A Fire of Driftwood by D. K. Broster

And now for something... somewhat different.

A Fire of Driftwood (1932) is D. K. Broster's eleventh published book and first collection of short stories. Like many authors of the time (including E. W. Hornung!), Broster seems to have got her start as a writer publishing short stories, as well as poetry, in magazines, and here various stories apparently written over some period of time were published in book form together.

I say it's a collection of short stories; actually it's two distinct collections of short stories published together for mysterious reasons and sitting slightly oddly alongside each other. The book is divided into two parts. The first set of stories are in very much the same vein as Broster's novels: romantic historical adventures, most of them set during the French Revolution and the rest not very far away from it. The second set are very different: they're supernatural horror stories in contemporary or near-contemporary settings. This makes for an interesting contrast, and reveals an intriguing new side of Broster's character as a writer.

The typical historical stories of the first set make a good complement to Broster's novels. Their plots feature many of the familiar trappings—duty and honour, nobility and courage in the face of tragic fates, parole prisoners, wounded characters being cared for by others, compassion and respect between enemies—but they also seem to extend and play on the structures of the novels in some interesting ways. The first story, 'Our Lady of Succour', can almost be interpreted as a subversion of the Keith Windham/Hervey Barrington type of the cynical character redeemed through kindness to a helpless wounded enemy, though the context is somewhat different. Another story has a sympathetic main character who again seems to be the honourable wounded enemy in need of the help of a courageous ingénue, but who it turns out was formerly a parole prisoner and (unthinkable to a Ewen, a Raoul or an Aymar) was arrested and imprisoned after breaking his parole. Two others feature characters, one Royalist and one Republican, both being killed by members of their own respective sides for putting personal above political loyalties—the parallel between them isn't very clear and perhaps wasn't intended as significant, but I thought it fit well with the more complicated attitude towards characters' political allegiances that Broster seems to be developing over time. As with the novels, most of the sympathetic characters are Royalists and their allies, but villainous Royalists and heroic Republicans are certainly not entirely absent.

The horror stories of the second set are not a complete departure from Broster's other writings—the prose style is very recognisably hers, she still manages to work French history into many of the stories and the religious elements of some of them are not unexpected from the co-author of The Vision Splendid—but they are certainly something a bit new. And they're impressively varied between themselves, too. There are ghosts, religious miracles, murders and early twentieth-century spiritualism. Some of the stories are very much overtly supernatural, others merely creepy; some have the same sentimental mood that shows up in the novels, others are shockingly brutal. Altogether I enjoyed this new aspect of Broster very much! The ending of 'The Crib' does that annoying thing of mocking the hypothetical sceptic who'd scorn to believe the supernatural tale were it presented to them as true, which I think generally ruins the mood of an otherwise good ghost story; but then 'The Book of Hours' seems to be half-subverting a similar sort of religious sentimentality, which perhaps made up for it. It was interesting to see the appearance in 'The Window' of First World War nursing, a biographical element which was apparently an important influence on Broster's writing but, until this story, not directly. 'Fate the Eavesdropper' and 'Clairvoyance' are both impressively bloody and beautifully chilling (though the latter is a bit unfortunately exoticising; Broster wouldn't perhaps have treated an ancient French sword the same way), but I think the most horrifying of all is 'The Promised Land', which starts out as a sort of light interwar-period social tragi-comedy and ends up somewhere that wouldn't look out of place in the more experimental and disturbing Agatha Christie novels.

theseatheseatheopensea has put together a good list of Broster's early magazine stories here, which shows that at least some of the stories in A Fire of Driftwood had been published in magazines some time earlier—the earliest one linked there is 'The Aristocrat', from 1906. Update: it's actually 'Fate the Eavesdropper', from 1902! I don't know how many of the rest were new, rather than just not being available on the internet now. It would be interesting to know when these were written in relation to her novels, given how many of them seem to be developing and complicating themes from the novels—perhaps, rather than being evidence that they were written later, if they clearly weren't, that shows the greater flexibility and room for experimentation in the shorter form.

In any case, short stories are certainly something D. K. Broster does well, and this collection (/these collections) has made a very enjoyable and exciting addition to the read-through! And next on the list is Almond, Wild Almond, which I believe returns to another familiar setting...