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Red Ike: A Novel of Cumberland
When Red Ike and his friend Will Moffatt accidentally spy two of their friends making love "under the Brutchstone" in rural Cumberland County, England, in 1883, they set in motion a series of events that will profoundly affect their own lives and those of their families and neighbors. Over the course of years, both men serve time in prison for crimes they never committed, and both are separated from the women they love. Yet somehow they persevere through great difficulties and hardships. This is a magnificent tale of struggle, survival, and the great English countryside, now brought back in print after many decades.
234 pages, Paperback
First published July 3, 2009
2 people want to read
About the author
S. Fowler Wright
116 books12 followersSydney Fowler Wright (January 6, 1874 – February 25, 1965) was a prolific British editor, poet, science fiction author, writer of screenplays, mystery fiction and works in other genres. Most of his work is published as by "S. Fowler Wright", and he also wrote as Sydney Fowler and Anthony Wingrave.
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December 10, 2020
In preparing my thoughts for this review, I uncovered a deeply tragic but simultaneously triumphant story behind this 1931 English novel, once almost lost until Wildside Press republished it in 2009 for the first time in three quarters of a century. If you are interested, stay till the end.
But before I get serious, I want to thank Wildside Press for their work in bringing this and other rare books back to life, and I also want to give them some friendly joshing. Because I simply must ask the question: what were you guys thinking when you decided on the cover image for this title? If people do judge books by its cover, one would think this was some boy toy romance, or a story about a creepy serial killer, or a retrospective of New Wave synth pop.
Well, this is none of those things. At its heart, this book was written to truly be one of the great English novels.
J. M. Denwood was a nonprofessional writer who had previously published collections of local poetry, songs, and short stories. His fictional novel, "Red Ike," was the culmination of his life's work. It caught the eye and praise of great authors like Hugh Walpole, who also wrote the foreword. But editor S. Fowler Wright did not feel the book could be published without serious revisions, so he was given permission to rework the manuscript significantly enough that he earned dual credit for authorship. I gather the intent was to bring the historic county of Cumberland, from where Denwood's lineage hailed, to the consciousness of the British public via a popular novel that would forever immortalize the place in the romantic hearts of armchair travelers in a way not encountered since Wordsworth.
Cumbria, land of neolithic stones and legends, of mountain and dale, of juniper and heather, of poetry and song, "of Wallace and the Bruce, of Edward Longshanks and the gallant De Harcla, of Kinmont Will and the bold Buccleugh..." Sounds like a great place!
And Cumberland, the most northwestern county of England bordering Scotland, is known for its superlatives, with the deepest lake, the highest mountain peak in England, and supposedly the best sausages. The book really brought alive an area in which I have never been, in the same way as, say, Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" did for North Tarrytown. You can smell the peat and wild mint, feel the embrace of the bracken, and hear the call of the owls in the untamed fells.
I still remained disoriented by the constant references to Cumbrian landmarks: "...he crossed from Mirkholme at an angle, and made straight for Lonscale gap... after skirting the shoulder of Saddleback... at Sour Nook...above the banks of the clear-winding Caldew." Geez! That means about as much to me as a Midwesterner trying naively to give me directions: "Just go south past the Highway Farty overpass and turn left at the Quiktrip, keep going till you get to Haddonfield High School, then take a right when the road forks by the old Krueger place, go two stoplights and then take the west road at Crystal Lake." I never have understood why authors do the same kind of thing in their books. Just say "the guy crossed the moor," because the shoulder of Saddleback sounds like something you'd order at The Publican in Chicago. And for those of you who've never dined there or been to Chicago, you see what I mean?!
But after all, this IS a novel of Cumberland, so I guess this is excused. "But Warren, you connoisseur of the rare and esoteric," I hear you say, "does this novel have any sort of plot?"
Okay, hold on to your Brutchstone, people! Essentially, this begins as sort of a mystery story, the mystery being why two young friends, Will and Ike, are being persecuted by an unscrupulous landowner and his cronies for no apparent reason. Will is the more quiet and reasonable one, and Ike has a temper as fiery as his red hair. One ends up in exile, and the other in jail for manslaughter until they return to their homeland seven years later to build a new life. But the persecution continues, for the two men are homeless now, Will's home being a burned husk and Ike forced to live in a cave. They survive by hunting, but as most of the land has been bought up for mineral rights, they are poachers and thus fugitives from the law. The original story was based on tales Denwood heard of his own father, John Denwood, who was a poet, poacher and fisherman in the area, one of a long line of working-class Lake Poets who, though often spoken of with an air of derision by literary snobs in the 1800s, included the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wright is a true class act. He was very demure about the role he played in the construction of the novel, downplaying his involvement considerably. He stated that mostly all he did was change the awkward first-person perspective of the original into the more flexible third-person. I totally agree with Wright that first-person narratives were ridiculously in fashion for decades, and was often the perspective chosen by less-experienced authors simply because they thought this was proper, only later to write themselves into a corner when they have to discuss events outside of the narrator's awareness. But it is too difficult to write in first-person when you have multiple characters in different locations doing different things, as we see in "Red Ike." Wright believed that first-person narration should be largely limited to stories written as a series of letters or as excerpts from a diary, and I tend to agree.
But outside of this perspective change, it is clear that Wright left much of Denwood's work extant, because after reading over ten novels of his by now, I am familiar with Wright's style. At first, I was quite taken aback by Wright's editing choices. He never would have allowed some of the careless lapses in narrative logic found here to take place in one of his own novels, and believe me, he wrote some bizarre pieces that defied logic. But in "Red Ike," characters end up constantly doing or saying senseless things for no reason. The reader thinks they know where a particular scene is going, and next thing you know, the characters are abruptly in another location talking to different people, or behaving in ways exactly the opposite of what you expect. In one sentence, a character may be having an argument outside of someone's home, and next sentence he is drinking in a bar across town. Another glaring example is that Red Ike steals a sacred fetish stick from a gypsy camp for no other reason than it had consequences for the story later. It reminded me of playing a Sierra video game from the 90s, where your character picks up a rusty iron cog and says to himself, "This could be useful!" Yes, you would later have to insert the rusty cog in an old clocktower toward the climax of the game, but there was no reason to pick it up and carry it around in the first place!
Other editing and continuity errors included the use of an electric flashlight in two scenes. Flashlights were not produced until 1899, and certainly would not have been commonly used by a podunk shepherd from The Bents until even more years later, but these scenes take place in 1883 and 1890. Yes, I know that's close enough, and the Internet didn't exist then, so it wasn't easy for writers to check their facts, but if the author had wanted to be at all careful he could have just said "The guy held a lamp."
But one grows to excuse these errors quickly as the pages begin to come alive by the second act. You begin to feel for the plight of the poachers, who struggle against the odds to maintain their decency and humanity while forced to live like animals. This is the age-old struggle between those who have everything and those who have nothing. No matter what your views on conservation, you sympathize with the poachers and begin to question the whole concept of game-preserves and control over ecosystems by the wealthy. While the commoners are jailed for bagging a few rabbits on managed property, the forests are exploited ruthlessly, the earth stripped and mined, railroads are cut through virgin forests, lakes are drained to supply water to growing urban areas, and tourists and rock climbers trample and erode the landscape. The novel concerns itself with the consequences of increasing legislation in the 19th Century that led to forced displacement of indigenous peoples from ancestral tenancies and what was previously common land. Like Wordsworth, Denwood was concerned about the impact of the industrial revolution on nature and its consequential cultural changes. But unlike Wordsworth, who took a more aloof and elitist attitude toward the plebians, not trusting the drunken and uneducated locals to appreciate the need for conservation, Denwood felt the common folk understood proper land management better than the elite, because they relied on the land for their lives and had a special relationship with it. Readers from across the pond will particularly see the shadows of native Americans in the plight of the rural Cumbrians.
Once you begin to appreciate what a labor of love this novel truly was for Denwood, the more the book's passion begins to inflame you and give your soul something to chew on. Like listening to an unfamiliar ditty sung by a crusty old local in a quaint pub, you find yourself raising your pint and singing along despite yourself.
And then it dawned on me why Wright made the choice to leave unmolested the many apparent errors and lack of polish. He recognized what a true labor of love it was, and wanted Denwood's true heart to shine through his own words. Denwood had been a lifelong collector and preservationist of Cumbrian dialect, lore, and folksongs, and "Red Ike" was his chance to honor the legacy of his poet father as well as of the land and people he loved so well. Wright made it his mission to help Denwood's passion project reach the public as unexpurgated as possible.
According to an article I found entitled "Courting the Muses" in an August 1931 of THE EVENING NEWS out of Harrisburg, PA, Denwood sought to have this ode to his father's life published for a long time before he was able to get S. Fowler Wright to work his magic. After getting kicked around for over a year by various publishers, the duo managed to sell 30,000 copies in their homeland (one of which I proudly own) and won additional circulation in America with a new title "Under the Brutchstone." Not bad for a first novel in the early 1930s. But by then Denwood's health was grave. He is quoted as lamenting, "I am so ill now that I cannot enjoy the luck or success that has come so suddenly." He had hoped the proceeds from his book could help pay for his much needed medical attention. I guess it helped, because he did manage to publish several more books after "Red Ike" before he shed this mortal coil in 1933. These included a book about poaching pheasant and fishing for trout, and a now obscure novel called "John Peel," about a legendary 19th Century huntsman (not the "Doctor Who" writer, though he is also from Cumbria).
Yes, S. Fowler Wright was a real class act. He helped an unknown and unrecognized man touch a dream because he believed in him, and he believed in honest art. That's why Wright truly did not want to change much in the original story, and in his honesty and humility, he made sure in his preface that the reader understood this going in. And by his actions, he helped capture the life drama of an everyday man and everyday people, and he took a literary snapshot of a culture that may have otherwise been completely forgotten.
Wright believed in preserving history because he felt it was important to remember where we came from, to celebrate what was special and unique, and to study what worked and what didn't in the evolution of various peoples and cultures. History was an essential discipline to Wright and to Denwood because they were fully aware of the fleeting nature of life. It is no accident that this novel contains numerous references to the Brutchstone and other relics of bygone civilizations that dotted the moorlands. It is not a coincidence that the reader is shown the founding inscription written by an unknown architect dating Will's house to 1662 before it is burned down savagely by the embodiment of greed.
Our lives exist but for a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, and as such the collective memory of human society is very short. If we fail to remember our past, we fail to exist in the future. This is the dark power behind Wright's ingenious masterwork "The Amphibians" where, in 500,000 years hence, the human race which forgot even its basic moral codes had long since destroyed itself and ceased to be even a memory.
And so, the story of "Red Ike" is a timely inspiration to us living in the 21st Century, where a growing movement led by multinational corporations to interpret the past as "problematic" has led to a misleading triumph of reboots, rewrites, censorship, thought-policing, and deconstruction of old heroes. As echoed in the great song by Depeche Mode: "Place it in your memory. Leave it in your past... but DON'T FORGET!"
Denwood's little novel actually proved to be quite popular for the time, and contributed to the romanticizing of poacher life as kind of outlaw hero culture in the eyes of the British public. It received 7 editions, with the last published in 1943. But the book, as well as the names of Denwood and Wright, eventually did fall victim to the short memories of the human race, providing the ultimate irony and justification for Denwood's attempts to preserve the songs, poetry, culture, and stories of his people. Thankfully, the Fowler Wright family and Wildside didn't forget, and I hope you too can enjoy the fruit of Denwood's passion.
So in conclusion, despite this book not being perfect in execution, "Red Ike" is like a piece of ingenious folk art or folklore that gives us lots to think about. And perhaps, just perhaps, it is the great English novel Denwood and Wright imagined it to be.
It just goes to show you really can't judge a book by its cover.
But before I get serious, I want to thank Wildside Press for their work in bringing this and other rare books back to life, and I also want to give them some friendly joshing. Because I simply must ask the question: what were you guys thinking when you decided on the cover image for this title? If people do judge books by its cover, one would think this was some boy toy romance, or a story about a creepy serial killer, or a retrospective of New Wave synth pop.
Well, this is none of those things. At its heart, this book was written to truly be one of the great English novels.
J. M. Denwood was a nonprofessional writer who had previously published collections of local poetry, songs, and short stories. His fictional novel, "Red Ike," was the culmination of his life's work. It caught the eye and praise of great authors like Hugh Walpole, who also wrote the foreword. But editor S. Fowler Wright did not feel the book could be published without serious revisions, so he was given permission to rework the manuscript significantly enough that he earned dual credit for authorship. I gather the intent was to bring the historic county of Cumberland, from where Denwood's lineage hailed, to the consciousness of the British public via a popular novel that would forever immortalize the place in the romantic hearts of armchair travelers in a way not encountered since Wordsworth.
Cumbria, land of neolithic stones and legends, of mountain and dale, of juniper and heather, of poetry and song, "of Wallace and the Bruce, of Edward Longshanks and the gallant De Harcla, of Kinmont Will and the bold Buccleugh..." Sounds like a great place!
And Cumberland, the most northwestern county of England bordering Scotland, is known for its superlatives, with the deepest lake, the highest mountain peak in England, and supposedly the best sausages. The book really brought alive an area in which I have never been, in the same way as, say, Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" did for North Tarrytown. You can smell the peat and wild mint, feel the embrace of the bracken, and hear the call of the owls in the untamed fells.
I still remained disoriented by the constant references to Cumbrian landmarks: "...he crossed from Mirkholme at an angle, and made straight for Lonscale gap... after skirting the shoulder of Saddleback... at Sour Nook...above the banks of the clear-winding Caldew." Geez! That means about as much to me as a Midwesterner trying naively to give me directions: "Just go south past the Highway Farty overpass and turn left at the Quiktrip, keep going till you get to Haddonfield High School, then take a right when the road forks by the old Krueger place, go two stoplights and then take the west road at Crystal Lake." I never have understood why authors do the same kind of thing in their books. Just say "the guy crossed the moor," because the shoulder of Saddleback sounds like something you'd order at The Publican in Chicago. And for those of you who've never dined there or been to Chicago, you see what I mean?!
But after all, this IS a novel of Cumberland, so I guess this is excused. "But Warren, you connoisseur of the rare and esoteric," I hear you say, "does this novel have any sort of plot?"
Okay, hold on to your Brutchstone, people! Essentially, this begins as sort of a mystery story, the mystery being why two young friends, Will and Ike, are being persecuted by an unscrupulous landowner and his cronies for no apparent reason. Will is the more quiet and reasonable one, and Ike has a temper as fiery as his red hair. One ends up in exile, and the other in jail for manslaughter until they return to their homeland seven years later to build a new life. But the persecution continues, for the two men are homeless now, Will's home being a burned husk and Ike forced to live in a cave. They survive by hunting, but as most of the land has been bought up for mineral rights, they are poachers and thus fugitives from the law. The original story was based on tales Denwood heard of his own father, John Denwood, who was a poet, poacher and fisherman in the area, one of a long line of working-class Lake Poets who, though often spoken of with an air of derision by literary snobs in the 1800s, included the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wright is a true class act. He was very demure about the role he played in the construction of the novel, downplaying his involvement considerably. He stated that mostly all he did was change the awkward first-person perspective of the original into the more flexible third-person. I totally agree with Wright that first-person narratives were ridiculously in fashion for decades, and was often the perspective chosen by less-experienced authors simply because they thought this was proper, only later to write themselves into a corner when they have to discuss events outside of the narrator's awareness. But it is too difficult to write in first-person when you have multiple characters in different locations doing different things, as we see in "Red Ike." Wright believed that first-person narration should be largely limited to stories written as a series of letters or as excerpts from a diary, and I tend to agree.
But outside of this perspective change, it is clear that Wright left much of Denwood's work extant, because after reading over ten novels of his by now, I am familiar with Wright's style. At first, I was quite taken aback by Wright's editing choices. He never would have allowed some of the careless lapses in narrative logic found here to take place in one of his own novels, and believe me, he wrote some bizarre pieces that defied logic. But in "Red Ike," characters end up constantly doing or saying senseless things for no reason. The reader thinks they know where a particular scene is going, and next thing you know, the characters are abruptly in another location talking to different people, or behaving in ways exactly the opposite of what you expect. In one sentence, a character may be having an argument outside of someone's home, and next sentence he is drinking in a bar across town. Another glaring example is that Red Ike steals a sacred fetish stick from a gypsy camp for no other reason than it had consequences for the story later. It reminded me of playing a Sierra video game from the 90s, where your character picks up a rusty iron cog and says to himself, "This could be useful!" Yes, you would later have to insert the rusty cog in an old clocktower toward the climax of the game, but there was no reason to pick it up and carry it around in the first place!
Other editing and continuity errors included the use of an electric flashlight in two scenes. Flashlights were not produced until 1899, and certainly would not have been commonly used by a podunk shepherd from The Bents until even more years later, but these scenes take place in 1883 and 1890. Yes, I know that's close enough, and the Internet didn't exist then, so it wasn't easy for writers to check their facts, but if the author had wanted to be at all careful he could have just said "The guy held a lamp."
But one grows to excuse these errors quickly as the pages begin to come alive by the second act. You begin to feel for the plight of the poachers, who struggle against the odds to maintain their decency and humanity while forced to live like animals. This is the age-old struggle between those who have everything and those who have nothing. No matter what your views on conservation, you sympathize with the poachers and begin to question the whole concept of game-preserves and control over ecosystems by the wealthy. While the commoners are jailed for bagging a few rabbits on managed property, the forests are exploited ruthlessly, the earth stripped and mined, railroads are cut through virgin forests, lakes are drained to supply water to growing urban areas, and tourists and rock climbers trample and erode the landscape. The novel concerns itself with the consequences of increasing legislation in the 19th Century that led to forced displacement of indigenous peoples from ancestral tenancies and what was previously common land. Like Wordsworth, Denwood was concerned about the impact of the industrial revolution on nature and its consequential cultural changes. But unlike Wordsworth, who took a more aloof and elitist attitude toward the plebians, not trusting the drunken and uneducated locals to appreciate the need for conservation, Denwood felt the common folk understood proper land management better than the elite, because they relied on the land for their lives and had a special relationship with it. Readers from across the pond will particularly see the shadows of native Americans in the plight of the rural Cumbrians.
Once you begin to appreciate what a labor of love this novel truly was for Denwood, the more the book's passion begins to inflame you and give your soul something to chew on. Like listening to an unfamiliar ditty sung by a crusty old local in a quaint pub, you find yourself raising your pint and singing along despite yourself.
And then it dawned on me why Wright made the choice to leave unmolested the many apparent errors and lack of polish. He recognized what a true labor of love it was, and wanted Denwood's true heart to shine through his own words. Denwood had been a lifelong collector and preservationist of Cumbrian dialect, lore, and folksongs, and "Red Ike" was his chance to honor the legacy of his poet father as well as of the land and people he loved so well. Wright made it his mission to help Denwood's passion project reach the public as unexpurgated as possible.
According to an article I found entitled "Courting the Muses" in an August 1931 of THE EVENING NEWS out of Harrisburg, PA, Denwood sought to have this ode to his father's life published for a long time before he was able to get S. Fowler Wright to work his magic. After getting kicked around for over a year by various publishers, the duo managed to sell 30,000 copies in their homeland (one of which I proudly own) and won additional circulation in America with a new title "Under the Brutchstone." Not bad for a first novel in the early 1930s. But by then Denwood's health was grave. He is quoted as lamenting, "I am so ill now that I cannot enjoy the luck or success that has come so suddenly." He had hoped the proceeds from his book could help pay for his much needed medical attention. I guess it helped, because he did manage to publish several more books after "Red Ike" before he shed this mortal coil in 1933. These included a book about poaching pheasant and fishing for trout, and a now obscure novel called "John Peel," about a legendary 19th Century huntsman (not the "Doctor Who" writer, though he is also from Cumbria).
Yes, S. Fowler Wright was a real class act. He helped an unknown and unrecognized man touch a dream because he believed in him, and he believed in honest art. That's why Wright truly did not want to change much in the original story, and in his honesty and humility, he made sure in his preface that the reader understood this going in. And by his actions, he helped capture the life drama of an everyday man and everyday people, and he took a literary snapshot of a culture that may have otherwise been completely forgotten.
Wright believed in preserving history because he felt it was important to remember where we came from, to celebrate what was special and unique, and to study what worked and what didn't in the evolution of various peoples and cultures. History was an essential discipline to Wright and to Denwood because they were fully aware of the fleeting nature of life. It is no accident that this novel contains numerous references to the Brutchstone and other relics of bygone civilizations that dotted the moorlands. It is not a coincidence that the reader is shown the founding inscription written by an unknown architect dating Will's house to 1662 before it is burned down savagely by the embodiment of greed.
Our lives exist but for a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, and as such the collective memory of human society is very short. If we fail to remember our past, we fail to exist in the future. This is the dark power behind Wright's ingenious masterwork "The Amphibians" where, in 500,000 years hence, the human race which forgot even its basic moral codes had long since destroyed itself and ceased to be even a memory.
And so, the story of "Red Ike" is a timely inspiration to us living in the 21st Century, where a growing movement led by multinational corporations to interpret the past as "problematic" has led to a misleading triumph of reboots, rewrites, censorship, thought-policing, and deconstruction of old heroes. As echoed in the great song by Depeche Mode: "Place it in your memory. Leave it in your past... but DON'T FORGET!"
Denwood's little novel actually proved to be quite popular for the time, and contributed to the romanticizing of poacher life as kind of outlaw hero culture in the eyes of the British public. It received 7 editions, with the last published in 1943. But the book, as well as the names of Denwood and Wright, eventually did fall victim to the short memories of the human race, providing the ultimate irony and justification for Denwood's attempts to preserve the songs, poetry, culture, and stories of his people. Thankfully, the Fowler Wright family and Wildside didn't forget, and I hope you too can enjoy the fruit of Denwood's passion.
So in conclusion, despite this book not being perfect in execution, "Red Ike" is like a piece of ingenious folk art or folklore that gives us lots to think about. And perhaps, just perhaps, it is the great English novel Denwood and Wright imagined it to be.
It just goes to show you really can't judge a book by its cover.
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