The Feast of Bacchus: It’s Greek to me

The Feast of Bacchus by Ernest G. Henham

Tenebrae (1898), by the London-born writer Ernest G. Henham, had turned out to be one of my favorite reading experiences of 2023, and I had been wanting to read another book from this same author ever since. A Gothically inflected tale dealing with fratricide, madness, and a 20-foot-long spider monstrosity, Tenebrae was a deliciously morbid treat; one that had been rescued from over a century’s worth of oblivion by the fine folks at Valancourt Books. Now, I’d like to tell you of my follow-up Henham experience, this one in the supernatural vein and released almost a decade later. And that book is The Feast of Bacchus.

The publishing history of this particular book is an easy one to set down. The Feast of Bacchus was originally released in 1907 by the British publisher Brown, Langham & Co. It would then go OOPs (out of prints) for 107 years, till Valancourt opted to resurrect it. (Tenebrae, by the way, was rescued from its oblivion after 111 years!) This was the eighth and final novel that Henham wrote under his own name. After moving from Canada back to his native Devonshire, the author wrote another 20 novels under the pseudonym John Trevena, many of them set in the Dartmoor region that he knew so well. The Valancourt edition from 2014, besides being (realistically speaking) the only choice for prospective readers today, also includes a highly literate/borderline impossibly erudite introduction by Henham authority Gerald Monsman; a spoiler-laden intro that is best read as an afterword, as the Valancourt editors suggest. As it happens, this latter Henham novel is not the 5-star masterpiece that I deemed Tenebrae to be, although it just might be a more formally accomplished piece of work. More on that in a moment.

Like Tenebrae, The Feast of Bacchus is largely set in a gloomy old house in the English countryside. The Strath, we learn, in the hamlet of Thorlund (population: 30), was built in 1670 and, as Henham’s story opens at the beginning of the 1900s, has been an abandoned wreck for over a century … abandoned, but not entirely empty, it would seem. Though considered to be not haunted by the locals, an undeniable something emanates from the center of the Strath, influencing for both good and ill everything and everyone in the area. Okay, I might as well tell you up front what the source of those influences are right now, since the information is revealed on the book’s back cover as well as in Monsman’s introduction. A pair of tragedy and comedy masks, which had been fashioned from human skin by a mad German toy maker in the 18^th century, are ultimately revealed to be the source of the emanations, and the eight characters who come under their influence soon find their lives forever changed as a result.

First up we have the Reverend Berry, a middle-aged scholar who lives next door to the Strath and has spent the last 30 years of his life walking in the Strath’s gardens and translating the poetry of Sappho and other Greeks of antiquity. When the Strath’s new owner, Reed, arrives from America with big plans for renovating the property, Berry warns him against doing so, and within days, the American is found dead, strangled, in front of his dilapidated house. Reed’s nephew, Charles Conway, a debauched wastrel from London, soon arrives to take possession (or, should I say, become possessed?), later joined by his impecunious writer friend, Drayton, and the two are soon seen to be dreamily ensconced in the Strath, working on a play (in the case of Drayton), reading the diary of Winifred Hooper, the unhappy daughter of the Strath’s original highwayman owner (in the case of Conway), and strolling around the garden.

Soon drawn into the Strath’s orbit as well is the Reverend Price, the squire/parson – or squarson, as Henham calls him (and yes, that is an actual word) – of the nearby village of Kingsmore; a kindly old man who cannot understand Berry’s, uh, burying himself in isolation. Price’s niece, the proto-feminist Flora Neill, later arrives for a visit, and she, despite her vow to never marry, quickly becomes interested in the Strath’s handsome new owner. And Flora is soon joined by her vain and foolish friend Maude Juxon; a woman without a serious thought in her head, on holiday in the country to get away from her young daughter and her decent but boring husband Herbert. Herbert, it seems, is a stockbroker whose business is on the verge of failure, and he too soon arrives on the scene, most particularly to observe Maude’s obvious infatuation with the handsome scholar Berry. And to round out the octet, we have Lone Nance, aka Nancy, a teenaged girl who lives in the area, who spends all her time communing with nature, and who is clearly suffering from some kind of mental disorder. Eventually, the twin masks of comedy and tragedy will gather all eight of these folks under the crumbling roof of the Strath, for a bemused evening of 18^th century costumes, dance, harpsichord music … and attempted murder…

Now, perhaps I should admit right here that The Feast of Bacchus will probably not prove an “easy book” for the average reader, unlike the extremely reader-friendly Tenebrae. I haven’t mentioned that the novel is patterned after those ancient Greek works that the Reverend Berry studies (Berry himself being referred to as an “exarchus” somewhere) and with numerous allusions to the dramatists and tragedians of over two millennia back. Monsman’s pedantic-beyond-belief intro isn’t as helpful as it might be, and his reference to the novel’s “Aeolic iambo-trochaic scansion patterns” will most likely elicit a groan from most. The novel will thus be appreciated variously by two separate groups: by the more scholarly readers with a thorough knowledge of the Greek classics and who are alive to all the book’s manifold subtleties, and by the average readers who just want to revel in Henham’s beautiful prose and enjoy a creepy tale of the supernatural. (Need I even mention which of the two camps I fall into?)

Henham, to his great credit, has done an impressive job of research as regards Greek drama and 18^th century period décor. His prose really is wonderfully detailed here. Thus, Maude doesn’t just pick some flowers at one point, but rather “marguerites and ragged-robins,” and Berry’s small church is said to feature “a canopied memorial, adorned by miniature fluted columns and capitals of spiral volutes, acanthus-leaf bosses, brackets of decorated foliage, grape pendants, and crotchets terminating in mitre-headed finials…” And the Strath, it must be said, is a wonderfully creepy abode in which to set the center stage for Henham’s play; a house in which bats flutter through the halls, fungi and nightshade sprout from the mildewed carpets, and cracks and gaping holes riddle the walls and flooring. Early on, Berry tells Reed “You are not strong enough to fight the place,” prefiguring Roddy McDowall’s famous line “You do not fight this house” from the classic 1973 film The Legend of Hell House. And it’s true: The Strath’s influence seemingly cannot be fought, and those who enter become wholly different inside than they were outside … and with zero recollection of what transpired indoors once they depart. (“Inside the Strath they were puppets; outside they resumed … their normal selves.”) Again, it is a house not haunted in the traditional sense, but one whose competing masks of comedy and tragedy influence its visitors back and forth, for better or (usually) worse.

Henham’s octet of characters are all finely drawn, especially so the Reverends Berry and Price and that empty-headed chatterbox Maude. And all eight become changed people as a result of their stay at the Strath. The author also provides his readers with at least four scenes of undeniable eeriness. In the first, Berry, in a kind of swoon, engages in some “automatic writing” and receives messages from some cosmic entities who endeavor to tell him what’s going on in the house next door … followed by a message from the deceased Reed! And then there’s the remarkable scene in which Berry, Price and Flora visit Conway at the Strath, and before long are dressed in 18^th century garb and perukes, and discussing the health of their current king … George the Second! Maude’s first visit to the Strath, during which she is compelled to believe that she has tragically murdered her own husband and daughter, is truly nerve racking. And, of course, nothing can top the hours-long masque that our octet holds in the house near the book’s end, with one and all going out of their minds, to violent effect. And I would be remiss if I failed to mention those exquisitely written and heartbreakingly sad passages that we get to see from Winifred’s diary of 1742; some of the most achingly poetic love musings that you have ever been privy to, trust me. Just Henham’s way of letting us know that even before the advent of the masks, the Strath had been the scene of great misfortune and tragedy. The Feast of Bacchus may not be as wonderfully Gothic in feel as Tenebrae, nor can it boast as many sequences of dramatic incident, but it still does have atmosphere to spare. (The novel is subtitled “A Study in Dramatic Atmosphere.”) Henham, rather than copying the Gothic style here, was more in tune with the Greek tragedy, and I suppose it’s a matter of taste as to which one you prefer. In Tenebrae, a gnawing sense of guilt results in madness; here, no matter what acts are committed inside the Strath, there is forgetfulness outside (although it is true that one of the characters does ultimately go quite mad … and no, not the madwoman Nancy).

I am certain that a repeat reading of The Feast of Bacchus would reveal subtleties and foreshadowings not immediately apparent during the initial perusal … such as when Berry tells Reed “…the Strath has its moods. Sometimes it is happy, and often it is sorrowful. It must either laugh or groan…” The book is assuredly an example of great literature, just as it is undeniably not for all tastes. Indeed, the book at times can be a bit of a slog, and will demand much of the average reader in terms of research for a full appreciation. Henham assumes that his readers are intimately acquainted with such Greek figures as Archilochus, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Amphis, Lycambes, Menippus and Alcman, as well as with such Greek locales as Mytilene and Hymettus. I found that I could never read more than 25 pages or so at a sitting, and felt at times to be as much of a translator as Dr. Berry! Another problem that I ultimately had is the fact that the origin we are given for those darn masks does not satisfactorily explain how they are able to affect human destiny for good or ill. In other words, Henham’s back story for the masks, gruesome as it is, does not go far enough in explaining its seemingly supernatural effects over the centuries. Still, this is nitpicking, and The Feast of Bacchus remains a beautifully written and impressive piece of work, when all is said and done … no matter which intellectual level you are approaching it from. Valancourt has several of the John Trevena titles available as part of its hugely impressive catalog, but what I would like to read next, despite my difficulties with this book, is Trevena’s 1911 novel The Reign of the Saints, which supposedly – set in a futuristic England as it is – contains some almost science fictional content. Hopefully, the folks at Valancourt will be making it available one day soon. If that book is anywhere near as memorable as Tenebrae or as accomplished as The Feast of Bacchus, I just know that I will enjoy it…