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rushthatspeaksI don't think that I first heard of David Lindsay's novel A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) through the essay in which C.S. Lewis says it is one of the most blasphemous books ever written, but that essay certainly added enthusiasm to my then-ongoing search for a copy. And upon reading it I saw both why it would have sent Lewis into something of a moral tizzy and how much of his Space Trilogy was composed in reaction to it (most). A Voyage to Arcturus contains some of the best fantasy travelogue ever written, is set in a universe whose metaphysics combines the most depressing aspects of Calvinism, Catharism, and not-terribly-well-understood Buddhism, is so intensely peculiar about gender that I have to tell myself Lindsay is talking about Arcturians even to parse how the book thinks sex roles work, and is one of those experiences where one is continually doing the mental equivalent of putting one's foot down on a stair-step that isn't where one expected it to be. I have never read anything remotely resembling it, and while I am not sure it is a likable book, I certainly respect it.
So after reading that one, I looked out for more Lindsay. He is not easy to find. Arcturus sold some ridiculously tiny number of copies on first printing and has turned into one of those books people talk about in essays more than reading, and I was amazed to find a copy of his The Haunted Woman (1922) a few years back in a used-bookstore crawl. That one is completely different from Arcturus in just about every direction and is altogether a tighter, more interesting and more congenial second novel-- it takes place in a castle which has one of the most unusual hauntings I know of, a room which turns people into their deepest selves when they enter it, and then wipes the memory from them as they leave, without erasing the effects of what they have said and done. After stumbling on that book, since those were the years before internet bibliographies, I did not manage to hear of any others.
Blessings on the conjunctions of internet bibliographies with university libraries. Sphinx (1923) is Lindsay's third novel.
And he had gotten better at his craft. Arcturus is an id-book, the kind where everything and the kitchen sink gets thrown at the page. The overwhelming impression Sphinx gives is of restraint, an iron discipline of form that leaves not one word of one sentence out of place.
On the surface, it's a domestic tragedy, one of those novels of fierce passions just under everyday life. The protagonist, a young man named Nicholas, has inherited some money and moved into a country-house to carry on some scientific experimentation. The family who live in the house have three adult daughters at home; there is an extremely attractive and still young-ish widow living down the street who has a reputation as a femme fatale; there is a young woman further down the street still who is a famous avant-garde composer now reduced to potboiler popular melodies for financial reasons. It is a very twenties sort of milieu, full of tennis and high tea, and the first movements are genuinely funny as every single person in the neighborhood chooses Nicholas, the uninterested party, as a confidant for more and more secrets. The number of notes he is asked to carry in a day, the number of people he is told to tell or not tell things: it almost moves into farce.
Except that the secrets get darker and darker, the stakes higher and higher. A man who is wooing both the middle daughter of the house and the composer threatens the composer's life at gunpoint, and it amuses the widow to try to make this stalker even more jealous. There is the ongoing question of who is interested in Nicholas, and what that interest consists of and for what reason, and the answers to it are profoundly not simple.
And then there is Nicholas's research. He has found a way to record and play back dreams, and not the kind of dreams a person remembers naturally, but the kind that he sees as prophetic vision or possible communication with the dead, dragged from the deep sleep after REM phase. His dreams are prophetic. But he still insists on treating them as dreams.
This is a complex, subtle, and spectacular book, full of black irony. It breaks into the supernatural only at very carefully planned intervals, and in ways it knows the reader will not find sufficient. It has the shape of a piece of music-- in fact, the composer has written a piece called 'Sphinx', which is played quite early in the novel, and if you look over the paragraph of Nicholas's impressions of that piece, you will see that he is describing the structure of the book. If the novel reminds me of anything, it's Alan Garner's The Owl Service, also a book in which a deep underlying myth nearly batters its characters out of having free choice. The figure of the Sphinx applies in four separate ways to the plot: each of the three most significant women in it is an aspect of the way legend depicts sphinxes, one the benevolent repository of unconscious wisdom, one the flying winged mind encumbered by the animality of concerns about daily life, and one the man-eating evil for the sake of evil. But also there is a quite specific riddle asked of Nicholas, by his dreams, the riddle which as we all know has only one answer...
I can only imagine that the reason this doesn't have more of a reputation is that it looks so bloody boring. I mean it looks like a bad thirties mystery novel setup for a while, and it has a lot of domestic detail, and I think the book's major flaw is that all the heavy lifting goes on under the surface, until the (quite late) point where that surface explodes in a way that makes perfect sense if you have been entirely disregarding the exterior appearance of every ongoing interaction, and which undoubtedly seems like total gibberish otherwise. I could wish Lindsay had had a little less self-discipline, or at least been willing to signal to his audience more freely what kind of book it is that he is writing, but then Lindsay has always been one of the writers I have read who cares the least about what, if anything, the audience thinks.
And, glory be, he's much better about gender in this one. That is to say, there are a lot of things that happen that are obnoxiously sexist, and a lot of people explain various actions by referring to the genders of the people involved, but the narrative knows that this is caused by the society in which the book takes place and that it is not a good thing. In fact the villain is actively using the social roles of femininity to cover her tracks, and using Nicholas' perception of himself-as-a-man to cover them further, and the novel is very perceptive about how that can work.
The edition I read has an introduction by Colin Wilson that is one of the most wrong-headed introductions I have ever seen on a piece of literature. He thinks it's a comedy. He also thinks Arcturus is about the concept of the artist as outsider. I would find this hilarious if it weren't so incomprehensible to me where in hell he even got these ideas from.
As you can probably tell, I very highly recommend Sphinx. As with all of Lindsay, it is utterly sui generis.
So after reading that one, I looked out for more Lindsay. He is not easy to find. Arcturus sold some ridiculously tiny number of copies on first printing and has turned into one of those books people talk about in essays more than reading, and I was amazed to find a copy of his The Haunted Woman (1922) a few years back in a used-bookstore crawl. That one is completely different from Arcturus in just about every direction and is altogether a tighter, more interesting and more congenial second novel-- it takes place in a castle which has one of the most unusual hauntings I know of, a room which turns people into their deepest selves when they enter it, and then wipes the memory from them as they leave, without erasing the effects of what they have said and done. After stumbling on that book, since those were the years before internet bibliographies, I did not manage to hear of any others.
Blessings on the conjunctions of internet bibliographies with university libraries. Sphinx (1923) is Lindsay's third novel.
And he had gotten better at his craft. Arcturus is an id-book, the kind where everything and the kitchen sink gets thrown at the page. The overwhelming impression Sphinx gives is of restraint, an iron discipline of form that leaves not one word of one sentence out of place.
On the surface, it's a domestic tragedy, one of those novels of fierce passions just under everyday life. The protagonist, a young man named Nicholas, has inherited some money and moved into a country-house to carry on some scientific experimentation. The family who live in the house have three adult daughters at home; there is an extremely attractive and still young-ish widow living down the street who has a reputation as a femme fatale; there is a young woman further down the street still who is a famous avant-garde composer now reduced to potboiler popular melodies for financial reasons. It is a very twenties sort of milieu, full of tennis and high tea, and the first movements are genuinely funny as every single person in the neighborhood chooses Nicholas, the uninterested party, as a confidant for more and more secrets. The number of notes he is asked to carry in a day, the number of people he is told to tell or not tell things: it almost moves into farce.
Except that the secrets get darker and darker, the stakes higher and higher. A man who is wooing both the middle daughter of the house and the composer threatens the composer's life at gunpoint, and it amuses the widow to try to make this stalker even more jealous. There is the ongoing question of who is interested in Nicholas, and what that interest consists of and for what reason, and the answers to it are profoundly not simple.
And then there is Nicholas's research. He has found a way to record and play back dreams, and not the kind of dreams a person remembers naturally, but the kind that he sees as prophetic vision or possible communication with the dead, dragged from the deep sleep after REM phase. His dreams are prophetic. But he still insists on treating them as dreams.
This is a complex, subtle, and spectacular book, full of black irony. It breaks into the supernatural only at very carefully planned intervals, and in ways it knows the reader will not find sufficient. It has the shape of a piece of music-- in fact, the composer has written a piece called 'Sphinx', which is played quite early in the novel, and if you look over the paragraph of Nicholas's impressions of that piece, you will see that he is describing the structure of the book. If the novel reminds me of anything, it's Alan Garner's The Owl Service, also a book in which a deep underlying myth nearly batters its characters out of having free choice. The figure of the Sphinx applies in four separate ways to the plot: each of the three most significant women in it is an aspect of the way legend depicts sphinxes, one the benevolent repository of unconscious wisdom, one the flying winged mind encumbered by the animality of concerns about daily life, and one the man-eating evil for the sake of evil. But also there is a quite specific riddle asked of Nicholas, by his dreams, the riddle which as we all know has only one answer...
I can only imagine that the reason this doesn't have more of a reputation is that it looks so bloody boring. I mean it looks like a bad thirties mystery novel setup for a while, and it has a lot of domestic detail, and I think the book's major flaw is that all the heavy lifting goes on under the surface, until the (quite late) point where that surface explodes in a way that makes perfect sense if you have been entirely disregarding the exterior appearance of every ongoing interaction, and which undoubtedly seems like total gibberish otherwise. I could wish Lindsay had had a little less self-discipline, or at least been willing to signal to his audience more freely what kind of book it is that he is writing, but then Lindsay has always been one of the writers I have read who cares the least about what, if anything, the audience thinks.
And, glory be, he's much better about gender in this one. That is to say, there are a lot of things that happen that are obnoxiously sexist, and a lot of people explain various actions by referring to the genders of the people involved, but the narrative knows that this is caused by the society in which the book takes place and that it is not a good thing. In fact the villain is actively using the social roles of femininity to cover her tracks, and using Nicholas' perception of himself-as-a-man to cover them further, and the novel is very perceptive about how that can work.
The edition I read has an introduction by Colin Wilson that is one of the most wrong-headed introductions I have ever seen on a piece of literature. He thinks it's a comedy. He also thinks Arcturus is about the concept of the artist as outsider. I would find this hilarious if it weren't so incomprehensible to me where in hell he even got these ideas from.
As you can probably tell, I very highly recommend Sphinx. As with all of Lindsay, it is utterly sui generis.
