By 6th December 1934, Lindsay wrote to his friend E.H. Visiak: “For though ‘The Witch’ is done at last, Gollancz, for one, has turned it down, and I can’t always expect the miracle of the publication of ‘Devil’s Tor’ to be repeated.” Lindsay began to re-write it. How many versions he wrote is unknown, but on 25 February 1936 Lindsay wrote to his friend Robert Barnes that “my book, which has taken very much longer than I thought, is still some days off its finish, and until I have seen it safely off the premises I shall be good for nothing.”
A month later, on 30 March 1936 he wrote to Visiak: “My ‘Witch’ I hoped would have been done last week, but now it must be this. Then, no doubt, my trouble of the other sort begins, and I must become trader as well as author! What nonsense, isn’t it?” On 11 June 1936, Lindsay updated Visiak: “I work daily on ‘The Witch’, but it is writing me, not I, it. When I started it I had certainly no idea where it would lead me. But whether anyone will ever read it after me—that I cannot say!”
The Lindsays moved house in 1938, leaving Ferring and going to number 62 Pembroke Crescent in nearby Hove. Doubtless this caused some disruption in the writing of The Witch, as did the outbreak of World War II. After Lindsay’s death in 1945 Lindsay’s sister wrote to Robert Barnes that “David has not been writing at all during the war—said he couldn’t concentrate.” This is quite understandable, for while Hove did not receive as many German attacks as nearby Brighton, it still experienced nearly 1,100 air raid alerts. The first air attack on Hove occurred on 30th June 1940. During the next attack, only two weeks later, in the early morning of 15th July, nine 50kg bombs fell across Pembroke Crescent, near Lindsay’s house. Lindsay was in his bath, and the explosion shattered the bathroom window. Lindsay was hit by splinters of glass, causing much loss of blood. There is little wonder that Lindsay couldn’t concentrate.
A few years later Lindsay gave up on The Witch. He left with the manuscript a note dated August 1942 and headed “Direction Concerning the Typescript of My Uncompleted Book The Witch.” It survives only in a transcription made by Robert Barnes in September 1945. It reads in full:
“The early chapters are in duplicate. The last chapter (unfinished) is numbered as to the pages. The numbered pages may probably have to be restored to their numerical order. There are also a quantity of sketch pages, and pages since revised, which should not be too carelessly destroyed. The whole book, which is unpublishable as it stands, requires deletion, reduction and revision. No one can do this but myself; nevertheless the book must by no means be destroyed or lost. It is, as to its material, one of the world’s greatest books, and cannot be replaced. I know no one who would understand it or appreciate it, save in parts. I do not wish Visiak to have the handling of it, and if he wishes to read it he should be put off. Bob Barnes is hardly intellectual enough to take in more than its general character; still, he could read it, under safeguards, if he ever asked to. Myers is not likely to want to read it, and would not appreciate it. My only hope is Andrew [Lindsay’s first grandchild, then not even one year old], if, in manhood, he shows, as I think he may, great musical and intellectual parts. I therefore wish to leave the typescript, with all the loose pages connected with it, to Diana [Lindsay’s elder daughter], to hold it in trust for Andrew, if the contingency arises; or to otherwise do what she pleases with the book, but on no account to destroy, lose of mislay it.”
After Lindsay’s death, parts of the manuscript were indeed lost, only to be found again in stages. An edited version of The Witch appeared in print, in the United States only, as part of the omnibus The Violet Apple and The Witch (1976), overseen by J.B. Pick (1921-2015), one of the preeminent Lindsay scholars who discovered Lindsay in 1946 and who first wrote on him as long ago as 1951 This omnibus also published for the first time Lindsay’s other finished novel, The Violet Apple, written in 1924 and revised between 1925 and 1927, but the publisher’s production qualities were not exactly the best (several passages of text were transposed, and the book’s chapter titles dropped), so that the standalone British edition of The Violet Apple (1978) is by far the preferred text. The situation with The Witch is more problematic. In 1980, Pick wrote: “When I first saw The Witch it was without either a beginning or an end. Then the first few chapters turned up. The copy used for publication in 1976 ended with Chapter 19. Very recently Lindsay’s elder daughter, Mrs. Diana Moon, came upon a Chapter 20 which, although it runs to 250 pages, is still incomplete, together with the final chapter (numbered 25) of a previous discarded version of the book” (Lines Review no. 75, December 1980).
Fortunately, the full manuscript of The Witch was thus re-gathered together, and it has resided in the National Library of Scotland since the early 1980s. We are now able to make a detailed analysis of what of The Witch was published in 1976—the only version of it published to date. The first nineteen chapters of The Witch comprise 389 typescript pages (circa eighty-five thousand words). Chapter 20, together with the final chapter (numbered 25) of a discarded version, comprise another 270 pages (circa sixty thousand words). There are additional draft pages, some of which are the same page (or pages) of text typed over and over again with very little variation. Not counting these draft pages, the surviving text of the unfinished novel comprises some one hundred and forty-five thousand words, which even at this length (one Lindsay himself recognized as too long—needing, as he said, deletion, reduction and revision) is less than three-quarters of the length of Devil’s Tor, which is around two hundred thousand words.
What Pick did in order to make a text for the 1976 publication was to prune the typescript available to him—this being the first nineteen chapters—down to just over half its size. He also renumbered many of the chapters, so that while the text that is published as Chapters 1 through 6 did indeed come from those respective chapters of Lindsay’s typescript, Pick’s Chapter 7 is made up from Chapters 7 and 8 of the typescript, and from there on through Pick’s Chapter 18, the chapter number of the original typescript is off by one (i.e., Pick’s Chapter 8 is from Chapter 9 of the typescript; successively on through Pick’s Chapter 18, which comes from Chapter 19 of the typescript). Pick’s Chapter 19 utilizes the remainder of Lindsay’s Chapter 19.. And Pick’s short Chapter 20 is Pick’s own account of some of Lindsay’s argument and of the stray pages then available.
I do not wish to criticize Pick. Under difficult circumstances he certainly did the best that he was allowed to do so that a representative text could be published. But the fact that forty years later the full surviving text of The Witch remains unpublished is frustrating to Lindsay readers and scholars. For it is a unique and remarkable book, though it is at the same time flawed and unfinished. It is a masterpiece in conception and partially so in execution.
The novel tells the story of an author, Ragnar Pole, who is very much like Lindsay himself, a writer of “major works of literary imagination” that are “read by few, comprehended by fewer, and wanted by none.” The Witch opens with Ragnar listening to a piano recital of one of Beethoven’s sonatas at a party at the house of a friend, Felix Wayland, the editor of a literary journal, the Memnon. The piano is being played by Cecilie Toller, who lives nearby but originally came from Vienna. Cecilie has brought to the party her visiting friends Marya Klangst, the violinist, and her ward or protégé, a young woman called Urda Noett. Afterwards Ragnar learns from Felix’s wife Lois that Felix wishes to speak with him upstairs. Ragnar goes, and he and Felix discuss the desperate financial shape of the Memnon. Ragnar is sympathetic, and will consider helping with the finances, but presently he feels increasingly disturbed mentally by something which he comes to realize is the presence in the house below of Urda Noett, who seems to represent some kind of supernatural agency. Ragnar excuses himself, and, at the beginning of Chapter 3, he retires to a tiny green-lit room near the staircase where he sits down to rest. Other significant characters of the novel include the medievalist Gaspary, and his daughter, Faustine, and a supposed friend of Gaspary’s, the mysterious Bluewr
ight, who seems in some way to be associated with death. Of Ragnar’s family, there is his brother Waldo and sisters Lenore and Elsa. Waldo’s wife is Adrienne. Ragnar is a bachelor, aged thirty-nine.
The plot of the novel is, at its most elemental, that Ragnar is allowed, while yet living, to pass through the three “musics” of death, in order to bear witness among mankind of these important matters. It is unfortunately impossible to discuss the achievement of the book without giving away the final revelation (which occurs in the uncancelled passages in Chapter 25 of a previous version of the book, which Lindsay retained, for it clearly shows Lindsay’s intention for the ending). The revelation is that the bulk of the novel never happened in Ragnar’s everyday world; that it has all been in essence a dream vision; that when Ragnar sat down in the tiny green-lit room at the beginning of Chapter 3, he never left it, and he returns to everyday consciousness still sitting there at the end of the book. His entire vision was inspired by the nearness of Urda Noett, who is the witch of the title, a “witch” meaning only a woman of remarkable spiritual attenuation. Ragnar in fact never meets Urda.
One factor that makes The Witch so brilliant is how gradually and skillfully Lindsay erodes the everyday world through language. Beginning just after Ragnar sits in the tiny greenlit room in Chapter 3, the writing becomes increasingly subjective and dreamlike, and Ragnar feels that “a kind of music was sounding in his ears.” Ragnar comes to learn of the three musics of death, each represented by one of the three musical women of the first chapter. Mrs. Toller is the nearest to earth, and her role is to liberate Ragnar from earthly concerns. When he encounters Mme. Klangst in Chapter 13, Ragnar passes through a supernatural purplish darkness, where he must rediscover in himself a principle of oneness (not of personality, but of his immortal soul). He is told that in the third music, his soul will “find heaven beyond heaven, distance beyond distance, and at last gain the wisdom of its own loneliness.” In Chapter 14, Ragnar is told that Urda is at Morion House, and he goes to meet her, though his progression through various spiritual landscapes and stages of being takes Lindsay another five chapters before, in Chapter 19, Ragnar finally approaches Urda. By this time, and throughout all there is of Chapter 20, the language has become ethereal, cadenced and with repetitive phrasings, almost like incantations, about the shadow-worlds and reality, the worlds and states of being, the undoubt of being, the living breath of Voice, the Meaning in translation, the ancientness of existence, and the journey of deathly being towards fulfillment. Pick aptly described this form of composition by saying that “Lindsay is not so much writing a novel as living a theology by a sort of dreaming through psychological states in a deliberately heightened prose of sonorous cadences.” Pick also noted wryly that Chapter 20 “on occasion reads like a translation by Carlyle of the most elusive speculations of Plotinus.”
Many readers will find this immensely challenging, and I cannot suggest that the last half of The Witch is anything other than difficult to read, and even more difficult to understand. But it has its rewards, and while reading or re-reading it, I always get the feeling of a kind of music playing in my mind—surely a feat of literary magic that Lindsay intended. The prose has movement, plot, direction, and meaning, and it seems to move like the sea in waves, ever-changing in detail yet for the most part revealing a consistent message, if one can grasp it. Summary cannot begin to do justice to Lindsay’s vision as expressed in this novel. Its readership will probably never be more than small, but those who can become attuned to its style will agree with the critic E.F. Bleiler, who, though he read only the abridged published version, called The Witch “one of the most remarkable, most thought-provoking works in the range of supernatural fiction.” J.B. Pick also once described it in a series of adjectives as “strange, powerful, creaking, beautiful, sombre, unearthly, labyrinthine.” It is each of those, and much more.
Lortz, Richard. Children of the Night (New York: Dell, 1974).
This little novel was nothing like what I was expecting it to be. Instead of a slightly cheesy vampires-in-New York City book, it turns out to be a bleak, haunting exposé into the home-life of several New York City children, who band together at night and kill vicariously. It is graphic, sexual, and horrific, served up with a generous helping of sleaze. Certainly horror, but with very little implied supernaturalism.
Lortz (1917-1980) published only five novels, and two others, Bereavements (1980) and Lovers Living, Lovers Dead (1977), are of supernatural interest. Children of the Night was reissued posthumously under the title Dracula’s Children (1981).
M
Maby, J. Cecil. By Stygian Waters (London: The Houghton Publishing Co, [1933]).
This collection of six stories is the only published fiction by J[oseph] Cecil Maby (1902-1971), who was born in South Africa but whose family immigrated to England when he was very young. Maby studied at Cheltenham College, and at the Imperial College of Science at London University. A legacy from his father’s will allowed Maby to pursue his own interests, resulting in a number of fringe scientific treatises, like The Physics of the Divining Rod (1939), co-written with T. Bedford Franklin, and further self-published books like Principles of Radiethesia (1966) and Confessions of a Sensitive: A Critical Study of the Paranormal and of Occult Faculties in Man (also 1966).
His writing style is digressive and clumsy. Of his six tales, “The Metamorphosis” and “The Caretaker” are short visions, the former an apocalyptic one. “The Elimination of Joseph Fisher” is a story of pre-vision and destiny. In “The Return of Roderick St. John,” the spirit of a dead man takes over the body of his younger brother. The two most interesting tales in the collection include “The Douglas Fir,” where a spirit appears in the wood cut from a certain Douglas Fir, and “The Artist’s Mother,” but both are ineptly told. The latter story is another example of pre-vision—where a visitor to an artist’s London home recollects seeing there a painting of the artist’s mother which was then in Italy. In a verbose preface, Maby relates that “the central pivot in several of these tales represents a fact of actual experience” and the stories take place upon the confines of reality, so they “may be termed borderland stories, rather than fictitious occultism.” Whatever. None of them are worth reading.
Macardle, Dorothy. Earth-bound: Nine Stories of Ireland. (Worcester, Massachusetts: The Harrigan Press, 1924).
Best remembered by the general public for her influential political history, The Irish Republic (1937), Dorothy Marguerita Callen Macardle (1889-1958) is known to readers of the supernatural primarily for her first novel, a gothic romance called Uneasy Freehold (1941), which was a bestseller in 1942 in America, where it was retitled The Uninvited and then successfully filmed under that name in 1944. Macardle’s three subsequent novels did not achieve such a high level of success.
Two decades earlier she had published her first volume of fiction, her only short story collection, Earth-bound: Nine Stories of Ireland. Macardle, a teacher at Alexandra College in Dublin, had begun to write these stories while in prison in 1923, after she had been jailed for her political activities. The stories mix together her interests in contemporary Irish politics and the supernatural. The main theme which recurs in the stories is that the dead are still here, earth-bound, affecting and interacting with the living. The nine stories are linked by a conceit: that they were told by Irish visitors to an expatriate Irish family in Philadelphia. The imprint is a fiction as well, for a label found in some copies of the book notes that the book was published in Ireland by the author at Frankfort House, Dartry, Dublin. Four of the nine stories were first published in Irish or Irish-American periodicals in 1924. The collection itself, though dated 1924, was published in January 1925.
All nine of the stories are excellent. “Earth-bound” tells of two republican men, on the run during the War of Independence, who are led to safety by a ghost. In “Samhain” the dead come to pray for an ailing priest. In “The Return of Niav,” a young mother watches her daughter waste away under t
he influence of a mysterious and fairy-like young girl. “The Portrait of Roisin Dhu” tells of an artist whose painting of an unnaturally beautiful woman draws the life from the woman herself. In “A Story without an End” a republican woman dreams that helping a fugitive will lead to the unlikely event of her husband’s death at the hands of men dressed in green, wearing the uniform of the I.R.A. The first part of her dream has come true, leaving her to worry about the second part.
These are elegant and well-written stories, highly recommended. An expanded edition of this collection was published by Dublin’s Swan River Press in 2016.
MacDonald, Ronald. The Laughing Elf (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1922). Illustrated by Roy Meldrum.
Soon after its publication, the critic Henry Savage called The Laughing Elf “a work of genius, bringing with it what Walter Pater calls ‘a strange new beauty’ . . . this book of fairy tales strung on a string as it were. The author is Ronald Macdonald, a son of that George MacDonald whose name is still one to conjure with” (Book Notes, February-March 1923, p. 77).
The particular tale of the Laughing Elf is the framing story which connects several otherwise independent tales. In it, an elf meets sorrow and learns to laugh. The sound of the laugh recurs in the remaining stories, causing significant moments of transformation for the characters. The frame-tale is a bit twee (as are the illustrations), but the other stories in the volume are of greater interest and of a higher order. They compare favorably to the fairy tales of the author’s father, George MacDonald.
Ronald Macdonald (1860-1933) was a schoolmaster before becoming a dramatist and novelist. He published fifteen novels, the first being The Sword of the King (1900), and the last being The Spandau Quid (1923), one of two novels published as by “Oliver Fleming,” written in collaboration with his son, Philip Macdonald, who became a detective novelist and Hollywood screen-writer. Ronald’s novel The Green Handkerchief, published in September 1922 (two months before The Laughing Elf), concerns an authoress who writes “lurid twaddle” for money to support her children, but who is revealed also to be the writer of insightful fairytales, one titled The Laughing Elf.
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