Sphinx by David Lindsay

As I’ve probably already mentioned, part of my plans for A Century of Books was to go back to the books I’ve had waiting on my shelves for years and years – particularly the rarer ones. If I’ve been lucky enough to find copies of them, I should probably the next step and actually read them. And Sphinx (1923) by David Lindsay is certainly one of those books. I tracked down a copy after loving his novel The Haunted Woman (though I liked it a bit less on a re-read), and I’ve been intrigued to try it ever since.

Lindsay is best known now for A Voyage to Arcturus, which I have not read, but some of his other novels took place solidly in this universe – though always with the supernatural and metaphysical at play. In The Haunted Woman, it was a room at the top of a staircase that only occasionally appeared and revealed people’s innermost beings – but they forgot everything that happened whenever they left the room. In Sphinx, Nicholas Cabot rents a room in the village of Newleigh, intent on developing his machine that can record dreams – and translate them into a curious psychical experience.

It’s a very curious novel – in that Lindsay has essentially superimposed a strange psychical phenomenon over the top of a fairly paint-by-numbers novel of love affairs and thwarted love. The family he is staying with has three adult daughters – Audrey, Evelyn, and Katherine – while there is a composer nearby (Lore) and a vampish widow (Celia) also in the neighbourhood. A violent, temperamental rogue called Maurice Ferreira seems to be having, have had, or thinking of having love affairs with all of them – but he has something of a mechanical mind, so Cabot hires him to put together some of his dream machinery.

As the novel progresses, Evelyn and Cabot experiment with the dream machine – but begin to see (or, rather, to experience) Lore being hunted through the woods – and they begin to worry for her safety, unsure whether the machine is showing truth or fabrication.

There are definite strengths to this novel. At the outset, Lindsay writes more naturally than I’ve seen elsewhere – the back-and-forth conversation of sisters and their uncertain guest is even quite amusing. And Lindsay is good at describing how fantastic phenomena can disrupt the everyday – fully immersive:

Suddenly Evelyn was in the middle of a nightmare!

The room streaming with sunlight, the open window with its blind only half lowered, the glorious green, blue, and golden world outside, the sweltering heat – all, without warning, had given place to a mad, fantastic dream, into which she had not even time to wonder how she had fallen. Se was not frightened, but it seemed to her as if her nature had parted from its moorings and that she had somehow become transported into chaos!

The world in which she now was bore much the same resemblance to the ordered world of reality as a cubist painting to an actual scene or group of persons. It was a kaleidoscope of colours and sounds, odours and skin sensations. Everything was accompanied in her by such a variety and rapidity of emotion that she had scarcely the ability to realise her internal feelings at all. She was just one big nerve!… All was hopelessly mixed together – darkness and brightness, heat and coolness, one landscape and another, triumph, gloom, laughter, exaltation, grief!… The things only came in vivid hints and momentary splashes, immediately to be lost again. It was no dream, but the dream of a dream. Supposing reality to be solid and dreaming fluid, this was gaseous. The elements of life were in a condition of disintegration. They still existed, but in combinations so impossible that she could not even understand their meaning…

I think that is rather brilliant, and shows us the world from an entirely new perspective. But the main problem with Sphinx is that all the women are essentially the same. I gave up trying to distinguish them after a while. The dialogue may be amusing, and Lindsay’s ideas are certainly unusual and (in their own way) brilliant – but he isn’t quite capable of encapsulating these within the confines of a novel. It is almost a truism, among those who write about Lindsay, that he was a first-rate novelist trapped with the prose of a third-rate novelist. Here, his prose is perfectly serviceable – but his characterisations and (to a lesser extent) use of structure are too weak to hold or sustain the ideas he has. A shame, but Sphinx remains fascinating – and I don’t doubt that Lindsay will retain the small but devoted following he has for at least another generation.