Sea Priestess.pdf

INTRODUCTION 5

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

IF one wishes to write a book that is not cut according to ny of

the standard patterns, it appears to be necessary to be one's own

publisher; therefore this book has not got the imprint of any

publishing house to lend it dignity, but must stand upon its own

feet as a literary Mekhizedek.

I once had the entertaining experience of receiving one of my

own books for review, but if I were called upon to review this

one, I should find it difficult to know how to set about it. It is a

book with an undercurrent; upon the surface, a romance;

underneath, a thesis upon the theme: "All women are Isis, and

Isis is all women," or in the language of modern psychology, the

anima-animus principle.

Various criticisms have been levelled at it by those who have

read it in manuscript, and as they will probably be repeated by

those who read it in print, I may as well take the opportunity of a

preface to deal with them, especially as there is no production-

manager to say to me: "You must cu fifty pages if we are to get it

out at seven-and-six."

It was said by a reviewer of one of my previous books that it is

a pity I make my characters so unlikeable. This was a great

surprise to me, for it had never occurred to me that my

characters were unlikeable. What kind of barber's blocks are

required in order that readers may love them ? In real life no one

escapes the faults of their qualities, so why should they in fiction

There are many drawbacks to my hero as a son, a brother, a

husband and a business partner, and he makes no attempt to

In her Introduction, Dion Fortune remarks that "this book has

not got the imprint of any publishing house." This statement

refers to the first edition of The Sea Priestess which was

published privately in England in 1938.

First published in 1978 by

Samuel Weiser, Inc.

Box 612

York Beach. Maine 03910

This printing, 1999

Library of Congress Card Number: 83-159136

ISBN 0-87728-424-5

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

requirements of the American National Standard for

Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-

1984.

6 INTRODUCTION

minimise them; nevertheless I retain my affection for him,

though I am quite alive to the fact that he could not compete

with the creations of the late Samuel Smiles. But then I do not

know that I particularly want him to. It has often seemed to me

that as one cannot please everybody, one may as well please

oneself, especially as I have. God be thanked, no publisher to

consider, who would naturally expect my book to contribute its

quota towards his overhead expenses and errors of judgment. It

was said of this book by a publisher's reader, who ought to know

what he is talking about, that the style is uneven, rising to

heights of lyric beauty (his expression, not mine), and on the

same page descending to colloquialisms.

This raises a pretty point in technique. My story is written in

the first person; it is therefore a monologue, and the same rule

applies to it that applies to dialogue--that the speakers must

speak in character. As my hero's mood changes, his narrative

style therefore changes.

Any writer will agree that narrative in the first person is a most

difficult technique to handle. The method of presentation is in

actuality that of drama, though maintaining the appearance of

narrative; moreover everything has to be seen not only through

the eyes, but through the temperament of

the person who is telling the story. A restraint has to be observed

in the emotional passages lest the blight of self-pity appear on

the hero. He must, at all costs, keep the reader's respect while

evoking his sympathy, and this he cannot do if he wallows in his

emotions. Consequently in the most telling scenes, where an

author would normally pull out the tremolo stop and tread on

the loud pedal, only curt, brief Anglo-Saxon may be used, for no

one employs elaborate English when in extremis. All effects have

to be obtained by "noises off". Therefore unless the reader has

imagination and can read constructively, the effects are lost.

INTRODUCTION 7

And this brings me to the question of constructive reading.

Everybody knows how much the audience contributes to the

performance of a play, but few people realise how much a reader

must contribute to the effect of a work of fiction.

Perhaps I ask too much of my readers: that is a point I am not

competent to judge, and can only say with Martin Luther: "God

help me, I can do no otherwise." After all, the style is

the man, and short of castration, cannot be altered. And who

wants to be a literary eunuch? Not me, anyway, which is perhaps

the reason why I have to do my own publishing. People read

fiction in order to supplement the diet life provides for them. If

life is full and varied, they like novels that analyse and interpret

it for them; if life is narrow and unsatisfying, they supply

themselves with mass production wish-fulfilments from the

lending libraries. I have managed to fit my book in between

these two stools so neatly that it is hardly fair to say that it falls

between them. It is a novel of interpretation and a novel of wish-

fulfilment at the same time.

Yet after all, why should not the two be combined? They have

to be in psycho-therapy, where I learnt my trade. The frustration

that afflicts my hero is the lot, in some degree at any rate, of a

very considerable proportion of human beings, as my readers

doubtless can confirm from their own experience. It is too well

known to need emphasis that readers, reading for emotional

compensation, identify themselves with the hero or heroine as

the case may be, and for this reason the writers who cater for

this class of taste invariably make the protagonist of the opposite

sex to themselves the oleographic representation of a wish-

fulfilment. The he-men who write for he-men invariably provide

as heroine either a glutinous, synthetic, saccharine creature and

call the result romance, or else combine all the incompatibles in

the human character and think they have achieved realism.

8 INTRODUCTION

THE SEA PRIESTESS 9

Equally the lady novelist will provide her readers with such

males as never stepped into a pair of trousers; on whom, in fact,

trousers would be wasted.

It is difficult for me to judge of my own characters; naturally I

think the world of them, but such partiality is probably no more

justified than that of any other doting parent. The late Charles

Garvice was convinced he wrote literature and was bitterly

jealous of Kipling.

How far my creations are wish-fulfilments is a matter on which

I am the last person to be able to express an impartial opinion. It

has often been said of me that I am no lady, and I have myself

had to tell the secretary of a well-known club which craved my

membership that I am no gentleman, so we will leave the

mystery of sex wrapped in decent obscurity, like that of the

parrot.

Nevertheless, I think that if readers in their reading will

identify themselves with one or another of the characters

according to taste, they will be led to a curious psychological

experience--the experience of the therapeutic use of phantasy,

an unappreciated aspect of psycho-therapy.

The psychological state of modern civilisation is on a par with

the sanitation of the medieval walled cities. Therefore I lay my

tribute at the feet of the great goddess Cloacina--

CHAPTER I

THE keeping of a diary is usually reckoned a vice in one's

contemporaries though a virtue in one's ancestors. I must plead

guilty to the vice, if vice it is, for I have kept a fairly detailed

journal for a good many years. Loving observation but lacking

imagination, my real role was that of a Boswcll, but alas, no

Johnson has been forthcoming. I am therefore reduced to being

my own Johnson. This is not my choice. I would far rather have

been the chronicler of the great, but the great never came my

way. Therefore it was myself or nothing. I am under no delusion

that my journal is literature, but it served its purpose as a safety-

valve at a time when a safety-valve was badly needed. Without it,

I think I would have blown the lid off on more than one

occasion.

They say that adventures are to the adventurous; but one can

hardly go seeking adventure with persons dependent upon one.

Had I had a young wife to face the adventure of life with

me, it might have been a different story, but my sister was ten

years my senior and my mother an invalid, and the family

business only just enough to keep the three of us during my

salad days. Adventure, therefore, was not for me, save at a risk

to others which I did not feel was justifiable. Hence the need for

a safety-valve.

These old journals, volume upon volume of them, lie in a tin

trunk in the attic. I have dipped into them occasionally,

"In jesting guise, but ye are wise,

Ye know what the jest is worth."

dion fortune

THE SEA PRIESTESS

THE SEA PRIESTESS 11

but they are dreary reading; all the pleasure lay in the writing of

them. They are an objective chronicle of things seen through the

eyes of a provincial business man. Very small beer indeed, if I

may be allowed to say so.

But at a certain point there comes a change. The subjective

becomes objective. But where, and exactly how, I cannot say for

certain. It was in an endeavour to elucidate the whole business

that I began to read through the later journals systematically,

and finally to write the whole thing out. It makes a curious story,

and I do not pretend to understand it. I had hoped it would

come clear in the writing, but it has not. In fact it has become

more problematical. Had I not had the diary-keeping habit,

much would have safely disappeared into the limbo of things

forgotten; the mind could then have arranged matters in a

pattern after its own liking, to suit its prc-conceived ideas, and

the incompatibles would have slipped into the discard

unnoticed.

But with things down in black and white, this could not be

done, and the affair had to be faced up to as a whole. I record it

for what it is worth. I am the last person to be able to assess its

value. It appears to me to be a curious chapter in the history of

the mind, and as such, to be of interest as data if not as

literature. If I learn as much from the re-living of it as I learnt

from the living of it, I shall be well repaid.

The whole thing began with a dispute over money matters. Our

business is an estate agent's business which I inherited from my

father. It has always been a good business, but was heavily

embarrassed by speculation. My father had never been able to

resist the temptation to pick up a bargain. If a house which he

knew had cost ten thousand to build were going for two, he had

to have it. But nobody wanted these great sprawling mansions,

so I fell heir to a stablcful of white elephants. All through my

twenties and well into my thirties I

wrestled with these brutes, peddling them piecemeal, till finally

the business assumed a healthy complexion once more and I was

in a position to do what I had long wanted to do--sell it and be

rid of it--for I hated it and the whole life of that dead-alive town-

-and use the money to buy a partnership in a London publishing

company. That, I thought, would give me the entree into the life

that fascinated me; and it did not seem to me a particularly wild-

cat scheme financially, for business is business, whether you are

selling bricks or books. I had read every biography I could lay

my hands on that dealt with the world of books, and it appeared

to me that there was scope for someone accustomed to business

methods. I may be wrong, of course, having no first-hand

experience of books and their makers, but that was how it

looked to me.

So I mooted the idea to my mother and sister. They were not

averse, provided I did not want them to come to London with

me. This was a boon I had never expected, for I had quite

thought I should have to get a house for them, as my mother

would never have put up with a flat. I saw the way opening up

before me in a manner I have never dared even to dream of. I

saw myself leading a bachelor life in Bohemian circles, a club-

man, and God knows what not. And then the blow fell. The

offices of our firm were part of the big old Georgian house in

which we had always lived. You couldn't sell the business

without the premises because it was the best site in the town,

and they wouldn't agree.

I suppose I could have forced it through and sold the house

over their heads, but I didn't like to do that. My sister came up to

my room and talked to me, and told me that it would kill my

mother to have her home broken up. I offered to set them up in

any house they fancied that was within my means, but she said

no, my mother would never settle. Surely I would let her live out

her old age in peace? It couldn't be for long now.

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