David Lindsay, page 11 of 11

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.

In the words of Futurama’s dithery Professor Farnsworth, “Good news, everyone!” — apparently, I am incredible. At least, I am according to this rather fatuous report, “Oops — I Read It Again!” (link from Neil Gaiman’s blog).

Why am I incredible? (You read my blog, yet have to ask?!) Because, it seems, I’m part of a rare 13% of the reading population — not just that 77% of it who admit to having “enjoyed a book* so much that they’ve gone back to read it again” (I’m not sure why “book” gets an asterisk — perhaps it’s a term that needs a more precise definition for the sort of people who read a site with a name like booktrade.info), but I’m part of the 17% who “have re-read a favourite tome more than five times” (surely not all of them were tomes, you lazy journalist, you — try scratching your head a few times before reaching for the thesaurus!)

Alright, so maybe reading a book — or several, I’ll not get into specifics yet — five times or more is odd, but surely it’s not “incredible”? But that’s just the word-geek in me getting picky. (To show how picky I can get, I also wonder why the report gives “C. S. Lewis” a full-stop after each initial, “J. K Rowling” only one, and “JRR Tolkien” none.) What makes this all the more distressing is that this is a report, I assume, from some sector of the book trade itself — as if the trade were so assured the wares it sells are so deeply worthless that reading them even once, after buying them, were to take things a bit far. (Certainly true in the case of sleb biographies and their like — maybe that’s the special meaning of book-with-an-asterisk I was looking for.)

Now that my incredible nature is out in the open, I might as well be frank about it. Not only do I habitually re-read books, I tend to regard reading a book for the first time as merely an opportunity to decide whether it’s worth re-reading — the re-reading bit being, for me, where the fun really starts. I tend to only keep books if I plan to re-read them at some time.

I haven’t always been like this. I used to be un-incredible, at least most of the time. (Except as a kid. All kids demand re-reading of the books they like. They’re not stupid.) I can’t actually pinpoint when my incredible, perhaps even mythical, status kicked in, but aside from re-reading favourite Doctor Who novelisations (which, at one point in my life, were all I read), I tended to read books only once. What happened was something like this: I kept buying new books and finding they were bad. After a while, getting distressed that I hadn’t read anything good for a while, and worried that it was me that had gone wrong rather than the hallowed publishing industry, I decided to revisit a book I had enjoyed, just to make sure. To my relief, I found I enjoyed it even more. And then, perhaps, other new approaches to this whole business of “reading books” (that’s books-without-asterisks) started to suggest themselves. Such as the idea that books which have been around for a long time, and which have continually been published and read for decades, if not centuries, might actually be better than new books. Classics, as they’re sometimes called, even by people without thesauruses. This was when I started reading (and re-reading) books like Moorcock and Cawthorne’s Fantasy: 100 Best Books and Horror: The 100 Best Books edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, and doing bizarre things like frequenting secondhand bookshops.

I know I’m probably still in a minority to re-read at least as much as I first-time read, but I do genuinely find it more pleasurable to re-read a book. Perhaps this is in part because I am, by nature, rather untrusting and over-critical as a reader. I want to know a book is worth investing in before I really go for it 100% in the reading — but if I am untrusting, it’s only because I’ve read so many bad and disappointing books that I’ve ended up that way.

The main objection to re-reading a book is that there’s no point because you know what’s going to happen. But, to me, knowing what’s going to happen not only doesn’t matter, it actually makes it better. Exposed to stories as much as we are, we’ve all developed enough of a “story sense” to second-guess where a story is going anyway, and the real pleasure of a twist-in-the-tale is not so much the twist itself, as how skilfully it’s handled. My two most recent re-reads are both minor books by favourite authors — Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami, and The Violet Apple by David Lindsay. The first time I read Sputnik Sweetheart was when I’d just discovered Murakami. At the time, I’d only read his massive (genuinely tome-like) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and in comparison found the slim Sputnik Sweetheart a bit disappointing, though with a strikingly weird bit in the middle (where a young woman gets stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel for the night and has an experience that turns her hair completely white), mainly because I wasn’t sure how to understand the end. Re-reading it, knowing how it ended, everything fell into place and made sense, and I had time to relax and understand other things about the book, like how each of the three main characters faces the same sort of strange crisis, but one evades it, one falls before it, and one — maybe — triumphs. With The Violet Apple, I found that knowing what was going to happen at the end only made the build-up much more poignant and emotionally powerful. (That’s how tragedy always works. Macbeth’s downfall was only a surprise for Macbeth himself.)

Another possible peculiarity of mine comes into play here, and this is to do with re-reading books by certain authors. The more you read of an author’s work, the more you get to understand them, and the more you get out of reading them. The first time I read the David Lindsay book, The Violet Apple, I was still under the spell of his most famous and impressive book, A Voyage to Arcturus, and so I read The Violet Apple with that other book in mind. But The Violet Apple is a very different book. It’s very un-fantastic, whereas A Voyage to Arcturus is almost nothing but fantastic; it’s also very human, whereas A Voyage to Arcturus is starkly inhuman. A Voyage to Arcturus could never contain a sentence such as “She could not bear that awful family loneliness and unsympathy”, but The Violet Apple does and, knowing Lindsay to be capable of writing such a sentence, I will in future re-read A Voyage to Arcturus slightly differently.

You don’t listen to a favourite song only once, do you? Why should books be any different, just because they take more time to re-experience? Human beings are memory-loving creatures. We treasure our experiences and go back over them, in our heads, again and again. Sometimes we do this to understand the experiences better, sometimes it’s just because revisiting them is so enjoyable. The reading of a book is an experience just like any other, and the reasons for doing it can be just the same.

To end off, a not-necessarily-complete list of books I’ve read four times or more (with no explanations or apologies — though, to intensify my weirdness, I’ll say that at least two in this list are books I’ve re-read straightaway after reading them for the first time): Moving Zen by C W Nicol, The Belgariad by David Eddings, A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, The Outsider by Colin Wilson, The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, The Influence by Ramsey Campbell, The Drowned World by J G Ballard, V for Vendetta by Alan Moore & David Lloyd… Not to mention the countless short stories I’ve re-read many more times than four or five. Short stories are, after all, so much more re-readable. But simply reading short stories nowadays is enough to commit you to a very dark and dingy corner of the asylum reserved for book-readers. Catch you re-reading the things, and they throw away the key. Before you eat it, or do yourself an injury with it or something.

Comment imported from the old version of Mewsings:
Gavin Burrows

Hi Murray, My response here!

http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2007/12/time-to-stop-consuming.html