********************************************************** * * * Tea with E.H.Visiak * * * ********************************************************** G.C.Wraith 1/2/2003 On Wednesday July 1-st 1964 I had tea with E.H.Visiak at his flat in Adelaide Crescent in Hove. I had recognized his name in the Brighton and Hove telephone directory while looking up something, I forget what. His name I knew from his foreword in the 1963 Gollancz edition of David Lindsay's "A Voyage to Arcturus" which I had bought a few months earlier. This purchase was a culmination of a long search. When I was quite young this book was serialized on the BBC's Third Programme, and it had made a lasting impression on me. I looked for copies in secondhand bookshops, without success, and did not actually get to read it until 1957 when I went up to Cambridge as an undergraduate. I knew that Cambridge University Library was a copyright library and so should have it somewhere. They did, but I had to get a note from my tutor (Dr. Vyvyan) before they would let me at it, and even then I was only permitted to read it in the library reading room. I was not disappointed. Reading it brought back with equal force the sense of awe and immediacy of imagination of my earlier impression. I spent the last year of my Ph.D. at the Courant Institute in Washington Square, N.Y., as a Fulbright scholar. I read in the paper about a new university that had just started outside Brighton. I had been taken to visit Brighton by the mother of a schoolfriend who lived on the South Coast, and had liked it. On that visit I had experienced my first meal in a Chinese restaurant, and had bought my first secondhand book from Bredon's bookshop for the sum of one shilling - Lord Dunsany's "The Gods of Pegana", signed by its illustrator, S.H.Sime. A nostalgic memory of Brighton from the windy canyons of Manhattan was spur enough, and I wrote to the Physics department of Sussex University enquiring whether they could find a job for me. They could. I started at Sussex University in the Autumn of 1963. I had found a first floor flat with a balcony overlooking Marine Square. When I saw Visiak's name in the directory I rang him up and asked whether we could meet. He invited me to tea the next day. Adelaide Crescent is a grand Georgian terrace, with generous staircases and large rooms. Visiak's flat was two storeys up. The door was opened by his companion, whom I judged to be a man in his sixties with a military background. Visiak was eighty six years old, frail but alert. Evidently the younger man looked after him. They greeted me very courteously, saying that they did not have many visitors, especially young ones, and they were eager to know more about Sussex University. I offered to show them round, not that there was much to see in those early days, apart from the architecture of Falmer House and the rural charm of the campus. They accepted with delight, and a week later, on a fine sunny afternoon, I bundled them into my tiny mini for an outing. Although the day of my first visit to them was fine, my memory is of a large room, heavily curtained and rather dark. When my credentials had been established to their satisfaction, Visiak was happy to answer questions about David Lindsay and to tell me about himself. Visiak had a rather startling intensity. One story about himself sticks firmly in my mind, which underlines this quality. He said that at one point of his life he had lived in Manchester, which he did not like. Furthermore, he had made a vow that he would never leave Manchester - there were complicated reasons why which he either never told me or which I have forgotten - and this made his suffering worse. However, one day, after buying a secondhand book of verse by Milton, he had boarded a bus while loaded with parcels. The book dropped to the floor and opened at a page containing the sage advice that you should not stick blindly to stupid vows. This he took to be an omen of sufficient authority to release him from his Mancunian hell, and such was his gratitude to Milton for this that he devoted himself to studying his works. I believe he came to edit the Oxford Book of Milton. Visiak told me that he had been rescued from madness and depression by experiences of transcendent sublimity. This struck a sympathetic chord with me, because three years before, my brother, afflicted with schizophrenia, had made his way out of Fulbourn hospital and had thrown himself under a train. I felt I knew something about madness, and mania and depression. In my second year at Cambridge, in the middle of a lecture, while I was doodling a sort of construction on the green cardboard folder of my notes, I had a vision, all of a sudden. I was naked, floating over a pit radiating an intense light. But this visual description is deceitful because it is a minor detail. What mattered was an inward illumination, I know of no satisfactory words, that somehow gave meaning to meaning itself. To say that something is important, what do you mean? What I experienced I felt to be of supreme importance to myself - the touchstone of significance. How long it lasted I did not know. When I became aware of the desk in front of me again, I was aghast, shocked. My first thought was to name what had happened to me, to put a handle on it. My second was to baulk at this - not to name it, because it was holy, unnameable and ungraspable, and so I have never named it and never grasped it. It grasped me, would be a better description. I am sure many, many people have experienced what I experienced. About two weeks after this vision I had a remarkable dream. I was looking at a picture book that I had had as a child, before I could read. It had thick strong black cardboard pages, with simple coloured pictures of animals and flowers in the jungle. I turned the page and the pages became my whole field of vision - I was in the book. Before me was a total blackness, save for an infinitesimal point of intense brilliance. It could have been in front of my nose or infinitely far away. The lack of anything with any dimension meant that there was no way to gauge any sort of distance. Again I was siezed by the feeling of ultimate significance, and I woke. When I told my friend Anant Rajwade about my dream he was quite matter-of-fact about it. He said that what I had seen was a well-known phenomenon, called the "seed". I had this dream again once or twice, but, as with the experience in the lecture room, I was determined to leave it decently alone. I am a rationalist in the sense that I prefer to keep a civilized relationship with what I do not understand - including myself, of course. So when Visiak talked of his experiences I felt that, however inaccurately, I could sympathize with them. He told me a lot of things about David Lindsay, with whom he used to stay in Ferring. One clear night they went out for a stroll after supper. Lindsay stopped, looked up at the stars, and declared that this was not his world. "What is your world?" Visiak asked. "A blinding whiteness" was Lindsay's reply. About a year afterwards I received a telephone call from David Cecil, a writer I knew of, but whom I had never met. He enquired about Visiak and I told him about my encounters with him. Quite why he had telephoned me of all people, or how he had got my number, I never discovered. I think it may have been something to do with introducing Colin Wilson to Visiak and with the publication later, in 1970, of "The Strange Genius of David Lindsay" by Colin Wilson, J.B.Pick and E.H.Visiak (ISBN 21298361X).