by E. H. Visiak
The two writers came to know each other well. As a result of this friendship of two unsuccessful writers, a wider appreciation of Visiak developed when Lindsay's greater status in the history of science fiction and fantasy became clearer and his name finally became well-known, following the publication of The Strange Genius of David Lindsay in 1970 (on which Visiak collaborated with J B Pick and Colin Wilson), and the increased popularity of Arcturus upon its republication around this time (it was published in paperback in the USA in 1968 as one of the precursors to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series of books).
Although Visiak himself would probably not have drawn such a comparison, HP Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) could be considered another “fantastic companion” of his in the 20th century. They correspond in their obsessive approach, old-fashioned tone, and narrative pace -that is, subdued for a lengthy time, then escalating to a crescendo. It is surely no coincidence that the two outsiders, from southern England and Rhode Island, were both haunted by visionary dreams and able to express explicit sexuality only in metaphors of terror! A motif comparison between Medusa and the stories of the ‘Cthulhu Mythos' provides further common beliefs. Lovecraft, as with Visiak, portrays a materially existing world beyond the human, associates the reality of the otherworldly sphere with the image of a door or gateway, and fears the horrors of miscegenation that can result only in human degeneration.
If you read the nonagenarian Visiak's autobiography Life's Mourning Hours (1968), with its anecdotal retrospectives and insights, while simultaneously leafing in the pages of Medusa, the similarities are obvious: The lights spoken of in the first chapter of the novel apparently relate to a childhood experience of the author, when he was shown celestial phenomena; the seaweed that graced the home of his grandparents also adorns the mantelpiece in the cottage inhabited by Will’s grandfather, who is himself modelled on Visiak’s own grandfather; and the lovingly-described garden that Mr Huxtable recalls in the seventeenth chapter, is none other than the one in Mongeham that was cherished by Visiak’s grandmother. So it is no surprise when Huxtable, in Visiak’s spirit, speaks of the lost Eden in the Book of Genesis.
The visionary aspects of Medusa are rooted in the biography of the author, whose psychic dynamics would have been appreciated by Sigmund Freud. Visiak’s personal testimony indicates that throughout his life he sought visions of uncommon, verbally incomprehensible intensity. The deadly “Octopus Wife” on the rock island, finally reached, joins in the dance Visiak constructs of dreaming and waking images, signifying a deeply fraught relationship with the opposite sex.
There remains the difficult question of why Medusa has intrigued up to the present day; fascinated, though, without the drawing narrative of, say, a Stephen King novel. Visiak’s literary action unfolds between verse-dominated romantic storytelling and a unique hermetic that unsettles the reader in an almost surreal way. The provision of explanations and justifications was of little interest to Visiak. Were it not for those passages of the text that describe an ancient island civilisation near Ceylon, which - “according to legend” - open up the way to a different world, the reader would be unable to appreciate the roles of the strange light, the rocky island and the monstrous Kraken; but these, for Visiak, were enclosed within a dream of inscrutable logic. The modern writer of horror generally likes to be explicit. But perhaps here precisely lies Visiak’s literary prominence: he stimulates the imagination, instead of remotely steering it.
Bonus short story - Medusan Madness
(Introduction by Hugh Lamb from The Thrill of Horror 1975)
Ignored through life
It seems, said I,
That even death
Hath passed me by
To celebrate his 93rd birthday, E H Visiak (1878-1972) wrote this sadly apt epigram. It sums up the life of the man called “the world’s greatest authority on Milton”.
Edward Harold Physick adopted the name Visiak in 1910; it is an old variation of his real name. He was born into a family which was already distinguished in the field of culture. As a young man, he was employed by the Indo-European Telegraph Company from 1897 to 1914. After this, he took up teaching for some time but eventually devoted himself entirely to .scholarship and writing. Visiak died in Hove in August 1972, after a long illness, and I do not think that, even now, his rare talents have been fully recognised.
In the field of research into the work of Milton, Visiak was unrivalled. His works Milton Agonistes (1923) and The Portent of Milton (1958) were very well received, and the Nonesuch Milton (1938), which Visiak edited, has been used as a universal authority ever since.
It was poetry that first made Visiak’s name famous, with his book Buccaneer Ballads (1910), which he later followed up with Flints and Flashes (1911) and The Phantom Ship (1912). His anti-war sentiments were expressed in grim poetical form in The Battle Fiends (1916).
As a macabre writer, Vlsiak has found a little wider reputation, for his classic novel Medusa (1929) was reprinted twice in his lifetime, in 1946 and 1963. In it, he uses the style of Robert Louis Stevenson (one of his literary heroes) to tell the strange tale of a voyage into unknown waters. It is a book replete with chillingly original spectral images and events, one of the few novels of the twentieth century that can honestly he called unique. The Medusa theme obviously fascinated Visiak, for he used it again in this rare short story. Set in an ostensibly normal mental home, it gradually progresses from light to dark, and needs at least two readings to be appreciated properly.
Before reading the short story, however, I invite you to sample E H Visiak’s poetical style. “The Skeleton at the Feast” comes from The Phantom Ship. It is undoubtedly one of the shortest and most horrifying pieces ever written in this country.
Though Visiak’s output was very small, he can truly he regarded as one of the most outstanding writers in the field of the macabre of the last hundred years. I hope that after reading these two pieces, you will agree with me.
The Skeleton at the Feast
Dance in the wind, poor skeleton!
You that was my deary one,
You they hanged for stealing sheep.
Dance and dangle, laugh and leap!
Tomorrow night at Squire’s ball,
I am to serve a sheep in hall:
My Lady's wedding, Lord love her!
Wait until they lift the cover!
Medusan Madness
The dreariness of the place was beyond expression. It had once been an ornate mid-Victorian mansion; and externally nothing had been altered. There were even peacocks there. As I sat on the balustraded terrace, with its grey, corroded Cupids, a peacock screeched, now and then, from somewhere in the grounds. The extensive lawns seemed to hold something dismally unnatural in their bleak, bright greenness, appearing queerly dull in the distance, on the fringe of a grey-dark plantation. The month was October and the time late afternoon; but nothing could have dispersed, or modified, the blight in that atmosphere—not the most genial summer sun.
A few of the inmates were moving here and there about the side-paths. I especially noticed a very tall old lady, with silvery white hair, who walked with a stick, but extraordinarily up-right.
“What beautiful hair that woman has!” I said to my poor friend.
“Yes, and she’s got a beautiful mind, too,” he answered in his slow, gentle voice. “I couldn’t possibly endure this if it weren’t for her.”
“Why is ...”
“Why is she here? She wouldn’t mind your asking that, and I’m sure that I don’t. She is here because she is sane.”
“I see,” I said.
“What do you see ?”
“A rather pretty young woman bringing our tea, I answered, laughing; but suddenly arrested by the look in his eyes.
It gave me the impression of a pang.
“Pretty!” he groaned, “Oh, my God!”
He sat silent, with an appearance of intense stillness, as if he were frozen. He seemed to be staring at something that he saw in t
he air; but the expression in his eyes was so terrible that I could not look at them. In the meantime, the maid set down the tea- things, glanced at him, and at me - rather peculiarly, I thought - and went her way.
“I’m awfully sorry, Evans,” I said as he seemed to be recovering. “I really don’t know what I said to... to distress you so much.”
“Of course you don’t,” he answered in a feeble, strained voice; “and I dare say this will resolve any doubts that may have come to you as to whether I really am insane. You don’t know my secret, and I cannot tell it to you. I couldn’t tell it to anyone—except to that woman,” he added, pointing to the tall lady in the grounds.
He drank some tea, and continued moodily:
“Schopenhauer was wrong in ascribing reality to the will. It is futile to attribute reality to an aspect. Besides, if you must single out in that way, the completely enlightened will would cease to function. What you call the conscience would cease also.”
“You mean that there would no longer be any desire? - “
“Desire would be swallowed up. There would be no more sea...”
He looked at me strangely, and continued:
“You have perception; but have you understanding? Are you... I wonder.”
The troubled look returned to his eyes, growing into an expression of settled pain. It is distressing to see suffering which one cannot by any means alleviate. In the faded light, the vast lawn and the shrubberies beyond appeared to extend in interminable gloom. The grounds seemed now deserted, and the peacock had ceased to give, at intervals, its peculiarly disagreeable and desolate cry. Only the tall woman continued to stalk in the side-path, looking queer and ghostly in the distance, with her silvery hair; and I had a fancy that she possessed the scene, in some way, like an embodiment of its mid-Victorian past. I felt wretchedly depressed, and eager, even anxious, to be gone.
But the diversion of talking with me was clearly of some service to my friend; so that I determined to prolong my visit, and also to repeat it very soon.
He was looking fixedly in the direction of the woman.
“She is going to come in,” he said presently. “If she turns across the lawn, I’ll tell you my story. It will be a signal.”
“Telepathy,” I said.
“Yes. More than that. Another man might have taken it that I was in love with her,” he added.
“Very likely he would,” I answered. “But why do you laugh like that?”
“Why? Oh, you’ll soon understand. She’s turning.”
Suddenly I felt terrified. I did not want to hear his story. I dreaded it. I had divined it, somehow. I do not mean specifically, but essentially and atmospherically.
“Are you... are you,” I asked, “quite sure that you want to tell me, Evans? Wouldn’t it... distress you too much?”
“I must tell you.”
“It was off Japan,” he went on in a rather disjointed way - “five days after leaving Osaka, where I had put in on a voyage to San Francisco. Ah, it’s a long time since I smoked…"
I had taken out my pipe and pouch.
“Why did you give it up?” I asked, grasping at the chance of a diversion.
“It gave me up, like other forms of illusion - all except...”
“ ‘The believing that we do something when we do nothing’ ,” I quoted hurriedly. “It’s not so simple as that, is it?”
“I had a steam-yacht,” he went on - he did not seem to have heard my question - “She was one of the fine Nineties yachts, built to sail as well as steam. It was near sunset; very calm - yes, very. Breathless - that is the very word. I remember thinking queerly, it’s holding its breath. Of course, I wasn’t clear what I meant; but I really did feel something. There really was some extraordinary tension - possession; and the sky! It was such an extraordinary, such an indescribable colour. It was intense, intense dark, dark, dark blue! But this did not diminish the light - the light that was so brilliant for me to see.... Oh, God!...”
“Evans,” I cried as I evaded his look, “do not go on! You’re in agony. You can’t stand it, Evans!”
“No. I shall be better. She is coming.”
He pointed to the tall woman, who was approaching the foot of the terrace across the lawn.
“Diomedea,” he shouted suddenly, “what is the word ?”
She answered with a strange gesture, letting fall her stick, clasping her hands, slowly unfolding them, spreading them out with the palms falling away downward. It was a gesture that expressed absolute emptiness, absolute abandonment. It perfectly expressed this, with the rhythmic beauty of unanswerable, irresistible eloquence.
She reversed the movement. I can only describe the effect as magical. I felt that, into an immeasurable vacuity, there was pouring a welling, solvent tide.
“You can go on now,” I said, feeling the words flow from me like a sigh.
I had not observed the woman particularly. She impressed me as being impersonal in some way. I could see her, of course, despite the dim light; and my impression is that she had a strangely classical Greek cast of face and extraordinarily bright, light blue eyes. But it is quite impossible to explain why, or how, I am unable to describe her at all clearly. She seemed interior to us; though that is too crudely definite a word to convey my meaning.
As to that amazing, wonderful language of her hands, it cannot be described as ceremonial, or symbolic - a ritual sign-language, in any way. It was too immediate, too essential in fact, to be styled language. The expression was identical with the idea; the form - which was also the substance - with the rhythm. Perhaps, in effecting this inner - and also outer - visualisation, she became, or gave the effect of becoming, impersonal, and accordingly obscure.
She was gone. I did not see her go. My consciousness, as far as I can express the experience, was submerged in a kind of vast ocean. I think Evans was proceeding with his story, emphasising insistently the peculiar dark blue, or blue dark, colour of the sky all above and around his yacht. But, for me, there was only the vague, neutral element of what, I suppose, was a subconscious, or partially subconscious, state.
Presently, however, I saw what he had seen - the skies duskily glowing in their deep, dark blueness, the sea almost black. The whole scene was overpoweringly impressive, sultry, intimidating. The virtually flat immobility of the waters seemed an impossible phenomenon.
Doubtless, it was impossible to normal visualisation. It is conceivable, however, that the normal pitch of the senses can be altered. Supposing, as Plato imagined, that the atmosphere in which we breathe and move might appear to an inhabitant of the upper, or ethereal element to have the comparative density of water: then, the sea would appear to such an observer, analogously, as solid. Scientifically, in fact, the ground is not so stable as it appears. It has its waves, which, like the colours above and below our range of vision, we are not able to perceive.
Now, I had emerged out of the subconscious state, as I have told- but how, or where?
There was something upon that sea. A figure was appearing. I was seized with indescribable sensations; emotions: fear, wonder, amazement, expectancy, strangeness - all-uniting, all-modifying strangeness!
Evans continued, telling his story, divulging his secret; which henceforth was also to be my secret - incommunicably so: even though in trying to describe what I saw and felt, I strain the ineptitude of words into nonsense.
But while I vainly tug at the sense and superficial letter of expression, I cannot but wonder whether, if power were given me I could transmute, transfuse, the pining torment by-the force of some liberating symbol. What superlative, irresistible genius might not be operated by the sting and flame of such cratered condensation! A thin steam of vague, insignificant analogies is, at least, some alleviation.
The appearance was monstrously beautiful - the figure, or creature, that suddenly became visible on that sea - so concretely visible - against those dark, violet dark, glowing, deep skies. It was as the incarnate bloom of which they were the u
mbrageous foil. It sweetly, faintly, delicately embodied the moon - like magic which is reflected in the soft splendour of the pearl. It was the essential, stark-naked, overpowering manifestation in form and voluptuous, smooth feminine feature of the grace that falls away continually in the brimmed contours of the waves.
Thus I saw it - and thus might see it still, unharmed, unhaunted in this horror of desolation, in this yearning, irremediable torment of desire; this racking hell! But it stirred; it moved; it turned upon me its penetrative, dream-like glance.