Glimpses of Camelot

When it came to creature comforts, Ithell Colquhoun did not require much. Scouting around Penzance for a suitable studio-cum-domicile following the breakdown of her marriage in 1947, she chanced, as she describes in The Living Stones (1957), on a garage-like structure of corrugated iron half obscured by “branches of thorn, elder and sycamore”, not far from Lamorna Cove. The entrance was “rotting”, “the skylight leaked”, “there were no cooking facilities and no gas or electric light … no tap, much less a sink; no bathroom (of course); no sign of a lavatory”. “What a mouldy little place”, exclaimed her companion. Colquhoun was sold. After all, “the floor was excellent, being constructed of strong planks”, and the river that ran below had ample water. Contacting the landlord, “one of feudalism’s last relics”, she began a tenancy that was to last for years.

Vow Cave, as Colquhoun came to call the property, is at the heart of this extraordinary memoir, which mixes psychogeography, ethnography, archaeology, folklore, occultism, gossip and entertaining grumblings about the state of modern life. At one moment Colquhoun might be considering the magnetic currents girdling the Earth, or Howel of Cornwall’s (mythic) final stand against Athelstan, and the next she might be moaning about the scourge of the motor car, the microphone (“destroys the art of speaking”), the “indiscriminate” use of radios or the mystery of wit: “Humour to me is one of life’s hardships … [It] is, fundamentally, an appeal for sympathy … but it has to pretend to give you something instead of admitting that it is asking something from you”. She could be playful, but she was serious about play. Her allusions and juxtapositions, her admixture of the sexual and spiritual, mind and body, bedrock and ether, in print and on canvas, were aimed at drawing out higher states of being and mapping a continuum between ancient and present ritual, this world and the next, or the one before.

A painter of great vision and technical skill (see previous pages), Colquhoun was above all committed to her theology, which she was at times happy to file under the category of “animism”. “For an animist is what I am”, she declares in The Living Stones, “not even a pantheist, though so I pretend when I feel the need for some veneer of urbanity.” (She was prepared to dissemble when it suited her.) All of her work – from paintings and sketches (some reproduced in this book) to novels, poems, book reviews, glossaries, memoirs and copious writings on magic, alchemy and tarot – was in some way committed to her spiritual belief system, which affirmed, among many other things, the connection between nature and women (a connection that had been severed by successive patriarchal systems) and the possibilities of shucking off, or synthesizing, gender constructs. Synthesis was her credo, her modus operandi, from mystical Christianity to druidry and the kabbalah.

Lamorna Cove had for decades been attracting artists, notably of the Newlyn School (S. J. Birch, Alfred Munnings)as well as the portraitist Gluck (who became a friend of Colquhoun) and the constructivist Marlow Moss. The main draw of the area for Colquhoun, however, was the landscape, replete with neolithic and Bronze Age relics – stone circles, menhirs, ancient boundaries and pathways – and shimmering with a wildness, and wetness, that, she was convinced, brought back preconscious memories. Born in Assam, India, she had come to England as an infant and never returned. In adulthood “she began a Western search for an equivalent” of her birthplace, and Cornwall, with its “end of the land” aura, was it. It was here she found glimpses of King Arthur and Camelot, the sunken kingdoms of Lyonesse and Atlantis, the sacred stones and rituals that seeped into her art and bolstered her beliefs. The Living Stones is named after one of the chapter titles, in which the author celebrates the region’s “geologic substratum”, which underpins everything that sits above it, the entire “psychic life of the land”. She identifies herself “with every leaf and pebble, and any threatened hurt to the wilderness of the valley seems to me a rape”.

While some may raise eyebrows at the bombast of this statement and the fervour of Colquhoun’s theosophy – sometimes based on a shaky grip of history – it is hard not be seduced by her faith in nature, her commitment to spiritual transcendence, her decentring of humanity. Her outlook spanned millennia. “What is socially acceptable today may be ostracized tomorrow”, she reminds us. And, like all religions to their non-adherents, Colquhoun’s is less interesting for the literalism with which one might take its practices than for its symbolism, its storytelling, even its ancient wisdom.

Detractors may similarly criticize Colquhoun’s orientalist approach to her adoptive home and high-handed attitude to material progress. Hedge strimmers and tractors are one citizen’s nuisance and another’s subsistence. Yet her insistence on the uniqueness of the region was genuine and profound. Frequently she affirms that Cornwall is its own “country” and laments the decline of the Cornish language. Reporting on the annual Gorsedd (ceremony) of the Bards of Cornwall, or the Mummers’ Play (“perhaps the most ancient of all dramas”), she approvingly concludes that “folklore in Cornwall is not a thing of the past only but a living activity”. And she was, in her way, embedded in the rural community – even if the locals found her “a terrible gossip”, according to the useful introduction by Edward Parnell. The Living Stones contains various references to chums with whom she tramped about, inspecting megaliths, saving owls, going down the pub. One presumes she didn’t do much entertaining (“I have never made a cake in my life”), but she did seem to enjoy company – even at the risk of alarming her companions with her creative output. “I do not think our friendship, so promisingly begun, ever recovered entirely from her shock”, she writes of one new friend, Monica Baldwin. That shock was provoked by the manuscript of her roman noir, Goose of Hermogenes (1961), which Baldwin had just read, “against my warnings”.

Well Baldwin might have blenched. Colquhoun’s novel, also now reissued, is a fascinating companion piece of such dark imagination and feverish hallucination that it makes The Living Stones look as dry as a Baedeker. Any attempt at narrative exposition risks producing a Borgesian map, but the bare bones of the story concern a youngish woman arriving at the house of her mysterious uncle on a mysterious island, where she is led by the resident “Anchorite” around a selection of rooms and gardens, lovingly and lavishly described, gaining occasional and deeply disquieting audiences with her grim relative over several days, sleeping fitfully and finding herself under increasing threat. The uncle, she comes to realize, wants the jewels she wears (“beautiful as children’s sweets and very precious”), in order to perform his strange alchemy: “I was now convinced that his ultimate aim was the conquest of death itself”. The logic is dreamlike, as characters and seascapes appear and disappear, assailants tumble out of windows and giant feathers sprout from the land. Gothic tropes abound. There is bloodletting and sadomasochism, there are whips and barbs, allusions to Hieronymus Bosch and at least one chapter epigraph from Yeats.

The language is admirably precise and at times arcane (“demesne”, “declivities”, “douce”, “the whole tenu”), though it can also be arrestingly colloquial: “Here we believe in giving the dead elbow-room”. A final chapter, “Hexentanz”, missing from the original edition, includes a description of a navel that secretes a “crystalline gum” the colour of burnt sienna and a group of tatterdemalion children who subsist off the dry scabs harvested from “the Stump”: “a man about thirty with no arms, legs or ears”. It is all rather alarming and, notwithstanding its careful narrative arrangement as our heroine moves through the various planes of her existence on the path to her astral death, it doesn’t quite hang together. “An island allegory considerably more elaborate than Kafka”, wrote the original TLS reviewer, Anthony Cronin (July 7, 1961), and he didn’t mean it in a good way. Certainly, it lacks the terrifying cohesion of Kafka’s world-building.

Yet for sheer atmosphere and surrealist imagery, Goose of Hermogenes is well worth turning to, as we are led around its “tortured oak-trees” and “spectral poplars”, its “oblong pools of water” and “red earth disguised as green”, to catch glimpses of glowing dancers, a cathedral rising above the tide or an old man at a party being carted off by a group of “busy” undertakers, his plaintive protestations falling on deaf ears: “I’m not dead yet … Let me die in peace”.

Toby Lichtig is the Fiction and Politics Editor of the TLS

The post Glimpses of Camelot appeared first on TLS.