Of Kings and Things

Strange Tales and Decadent Poems

Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock; edited by David Tibet

Strange Attractor Press 2019

Hb/Pb, 360pp, illus, bib, £40/£15.99, ISBN 9781907222573

In his anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 18921935, WB Yeats describes the fin de siècle, decadent, PreRaphaeliteera author and poet Stanislaus Eric Stenbock (18601895) as a “scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men”.

Despite this endorsement, in the years since his death, Stenbock’s distinctive body of work – his meagre output, three thin volumes of verse and one book of short stories, all of them published in small, privatelyprinted editions

– has languished in unfortunate obscurity.

A reappraisal of this fascinating body of work is long overdue; Of Kings and Things is a selection of Stenbock’s finest work under the careful stewardship of editor David Tibet.

Stenbock was born to the daughter of a wealthy German cotton importer and an Estonian aristocrat. Following his father’s death, his mother remarried a clerk who later obtained the position of Permanent Secretary in the British Treasury. As a result, financially speaking, Stenbock lived a charmed life.

He was a sickly child, spent much of his upbringing in German private schools, and briefly attended Oxford, which he left before obtaining his degree. Originally a Protestant, Stenbock converted to Roman Catholicism, much to his family’s dismay. Given his extravagances, which were decidedly not limited to his religiosity, his stepfather placed him on a rather strict allowance.

From an early age, Stenbock exhibited artistic tendencies. At only 21 years of age he published his first book, a small collection of dark, densely allusive, richly textured poems that went largely unnoticed.

This was followed by a second volume, Myrtle, Rue, And Cypress (1883), which consists of frequently supernaturalthemed poems. Stenbock dedicated the collection to several young men, including Simeon Solomon, a tragic preRaphaelite painter who 10 years earlier had been criminally prosecuted for a homosexual liaison in a public toilet. Again, the volume was ignored.

In considerable debt to his printers due to a lack of sales, Stenbock escaped to Europe, and while there he experienced some comparative impoverishment. He also apparently suffered from mental illness. He travelled frequently during this period and it is said that he was always accompanied by a lifesized doll made of wood; he called this doll le petit comte and believed it to be his son.

Stenbock’s fortunes improved when, in 1885, he inherited a vast Estonian estate from his grandfather, and took up residence in the estate’s palatial manor, cohabitating with his cousin, Theophile von Bodisco, and other relatives. Stenbock lived in considerable luxury, yet he soon tired of Estonian provincialism, and longed for the familiarity of English life.

He returned to London in 1887 and came to associate with some of the bestknown talents of the day, including Oscar Wilde, the artist Aubrey Beardsley, publisher Ernest Rhys, and poet Arthur Symons.

In 1893, Stenbock published his last volume of poems, the decidedly melancholic

The Shadow of Death .Healso dabbled in the short story form. Only one book of short stories was published in his lifetime, Studies of Death: Romantic Tales (1894).

The same year, Stenbock submitted his “supernatural timeslip play” (in Tibet’s description), La Mazurka des Revenants, for consideration in The Yellow Book; the work was ultimately rejected due to space considerations.

Stenbock died the following year after he collapsed during an apparent drunken, psychotic rampage in which he attempted to attack someone, possibly a housekeeper, with a fire poker; the likely cause of death was cirrhosis, the culmination of a lifetime of drug abuse.

Given the prevalence of poetry in his previously published work, Of Kings and Things, interestingly enough, primarily comprises a selection of Stenbock’s finest prose efforts, including 15 of his best stories, with eight poems of varying length and an autobiographical essay.

This handsome edition is illustrated with a number of fascinating portraits of Stenbock and his family and associates and, most welcome, reproductions of his original books, themselves lovely objets d’art.

Modern readers of Stenbock’s work should find it a revelation; at his best, Stenbock’s stories anticipate similar dreamlike themes, subjects, and stylistic devices in the weird fiction stories of subsequent decades – everything from werewolves to vampires to demonic pacts, among other occult subjects

– and his lush poetry, despite its Roman Catholic overtones, certainly ranks amongst the most depressingly morbid, deathobsessed verse of its era. Eric Hoffman

★★★★★