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Oswell Blakeston (1907 - 1985)
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Oswell Blakeston ran away from his bourgeois home as a schoolboy, becoming a conjuror's assistant, cinema organist and clapper boy with David Lean at Gaumont film studios. In the large close-ups used to convey information in silent films - "hands holding letters, visiting cards and so on" - Blakeston played the hands of many stars. He began writing film criticism, later becoming assistant editor of the influential magazine Close Up. "Oswell Blakeston" was adopted instead of his real name, Henry Hasslacher. (Oswell was derived from that of the writer Osbert Sitwell. His mother's family name was Blakiston, which he modified.)
With Francis Bruguiere, Blakeston pioneered abstract films in Britain. He was also a writer of filmscripts, plays, novels, cookery and travel books, prolific artist, poet and lecturer. Among his enormous literary output were his 1932 book Magic Aftermath, "the first fiction to be published in spiral binding"; the 1935 crime story The Cat with the Moustache (a collaboration with Roger Burford), "one of the first descriptions of trips with mescal"; and the 1938 anthology Proems, in which Blakeston "published the first poems by Lawrence Durrell".
Dylan Thomas called Blakeston "a friend of all boozy poets and me too". Oswell wrote regular articles on London's pubs for What's On for some 25 years. A bar-room acquaintance was the writer M.P. Shiel, who in strange circumstances became king of the Leeward Island of Redonda, of which Blakeston was made a duke.
As a writer of stories, John Betjeman reckoned that Blakeston was a neglected genius of the macabre. His 1947 collection Priests, Peters and Pussens had idiosyncratic illustrations by Max Chapman, a young avant-garde painter who would become Blakeston's lover until the older man's death. Blakeston and Chapman co-wrote stories, among them Jim's Gun (1939) and Danger in Provence (1946). While writing the latter in Venice, the authors were arrested as Russian spies. On hot evenings they had been using a typewriter on the roof - they were thought to be transmitting Morse messages.
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What remains of Oswell Blakeston's fiction
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Adventure Without Asking: David Smith accidentally gets into a first class compartment when he boards a train at Waterloo. He finds himself alone with "a small, obese creature with a face so flabby that it looked like the disintegrated face of a medium in a spiritualist photograph after he has been deserted by one ghost and before he is possessed by another."
This man is a doctor, hypnotist and mind reader, and he's also extremely bitter and twisted about both his unfortunate appearance and his wife's infidelity. Having caused David to faint at the station, he has him removed to his quarters where he can torment him with a scene from his worst nightmares. Weird and extremely horrible.
- from Charles Birkin, ed. Not at Night (Phillip Allan, 1935)
_____
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The Hut: "The first lad who slept there hacked off his hand with a penknife. He confessed, afterwards, that he had stolen with that hand ... The last ...er ... victim, was a tramp who had stolen a bag of gardening tools from the village ... he blinded himself on a rake ..."
It served as home to a religious fanatic, a fervent believer in "if thy right hand causes thee to sin .." self-mutilation for even the slightest transgressions. Peter and Daisy, lost in the countryside, hole up there for the night but she is unable to sleep and, fatally, says as much to the sinister stranger who greets them in the morning. The hut is on his land and, back at his farmhouse, he relates to them the macabre history of the hut with obscene relish ...
- from Charles Birkin, ed. Gruesome Cargoes #13 (Phillip Allen, 1936)
_____
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Snow Time: Switzerland. A young English boy, bullied by his nurse, scoops his sago pudding into a cigarette box and hides it in a cupboard only to be tormented by it in a nightmare: "The eggs, the nasty horrid eggs had hatched! Long white things were crawling towards the bed, waving their sightless heads to get the direction where they sensed the small boy was lying, then worming their way forward ..."
- from Hugh Lamb, ed. Return from the Grave (W.H. Allen, 1976)
____
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For Crying Out Shroud : Chapter XIV
The telephone rings, and the doctor puts out a large hairy hand to stifle the patient’s screams. Two masked male nurses move forward to help the doctor with the man who writhes in agony; and a hydrocephalic female nurse answers the phone.
‘Oh yes,’ she says in a mellifluous voice, ‘the patient is . . . quite comfortable.’
Jim half wakes with the nightmare.
Then he turns on the other side and falls back into un-easy sleep.
In the second nightmare he is in a hot country, in some tourists’ shop where they sell, as souvenirs, the shrunken heads the Indians make; and Jim recognises, in one of the tiny grinning faces, his own features.
- from For Crying Out Shroud, a novel (Hutchinson, 1969)
- (read the rest)
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What else remains of Oswell Blakeston
![]()
His Wikipedia entry
A biography and inventory of his papers
Info on his film Light Rhythms (1930) at silentera.com
His books available at alibris
----
*
p.s. Hey. My back thing seems to be beginning to improve post-doctor, and I'm slightly more myself, but we will see. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Didn't watch. Not even clips, actually. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien. Yes, LCTG will be released on DVD and made available for streaming in the early summer. The exact date isn't set yet. Late June - early July is a guess. Thanks for asking, man. ** Armando, Hi. Oh, man, I'm sorry to have jumped to that wrong conclusion. The same day you commented, someone wrote to tell me they'd downloaded an illegal torrent of it, and I mistakenly assumed that had been your source. I'm very sorry about that. I'm feeling better. It's a slow process, and I have to be super careful for the next couple of days, but, yeah, I hope my back is gradually correcting itself as I type. Thanks for caring. Hm, interesting questions. Five favorite Viscontis: 'Death in Venice', 'The Damned', 'Ludwig, 'Rocco and his Brothers', 'White Nights'. Least favorite: 'Conversation Piece'. Three favorite Antonionis in order: 'Red Desert', 'Blow Up', 'L'Eclisse'. What are your fave and least Viscontis and your three fave Antonioni's in order, please? ** James, Hi, James. I don't think I do. Well, okay, I've never tried it, so ... hm, actually ... ha ha. Thanks for your thoughts. I think/hope I'm upswinging. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! Ah, gorgeous with a sublime edge, even so through a non-related chorus of ouches on my end. Or maybe not completely unrelated, if you catch my drift ;) . They even drove me to use an emoticon, for goodness sake.Thank you, maestro. If a blog could bow physically, it would be. Love, me. ** Steevee, Hi. Thanks, man. I hope he did. Well, he did, but 'how much' is the question that the next couple of days will answer. Man, hopes right back at you about the kidney stone. Ugh. Hm, I don't think I know Tomeka Reid Quartet. I will for sure go listen. If Reid played with Braxton, that extremely good enough for me. Sounds fascinating. Great, thank you a lot, Steve! ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dora. I will absolutely for sure watch 'Mommy'. Maybe it's on French Netflix. That seems highly possible. Thanks about the slave post. Well, yeah, it's kind of this ongoing labor-intensive thing. I basically spend the month before the escort and slave posts doing almost daily explorations of various sites where escorts/clients and slaves/masters do their soliciting and flirting. It takes a lot of work and patience to find interesting ones. 90% of the escorts/slaves say basically the same, basic things in their profiles, and the curious, eccentric ones, especially by guys that have a general qualification as 'attractive', are rare. Then I gather the profiles I like until I have enough for a post. In a nutshell. I'm still in pain, but it's notably less. Supposedly, according to the doc, the pain should gradually disappear over the next couple of days. Boy, I hope so. How was your Tuesday? ** Sypha, Excited, amazed! ** _Black_Acrylic. Thanks, Ben. Yes, fingers very, very, very crossed that his treatment worked. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Mine is supposedly a combo of having a lifelong imperfect spine and surrounding tissue stuff. That's what he said. They torrent everything these days. I dig, but it sucks for a little film like ours and re: that happening so far in advance of the release plus god knows if its the final cut. I'm afraid to check. ** Okay. Today you get a little fallout from the impairment caused to the blog by my current physical fucked-up-ness. I hope to keep the past to a minimum. Oh, for those who aren't conversant with the blog terminology, 'back from the dead' means it's a post that, for reasons too complicated to explain here, has not been online or available for viewing since the day it originally launched. So, unless you're a long-termer who happened to check the blog that long ago day, it's a new post, I guess. Blah blah. See you tomorrow.
Oswell Blakeston (1907 - 1985)
Oswell Blakeston ran away from his bourgeois home as a schoolboy, becoming a conjuror's assistant, cinema organist and clapper boy with David Lean at Gaumont film studios. In the large close-ups used to convey information in silent films - "hands holding letters, visiting cards and so on" - Blakeston played the hands of many stars. He began writing film criticism, later becoming assistant editor of the influential magazine Close Up. "Oswell Blakeston" was adopted instead of his real name, Henry Hasslacher. (Oswell was derived from that of the writer Osbert Sitwell. His mother's family name was Blakiston, which he modified.)With Francis Bruguiere, Blakeston pioneered abstract films in Britain. He was also a writer of filmscripts, plays, novels, cookery and travel books, prolific artist, poet and lecturer. Among his enormous literary output were his 1932 book Magic Aftermath, "the first fiction to be published in spiral binding"; the 1935 crime story The Cat with the Moustache (a collaboration with Roger Burford), "one of the first descriptions of trips with mescal"; and the 1938 anthology Proems, in which Blakeston "published the first poems by Lawrence Durrell".
Dylan Thomas called Blakeston "a friend of all boozy poets and me too". Oswell wrote regular articles on London's pubs for What's On for some 25 years. A bar-room acquaintance was the writer M.P. Shiel, who in strange circumstances became king of the Leeward Island of Redonda, of which Blakeston was made a duke.
As a writer of stories, John Betjeman reckoned that Blakeston was a neglected genius of the macabre. His 1947 collection Priests, Peters and Pussens had idiosyncratic illustrations by Max Chapman, a young avant-garde painter who would become Blakeston's lover until the older man's death. Blakeston and Chapman co-wrote stories, among them Jim's Gun (1939) and Danger in Provence (1946). While writing the latter in Venice, the authors were arrested as Russian spies. On hot evenings they had been using a typewriter on the roof - they were thought to be transmitting Morse messages.
----
What remains of Oswell Blakeston's fiction
Adventure Without Asking: David Smith accidentally gets into a first class compartment when he boards a train at Waterloo. He finds himself alone with "a small, obese creature with a face so flabby that it looked like the disintegrated face of a medium in a spiritualist photograph after he has been deserted by one ghost and before he is possessed by another."This man is a doctor, hypnotist and mind reader, and he's also extremely bitter and twisted about both his unfortunate appearance and his wife's infidelity. Having caused David to faint at the station, he has him removed to his quarters where he can torment him with a scene from his worst nightmares. Weird and extremely horrible.
- from Charles Birkin, ed. Not at Night (Phillip Allan, 1935)
_____
The Hut: "The first lad who slept there hacked off his hand with a penknife. He confessed, afterwards, that he had stolen with that hand ... The last ...er ... victim, was a tramp who had stolen a bag of gardening tools from the village ... he blinded himself on a rake ..."It served as home to a religious fanatic, a fervent believer in "if thy right hand causes thee to sin .." self-mutilation for even the slightest transgressions. Peter and Daisy, lost in the countryside, hole up there for the night but she is unable to sleep and, fatally, says as much to the sinister stranger who greets them in the morning. The hut is on his land and, back at his farmhouse, he relates to them the macabre history of the hut with obscene relish ...
- from Charles Birkin, ed. Gruesome Cargoes #13 (Phillip Allen, 1936)
_____
Snow Time: Switzerland. A young English boy, bullied by his nurse, scoops his sago pudding into a cigarette box and hides it in a cupboard only to be tormented by it in a nightmare: "The eggs, the nasty horrid eggs had hatched! Long white things were crawling towards the bed, waving their sightless heads to get the direction where they sensed the small boy was lying, then worming their way forward ..."- from Hugh Lamb, ed. Return from the Grave (W.H. Allen, 1976)
____
For Crying Out Shroud : Chapter XIVThe telephone rings, and the doctor puts out a large hairy hand to stifle the patient’s screams. Two masked male nurses move forward to help the doctor with the man who writhes in agony; and a hydrocephalic female nurse answers the phone.
‘Oh yes,’ she says in a mellifluous voice, ‘the patient is . . . quite comfortable.’
Jim half wakes with the nightmare.
Then he turns on the other side and falls back into un-easy sleep.
In the second nightmare he is in a hot country, in some tourists’ shop where they sell, as souvenirs, the shrunken heads the Indians make; and Jim recognises, in one of the tiny grinning faces, his own features.
- from For Crying Out Shroud, a novel (Hutchinson, 1969)
- (read the rest)
----
What else remains of Oswell Blakeston
His Wikipedia entry
A biography and inventory of his papers
Info on his film Light Rhythms (1930) at silentera.com
His books available at alibris
----
*
p.s. Hey. My back thing seems to be beginning to improve post-doctor, and I'm slightly more myself, but we will see. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Didn't watch. Not even clips, actually. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien. Yes, LCTG will be released on DVD and made available for streaming in the early summer. The exact date isn't set yet. Late June - early July is a guess. Thanks for asking, man. ** Armando, Hi. Oh, man, I'm sorry to have jumped to that wrong conclusion. The same day you commented, someone wrote to tell me they'd downloaded an illegal torrent of it, and I mistakenly assumed that had been your source. I'm very sorry about that. I'm feeling better. It's a slow process, and I have to be super careful for the next couple of days, but, yeah, I hope my back is gradually correcting itself as I type. Thanks for caring. Hm, interesting questions. Five favorite Viscontis: 'Death in Venice', 'The Damned', 'Ludwig, 'Rocco and his Brothers', 'White Nights'. Least favorite: 'Conversation Piece'. Three favorite Antonionis in order: 'Red Desert', 'Blow Up', 'L'Eclisse'. What are your fave and least Viscontis and your three fave Antonioni's in order, please? ** James, Hi, James. I don't think I do. Well, okay, I've never tried it, so ... hm, actually ... ha ha. Thanks for your thoughts. I think/hope I'm upswinging. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! Ah, gorgeous with a sublime edge, even so through a non-related chorus of ouches on my end. Or maybe not completely unrelated, if you catch my drift ;) . They even drove me to use an emoticon, for goodness sake.Thank you, maestro. If a blog could bow physically, it would be. Love, me. ** Steevee, Hi. Thanks, man. I hope he did. Well, he did, but 'how much' is the question that the next couple of days will answer. Man, hopes right back at you about the kidney stone. Ugh. Hm, I don't think I know Tomeka Reid Quartet. I will for sure go listen. If Reid played with Braxton, that extremely good enough for me. Sounds fascinating. Great, thank you a lot, Steve! ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dora. I will absolutely for sure watch 'Mommy'. Maybe it's on French Netflix. That seems highly possible. Thanks about the slave post. Well, yeah, it's kind of this ongoing labor-intensive thing. I basically spend the month before the escort and slave posts doing almost daily explorations of various sites where escorts/clients and slaves/masters do their soliciting and flirting. It takes a lot of work and patience to find interesting ones. 90% of the escorts/slaves say basically the same, basic things in their profiles, and the curious, eccentric ones, especially by guys that have a general qualification as 'attractive', are rare. Then I gather the profiles I like until I have enough for a post. In a nutshell. I'm still in pain, but it's notably less. Supposedly, according to the doc, the pain should gradually disappear over the next couple of days. Boy, I hope so. How was your Tuesday? ** Sypha, Excited, amazed! ** _Black_Acrylic. Thanks, Ben. Yes, fingers very, very, very crossed that his treatment worked. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Mine is supposedly a combo of having a lifelong imperfect spine and surrounding tissue stuff. That's what he said. They torrent everything these days. I dig, but it sucks for a little film like ours and re: that happening so far in advance of the release plus god knows if its the final cut. I'm afraid to check. ** Okay. Today you get a little fallout from the impairment caused to the blog by my current physical fucked-up-ness. I hope to keep the past to a minimum. Oh, for those who aren't conversant with the blog terminology, 'back from the dead' means it's a post that, for reasons too complicated to explain here, has not been online or available for viewing since the day it originally launched. So, unless you're a long-termer who happened to check the blog that long ago day, it's a new post, I guess. Blah blah. See you tomorrow.