Harold
Alfred Manhood's short stories are in the same mould as those of
T. F. Powys and A. E. Coppard, with a strong rural setting and
leavening of folk wisdom, and a sense of allegory or fable to them
which hovers on the brink of the fantastic without embracing it
fully. There is no doubt that his two earliest collections,
Nightseed (1928) and Apples By Night (1932), are by far the
strongest. His later work can be desultory and diffuse, with too
much reliance on twist endings, sentimental set-pieces and
straightforward fishing yarns. But in these early books, there is
an aura of strangeness and a definite feeling of the presence of a
vital, original imagination. He is particularly adept at the
arresting and unusual simile, and at conveying a sense of the
timeless and archetypal in both the country and characters of his
stories. A good example is 'The Unbeliever', from Nightseed, which tells of the ancient
curator of an historic hunting lodge deep in a forest, not much
visited, and his wrestling with belief and unbelief, and his
strange carvings: all the enigmatic quality of de la Mare's work
is here. Some of his tales can be brutally macabre, such as 'Three
Nails', about a domestic crucifixion, or 'The Cough', about a
consumptive child. Although Manhood wrote one novel,
Gay
Agony, it is
in the short story form that he is a master: the Selected
Stories of
1947 is a plentiful but not especially discerning offering.
Readers will enjoy considering the inner meaning of his fable-like
work and whether there is a supernatural or uncanny implication or
not. Manhood spent most of his years living in a converted railway
carriage in a field in Sussex, brewing his own cider and growing
much of his food. In his later years he seems to have given up
writing all together.
Mark
Valentine
Short Stories
Nightseed
and Other Tales, Jonathan Cape (London), 1928
(Including: "Nightseed", "The Brotherhood", "The
Peach Tree", "Misery Cottage", "A Simple Tale", "The Unbeliever",
"Honeymoon", "The Cough", "The Dainty Pike", "Values",
"Match-Motive", "The Hero", "The Black Apron", "Andrew
God-Himself", "Orangers", "Fear".)
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