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Sphinx
Published by Nodens Books, with an Introduction by Douglas A. Anderson. In Sphinx (1923), Nicholas Cabot has come to a countryhouse called Mereway where he plans to work on a machine he has invented that records dreams. He encounters a family with three marriageable daughters, and takes refuges from them in the company of some neighbors, including the calculating Celia Hantish and the well-known composer Lore Jensen, who has written a tune called “Sphinx" which hints at the riddle of existence. Meanwhile as Cabot experiments with his machine, he finds that dreams give access to a deeper meaning of life.
228 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1923
4 people are currently reading
133 people want to read
About the author
David Lindsay
36 books96 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 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 7, 2024
Far be it for me to deny the work of a great all round scholar and renaissance man like Colin Wilson, but does he really understand David Lindsay? Does anyone? Am I reaching when I feel so differently about him than do many of his critics? I've read three of his books now and all have been revelations to some degree. Mr. Wilson seems to like to talk about Lindsay and his obviously awkard and clumsy friend, fellow writer E.H. Visiak, as if they were the same person, or thought about the world in the same way. After reading Visiak's Medusa, and a little bit of his terrible nautical poetry, I really think this isn't the case! Visiak may be uncomfortable about sex, clumsy at writing, and maybe a bit misogynistic; I don't think Lindsay is any of those things, and maybe that's part of the reason why the reported arguments between these two could be so stormy?
David Lindsay is very much a forgotten writer today, and if he's discussed at all, it's for his debut novel, the incredibly strange and powerful A Voyage to Arcturus. his other works don't take place on other planets full of detailed geography and bizarre forms of life, but they seem equally strange in their own way, with the Edwardian conventionality being, in my opinion at least, a mere mask through which you catch startling, powerful glimpses of Lindsay's real genius. If you like, you can see the Edwardian setting of his later novels, and their stuffy drawing rooms and social mores, as Crystalman's world (the false world of the demiurge), which the characters, in their own ways, are trying to pierce through, to find the real centre of things. In Lindsay's second novel, The haunted Woman, there was only one character, the protagonist Isbel, who needed to pierce this veil, but here in [i]Sphinx[/i], it's everyone.
I found this book to be really moving, and was really captivated by it in a way I find not too easy to explain. There is such an undercurrent of stormy desire, a need to escape, to break away from social conventions and irritating standards, present in nearly every character. Further belaying the accusations leveled against Lindsay by, E.G., Joanna Russ, to me, this also feels like a work espousing the virtues of feminism, with all the women characters being very strong and vibrant, speaking for themselves with great passion and deploring the strictures that society forces them to follow. Everyone copes in their way, but those ways can often be destructive. You feel for every one of these people though, even when they're not always very likeable. The person who appears to be our protagonist, Nicholas Cabot, is cold and a little harsh, but also has moments of visionary clarity. Lindsay can't seem to help but bring in thoughts of interplanetary romance, too, even if this isn't that kind of book, when Nicholas ruminates about humanity's legend being carried to the far reaches of time and space, and what this could ultimately mean -- if anything. he's invented a machine that can record people's dreams -- that's the element of science fiction that underpins this book, but moreso, it allows for the characters to have genuine out-of-this-world experiences and to share them with one another. It's beautiful and terrible, all at once, and throughout the book, all sorts of implications and existential quandaries are discussed. I enjoyed the obscure way in which the riddle of the Sphinx was incorporated, too.
Ultimately, the book is tragic, in a way, but also ends on such a poignant note of both hope and melancholy. I think I raised the rating an entire star because of the last chapter: It's absolutely gorgeous, and heartbreaking. I had a feeling what was coming and I think I actually cried out when the moment came, and then Lindsay took me into this powerful, symbolic dream of understanding and pathos that is so, so far beyond the conventionality of the book's setting, that I was left with absolutely no doubt in my mind that David lindsay was a sort of emotional rebel, a man of great complexity who was probably not at home in his time or place, and maybe never would have been. Just thinking about this last chapter makes my eyes prickle, it was such a moving and emotional experience, almost like the end of Arcturus in its transcendental quality, but far more personal, emotional, human. If the revelation at the end of Arcturus is that the only thing to suffice is a grim battle between the forces of the true creator and the demiurge, the revelation of Sphinx is one of final understanding and beauty amidst death and despair. I felt so bad for Evelyn, who thought she was doing the best thing, but only ended up making a terrible mistake. She seems to be the one in Lindsay's mind, like isbel in The haunted Woman, who has made the terrible but necessary spiritual transition, who has looked into the mirror and seen not only the vision of herself, but reached the plateau of understanding. in her descent, which will doubtless lead to years of pain for her in the real world in which she must live, she has also ascended to a higher level of consciousness. In a way, lindsay's confirming what he set out in his earlier books: That pain, dissonance, ugliness even, are necessary, and that they can actaully make us into better people. The philosophy seems at times stark and harsh, but I think in his more "conventional" settings, lindsay has managed to transmute his metaphors about spirituality and life into something a little more comprehensible, more humanely emotional, and shows an outlook that is far more wise and tolerant than you might at first expect. he shows sympathy for every one of his characters, even the rakish type who is described earlier in the texxt in pretty unflattering terms, and I don't mean that he just gets us to relate to him in the way that any good writer should, but actually categorically says in the end that he will be allright, that the experiences he's had in this story will devastate him but that he'll return a stronger and better person. In order to bring all those transitions about though, there must be death and loss.
The real tragedy for me is that Lindsay died impoverished and sad and silent, stoically refusing to take care of his own health issues, scarred by the second World War and never achieving the dream of being a successful writer. Why not? I've asked myself that quite a few times, and i don't know the answer. This book is accessible, and even if it didn't seem to meet with success in 1922 when it was published, I really think it deserves some serious appraisal now, over 100 years on. it's so clear and obvious to me that Lindsay is railing against the sensibilities of his time and the generation in which he grew up, that I almost have to doubt myself when not many others really seem to see it, not even a psychologically astute man like Colin Wilson. My sense of being pulled somewhere deeper and more passionate by this book was so strong though that I really don't think I'm wrong, and I believe David Lindsay has just been misconstrued and misunderstood consistently for a hundred years. That's kind of wild to me, but there you go. Maybe if lindsay had as much scholarship as, say, a Henry james, the majority of people would feel differently about him and his work, but he remains an incredibly obscure writer, despite the great interest his seminal work of SF/weird fiction, A Voyage to Arcturus, continues to generate in certain circles.
I don't know who'll read this or who might actually feel as much from this book as i did, but I urge you to give it a try. Don't be fooled by those stuffy drawing rooms and the patently silly stuff, like neighbours writing huffy notes to one another when they're upset instead of talking face to face. That's not the thing. The melodrama in this book is a background -- not without interest, but moreso because of the characters' attempts to puncture it, especially the women characters. When I first read Arcturus I kind of thought Lindsay might be the dour, conservative Scotsman some of his critics (even some who enjoy the book) seem to want to paint him as, but with three of his books now accumulated together in my mind, I really feel strongly that this isn't the case. Sphinx was for me a profound emotional experience that hit me right in the heart, and that last chapter shook me in such a way that I was left a bundle of contradictory feelings, both elated and incredibly sad at the same time, but also, with the feeling I'd just touched something of greatness.
Poor Evelyn, though. The book ends just as her terrible journey is about to begin. But we don't need to read about it. That would just be more melodrama, wouldn't it? It's enough for us to imagine it, and shed some tears for her.
David Lindsay is very much a forgotten writer today, and if he's discussed at all, it's for his debut novel, the incredibly strange and powerful A Voyage to Arcturus. his other works don't take place on other planets full of detailed geography and bizarre forms of life, but they seem equally strange in their own way, with the Edwardian conventionality being, in my opinion at least, a mere mask through which you catch startling, powerful glimpses of Lindsay's real genius. If you like, you can see the Edwardian setting of his later novels, and their stuffy drawing rooms and social mores, as Crystalman's world (the false world of the demiurge), which the characters, in their own ways, are trying to pierce through, to find the real centre of things. In Lindsay's second novel, The haunted Woman, there was only one character, the protagonist Isbel, who needed to pierce this veil, but here in [i]Sphinx[/i], it's everyone.
I found this book to be really moving, and was really captivated by it in a way I find not too easy to explain. There is such an undercurrent of stormy desire, a need to escape, to break away from social conventions and irritating standards, present in nearly every character. Further belaying the accusations leveled against Lindsay by, E.G., Joanna Russ, to me, this also feels like a work espousing the virtues of feminism, with all the women characters being very strong and vibrant, speaking for themselves with great passion and deploring the strictures that society forces them to follow. Everyone copes in their way, but those ways can often be destructive. You feel for every one of these people though, even when they're not always very likeable. The person who appears to be our protagonist, Nicholas Cabot, is cold and a little harsh, but also has moments of visionary clarity. Lindsay can't seem to help but bring in thoughts of interplanetary romance, too, even if this isn't that kind of book, when Nicholas ruminates about humanity's legend being carried to the far reaches of time and space, and what this could ultimately mean -- if anything. he's invented a machine that can record people's dreams -- that's the element of science fiction that underpins this book, but moreso, it allows for the characters to have genuine out-of-this-world experiences and to share them with one another. It's beautiful and terrible, all at once, and throughout the book, all sorts of implications and existential quandaries are discussed. I enjoyed the obscure way in which the riddle of the Sphinx was incorporated, too.
Ultimately, the book is tragic, in a way, but also ends on such a poignant note of both hope and melancholy. I think I raised the rating an entire star because of the last chapter: It's absolutely gorgeous, and heartbreaking. I had a feeling what was coming and I think I actually cried out when the moment came, and then Lindsay took me into this powerful, symbolic dream of understanding and pathos that is so, so far beyond the conventionality of the book's setting, that I was left with absolutely no doubt in my mind that David lindsay was a sort of emotional rebel, a man of great complexity who was probably not at home in his time or place, and maybe never would have been. Just thinking about this last chapter makes my eyes prickle, it was such a moving and emotional experience, almost like the end of Arcturus in its transcendental quality, but far more personal, emotional, human. If the revelation at the end of Arcturus is that the only thing to suffice is a grim battle between the forces of the true creator and the demiurge, the revelation of Sphinx is one of final understanding and beauty amidst death and despair. I felt so bad for Evelyn, who thought she was doing the best thing, but only ended up making a terrible mistake. She seems to be the one in Lindsay's mind, like isbel in The haunted Woman, who has made the terrible but necessary spiritual transition, who has looked into the mirror and seen not only the vision of herself, but reached the plateau of understanding. in her descent, which will doubtless lead to years of pain for her in the real world in which she must live, she has also ascended to a higher level of consciousness. In a way, lindsay's confirming what he set out in his earlier books: That pain, dissonance, ugliness even, are necessary, and that they can actaully make us into better people. The philosophy seems at times stark and harsh, but I think in his more "conventional" settings, lindsay has managed to transmute his metaphors about spirituality and life into something a little more comprehensible, more humanely emotional, and shows an outlook that is far more wise and tolerant than you might at first expect. he shows sympathy for every one of his characters, even the rakish type who is described earlier in the texxt in pretty unflattering terms, and I don't mean that he just gets us to relate to him in the way that any good writer should, but actually categorically says in the end that he will be allright, that the experiences he's had in this story will devastate him but that he'll return a stronger and better person. In order to bring all those transitions about though, there must be death and loss.
The real tragedy for me is that Lindsay died impoverished and sad and silent, stoically refusing to take care of his own health issues, scarred by the second World War and never achieving the dream of being a successful writer. Why not? I've asked myself that quite a few times, and i don't know the answer. This book is accessible, and even if it didn't seem to meet with success in 1922 when it was published, I really think it deserves some serious appraisal now, over 100 years on. it's so clear and obvious to me that Lindsay is railing against the sensibilities of his time and the generation in which he grew up, that I almost have to doubt myself when not many others really seem to see it, not even a psychologically astute man like Colin Wilson. My sense of being pulled somewhere deeper and more passionate by this book was so strong though that I really don't think I'm wrong, and I believe David Lindsay has just been misconstrued and misunderstood consistently for a hundred years. That's kind of wild to me, but there you go. Maybe if lindsay had as much scholarship as, say, a Henry james, the majority of people would feel differently about him and his work, but he remains an incredibly obscure writer, despite the great interest his seminal work of SF/weird fiction, A Voyage to Arcturus, continues to generate in certain circles.
I don't know who'll read this or who might actually feel as much from this book as i did, but I urge you to give it a try. Don't be fooled by those stuffy drawing rooms and the patently silly stuff, like neighbours writing huffy notes to one another when they're upset instead of talking face to face. That's not the thing. The melodrama in this book is a background -- not without interest, but moreso because of the characters' attempts to puncture it, especially the women characters. When I first read Arcturus I kind of thought Lindsay might be the dour, conservative Scotsman some of his critics (even some who enjoy the book) seem to want to paint him as, but with three of his books now accumulated together in my mind, I really feel strongly that this isn't the case. Sphinx was for me a profound emotional experience that hit me right in the heart, and that last chapter shook me in such a way that I was left a bundle of contradictory feelings, both elated and incredibly sad at the same time, but also, with the feeling I'd just touched something of greatness.
Poor Evelyn, though. The book ends just as her terrible journey is about to begin. But we don't need to read about it. That would just be more melodrama, wouldn't it? It's enough for us to imagine it, and shed some tears for her.
April 29, 2010
Sphinx is a marvellous book which I re-read often and always get more from.
It is difficult to say anything about Lindsay's writing that does it justice. His style is his own, created for his own purposes.
There is a flaw in this edition : It has two pages printed twice and two omitted that are present in the first edition and in the recent Resonance Bookworks edition.
For about ten years, however, it was the only edition I had and I loved it despite the suspicion there was some missing in the closing chapters.
It is difficult to say anything about Lindsay's writing that does it justice. His style is his own, created for his own purposes.
There is a flaw in this edition : It has two pages printed twice and two omitted that are present in the first edition and in the recent Resonance Bookworks edition.
For about ten years, however, it was the only edition I had and I loved it despite the suspicion there was some missing in the closing chapters.
August 2, 2017
The fantastic elements could have made for a good short story, but the plot seems to be padded out to bring it to novel length. The conceit of a machine that can record dreams seems little more than an afterthought. Most of the novel is given to a Victorian melodrama of manners, and the main character, Nicholas, is distinctly unlikable.
July 28, 2017
This is essentially a book set in much older England that has to do with the lives of certain fairly rich people. Normally a novel with that setting would put me off immediately, but whether it's the amazing scenes Lindsay writes that instantly transport you or how surprisingly well written this novel is, I instantly fell for it. Almost as if I, the reader, became a Nicholas to the story's Ms.Hantish
December 13, 2022
On the surface a simple story about passions in a small middle class community in the 1920s, wrapped in social mores, with a substory about a device to record dreams. After finishing it though, I began to see it as more a parable about people struggling for emotional freedom in a highly restrictive setting. The dream recordings are used to illuminate the characters in ways that would be hard to bring out in the main narrative.
June 17, 2018
Anyone reading this purely because its author also wrote A Voyage to Arcturus is likely to be very disappointed. There are a couple of pages towards the end that suggest the same brilliance; otherwise it's a competently written tale of middle-class relationships in 1920s Hampshire, unexceptional but with a certain dated charm. The supernatural element is interesting but very slight.
January 17, 2023
I wonder if anyone has ever looked into David Lindsay at a male feminist writer … the story again could have been wrapped up in about three chapters but it went on and on and on to which avail? I am none the wiser only that having tea is of utter importance!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews