mewsings in June 2024

Myers’s second novel, The Clio — or The “Clio”, to be precise — was published in 1925, and it’s instantly obvious he’s improved as a writer. The prose is cut back but vivid in its descriptions, and simpler in depicting action. He has a larger cast of characters but handles them with a lighter, more distanced touch, with occasional glimpses into their inner lives, rather than extended digressions. There’s a lot more dialogue, and it doesn’t consist of people lecturing one another — or, thankfully, reading out essays to each other. It’s also shorter, around 60,000 words to the previous novel’s 150,000. There’s an air of lightness to the whole thing: the prose, the plot, the characters, the theme — though the second half takes a turn which gives the book enough of a bite that it’s in no danger of being mere froth.

The “Clio” of the title is “probably the most expensive steam-yacht in the world”. At the start of the book it’s heading down the east coast of America, and, seemingly on a whim, its owner Harry Oswestry decides to take it down the Amazon. On board are a collection of mostly wealthy idlers, who don’t really care where they go, as long as it’s vaguely distracting. Lady Oswestry, Harry’s mother, is mostly concerned with finding somewhere she can buy her favourite face-cream, so as to hold back the wrinkles long enough to catch the attention of Sir James Annesley. Her younger son, Hugo, is wondering whether to go into politics, but is more concerned with which of the young ladies on board he should fall in love with. Of the young ladies, most are basically indistinguishable, apart from Stella Barlow:

“She had been to Girton, and her career there was understood to have been dreadfully distinguished. She had discovered something quite new about atoms; and then, right on the top of this, she had learnt Russian, gone off to Russia, and interviewed Lenin, about whom she had just published a book.”

Despite this, looking at her, Sir James thinks, “For all her brains she had the appearance of being quite a foolish young thing.” She, it turns out, is one of two characters Myers is deliberately underplaying in the first half of the novel — in fact, she sadly remains underplayed, a fault brought over from Myers’ previous novel. The other is the yacht’s owner, Harry. His mother’s least favourite son (she seems to have decided he’s never going to make anything of his life), the reason he initially gives for heading down the Amazon is: “It’ll amuse me considerably—to see the young women’s complexions—after the insects have had a go at them.” But, it turns out, he has another purpose.

As they head down the Amazon, the passengers and crew hear rumours of a political revolution in Para. They at first assume this will just provide some local colour to their trip, but when the Clio has to dodge a river-mine and ends up grounded on a stretch of forest-bank a day’s walk from the nearest settlement, things start to take a darker turn. Boredom sets to work on them, forcing these often shallow characters to think about their lives in a way they hadn’t before; and then it’s not boredom but danger. One man goes out for a walk in the jungle, gets lost, and seriously thinks he’s going to die; another catches a fever and actually does die. And Harry, it turns out, has been helping to plan this revolution for some time, and may actually be hoping to install himself in the new government, should it manage to get itself into power.

The Clio, then, starts out with the air of a light comedy, more concerned with who among the passengers is going to pair off with whom, then undermines the leisure and privilege just enough to make these characters consider their lives a little deeper. Not too deeply — none of them, apart from maybe the dying Sir James in his final moments, really hits the existential depths of Nicholas from The Orissers, and one shallow young man escapes any change at all. (Nobody, as far as I recall, discusses the actual politics of the revolution in Para — it’s just “a revolution”, and anyway, it’s happening in a foreign country.)

A much more readable book than his first novel, it’s hard to say, though, whether this is the one to go for if you want to sample Myers’s writing. His most well-known and enduring works are the sequence of novels that followed this one, known collectively as The Root and the Flower, which I’m thinking (I’ve not read them yet) are probably going to take the writerly lessons of The Clio and apply them to his deeper concerns about how to live one’s life, which were present, though seriously undigested, in The Orissers. On its own, The Clio is a fun read as a novel of the roaring twenties, without Fitzgerald’s air of the doomed tragedy of it all — but whether that’s a plus or a minus is hard to tell.

Myers himself seems to have been a mix of the political idealism of Harry and the more shallow leisured life enjoyed by the other characters here. His marriage is a case in point: having fallen in love with a slightly older woman at a young age, he agreed to wait a couple of years until she felt she could be sure of him, which seems to imply a seriousness of genuine feeling. Once they were married, though, he embarked on a number of affairs, at least one of which lasted long enough for him to set up himself and his lover in another house, and even to expect his wife to welcome the woman to the house that they shared. But he would also use his wealth to support those whose work he believed in. When, for instance, George Orwell was told he needed to spend some time in sunnier climes for his health, Myers gave money to Orwell’s friends to pass on anonymously, funding his getaway to Marrakesh. His life, then, seems full of contradictory impulses, and perhaps the light tone of The Clio means it was written at a relatively calm time, for him.

I’ve long been meaning to read something by Leopold Hamilton Myers (1881–1944), one of David Lindsay’s few literary friends. Unlike Lindsay, Myers seems to have achieved both popular and critical success in his own lifetime; again unlike Lindsay, he’s almost entirely forgotten today. The Orissers was his first novel (though he’d published a verse-play, Arvat, in 1908). He started working on it around 1909, and it was published in 1922, initially in a large-format limited edition, which was, ironically, easier for me to find and buy than its standard first edition. So, I’ve ended up with a signed copy, little smaller than a shoe-box, with a letter from Myers to the owner pasted in (see below).

The titular Orisser family have lived on the country estate of Eamor for generations. At the opening of the novel their latest patriarch, the archaeologist Sir Charles Orisser, has given in to impulse and taken a new, young wife, Lilian (a cousin, so also an Orisser). After this he feels the need to amass more money, makes bad investments, ends up broke and kills himself. Lilian, now penniless and living in an enormous house, receives an offer of marriage from a former admirer, another much older man, the business tycoon John Mayne. Mayne promises to pay off all her husband’s debts if she marries him, and to bequeath Eamor back to her when he dies, so it will remain in the hands of the Orissers. But the marriage doesn’t go well. Lilian continues to live in Eamor — away from her husband — and when Mayne becomes ill, the family start to doubt he really is going to will the house back to them, considering how Lilian failed to live up to his expectations as a wife.

It’s easy to see from this summary why the novel attracted comparisons with E M Forster, as both The Orissers and Howards End are about the ownership of a beloved house, fought over by two families, one worldly and business-wise, the other artistic or unworldly in some way. (Forster met Myers just once, and found him “chilly”.) It’s perhaps less easy to see why the novel was also compared by at least one reviewer to Wuthering Heights, but I suspect this comes about because of a rather odd character, Cosmo Orisser, who is surely the most interesting in the book — or would be, if he was allowed to actually appear on the page, rather than having his exploits mostly related secondhand, before finally turning up only to drop dead.

Cosmo seems like just the sort of character who’d have appeared in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (and Wilson did write about Myers in his essay collection Eagle & Earwig, saying “there are few novelists who make such an excellent impression”, but probably referring here to his later books). Here’s Cosmo — “the world abhorring and by the world abhorred”:

“Cosmo was a magnificent creature. His great physical vitality was matched by the fire of his spirit. One felt that his body with all its energies was subjugated to his imperious mind. What, then, was the reason of his failure in life?”

What indeed? Cosmo is a mystery Myers doesn’t provide us with enough clues to solve. (There’s one incident early in the novel — related secondhand, of course, and not once but twice — where Cosmo, on holiday in a foreign country, stabs his rich host, only to nurse him back to health and part on seemingly good terms. Lilian walks in on the scene, but refuses to say something key about it, which only makes me wonder what we’re meant to understand about what really happened. Was Cosmo involved in a homosexual affair with his host, for instance? It’s the only thing I can think, but despite having two separate characters relate the incident, Myers evades the slightest hint for both the stabbing and the parting on good terms.) Cosmo then spends the rest of the novel either fevered, mad, or just plain dangerous to know:

“Every hour spent in Cosmo’s company added to his wonder at the strange combination of wisdom and folly, insight and blindness, that his companion presented. Unreasonable as Cosmo was, there was yet much to admire in his extreme sensitiveness to all that was unlovely and mean in the spiritual as well as in the material life…”

Cosmo, though, feels like a character from another novel — perhaps one by Dostoevsky — who’s occasionally glimpsed from this far more sedate and Englishly-reserved one.

John Mayne is the other impressive character, though more of the George Bernard Shaw than the Colin Wilson Outsider type, justifying his money-making with no apologies about being so rich. Like Cosmo, though, he spends most of the novel off-page, even when he’s in the same house as the other characters. I can’t really remember if he makes an actual appearance before his death near the end, which finally precipitates the events the previous pages have been building towards.

I say “building”, but really, there’s an awful lot of novel before things start doing even that. This is a long book, and I have to say I found the first three quarters, if not more, often quite tedious. Myers brought on his characters — apart from those interesting two, who we only hear about — and just seemed to shift them about like a chess player trying to decide which move to make. The main characters are one Allen Allen — and any other novelist, surely, would have explained why his main character has the same name twice, or even make a joke about it, but not Myers — and the young Nicholas Orisser. Much time is spent on Nicholas’s existential pains, and his agonising over an affair he proceeds to have, then break off. None of which I cared about. Nicholas, I couldn’t help feeling, was something of a first-novel repository of his author’s pent-up feelings about his young self, but lacks the sort of distance that might hone such a mess of adolescent angst into something interesting. It all felt a little squalid and self-directed.

At other points, Myers seemed to be struggling with what to do with his characters. At one stage, young Nicholas even reads Allen Allen an essay he’s written on the meaning of the other characters in the novel, with no irony or postmodernism intended. (And this brings out another flaw in the book. Myers likes to tell us things about his characters, but doesn’t actually make those characters live up to what he tells us about them. It’s as though he’s desperately flinging depth at them, but it refuses to stick.)

I kept reading because I’d glimpsed a discussion near the end in which Nicholas and Allen talk about “the Great Mother”, and wondered if this might have been read by David Lindsay — who surely must have read his friend’s novel — and in some way influenced Devil’s Tor. But Myers’ characters have none of Lindsay’s mystical feelings. To Nicholas, the Great Mother is the force of nature that drives men to find a mate and reproduce, nothing more. Allen Allen has a slightly deeper view:

“Yes, in you it is Venus, not Isis—not Isis, the sacred mother of life, upon whose statue was engraved the words: ‘I am that which is, has been, and shall be.’”

But still it’s not Lindsay’s cosmic quest for a meaning behind it all.

The one thing I will say about The Orissers, though, is that it ended well. Suddenly, in the last quarter (or probably less), with John Mayne newly dead and the other characters manoeuvring around some wills and other documents, things build to a genuinely tense and dramatic confrontation. All taking place in one room, with a small cast of characters, it could have made a good short play, or a taut novella — though how much of the previous bagginess was required as a build-up, I don’t know.

Myers is an intriguing man. The one fact always brought up in every biographical summary of him, however short, is that his father was F W H Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. (It’s thanks to L H Myers that his father’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was compiled, abridged, and published, after its author’s death — and, it has to be said, that same author’s failure to turn up at his appointed return from said death.) Myers himself made some interesting friendships — with Olaf Stapledon, David Lindsay, and L P Hartley, to name but three who have appeared on this blog — but towards the end of his life rejected them all. (Apparently, he wrote to his wealthy friends, saying that, despite his affection for them, he never wished to set eyes on them again.) Born into wealth and taking full advantage of it, Myers nevertheless considered financial inequality to be one of the main sources of the world’s ills. (Frances Partridge, in her diary, writes of him: “Once when lunching at Claridges I couldn’t help commenting on the contrast between our surroundings (oozing money and privilege) with the theories he was propounding. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said, ‘but that has absolutely no bearing on their validity.’”)

Despite The Orissers being something of a stodgy read, that ending made me wonder if he hadn’t burned away all the first-novel dross most writers get done with in their unpublished works. (Myers, being rich and well-connected, was perhaps denied the sort of publisher’s rejection he needed to make him try again and do better. I’m pretty sure his first novel’s publication was at least partly paid for by Myers himself, and some of its good reviews came about through friendship rather than literary judgement.) So, I also read his next and much shorter novel, The Clio. And, it turned out, Myers had learned something after all…