A couple of years ago, I decided to write up the research I’d gathered about the life of David Lindsay, the author of A Voyage to Arcturus, into what I assumed would be a short booklet, an expanded version of the biographical essay I’d had on my website about Lindsay, The Violet Apple.org, for several years. This was basically because the main research resources I had at my disposal—family history records, newspaper archives, and so on—weren’t providing much in the way of new information, and I wanted to put a line under my biographical research and move onto something else. The result, though, was a modest book rather than a short booklet—60,000 words or so, plus footnotes, index, etc.—which I’ve finally got to the point of being able to publish, as I Dream With Open Eyes: The Life of David Lindsay, Author of A Voyage to Arcturus.

It was my brother’s extensive family history research that started me off. Demonstrating the sort of records you could find, he showed me the 1881 census record that included a five-year-old David Lindsay, living with his family (and one domestic servant), in Lewisham. Even though it was just a set of tabulated data, it felt like I was getting a time-travelling glimpse of the family, lifting the roof off their house and seeing them inside. At the time, due to a few errors in other books on Lindsay, there was a little ambiguity about his actual birth year and place (England, or Scotland?, 1876 or 1878?), so, when I ordered a copy of his birth certificate soon after, it felt good to be able to put on my website a definite date and place (3rd March 1876, in Blackheath, England) for his birth. After that, I started getting into doing my own research in online family history archives (with plenty of help from my brother, alerting me to other types of records, such as the Army Pension Record), the British Newspaper Archive, and so on.

David Lindsay in the 1881 census

My first aim on the BNA was to affix a definite date for the disappearance of David Lindsay’s father, Alexander, who walked out on the family without telling them (going to Canada, it turned out), with the result that for a while they weren’t sure what happened to him. When I found a newspaper notice relating to his disappearance, it was one of those rare events where the result gives much more information than you’re expecting (and also raises more questions). It came on about the thirtieth page of search results, after looking at every reference to “Lindsay” in their local paper, the Kentish Mercury. The odd thing is, once I found it, I found it in a load of other places, too, as the notice was reprinted throughout the country:

The Kentish Mercury, 4th May 1888

But this also points to a limitation of public research archives. There’s no way to know why this man disappeared (or even to be sure he went to Canada—he doesn’t seem to be listed on the available census records, but of course may have been using a different name).

Unlike H P Lovecraft, Lindsay didn’t write many letters, and didn’t reveal much about himself in the ones that have been published. There’s an awful lot that just will never be known about him. In a review of a previous book about Lindsay, Bernard Sellin’s Life & Works of David Lindsay (in which the life part is only one chapter), Gary K Wolfe noted that while “Readers of A Voyage to Arcturus are almost inevitably intrigued by the kind of man who could have produced such a strange book”, Sellin’s Life & Works doesn’t “do much to put our curiosity to rest… [or] substantially explain his fiction”. I don’t think anything’s going to come along to explain Lindsay’s fiction from a biographical perspective—the fiction has to be taken as an expression of his intense inner life, and all the evidence that we’re going to have of it—so I Dream With Open Eyes is basically an attempt to tie as many facts and figures to the man as I can, with no promise to “explain” the fiction. (Okay, I do make a few comments, but I really want to write something separate, and at length, on Lindsay’s fiction some day.) Perhaps someone with more resources can take things further. If so, I hope they’ll find the research I’ve done helpful.

That said, who knows what will turn up? Shortly after finishing the manuscript and preparing it for publication, Mark Valentine published a piece that revealed Lindsay had, in fact, written at least two novels before A Voyage to Arcturus, and attempted to place them with a publisher. (This came, ironically, a couple of weeks after R B Russell opened a post on the Tartarus Press blog—having recently published a biography of T Lobsang Rampa—with: “It is inevitable that the publication of a biography prompts new material to appear.”)

I Dream With Open Eyes strays a little bit from being merely a biography of David Lindsay. I take a good look at the reviews his books received in his lifetime (and I think these go to prove not that he was misunderstood in his day and we get him better now, but that he was always misunderstood, and sometimes hated, but he also always had people who liked what he did—he’s very much a Marmite kind of writer—and this is as true today as it was in 1920). I also devote a chapter to Lindsay’s brother Alexander, and a long chapter to the afterlife of Lindsay’s works in the century following his death. In that sense, this is as much a biography of Lindsay’s works as it is of the man himself.

I Dream With Open Eyes is available now as a hardback. I’ve also uploaded it to Archive.org, where it can be read online or referred to for free. I’ll probably follow it with paperback and ebook versions at some point.