The bizarre story of bestselling Edwardian SF writer (and paedophile rapist) MP Shiel

MP Shiel

A friend once remarked that the modern penchant for reading about the lives of writers rather than their work is a sign of decadence. I’m pretty sure this started in the 1970s, with biographies of Lytton Strachey and Somerset Maugham and the publication of Evelyn Waugh’s letters and his remarkably louche diaries. I think my friend, who is a distinguished translator of (mainly) French novels into English (I shall be publicising her new translation of Les Miserables when it’s published later this year by Penguin – hell, I may even read it!) may very well have been right.

I’ve certainly avoided literary biographies since she made that comment. I even generally avoid author interviews in newspapers and magazines – but mainly because so many of them turn out to be utter jerks. (I suspect that literary festivals can also be an unhealthy form of displacement activity – after all, hearing someone talking about their new book in person’s pretty much the same thing as reading it. Isn’t it?)

Now and then, though, you read a book where the desire to learn more about the writer is overwhelming. M.P. Shiel’s 1901 science fiction novel The Purple Cloud is one of the strangest and most powerful books I’ve ever read. I’d been vaguely aware of it for years – it used to pop up regularly in Top Ten lists of SF and Horror novels - but I only got round to reading it recently, thanks to Kindle and that marvellous website, Arthur’s Bookshelf. After I’d finished it, I simply had to look the author up online.

First, the basic plot.  Adam Jeffson, the book’s hero (anti-hero, really – he’s difficult to warm to), joins an expedition to the North Pole. Unbeknownst to him, his fiancée – a wicked countess, no less – has poisoned one of the original expedition members to ensure her intended gets the dead man's place. Whichever member of the team reaches the North Pole first will receive an enormous monetary prize.

After killing one of the other expedition members en route to the Pole, Jeffson returns from the Arctic – the expedition’s sole survivor – only to discover that the human race has been wiped out by a toxic purple cloud which has slowly drifted up from the Antipodes. There’s a splendidly eerie scene where Jeffson discovers hundreds of dead bodies of every imaginable hue, sporting a profusion of national costumes, piled up in a remote Norwegian port where the deadly cloud had eventually overtaken them in their flight North:

Two yards from my feet, as I stepped to the top, lay a group of three:
one a Norway peasant-girl in skirt of olive-green, scarlet stomacher,
embroidered bodice, Scotch bonnet trimmed with silver lace, and
big silver shoe-buckles; the second was an old Norway man in knee-
breeches, and eighteenth-century small-clothes, and red worsted
cap; and the third was, I decided, an old Jew of the Polish Pale, in
gaberdine and skull-cap, with ear-locks.
 I went nearer to where they lay thick as reaped stubble between the
quay and a little stone fountain in the middle of the space, and I saw
among those northern dead two dark-skinned women in costly dress,
either Spanish or Italian, and the yellower mortality of a Mongolian,
probably a Magyar, and a big negro in zouave dress, and some
twenty-five obvious French, and two Morocco fezes, and the green
turban of a shereef, and the white of an Ulema.

Many years later, in Istanbul, Jeffson (who has spend much of the intervening time setting fire to cities around the globe, including London) meets a naked, attractive 20-year old girl who has also survived the catastrophe thanks to having been effectively walled up in a subterranean cavern as a child (don’t ask). What’s odd is that Jeffson goes to the most extraordinary lengths not to have sex with her, even insisting on living on a separate island. While I was reading it, I remember wondering why an English gentleman would have found it quite so hard to keep his membrum virile under control – but it was obviously an enormous problem (as it were) in Shiel's mind. At this point, the writer’s style becomes extremely overwrought, and, well… distinctly purple:

'Oh, yes, a clever little wretch,' I went on in a gruff voice, 'clever as a
serpent, no doubt: for in the first case it was the Black who used the
serpent, but now it is the White. But it will not do, you know. Do you
know what you are to me, you? You are my Eve!—a little fool, a little
piebald frog like you. But it will not do at all, at all! A nice race it
would be with you for mother, and me for father, wouldn't it?—half-
criminal like the father, half-idiot like the mother: just like the last, in
short. They used to say, in fact, that the offspring of a brother and
sister was always weak-headed: and from such a wedlock certainly
came the human race, so no wonder it was what it was: and so it
would have to be again now. Well no—unless we have the children,
and cut their throats at birth: and you would not like that at all, I know,
and, on the whole, it would not work, for the White would be striking a
poor man dead with His lightning, if I attempted that. No, then: the
modern Adam is some eight to twenty thousand years wiser than the
first—you see? less instinctive, more rational. The first disobeyed by
commission: I shall disobey by omission: only his disobedience was
a sin, mine is a heroism. I have not been a particularly ideal sort of
beast so far, you know: but in me, Adam Jeffson—I swear it—the
human race shall at last attain a true nobility, the nobility of self-
extinction.”

Easier to have gone on the hunt for rubber johnnies, one would have thought – but the level of sheer, throbbing lust contained in these pages (this all goes on for quite a while, believe me) as well as the depth of the character’s self-loathing, and the extraordinary vehemence of his verbal assaults on the poor girl suggest there’s something monumentally odd going in the writer’s subconscious.

Shiel, who, on the evidence of this novel, had an extraordinarily vivid creative imagination and was a deeply original and powerful – if utterly humourless – writer, turns out to have been a fascinating but unpleasant character. Born in Montserrat to a West Indian mother and a mixed-race father, Shiel, who was educated in Barbados, moved to London in 1885, at the age of twenty. He enjoyed some huge popular successes with sensational novels (including the best-seller, The Yellow Danger, about the threat posed by the evil Chinese – yes, the original Yellow Peril tale, and evidently a source of inspiration for Fu-Manchu creator, Sax Rohmer). He evidently also influenced writers such as Jack London and H.G. Wells, and he seems to have been friends with decadent poet Ernest Dowson and the truly great horror story writer, Arthur Machen, and wasn’t short of extravagant praise from some notable admirers. But he failed to make an impact as a literary writer, took to writing plays, dabbled in socialist politics, and eventually died in poverty in 1947.

For a long time, it was believed that Shiel had served time in prison for fraud, but in 2008 it was discovered that, in 1914, he was sentenced to hard labour for raping his 12-year old de facto stepdaughter (he may very well have done the same to her sisters). Apparently, he showed no remorse for his crime, for which he served 16 months. Nice chap! Suddenly, the foetid sequences from The Purple Cloud – written a number of years before his court case - in which he fights the evidently overpowering urge to have sex with an innocent girl young enough to be his daughter make perfect sense.

Hardly a great role model – but Shiel’s life strikes me as more than interesting enough to deserve at least a BBC 4 documentary. After all, Edwardian London can hardly have been awash with bestselling novelists of West Indian descent. Over-emphasis on a writer’s life rather than their work may very well be a sign of decadence – but I think we have a pretty good excuse when it comes to Matthew Phipps Shiel.

No films have been made of The Purple Cloud, but it appears to have served as the inspiration for The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) starring Harry Belafonte as a man who emerges after being trapped for a while by a cave-in at a mine to discover that short-lived radioactive spores have destroyed humanity. He and meets another survivor, played by Inger Stevens, for whom he doesn't have have the hots... but another male survivor appears (played by Mel Ferrer) and things get fractious. 

Should you be at all interested, this extraordinary novel is available to read online here, and can be dowloaded to Kindles and iPads free of charge here.