Vera Dwyer

In 1934, the Australian writer Vera Dwyer visited England after her latest novel, In Pursuit of Patrick (1933), had been republished here by John Lane. She wrote a series of articles detailing her literary encounters during the trip (mostly with long-forgotten names such as Hamilton Fyfe and Rose Fyleman, but also JB Priestley and Richmal Crompton), the third of which included a visit to EH Visiak. Not really an interview so much as a brief sketch, it nevertheless gives a little glimpse into the sort of person Visiak was.

Dwyer was the daughter of journalist George Lovell Dwyer, and had been born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1889. She’d married in 1915 a bare few weeks before her husband was sent to fight in the First World War, but the couple divorced in 1925. Her writing career began with a story published at the age of 9, and continued with a children’s book, With Beating Wings (1913), written in her teens. Her adult novel In Pursuit of Patrick is described in a review by The Australian Worker as “a brightly-written book about a Bright Young Thing who chases a Bright Young Man through 200 pages, and over thousands of miles of land and sea”. She died in 1967.

Visiak would have been 55 or 56 at the time, and, from my attempts to work out where he lived throughout his life, seems to have moved this year, some time between March and June, from 30 Cavendish Road in Brondesbury (where he’d lived since at least 1911, and where he’d run his Ascham House preparatory school for boys) to 38 Rutland Park Mansions in Willesden (which suits the description of “a tall, narrow house” in the article, and is close to a railway line). The other writer mentioned as attending this soirée, whom Dwyer calls Visello, must be Arthur Vesselo (1911–2000), who collaborated with Visiak on the story “I Am a Murderer”, which appeared in Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries in 1935, and whose output, according to the FictionMags Index, seems to have been confined to a year either side of this article. He later became a film critic, writing for Sight and Sound, before becoming head of the Central Film Library in London (now absorbed into the BFI).

Dwyer’s article was titled “Meeting the Authors”, and appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald Women’s Supplement, on 20 November 1934:

While I was journeying from Australia to England, a girl who had joined the ship at Port Said, and at whose parents’ home in London I was later to enjoy much pleasant hospitality, gave me an autographed copy of a book entitled “Milton Agonistes—A Metaphysical Criticism,” by E. H. Visiak. It was not very hopefully that I set out to read this highly analytical work, for I am not a Milton scholar, and I feared that many of its allusions would be lost upon me, but I soon discovered that there was so much beauty of thought and phrasing, such a luminous quality in Visiak’s prose, that I was able to enjoy it deeply for its own sake.

In the days that followed I read some of his verses, of which John Masefield himself has expressed admiration. Indeed, although this writer’s work is not much known in Australia, and has no wide popular appeal in his own country, it is held in high esteem by many of his fellow-authors, and when, shortly before I left England, Mr. Visiak gave an afternoon’s reading of his poems at a public hall in London, it was attended by some of the most famous literary men in the land, including Walter de la Mare.

He has written some fine sea chanties and poems about ships. He is not a traveller, but the romance of the sea is in his Cornish blood, and has inspired him to write several novels, too, among them “The Haunted Island” and “Medusa,” a piratical tale, with elements of mysticism and horror, published by Gollancz.

All I heard of his unusual personality interested me, and I was pleased, some weeks after my arrival in London, to receive an invitation to Sunday evening supper at Mr. Visiak’s home, in company with my ship-board friend.

Our host proved to be a tall, thin, worn-looking man, who lived with his mother in a tall, narrow house which, though not handsomely furnished, was stored with unusual treasures, like the mind of its occupant. He showed me his collection of Milton portraits, his books, his models of ships, a pewter jug which Charles Dickens had given to his grandfather, and many curious old prints and engravings.

After supper we sat in the unlighted study, while the summer dust gathered slowly, until the room was filled with gloom, illuminated at intervals by lights flashing through the windows from trains passing along an overheard bridge in the near distance, while a stimulating discussion took place on the problem of good and evil, in which another of the guests, a short-story writer named Visello, took an active part. There were some fine threads of argument to follow, spun from Mr. Visiak’s deep delving among ancient and forgotten books.

I have seldom felt farther away from the modern world, with its often cheap and crude sophistication, its artificiality and blatant commercialism, than in that dim London sitting-room, with the busy traffic flashing and rumbling by outside.

For a second, more amusing, glimpse of Visiak the literary man, there’s this from The Biggleswade Chronicle, 9th April 1937:

Sir Arnold Wilson, MP for Hitchin, and Mr E H Visiak, the novelist, were involved in a misunderstanding at the centenary celebrations of Swinburne’s birth, on Monday night. Mr Visiak was proposing a vote of thanks to earlier speakers, and was speaking on the merits of Swinburne, when Sir Arnold, who was chairman, interjected: “You are here to move a vote of thanks, not to go on eulogising Swinburne.” Sir Arnold said afterwards, “I was chairman of the meeting, when he had spoken for some time on Swinburne, which was not the purpose of his speech. I used my authority as chairman and told him that he was moving a vote of thanks. Mr Visiak misunderstood my motive, and I think he must have forgotten that I was chairman. I meant no discourtesy to the speaker.”

A sequel of sorts is to be found (oddly, three days earlier) in the Manchester Evening News:

Having slept on the matter, Mr E H Visiak the writer whose speech at the Poetry Society’s Swinburne centenary celebrations was interrupted by Sir Arnold Wilson, MP, feels that no apology from Sir Arnold is called for.

“It is true that Sir Arnold used the words, ‘You’re here to move a vote of thanks to me, not to go on eulogising Swinburne,’” Mr. Visiak told me to-day. “I am content to treat that as a jocular but justified reminder that I had gone on talking a bit too long.

“Sir Arnold is a great personal friend of mine, and I am sure that he did not mean to be offensive.”