David Lindsay, page 11 of 12

The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly, published in 1926 (1927 in the US, as A Blade for Sale), is usually regarded as the exception among David Lindsay‘s writings. Dismissed as a potboiler, it’s passed over quickly, if it’s mentioned at all, in any examination of Lindsay’s more serious novels. It is, as J B Pick says, “the only book of Lindsay’s without metaphysical overtones”, and it’s those “metaphysical overtones” which tend to draw readers of A Voyage to Arcturus on to Lindsay’s other works. But if, like me, you’re interested in Lindsay as a writer, rather than a philosopher or metaphysician — and despite the serious themes in his works, it’s the human dramas at their core which bear the weight of meaning, so The Haunted Woman, Sphinx, The Violet Apple and Devil’s Tor aren’t novels by accident, nor are they merely philosophical tracts candied up into stories — then de Mailly is an interesting book, if only because it presents a side of Lindsay not to be found in any of his other works.

As to its being a potboiler, it is. Or, it tries to be. And it’s perhaps in its failings as a potboiler that it’s the most interesting.

At the same time as Lindsay was writing de Mailly, he was also writing his third published novel, Sphinx, which contains some thoughts on potboiling. Central to Sphinx is the character of composer Lore Jensen, who once created works of great profundity (including the piece which gives the novel its name), but, through having to write more popular music to earn a crust, has become creatively bankrupt. Accused of potboiling, she bursts out with: “But if I don’t boil my own pot, are you going to boil it for me? I suppose you think it’s bad art to have a pot!” But her drug-taking and dissolute lifestyle give the lie to any pretence she’s just following the demands of her muse; something has gone rotten within her. In a rather subtle little irony, Lindsay has her briefly engaged to a music critic — the ultimate symbol of the composer wedding herself to the demands of public taste!

But I don’t think anyone can blame Lindsay for attempting a potboiler — I certainly don’t. If it had funded another “metaphysical” novel, I’d have quite happily had a shelf-full of de Maillys. The trouble was, even though it was the first of his novels to be republished abroad, de Mailly didn’t result in financial success.

The key to the sort of novel Lindsay was aiming for in de Mailly is that it should be closer to a wish-fulfilling daydream than to real life. It should have heroes & baddies, adventures & romance, danger & derring-do. In his lead character, Gaston de Mailly, Lindsay may have been trying to create a series character of the sort popular at the time (new Sherlock Holmes stories were still being published in the 1920s, and de Mailly has some similarities to Holmes). To start with, the novel is episodic, and might even have been intended as a series of short stories. The first episode, for instance, lasts just two chapters, the second lasts three. After that, though, the episodes get longer. The third “story” lasts six chapters, while the fourth spans the whole of the remainder of the book — more than half its 319 pages. This could, of course, have been Lindsay’s intention — to warm up with a few short stories then extend to a novelette — but I think there’s another explanation, which lies in the sort of stories Lindsay was telling.

The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly is set in the France of Louis XIV, in 1700, and thus slap-bang in the middle of the longest recorded reign of any European monarch. It is an age of wit and sophistication, politics and diplomacy, but also of warfare and swordplay. Gaston de Mailly, our hero, declares himself firmly allied to the latter path. A gentleman by birth (though he starts the novel in financially straitened circumstances), he’s a soldier by trade:

“For my part, I am not a politician… I care nothing for this dry paper warfare where we fight at invisible range, and where the beaten enemy will come to life again the next day.”

His adventures, though, rarely require him to resort to his blade; his wits are his main weapon. (In the longest action sequence in the book, near the end, de Mailly combines cunning and swordplay to neatly defeat multiple opponents.) The best example of de Mailly in action is to be found in the second episode of the novel, in which our hero makes his first ever visit to the Court of the Sun King at Versailles. Initially, he’s out of his depth, and in danger of becoming the butt of a reputation-ruining practical joke. Brought before the King to explain himself, though, he manages to turn the situation around, to make the jokers the victims of their own joke, and ends up gaining himself a cool eight thousand crowns, not to mention the respect of the King.

de Mailly’s wit, then, is as sharp and nimble as his blade, and the main appeal of his adventures is seeing how he applies his cunning to the various situations he finds himself in. At times, his deductions from a few clues are almost Holmesian (at one point, for instance, he deduces the nature of the plot he’s entangled in from the mere fact that his sword has been stolen and swapped with another), and he even indulges in a soliloquised pean to “Divine Logic”:

“‘Tis truly astonishing what a load logic will bear when compelled! … It is to follow a thread through chaos… There is even beauty in it. To the divine sciences of astronomy, music, poetry, and philosophy, we must assuredly add logic as a fifth. ‘Tis a picture of the soul struggling through the gross appetites and passions of the world. Pulled down on all sides by material considerations, she is ignorant of her destination, which is heavenly; but she deduces it from her own resources, and this deduction possesses more of certitude than all the flesh, blood, and gold of the visible cosmos!”

That “picture of the soul” passage is almost A Voyage to Arcturus in miniature, though with a slightly higher dose of optimism, and is evidence, perhaps, of Lindsay’s more serious authorial DNA showing through.

Heroes who survive on their wits were popular at the time de Mailly was being written. I’ve already mentioned Sherlock Holmes; Agatha Christie’s first novels were being published in the twenties, too, and detective stories in general (of the era, anyway) were all about the triumph of deductive intelligence over the messy world of the passions. So it seems that choosing to make his hero a derring-do swashbuckler with the keen logic of a Holmes or a Poirot was a shrewd move on Lindsay’s part, or certainly one in keeping with the times. There were two problems with Lindsay’s use of his hero, though.

The first, more minor, problem, was in the way Lindsay introduces de Mailly. In the first episode, our hero tries to help a nobleman at risk of losing his inheritance because a widow is intent on marrying his rich, bachelor uncle, to whom he is sole heir. de Mailly comes up with the perfect plan — the young nobleman should marry the widow himself! — but is immediately thwarted when the widow kidnaps the uncle and whisks him off in carriage, with a priest in tow. So, in this first adventure, where you’d expect the newly-introduced hero to prove his credentials, de Mailly in fact fails, despite coming up with a clever stratagem. This wrongfoots the reader from the start. It’s as if Lindsay can’t quite sustain the daydream level of the pulp adventure, but has to bring in the messiness and unpredictability of real life, in which no clever plan, however clever, can be a sure success. In fact, of the four adventures of Monsieur de Mailly we have in the novel, our hero only succeeds in two; in the others, his clever planning comes to nothing (in both cases, by the sudden intrusive action of a woman, which could perhaps be taken to represent Lindsay’s scornful muse, bursting in to destroy his hero’s house-of-cards faith in logic).

The second problem lies in the complexity of the final adventure in the novel. de Mailly finds himself caught in a night-time scheme to assassinate a minister, but every person involved in the plot seems to have conceived a way of twisting it to their own ends. Thus, de Mailly has to disentangle himself from not one, but many plots and counterplots, and also has to come up with a stratagem of his own to ensure he comes out on top, too. (This is one admirable aspect of de Mailly — in making his protagonist a “hero of wit”, Lindsay doesn’t then set him up against idiots, but against people as capable of thinking and rethinking their way through a plot as de Mailly himself.)

The point about this problem with de Mailly is best summed up by J B Pick:

“A writer who is more interested in theme and purpose than in plot tends to overdo the elaboration and intricacy of any story in which plot is a major consideration. De Mailly has so many twists and turns that the reader is eventually lost in the maze.”

It’s as if, by the fourth episode, Lindsay has already tired of the daydream aspect of his hero’s adventures, and has had to resort to incredibly complicated plot convolutions to sustain his own interest. This fourth episode is readable, and enjoyable, though not in that easy-reading way you’d expect from a pulp-style adventure. It’s more like a tightly-played chess game between not two but a handful of opposing players.

Taken as an attempt at writing a pulp-style series of adventures, then, de Mailly is flawed, but is not a total failure by any means. The second episode, in the Court of the Sun King, is a perfect little story of the triumph of de Mailly’s wit, while the fourth episode is a sort of Bach Fugue of interweaving plotlines whose sharp about-turns, plots and counterplots have an almost breathtaking elegance, if only you can hold each individual character’s wants, expectations, understandings and misunderstandings in your head. But when it comes down to it, it seems that Lindsay just couldn’t quite sacrifice his integrity towards his own (often pessimistic, certainly difficult) worldview, in which the gaining of what one wishes for is a struggle that wrenches the very soul, not just something that takes a little wit and swordplay. In addition, when the lower-intensity storytelling of de Mailly began to drag, Lindsay had to amuse himself with increasingly complicated plots.

In writing de Mailly, Lindsay took some pains with regards to historical accuracy — he mentions, to give one instance, the fact that calling a married woman “madame” was only, in 1700, a practice of the nobility, yet to filter down to the middle classes — but he by no means shoves his research down the reader’s throat. Generally, the tone of the book is one of witty adventure, more along the lines of The Three Musketeers, or a Grey Mouser episode from Fritz Leiber, with Gaston de Mailly’s dry, cynical wit being one of the key pleasures along the way. I end with a few examples:

“In politics, as elsewhere, there are nine pedants to one man of resource.” — (an early version of Sturgeon’s Law)

“You are a lawyer, Fleurus; which is to say, an animal trained out of noble sentiments.”

“He who has a bad wife is dipped in the Styx against all other calamities.”

I love books, though I try not to collect them, mostly for reasons of space and money. The impulse, however, is definitely there.

Occasionally I give in. I bought the Small Beer Press limited edition hardback of Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners — having reduced the paperback to a battered wreck because I kept it in my work bag to read at lunchtimes. Kelly Link is, I think, one of the most innovative and interesting fantasy writers of recent times (ditto Thomas Ligotti, ditto Ted Chiang), and her story “Magic for Beginners” just blew me away in the most pleasantly confounding manner. Besides, it’s a beautifully produced book and it came with a free pack of playing cards. So, when I say I try not to collect books, I basically mean I tell myself I’m not collecting them, but buy a few for their collectibility anyway.

There’s one area, though, where, however much I might deny it, I’m definitely forming a collection, and that’s the works of David Lindsay. I started collecting Lindsay first of all because, having read A Voyage to Arcturus and been profoundly mind-zonked by it, I wanted to read all his other books. So it started off as a desire to get a readable copy of each of his novels. He only wrote six (seven, if you count The Witch as finished, though it has never been published in full), and only five of them were published in his lifetime. But it’s still something of a task to get them all. (And that, I suppose, is what collectibility is about. The quest, or the hunt. It’s as close as I get — as close as I want to get — to spearing wild mammoth, or whatever the reductive “we’re all cavemen really” explanation for the impulse to collect things is. Which I don’t believe, anyway.) I still remember the thrill of, in the early days of the internet, finding Blackwells had a secondhand book search service, which promptly found me a copy of The Violet Apple for £20. (And the added thrill of reading it and finding it was a wonderful book.) Then the distinct un-thrill as I followed that up with a request for Bernard Sellin’s Life & Works of David Lindsay, which they found… for £170. (It has since come out in POD paperback, much to my relief.) The crisis point of this particular stage of collecting came when I realised there was only one David Lindsay novel I didn’t have — his least characteristic book, usually called a “potboiler”, The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly — and that was because it hadn’t (at the time) ever been republished, meaning that it was only available as an expensive first edition. (It has since been published in paperback.) I tried telling myself I didn’t need to read it. But then I thought, “Do I really want to go through the rest of my life knowing there’s a David Lindsay book I haven’t read? Whatever the cost?” I ended up buying it in its US-retitled edition, A Blade for Sale (which was slightly cheaper than the UK first), but still at £{preposterous (for me anyway)}, which remains the most expensive book I’ve ever bought, by a long chalk.

The thing was, by this time, my collecting of David Lindsay had entered another phase. Popping down to Worthing one afternoon, to see a performance of some M R James stories adapted for the theatre, I found a hardback copy of A Voyage to Arcturus (a Gollancz reprint, not the original) for £5 in one of those lovely secondhand bookshops they have down there on the coast. I couldn’t help picking it up. All I had, at that point, was the Ballantine paperback, which has a good cover, but also its fair share of typos. (Though not as many as the execrable Bison Press edition, which was obviously scanned in, OCR’d, and not even properly spell-checked afterwards. So, okay, you get the occasional number 1 instead of a letter l, but you also get the occasional word that has been changed — “comforted” for “confronted”, for instance, which is a significant alteration of meaning. After buying that book I wrote the only letter of complaint to a publisher I’ve ever written. Of course, I got no reply. If they can’t be bothered to proofread their own books, why should they care what their readers think?) Having picked up that Gollancz hardback (it was a really nice palm-sized edition), I couldn’t help buying it. But I could justify it to myself by saying it was merely a nicer edition than than the one I already had. I wasn’t collecting David Lindsay…

I now have fifteen copies of A Voyage to Arcturus. Largely, this is because I run a David Lindsay website, Violet Apple.org, and started buying a copy occasionally so as to add better cover scans and bibliographic information to the site without having to nick other people’s information and feel guilty. But this is, I think, just a backdoor way of allowing myself to collect David Lindsay. I have, for instance, two German editions of A Voyage to Arcturus, one of which is the neatest-feeling paperback I own (though of course I can’t read it), and which had the unexpected bonus of being illustrated. I also have a German paperback of The Haunted Woman (retitled Fenster ins Frühlicht, which Google translates as “Window in the early light”), and a French Arcturus. I want the two other French editions, partly to solve the mystery of why I’ve found two quite different cover scans of un voyage en arcturus for the same year. My current Holy Grail, though, is the third Canongate edition of A Voyage to Arcturus; I have two, one with a Frank Brangwyn cover, one with a James Cowie cover. There is a poor-quality, black and white scan that’s been floating around the internet since about day one, of a Canongate Arcturus with a Max Ernst cover. I want that most of all. Partly so I can get rid of that horrible little smudgy webcam photo. Partly just to see if it really exists (which I’m beginning to doubt.)

But the thing that, ultimately, stops me from collecting David Lindsay is the next step on from this. What I’ve been buying so far has basically been paperbacks. I bought them at first because they have interesting covers, but also of course because they’re cheap. The next step is a quantum leap in collecting stakes. Because David Lindsay has never exactly had mass appeal, there weren’t many of his books printed, which means there aren’t many around now. First editions of his books are ridiculously rare, and ridiculously expensive when they do appear. The true Holy Grail of any David Lindsay collection is, of course, a first edition Voyage to Arcturus, but that is so far beyond even thinking about, for me… (A quick check with AbeBooks tells me that, to buy a first edition of each of David Lindsay’s six books (including The Violet Apple & The Witch in a single edition), would cost £3,728, and that’s with having to buy a reissue of Sphinx, because there’s no first edition around at the moment. Alright, it’s hardly first-edition Harry Potter, but it’s still a lot as far I’m concerned.)

So, instead of furthering my collection by buying first editions, I’ve distracted that particularly expensive urge by branching out with a little lateral thinking, looking for books and items associated with David Lindsay in some way, with the intention of adding new information to the site. (Not much happens in the world of David Lindsay. I struggle to find a couple of news items a year.) One of the breakthroughs here was a copy of The Radio Times from 1956, when A Voyage to Arcturus was adapted for the radio. I bought it in the hope there would be credits and perhaps a bit of a blurb about the production, but was thrilled to find an accompanying article and an original illustration, as well as a full cast list (which you can find at the Violet Apple site). I doubt there are going to be many finds like that, but it’s fun keeping my mind open for similar oblique approaches to forming a collection.

Far more fun, I suspect, that spending one and a half grand on a battered first edition of A Voyage to Arcturus. I’ll leave that for when my Premium Bonds come up… After all, they’re about thirty-eight years overdue.

This week I’ve mostly been reading a recently-released collection of book reviews by Colin Wilson, Existential Criticism, from Paupers Press. (If the title sounds rather dry, the contents are anything but, as I several times found myself laughing out loud.) After finding his first book, The Outsider, in a bookshop in Tunbridge Wells and buying it on an impulse, I was instantly hooked on Wilson’s writing, and went through a period of reading everything by him I could get my hands on. In those pre-internet days, when the thrill of the hunt was a large part of book collecting, this, combined with the wide range of Wilson’s interests, resulted in my reading books on subjects I’d not normally be interested in, such as serial killers (in often rather grisly detail), cult leaders, and UFOs. Then, almost as abruptly, I suddenly had my fill of Wilson, got rid of most of the books by him I’d collected, and read him no more. Or almost no more, because I’d occasionally dip in when he released a new book (I reviewed The Angry Years on this blog a few years ago), and have slowly been warming to him again. When Existential Criticism arrived in the post last Saturday, I sat down for a quick dip-in and soon found myself absorbed as I remembered all the things I’d liked about his work from before.

Colin Wilson’s writing is incredibly moreish. Every so often I go through my bookshelves, pulling off books, flipping through, and asking what it is the authors have that makes their writing work, and I always end up with a Colin Wilson book in my hand. Other writers may have a characteristic prose style, or a unique imaginative world, but Wilson writes in a straightforward manner, and his best writing is as likely to be his non-fiction as his fiction; nevertheless, he’s compulsively readable.

Why? It comes down, I think, to two things. The first is his intense interest in what he’s writing. Whatever he’s writing about, he goes at it like a hungry fox eyeing the fat rabbit on the other side of the field — wily, but determinedly singleminded. Wilson is also tremendously knowledgeable. At times, he seems to have read just about every book in existence — and not just the ones that would make him “well-read”, but the dregs, too, and read with no preconceptions, meaning he’s found value where others wouldn’t stoop to look, and been unimpressed by what others universally praise. There’s a real feeling of the stuff-of-life in Wilson’s writing. He’s willing to throw every element into the pot — and that means the tawdry, quirky, gossipy messiness of it as much as the idealistic striving. Whether he’s writing about murderers or philosophers, science or the occult, he accords it all equal value as a source of potential understanding, of ideas. (And this may be the reason he’s not as appreciated as he ought to be — his more culturally po-faced critics get embarrassed by his serious approach to things they think beneath them.) This leads to the second essential element that powers his writing, the easy-going confidence that is, perhaps, its most attractive quality.

But what was it that stopped me reading Wilson’s work? Weirdly, it’s the thing that Wilson himself would consider the most important element in his writing: the existentialism.

I don’t disagree at all with the philosophical element of Colin Wilson’s writing, which basically comes down to the idea that boredom, or the deeper feeling of purposelessness or meaninglessness, isn’t (as it was taken to be by Existentialists such as Sartre) an essential fact of human existence. It can be overcome, simply by making the effort. And the effort involves merely making yourself interested in something. The more intense the interest, the more meaningful life will seem. Wilson has obviously achieved this. Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, identifies this finding a focus in life, this creating a meaning from the inside rather than waiting for it to arrive from the outside, as a key factor determining which of his fellow-prisoners survived the concentration camps of the Second World War.

As I say, I had no problem with this idea, and was happy for Wilson to bend every subject he treated round to it, as he inevitably did, so he could rehearse its main points. I had no problems, either, with him treating the writings of the likes of Rilke or Sartre — who I haven’t read and don’t intend to — as testing grounds for his philosophy. But it started to grate when he turned his attention to writers whose work I love, and almost always found them seriously wanting. H P Lovecraft, for example, was damned pretty thoroughly in The Strength to Dream. And though Wilson was a key figure in rescuing David Lindsay‘s A Voyage to Arcturus from near-oblivion, his interpretation of Lindsay’s work has, as a result, sometimes been taken as the only interpretation, one that seems to me quite reductive, particularly when applied to Lindsay’s second novel, The Haunted Woman. All this began to grate on me, and the feeling returned when I read, in Existential Criticism (p. 57): “Borges is not a great writer because he is not a mature writer. He has remained in a kind of perpetual adolescence.”

Back when I first encountered these criticisms, I couldn’t get over them. I felt Wilson had missed the point, but overawed as I was at the time by his evident intelligence and confidence, I couldn’t bring myself to admit this. Instead, I gave up reading him. Now, though, I find it easier to simply say, “I beg to differ,” and read on, still enjoying the Wilson I used to enjoy, and taking the rest as a challenge to what I’ve since come to think. Because, yes, it’s easy to criticise Lovecraft for being a pessimist, for being overwhelmed by the threatening bleakness of the universe. And no, Lovecraft didn’t provide an answer to the existential problem of life’s apparent meaninglessness, but what he did do was encapsulate the problem in an entirely new imaginative form. This can only be regarded as a failure if you treat fiction as a form of philosophy. But I think it’s the other way round. Aesthetics contains philosophy, not vice versa. And this, I think, is one of Jorge Luis Borges’s strengths. Borges takes obscure philosophical ideas and plays with them as easily as a poet plays with words. Wilson may take this as evidence that Borges didn’t believe in anything with any conviction; I’d say it means Borges believed that the world is not one thing, with one single interpretation, but a manifold thing worthy of a million interpretations, none of which is wholly right nor wholly wrong — a multiverse rather than a universe — which is a very Borgesian idea (the Aleph, the Book of Sand, and Shakespeare’s Memory are also many-things-in-one), but also, surely, the same as the existential idea that “meaning is not in the world, but one’s head” (as my version of Alice puts it). In fact, if you want to get properly philosophical about it, it’s the idea William James (a frequent Colin Wilson touchstone) wrote about back in 1907, in A Pluralistic Universe.

In the Borges review, Wilson does go on to say that he enjoys Borges as a writer, just finds him lacking in an existentialist sense. Wilson has even dedicated a book to him (The Philosopher’s Stone), and has written stories in the Lovecraftian mode (“Return of the Lloigor”). So, I’m going to get over it, and carry on enjoying Wilson, having left him alone, I think, for too long.