A New Illustrated Edition of A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS

Recently published in the US by Beehive Books of Philadelphia  is a new, lavish illustrated edition of David Lindsay's classic 1920 novel, A Voyage to Arcturus. The illustrations are by Jim Woodring, brightly colored and striking in an individualist style. Whether this psychedelic surreal style is appropriate for Lindsay's novel is a matter of personal taste. But the production quality of this new edition is very high. Here I share a few highlights to showcase this new edition. 

First, the oversized book comes in a box:

Opening the box you see the slip-cased book:

And pulling the book out of the slipcase, one sees:

Opening to some random pages, there are double-spread illustrations, and pages mixing illustration and text:

 

And finally, an illustration of Sullenbode, followed by the facing page of text:

The Centenary of A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS

One hundred years ago today, on 16 September 1920, the most remarkable novel of the twentieth-century was published by Methuen of London:  A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay.  The recognition of this novel's special qualities was slow to come. It was not reprinted until 1946, the year after its author's death.  

In the August 1946 reprint, publisher Victor Gollancz noted that "of the small [first] edition that was printed, 596 copies were sold and 834 'remaindered'."   The statement is nearly correct, but it has often been misinterpreted to imply that the first edition sold only 596 copies, and no more.  Methuen initially printed 2500 sheets, but only ordered 1000 to be bound.  The book sold so minimally that by February of 1921 Methuen wasted 1000 copies of the sheets, and the other copies were bound up and sold over the next five years.  In all, 1,500 copies of the first edition were sold before the book went out of print. 

Victor Gollancz reprinted another new edition in June 1963, and finally the first American edition was published by Macmillan in October 1963, but for this edition the entire novel was line-edited, resulting in thousands of changes to Lindsay's text, ranging from re-punctuation on to alterations of more significant words and phrases. Unfortunately this corrupted text became the base text used by many publishers, in England as well as in America.  The corrupt text also turned up on the internet, and as a result most of the reprints done over the last few decades replicate the flawed text.

The first paperback edition came from Ballantine Books. It had five printings in the US through 1977 (two with the Unicorn masthead of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series), and two printings in the UK from Pan/Ballantine in 1972 and 1974.  A further UK printing from Sphere appeared in 1980.  

The novel began to receive real recognition in the 1960s, following a radio dramatization that had been done on the BBC in 1956. Since then, it was made into a student film by Bill Holloway in the early 1970s (watch it here, where it is misdated to 1979); appeared as an opera in Los Angeles in 1985; and last year was made into a strange heavy metal musical in Australia (see the website here). [For more on Bill Holloway, see this old Worwoodiana post here.]

Here follows a cover gallery of some of the editions of A Voyage to Arcturus. 

The first edition. Image from L.W. Currey's listing here.

 The 1946 Gollancz edition.

The 1963 Gollancz edition.

The 1963 Macmillan edition.

The 1968 Ballantine edition. Art by Bob Pepper.

 

The 1980 Sphere edition. Art by Peter Jones.

Added (9/17/20):  The Texts in Various Editions of A Voyage to Arcturus

The Best text:

UK Methuen, 1920.  The only edition proofed by Lindsay himself.  I have noted six typos in the text. The US Gregg Press, 1977 edition is reproduced photographically from the 1920 original edition, and thus contains the exact same text.

Good text:
 
The text was reset for the UK Gollancz, 1946 edition. Inevitably, there were some minor alterations (e.g., in chapter one “She [Mrs. Jameson] received him gravely” is mistakenly altered to “She received him bravely”), but the text remains fairly sound. The UK Gollancz, 1963 edition is reproduced photographically from the 1946 edition, as are its reprints (1968, 1971 and 1978).  The US Citadel Press, 1985 edition is also photographed from a Gollancz text.

Other editions reset from the Gollancz edition include: the UK Canongate, 1992 (and a 1998 reprint); and the US University of Nebraska, 2002 edition.

Corrupted text.

The US Macmillan, 1963, edition was line-edited introducing many hundreds of changes throughout the novel.  Some are merely punctuational, but many are stylistic, altering words, phrases and word order.

This corrupted text has proliferated in many editions, including all five printings (1968-1977) of the (reset) US Ballantine Books edition; both printings (1972 and 1974) of the UK Pan/Ballantine edition; the UK Sphere, 1980 edition and the UK Allison & Busby, 1986 edition (which is in fact photographed from the Sphere resetting); the UK Savoy Books 2002 edition; the UK Fantasy Masterworks, 2003 edition; and the US Dover 2005 edition. Most POD editions use the corrupt text from the Gutenberg file.

Harold Bloom and A Voyage to Arcturus

The well-known literary critic Harold Bloom passed away yesterday at the age of 89. I will leave it to others to comment on the breadth of his career and on his qualities (or at times the lack thereof) as a critic, save to note that David Bratman has written about Bloom's failure to understand Tolkien in this post.  Here I'd like to explore Bloom's curious relation with David Lindsay's novel, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).

In Bloom's Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982), there is a chapter on "Clinamen: Towards a Theory of Fantasy," in which Bloom  makes a number of surprising comments about Lindsay's book. In fact the whole chapter centers on Bloom's view of A Voyage to Arcturus, an eccentric view nonetheless.  Here are a few of Bloom's early comments (before he waxes into his main argument):

David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, first published in 1920 in England, is a very unevenly written book, varying in tone from preternatural eloquence to quite tedious bathos. Yet I will assert for it a greatness that few contemporary critics might grant, and part of that greatness is the book's near-perfection in a particular kind of romance invention, as once it would have been called--the kind we have agreed to call fantasy. (p. 200)

The deepest affinities of Lindsay's mad sport of a book are with Lewis Carroll's apocalyptic release of fantastic energies and desires, though what emerges as purified wonder in Carroll manifests itself as horror and torment in Lindsay.  Try to imagine Through the Looking Glass as it might have been written by Thomas Carlyle. and you will not be far from the verbal cosmos of David Lindsay. (p. 201)

But Bloom's most revealing comment comes several pages later:

In regard to Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, I have experienced a relationship marked by a wild fondness and an endless ambivalence, itself productive of my own first attempt at literary fantasy, published in 1979 as The Flight to Lucifer, a book very much in the Arcturan shadow. (p. 207)

The Flight to Lucifer was Bloom's only novel, and I believe his only published work of fiction. Indeed it was written very much in the shadow of A Voyage to Arcturus, for it is basically a dull and lifeless re-write (even to its title) of Lindsay's book along even more expressly and didactical Gnostic lines. After its 1979 hardcover publication and the subsequent 1980 trade paperback, the book has never been reprinted. Soon after this Bloom disavowed the book.  In an interview in 2015 he noted "I had to pay the publisher not to have a second printing of the paperback. If I could go around and get rid of all the surviving copies, I would."

Is the book as dire as all that suggests?  Sadly, it is. 

Hugh Deane and A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS

David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus was first published in 1920, and not reprinted until 1946.  At some unknown point, an illustrator who signed himself "Hugh Deane" did an illustration  titled "The Ride on the Shrowk" for chapter IX. The illustration itself is unsigned, but on the back, in the same hand as  the text below the illustration, it reads: "Please return to / Hugh Deane / 6 Stonor Road / Kensington W14"

"Hugh Deane" doesn't appear in reference works on artists, nor can I find biographical details using the usual genealogical resources.  I suspect "Hugh" might be the artist's nickname, or middle name, and not his legal name. 

A search on the web turns up some additional information.  Bromer Booksellers of Boston currently have for sale an original watercolor of Henrik Ibsen and Four of His Heroines by Deane which they date to "1925" (copied at right; the link to the seller's entry is here), and they state that "Hugh Deane was a Kensington-based artist, known primarily for his work on magazines and periodicals of the 1920s and 30s." Yet I can find no examples of his published work in the 1920s or 1930s.  I can find one example from the mid-1940s, a book Ten Little Chelas (1947), with verse by Michael Juste and illustrations by Hugh Deane, published by the Atlantis Book Shop.  

And a 2005 auction of some of Deane's illustrations and portrait caricatures, including a frontispiece for Hoffmann's Nutcracker, lists them as "c. 1920-1925".  However, the associated hand-drawn title page for Hoffmann's Nutcracker gives the proposed publisher and proposed date as The Neptune Press, 1947. The only actual  publication I have discovered by Neptune Press is 777 Revised (1955) by Aleister Crowley. 

Thus with two items able to be dated to 1947, I suspect that the illustration for A Voyage to Arcturus also dates to around 1947, not long after the book was reissued in August 1946. 

If anyone has further knowledge of Hugh Deane to share, please write in.  

In Memoriam: Bill Holloway (1950-2014), director of A Voyage to Arcturus (1971)

Bill Holloway passed away in April at the age of 63, and I’d like to pay honor to his memory here.  A fuller obituary appears here.

I first came into contact with Bill in the mid-1990s, having tracked him down through the Antioch College alumni office, who passed on to me his address in Massachusetts. I was interested in learning more details about the college project he’d done in 1970-71, a film version of David Lindsay’s 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus.  We first chatted about this over the telephone on 2 April 1996, and got in touch again in 2003 as Bill made a transfer of the film to VHS, and subsequently re-edited the film for a DVD release. 

Bill Holloway and his camera

A Voyage to Arcturus was an independent study film project, and was filmed over three weeks during the summer of 1970, using local students and amateur actors.  It was made with a very small budget, using out of date black-and-white film stock.  Rod Serling saw a rough cut (without sound) on a visit to the college as an Antioch alumnus, and he assisted in getting an N.E.A. grant for money to finish making the film. For a few years around 1972-73 it received some distribution in the U.S. through the MacMillan Audio Brandon Catalog, but I doubt it played at very many venues.  The only contemporary review of it that I have seen dates from 1973, after a showing at a meeting of the Denver Science Fiction Association on July 21st.  The short review, by Phil Rose, reads in part:

Directing A Voyage to Arcturus

My general reaction is that a person would probably not enjoy it (or understand it at all) without having first read the book.  The special effects are minimal, many important scenes are omitted, and the ending of the film in no way does justice to the powerful climax of the book.  Still, for such an ambitious project there are many good scenes.  I found the portrayal of Krag particularly good, and that of Maskull not so good.  I would recommend, for group showings, that someone who has read the book give a brief outline of the story of Lindsay’s ideas before the viewing.

This isn’t an unfair critique, and Bill didn’t disagree with it. After all, the film was begun when he was nineteen, and shot with virtually no money, using students and amateurs. Bill felt the project was his education in film-making, and he thought the camera-work and composition was good, and that some of the footage had a really nice look.When he re-edited the film for the DVD release, he reworked the ending, even getting the original Nightspore (Tom Hastings) to do a new voice-over. 

Bill was a kind and interesting man, and he will be missed by everyone who knew him. The DVD of A Voyage to Arcturus is still available here, or you can see the seventy minute film on YouTube here, along with a short nine minute interview with Bill here (the same interview is on the DVD). 

The cover to the DVD