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The Violet Apple
The Violet Apple was written in 1924 and after its rejection by publisher John Long, the author revised it between 1925 and 1926. There is a record of it having been refused once more before Lindsay withdrew it. It finally saw publication in America in a joint volume together with The Witch in 1976.
"It concerns an heirloom that is reputed to contain pips from the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, and when the heirloom is broken, someone plants the seeds, which grow forth a stunted apple tree, which blooms and gives fruit to two violet apples. A man and a woman separately eat of the fruits, and experience a metaphysical raising of consciousness" - Douglas A. Anderson.
"It concerns an heirloom that is reputed to contain pips from the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, and when the heirloom is broken, someone plants the seeds, which grow forth a stunted apple tree, which blooms and gives fruit to two violet apples. A man and a woman separately eat of the fruits, and experience a metaphysical raising of consciousness" - Douglas A. Anderson.
- GenresFiction
256 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1976
38 people want to read
About the author
David Lindsay
36 books98 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
David Lindsay was a Scottish author now most famous for the philosophical science fiction novel A Voyage to Arcturus.
Lindsay was born into a middle-class Scottish Calvinist family who had moved to London, tho growing up he spent much time in Jedburgh, where his family was from. Altho awarded a university scholarship, he was forced by poverty to enter business, becoming a Lloyd's of London insurance clerk. He was very successful but, after serving in WWI, at age forty, he moved to Cornwall with his young wife, Jacqueline Silver, to become a full-time writer. He published A Voyage to Arcturus in 1920. It sold 596 copies before being remaindered. This extremely strange work was not obviously influenced by anyone, but further reading shows links with other Scottish fantasists (e.g., Geo. MacDonald). It was in its turn a central influence on C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet.
Lindsay attempted to write more commercially with his next work The Haunted Woman (1922), but this was barely more successful than Voyage. He continued writing novels, including the humorous potboiler The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly, but after Devil's Tor in 1932 he found publication increasingly difficult and spent much time on his last work The Witch, published posthumously.
He and his wife opened a Brighton boarding house. They did not prosper and their marriage underwent considerable strain. The house was damaged by the first bomb to fall on Brighton in WWII. In his bath at the time, Lindsay never recovered from the shock. His death from infection caused by a tooth abscess was unrelated to the bomb.
A Voyage to Arcturus has been described as the major underground novel of the 20th century. The secret of Lindsay's apparent strangeness lies in his metaphysical assumptions. A gnostic, he viewed the "real" world as an illusion which must be rejected in order to perceive genuine truth. In The Haunted Woman, the two main characters discover a room which exists only some of the time. Together there they see more clearly and express themselves honestly. In The Violet Apple, the fruit is that eaten by Adam and Eve. The description of its effects is a startling, lyrical episode in a novel otherwise concerned with ordinary matters.
Lindsay's austere vision of reality may have been influenced by Scandinavian mythology. After being out of print for decades, his work has become increasingly available. He is now seen as being a major Scottish fantasist of the 20th century, the missing link between George Macdonald and modern writers such as Alasdair Gray who have also used surrealism and magic realism.
Arcturus was produced as a 35mm feature film by William J. Holloway in 1971. It was the first film funded by a National Endowment for the Arts and has recently been re-released.
Harold Bloom has also been interested, even obsessed, with Lindsay's life and career, going as far as to publish The Flight to Lucifer, which he thought of as a Bloomian misprision, an homage and deep revision of Arcturus,/i>. Bloom admits his late-comer imitation is overwhelmed by Lindsay's great original.
Bibliography:
A Voyage to Arcturus, 1920
The Haunted Woman, 1922
Sphinx, 1923
The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly, 1926
Devil's Tor, 1932
The Violet Apple & The Witch, 1976
A Christmas Play, 2003
Further reading:
The Strange Genius of David Lindsay: An Appreciation by J. B. Pick, E. H. Visiak & Colin Wilson, 1970
The Life & Works of David Lindsay by Bernard Sellin, 1983
David Lindsay's Vision by David Power, 2005
David Lindsay was a Scottish author now most famous for the philosophical science fiction novel A Voyage to Arcturus.
Lindsay was born into a middle-class Scottish Calvinist family who had moved to London, tho growing up he spent much time in Jedburgh, where his family was from. Altho awarded a university scholarship, he was forced by poverty to enter business, becoming a Lloyd's of London insurance clerk. He was very successful but, after serving in WWI, at age forty, he moved to Cornwall with his young wife, Jacqueline Silver, to become a full-time writer. He published A Voyage to Arcturus in 1920. It sold 596 copies before being remaindered. This extremely strange work was not obviously influenced by anyone, but further reading shows links with other Scottish fantasists (e.g., Geo. MacDonald). It was in its turn a central influence on C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet.
Lindsay attempted to write more commercially with his next work The Haunted Woman (1922), but this was barely more successful than Voyage. He continued writing novels, including the humorous potboiler The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly, but after Devil's Tor in 1932 he found publication increasingly difficult and spent much time on his last work The Witch, published posthumously.
He and his wife opened a Brighton boarding house. They did not prosper and their marriage underwent considerable strain. The house was damaged by the first bomb to fall on Brighton in WWII. In his bath at the time, Lindsay never recovered from the shock. His death from infection caused by a tooth abscess was unrelated to the bomb.
A Voyage to Arcturus has been described as the major underground novel of the 20th century. The secret of Lindsay's apparent strangeness lies in his metaphysical assumptions. A gnostic, he viewed the "real" world as an illusion which must be rejected in order to perceive genuine truth. In The Haunted Woman, the two main characters discover a room which exists only some of the time. Together there they see more clearly and express themselves honestly. In The Violet Apple, the fruit is that eaten by Adam and Eve. The description of its effects is a startling, lyrical episode in a novel otherwise concerned with ordinary matters.
Lindsay's austere vision of reality may have been influenced by Scandinavian mythology. After being out of print for decades, his work has become increasingly available. He is now seen as being a major Scottish fantasist of the 20th century, the missing link between George Macdonald and modern writers such as Alasdair Gray who have also used surrealism and magic realism.
Arcturus was produced as a 35mm feature film by William J. Holloway in 1971. It was the first film funded by a National Endowment for the Arts and has recently been re-released.
Harold Bloom has also been interested, even obsessed, with Lindsay's life and career, going as far as to publish The Flight to Lucifer, which he thought of as a Bloomian misprision, an homage and deep revision of Arcturus,/i>. Bloom admits his late-comer imitation is overwhelmed by Lindsay's great original.
Bibliography:
A Voyage to Arcturus, 1920
The Haunted Woman, 1922
Sphinx, 1923
The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly, 1926
Devil's Tor, 1932
The Violet Apple & The Witch, 1976
A Christmas Play, 2003
Further reading:
The Strange Genius of David Lindsay: An Appreciation by J. B. Pick, E. H. Visiak & Colin Wilson, 1970
The Life & Works of David Lindsay by Bernard Sellin, 1983
David Lindsay's Vision by David Power, 2005
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 4, 2014
Though this morning I was glad to be done with this book, this afternoon it exerts a strange pull on me. There is a weird power in every book of Lindsay’s I’ve read, which I partially attribute to his grim determination to put into exact words the extra-lingual details of his metaphysics, especially as words did not seem to come too easily to him. He was a man who surely needed to express his philosophy, for his own personal benefit, but for some reason he chose to use fiction as his vehicle. I suspect he would have been much more technically successful if he had chosen a direct aphoristic form, but then he was also highly systematic, and also enjoyed tales of adventure (at least in his youth), so I suppose he decided literature was a viable option, and had an air of practicality which satisfied his Scottishness. But the man could not write! Yet still his books have a weird power that lingers in the mind.
Part of this power surely stems from his undeniable sincerity and his determination to express the profundity of his thoughts, but part of the power also comes from his very limitations as a writer. These limitations allow his efforts to express himself to show through the story’s surface, so that as he struggles to bring into expression the metaphysical realities that seethe beneath life’s surface the theme of these realities exploding into mundane life is made more tangible by the reading experience. One can feel them down there beneath the surface as one reads awkward accounts of family gatherings and dinner parties, and one has plenty of opportunity to feel them in The Violet Apple as a good 85% of the book is taken up by a highly detailed account of what I can only call “sexual politics” among a small group of friends and family. But even here his strange power exerts itself, at least in retrospect as the themes settled into my mind and worked their way into my thoughts. Reading through it, though, was a burdensome chore.
The story is a literal retelling of the eating of the apple in Eden in a rather stuffy 20th century setting. The apple is a literal apple, grown from a millennial old seed that was directly descended from Eden’s tree. Two couples are disrupted by the eating of the apples, as “Eve” and “Adam” upon tasting the fruit fully realize they are meant for each other, though each is engaged to another.
I admit that while reading this my main interest was in the descriptions of the ecstasy each felt after eating the apples, as Lindsay always does this part of his stories very well. He might just unbutton the top button of his writer’s jacket during these passages, but this unbuttoning is felt all the more because of his typically extreme restraint. But this was the source of my initial disappointment with the book, as Lindsay did not linger in this other world of ecstasy. He instead used its rather brief appearance to throw even more light on the cramped dynamics of the world of sexual politics.
Though the after-effects were very interesting as “Adam” and “Eve” lost their previous abilities to navigate that world, as each could see the true soul of a person by looking at their face. “Eve” lost the ability to assemble an attractive outfit, since she could no longer harmonize colors and fabrics and instead could only evaluate colors on an individual basis. “Adam” dropped out of his career as a successful playwright because of its shallowness, and the inherent shallowness of verbal expression in general, so that he could move to the country and get closer to the elements. And the book ends on an optimistic note (rare for Lindsay) as the two decide to merge their lives, beyond sexual politics, though how exactly this is to happen is left up in the air.
So, though I can hardly imagine wading through this book again, its awkward lumbering power lingers, accentuated by the poignancy inherent in Lindsay’s struggles to express himself, and thus to save himself by attempting to clarify his philosophy as it continued to evolve from book to book. His was no moribund philosophy, but a living one, and so this too adds to the weird power his books exert.
Part of this power surely stems from his undeniable sincerity and his determination to express the profundity of his thoughts, but part of the power also comes from his very limitations as a writer. These limitations allow his efforts to express himself to show through the story’s surface, so that as he struggles to bring into expression the metaphysical realities that seethe beneath life’s surface the theme of these realities exploding into mundane life is made more tangible by the reading experience. One can feel them down there beneath the surface as one reads awkward accounts of family gatherings and dinner parties, and one has plenty of opportunity to feel them in The Violet Apple as a good 85% of the book is taken up by a highly detailed account of what I can only call “sexual politics” among a small group of friends and family. But even here his strange power exerts itself, at least in retrospect as the themes settled into my mind and worked their way into my thoughts. Reading through it, though, was a burdensome chore.
The story is a literal retelling of the eating of the apple in Eden in a rather stuffy 20th century setting. The apple is a literal apple, grown from a millennial old seed that was directly descended from Eden’s tree. Two couples are disrupted by the eating of the apples, as “Eve” and “Adam” upon tasting the fruit fully realize they are meant for each other, though each is engaged to another.
I admit that while reading this my main interest was in the descriptions of the ecstasy each felt after eating the apples, as Lindsay always does this part of his stories very well. He might just unbutton the top button of his writer’s jacket during these passages, but this unbuttoning is felt all the more because of his typically extreme restraint. But this was the source of my initial disappointment with the book, as Lindsay did not linger in this other world of ecstasy. He instead used its rather brief appearance to throw even more light on the cramped dynamics of the world of sexual politics.
Though the after-effects were very interesting as “Adam” and “Eve” lost their previous abilities to navigate that world, as each could see the true soul of a person by looking at their face. “Eve” lost the ability to assemble an attractive outfit, since she could no longer harmonize colors and fabrics and instead could only evaluate colors on an individual basis. “Adam” dropped out of his career as a successful playwright because of its shallowness, and the inherent shallowness of verbal expression in general, so that he could move to the country and get closer to the elements. And the book ends on an optimistic note (rare for Lindsay) as the two decide to merge their lives, beyond sexual politics, though how exactly this is to happen is left up in the air.
So, though I can hardly imagine wading through this book again, its awkward lumbering power lingers, accentuated by the poignancy inherent in Lindsay’s struggles to express himself, and thus to save himself by attempting to clarify his philosophy as it continued to evolve from book to book. His was no moribund philosophy, but a living one, and so this too adds to the weird power his books exert.
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