fantasy, page 37 of 92

What is the haunted woman in David Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman haunted by? The novel starts with Isbel Loment (whose name is a wonderfully Lindsayan mix of music and tragedy), engaged to a Lloyd’s underwriter, Marshall Stokes, but in the meantime living an itinerant existence in a series of hotels with her aunt, Mrs Moor. Before her marriage, Isbel knows she must find a place for her aunt to settle, and Marshall, coming back from a trip to the United States, hears of a possibility, Runhill Court, near Steyning, in Sussex. As Isbel and her aunt are at present staying in Brighton, it’s only a short car-ride away, so an afternoon excursion is planned.

As well as showing the two women round this mostly Elizabethan mansion, Marshall has an additional assignment given to him by the house’s current owner, the 58-year-old widower Henry Judge. Judge, not presently living at the house, had some unusual experiences in the East Room, and wants Marshall’s opinion of the place. (Presumably he asked Marshall because, as Marshall himself admits, “I’m not gifted with a great deal of imagination”, and so might be expected to be down-to-earth in such matters.) But it’s Isbel who senses something strange about the place, hearing a sound in the passage leading to the East Room which the others can’t hear, and which she compares to both an orchestra tuning up, and “a telephone wire while you’re waiting for a connection”.

It’s already been revealed that Isbel has unfulfilled depths to her character. Sherrup, an artist and musician they meet briefly at Runhill Court, later tells her she’s “an artist without a profession… a lightning-rod without an outlet”, and she herself has already intimated that the rather shallow Marshall might not be the best match for her:

“I don’t know. . . . Love must be stronger than that. . . . I mean, one girl might be content with mere placid affection, and another might ask for nothing better than a thick sentimental syrup. It depends on character. My character is tragic, I fancy.”

Isbel, then, is all potential; the house, with its supernatural orchestra tuning up, is also all potential. Isbel says Runhill Court’s “atmosphere seems tragical”, so it’s obvious in which general direction all this potential is going. And when she meets the house’s owner, Henry Judge, and he says to her:

“There are deep, and possibly painful, transactions of the heart to which the term ‘romance’ would be quite inadequate…”

— she perhaps ought to know Marshall is not the man to fulfil her deeper nature, and Henry Judge is. But, already engaged as she is, society will not allow her to even think of the possibility. So constricting are the social rules by which Isbel and Judge live, it affects even their ability to feel when their deeper selves begin to suggest a route towards fulfilment.

(The social world, in The Haunted Woman, is staid and placid on the surface, but vicious immediately beneath, as exemplified by Isbel’s exchanges with the widow Mrs Richborough, who also has her sights set on Judge. Judge, like all the men in the novel, except perhaps for the artist Sherrup, is oblivious to the barely-veiled subtext of what Isbel and Mrs Richborough are saying, but beneath their civilities, the two women are spitting venom and all but tearing at each other with their teeth.)

So, it’s her tragical, passionate nature that makes Isbel a haunted woman, and it requires a haunted house to bring the haunting out. Runhill Court doesn’t offer the traditional kind of haunting; its ghost is architectural. As Sherrup says of the structure that first stood where Runhill Court stands now:

“It was called Ulf’s Tower. The story is that Ulf was the original builder of the house. He lived about a hundred years after the first landing of the South Saxons… When Ulf built his house, Miss Loment, it was on haunted land. Run Hill was a waste elevation, inhabited by trolls—which, I figure, were a variety of malevolent land-sprites. Ulf didn’t care, though he was a pagan. He built his house. I gather he was a tough fellow, away above the superstitions of his time and country. And—well, one day Ulf disappears and a part of his house with him. Some of the top rooms of the Tower were clean carried off by the trolls; it happened to be the east end of the house, the nearest to their happy hunting-grounds. That was the very last that was heard of Ulf, but all through the centuries folks have been jumping up to announce that they’ve caught sight of the lost rooms. . . . ”

These rooms, accessible by a staircase that appears only to certain people at certain times, are where the story of Isbel and Judge’s true selves play out. The idea that it’s only in a place supernaturally removed from the day-to-day world that we can even start to make contact with our deeper feelings, our truer instincts, is typically uncompromising of David Lindsay. What’s worse, as soon as Isbel and Judge leave the rooms, they return to their everyday mindsets and forget everything that has just happened, even their most heartfelt vows and life-changing decisions.

Unlike A Voyage to Arcturus, The Haunted Woman offers no explicit, final explanation. Isbel has no Krag to tell her what it all means. This is one of the characteristics of Lindsay’s novels between Arcturus and Devil’s Tor — the human characters get mind-blasting visions, but no clue or guidance as to what they mean or how to fit this new strata of experience into the everyday world of twenties England.

For most of The Haunted Woman, though, the meaning of the supernatural elements seems clear. Up the phantom staircase, Isbel is confronted by three doorways, and in her first three trips, she explores a different room each time. In the first room, furnished only with a mirror, she receives a vision of herself as she truly is, with all her tragical and passionate potentialities written clearly on her face. In the second room, furnished only with a couch, she meets Judge and the two can “drop the mask of convention, and talk to each other more humanly and truthfully” than in the outside world. But what of the third room? Here, there’s a window, looking out on a Spring-like, fresh world, unspoilt by man. No roads, no hedgerows. A musician plays his archaic instrument and his music awakens the pair’s passionate nature, until they’re overwhelmed, and can’t sustain the “worldly prudence on his side, angry pride on hers” that keeps them apart in the normal world. But what Lindsay does next takes it all one step further than a mere allegory of love in the face of straitening social bounds. Looking into the musician’s face kills two of the novel’s characters. The musician is not, then, the embodiment of human love or passion, but of the essentially tragic nature of the passion that’s so much a part (though submerged throughout her normal, waking life) of Isbel’s character.

So, passion, or love, is lifted to the level of Muspel (our true spiritual home) from A Voyage to Arcturus, as though Lindsay is saying that what Pain was in that first novel, Tragical Passion is in this one — the way out of a deceptive, ensnaring world, and the way home. (Lindsay several times in the novel links passion with pain — and music — as when he describes the sound of the musician’s bowed instrument as “low, fierce, passionate, exactly resembling a deep, forced human cry of love-pain.”)

This feeling that the coming together of a man and woman in a deeply meaningful, but deeply tragical and troubled manner, is the closest the living can come to a sort of reconnection with their deeper, truer selves, is reiterated in The Violet Apple, and intensified in Devil’s Tor. (I’d say it also has a hint of fairy-tale fulfilment at the end of The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly.) It obviously had great meaning for David Lindsay, and is certainly an argument for regarding his post-Arcturus novels not as commercial compromises (as they’re often seen), but as genuine attempts to further his understanding of his own ideas.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford is currently (1st June to 28th October) running an exhibition of items from the Tolkien archives. I’ve never been one to bask in, for instance, the particular chair an author wrote in (the chair from Tolkien’s study, and his little writing desk, are both on display), nor to get much from standing in the presence of an original manuscript, unless it’s been made more interesting with doodles (as with Mervyn Peake) or interesting corrections. I was, though, genuinely thrilled to see some of Tolkien’s original artwork, including two I must have known since first reading The Hobbit around the age of 10 or 11 — “A Conversation with Smaug”, which was used as the cover to my copy of The Hobbit, and his illustration of the trolls.

What struck me about both was how small they were. Neither seemed appreciably bigger than the state in which I’d first seen them, i.e. the page-size of a 1970s paperback (they were probably more hardback size). And this smallness — tinyness, even — became something of a theme throughout the exhibition. For someone who created the first modern epic-sized fantasy, Tolkien, when he wrote, and when he drew, wrote and drew very small. The thing that really brought this home was seeing a letter written by Tolkien’s mother. Her handwriting was extremely neat, quite stylistic, but extremely tiny. I can’t find an example to reproduce, but I particularly remember her letter “p”, which had a strongly angled upright, with a little curlicue at the end, joined onto a perfect little circle. The whole thing looked as regular as typewritten text, but also, of course, being handwritten, entirely unique. And also tiny. Tiny, tiny, tiny.

Moving from that to some examples of Tolkien’s own writing, in his invented scripts, seemed more of a logical step than a leap of invention — with his invented letters being based around tiny circles with lines and curlicues attached, all so neat and tiny. Not quite as tiny as Mrs Tolkien’s, but tiny nevertheless. The tinyness of Mrs Tolkien’s handwriting could, of course, be put down to her writing on small letter-paper to keep down on postage costs, but to me, the tinyness of Tolkien’s runes and handwriting makes me think more of the privacy of imaginative creation, as though, in a way, he was making his “sub-created” world out of deliberately smaller elements, to contain it within our world, not make it stand on a par with it.

And I’ve no doubt that so much practice with tiny, neat calligraphy would have given Tolkien the control of his pen (and paintbrush) needed to produce his very neat drawings and paintings. There was a quote from Tolkien reproduced alongside one of his drawings, saying that he didn’t have the patience to be an illustrator and didn’t think he could draw, but I’m always impressed by how much the more successful of his artworks work because of the sort of sparseness and control you don’t expect to find in an amateur, who’d be more given to over-drawing, filling up the page with detail to compensate for lack of skill. Tolkien seemed to know what he wanted to draw, did it to the best of his ability, then stopped. And his use of colour on occasion makes successful use of quite restrained pastel shades, another thing I don’t associate with someone who “can’t draw”.

I have to add, though, that the last thing I looked at in the exhibition was Pauline Baynes’ watercolour map of Middle-earth, and there you could definitely see the subtle touches that showed a professional was at work. Despite being the original piece, I could only detect the barest hint of supporting pencil work — a very faint line running through the centre of the curves of text naming regions of the map was about it. (The colours were also a lot subtler and brighter than the image I’ve linked to.) Pauline Bayne’s illustrations (for the Narnia books) are something I’ve known for about as long as Tolkien’s Hobbit illustrations, so that was another thrill, seeing some of her original work.

Elsewhere, there were Tolkien’s maps — not just finished versions, but some work-in-progress versions, one of which had a second layer of paper stuck onto it, where frequent rubbings-out and corrections led to his needing to redraw a section. Role-playing gamers of a certain generation will no doubt be thrilled to see one map of Middle-earth drawn on green-lined graph paper, which was, for me, the go-to stationery for your serious fantasy role-play mapping (having smaller squares than standard squared paper, it seemed you were being that much more serious). Role-players will also be happy to see Tolkien’s artistic attempts to recreate pages from the Book of Mazarbul that the Fellowship find in Moria, recording the last days of the dwarves’ attempt to reclaim their old domain. Tolkien has artistically burned the edges and added suggestive smudges of blood-like red. It could be a prop from a particularly well-made dungeon crawl.

There were also letters. On display was a reader’s report from a young Rayner Unwin on The Lord of the Rings, and a few fan letters, one in runes, one from a young Terry Pratchett (praising Smith of Wootton Major), and some illustrations to The Lord of the Rings done by Princess Margrethe, two years before she became Queen of Denmark.

All in all, a good exhibition. Not many physical objects (a chair, a collection of pipes, an old — and, again, tiny — notebook), nor many photos, but the things I got the most out of, anyway, were the originals of the illustrations and book-cover designs (those for The Lord of the Rings and the first hardback of The Hobbit were all there). The exhibition was held in one reasonably-sized room, but it didn’t feel small, thanks in part to that intriguing Tolkienian tinyness.

After High-Rise (1975), J G Ballard wrote one of his strangest novels, The Unlimited Dream Company. Published in 1979, it won the 1980 British Science Fiction Association award for best novel — which was, as the SF Encyclopedia points out, the only SF award he won — but, perhaps because it stands shadowed between the Ballardian monoliths of Crash (1973) and Empire of the Sun (1984), it’s a book that gets little attention, not least from Ballard himself, who rarely seems to have mentioned it in interviews — certainly nowhere near as much as The Atrocity Exhibition, to which it could well stand as a sort of opposite. It is, in a sense, his magical realist novel, his most outrightly fantastical. It’s also, compared to the novels that came before it, perhaps his first non-dystopia. But it doesn’t seem right to call it a utopia, either. Rather, it seems better to call it a sort of imaginative vision.

The narrator, Blake, is a young ne’er-do-well whose schooling and early attempts at employment are nothing but a series of increasingly bizarre and self-destructive failures:

“Whatever new course I set myself, however carefully I tried to follow a fresh compass bearing, I flew straight into the nearest brick wall.”

One morning, after an abortive and seemingly spur-of-the-moment attempt to murder his latest girlfriend, Blake steals a light aircraft (having picked up the basics of operating one while working as an aircraft cleaner at London Airport) and pretty soon crashes it into the Thames by Shepperton (which he calls “the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere”, and where Ballard himself lived for most of his adult life). Soon after emerging from the drowned aircraft (where he may have spent as long as eleven minutes trying to free himself, meaning he may actually have died underwater), Blake discovers that he cannot leave the town. If he approaches its borders they recede before him, meaning he can walk infinitely in any direction without ever leaving Shepperton.

He also learns he has begun to develop magical, even god-like, powers. The blood from his wounded hands has the ability to heal; he can transform himself, and others, into fish, birds, and animals; he can fly, and can give others the gift of flight, too. His bodily fluids — and it’s a novel rather full of bodily fluids — cause exotic plants to grow. His presence leads all sorts of birds to start appearing in Shepperton, from pelicans to penguins to parrots and condors. He eventually finds he can absorb people into his body, feeding off their existence within him while they reside there, awaiting release.

With so many miracles on show, he soon wins the people of Shepperton over, and it’s not long before, as in High-Rise, the commuters are ignoring their trains, doffing their clothes, and (unlike High-Rise) giving away all their possessions. Bank managers lay out the currencies from their vaults on tables for anyone to take, supermarkets and white goods stores abolish their checkouts.

The town comes to see Blake as a sort of messiah — as does Blake himself, who soon progresses, in his own estimation, to local god, and then to “the first god, the primal deity”. The only exceptions are the seven people who witnessed Blake’s crash and subsequent revival. (One of whom, Blake suspects, may have attempted to murder him, judging by the hand-shaped bruises on his body.) These seven, whom Blake comes to think of as his “Family”, often resist his orgies of transformation and flight, but they are the ones Blake most wants to transform.

Among their number is a widow, Mrs St Cloud, and a priest who dabbles in archaeology, Father Wingate (a father-mother pair whose names both mix sky/flight with religion). There’s also Mrs St Cloud’s daughter, Dr Miriam St Cloud, whose running of a local clinic is disrupted when Blake begins healing all her long-term patients. Stark, a young man who owns a nearby zoo and amusement pier, is the most immune to Blake’s wonders — when the whole town is giving away its possessions, it’s Stark who drives around collecting TV sets and washing machines, stuffing his pockets full of free foreign currency. Finally there are three children, a blind girl, a lame boy, and another boy with Down’s Syndrome. Although clearly affected by Blake’s crash, they’re almost shy when it comes to his attempts to include them in his town-wide transformations, as though they see a value in their disabilities that Blake’s easy cures and magical transformations into birds, fish, or flying humans would do away with. Blake’s relationship with the townspeople of Shepperton goes through dark patches — one of his festivals of free money and flight is about to swerve into violence at one point, and, oh yes, they later shoot him and dump his body by the town War Memorial — but ultimately it’s his relationship with these seven, his “Family”, that drives the novel in its strange, dream-like progression.

Ballard often said he was a moral writer — that his dystopias, despite the way they offered his protagonists a sort of inner fulfilment, were nevertheless meant as warnings — but it’s hard to see the moral in The Unlimited Dream Company, whose protagonist/narrator’s mix of self-deification and lack of self-recrimination often treads a line between the god-like and the infantile. The Blake who begins the novel with an attempt to murder his girlfriend is hardly a reformed character by the end, nor is he ever really challenged or taught any lessons. He comes close, several times, to crossing a line even a pagan god shouldn’t cross with Shepperton’s children, and it’s only because of a moment of distraction that he doesn’t go through with it.

Instead, the book seems to be a pure, if brutal, dream-like vision of transformation. Nothing matters, between its covers, but Blake’s, and Shepperton’s, ultimate liberation through flight. When things change, when Blake discovers a new power, or when the town turns either for him or against him, there doesn’t seem to be a particular reason for the change, as though these are ritual stages that have to be gone through rather than the results of cause and effect. At times, the transformation Blake seems to be offering is harsh, almost inhuman, and The Unlimited Dream Company, to my mind, sits alongside some of the more blatantly visionary writers about fantastical transformations, like Clive Barker, or the Robert Holdstock you find in the second half of Lavondyss.

Ultimately, The Unlimited Dream Company seems to work best as a dream or vision, an intense dose of imagery centred on flight, freedom, and transformation, and a literal rising above the everyday life of a suburban town.

It’s a book that took Ballard two and half years to write, something true only of Crash before it. And despite the seemingly effortless sequence of dream-like scenes in the novel, he found the writing of it “imaginatively exhausting”. At first, when you read one of Ballard’s few comments about the novel, it’s tempting not to take him entirely seriously when he says something like:

“In many ways I feel that, without realising it at the time, I was writing a piece of my own autobiography — that it’s about the writer’s imagination, and in particular my imagination, transforming the humdrum reality that he occupies and turning it into an unlimited dream company.”

(This is quoted in Interzone #106, but originally comes from Sam Scoggins’s 23-minute film, The Unlimited Dream Company — which is not an adaptation, but mostly an interview with Ballard, and well worth a watch.)

The more I think about it, though, the more the idea that this novel is a sort of inner autobiography fits. It’s an allegory of the imaginative writer’s life. It begins with a troubled and unconventional young man’s difficulties in finding a place in life (“the police harassment and third-rate jobs, the dreams running off at half-cock”). Then the crisis, the breakdown and break-away in one last desperate attempt at self-expression, trusting himself entirely to his purest impulse, “the simplest and most mysterious of all actions — flight!”

Then, realising he’s as trapped in Shepperton as an imaginative or visionary artist is trapped in the mundane world, he sets about doing his best to transform it and its residents through the power of his imagination, bringing his own particular magic into all these humdrum lives, elevating them, freeing them, changing them at the deepest level. And he passes through darkness, and through self-aggrandisement, and through death, but ultimately he’s freed from his old, ne’er-do-well self, that history of failure.

(And the character Stark could be seen as the sort of man Blake would have become without a visionary imagination — a peddler of cobbled-together amusements, a pier-attraction zoo-owner, doing his best to bring a little exoticism and fairground magic into people’s lives, but never going to amount to much.)

The Unlimited Dream Company is an expression of Ballard’s faith that “a powerful and obsessive enough imagination can reach, unaided, the very deepest layers of the mind” — a faith in the transformative powers of imagination, a kind of creative dream-manifesto. As I say, it could be seen as an equal-and-opposite to The Atrocity Exhibition, standing in the same relation to that earlier book as Alan Garner’s Stone Book Quartet stands to his traumatic Red Shift — a necessary and healing counter-balance to the earlier work’s images of dislocation and trauma.

I must admit I still don’t fully get the title, though.