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"Here, then, is a host of material of the greatest interest and fascination waiting to be discovered. But the probability is that most of it has vanished beyond recall. However, perhaps there is some slight hope. "
Fr. Brocard Sewell, "The Manuscripts of Montague Summers" (1970)
The late Father Brocard Sewell, O.Carm., a founding editor of The Antigonish Review, was a champion of literary outsiders, or "black swans" as he characterized them, borrowing an image from Juvenal's Satires. Among the rarest of rare birds cherished by Fr. Sewell was Montague Summers. Summers fascinated Sewell who, in his youth, once followed the elusive, black clad priest as he walked with his pet dachshund, Cornelius Agrippa, near the beaches of the Hove Lawns in Sussex. Sewell was within tapping distance of Summers when the priest and his dog turned a corner suddenly and vanished, as if into thin air.
Missing manuscripts, like vanishing clerics, are a staple of good gothic fiction. Unfortunately, errant documents are also the bane of literary and historical scholarship. The papers of Montague Summers (1880-1 948) - an authority on Restoration drama, the gothic novel, and the supernatural - disappeared sixty years ago and have remained a source of speculation as well as fascination among antiquarians, researchers, and collectors for over half a century. It is a pleasure to report that one among many mysteries surrounding Summers is about to be put to rest: The papers exist, the collection is intact and almost complete, and the materials have been located and catalogued, even if only preliminarily. The late Fr. Sewell would have been delighted to discover that many of the enigmas surrounding the Summers collection have now been resolved, and equally pleased to find that some mysteries remain.
In spite of the fact that Brocard Sewell never met Summers, and corresponded with him only briefly, he wrote several articles on Summers and even a book-length memoir pseudonymously published and skillfully woven together from letters, interviews, and a now lost, unpublished recollection penned by Summers ' s long-time friend, the poet John RedwoodAnderson.2 Redwood-Anderson's Recollections of Montague Summers (also known as Montague Summers: The Early Years) was perhaps the closest thing to a true biography ever written about Summers, by someone who knew him...