Alas! I have to give up my proposed 'She' story. It will not do. My hands are too tied by the contents of SHE and AYESHA. Also it is impossible to keep up interest in a tale laid beyond the confines of our Earth, since before it the average human imagination fails. So there's an end of She! I was reading AYESHA last night. It has weaknesses, but I must say I think that it contains fine things -- the transformation of Ayesha, for instance, and all that it symbolizes. If that is not good of its sort, I do not know what is. On the whole I am glad I attempted the sequel, dangerous as it was. But there I think the venture had better end, although I had thought of some celestial -- or infernal -- scenes.
Given that Haggard did later go on to write a prequel to SHE (SHE AND ALLAN [1921]) and then a prequel to the prequel (WISDOM'S DAUGHTER [1923]), I was surprised to learn that he thought to have written a sequel to AYESHA (itself a sequel to the original SHE, set a generation later), apparently to have taken the form of an afterlife novel set in celestial or infernal domains. I'm reminded of Poe's "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" [1839], "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" [1841], and "The Power of Words" [1845] -- all interesting, but definitely not among Poe's well-known works. Perhaps it's just as well Haggard never wrote up this idea (which wd have come as the final book in the internal chronology of the series) -- after all, as C. S. Lewis memorably said, people read Haggard for the story, not the ideas:
. . . though Haggard had sense, he was ludicrously unaware of his limitations. He attempts to philosophise. Again and again in his stories we see a commonplace intelligence, armed (or hampered) with an eclectic outfit of vaguely Christian, theosophical and spiritualistic notions, trying to say something profound . . .
--CSL, "The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard")
Still, it'd be interesting to know a little more about what he had in mind . . .
--JDR
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*THE PRIVATE DIARIES OF SIR H RIDER HAGGARD 1914-1925), ed. D. S. Higgins [1980]
I'm glad Haggard didn't write that "afterlife" She. Lewis is right. I suspect the book would have had a few interesting weird scenes, and a lot of "metaphysical" dialog. Haggard himself thought that his best work had been done in the decade that included King Solomon's Mines, She, Cleopatra, Eric Brighteyes, Montezuma's Daughter, etc. I believe it was after this time that he took to dictating his novels. That worked pretty well when the narrator's voice is good old Allan Quatermain. But it seems to me that, in other books, e.g. the disappointing When the World Shook, Haggard found it regrettably easy to write dialogue rather than incident...
ReplyDeleteJeez - Lewis's comments could easily apply to his own novels, with their 5th grade Bible summer camp moralizing. As far as novelists go, I'll take Haggard over Preachy Lewis any ol' day!
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