‘The Automaton’ by David Wheldon

The late David Wheldon was a medical doctor who specialised in the treatment of multiple sclerosis, successfully devising a protocol to treat his wife, the artist Sarah Longlands, so that she could live a full life and continue to paint. He also wrote novels and short stories, initially to acclaim, but latterly in something like obscurity until, by the good works of writers Aiden O’Reilly and David Rose, his more recent stories began to find homes, culminating in the publication by Confingo Publishing of the collection mentioned above.

The Automaton, like most of Wheldon’s fiction, is best described by a term I think first coined by O’Reilly – ‘ireal’, since it’s a story very much of this world, and very much not. To this end, Wheldon is a master of specifics and tone, able to convince his readers while leading them guilefully into the unforeseeable.

The story, set in 1905, is narrated by a grammar school boy, the son of the manager of an ailing theatre. A preface tells us the narrator fell in battle near the end of the First World War. Thus the narrative has the flavour of a memoir, presumably discovered after his death.

First published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press in 2017, and then in the collection The Guiltless Bystander, Confingo Publishing 2022

The automaton in question is a waxwork of a beautiful woman, dignified and unknowable, clothed in finery that has seen better days. She is also an unbeatable chess master, who sighs gently before manipulating her pieces in a manner designed to perplex her opponent. She is introduced – borne upon a sedan by an impresario of questionable character – to the theatre in the hope of saving its financial future.

There’s a gradualness to Wheldon’s storytelling which adds to its richness. His use of dialogue is mannered and leisurely but, in its own time, revealing. Because of this, I feel that all I should say further is that the boy forms a relationship with this beguiling, unworldly creature, and that the term sentience is introduced and repeated artfully as the story develops. This is an enigmatic, troubling, and deeply moving story that leaves a lasting mark on the reader.

‘The Gatekeeper’ by David Wheldon

I have to again declare a personal interest in this choice, as I was introduced, first to Wheldon’s work then to Wheldon himself by the Irish writer Aiden O’Reilly. Wheldon was a genuine outsider; despite finding fame with a string of novels in the 1980s he stuck to his profession in medical research but continued to write, mostly poetry and short stories, in complete obscurity once the acclaim had died. O’Reilly had discovered the novels while living in London at the time. In the Internet age and back in Dublin, O’Reilly came across Wheldon’s website – used also for his medical writings – and made contact. He decided to help get Wheldon’s short fiction published and asked me to suggest some British magazines; Confingo was one of them. Tim Shearer, the editor, was as intrigued by Wheldon’s work as I was, published several stories in the magazine, then decided to publish a collection. Very sadly, David Wheldon died just as the book was going to print.

His stories are deeply strange in ways hard to describe. The settings are mostly English, but an almost mythical, timeless England which could be Victorian or post-war, but with contemporary details and Continental inflections – Dickens crossed with Kafka, perhaps. But the one that snags my memory differs in being set in China, and in a far deeper past.

The first, and longest, of three subtitled sections is narrated by a candidate arriving by sedan chair, after a six-day journey, to an Examination Station, being assigned his cell (a very monastic yet bureaucratic set-up) and informed of the arrangements for food and facilities while confined for the duration of the examinations.

Opening a cupboard, he hears a girl’s voice – she has discovered a loose brick in her corresponding cupboard against the party wall. This allows us to glean some scant details from their conversation and their own guesswork, but it only adds to the sense of our alienation, as do the hints of an impending apocalypse: both have had some infection in childhood which leaves scars but also gives immunity against smallpox, an epidemic of which has been prophesied. Is that why they were chosen as candidates? They, and we, don’t know.

After a single-paragraph middle section, a meditation on sleep, the final section, a longer single paragraph, offers the reflections of the ageing gatekeeper, himself once a childhood candidate who chose the position instead of whatever other career awaited him; he too protected against the smallpox to come; he too aware only of the essential mystery behind the lucidity of life.

Haunting, that deceptive lucidity.

Collected in The Guiltless Bystander, Confingo Publishing, 2022