Brian Aldiss - Collected Essays

In fact, Stapledon is a writer of a notably English kind, his attempts to establish an individual mythology somewhat reminiscent of William Blake (the sub-title of his novel, Odd John echoes a poem of Blake’s, ‘A Story Between Jest and Earnest’—though there’s precious little enjoying of the lady in the book). His grandiosities recall Charles M. Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, Dawn in Britain , with its quixotic attempt to restore Chaucer to modern English. Two other voices echo conflictingly through Stapledon’s fiction, the voice of John Milton in Paradise Lost and the voice of that Victorian storm-trooper, Winwood Reade, author of The Martyrdom of Man.

In many respects, Stapledon is of his time. Born in 1886, he was torn by religious doubt, like many men of his day. Essentially a Victorian, he had trouble fitting into the post-war world. Together with many others, he flirted with pacifism, communism and promiscuity. And being outside the swim of London literary society, he knew few other authors and soon became critically disregarded.

The central premise of his work, that mankind is irrelevant to the purposes of the universe, proves unpalatable to many. His admirers honour him precisely for that unpalatability, so variously, so swoopingly expressed. We encounter in his work faith versus atheism, and the seeking for individual fulfilment versus communality, whether terrestrial or stellar. These remain painfully contemporary concerns. In his two great glacial novels, spanning the thirties, we encounter spiritual suffering and the surreal mutations which mankind must undergo at a Creator’s command.

My first encounter with Last and First Men came at a time of suffering and mutation. I was part of the British Second Division, fighting back the Japanese Army which had invaded Burma and Assam and was planning to storm the gates of India. I was nineteen, brown as a berry, on half rations. We were about to advance on enemy-held Mandalay while shooting DDT down our pants and under our arms. Specifically, I was standing in a commandeered bungalow in the jungle outside Kohima, awaiting a typhus injection.

The medical officer had established his temporary HQ in the home of a tea planter who had fled—to India or England. In the room where I awaited my jab were book-lined shelves. Among the books were two blue Pelican books, together comprising a paperback edition of Last and First Men . The title caught my eye. I took them down and began to read.

I could not leave them behind when I was summoned to the surgery. I kept them. For the first and last time, I stole a book. Well, it was wartime …

While the great salvation and destruction of the sunlit world went forward, Stapledon’s steady voice proved to be what was needed. In particular, his daring time-schemes appeased an urgent desire for perspective.

What sustained me then, as we advanced across the Burmese plains, was the bleak vision of humankind locked within the imperatives of creation. If Stapledon’s name is to be preserved, it will be by science fiction readers. Quite apart from the intrinsic interest in his writing, there is also the wider question: why is not SF, or work which closely resembles SF, accepted into the general corpus of the century’s literature? The writing is excellent; the subject under discussion is a central one; the author was not exactly a backwoodsman; nor did he write in obscure tongue; so how is it that he suffers a general neglect? Why is he not considered as is, say, Jorge Luis Borges or Mikhail Bulgakov or even William Burroughs?

These are perforce rhetorical questions. I cannot answer them. Nor, as far as I can see, can anyone else. De gustibus non est disputan-dum . And yet … we must continue to dispute …

I was instrumental in having Penguin Books reprint Last and First Men in 1963. The edition contains my Foreword, and was reprinted more than once. Harvey Satty, the active chairman of the Olaf Stapledon Society, published Nebula Maker in 1976, an interesting early attempt of Stapledon’s to write Star Maker . Later, Satty, in collaboration with Curtis C. Smith, produced a comprehensive bibliography (1984). The volume contains an essay by Stapledon never before published. In 1982 came Patrick A. McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon from Twayne Publishers. This slender volume presents excellent summaries of Stapledon’s novels. McCarthy collaborated with Charles Elkins and Martin Harry Greenberg to produce The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon in 1989.

In 1987, the Los Angeles publisher, James Tarcher, published an edition of Star Maker with my introduction and, in the following year, Last and First Men , with a Foreword by Gregory Benford and an Afterword by Doris Lessing. This is claimed to be the first complete edition of the novel to be published in the USA. In fact, Dover Books had published the complete text in 1968.

A curious player in the Stapledon game is the celebrated critic, Leslie A. Fiedler. Fiedler’s Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided was published in 1983. [1] Fiedler had shown interest in Stapledon some years previously. When Harry Harrison and I were editing a series of hardcover and paperback reprints of classic SF in the 1970s (SF Master Series), Harry persuaded Professor Fiedler to write an introduction to Odd John. [2] An excellent introduction it is too. The longer critical work is of more dubious value.

The authority on Stapledon is undoubtedly Dr Robert Crossley. Again an American weighs in to great effect. Crossley has a better grasp of British weirdness than Fiedler; he is familiar, for instance, with the deadly English habit of litotes; as witness his exemplary editing of Talking Across the World: The Love Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, 1913–1919. [3]These gentle, humorous letters of courtship during a terrible war are touching and beautiful. They carry us closer than anything else to the private man, and far beyond the world of science fiction, though they are not without speculative content.

Crossley follows up with his massive biography, Speaking for the Future: The Life of Olaf Stapledon . [4]This will always remain the standard life.

The new biography brings out well Stapledon’s sense of division within himself, manifest in his fiction. Even the august Star Maker —the very emblem of Stapledon’s cogitations—is given, like the god Shiva, a dual nature, both mild and terrible. The opening sentence of Last and First Men makes the division clear: This book has two authors’.

Other examples of this division are not far to seek. The title of Stapledon’s last book, clearly autobiographical in nature, and published only months before his death in 1950, is A Man Divided. In ‘The Peak and the Town’, the posthumously published essay included in the 1989 book mentioned above, one of the characters speaks of ‘the double life’ as ‘a marvellous duplicity’. This submerged quality—Mary Shelley speaks poignantly of it too—manifests itself in the first of the letters Crossley preserves in Talking Across the World. In a letter declaring his love to the distant Agnes in Australia, Stapledon says, ‘I fear lest you might in answering say there is no hope at all, and if you were to say that I should only outwardly accept it, and inwardly go on hoping and acting as if there was a chance …’

Stapledon served as an ambulance driver in the First World War. For his courage he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. In that serving capacity, he observed the divided nature of his fellows, remorseless in enmity, at other times compassionate to friend and foe alike.

Mathew Arnold has a splendid poem, ‘The Buried Life’, in which he says how