Saturday

Acquisitions (90): Ernest Bramah


Ernest Bramah. The Celestial Omnibus. Introduction by John Connell. London: Published by John Baker for the Richards Press, 1963.


Simone de Beauvoir: Must We Burn de Sade? (1953)

Must We Burn Kai Lung?


It's a legitimate question, I'm afraid. In both cases. Even in the brief period of press freedom after the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade was considered beyond the pale. It's actually quite difficult to understand how any of his works survived into the modern age, given the disgust and hostility they've aroused in almost all commentators.

The world of Chinoiserie and ethnic stereotyping which lies at the heart of Ernest Bramah's "Kai Lung" stories would probably be almost equally offensive to contemporary critics if it weren't for the fact that most of them have never heard of him.

Recently, however, I found a number of Bramah's works for sale in a local opportunity shop, which has had the effect of reminding me how very amusing I found them when I was a child.

My father was a big fan, and was constantly quoting such Kai Lung-isms as “However entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?” - or, particularly: “There are few situations in life that cannot be resolved promptly by either suicide, a bag of gold, or thrusting a despised antagonist over a precipice on a dark night.” That's certainly one that's stayed with me.

But what exactly are we talking about? Before going further in this investigation, I'd better try to give you some idea of the sheer scale (6 major collections and one novel, including at least 47 separate stories, some of considerable length) and duration (from 1896 to 1940 - more than 40 years of publications) of the Kai Lung phenomenon:

I retire to leafy bowers
And immerse myself in Kai-Lung's Golden Hours
- Ogden Nash, Collected Verse from 1929 On (1961): p.452

    Ernest Bramah: The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900)


  1. The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900)
    1. The Transmutation of Ling
    2. The Story of Yung Chang
    3. The Probation of Sen Heng
    4. The Experiment of the Mandarin Chan Hung
    5. The Confession of Kai Lung
    6. The Vengeance of Tung Fel
    7. The Career of the Charitable Quen-Ki-Tong
    8. The Vision of Yin, the Son of Yat Huang
    9. The Ill-Regulated Destiny of Kin Yen, the Picture-Maker


    2. Ernest Bramah: Kai Lung’s Golden Hours (1922)


  2. Kai Lung’s Golden Hours (1922)
    1. The Story of Wong Ts'in and the Willow Plate Embellishment
    2. The Story of Ning, the Captive God, and the Dreams That Mark His Race
    3. The Story of Wong Pao and the Minstrel
    4. The Story of Lao Ting and the Luminous Insect
    5. The Story of Weng Cho or the One Devoid of Name
    6. The Story of Wang Ho and the Burial Robe
    7. The Story of Chang Tao, Melodious Vision and the Dragon
    8. The Story of Yuen Yan, of the Barber Chou-hu, and of His Wife, Tsae-che
    9. The Story of Hien and the Chief Examiner
    10. The Story of the Loyalty of Ten-teh, the Fisherman


    3. Ernest Bramah: Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928)


  3. Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928)
    1. The Story of Wan and the Remarkable Shrub
    2. The Story of Wong Tsoi and the Merchant Teen King's Thumb
    3. The Story of Tong So, the Averter of Calamities
    4. The Story of Lin Ho and the Treasure of Fang-Tso
    5. The Story of Kin Weng and the Miraculous Tusk
    6. The Story of the Philosopher Kuo Tsun and of His Daughter, Peerless Chou
    7. The Story of Ching-kwei and the Destinies


    4. Ernest Bramah: The Moon of Much Gladness (1932)


  4. The Moon of Much Gladness (1932)


    5. Ernest Bramah: Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry-Tree (1940)


  5. Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry-Tree (1940)
    1. The Story of Prince Ying, Virtuous Mei and the Pursuit of Worthiness
    2. The Three Recorded Judgments of Prince Ying, from the Inscribed Scroll of Mou Tao, the Beggar
    3. The Ignoble Alliance of Lin T'sing with the Outlaw Fang Wang, and How It Affected the Destinies
    4. The Story of Yin Ho, Hoa-mi, and the Magician
    5. The Story of Ton Hi, Precious Gem and the Inconspicuous Elephant
    6. The Story of Sam-Tso, the Family Called Wong, and the Willing Buffalo
    7. The Story of Saho Chi, the No-longer Merchant Ng Hon, and the Docile Linnets
    8. The Story of the Poet Lao Ping, Chun Shin's Daughter Fa, and the Fighting Crickets


    6. Ernest Bramah: The Celestial Omnibus (1963)


  6. The Celestial Omnibus (1963)
    1. The Transmutation of Ling
    2. The Vengeance of Tung Fel
    3. The Confession of Kai Lung
    4. The Encountering of Six Within a Wood
    5. The Inexorable Justice of Mandarin Shan Tien
    6. The Out-Passing into a State of Assured Felicity
    7. The High-minded Strategy of the Amiable Hwa-mei
    8. The Malignity of the Depraved Ming Shu
    9. The Story of Prince Ying
    10. The Story of the Poet Lao Ping


    7. Ernest Bramah: Kai Lung Raises His Voice (2010)


  7. Kai Lung Raises His Voice (2010)
    1. The Subtlety of Kang Chieng
    2. Ming Tseun and the Emergency
    3. Lam-Hoo and the Reward of Merit
    4. Chung Pun and the Miraculous Peacocks
    5. Yeun Yang and the Empty Lo-Chee Crate
    6. Sing Tsung and the Exponent of Dark Magic
    7. Kwey Chao and the Grateful Song Bird
    8. Li Pao, Lucky Star and the Intruding Stranger
    9. The Cupidity of Ah Pak or Riches No Protection Against Thunderbolts
    10. The Romance of Kwang the Fruit Gatherer
    11. The Destiny of Cheng, the Son of Sha-kien of the Waste Expanses
    12. The Romance of Kwang the Fruit Gatherer
    13. The Emperor Who Meant Well


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Ernest Bramah: The Eyes of Max Carrados (1923)


Mind you, that's not all that Ernest Bramah wrote. His other most celebrated creation is Max Carrados, the blind detective. He, too, has his fans (and, for all I know, detractors), but I've never really studied him in detail. No, given my own passion for Chinese fiction - classical and modern - it was always the Kai Lung books I gravitated to.

You'd think I'd know better, really. After all, it you've read the complete texts (albeit only through the occluded medium of their various English translations) of the four great Chinese classical novels (The Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, The Journey to the West, and The Red Chamber Dream), why on earth would you bother with the tepid ditch water of Kai Lung?


Luo Guanzhong: San Kuo (1925)


First of all, because I suspect that Bramah had done the same thing. It's apparent from internal evidence that he'd at least consulted, if not read through C. H. Brewitt-Taylor's 2-vol translation of the San Kuo, or Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1925) - the first complete English version of that work.


Shi Nai’an: Shui Hu Chuan (1933)


He may also have read Pearl Buck's adaptation of the Water Margin - All Men are Brothers [Shui Hu Chuan].. 2 vols (New York: The John Day Company, 1933) - though that I'm not so sure about. It would, in any case, have come too late to influence the tenor of the Kai Lung stories, which were mostly already written and published by then.


Robert van Gulik, trans.: Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (1949)
Anon. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel. Trans. Robert van Gulik. 1949. New York: Dover, 1976.
Secondly, because he's not the only one to indulge in this kind of Chinese-inflected fiction: Robert Van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries are, admittedly, a more complex case, but they highlight a lot of the same questions. Van Gulik, a Dutch sinologist, came across a genuine 18th-century Chinese detective novel, Dee Goong An, whilst working as a diplomat in the Guomintang capital Chongqing during the Second World War. This he translated into English under the title Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (1949).
The main character of this book, Judge Dee, was based on the real statesman and detective Di Renjie, who lived in the 7th century, during the Tang Dynasty (AD 600–900), though in the novel itself elements of Ming Dynasty China (AD 1300–1600) were mixed in.
Van Gulik then went on to compose a long series of novels of his own about this character, who has since been taken up by French author Frédéric Lenormand and a series of other mystery writers. I only own two of Van Gulik's books myself, but it's fair to say that they pose a pretty puzzle in what can (and cannot) be called "authentic":


Robert van Gulik: The Haunted Monastery & The Chinese Maze Murders (1961 & 1957)
Robert van Gulik. The Haunted Monastery & The Chinese Maze Murders: Two Chinese Detective Novels. 1961 & 1957. New York: Dover, 1977.

Keith West: Ma Wei Slope (1944)


And then there are such isolated examples of literary ventriloquism as Keith West's Ma Wei Slope: A Novel of the T’ang Dynasty (London: The Cresset Press, 1944), a version of the story of Yang Guifei, the inspiration for Bai Juyi's "Song of Everlasting Sorrow", which describes the Emperor Xuanzong's love for her and perpetual grief at her loss.


Walter Bitner: 100 Years of Jack Vance (2016)


Thirdly, because the influence of the typical, infinitely resourceful Kai Lung hero is clearly mirrored in the omnicompetent protagonists of such SF authors as A. E. Van Vogt and (in particular) Jack Vance.

Recently, while rereading the stories selected for The Celestial Omnibus (the title a rather cheeky reminder of E. M. Forster's collection of the same name), I was struck by how closely Bramah and Vance resemble each other. A Vance hero generally takes the most sensible course of action, thus outwitting his more devious adversaries, and vindicating the application of logic to human affairs.

It's certainly easy to see the influence of John W. Campbell's Nietzschean "man-plus" theories in the evolution of the Vance protagonist - as one can in Van Vogt, Frederick Pohl, L. Ron Hubbard, and other SF-writers of the 1940s. There's a bit more to it than that in Vance at least, though. As I remarked in an earlier post about his work:
There's generally a superman type in each of his stories, who applies intelligence and cunning (with occasional bouts of compassion) to the sacred task of getting his own way. Some of these are more reprehensible than others (Cugel, for instance), but they are - to a man - unflappable: a little like Raffles or those other Edwardian sensation heroes: Dornford Yates' Berry, or Sapper's Bulldog Drummond.

The other thing he excels in is endlessly inventive descriptions of new alien planets. His favourites ('Big Planet', for instance) tend to be extremely large, quite populous, and full of diverse landscapes - peaks, canals, space-ports. In his fantasy settings ('Lyonesse', for instance), he subtracts technology and amps up the environmental richness, but otherwise there's not a great deal of difference. If you like Vance's SF, you'll like his fantasy, and vice versa and contrariwise.
I hadn't, at that point, noted the resemblance to Kai Lung in both of these aspects of his work, but it is, in retrospect, pretty obvious. I suspect, too, that if one were to expand this search through his speculative fiction-writing contemporaries, a great many more parallels of this kind could be found.


Simone de Beauvoir: Faut-il brûler Sade ? (1951-52)


Must we burn Kai Lung, then? The obvious answer would be 'yes'. His stories present an outdated caricature of Chinese culture, complete with pigtails, joss-sticks, and sinister Mandarins.

But, as Beauvoir reminds us, burning Sade would not necessarily have helped us in our attempts to understand some of the stranger recesses of human psychology and culture. On the contrary, in fact. Could the same lofty claim be made for Ernest Bramah? Probably not. But those of us interested in the evolution of popular fiction, especially the easy-to-miss crossovers between seemingly distinct genres, would feel the lack of certain essential clues coded within his work.

To call it harmless might perhaps be going a bit too far. But the stories remain - when taken with a considerable grain of salt - really quite delightful at times. Admirers of Wodehouse or Chesterton will find it almost impossible to resist Kai Lung.

Chinoiserie is certainly something we're right to be suspicious of, but the misinterpretation and caricature of other cultures is - whether we'd like to admit it or not - the source of a great deal of vigour in all the creative arts. Take Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915), for instance. Or the late 19th / early 20th century influence of the Japanese print on European painting and design.


Ernest Bramah: Kai Lung: Six (1974)



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Ernest Bramah: Complete Works (2023)

Ernest Brammah Smith
(1868-1942)

Books I own are marked in bold:

    Fiction:

    Kai Lung:

  1. The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900)
    • The Wallet of Kai Lung. 1900. Introduction by Grant Richards. 1923. London: The Richards Press Ltd. Publishers, 1951.
    • The Wallet of Kai Lung. 1900. London: Penguin, 1936.
  2. Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922)
    • Kai Lung’s Golden Hours. Preface by Hilaire Belloc. 1922. London: the Richards Press Ltd., 1942.
  3. Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928)
    • Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat. London: The Richards Press Ltd. Publishers, 1928.
    • Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat. 1928. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954.
  4. The Moon of Much Gladness [US: 'The Return of Kai Lung'] (1932)
    • The Moon of Much Gladness. London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1932.
  5. The Kai Lung Omnibus (1936)
    1. The Wallet of Kai Lung
    2. Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat
    3. Kai Lung's Golden Hours
  6. Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree (1940)
    • Kai Lung beneath the Mulberry-Tree. 1940. London: the Richards Press, Ltd., 1951.
  7. The Celestial Omnibus (1963)
    • The Celestial Omnibus. Introduction by John Connell. London: Published by John Baker for the Richards Press, 1963.
  8. Kai Lung: Six (1974)
    1. The Story of Lam-Hoo and the Reward of Merit
    2. The Story of Chung Pun and the Miraculous Peacocks
    3. The Story of Yeun Yang and the Empty Soo-Shong Chest
    4. The Story of Sing Tsung and the Exponent of Dark Magic
    5. The Story of Kwey Chao and the Grateful Song Bird
    6. The Story of Li Pao, Lucky Star and the Intruding Stranger
  9. Kai Lung Raises His Voice (2010)

    10. Max Carrados:

  10. Max Carrados (1914)
  11. The Eyes of Max Carrados (1923)
  12. Max Carrados Mysteries (1927)
  13. The Bravo of London (1934)
  14. Meet Max Carrados. BBC (1935)
  15. Best Max Carrados Detective Stories (1972)
  16. The Eyes of Max Carrados Omnibus (2013)

    17. Miscellaneous:

  17. What Might Have Been [aka 'The Secret of the League', 1907)] (1900)
  18. The Duplicity of Tiao. The Woman at Home (1900)
  19. The Impiety of Yuan Yan. Macmillan's Magazine (1904)
  20. While You Wait. The Bystander (1905)
  21. The Mirror of Kong Ho (1905)
  22. The Red Splinter. Wickepin Argus (1913)
  23. The Specimen Case (1924)
    1. Ming-Tsuen and the Emergency [Kai Lung]
    2. The Delicate Case of Mlle. Celestine Bon
    3. The Dead March
    4. A Very Black Business
    5. The Bunch of Violets [Max Carrados]
    6. Revolution
    7. Smothered in Corpses
    8. Fate and a Family Council
    9. Lucretia and the Horse-Doctor
    10. The War Hawks
    11. The Great Hockington Find
    12. Hautpierre's Star
    13. The Goose and the Golden Egg
    14. The Making of Marianna
    15. Bobbie and Poetic Justice
    16. The Heart of the Pagan
    17. Once in a Blue Moon
    18. The Marquise Ring
    19. The 'Dragon' of Swafton
    20. The Dream of William Elgood
    21. From a London Balcony
  24. Short Stories of To-day and Yesterday (1929)
    1. Hien and the Chief Examiner [Kai Lung]
    2. Wong Pao and the Minstrel [Kai Lung]
    3. Chang Tao, Melodious Vision and the Dragon [Kai Lung]
    4. Wong T'sin and the Willow Plate Embellishment [Kai Lung]
    5. The Secret of Headlam Height
    6. The Curious Circumstances of the Two Left Shoes
    7. The Missing Actress Sensation
    8. The Delicate Case of Mlle. Celestine Bon
    9. A Very Black Business
    10. Smothered in Corpses
    11. The Goose and the Golden Egg
  25. A Little Flutter (1930)

    26. Plays:

  26. Blind Man's Buff (1918)

    27. Non-fiction:

  27. English Farming and Why I Turned It Up (1894)
  28. A Handbook for Writers and Artists: A Practical Guide for Contributors to the Press and to Literary and Artistic Publications; by a London editor (1897)
  29. A Guide to the Varieties and Rarity of English Regal Copper Coins: Charles II – Victoria, 1671–1860 (1929)


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  • category - Mystery & Occult: Fiction


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