"Only long, very green grass, and a may tree, and a witch dancing."

One of the delights of Readercon was Henry Wessells’ talk on twenties fantasy, “Standing in the Shadows of Lud.”  I had read only two of his six listed books, both magnificent: Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925) and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman (1926).  The first he spoke of, Stella Benson’s Living Alone (1919), is a dizzy joy.  This is how it opens:


MAGIC COMES TO A COMMITTEE

There were six women, seven chairs, and a table in an otherwise unfurnished room in an unfashionable part of London. Three of the women were of the kind that has no life apart from committees. They need not be mentioned in detail. The names of two others were Miss Meta Mostyn Ford and Lady Arabel Higgins. Miss Ford was a good woman, as well as a lady. Her hands were beautiful because they paid a manicurist to keep them so, but she was too righteous to powder her nose. She was the sort of person a man would like his best friend to marry. Lady Arabel was older: she was virtuous to the same extent as Achilles was invulnerable. In the beginning, when her soul was being soaked in virtue, the heel of it was fortunately left dry. She had a husband, but no apparent tragedy in her life. These two women were obviously not native to their surroundings. Their eyelashes brought Bond Street—or at least Kensington—to mind; their shoes were mudless; their gloves had not been bought in the sales. Of the sixth woman the less said the better.

All six women were there because their country was at war, and because they felt it to be their duty to assist it to remain at war for the present....

Five of the members were discussing methods of persuading poor people to save money. The sixth was making spots on the table with a pen.

They were interrupted, not by the expected Mayor, but by a young woman, who came violently in by the street door, rushed into the middle of the room, and got under the table. The members, in surprise, pushed back their chairs and made ladylike noises of protest and inquiry.

"They're after me," panted the person under the table.
 She is, of course, a Witch:  a spirit of sheer anarchy, and keeper of the House of Living Alone, “a monastery and a convent for monks and nuns dedicated to unknown gods.”  It stands in a backwater of London, on Mitten Island, and you need a ferryman to bring you over.  The sixth woman, Sarah Brown, finds a room there:  not a refuge but a portal.

A garden of quite a good many yards lay behind the house; it contained no potatoes or anything useful, only long, very green grass, and a may tree, and a witch dancing. The extraordinary music to which she was dancing was partly the braying of a neighbouring donkey, and partly her own erratic singing. She danced, as you may imagine, in a very far from grown-up way, rather like a baby that has thought of a new funny way of annoying its Nana; and she sang, too, like a child that inadvertently bursts into loud tuneless song, because it is morning and yet too early to get up ... She was wearing a mackintosh, which was in itself rather funny, but her feet were bare.
 The book wanders onward, every which elsewhere, with a plot like a lawnful of fireflies.  Its tone is part acidulated syllabub, part hypnagogic reverie, part slapstick.  There are ghosts in an air-raid shelter, played for social comedy; fairy Land Girls--slackers all--and their anxious dragon overseer; a Cockney Eros named Elbert; a daft noble warlock soldier (“one felt that magic was not encouraged in the Army”); a blizzard of butterflies drowning in soup at a dinner party; and (of course) Harold the Broomstick, who “is apt to shirk cleaning the stairs, but as it happens, he is keeping company with an O-Cedar Mop in Kentish Town, and I've no doubt she would come over and do the stairs thoroughly every Tuesday night.”

At times it lurches into sententious whimsy; now and then, there is a soul-jarring note of casual prejudice.  There are patches of twee.  But at its sharpest, the satire still needles:  “I gather America is too full of Liberty to leave room for socialism, isn't that so?”  You could call it proto-Pratchetty, if it weren’t so very much itself.

And when it flies, it is magicomedy, a Fimbulwinter’s Tale.

For Benson, the Great War has arisen from the absence of Magic, out of the abyss of reason; she hopes for its return:  “And as for spells—we have started a new spell. That's the curious part of this War. So gross and so impossible and so unmagic was its cause, that magic, which had been virtually dead, rose again to meet it.” France is unimaginable, a blackness burnt out of time; but at the fringes there is fire leaping, and fantastic shadows.

Here’s midnight over London, and an aerial dogfight:

The guns were shouting now, and the shells wailed and burst not so very far below them, but Harold trembled no longer. More quickly than a falling star he swooped, and in a second the alien witch was in sight, an unwieldy figure whose broomstick sounded rather broken-winded, probably owing to the long-distance flight and to the fourteen stone of Teutonic magic on its back. There was a wicked-looking apparatus attached to the collar of the German broomstick, obviously designed to squirt unpleasant enchantments downward. This contrivance was apparently giving some trouble, for the German was so busy attending to it that at first she did not see or hear the approach of Harold and his rider. She was aroused to her danger by a heavy chunk of magic which struck and nearly unseated her. In a second, however, she was ready with a parrying enchantment, and the fight began. The two broomsticks reared and circled round each other, and over and under each other. From their riders' finger-tips magic of the most explosive kind crackled, and incantations of such potency were exchanged that, I am told, the tiles and chimney-pots of the streets below suffered a good deal. Round and round and over and under whirled the broomsticks, till the very spaces went mad, and London seemed to rush down nightmare slopes into a stormy sky, while its lights swung from pole to pole and were entangled with the stars.

Both broomsticks were by now so uproariously excited that neither witch was able to aim her magic missiles very carefully, and indeed it was not long before Harold passed entirely beyond control. After bucking violently once or twice, he gave a wild high cry that was like the wind howling through the fierce forest past of his race, and fell upon the other broomstick, fixing his bristles into its throat. The shock of the collision was too much for both witches. Our witch—if I may call her so—was shot over Harold's head, and landed on the ample breast of her adversary, who, in consequence, lost her balance. They fell together into space.

Nine