Philip Jose Farmer
A Feast Unknown
Volume IX of
The Memoirs of Lord Grandrith edited by Philip Jose Farmer
EDITOR’S NOTE
Lord Grandrith has written nine volumes of autobiography, totaling close to a million and a half words.
Yet this volume, the latest, covering only a part of 1968, is the only one published. Lord Grandrith had planned to publish all the volumes someday, when it became possible to reveal his true identity and true story. However, Grandrith turned against the Nine who had given him the elixir of prolonged youth.
The first eight volumes are hidden in a place only Grandrith and his wife know. He made arrangements through the editor to publish Volume IX after he had failed to get it published in England,
France, Sweden, South Africa, and at several houses in the United States. Grandrith states the Nine were behind the rejections and the various “accidents” to and “losings” of the mss. he sent out.
Fortunately, he had met the editor at the home of a common friend in Kansas City, Missouri. The editor did not then know the true name of James Claymore, as he was calling himself at the time. A letter sent from Lima, Peru, told the editor of Claymore’s actual name and identity. It also outlined the danger that Grandrith, his wife, and several others were in. The next letter came from Dublin, Ireland. The third had no postmark and was left in the editor’s mailbox between midnight and six a.m. The editor sent his reply to a man in Stockholm, Sweden, as requested. The ms. of Volume IX was mailed from Western Samoa.
The editor has Americanized various English terms, changing bonnet into hood, petrol into gas, lorry into truck, etc. The locations of various places in Kenya and Uganda were purposely made vague by
Grandrith. This was not done to protect the Nine but to protect those foolhardy people who might try to seek out the Nine or the now-buried gold mines of the valley which Grandrith named Ophir.
In addition, the incident of the landing at Penrith is not quite accurate. Penrith has no airport. The events after the landing did happen as described, but the airport was created by Grandrith to obscure the actual event. He wants to protect a friend who set out lights on a meadow so the plane could land there.
Grandrith refuses to change the incident to bring it closer to reality. We can only respect his reasons without understanding them.
In his last letter, Grandrith says that “almost nobody, will believe this. Not at this moment, anyway.
But events conceived and brought forth by the Nine will soon convince the world. I hope then that it will not be too late for the world. Meanwhile, we are all alive and fighting, though doing more hiding than fighting. And I have added another book to the autobiography.”
—Philip Jose Farmer
FOREWORD
Since the first eight volumes of his memoirs have not yet been published, Lord Grandrith has written a special foreword which encapsulates the early part of Volume I. Without this, the reader would be puzzled by some of the references in this volume.
I was conceived and born in 1888.
Jack the Ripper was my father.
I am certain of this, although I have no evidence that would stand up in court. I have only the diary of my legal father. He was, in fact, my uncle, although he was married to my mother.
My legal father kept a diary almost up to the moment of his death. Shortly after he had locked it inside a desk, he was killed. His last written words recorded his despair because his wife had just died and
I, only a year old, was wailing for milk. And there were no human beings within hundreds of miles, as far as he knew.
I alone have read the entire diary. I have never permitted anyone else to read any of the diary preceding the moment when my uncle and my mother sailed from England for Africa.
My “biographer” would have been too horrified by the truth to have written it if I had been unkind enough to reveal it to him. He was a romanticist and, in many ways, a Victorian.
He would have made up a story of his own, ignoring the real story, as he did with so many of my adventures. He was interested mainly in adventure for its own sake, although he did describe my psychology, my Weltanschauung. However, he never really transmitted the half-infrahuman cast of my mind.
Perhaps he could not understand that part of me, although I tried to communicate it as well as I could. He tried to understand, but he was human, all-too-human, as my favorite poet says. He could never grasp, with the human hands of his psyche, the nonhuman shape of mine.
That part of the diary which I had forbidden others to read describes how my mother happened to be with her husband in Whitechapel on that fog-smothered night. She had insisted on going with him to look for his brother, who had escaped from the cell in the castle in the Cumberland County. Private detectives had quietly tracked John Cloamby to the Whitechapel district of London. His brother, James Cloamby,
Viscount Grandrith, had joined the hunt. My mother, Alexandra Applethwaite, related to the noble family of Bedford, had insisted on accompanying him.
My uncle objected to bringing his wife along for several reasons. The strongest was that his brother had attempted to rape her when he had broken out of his cell after bending several iron bars and uprooting them from their stone sockets. Only her screams and the prompt appearance of two manservants armed with pistols had saved her. Alexandra, however, persisted in her insane belief that she alone could make him surrender voluntarily when he was found. Also, she said that she alone could locate him exactly. There was, she claimed, a psychic bond between them, “vibrations” which enabled her to point toward and track him as if she were a human lodestone.
I use the word “insane” in describing this belief because later developments (described by my
“biographer” and by me in Vol. I) revealed her mental instability.
She also said that if she were not allowed to go with her husband in the search, she would inform the police and the newspapers of what had happened.
My uncle gave in to her. He had a horror of publicity of any kind and especially of this kind. Also, he might have been arrested for concealing evidence of murder. He was, in fact, an accessory after the fact of murder, if, indeed, there was a fact.
My uncle believed that his brother was responsible for the disappearance of two whores from villages only a few miles from the estates. A severed breast was found on the shore of a tarn; this was all. The locals presumed that somebody had done away with the two women and buried them somewhere. My uncle connected his brother to the murders because of his ravings while in the cell about killing all whores, including his mother. Especially his mother.
His mother, of course, was safe from him. She had killed herself when James, John, and Patrick, her three sons, were quite young. Her husband had killed himself because he suspected that a Swedish gentleman was the father of the boys and that she may have killed herself because her conscience made life unbearable. Their aunt raised the three boys and was much loved by them. But John Cloamby never forgave his mother, although he had never spoken of her until his madness took him.
Later, my uncle believed that John was Jack the Ripper. Before his breakdown, John had been a medical doctor. His real motive in becoming a physician was not in curing the sick. He wanted to know everything about the human body because he intended to find out the secret of immortality. To this end, he had meant to learn much more of chemistry and botany than any medical doctor had ever known.