David Lindsay's Sphinx
Lindsay's Third Strike
Everything David Lindsay wrote was a failure. His first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), is a mad thing, soaked in a deeply realized personal metaphysic, and filled with strange beings—with extra eyes and extra arms—who inhabit otherworldly landscapes. Tolkien admired it. C.S. Lewis was deeply influenced by it. But it sold a a whole 596 copies of the 1st edition. Lindsay then decided to dial things back and put out something a little more commercial. The Haunted Woman (1922) was the result. It, too, is a wild and wonderful book, and it, too, sold poorly. Which brings us to Sphinx (1923) where Lindsay made even further efforts to write something in line with the popular taste. Guess what? His third novel flopped like a fish.
Lindsay wrote several more genre-bending books before he died just after WWII, though he had difficulty finding a publisher for them.
Then Lindsay was discovered in the 1960s and 1970s. Hippies looking for cool stuff to read while they were on acid followed the breadcrumbs leading from Tolkien and Lewis to Voyage. And indeed, there is no book so trippy as A Voyage to Arcturus.
This resurgence of interest eventually led to Sphinx being reprinted by Xanadu Publishing in 1988, as part of The Supernatural Library.
So here we are.
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Nicholas Cabot, an independent researcher/amateur scientist, has used a newly attained inheritance to rent a room in the country so he might pursue his chemical research. He is building a device meant to record dreams and play them back as a movie. He has a prototype, but wants to create a machine large enough to record dreams of much greater length. For some reason, Cabot notes at one point early on in the novel, it is necessary that he remain celibate while he finishes his research.
However, Cabot lands-up in a house owned by a retired actor named Sturt, and finds himself surrounded by young, pretty women who know he has come into a small fortune. They include Sturt’s daughters Audrey, Evelyn and Katherine; successful but troubled composer Lore Jensen; and charming, rich widow Celia Hantish. Cabot’s various exploits with these women take up the bulk of the novel, as he attempts to build his scientific device in the face of the pleasurable diversions of upper middle-class English Society just after WWI.
Cabot records short “clips” of his own dreams on his prototype, and shows them to Evelyn Sturt, who has become a kind of partner in his research, having recognized its importance. These clips seem precognitive, and show Lore Jensen in great danger, perhaps about to be murdered. But upon waking, Cabot can never remember the longer sequence from which they have been excerpted. Since the future site of this potential murder is a party to be given by Lady Wyburn, a rich neighbor, Cabot strives fitfully to complete the upgrades to his machine before this event so that he can record a complete dream on it that will allow the shorter bits to be better understood. Perhaps this way disaster can be averted.
Party day arrives without this longer dream having been dreamt, however, and disaster results. Lore is found drowned. The police arrive and the party dissolves into acrimony
Next night Cabot decides to run his new recorder so as to finally let his vision unfold on it. But Evelyn Sturt fears what this dream will show. She doses Cabot with an extra shot of sleeping potion, and steals his machine, which she places in front of her unconscious father, who she hopes will pass the the night uneventfully.
But it turns out that Lore Jensen was Mr. Sturt’s illegitimate daughter, so his dream proves to be a follow-up to Cabot’s. It becomes clear that Jenson’s death was a suicide, and that the act finally allowed her to throw off the chains of this world and achieve a higher mode of existence. Father and daughter meet, and hug, and Jenson rides off on a white horse, accompanied by a second personage who reveals himself to be Nicholas Cabot. Lindsay writes that these two greet one another as old friends, though they were not particularly friendly during the “realistic” sections of the book. Their horses take flight, and they disappear into the sky.
Evelyn wakes and discovers that the extra dose of sleeping potion she fed Cabot has killed him…
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So, to get a few things out of the way: it’s a pretty good book. The drawing-room stuff, an Edwardian Comedy of manners of the kind that had already made a limited appearance in The Haunted Woman, entertains in the moment, even if its plotlines become convoluted and hard to follow. Thematically, these bits highlight the idea present in all Lindsay’s work that our day-to-day existence is fake, a brittle artifice ready to shatter and reveal…something. For example, Cabot is told that the Sturt girls’ emotional outbursts cannot be trusted as real because their father was an actor and they have “stage blood” in them. There is an entire chapter called “Celia Explains The True Position” which details the “fibs” Celia wants told to accomplish certain social ends. Some critics have suggested that the reader dislikes these people for their constant subterfuge, but I don’t find that true. What is true though is that their entire lives seem to consist of the playing of moves in an elaborate social game, the purpose of which is not clear. And this is where the books convoluted mid-section works as fiction The reader may not see the point of the whole exercise, but the players are still condemned to play on regardless.
And it ends well. The reader is invested enough in the major characters that when Lore and Cabot die it is a real blow, and in the case of Cabot a wicked final plot-twist. Furthermore, in the dream sequences, in particular Sturt’s final dream, Lindsay nears Voyage to Arcturus levels of mind-blowingness.
As an aside, this novel is also Lindsay’s most openly autobiographical, with both Cabot and Lore Jenson standing-in for the author in different ways. For example, it is said that while Jenson’s earlier work (including a piece called Sphinx, from which the novel gets its title) were attempts at Art, she has since turned to commercial hackery to pay the bills. The parallels between her musical career and Lindsay’s writing career are hard to miss. Worth noting again is the final dream, which has our celibate, tee-totaling scientist and our dissolute, pill-popping musician riding off into the afterlife together like long-time pals. But after all they are the novel’s two truth seekers, one through Science and the other through Music; perhaps they finally see this quality in one another.
Finally, we should put aside the notion, promoted by Colin Wilson in the introduction to Sphinx and elsewhere, that Lindsay was a genius stuck in the body of an 2nd rate prose stylist (not exactly his words, but close enough). For one thing, Wilson obviously never read Theodore Dreiser, who was an author of great novels (like An American Tragedy) filled with truly awful sentences (“Biltz and the fungoid farm land after Clyde and Lycurgus was depressing enough to Roberta…” being one of my favorites). Lindsay’s prose may not be particularly distinguished, but it is perfectly serviceable, and its occasional bluntness works well when his novels are in their deepest, most fantastical waters. In any case, the Xanadu edition of Sphinx, where Wilson’s introduction appears, does Lindsay no favors. There are a couple of occasions where long passages repeat word for word, and, I think, there is at least one page missing somewhere near the end of the book.
On the other hand, if the reader comes to Sphinx looking for “the supernatural”, which is indeed a term that appears prominently on the cover, they won’t find much, and may feel they have been lured under false pretenses. For while the dream sequences are impressively done, especially Mr. Sturt’s final vision, they comprise only a few short chapters. The rest of it is Cabot going to dinner or to tea and so forth. So, it wouldn’t be the first book I would recommend to the reader, if they are looking vintage Lindsay. That would be Voyage, followed by The Haunted Woman. If they were still interested afterwards, I would point then them towards Sphinx: same vibe, but mellower.
PS. As noted previously I thought I had lost this book. Turns out it was right at hand all along, disguising itself as another book.
PPS. Something I didn’t know: Lindsay’s older brother Alexander also wrote science fiction under the name of Alexander Crawford. There is a lost world novel among his works, so I imagine he is now on my find list.
PPPS: Best site on the Net for information on Lindsay is hands-down Violet Apple.