books, page 1 of 136

In Robert Altman’s 1972 film Images, Susannah York plays a woman whose life is invaded by a series of ghosts/doubles/hallucinations when she spends time alone at a remote house in Ireland. It starts with a mysterious phone call, where an unknown person implies her husband is having an affair—but the voice on the other end of the phone is her own. A man with whom she’d had an affair years ago suddenly appears, but he died three years ago. Going for a walk and looking back from across a lake, she sees herself entering the house. The filmmakers start playing games: the daughter, Susannah, of her husband’s friend is played by Cathryn Harrison, while Susannah York is playing a woman called Cathryn. In one scene, the two—with their identical long blonde hair—sit together to complete a jigsaw puzzle, Cathryn with her left hand on the left, Susannah with her right hand on the right. It all has echoes of Bergman’s Persona (1966), and more than a touch of Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). But does it all mean something, or are the filmmakers just providing a series of shocks, playing with significances? Well, you won’t find the answer to that question here. I’m going to look at another aspect of the film.

In it, York plays a writer, and we occasionally hear, by way of an inner monologue, passages from the children’s fantasy she’s working on. (Early in the film, we see books in her study open at pages showing works by Edmund Dulac and John Bauer.) The credits say that “In Search of Unicorns” is a book for children by Susannah York, though if you were intrigued by the whimsical, incantatory language of the snippets heard in the film, you wouldn’t have been able to go out and buy it, not immediately anyway. In Search of Unicorns didn’t come out till the following year, and by that point it had changed.

In an interview around the time of its publication, York said that Unicorns is “not just aimed at children, but adults too”, but it’s pretty clearly for children. (The book is not long, is large-format, and every page is illustrated in a sometimes naïve style.) The story starts with Hero, the Lord of Umbany (though Umbany’s lords only hold the post for a year at a time), setting out for a walk, intent on avoiding his lordly responsibilities. He meets Una, a “ladychild”, who seems to have just appeared out of nowhere—she doesn’t know where she came from or, at first, her own name. Hero takes her home. A hunter and poet, he’s also a painter, and when Una sees a mural on his wall depicting a unicorn, she’s suddenly struck by a passionate need to see such a creature. Meanwhile Obnokshuss, the Devil of Umbany, has his eye on her—or, more specifically, on her pink new soul. He likes to capture souls, keeping them in cages till they turn from pink to grey to black, whereupon they’re so lost to goodness that he can use them in an army he intends to unleash on the land of Umbany. But there are seven conditions which, if met, will free all his captured souls, and Una’s appearance is one of them. The final one is her finding her much-desired unicorn. He has, then, a double reason to capture her.

The setting is part stone age, part land of fairy tales. A statement near the beginning (“Now Ums, as you probably know, are very small people”) sounds Hobbitish, but in one promotional interview, York says she’d not read Tolkien. (And the rest of the story doesn’t feel anything like The Hobbit, let alone The Lord of the Rings.) In fact, one of the book’s plus points—and what drew me to reading it—is its air of naivety, a fantasy written by someone who seemingly hasn’t read any (but who has, no doubt thanks to acting in Shakespeare, a love of language, and a stock of archaisms to draw on).

It’s a simple tale, its ultimate meaning given by York in an interview:

“I believe all of us are engaged in a search for our own kind of unicorn, big or small, one or more, tangible or intangible… Your unicorn can only be yours when it is given its freedom and it chooses to come back to you.”

(Which can’t help reminding me of The Three Amigos: “In a way, all of us have an El Guapo to face someday. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For us, El Guapo is a big dangerous guy who wants to kill us.”)

The 1974 edition of In Search of Unicorns was illustrated by Wendy Hall (who said York had very clear ideas on how the characters should look, as many of them were based on her friends and family). It was later revised and re-illustrated by Pat Ludlow in 1984, and I suspect one of the reasons (though I haven’t seen it) for the new illustrations would be that Una spends most of the first half of the book entirely naked (perhaps inspired by that John Bauer image), and that might have been changed as the hippie-ness of child nudity became less acceptable. (I also wonder if one of the revisions might have been to get rid of the line: “Hero was rather partial to ladychildren, especially if they looked small and fragile”.)

The text of even that 1974 edition, though, isn’t the text from the film—which was a bit disappointing, as it was the playfulness of the language that drew me to it, and that seems to have been partially, but not wholly, lost. Here, for instance, is the opening as narrated in Images:

All in a night, spring came, rushing from beyond the ends of the earth and spilling out all over Umberny, its sack full of colours, and buds and birds’ eggs, snails and tadpoles, rainbows and newborn animals. Bees hummed, mammoths gambolled, meadows rang with the plighting of troths, and deep in his ancestral cave Hero Fairbeard Frisky, Lord of all Ums, snored and grunted, stirred and groaned, and got out of bed to look outside. “Fiddle-fuddle, Umb! A thousand spitting curses!”

In the book, though it starts more directly and still has a little of that verbal playfulness, it feels as though it’s lost the far-away, wistful fantasy tone somewhat:

“Fiddle, fuddle, bother; if I haven’t woken in the deepest of Umish Glooms, my name’s not Hero Frisky!” To hear the Lord of Umbany, you’d never have thought it was the first day of spring. Out he had rushed of Frisky Hall at dawn—down through Upper Um, over the bridge, and out to the open road. All about him in the hedgerows snails scuttled, and little blue eggs fell plop! into nests; bluebells and pollywots waved from banks and far away in the Forest (where Hero was heading), baby mammoths gambolled and trumpeted.

Perhaps it’s significant that the narrative has picked up a “you”—a sign it’s being self-consciously adjusted for a child audience. (And surely snails don’t “scuttle”.) One of the things, I can’t help thinking, that added to its effect in the film is that Cathryn is telling this story to herself, in her own head, so it’s not being acted out or told to a child. This gives it a wistful, musing tone, somewhat like Oliver Postgate’s narrations to Bagpuss or The Clangers.

As another example, from when Una sees Hero’s mural of a unicorn. The film has:

Una stared at the carved, curving creature, delicate, questing, perfect, with arched neck and a single slender horn.

The book has much of the same language, but sounds like the result of a writer doubting their reader, and losing something in the process of making it all clearer:

A creature—a carved, curving creature, like none of the others—was leaping out of the rock at her, delicate, questing. . . perfect!

Interviewed at the time of its publication, York said “I worked on it intermittently for three years. In the end I re-wrote it three times.” And: “The main problem was simply getting carried away by the sound of the words, and having to cut severely to get the story moving.” As it’s for children, getting the story moving was probably a wise move, but for me, I’d have loved to read more of what I was hearing in the film, which was clearly driven by “the sound of the words”—something that has worked for children’s fantasy since Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

York read the book on Jackanory in April 1974, and it was later staged as Searching for Dreams in 1990. She went on to write one more book for children, Lark’s Castle, published in 1976: “A stone with magical properties helps a wooden doll and other captive toys outwit a cantankerous witch.” The first edition seems to have a naked man running after an animated doll on the cover…!

Olaf Stapledon’s second novel, published in 1932, is not so much a sequel to Last and First Men (1930) as a sort of pendant to it (as his next novel, Odd John, started out as an appendix to this one). Like that first book, it’s dictated by a Neptunian from the far-future final race of humankind, who have developed the ability to project their consciousnesses into minds of the distant past, and not just witness events, but influence them to a certain extent, too. (Stapledon gets over the difficulty of the future being able to influence the past with a little handwaving: “Thus when I am observing your mental processes, my activity of observing is, in one sense, located in the past.” Or, for a little more detail: “though future events have indeed no temporal being until their predecessors have ceased to exist with temporal being, all events have also eternal being. This does not mean that time is unreal, but that evanescence is not the whole truth about the passing of events.”)

Instead of the vast, thousands-of-millions-of-years sweep of Last and First Men, Last Men in London concentrates on one comparatively tiny sliver of time, but one that is nevertheless “a crucial incident in the long-drawn-out spiritual drama of your species”: the First World War and its immediate aftermath. And the Neptunian chooses to approach this period through the consciousness of one individual, a relatively ordinary man called Paul. His intent is to present a deeper understanding of the causes of what was then known as the Great War, but also, by introducing Paul to glimpses of the more cosmic worldview of the Eighteenth Race of humankind, to see how this affects a man of our age. “It is my task,” he says, “to tell you of your own race as it appears through the eyes of the far future…”

After the immensely compressed tale of multiple human species in his first novel, focusing on a single individual might make it sound as though Last Men in London would read like a more straightforward narrative. In fact, it’s even less of a traditional novel (in terms of character, plot, and so on) than Last and First Men. After an initial chapter which details life on far future Neptune, we get a brief glimpse of Paul as he hesitates before an army recruitment centre in London, wavering between social pressure to join up and his more deeply held belief in pacifism. But this is one of the few conventional scenes in a book that has only about three or four named characters, and almost no scenes with dialogue, action, and so on. Following the introduction of Paul, the narrator digresses for two long chapters on the causes of the Great War (whose roots are not in the messiness of Imperial European politics as you might think, but in the very nature of our simian ancestry), before returning to Paul and his personal experiences in the war, and then onto his life in the years that followed.

This is only partly a criticism—you come to Stapledon for ideas, not realism—but I have to say I still find Stapledon at his most readable when he’s following a narrative, whether it be of the human race as a whole as in Last and First Men, or the life of an intelligent dog in Sirius. (To be fair, Stapledon declares early on: “Though this is a work of fiction, it does not pretend to be a novel. It has no hero but Man.”) Here, he has his exposition dials turned up to eleven—which isn’t a criticism as such, but I have to say I did find these sections, though interesting, a bit of a slog.

But Last Men in London could also be a kind of autobiographical novel. Like Paul, Stapledon refused the call-up into the army, but elected to serve in the Friends Ambulance Unit as an expression of his pacifism—and, like Paul, he won the Croix de Guerre, and was intensely aware of the irony of a pacifist winning a war medal. Also like Paul he spent time as a teacher. All this leads me to suspect you can probably read Paul’s education in a wider worldview as Stapledon’s own philosophical awakening, with the Neptunian narrator/educator a sort of fictional stand-in for Stapledon’s inner, guiding, slightly alienated deepest self. (It might even be better to read this novel as Stapledon’s attempt to write about the causes of the First World War being derailed by an inner need to tell the story of his own philosophical development.)

As to the causes of the Great War, from the Neptunian perspective it comes down to humankind’s “practical intelligence” getting ahead of its deeper self-understanding, plus a tendency in the First Men (as the Neptunians call us) towards “the importance of personal triumph over others in the great game of life”—the tendency to value heroic individuals over humankind itself, with a corresponding belief in nations as a sort of communal hero-self, with one nation necessarily triumphing over others being the accepted state of things. From the Neptunian point of view, the Great War was on the cards from the moment we came down from the trees (we have “a will that is still in essence simian, though equipped with dangerous powers”), but awaited the technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century for its fruition:

“…your ‘modern’ world came too soon. In the century before the war it developed with increasing acceleration. You had neither the intelligence nor the moral integrity to cope with your brave new world.”

More interesting from a present day perspective, perhaps, is Stapledon’s insight into the mood during and after the Great War. There was, he says, a “suspicion in all the combatants that human nature had failed”, its ultimate effect being to “undermine man’s confidence in his own nature”. He goes on, in perhaps his most passionate and forthrightly critical section of the book, to detail how various sectors of society—politicians, religious leaders, teachers, artists and writers, common people—contributed to the war by turning a blind eye or justifying it to themselves. Perhaps the most useful passage to read today, as it still has such relevance, is this:

“Many people seemed to Paul to unearth a new self to cope with [the war], a simpler, less doubting, more emotional self, a self that concealed under righteous indignation a terrible glee in the breakdown of old taboos.”

Post-war, Stapledon describes the mood as one of:

“…a deep and deadly self-disgust, a numbing and unacknowledged shame, a sense of huge opportunities missed, of a unique trust betrayed, and therewith a vast resentment against earlier generations, against human nature, against fate, against the universe.”

Though Paul, in moments of particularly Stapledonian insight, still finds himself thinking:

“How can things be so wrong, so meaningless, so filthy; and yet also so right, so overwhelmingly significant, so exquisite?”

Which is perhaps one of the things that led John Kinniard to write, in Starmont Reader’s Guide 21: Olaf Stapledon, that “Stapledon’s philosophy is best approached as a challenge and a corrective to the disillusionment that became the dominant attitude of the Nineteen-twenties.”

So, what is Stapledon’s answer to all of this? It can be summed up in ideas that were already present in Last and First Men: “loyalty to man and worship of fate”. Or, as the Neptunian narrator puts it in a way that perfectly sums up Stapledon’s mix of the acceptance of cosmic doom with a defiantly joyous optimism:

“The story of your species is indeed a tragic story, for it closes with desolation. Your part in that story is both to strive and to fail in a unique opportunity, and so to set the current of history toward disaster. But think not therefore that your species has occurred in vain, or that your own individual lives are futile. Whatever any of you has achieved of good is an excellence in itself and a bright thread woven into the texture of the cosmos. In spite of your failure it shall be said of you, had they not striven as they did, the Whole would have been less fair.”

Does this help us at all, though, in the prevention of future wars? Stapledon’s notion of “loyalty to man and worship of fate” is a little too vague to be practically useful (unless one were to be faced with a catastrophe that really did threaten the species as a whole like, say, an increasingly unstable climate). Who is to say what best serves “man” or what should be regarded as “fate”? Elsewhere, Stapledon criticises the pursuit of happiness for this very reason:

“For if happiness alone is the goal, one man’s happiness is as good as another’s, and no one will feel obligation to make the supreme sacrifice. But if the true goal is of another order, those who recognise it may gladly die for it.”

Reviews at the time, though fewer than for Stapledon’s first novel, were mostly positive: “one of the most impressive things I have read” (The Birmingham Weekly Mercury), “engrossing and equally stimulating to the imagination and the reflective capacity” (The Aberdeen Press and Journal), “approached seriously, it will be found a rich, stimulating book” (The Daily News). Hugh I’Anson Fausset, in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, though, offered up a criticism of the Neptunian narrator:

“He may personify ‘the mature individual who has wholly escaped the snares of private egoism,’ and whose will is for the racial good, but only by ceasing to be a person with a real unity of being and a spiritual centre.”

Around the same time, Fausset reviewed (positively) David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor, a novel which has a few similarities with Last Men in London: both are books in which events and characters are manipulated by science-fictional beings (one from the future, one from space); both touch on the early evolution of humanity and talk of a coming, better race; both make use of sometimes quite intense examination of characters’ inner motives; and both ultimately move towards the metaphor of music made up of many individual instruments as a way of apprehending the cosmic story (and Stapledon’s declaration that “There is no music without the torture of the strings” might have interested Lindsay).

John Wyndham’s Chocky (1963) is a much more readable take on the theme of the alien/futuristic visitor inside one’s own head. I’m sure Wyndham must have read at least some of Stapledon’s works, and wouldn’t be surprised if he’d read them all. Whether he remembered it while writing Chocky is debatable, but there’s a hint of Stapledon’s cosmic vision in Chocky’s parting statement about intelligent life being “the rarest thing in creation, but the most precious. It is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. Without it, nothing begins, nothing ends…”

Last Men in London is not one of Stapledon’s essential works, but it does make interesting reading as a historical document (its insights into the postwar mood), and as a transition point in Stapledon’s own creative direction: here, he’s working out how to take the themes of Last and First Men and apply them to his evident interest in the philosophical development of an individual. His treatment of Paul’s life is rather distant and unengaging, but he ends the novel with a short episode in which Paul, as a teacher, encounters a weird-looking child prodigy who proves to be, like the next novel’s “Odd John”, a throw-forward to the next step in human evolution. Writing Last Men in London, then, perhaps showed Stapledon the way he should be going, and which he’d do more successfully in both Odd John and Sirius.

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.

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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.”