The Landslide

  Bombardier

  Monkeyface

  Ratman’s Notebooks

  Also available from Valancourt Books

  The Garden God

  by Forrest Reid

  The Tom Barber Trilogy

  by Forrest Reid

  An Air that Kills

  by Francis King

  The Book of Life

  by C. H. B. Kitchin

  THE

  BURNABY EXPERIMENTS

  an account of the life and work

  of John Burnaby and Marcus Brownlow

  by

  STEPHEN GILBERT

  With a new preface by Patricia Craig

  Kansas City:

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  2012

  The Burnaby Experiments by Stephen Gilbert

  First published London: Faber and Faber, 1952

  First Valancourt Books edition 2012

  © 1952 by Stephen Gilbert

  Preface © 2012 by Patricia Craig

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover by Berthold Wolpe, reproduced with permission of Faber & Faber

  isbn 978-1-934555-57-6 (trade paper)

  All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.

  Design and typography by James D. Jenkins

  Set in Dante MT

  Published by Valancourt Books

  Kansas City, Missouri

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PREFACE

  The Burnaby Experiments, Stephen Gilbert’s fourth novel, was published in 1952. It is in itself something of an experiment, dealing as it does with the difficult subject of psychic translocation, but presenting it, with all its presumptions and technicalities, in an immensely readable and engaging way. It makes for an unforgettable narrative.

  The book has a framing device. Gilbert’s central character is called Marcus Brownlow, and The Burnaby Experiments is written, as it were, by Marcus’s (unnamed) literary executor and inheritor of his papers. The main part of the story—which the “editor” has changed from a first-person to a third-person account—concerns Marcus’s somewhat fraught association with a strange and redoubtable old gentleman called Mr. Burnaby. Before the two get together, though, a couple of episodes from Marcus’s schooldays come into the picture. At his minor public school in England, the otherwise undistinguished Irish boy exhibits one startling and not altogether auspicious trait, an ability to predict the future in some of his dreams. This untoward ability, with accompanying contretemps, sets the scene for much of what’s to follow.

  Once his schooldays are over, Marcus finds himself at something of a loose end back home in 1930s suburban Belfast, in Northern Ireland. From his state of vocational uncertainty he is plucked by millionaire Burnaby, a fellow precognition specialist, and installed in a large old house in County Donegal with a martello tower at one end of it. Here the “experiments” of the title are carried out, under Mr. Burnaby’s direction. It is largely a matter of concentration. “‘It’s like learning to swim, or like the children learning to fly in Peter Pan,’” Marcus’s instructor tells him. “‘First you’ll have to learn to move about the room without your body. . . .’”

  A tall order, perhaps; but Marcus is an enthusiastic participant, at least to begin with. Gradually he comes to resent his mentor’s demand for total commitment on his protégé’s part. And once the prospect of a happy and unremarkable life—marriage, a family, the ordinary entertainments of youth—is held out to Marcus, it becomes clear that a dangerous clash of loyalties is impending.

  In this novel, autobiography and invention converge, to exhilarating effect. Stephen Gilbert has taken an aspect of his own life, his sometimes difficult friendship with the much older Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid, and subjected all its vexations and complexities to the transforming power of fiction. John Burnaby is Forrest Reid magnified, with many of Reid’s characteristics transferred intact to the page, down to his abruptness, his taste in literature (Henry James, Arthur Machen), and other emphatic opinions. Most of the details of Burnaby’s background—“He belonged to a North of Ireland commercial family”—are identical with Forrest Reid’s.

  If it’s not altogether an affectionate portrayal, it is none the less very striking. There is also a slight element of tit-for-tat about it. Forrest Reid famously inserted the real-life Stephen Gilbert into a central position in his own novel of 1934, Brian Westby. Gilbert suffered a good deal of unease on account of this fictional version of himself, though the strong friendship between the two authors survived the ensuing friction. Gilbert held off with his retaliation—if that’s what it was—until after Forrest Reid’s death in 1947. He knew how much he owed to the older writer, but at the same time there were things he simply had to get out of his system, including his annoyance at Reid’s incessant attempts to impose his own ideas on his younger fellow author. If, however, in this particular instance, resentment or exasperation drove Stephen Gilbert’s lit
erary impulse, we should be grateful for its outlet in the wonderfully original and intriguing Burnaby Experiments.

  All Stephen Gilbert’s novels are concerned to some degree with the enlargement of life by fantasy: even the most realistic of them, Bombardier (1944), achieves a kind of surreal quality with its deadpan approach to the exigencies of active service in wartime. But The Burnaby Experiments is perhaps the most vividly realized. It is also very funny, before an elemental darkness enters in. Take Marcus’s first journey from Belfast to Donegal, in the company (as he supposes) of an old school friend named Caldwell. Marcus’s increasing bewilderment at Caldwell’s mad and mystifying antics along the way is conveyed with aplomb. “. . . [T]he crowds seemed to confuse Caldwell. Everyone walked straight at him, and to avoid collisions he kept skipping backwards and forwards in the most extraordinary fashion.”

  Extraordinary indeed. “It took them ten minutes to reach Donegall Square”, the passage goes on—an excessive amount of time only if you’re familiar with the route they’re following. Among the incidental pleasures of this novel is its naming of local places and landmarks—Gibson’s Corner, the Albert Clock, the flower sellers outside Mullan’s bookshop—as its author goes about evoking a bygone, inter-war Belfast, with its whirring trams and buses, its constant faint smell of the Lough. And then he does the same for Donegal, all heathery hills and grey outcrops of rock, and the yellow glow of oil-lamps shining in cottage windows. Along with his other assets, Stephen Gilbert is endowed with a vibrant descriptive gift. And along with his other activities—as a businessman, CND activist and pater familias—he produced a small but distinctive body of work, highly individual in its concerns and techniques, and embodying a unique voice.

  Patricia Craig

  November 21, 2012

  A leading literary critic and anthologist, Patricia Craig regularly contributes to the Independent, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Irish Times and New Statesman, and has appeared on various television and radio programmes.

  She is the author of Brian Moore: A Biography (Bloomsbury, 2002) and has edited many anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Ireland (Oxford University Press, 1998), The Rattle of the North (Blackstaff, 1992), The Belfast Anthology (Blackstaff, 1999) and The Ulster Anthology (Blackstaff, 2006).

  THE BURNABY EXPERIMENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks are due to the following:

  Messrs. Molyneux & Wright, Solicitors, Dublin;

  George Baker, Esq., M.A., Headmaster of Gidley Grammar School, formerly assistant master at Cranlow School;

  Dr. R. A. Slade, M.A., D.Litt. (Hon.), Headmaster of Cranlow School; and above all to

  Mr. and Mrs. Conway, Malin, Malone Road, Belfast, and to Miss Conway, without whose assistance this book could not have been written.

  INTRODUCTION

  Iwas at school with a boy called Marcus Brownlow. His nickname was Screwey. We were never exactly friends, though for a period, when we were both in the lower school, I saw a good deal of him. Later on I lost touch with him. He was one of those boys who never really succeed at school. No one notices when they leave. Like old soldiers in the song they simply fade away.

  I never noticed when Marcus Brownlow left. It was only when I came to write this book that I discovered he had left two terms before me, at Easter 1928. Yet, in the interval, I had often thought of him. I used to wonder vaguely what had happened to him; but I made no inquiries.

  Then, in December 1937, I received a letter from a firm of solicitors in Dublin, informing me that he was dead, and that he had left me ten thousand pounds on condition that I agreed to act as his literary executor. They added, however, that the will in which this and several other bequests had been made was invalid—not having been witnessed, but that the “heirs at law” had “decided to honour what were without doubt the wishes of the deceased”. The letter added that so far as the solicitors were aware the late Mr. Brownlow’s literary activities had not been extensive.

  I accepted the appointment. At that moment I would have done a good deal for one thousand pounds let alone ten. I went to Dublin and called on the solicitors, Messrs. Toole, Delaney & Fitzgerald. I had a long interview with Mr. Delaney, the head of the firm. He said that so far they had come across no literary remains whatever, but that if they did they would immediately send them to me. He wanted to know what Screwey had been like at school and I found I could remember a good deal more than I would have thought. In return for my information Mr. Delaney told me all he could about Screwey’s life, from the time he left school till the time of his death.

  It appeared that for some years Screwey had been a sort of secretary-companion to an eccentric millionaire called John Burnaby. Actually I had heard of John Burnaby. My father and other men of his generation would speak of him sometimes with a sort of envious admiration. I knew that he had made a fortune on the stock exchange in the early nineteen-hundreds, though I had never been quite clear as to how it had been done.

  Mr. Delaney didn’t know how it had been done either. He said that it hadn’t been until after his retirement that Mr. Burnaby had become a client of theirs. He had retired quite early in life and for many years had lived alone, except for a few servants, in a sort of castle in one of the wildest parts of Donegal. From 1929 until Mr. Burnaby’s death in 1935 Screwey had lived there with him, and he had continued to live there by himself for all that remained of his own life.

  To me it sounded as if Screwey had had a very uninteresting time, but I wasn’t quite certain. At Shellborough he had been obscure, unimportant, a dud at both games and work: yet I could remember one week when he had been the most talked-of boy in the school: something quite inexplicable happened and he was at the centre of it, was the cause of it indeed, if such a thing could be said to have a cause. One or two of the facts Mr. Delaney gave me about him also seemed quite inexplicable—as if under all the dullness there had been going on an exciting, secret life.

  I left Dublin a good deal puzzled. There were several ways in which Screwey might have got to know that I was writing. What I couldn’t understand was why he had appointed a literary executor if he had never done any writing himself.

  I had been at home about a week when I received a flat square parcel, of a shape very familiar to unsuccessful authors. By the same post came a somewhat apologetic letter from Mr. Delaney. “I am afraid your position of literary executor is going to prove less of a sinecure than we had anticipated,” he wrote. “Under separate cover I am posting you a manuscript which we discovered yesterday. Whether it was intended or is suitable for publication you will no doubt be able to inform us when you have read the work. We shall be glad if you will give the matter your attention.”

  I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the book was a novel. It was handwritten, and somehow I thought that I would find it tedious reading. Obviously, however, I had to read it: so I began at once. I had read three or four pages before I realized that the book was not a novel told in the first person, but Screwey’s autobiography.

  This aroused my interest. I found too that his writing was perfectly legible. Except for meals I read straight through the book till I reached the end. It was a long book—about two hundred thousand words I should say—and I found it enormously interesting. It was completely unsophisticated: it gave the impression of having been written by a child. I couldn’t imagine any publisher accepting it. Yet who, after all, was I to talk? None of my books had been accepted.

  Mistrusting my own judgement, I therefore decided to give the book a trial as it was. I went over the manuscript again, correcting spelling mistakes and obvious slips. Then I had it typed and sent it to a large firm of publishers in London.

  After two months it came back, with the following letter:

  Dear Sir,

  After careful consideration, we have decided not to ma
ke an offer to publish your book. We return your manuscript herewith.

  Yours faithfully,

  ————

  I always gave my own books three chances and I felt it only fair to do the same with Screwey’s. But it was no good: the other two publishers whom I tried also rejected it.

  At first I didn’t know what to do. I felt that as I was taking the legacy I was obliged to do everything in my power to get the book published. I could of course have paid for its publication; but I thought that a book brought out at the expense of the author, or of the author’s executor, would have little chance of success. Somehow or other I had to get it accepted in the ordinary way by a reputable publisher.

  I decided to edit it and rewrite it. In the meantime several other manuscripts had come to light and been posted on to me by Mr. Delaney. These consisted of a journal written by Mr. Burnaby, and a mass of notes, some in Screwey’s handwriting, some in Mr. Burnaby’s. They had been found in an old oak chest in an attic room in the house in Donegal. I worked at them for over a year. I visited Belfast and Donegal, and interviewed everyone I could find who had known Screwey or Mr. Burnaby. Eventually I produced a book of about a hundred thousand words which was a sort of digest of the notes and of the two journals. In the summer of 1939 I sent it to a publisher. After two months it was returned—rejected. As before I tried two more publishers: the result was exactly the same. By this time the war had broken out and after the third rejection I put the manuscript away.