"DENIS STONE: THE CROME QUARTOS AND THE KING IN YELLOW"
An Analysis By Fredrick Morris
Much of what the general public knows today of the poet David Strata (1898 - 1927) can be found in Huxley's vindictive parody of him as "Denis Stone" in "Crome Yellow" (1921) but before his alcoholism and suicide in 1927, he had created a substantial body of work. He first became the subject of public attention for his light verse - though his poems where never quite as fatuous as 'The Woman Who Was Like A Tree' (Crome Yellow, Huxley) - and for his series of 'pen-poem-portraits' of the famous, the equivalent in words, of Max Beerbohm's sketches. Who can forget his dig at Churchill then Secretary of State for Air:
"Himself, his balloon rising to the top
Could not predict the coming of the pop!" (On Churchill, Tit-bits 1923)
Or his lines on the anniversary of the death of Oscar Wilde:
"Had he stayed safely this side of the bars,
To feed his panthers, he would have the stars,
Instead breaking zoo-keeper's etiquette,
He flung himself in gutters, je regrette." (On Wilde, Punch 1920)
Cruel, we may think, and in the view of later history perhaps unjustified, but at the time, Strata was considered a politically astute writer, and his poems appeared in magazines as diverse as Punch, Harpers, Tit-Bits, and the early New Yorker under Harold Ross. He was by no means the 'sweet child in white trousers' of Huxley's parody - but a short pugnatious Irish youth in his early twenties: "infuriated by the rich, revolted by the poor, and bored by the middle-classes", as Dorothy Parker said (Private letter 11th August 1922, published 2014, Unpublished Letters Of Dorothy Parker, Sevenford Valley University Press). Huxley's parody splits Strata's real personna between the dilletante 'Denis Stone' and the 'intuition driven' hack 'Mr Barbecue-Smith'. Interestingly Huxley's, Denis Stone, and Barbecue-Smith, could also be said to represent the early writings of Robert W. Chambers (The King In Yellow) set against his latter work (the largely forgotten though popular in their day, romantic novels). Huxley's quotes the 'fearful thing it was to fall into His hands' in the preaching of Mr Bodiham (Crome Yellow, Chapter IX) , and his descriptions of the pallid doll like face of Anne Wimbush, and the similar countenance of Mrs Bodiham suggest that he himself was well aware of the Play as does the inclusion of Rabidranath Tagore (The King of the Dark Chamber) among the writers recognised by Mary.
[Peer review comment: or perhaps Huxley was a dreadful snob about women, and Rabidranath was sufficiently famous - he did win the Noble Prize in 1910 - to come to mind. Not everything in art is a signifier that the artist has read the Play. You might almost as well assert that "Thom Ryng" the author of the 1999 version, took his name deliberately from the mysterious author "Thom" of the 10 volume works and wonderings, on the false bookshelf (Crome Yellow, Chapter XIV). SBJ MA(J)]
Late in 1924 David Strata began work on a sustained body of poems modelled on T.S.Eliot's The Wasteland and drawing on material from Irish mythology as well as papers reaching him from his French connections on his mother's side. (Huxley correctly attributes to him a love of French literature, although he suggests that it mainly took the form of trashy somewhat racy novels). Without being able to pin down these papers, it is clear that some may have contained material pertaining to the Play.
Consider these lines, addressed to Edward Upward (1903-2009), in the prologue to the Quartos (1924) considered by many critics to refer in part to Strata's disasterous and short affair with Feiron Morris:
"I do not think the choice remains my own,
To write or not to write, to live or die,
Can we be said to throw down all the fates,
When mothers or the priests tie up the gates
And masked, patrol the roads that lead to town." (Crome Quartos, Prologue, 1924)
Surely, this must be influenced by CASSILDA's lines at Act 1 Scene 2: 46-49
"And yet they feel the choice / remains their own,
Or that is wrought by fates impersonal,
Not mother picked, nor Priest however masked."
[Surely? Or perhaps Blake's
The Garden of Love (1794) could have influenced both independantly?
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.
SBJ MA(J) ]
Of greatest interest to us, must be whether the material seen second hand in Strata, can inform the gaps in the extant 1893 text - specifically the section of his long poem called THE FEARFUL WEDDING.
This paper will reproduce the twenty four stanzas of David Strata's CROME QUARTOS: II THE FEARFUL WEDDING, and suggest how they may be read as a missing scene of Thomas de Castigne's Le Roi en Jaune.
