Colin Wilson, page 2 of 5

In some ways, John Cowper Powys’s massive 1933 novel A Glastonbury Romance bears comparison with David Lindsay’s massive 1932 novel Devil’s Tor. Both are set in rural South West England, where mystical visions seem to presage a worldwide spiritual or religious revival; both spend a lot of time examining, in intense detail, the inner lives of their characters; and both are, as already said, massive (A Glastonbury Romance being more than twice the length of David Lindsay’s 200,000-word “monster”). And this massiveness is part of their point — they want to come across as major statements, their physical heft a corollary to the weight of what they’re trying to say. But Lindsay’s and Powys’s intents are poles apart. Lindsay’s fundamental urge was world-rejection; his need was for a radical re-understanding of the universe’s troubling core mystery. Powys, on the other hand, was all about acceptance of life. To him:

“There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless, because the reality of Being is forever changing under the primal and arbitrary will of the First Cause. The mystery of mysteries is Personality, a living Person; and there is that in Personality which is indetermined, unaccountable, changing at every second.”

But Powys isn’t the sunny-minded optimist you’d imagine as Lindsay’s opposite. He doesn’t turn away from (Lindsay’s touchstone) pain. He believed in accepting all of life, from the sublime and mystical to the crude and rude, and not merely with a stoic shrug, but by seizing it with an almost pagan ferocity. As one of the central characters of A Glastonbury Romance, the unconventional preacher, faith-healer, and (for most of the novel) Mayor of Glastonbury, “Bloody Johnny” Geard, says of his (very personal and idiosyncratic) beliefs:

“It matters not at all from what cups, from what goblets, we drink, so long as without being cruel, we drink up Life. The sole meaning, purpose, intention, and secret of Christ, my dears, is not to understand Life, or mould it, or change it, or even to love it, but to drink of its undying essence!”

The novel starts with the reading of a will. Canon Crow has died, and his family, with members ranging from the trampish rogue John Crow to the opportunistic industrialist Philip Crow, gather to learn that none of them has inherited anything. The whole £40,000 has been left to “Bloody Johnny” Geard of Glastonbury. Geard, though, does not see this as a personal bequest. He believes it’s his mission to turn his home town of Glastonbury — resting place of the Holy Grail and the Blood of Christ — into a world-class site of spiritual pilgrimage, “a mystical rival to Rome and Jerusalem”, and sets about doing just that. His first act is to announce a Passion Play, with mixed-in Arthurian elements, and he hires John Crow to organise it and advertise it to the world.

But really, Powys is almost wilfully uninterested in plot. His intent, as stated in a 1953 preface to a later edition, was to examine:

“Nothing more and nothing less than the effect of a particular legend, a special myth, a unique tradition, from the remotest past in human history, upon a particular spot on the surface of this planet together with its crowd of inhabitants of every age and of every type of character.”

Which reminds me of Alan Moore’s intent with From Hell, to take the Jack the Ripper murders and examine them as a “human event” that touches the lives of many different people in many different ways. Powys is doing the same with the myth of the Holy Grail. But even this is to imply A Glastonbury Romance has more focus than it has, and I’d say a better guide to the sort of thing this novel is doing is a quote from the critic George Santayana, who said of Dickens (in a 1921 essay called “Dickens”):

“…what he had was a vast sympathetic participation in the daily life of mankind.”

And that seems more like what Powys is doing. With the excuse of following the events (very loosely, and often only as background or rumours) surrounding the putting-on of Geard’s Passion Play (in the first half of the novel) and, in the second half, the conversion of Glastonbury to a Socialistic commune, and Geard’s use of the healing powers of its “Grail Fountain” to turn the town into a British Lourdes, Powys dips into the inner lives of his many and varied characters, some of whom have nothing to do with the Play or those later events, or who only touch them lightly. Even major-seeming plot events are brushed aside offhand. In one chapter, Geard takes Tittie Petherton, who has been suffering awful pains from cancer, to the Grail Fountain, to cure her and provide his Glastonbury with its first miracle. We leave them there, mid-cure, and hear nothing for several chapters, then all-too-briefly glimpse Tittie Petherton, apparently fully cured, enjoying scones at a tea. It’s never stated that she’s cured, though she’s obviously better, and we don’t get the sort of disbelieving or believing reactions you want to hear. It’s almost as if the actual relation of plot is an embarrassment to Powys, and best brushed under the carpet. (Though it has to be said that in four of the book’s longest chapters — that dealing with the Pageant itself, and the final three which round off the book — Powys resolves his major plot strands with the same sort of dramatic brio as Peake displays in his Gormenghast novels’ major set-pieces.)

Powys is interested, most of all, in inhabiting the lives of his multitude of characters, in sampling their peculiar ways of experiencing the world, of thinking about it, of feeling about it, of relating to it. And he isn’t only interested in human characters. His is “a universe so thrilling and so aching with teeming consciousness” that, in wandering from one character to another, he occasionally brings in a non-human consciousness, including at one point a tree, or the sun (which takes a particular dislike to the Vicar of Glastonbury, though this only results in his feeling the heat a little more than others if he goes outside without a hat), the dead Canon Crow freshly laid in his grave (who has an ethereal though down-to-earth conversation with his wife, who’s buried in another country), and the “First Cause” — the God of Powys’s universe, a being whose nature generates all the good and all the evil in our world. (For Powys, it’s only human beings who can actually “produce good out of evil” as “this they do of their absolute free-will”; the First Cause just pours both good and evil out, constantly.)

In this way, Powys seems to stand in an odd relation to the modernist writers of his time. On the one hand, he employs the stream-of-consciousness technique of dipping into his characters’ minds, to relate both their consequential and their inconsequential thoughts, just as Virginia Woolf does in Mrs Dalloway. (Also her technique of shifting from one character to another as they pass in the street, or glance one another across a field.) On the other hand, he has no interest in the concept of the unreliable narrator, or of giving up any of the authorial authority the likes of Dickens took for granted. Which isn’t to say he comes across as dictatorial. Rather, he’s convincing through the sheer novelty and strangeness of the inner worlds he presents us with. In a way, Powys, as narrator, is like one of the “invisible anthropologists” he sometimes mentions as witnessing the events of his novel — the disembodied inhuman entities he tells us are lingering around his many characters, watching what they do with mild, dispassionate interest. Powys actually gets a mention in Colin Wilson’s monumental study The Occult for his having “deliberately set out to cultivate ‘multi-mindedness’, to pass out of his own identity into that of people or even objects”, and not just in his novels, but in his daily life.

There’s a quote from Wilson on the back of my 1975 paperback edition of the novel, calling it “Possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and one of the great mystical masterpieces of all time”. Powys’s mysticism, though, isn’t anything like Lindsay’s. With Lindsay, visions give his characters a glimpse of another reality, and when they return to this world it’s with a feeling they’re sinking back into a second-rate or false reality. With Powys, visionary experiences are just one part of the vastness of the one, single reality — a rare part, yes, but still a part of this world, not a glimpse of another. And his characters’ visionary experiences don’t, in the end, turn out to be that important. Three of his main characters, the roguish John Crow, the would-be-saint Sam Dekker, and the would-be-sinner Owen Evans, have visions. Evans, who thinks playing the part of Christ on the Cross in the Pageant will cure him of his obsessive sadistic fantasies, does have a vision of Christ, but the effect of that vision wears off, and what actually saves him, in the end, is the love of his wife. Sam sees the Holy Grail, and feels the need to rush around telling everyone, but where he expects to have to overcome disbelief, he’s instead faced with indifference. John Crow has a vision of Excalibur, but this has even less effect; chapters later he’s disgusted with Geard’s peddling the reality of the Arthurian myths as “lies”. Geard, the most mystically-minded character in the book, is more childlike than saint-like, and in place of Lindsay’s need, in Devil’s Tor, for his characters to give themselves up to serve that book’s demanding, tragic Goddess, Geard sees Christ more as “a Power to be exploited”:

“He [Christ] was the Mayor’s great magician, his super-Merlin… Never once had it crossed the threshold of Mr Geard’s consciousness that it was his duty to live a life of self-sacrifice.”

(I like that fact that, ultimately, the source of Geard’s force of personality is “the man’s complete freedom from self-consciousness”.)

Powys’s mysticism is not about glimpses of other worlds, but more an awed appreciation of this one. Every moment, for him, however quotidian, is imbrued with a sort of mystical light, and he loves to let us into the mind of a minor character and reveal that, in some quiet way, they have the secret of life’s true meaning, and have had it, quite naturally, since they were born:

“When not in acute physical pain, or in the presence of acute physical pain, Nancy Stickles enjoyed every moment of life. She liked to touch life, hear life, smell life, taste life, see life…”

It’s an odd thing, though, that for a book published in 1933, and ostensibly set in “the present” — and which features an aeroplane, and cars, and I think at one point someone suggests using a telephone, though nobody has a radio, but evidently it is the 1930s — it makes absolutely no mention of the First World War. None of the characters thinks of it, or recalls having served in it, or has lost anyone to it, or been wounded in it. If Powys is a modernistic writer in the techniques he employs, he seems utterly indifferent to the driving force behind such works as The Waste Land or Mrs Dalloway (with its shell-shocked Septimus Smith). Powys doesn’t even present his life-acceptance as an answer to the worldwide trauma of the Great War, and the widespread loss of belief of the 20th century; it’s as though it just doesn’t affect him, so he doesn’t mention it. (Which is doubly odd, because Powys obviously has a real hatred of cruelty. He apparently had a belief that, early in life, his thinking ill of others caused them actual ill, so he practised a sort of generalised benevolence, so as not to magically cause anyone harm.)

It could be that, as I said with Peake’s Gormenghast, the war makes itself felt in the way both that book and this one ends with a flood. In A Glastonbury Romance, the army even turns out to help, but there’s just not the same feeling, as with Peake, of this being a terrible disaster thrust upon all its characters in the same way the war was thrust upon the real world. With Powys, it feels more as though he just needed to find a way to end his massive book, so came up with a flood, as a sort of watery full-stop.

Reading A Glastonbury Romance is like taking a holiday, not just in another place, but in a timeless time. It’s a glimpse into Powys’s own worldview, one obviously nurtured in a rural upbringing, free of the modern world’s onslaught of communication and networking, a world in which one could really develop an eccentric inner life, an individualistic and even mystic way of experiencing one’s own existence and the quiet, slow-paced, characterful worlds of nature, and other people. That, more than anything, is what lingers, having read this book. It’s less about getting from page 1 to page 1,120, than it is about switching to a different mode of existence whilst being nestled between its capacious pages — a subtler, stranger, and perhaps now-lost mode of existence, but certainly one I’m glad to find preserved in Powys’s novel.

Although Hermann Hesse had been a published author since 1902, Demian (written in 1917, published in 1919) marked a new beginning for him as a writer. He had volunteered at the start of World War I and, found unfit for duty, was put to use taking care of prisoners of war. But he didn’t buy into the relentless patriotism of the times, and wrote against it, earning himself a tirade of hate from the press and through the mail. In the midst of this, his father died, his son became seriously ill, and his then-wife Maria Bernoulli (of the mathematical Bernoullis) was suffering from schizophrenia. Hesse had a breakdown, and began receiving psychoanalytic therapy from J B Lang, a doctor on Jung’s staff. Although later he was not uncritical of psychoanalysis (particularly when it was applied to literature), Hesse remained a friend of Lang’s, who treated him again whilst Hesse was writing Steppenwolf, and Hesse even returned the favour, seeing Lang through a crisis of his own. Hesse also became friends with Jung, and Jung’s ideas are an obvious influence on Hesse’s novels from this point on, though most markedly in Demian, which Colin Wilson, in The Outsider, identifies as the first of Hesse’s “major novels”. When it first came out, Demian was presented as the memoir of its protagonist, Emil Sinclair. It was only when it was in its ninth edition, the following year, having become a hit with young men coming back from the front wondering what the fighting had all been for, that the book was published under Hesse’s own name. (I can’t help wondering if any of its earlier readers might have felt a little betrayed on learning it was fiction, not autobiography.)

The story follows the development of its narrator, Emil Sinclair, from the age of ten to eighteen. At the start of the novel, although he lives in a comfortable, well-off and loving family, he’s aware that outside the warmth and light of his home there’s a world of darkness, chaos, crime, “servant girls and workmen, ghost stories and scandalous rumours, a gay tide of monstrous, intriguing, frightful, mysterious things”. He has his first brush with this world when an older boy blackmails him into stealing money from his parents. Sinclair is saved by another older boy, Max Demian, who seems much more mature than any of the other boys in the school, and more knowledgeable than many of the teachers.

Walking home together after a lesson on the story of Cain and Abel, Demian introduces Sinclair to an alternative interpretation: Cain was feared before he did anything wicked, and the story of his murdering his brother may be a later addition, provided as a justification for the fear people felt of this man who bore a special “mark” on his face, that set him apart from his fellows. Sharing this with his father, Sinclair is warned against such heretical thinking. For a while, Sinclair avoids Demian, and retreats once more into the familial “world of light”, though it feels, more and more, a lie.

This knowledge of the darkness in the world — and within himself — continues to work on Sinclair throughout his education, leading him to, at one point, become nothing but a drinking wastrel among the worst of his fellow students. But the influence of Max Demian continues to be felt, even when the boy himself is not there, and Sinclair pulls himself through, becoming, after that low point, a much more serious-minded solitary student, pursuing his own path to self-knowledge through dreams and painting, through which he tries to realise certain symbolic images that keep recurring to him — first the face of a young woman he idolises from a distance, then an image of a bird emerging from an egg which Max Demian pointed out on a faded, worn-down coat of arms above the doorway to Sinclair’s family home. When this bird image is finished, Sinclair sends it to Demian, even though he’s not sure Demian is still at his old address. He receives, by way of an answer, a slip of paper in his school book, reading:

“The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must first destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The name of the God is called Abraxas.”

Abraxas is a name tied to Gnosticism, and may be related to the word “Abracadabra”. (It may also be a mis-transcription of the far less impressive-sounding “Abrasax”.) Hesse, though, may have encountered it in a privately printed little volume called Seven Sermons to the Dead, which was the only portion of what is now known as The Red Book: Liber Novus that Jung published during his lifetime. (A translation of Seven Sermons, by Stephan A Hoeller, can be read online, at Gnosis.org.)

In these “sermons”, which condense Jung’s explorations of the deepest aspects of the unconscious, Abraxas is presented as a forgotten deity who combines and transcends good and evil, and seems a presiding deity of the unconscious:

“He is the unlikely likely one, who is powerful in the realm of unreality… he is undefinable life itself, which is the mother of good and evil alike… Abraxas, however, speaks the venerable and also accursed word, which is life and death at once… Abraxas generates truth and falsehood, good and evil, light and darkness with the same word in the same deed. Therefore Abraxas is truly the terrible one.”

As Sinclair is trying to find a way to contain both the light and darkness within himself, he wants to know more about this mysterious god. He meets a musician, Pistorius, who seems to want to be a priest of a new religion bringing Abraxas back into worship. At first, I thought Pistorius might have been Hesse’s characterisation of Jung, but several sources I’ve read say it’s a portrait of Hesse’s analyst, Lang. This part must have been written when Hesse was coming to the end of (or after) his analysis and was getting impatient with what he perceived as its limitations. Of Pistorius, he says:

“He had wanted to be a priest, to announce the new religion… But it was beyond his power to do so… He lingered too much in the past, his knowledge of ancient days was too precise; he knew far too much about Egypt, India, Mithras and Abraxas… the New must be really new and different and must spring up from new soil and not be created from museums and libraries.”

Hesse’s novel is all about finding “the New”, and how to be a human being in a world where many people:

“…are all conscious of the fact that the laws of life they have inherited are no longer valid, that they are living according to archaic tablets of the law, that neither their religion nor customs are adapted to our present-day needs.”

This is not the nineteenth-century world in which each person’s destiny is clear — for the young Sinclair, for instance, “my destiny in life was to become like my father and mother; pure, righteous and disciplined” — but a new world, with no established guide as to how to live. Hesse, through Sinclair, puts forward the idea that each human being “is a valuable, unique experiment”, “each one… an attempt on the part of nature to create a human being.”

As Sinclair says:

“I was… a ‘throw’ into the unknown, perhaps for some new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only vocation was to allow this ‘throw’ to work itself out in my innermost being, feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!”

And doing so, uniting in himself the dark and light worlds into one, whole, new world, may mean destroying the old one, but Hesse, in 1917, already knew such a destruction was on the cards, and the novel ends with Sinclair taking part in the First World War.

Throughout this latest read of Demian, I found myself at times reminded of another writer I hadn’t previously associated with Hesse, Gustav Meyrink (whose Angel of the West Window I reviewed last year). Demian treads the line between a psychologically-minded Bildungsroman and a novel of occult initiation full of strange, perhaps-visionary incidents. Max Demian, for instance, proves to have mental powers that enable him to make teachers ignore him when he doesn’t want to take part in a class, and even to will people to do certain things, if he thinks strongly enough. But the most Meyrink-ian aspects are where Sinclair’s involvement with his visionary inner world spills into the outer world: is Max Demian a person at all, or is he an aspect of Sinclair, an exteriorisation of his Jungian, realised Self?

Demian’s ending has always disappointed me, because its resolution is almost entirely visionary, or symbolic. (Colin Wilson says it “ends with a whirl of Shelleyan airy-fairy…”) It seems to me that novels based on beliefs such as Hesse was presenting, about the ultimate path of human destiny rather than being based on actual experience, run a real risk of ending in unconvincing wish-fulfilment, or petering out trying to avoid it. Demian does the latter, but not before presenting a very compelling picture of the dilemma of how to live in a world where there’s no clear, God-made plan for each and every man and woman. Hesse does provide something of an answer (“There was but one duty for a grown man; it was to seek the way to himself…”); it’s just finding a way to depict the culmination of that “way to himself” (which is surely never-ending). Still, Demian is my second-favourite Hesse novel (after Steppenwolf), and worth reading.

I first heard of Axël by Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (to give him his full title) when its most famous line was quoted by Colin Wilson in The Outsider. Towards the end of the play, its young hero, Count Axël of Auersperg, having declared his love for the heroine Sara, realises that, from this point on, life can only be an anticlimax. Sara has just suggested a good two pages’ worth of places they might go, wonders they might see, raptures they might endure, but he replies:

“As for living? our servants will do that for us.”

And so the pair share a cup of poison — a “magnificent gem-encrusted cup”, that is, because at this point Axël and Sara are virtually swimming in a recently-uncovered stash of gold, silver, gems and jewellery — and the play ends with their deaths.

At one time I was determined, having read Wilson’s Outsider a couple of times, to go through all the books he mentioned in it, reading them, too. (I recently compiled a list of the works he mentions, and put it up on my site.) I’m now pretty sure I’ve no interest in reading every book Wilson alludes to, but Axël somehow remained one I wanted to try. It’s difficult to get hold of, despite being translated into English twice (by H P R Finberg in 1925, and Marilyn Gaddis Rose in 1970); Wilson himself might have only known it through Edmund (no relation) Wilson’s summary in the final chapter of his 1931 critical study of “imaginative literature”, Axel’s Castle (and by “imaginative literature” he meant mostly the French Symbolist poets — Edmund Wilson seems to have hated fantasy, famously denouncing both Lovecraft and Tolkien). But, finally, I tracked down a paperback copy of Gaddis Rose’s translation, published in 1986 by the Soho Book Company, in a suitably French-decadent yellow cover.

The play opens with Sara, an orphan consigned to a nunnery, just about to take her final vows. It’s a rich ceremony, and one the church has much interest in, Sara being quite wealthy. Sara herself says nothing while she’s presented at the altar and lectured (at length) by the Archdeacon, who, finally, asks if she will “accept Light, Hope and Life” in devoting herself fully to God. With one word — her first, and it’s a “No” — it’s as though the very church comes crashing down around her. Nuns run for cover, the abbess starts shrieking and the Archdeacon — inevitably — delivers another lecture. Then Sara throws a handy axe through a window and makes her getaway.

The second act shifts to a castle in remote Auersperg in Germany, in whose dark, endless forests the young Count Axël spends his days in hunting and his nights receiving instruction from the mysterious Master Janus. A visitor, Commander Kaspar, hears a legend about the young Count’s father. When Germany was threatened by Napoleon, an enormous portion of the country’s wealth was given to a select group of military men to hide in some remote spot, in case Napoleon should win through and claim it for spoils. The old Count hid it in his lands, then was killed (in a plot by several of his countrymen who wanted the treasure for themselves). Only his wife knew where the treasure was, and she died soon after. When the Commander confronts Axël with this story, the young Count, who up to this point has been entirely civil towards his guest, takes instant offence and calls for duelling swords. There then follows a very, very long portion in which Axël defends his unwillingness to either look for the treasure himself or let anyone else do so. (The translator, in her foreword, says that Axël has “perhaps the most tedious second act in modern drama”, and it’s this long justification scene she’s talking about. Yeats, who initially enthused about the play during its first performance, later recommended that, should it ever be brought to Britain, its second and third acts should be reduced in length “enormously”.) Axël, contemptuous in every way of the complacency, materialism and worldliness Commander Kaspar represents, kills him in the ensuing duel, then, disgusted with himself, goes to see Master Janus.

Master Janus is an occultist — “I do not instruct; I awaken” — and he tries to pull Axël out of his despondency by declaring his pupil’s disgust with both himself and worldly life in general to be only an indication that:

“…you are ripe for the supreme Test. The vapour of the blood shed for the Gold has just diminished your essence. The fatal effluvia envelop you, penetrating your heart—and, under their pestilential influence, you have become a child again, stammering mere words. Heir to the instincts of the man you killed, you live through the old thirst of voluptuousness, power, and pride, inhaled and reabsorbed into your organism, lighting up the reddest blood in your veins. O redescended from the sacred thresholds, the former mortal is going to come back to life in the disavowing eyes of the guilty Initiate! The Hour has come…”

And so on. Janus has an answer for everything — a long answer, in technical occult jargon — but it always seems to boil down to the same thing. Whatever Axël says, however much he disavows or rejects, it’s “Then at last you are truly ready to begin,” as though everything up to now has been a mere preparation. And, as the act continues, you get the impression that this is how it will always be with Master Janus — always a beginning, always a promise of some great transformation to come, but never the fulfilment. Finally seeing this, Axël bursts out with:

“I want life! Not more knowledge!”

And he banishes Janus. (Who, as he leaves, mutters, still self-justifying: “…the Work nears fulfilment.”)

In the final act, Sara comes to the castle. She, it turns out, knows where the rumoured treasure is hidden. At night, she creeps down to the crypt and presses a certain death’s-head decoration, opening a secret vault overflowing with coins and gems (“a scintillating torrent of gems, a rustling rain of diamonds”). But she’s unaware that Axël is hiding in the crypt, having come down there to end his life. After a brief misunderstanding (Sara, armed with two pistols, shoots Axël, wounding but not killing him), the two fall instantly, passionately in love. Sara gives her speech about all the things they could do; Axël gives his:

“If we accepted life now, we should commit a sacrilege against ourselves. As for living? our servants will do that for us.”

And so the play ends, with the self-slain Axël and Sara a Romeo and Juliet caught, not between Montagues and Capulets, but Idealism and Reality.

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam worked on Axël for almost twenty years. Despite his title, he was not rich. Significantly — considering the buried-treasure plot in this play — his father wasted the last of the family wealth buying up estates, often at inflated prices, convinced they’d contain buried treasure. At the age of seventeen, Villiers went to Paris, to pursue a similarly fruitless task, though the treasures he sought to unearth were of the imagination. He became a poet and, once the wealthy aunt who supported him died in 1871, spent most of the rest of his life in poverty. (He died in 1889.) During the time he worked on Axël (as well as other works — his Contes Cruels are his most-read work), he passed from Catholicism to Occultism and back to Catholicism again, a movement tracked by the play’s many renunciations: of Catholicism, materialism, Occultism, then life itself. He did achieve some success towards the end of the 19th century, as poetic and artistic Symbolism came into fashion, but by this time his health was failing. On his death-bed, he planned a legal case against God for taking away his life before he could finish his work.

Axël is a play more to be read than performed. (When it was performed, it was about five hours in length. Some of the speeches are very static and go on for pages.) It might have looked fabulous had it been set-designed by Gustave Moreau — certainly the ending would have, with Sara bathed in jewels like one of Moreau’s Salomés — and perhaps could have been twinned, in a buttock-numbing double bill, with Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, another archetypal Symbolist drama.

Its series of renunciations (the acts are titled “The Religious World”, “The Tragic World”, “The Occult World”, “The Passional World”, after what each rejects) remind me of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, which certainly has Symbolist affinities. But Axël ends merely in death, a final renunciation, whereas Lindsay’s work turns its last, all-encompassing world-rejection into its protagonist’s transformation and a return, with renewed purpose, to the world he’d rejected.

Another comparison is the 1970 film Performance, if Count Axël were (as his umlaut suggests him to be) a heavy metal singer in retreat, self-cosseted and no longer able to create, and with Sara in the James Fox role, only not a gangster on the lam but a nun on the run. But, again, Performance hints at some sort of transformation beyond its concluding deaths, whereas Axël doesn’t.

Axël lacks that final vitality. At times, its rejections feel like a list of its writer’s resentments and self-justifications rather than a genuine stand for truth. In her foreword, Marilyn Gaddis Rose calls it “the epitome of Symbolist drama”, and it does, at its best, feel like a Moreau painting — scintillatingly bejewelled and Romantically doomed — but, as with Moreau, the figures are too stiff to feel like real human beings, and the whole thing is ultimately too static to work as drama. It’s one of those works, I think, it’s perhaps better to know about than to read, and maybe it’s better — as with Axël and Sara’s love — as a single line and a hint of what might have been:

“As for living? our servants will do that for us.”