Influences. Many of Home’s Weirdbook stories
were based on experience and history.
The old mahogany contractor in “The
Hell of Black Lines” (1982) was based on a person Home knew well in
Belize. “Black Silver, Gold, and
Purple” (1979) was the first of five stories in the Ruthveniad, based on ancestors in
Scotland. His great-aunt had tried to
interest him as a child in the fact that his great-to-the-eighth grandmother
was the First Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Anne. Unable to use words like
“adultery” and “illegitimate child” to her young nephew, she could only make
vague allusions. Home had to discover
for himself the family lore that this bedchamber access had given the
chamberlady-grandmother’s handsome 19-year old brother access to the queen and
fatherhood of the prince who became King Charles I. Imagine young Home’s delight to learn that
his ten-times-great grandfather was Patrick, Lord Ruthven. Imagine him rolling the name across his
tongue: Lord Ruthven!—the first vampire of English language literature and
progenitor of a whole scurvy crew of traitors, warlocks, sorceresses,
alchemists, assassins, and mathematicians. Just imagine the jolt that gave to a
young writer already bent towards the gothic.
The world and the creatures in it, interpreted by a
writer’s imagination, made their own rich contributions to Home’s writings.
Summarizing his life in another little magazine, Home wrote that it had been
spent mostly in “the orchid-hung jungles of Central America, the glacier-girt
faery-world rain forest of Southeast Alaska, and the rarefied heights of the
Himalayas”, but he also traveled over western South America, Polynesia
(especially Easter Island), plus Scotland, Romania and Antarctica. When Home returned from 18 months in the
Himalayas, Ben P. Indick wrote that Home had “been in some of the remotest and
most dangerous places on earth”, to which Home replied that no place he had
been was as dangerous as the streets of New York City, where he’d never set
foot.
Published Poetry
The
first appearance of any of Home’s poetry in a hardback anthology was in the
1965 Poets of the Midwest, and a
number of his poems were printed in the little magazines of the 1960s. However, his style changed in the mid-‘60s
with his discovery of writers Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, Stanley Kunitz,
Richard Wilbur, and Lawrence Durrell.
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Three Poetry Collections, by William Scott Home (1986). Included Metamorphoses of The Vampire and Other Transmutations; The Ransom of Enchanted Castles: Thirty-Six Poems; and Onyx and Bloodstone: Thirty-Six Poems. |
In
the 1980s John Squires, who was a regular correspondent and generous donor to
Home (and, until his death in 2012, executor of Home’s literary estate),
photocopied his own favorite selections from Home’s self-published Onyx and
Bloodstone and The Ransom of Enchanted Castles and circulated these amongst
a friendly cabal of readers. Ganley also
published his poems regularly in Weirdbook and Amanita Brandy. However,
Home’s more mainstream pieces afterwards were rarely published, and he jokingly referred to them under the collective title: Paradise Disdained.
In
1985, Randy Everts of The Strange
Company brought out two collections of Home’s original
verse: Black Diamond Gates,
pieces reflecting the 1200-1600 AD era of magic and experimental science, and Stain
of Moonlight, more general poems written over the same period. Home reports that Evert then accepted a third
collection, Djinn and Jewel-Men, but never printed (or returned)
it. Other original works finding no
publisher include “Depth Charge”, “The
Streets of Midnight Wander Through the Skull”, “Made Cold by Universe”, and “The Dimness and Darkness of Distance”, to name just a few.
Sheaves of Translations
While studying French in high school, Home received a
number of French books from his great-aunt (she who had first alerted him to his hideous genetic heritage) and set about
translating Jose-Maria de Heredia’s “Flight
of the Centaurs”, published by a highly encouraging Lilith Lorraine in Flame (she liked the Baudelaire
translations better). He next set about translating the entirety of de
Heredia’s “Les Trophées”
as well, finishing, in each of three attempts, about a third
of the book, with the results published piecemeal in various anthologies.
By the early 1980s Stanley McNail was publishing his
translations in Nightshade, and Home got McNail interested in producing a
volume of horror-fantasy translations to equal Derleth’s Dark of the Moon,
which had excluded translations. By that
time, Home had a thick sheaf of French, Spanish and Portuguese translations and
suggested that if the German, Scandinavian, and Russian translators could be
roused, it was a fait accompli. These
latter did not respond, but by the time Nightshade ceased publication,
Home had enough on his own to fill two books: Metamorphoses of the Vampire and Other Transmutations (tag line
from Baudelaire) and We Come From the
Deaths of Stars (tag line from Henri de Regnier), containing the
Nostradmicon—straight translations, one science fiction writer translating
another, of a quatre-vingtain of
quatrains from Nostradamus. (Everts briefly showed interest, suggesting the
title Strange Moons Circle.)
Home continued to translate full tilt, resulting in
the collection Writhing Star-Scaled Body
(tag line from Victor Hugo). This also unpublished (and as yet incomplete)
volume includes writers unknown in the U. S., such as Iwan Gilkin, Maurice
Rollinat, Maurice Magre, in addition to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Corbiere, a number
of 19th Century Brazilian Portuguese poets utterly unknown abroad
(with the exception of Olavo Bilac), and a smattering of Haitian French
writers. As a self-proclaimed “run-of-the-mill fin-de-siècle symbolist and decadent without even a
neo in front of it”, Home felt particularly suited to take on translating the
latter school.
Many of these pieces stayed on Home’s to-do list for
30 or 40 years. He noted that, despite many tries, he was unable to render
Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne” (Spoiled Meat”) until his old age because he had
been “insufficiently immature” to manage it before.
III. An
American King for Redonda
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View of the island micronation of Redonda, from the
southeast.
Photo by Invertzoo, made available on Wiki Commons.
|
It is not widely known that William Scott Home has made a claim to the Kingdom of Redonda. That Home is the true King of Redonda was a revelation even to himself, and the unraveling of this truth took a winding path.
The Events
In 1960, primed by Lovecraft’s recommendation, Home snapped up a copy of M. P. Shiel’s Best Short Stories in a Denver bookstore and speedily recognized Shiel as his pre-incarnation and stylistic model.
In December 1970, Home flew around the island of Redonda, from Dominica to Antigua and back, for a seminar, unaware that the last legitimate king, Juan I (John Gawsworth) had died on 23 September, three months before. Gawsworth had been appointed successor by the first king, M. P. Shiel, whose father had claimed the island* for his son on the occasion of his birth (21 July 1865).
[*The British Empire’s claim, issued in 1872, is subsequent and invalid.]
In 1974, Ben Indick, responding to the pieces in Frierson’s HPL, declared Scott Home to be the stylistic reincarnation of M. P. Shiel, who was himself recognized as the literary reincarnation of Edgar Allan Poe (whose last unfinished story, “The Lighthouse”, set its protagonist alone on an isolated rock). Thirty-one years after Poe’s death, the 15-year old Shiel was crowned King of Redonda on the island.
Several years later, Home learned of King Juan’s death, and that there were no legitimate heirs, and so proclaimed his Thaumaturgical Reincarnate Legitimacy with the name Guillermo I, with the concurrence of numerous writers and friends. Thus was “The Lighthouse” fulfilled.
The Evidence
Home’s bona fides match Shiel’s: Legitimate royal descent through three different illegitimate Stuart daughters; descent from the first vampire of English fiction and his horde; a biographical connection to the Caribbean as a resident and explorer (though the only volcanoes to erupt on Home’s arrival were in Hawai’i and Chile); and as the greatest living writer of horror fantasy. By his 2005 Instrument of Succession, Home decreed his successor must meet these requirements and adopt a regal cognomen distinct from any predecessors, all subject to confirmation by the House of Lords, which was hereafter to be known as the House of Peers (to avoid sexism).
|
Flag of the Sovereign and Independent Buccaneer Kingdom
of
Redonda, designed by H. S. M. Guillermo I
(Home pictured, singing the anthem with assembled subjects)
|
The Kingdom
On the Kingdom’s centennial, 21 July 1980, Home officially demanded recognition of the Sovereign and Independent Buccaneer Kingdom of Redonda, set up a cabinet, and challenged all pretenders and imposters, intenders and preposters, to put up their dukes (should he prevail, he would put up his duchesses). One humorless and inarticulate Brit declared him “an eccentric writer living in Alaska”, but no challenges were offered.
On that occasion, Home presented the first national flag, the national anthem and hymn, and the national motto (Pro Se Quisque). He pegged the official monetary unit, the doubloon, at US $4.60 and decimalized the coinage (later regretted). He also specified the royal regalia (a crystal skull as orb, a narwhal tusk as scepter) and, as Lord of the Sea, issued his claim to the dependencies of Trinidade-Martim Vaz, Buss Island, Daugherty Island, Gama Land, and Yezoland.
Home issued patents of nobility to all the dutiful worthy of royal favor, giving titles to Zaleski, Saulsdomdaniel, Phorfor, Xélucha, Huguenin, Tulsah, L’Abri, Bomarzo, and others; granting Paul Ganley likewise the Earldom of Drakulya and Beztérce and the Baron Frankenstein. Other worthy peers include Ben Indick, John Squires, and such as Frank Belknap Long, Sprague de Camp, Philippe Druillet, Jacques Bondon, and many more, all duly registered in Quirk’s Peerage. (Derleth was dead by the centennial, and Home gave no posthumous titles.)
Throughout the 1980s, Redonda Day feasts were held annually, to a considerable and riotous assembly, at Castle Huntley tower (now named CreepingKeep), the royal residence, in the Valley Full of Flowers. Over time, attendance declined owing to the natural attrition of the peers. In late years, Homes remarked he suffered from the “loneliness of the long-persisting mummer.”
A Shiel Continuum
In 1983, Home contributed “The Rose Beyond the Thunders and the Whirlpools”, a study of Shiel’s short stories, to A. Reynolds Morse’s massive volume Shiel in Diverse Hands. Morse declared the study “exquisitely erudite.”
In October 1992, Home reached the island of Vaila in Shetland and was given a personal tour of the griffin-guerdoned House of Sounds where no cat will stay. The house (a real one, not the fictional horror) was for vend at £225,000—a king’s ransom, but no one ransomed this king.
IV. As a Closing
In later years, Home told one correspondent he had been able to fulfill three ambitions in his life: (1) to be the greatest living writer of horror fantasy; (2) to “journey down the world’s backbone”—that is, travel overland from 10 miles north of Point Barrow (Arctic Circle) to 80 miles north of the Antarctic Circle, in stages permitting detailed exploration of the natural, archeological, historic and cultural features of the whole Cordillera; and (3) to spend time in the Himalayas studying in Tibetan schools and monasteries. The highlight of achieving the third ambition was being present in the Kingdom of Zanskar for the historic, first-ever visit of a current Dalai Lama (in 1980).
Home’s travels reflect his interest in hiking, climbing, caving, canoeing, kayaking, skydiving, parasailing, bungee-jumping, and general exploring, especially in other cultures and languages. His only complaint? That he never got enough of any of them.
He has not had enough of the writing life, either. His writing output never declined, but as the little magazines disappeared, and his own finances ebbed, he less often attempted large-scale mailings, and a newer generation of editors did not know him. Also, when finishing up his nonfiction research book In Search of Lord Ruthven, the computer he was using ate the entire text, a devastating blow. However, in spring 2015, on the revival of Weirdbook, Home resumed contact with Paul Ganley and others and started producing a fresh burst of stories and poems.