Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future

¶131But what of the life as a whole, including the years before *Last and First Men*? Olaf Stapledon played a role, rarely at center stage and often as a kind of invisible man, at some of the formative events of the last hundred years. His earliest years were lived in the small English colony at Port Said, at the entrance to the Suez Canal. From a childhood at the crossroads of the British economic empire, he took away images of a multi-ethnic world and of imperialist arrogance he never forgot. As one of the first tutors in the Workers' Educational Association, he was a pioneer in the effort to democratize education. During the Great War he evolved a pacifism that led him to ambulance work for the Quakers and was later reconstituted in the disarmament movement of the thirties and antiwar activism at the outset of the Cold War. His politics were always on the Left but always fell short of an unqualified endorsement of

¶156On that March night Moskowitz may have been the only person in the Mosque Theater who had read any of Stapledon's fiction, the only one who hadn't come to hear political oratory but to see a legend. The name of Olaf Stapledon had passed by word of mouth through a small group of American science fiction readers who had discovered his out-of-print fantasies and fables of the 1930s. Now he was sixty-three, gray-haired but still plump-cheeked as adolescent. A newsman's camera that night captured the impression of youth, and the next day's papers showed a figure who looked no older than the man Howard Coster had photographed eleven years earlier. When he stood up awkwardly on the stage in Newark and attempted to calm the storm over his supposed political loyalties, he spoke wearily, with the ghost of a smile, and pronounced his concise anti-autobiography: "I am not a Communist. I am not a Christian. I am just me."[15]

¶174A. The Mind Association; The Authors' Club, London; The University Club, Liverpool; Sandon Studios Society, Liverpool; The Aristotelians Association; The Royal Institute of Philosophy; The Society for Psychical Research; The United Nations Association; The Federal Union; The Crusade for World Government; The Fabian Society; The Dasca Club, Liverpool; I belong to some others of the same kind that I cannot now remember.

¶257Although Willie had not gone to a university and had had only a modest systematic education before going out to Port Said to work for his father, he had an amateur’s passion for the classics and for science. Alongside the volumes of Carlyle, Ruskin and Emerson, Bunyan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Macdonald that represented Emmeline’s tastes, were Willie’s set of Greek and Roman translations, a complete Shakespeare, and works by Darwin, Huxley, Lockyer, and Tyndall. He kept fastidious notebooks for copying out long extracts from his scientific reading, and in the early years of his marriage he set problems for Emmeline to solve—and she dutifully wrote out answers.

¶265To Olaf, Willie began sending a weekly typed letter, telling him of doings at the Canal and expressing his anxiety lest his son forget him. “I wonder will you think of Father today,” or “Think of Fa a bit sometimes and of the happy times we had together here,” he wrote plaintively.[36] Those happy times resurfaced decades later in Stapledon’s late-blooming literary career. Although he lived in Port Said for only five years (excluding a few visits in the mid-1890s and a four-month nostalgic return at the age of twenty-six), the stream of letters from his father between 1891 and 1901 not only kept his impressions vivid but mythologized those young years when all three members of his little family were together. The boy’s telescopic visions “of a universe that teemed with suns and inhabited worlds” bore fruit four decades later in the great cosmic inquiries of the 1930s, *Last and First Men* and *Star Maker*. The international assortment of characters in his 1935 utopia *Odd John* is explicitly linked to Port Said, “the most cosmopolitan spot in all the world.”[37] But the novel closest to Olaf’s Egyptian memories is an extraordinary fantasy, overtly based on genetic experiments performed in the early 1940s by C. H. Waddington. *Sirius* is the story of a dog chemically and surgically altered with a large brain of human dimensions. When Naomi Mitchison asked him in 1944 why he had written such a book, at once bizarre and improbably moving, he replied, “I was brought up with a rather intelligent fox-terrier in Egypt, and this book profited by that quite a lot. In fact it now seems to me a sort of distorted act of piety toward that former but never quite forgotten beloved.”[38] The author’s explanation did not tell the whole truth about *Sirius* and the “beloved” that inspired it, but he traced the wellsprings of imagination all the way back to a five-year-old’s first visionary gleams. His pet dog Rip, with whom he was frequently photographed in Egypt and to whom he sent numerous childish notes enclosed in his own letter to his father, was often named by the adult Stapledon when he talked about *Sirius*. He told an audience in Manchester in 1947 that his novel had been inspired by an early “vision,” and he sketched that insight into “the aliveness of all living things” in his partly autobiographical *Last Men in London* (1932):

¶267Set exclusively in Wales and England, *Sirius* nonetheless has the deepest Egyptian roots of all Stapledon's books. The young boy photographed with his terrier sitting upright at the table is father to the man who imagined a sheep dog raised as a human child in a Welsh family.

¶348Another poster, headed “What Are the Educative Merits of Bathing?”, outlined his ideas on swimming as the best of all exercises, on the aesthetic and moral value of nudity, on the intimate contact of the human body with water as “worship of Nature.”[26] Like all his pamphlets, it was an obsessive catalogue of first principles, but the practical results were undeniable: every Abbotsholmian learned to swim under the tutelage of his peers without adult intervention. A committee, run by a captain and vice-captain, gave lessons and tests to inexperienced students to bring them through seven stages of proficiency culminating in underwater swimming and lifesaving. Cold-water bathing became Olaf’s lifelong habit; in his fifties he used to flabbergast his neighbors, who watched him crack the ice on the Dee estuary in West Kirby for a January dip.

¶358The "miniature kingdom" at Abbotsholme was a singlemindedly Platonic society; masters were dismissed if they married, and Reddie would splutter at any suggestion of coeducation. With “camaraderie” as its cardinal virtue, Abbotsholme was to remake the Englishman so that he could stand confidently alongside the courtly Spaniard, the polite Frenchman, and the charming Italian as a warmhearted global citizen who would no longer “offend the world by a want of sympathy and feeling, or, in a word, affection, in both public and private conduct.”[41] That aspiration resided in the school anthem, “The Love of Comrades,” distilled from Whitman’s poem of the same name and laced with a jigger of British imperialism:

¶359Come! We will make the Continents inseparable; We will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon; We will make divine magnetic Lands: With the love, the love of Comrades; With the life-long love of Comrades; With the love, the life-long love of Comrades.[42]

¶388None of Olaf’s close friends belonged either to the smartest social set at Oxford or among the intellectual stars. Most came from Scotland or the North of England. All were politically more conservative than he. Not a single one, including Olaf, achieved a “First” in his degree examinations. Among the later luminaries at Balliol with him but never mentioned in his letters or diaries were Julian Huxley, Harold Nicolson, and the Biblical scholar Ronald Knox. The Etonians at Balliol whose premature deaths in World War I would make them popular icons—Julian Grenfell and Charles Lister—had little to do with the déclassé scholar from Liverpool and Abbotsholme. E. V. Rieu, later Olaf’s editor at Methuen, was also at Balliol in these years, but their contacts were limited to their common membership in the Arnold Society, a debating club. Early in his adult life, as later in his literary and philosophical career, Stapledon was more comfortable, if not entirely happy, inhabiting the fringes. Resistant to the snobbery of old money and often feeling out of his depth in elite intellectual circles, Olaf at Oxford manifested the provincialism that he later proudly claimed as a badge of honor.[7]

¶431But why is it sacrilegious to use direct means for the improvement of the human breed? We have been given wherewithal to climb a little nearer to divinity. Are we to stand mesmerised within the chalk circle of convention? No doubt we must act with caution. Our knowledge being still incomplete, we must not attempt very much at first. But let us at least have the will to progress.[54]

¶462Among the frivolous prose sketches of 1911 is a charming fantasy about himself as a dancer swaying to the homely music of a Liverpool dinner party. Abruptly his toes leave the floor and he flies out from Merseyside to the Sahara to the Indian Ocean, acquiring a lengthening string of partners while the music of fiddles and fifes drifts in from the constellation of Orion. At last he joins Agnes Miller in Australia in a universal waltz that, he fancies, with many feet would smooth and buff the earth's surface, making the planet gleam in the eye of a cosmic beholder. Twenty-five years would pass before he returned to extend that image in the glorious fourth chapter on interstellar exploration in *Star Maker*, but for now he was tentatively identifying the mysteries that would claim his most mature speculations: "I wonder what glories are beyond. One would like to lift up the corner of the curtain at the sunset some evening, where the glory comes underneath it. But I suppose curtains are not meant to be lifted—or only by some people."[35]

¶465The strike jolted Olaf into comparing his relatively trivial problems over work with those of the carters in Birkenhead and the tram drivers in Liverpool. His head was in the clouds and his eyes on the stars, “all the while down below the very insides of the earth are rumbling as if to erupt.”[38] Looking for something to do in solidarity with those who had struck, he sought out the Workers’ Educational Association, just getting established on Merseyside. In October he started attending weekly meetings. By year’s end he was giving occasional talks to large groups and running a weekly WEA tutorial class in modern history. In tones of *noblesse oblige* it took him several years to eradicate from his habits of speech, he told Agnes of a talk on Carlyle’s “Hero Worship” he gave to forty-two Birkenhead workers: “If they enjoyed it as much

¶466I did, their applause must have been sincere. It is the subsequent discussion that is so fascinating. I can’t tell you how weighty their remarks are (nor how idiotic at times). Most of them have suffered enough misery (of one sort & another) to make the ordinary person like me a permanent blackguard. Yet mostly they are splendid, misguided men.”[39]

¶496course, and through its very use & wont would never have been so earnestly desired! In fact you make me laugh at myself for having to act the part of a clandestine adorer, which I am not! It is no use talking. But there is just one other point. Dorothy, do believe me, does not in the least take my attention off other girls; rather the reverse, since I began to know what a girl is like. I that you believe that, because otherwise it merely that you do not at all understand me. If anyone were to hold my attention in that way, I assure you it would not be Dot, but another, with regard to whom also I fear you do not understand. . . . But *surely* you see the difference between a close blood relation and an outsider. I like Dot because we are so much the same, & all that. But the whole fun of the thing would be gone if somehow we were to cease to be such near blood relations. All our relations are the same except our parents. She is the nearest relation I have (here) of my own generation. We are looking, not *into* each other's eyes with a sense of excitement, but *out* of each other's eyes with a sense of kinship. However, the longer I talk, the worse I shall make it seem.

¶545The other intriguing poem from this period is "Salvation," written at Galsworthy, the farm in Devon. It is the only psalm for which there is a detailed record of the event that prompted it. On 22 June the tenant farmers at Galsworthy, Mr. and Mrs. Fishleigh, invited their landlord's son to join them for worship at a local Methodist chapel, a squat, almost windowless building lit by oil lamps—very different from the graceful Anglican parish church on a hilltop at Northam a few miles away where the seafaring generations of Stapledons were buried. The minister, using a text from the Epistle to the Ephesians, began what Olaf thought at first an eloquent sermon on peace: "The people listened and sometimes murmured approval, and some sighed at the first mention of peace." But then the preaching shifted to the priority of saving one's own soul before all else, and Olaf became annoyed, for the sermon contradicted both his Liverpool-fired social sense and his own visionary theological politics:

¶546There's more for a man to do than the saving of his own little speck of a soul. Soulsaving is a means, not an end. If every one "saves" his own soul the greater end, the "saving" of all souls & all soul, will be done. A man's first duty is to save his own soul only because his own soul is the bit of soul that has been entrusted to him to save, not because if he doesn't save his soul he'll go to hell and be burnt, nor because if he doesn't save it he won't get that peace. . . . Why always this insistence on heaven? As if a few years spent down here were to earn eternal peace or damnation! Rubbish. If we go on living as personalities after death we go on striving and stumbling and climbing.[37]

¶547Immediately (the manuscript bears the same date of 22 June) Olaf turned this experience into a poetic dialogue that begins:

¶570One such essay, "The People, Self Educator," originally an address to the Liverpool Ruskin Society, proposes that those whom the upper classes call "uneducated" are self-educated, and that teachers of working people succeed only when they see themselves not as authorities handing down wisdom but as inspiriting catalysts who motivate workers to seize their own education. This progressive view of education is disfigured, however, by ideas about race the author would later outgrow: "No parental care on the part of a conquering nation will turn Bushmen into Britons. On the other hand no lack of schools and colleges can make of the New Zealanders anything other than a civilized race."[57] During World War I, Stapledon's Anglo-Saxon prejudices dissolved into a more generous view of global community, and while he long remained curious about eugenics (at least until the revelations of Nazi experiments several decades later) he distanced himself from the notions of cultural homogenization on white European terms found in his earliest prose writings.

¶579After this initiation in 1913, the next year's summer school ought to have been even more gratifying. Former students had spread the word and enrollments were larger; Olaf had become fast friends with the summer director, Evan Hughes; and just before he set out for North Wales, Agnes had agreed to marry him (though by mid-August she had changed her mind).[71] On the night of 1 August, he wrote lightheartedly of his climbs up and down the Welsh hills, sketching a map for Agnes of his walking route to Bangor. Only near the end of the letter is there a terse allusion to the wider world: a note of relief that Agnes got out of Paris before "all this war scare."[72] On the second of August, 160 working men and women arrived by train for their holiday of study and writing, and a few hundred miles away throngs in front of the Kaiser's palace cheered as the German army moved swiftly toward Luxembourg. Sitting in his room that evening in a cul-de-sac of the United Kingdom as declarations of belligerency issued from European capitals, Olaf wrote: "We are in the midst of the European crisis & the beginnings of war. It is unimaginable."[73]

¶604Finally on 1 August 1915, with passport and Red Cross badge and a new short haircut, Olaf took his ambulance to France. By then Agnes had at last agreed to marry him—although the war made theirs a marathon engagement—and he was eager to prove his courage, because, under her conservative father's influence, she was expressing doubts about whether relief work was a sufficient response to German aggression. If Olaf had fantasies, however, of breaking in his car with a dramatic assignment to dangerous front-line operations he was quickly introduced to the mundane realities of FAU life. He pulled on heavy blue overalls and spent most of August doing unromantic mechanic's work at the Unit’s garages in Dunkirk, learning the censorship rules that governed outgoing mail, and discovering how heavily time could hang on one’s hands through long periods of the war.[27]

¶683In age and temperament Olaf was not a conventional graduate student. He planned his course of study while working up his German and preparing his syllabus for two extension courses in Shakespeare for the WEA. With evening lectures to prepare and a wife and child at home, he had little time to socialize with other students; he became friendly only with another man in his late thirties, J. E. Turner, and an exchange student, Kuo Chieh Chang (on whom the young Chinese physicist in *Last and First Men* may be based).[38] At first, Olaf found the M.A. program intimidating: "I am technically deficient," he thought after listening to another student's seminar paper on the relativity of knowledge. Following another meeting he wrote, "I get rather lost in the discussion."[39] The war had left him out of touch with new trends in philosophy and psychology, and he determined to repair his deficiencies. Early in 1922 he immured himself for days in the British Museum Reading Room from opening to closing time, devouring Freud: *The Interpretation of Dreams*, *Leonardo da Vinci*, *Delusion and Dream*, *Theory of Sex*, *Totem and Taboo*, *Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious*. "Ever so much to read."[40]

¶685Stapledon found seminar papers hard to write because they required compressing ideas into a neat thirty-minute presentation when he wanted to arrive at "epoch-making conclusions." He would work night and day to produce 10,000-word essays that he then had to cut by two-thirds, often feeling that the result looked like "a most wildly speculative effort." Mair urged Olaf not to trim the venturesome and speculative ideas from his papers but to let them "be tried on the dog" (as he liked to describe the process of reading a paper to the seminar); making a respectable thesis of them would come later.[42] By term's end Stapledon felt intellectually secure enough to declare for a Ph.D. Dissatisfied with what he saw as the rationalist excesses of orthodox Freudianism, he altered his topic from the psychological study of symbols to a philosophical analysis of the problem of meaning.

¶724Shuttling back and forth between elementary WEA classes and the rarefied atmosphere of the Philosophy Seminar at Liverpool University, between political canvassing for Labour causes and library research, Stapledon, in words he used to title an article in the year of his death, was living the life of "a plain man talking about values." And writing about them. Late in 1924 he submitted his doctoral thesis in the area of inquiry now called semiotics.[3] He was two months shy of his thirty-ninth birthday when he presented himself on 5 March 1925 to the vice-chancellor of Liverpool University for his degree. His mind was less on ceremony (which he always hated) than on a lecture he was writing on "Democracy as an Ideal," on the recent thrill of hearing a scratchy performance of Schumann and a clear reading of the news on a neighbor's radio, and on an exhibition and sale he and Agnes were planning at their house the following week for his old Ambulance Unit friend, the nearly destitute Eric Robertson.[4] At the high moment of his investiture as a philosopher, Dr. Stapledon was, typically, in the midst of an energetic, many-sided life.

¶725The one-word title of his thesis, "Meaning," was concise, cryptic, and brazenly inclusive, for the author saw himself working "at the point where psychology, physical science, logic, and epistemology are united."[5] The topic was lively and controversial among philosophers of the period, perhaps most visibly in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards's 1923 *The Meaning of Meaning*, with which Stapledon sustains a running argument in his thesis. An admirer of his later fiction and philosophy, looking for traces of the work to come, can discern a familiar intellectual style in the 433 pages of critical summary and technical analysis of competing views of how (and whether) we make sense of the world: "So called 'false' meanings are always true meanings, within a certain system, but no meanings at all in the system in which they are falsely taken to be meanings," or "The only fully intelligible universe is a monistic universe. It does not, however, follow that the universe really is fully intelligible." At such moments the thesis writer prefigures the creator of alternate universes in *Darkness and the Light* and the agnostic narrator of *Star Maker*. On the very problem of change and continuity, Olaf admitted a rare self-conscious joke: "I, who as a child nibbled a jam tart and said I didn't, am in some sense the same I who now nibble at philosophy."[6]

¶730Meanwhile Olaf took Mair’s advice and began his first book, on a topic few English philosophers were inclined to pursue: the impact of psychology on ethics in the disenchanted aftermath of the Great War. In a burst of energy, he drafted almost half of *A Modern Theory of Ethics* by midsummer 1925. Then, on a visit to Oxford, he awoke to the realities of academic employment in a faltering economy for an older candidate working on an unfashionable topic:

¶734Discouraged as he was by the academy's indifference to him, Olaf continued to find outlets for his philosophical ideas and to experiment with new modes of expression. As a postgraduate in the Liverpool Extension but with no other department to call his home, he still participated in Mair's Philosophy Seminar, where he had first worked out the issues for his doctoral thesis. The Seminar—a biweekly, yearlong symposium on a single topic attended by the staff and graduate students in the department—now became the proving ground for the chapters of *A Modern Theory of Ethics* and for the bold speculations of the work that would define Stapledon's career, *Last and First Men*. In 1927–1928 the seminar studied Whitehead's *Science and the Modern World* d addressed the question: "What is the bearing of scientific discovery upon the problems of philosophy?” It was an issue tailor-made for Olaf who, while working on his thesis, had become deeply fascinated by the intersections between philosophy and the physical and behavioral sciences.

¶736Not ordinarily the most active discussant, Olaf sat through Seminar meetings with a nearly expressionless face, seldom giving away his position unless provoked. At forty, slim and pink-cheeked, with an unruly mop of blond hair and alert pale blue eyes, he looked ageless and a little inhuman. When he spoke up—especially if his own work was under discussion—he slipped into the funereal tones and exaggerated politeness he adopted whenever he felt self-conscious. Neither flamboyant nor aggressive, Stapledon’s measured arguments suggested a mind operating on an entirely different frequency from anyone else’s. His mind was absorbent and generous enough to take in viewpoints very different from his own, but he came at topics from an angle that often led to controversy. One day, he told Agnes, it was “mostly me against the rest, about the religious sense.” Rejecting anthropocentric assumptions, he would ask how any decision should be judged in relation to the nature and purposes of the universe. Determined to make terrestrial acts confront ultimate reality, to set the human microcosm against the backdrop of an unfathomable macrocosm, he took a philosophical stance that seemed visionary—or cockeyed. On days when he held the floor and argued issues that were close to him, he came home exhilarated and exhausted.[16]

¶746The agnostic piety Stapledon embraced in his mature years, his attraction to the mood of eighteenth-century deism as expressed in Alexander Pope's famous epigram "Whatever is, is right," is both an intricately reasoned proposition and a psychological war wound. And whether considered as philosophy or as autobiography, this calm resignation to, and exultation in, suffering is the single most troubling, and for some readers offensive, motif in his philosophy and fiction.[26]

¶770Nor Russell, Wells, nor Freud, nor Bernard Shaw gospelled as yet through dark suburbia.

¶808More recent works also made an impact. In 1923, Stapledon read Wells's *Outline of History* and in 1927 J. W. Dunne's *Experiment in Time*, the first a model of synoptic and generalizing history and the second an investigation of telepathy that challenged the commonsense metaphor of time's arrow. He also read Gerald Heard's *Ascent of Humanity*, but found its notions of psychological evolution unreliable. An essay acquired in 1928, during the early phase of *Last and First Men*'s composition, had a far greater impact on the decision to extend the book beyond the relatively modest confines of the outline in “The Future Speaks”: J. B. S. Haldane's “The Last Judgment.” Haldane's speculative apocalypse is a cornucopia of unelaborated but provocative guesses and fancies about the future, around many of which Olaf built entire episodes—the depletion of fossil fuels and the destruction of the earth by its disintegrating moon, the development of new human senses and the abolition of pain through eugenic manipulation, the terraforming of Venus and the fashioning of a stumpy dwarf humanity to colonize Jupiter.[24]

¶810If its epic and historical claims and its status as myth were uppermost in the author's mind, it was the scientific boldness of *Last and First Men* that captivated its stunned first readers, many of whom did not recognize the author's name. From London the poet A. S. J. Tessimond wrote, "You've made time, man, mind thrilling, and damned few people have done that." John Dover Wilson, the WEA inspector turned Shakespearean editor, was distracted from all other work for four days: "You have invented a new kind of book & the world of Einstein & Jeans is ready for it." Haldane the geneticist found the science of *Last and First Men* "unimpeachable," assumed incorrectly that Stapledon worked in a research laboratory, guessed that his own essay "The Last Judgment" had been an influence, and offered free consultations on the author's next myth. Haldane's sister Naomi Mitchison was "entranced" and "didn't read anything else, even the daily paper, till I'd finished it." The astronomer Arthur Eddington "appreciated equally the wisdom of its sense and the subtlety of its nonsense." Julian Huxley, just having collaborated with Wells on the massive *Science of Life*, sent an effusive message: "The blend of imagination and scientific plausibility is more than Wellsian!" Three readings convinced the novelist L. H. Myers that no one "deals with the immensities with such judgment." Gerald Heard, thrilled to find a book that treated his pet interests in telepathy and group consciousness with scientific rigor, wrote four times to Stapledon within a month and used his connections in London newspaper circles to turn himself into a one-man publicity machine for the book.[26]

¶822Back on Merseyside, Olaf's national attention brought new speaking engagements outside the adult-education circles that had been his bread and butter as a lecturer. He found himself addressing conservative audiences who wouldn't have dreamed of inviting a socialist WEA tutor but were glad to have a speech by a well-known local writer. The marriage of lecturer and listeners was not always happy. Speaking on "Selfishness—Its True Place in Business" at a Liverpool Rotary Club luncheon, he deplored competition as the symptom of an archaic individualism and left his audience baffled by what one Rotarian lamented as "an abstruse ethical subject" not well-suited to a hotel meal.[37] Before long, Olaf resigned from the Philosophy Seminar at the university and reduced his WEA classes to one per term to make room for other paid talks and to give himself time to write. The sales of *Last and First Men* were good enough to tempt him to the thought that he might be able to replace at least some of his teaching income with royalties from popular writing. At Methuen, E. V. Rieu was already asking for a sequel.

¶834A book of mine, *Last and First Men*, has received a certain amount of attention, and nearly every review has contained some reference to yourself. Recently I have come to feel that if you happened to notice the book, a copy of which the publishers must have sent you, you might wonder why I had not the grace to make some acknowledgment of your influence. Of course it cannot matter to you whether a new writer admits his debt or not; and anyhow you may not have seen the book or the reviews. All the same I should like to explain. Your works have certainly influenced me very greatly, perhaps even more than I supposed when I was writing my own book. But curiously enough I have only read two of your scientific romances, *The War of the Worlds*, and *The Star*. If I seem to have plagiarized from any others, it was in ignorance. Your later works I greatly admire. There would be somethng very wrong with me if I did not. They have helped very many of us to see things more clearly. Then why, I wonder, did I not acknowledge my huge debt? Probably because it was so huge and obvious that I was not properly aware of it. A man does not record his debt to the air he breathes in common with everyone else. Yours very truly W. Olaf Stapledon[44]

¶835Literary historians have been so eager to trace a lineage from Wells through Stapledon to later practitioners of science fiction that they have quoted the homage of the final sentence out of context. But it was Wells the utopian and the public educator, not the romancer, whose forgiveness Olaf asked for wholesale borrowing. The letter was forwarded to Wells on tour in the United States; from Boston he sent back a gruff, vulgar, typically Wellsian absolution (in which, like many other readers, he got Stapledon's title wrong): "It is all balls to suggest *First & Last Men* (which I found a very exciting book) owes anything to my writings. I wish it did." He told Stapledon he was endorsing the book in his new encyclopedia of economics, *The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind*, and, always on the lookout for a disciple, invited him to visit his London flat or his French villa.[45] Their first meeting did not occur until five years later, but they began exchanging books, reviewing each other's work, and debating philosophy and politics by letter.

¶866A partially disintegrated recording of this address, rescued by the Stapledon family from the BBC archives, contains the only known transcription of Olaf's voice. When Agnes once asked him what he thought about the importance of "nice" accents, he replied, "Certainly in the days when I used to live among people who always spoke so, namely at Oxford, I used to think anything else was at best flat and undistinguished and at worst very painful. But that was long ago. My own talk for instance is now very undistingushied, largely owing to the F.A.U. and W.E.A."[7]

¶871Not content simply to be a lecture-and-radio pundit, Olaf set to work on a "book of dogmas" that would lay out a comprehensive prescription for building a global Utopia.[8] That book he ultimately called, in his favorite metaphor, *Waking World*. The most challenging, ambiguous, and artful of his utopian writings, however, was a work of fiction written nearly in tandem with *Waking World* in 1933 and 1934. Fleshed out from a discarded chapter of *Last Men in London* and given a teasing subtitle ("A Story Between Jest and Earnest") reminiscent of More's skepticism about Utopia, the book's title underwent several alterations. From awkward suggestions of a tract ("Disportment" or "The Career of a Sport") the title evolved to emphasize a personality rather than a thesis—"John Alive" and finally, at a very late stage, *Odd John*. With *Odd John*, Stapledon for once did not have to warn readers that this fiction was "not a novel." Inventing his first truly rounded character, a physical and mental freak who rejects the prevailing ethical and cultural norms, he also conducted his most troubling excursion into Utopia, one that epitomized the decade's dwindling hopes, in the era of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Franco, for achieving the good society.

¶879The history of the H. G. Wells Society is briefer but just as unedifying. With Wells's blessing, Society proclaimed its members open conspirators who would change minds and institutions. Vernon Porter, its young chairman, foresaw a cultural evolution with a fairy-tale ending: “The work of the Society would go on quietly, enthusiastically, continually, with ever-widening range, until one day mankind would wake up to find the World State no longer an inspiring vision but a living reality.”[15] Three speakers were advertised for the Society’s first public meeting on 15 May 1934 at Caxton Hall in London: the suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst, the dilettante journalist Gerald Heard, and Stapledon. The hall was crowded by a youthful, racially diverse audience. In a lengthy address Olaf, described by an observer (perhaps only by contrast to Pankhurst and Heard) as “a forceful he-man,” asked the Society to keep a distinction between education and propaganda, realizing that any utopian community must foster critical intelligence in its citizens, starting with its children.[16] At the same time, he said, an effective movement had to make emotional appeals because the opposition would not hesitate to use sentiment, propaganda, and theatrics to maintain the old order. Utopians needed fresh symbols, and “we should beat our opponents on their own ground and make use of even flags, banners, and slogans.” Finally, previewing a theme in his *Waking World*, he hedged on Wells’s social vision that neglected art and religion and overprized science; a reconstructed society must be wary of “scientists going the way of priests and becoming a hard and dogmatic caste.”

¶882*Waking World* is a record of Stapledon's loyalty to the utopian idea in the face of the dystopian 1930s and of his heretical departures from Wellsianism. Its composition is traceable to a meeting with Victor Gollancz in the summer of 1932 after Olaf had finished his essay on the future for Naomi Mitchison's *Outline for Boys and Girls*.[21] Impressed by the enormous commercial success of Wells's *Outline of History*, which continued a full decade after its first edition, Gollancz decided that his firm should follow up the Mitchison anthology with more "outlines." He proposed that Olaf write a book for older teenagers on what they could do to create the world their children would inhabit. Gollancz advertised it as "It Is Up to You: An Appeal to the Young" for his spring list of 1933. But he never actually wrote a contract, and he declined to publish what Stapledon submitted. The rejected manuscript has disappeared, but a few traces of the episode remain: a synopsis of "It Is Up to You" printed in Gollancz's advertisement; an aside by Naomi Mitchison in a letter to Olaf ("Make Victor give you a contract; he is a wretch"); and a cryptic acknowledgment in the preface to *Waking World*: "To Mr. Victor Gollancz's shattering comments on an earlier and abortive experiment I owe much."[22]

¶885*Waking World* set out to correct an exclusively biological definition of human nature. Properly understood, Stapledon argued, the scientific revolution encouraged a "spiritualizing" process fundamentally different from the complacency of religious doctrines that assigned human beings a unique role in Creation. By dethroning humanity, scientific research can purify religion, restoring the meaning of "religare" (to tie back): "In giving man a sense of his indissoluble unity with the rest of the cosmos; and persuading him to be glad of it, the influence of science has been almost literally *religious*, binding, harmonizing."[25] By yoking religion and science, in however unorthodox a way, *Waking World* subverted a central tenet of Wellsianism. A modern, secular Utopia of the sort Wells had been boosting since the century began did not fulfill all human needs. The old gods of Greece and Judea, of the Vatican and Canterbury might be dead, but the religious sense had not atrophied.

¶887Although Stapledon and Wells had real ideological and temperamental differences, a reviewer of *Waking World* noticed one remarkable similarity: "Mr. Stapledon is developing just as Mr. Wells did. He began by producing a firstrate scientific romance, 'Last and First Men,' corresponding to 'The Time Machine.' Now he has produced a non-fictional account of the world to which he hopes we are waking, just as Mr. Wells did in 'Anticipations.' "[27] Scientists, however, were as unenthusiastic about *Waking World* as was Wells. The physicist J. D. Bernal, whose work Olaf admired, thought it hopelessly, piously old-fashioned. He accused the author of demanding from science a mystical "beatific vision" without realizing that science did not pronounce on ultimate values. Stapledon was merely revisiting the Stoicism of the later Roman Empire, which blindly worshiped anything that exists simply because it exists: "No other religion may be possible to an intelligent and honest man in these days, but we may well ask whether religion which has lost so much of its content is worth preserving at all." The criticism wounded Olaf because he relished the praise scientific readers had heaped on *Last and First Men*. "I'm afraid *Waking World* has damned me in the eyes of the scientists. It's sad, because I have usually a dog-like respect for them. And yet—they're so *sure* of themselves."[28]

¶917*Odd John* has a pivotal place in the history of fictions that imagine the difficult emergence, by natural process or artificial intervention, of a higher form of humanity. Of the notable "superman" novels that preceded it—Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*, Wells's *Food of the Gods*, and J. D. Beresford's *Hampdenshire Wonder*—Stapledon indicated the express influence of the last of these on his book.[61] Several later contributions to the type, all by authors who read Stapledon carefully, have the mark of *Odd John* on them. John's *homo superior* in search of a community becomes Wells's *homo sideralis* in *Star-Begotten* (1937) and Theodore Sturgeon's *homo gestalt* in *More Than Human* (1953). Arthur Clarke's metamorphosed children in *Childhood's End* (also 1953) are nearly as weird as John's companions. Our last glimpse of Ben Lovatt in Doris Lessing's *Fifth Child* (1988), of all the analogues the one most nearly like *Odd John*, is an image of him on the television screen "standing rather apart from the crowd, staring at the camera with his goblin eyes, or searching the faces in the crowd for another of his own kind."[62]

¶918Recent commentaries on *Odd John* assume Nietzsche as a presiding philosophical influence. Actually, when Olaf read *Also Sprach Zarathustra* he thought it "pompous" and "ludicrously egotistical," declaring himself "hostile" to its central ideas.[63] Nevertheless, what he objected to in *Zarathustra* others might find all too evident in the career of John. One friendly reader of the novel dissented sharply from the tradition of utopian "supermen" the author had joined. Jack Haldane told Olaf the idea of an evolutionary sport was "perfectly possible" scientifically, but he deplored a regressive ideology that premised Utopia on a charismatic leader with telepathic powers:

¶919I totally and radically disagree with your general attitude to social problems. As a (not too thorough-going) Marxist I believe that man progresses to a better state of society by developing the internal contradictions latent in the existing state, and *not* by the godlike activity of great men (the fascist theory). . . . It seems to me that your attitude is the kind which leads people to fascism.[64]

¶924Although his career as author and public figure in England was barely five years old at the end of 1935 and some commentators were still misdescribing, him as "quite a young man," Olaf was turning fifty.[70] Some of his best work still lay ahead in the next fifteen years, and the book many people consider his masterpiece was in early stages of composition in 1935. But his reputation a writer of fiction was already at a peak he would not rise to again before his death, and he was starting to suspect that his professional life was not going to have the brilliant finish he wanted. For the American publicity campaign for *Odd John*, he produced a miscellany of comic self-assessments that sum up an imperfect life at midcentury:

¶931Almost from the time he learned to use pen and paper, Olaf could not help writing about the stars—in youthful diary passages and in the poems of *Latter-Day Psalms*, in reports from his ambulance post during the war and in his verses of the twenties. In *Star Maker* he aimed to be comprehensive and definitive, to settle the human place in the universe, “to swallow the Whole,” as Wells said in a mixture of admiration and distaste when he saw the finished product.[3] If *Waking World* was Olaf’s “book of dogmas,” *Star Maker* was to be his confession of faith as a pious agnostic.

¶932The Danish art historian Aage Marcus first met Stapledon on an English visit in 1934 and heard about “the Cosmos-book,” Olaf’s vague designation of his work-in-progress. Over the next three years, Marcus got periodic reports on how the project was faring. After *Odd John* appeared, Olaf wrote, “I am now engaged on my book about the stars, a more serious undertaking. Indeed I have started afresh on it several times and been dissatisfied.” Marcus was thrilled: “I was *very* glad to learn that the Cosmos-book is now proceeding well; that book has haunted me as no other since you told me about it that April night 1934. . . . You may believe that I long for it!!”[4]

¶933A preview of *Star Maker* slyly inserted into the final chapter of *Odd John*, when the narrator discovers a manuscript on the history of the universe, is a sign of Stapledon’s determination to complete his most audacious myth. Unlike *Last and First Men*, which he wrote as a virtual recluse, the cosmos-book was widely circulated in manuscript. The first person to get an extensive look was Naomi Mitchison. The draft of a cosmic history, from the first nebulae to the extinction of all life, accompanied Naomi late in the summer of 1933 on a difficult visit to her aging father in Perthshire. “I am in the bloody middle of patriarchy here,” she wrote. Her commentary, affected by father-daughter struggles and “bottlesfull” of antirheumatic analgesic that left her head and her prose spinning, is one of the shrewdest assessments ever made of

¶936What she had read, labeled "Discarded MS. of Star-Maker," was found forty years later in Stapledon's desk and published under the title *Nebula Maker*.[5]

¶963Olaf grew desperate to bring his work on the Peace Letter to some kind of conclusion. In June 1936 he had begun a drive to finish *Star Maker*, rapidly producing chapters for Leo Myers to criticize. “Methuens want it by December,” he wrote to Aage Marcus in early September, “but I doubt if I can finish it so soon.”[26] Meanwhile, he dispatched his fourth and last draft of the Peace Letter to thirty newspapers. The ten-point Letter began appearing in papers at the end of September. Its seventh and eighth articles, calling on Britain to “surrender for the good of humanity any privileges, imperial or economic” acquired through commercial exploitation and to grant its colonies “self-government speedily and without restriction,” generated a flurry of correspondence in *John O’London’s Weekly*. When a reader objected to such “emotional blather” since he could not imagine what privileges Englishmen had at the expense of other people, Olaf was moved to wonder whether the reader, ignorant of the unrest in India, Kenya, and Egypt, was under the illusion that “the British Empire is a purely philanthropic institution.”[27]

¶974As serious as he was about presenting the facts of the war, he never forgot the difference between propaganda and education and wanted his listeners to be skeptical of everything they heard. That loyalty to self-conscious detachment overrode all other loyalties, especially when Olaf was in his study. He had worked so intensively in the last months of 1936 on *Star Maker* that his critical faculties were numbed. He finished the last chapter just before Christmas and needed to produce a typed copy almost at once for his editor. Weary and in doubt, he asked Leo Myers to advise him on cuts. The letters Myers wrote on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day did not ease his mind. All through the year Leo had been rallying Olaf's spirits about *Star Maker*. On 21 November, before he saw the last few chapters, he wrote, "I don't see how—at this stage in human knowledge—a better book on such lines could be written." Suddenly at Christmas his praises grew bland and he carped at the representation of the Star Maker in the climactic visions. The conclusion "trivialized" the myth and revealed a Creator with no ethical sense. Myers thought Olaf had better recast the entire framework of the book as a dream rather than a vision.[36]

¶975From the time Myers first read a synopsis of *Star Maker* in the summer of 1934, he wanted it "primarily to be *a work of art*." He was enthralled by it as a theological romance and cautioned against political allusions that might soon render episodes obsolete. He wanted Stapledon to develop "language almost Biblical."[37] Despite Olaf's insistence that *Star Maker* was "not a novel," Myers criticized it as if it were one, demanding high seriousness and stylistic elegance of the sort he attempted in his own trilogy of the 1930s, *The Root and the Flower*.[38]

¶976To the degree that *Star Maker* belongs to the literature of spiritual quest, Myers was an ideal reader (although, happily, Stapledon took little of his advice about altering the theological vision of the final chapters). Few twentieth-century works of fiction take theological inquiry as far as *Star Maker* does, and the work it has most often been compared to is the *Divine Comedy*. What Dante built, Stapledon dismantled. Where Dante invested a stable cosmos with a supremely authoritative, managerially efficient, and just but loving God, Stapledon found radical instability in multiple cosmoses, launched and discarded by a force inaccessible to human understanding. As for the Star Maker's relationship to his creation, love has nothing to do with it. But as original a work of theological romancing as *Star Maker* is, it is not merely idiosyncratic. In 1934, Olaf read one of the landmarks of modern theology, Rudolf Otto's *Idea of the Holy*, and found a kindred spirit. He was soon recommending Otto's concept of the "numinous" or radically "other" nature of divinity and telling people that awe was the central religious emotion, "a corrective to the much commoner idea that the essence of religion is the conviction of the deity's friendliness."[39]

¶979I peered further, over the earth's shoulder, and saw the mountains where the last free black men had desperately defended their homes with muskets and spears against Italian guns, Italian aircraft. Desperately, vainly, yet not in vain; for the rumour of their stand and of their slaughter spread through Africa. Camels bore it through the gritty storms of the Sahara. Negro workers by the great lakes, where wild elephants trouble the crops, whispered it to one another, with sidelong glances at their own white masters. Hunters in the gorilla-haunted jungles, and in the veldt among the great wild herds, told the same tale. Far to the south, where Dutch and English thrive on the negro millions, I heard it whispered, 'The Blacks are waking.'

¶980In the text as published, everything in this splendid passage is flattened into three cautious sentences. The great racial awakening, the liberation of a continent becomes an ill-defined dream: "Far southward, black men slept beside the great lakes. Elephants trampled the crops. Further still, where Dutch and English profit by the Negro millions, those hosts were stirred by vague dreams of freedom."[40]

¶981Remembering how quickly the topical first forty pages of *Last and First Men* had dated, Stapledon blunted a sharp image of a new Africa, and in the process the passage lost its political edge and visionary luminance. In the published version the elephants are more prominent and more active than the sleeping Negro millions. Elsewhere in the final panorama, similar passages were deleted from the manuscript at Myers's urging: the "fiery glow in the sky" over Madrid where Spaniards "fought for life against the power of money, equipped with bombs and lies"; a glimpse of Rome, "city of past glory, where now the great idol of the mob, empty, echoing the mob's inarticulate howls, spell-bound the young men"; across the Alps more young men, "ranked together in their thousands, exalted, possessed, saluting the flood-lit Führer;" beyond China's Great Wall "fur-coated troops, Western in equipment but Eastern in devotion, spread the Pax Japonica with machine guns." By the time he was finished revising, Stapledon had drafted and redrafted *Star Maker* nearly as many times as the Star Maker had created and re-created the Cosmos. When the book was in page proofs in April, he wrote: "At the moment I am thoroughly disgusted with it, and can't imagine why I wrote it or why anyone should read it."[41]

¶988The earliest version of the cosmos-book, the 1933 fragment known as *Nebula Maker*, contains nothing like the intensely personal first chapter of *Star Maker*. But by midsummer 1936 the story about the stars had become inextricably linked to the "prized atom of community," the "little treasure" of Olaf-and-Agnes living in "intricate symbiosis" like "two close trees whose trunks have grown upwards together as a single shaft, mutually distorting, but mutually supporting."[47] Olaf's incorporation of his wife and marriage into the fiction of *Star Maker* was hardly sentimental, though. The unhappy narrator questions the "complacent and ingrown domesticity" of his marriage and alludes vaguely to "our own not infrequent discordancy." That Agnes was uncomfortable with this shadowy portrait of her married life can be surmised from her copy of the book, in which passages that refer to herself are marked for cutting in a future edition.[48]

¶1002Perhaps the most gratifying response came from one of Olaf’s intellectual heroes, someone he had occasionally criticized, often learned from, always respected, but had not yet actually met. Leo Myers knew him, though, and couldn’t stand him:

¶1004But Myers let his bias carry him away. Bertrand Russell *had* read *Last and First Men*, thought Stapledon owned “a very remarkable cosmological imagination” and an instinct for tragedy, and admired his freedom from the “common imaginative defect” of utopians who trust too much in government, scientific progress, and virtue as its own reward. Russell enjoyed the “grim jest” of *Star Maker*’s political allegory and the “austere beauty” of its style. The book’s spiritual inquiry—which Myers expected him to revile—engaged Russell for its “intellectual courage.” He liked the notion of the Star Maker as “an artist rather than a philanthropist,” and in the final meditation on the “two lights” of reason and love he found “all that is good in religion without any of the bad features of most historical creeds.”[63]

¶1030Much as he admired the Russian experiment, Olaf's deepest loyalties, as he had said long ago, were not to any nation but to the human species. Early in 1939 the American Clarence Streit published his controversial book *Union Now*. Streit advocated a federation of fifteen North Atlantic democracies as the first step toward a world government and proposed a "declaration of dependence" in which all human beings would recognize their common interests.[18] This was a bandwagon Olaf was ready to board. The failure of the League of Nations, premised on power sharing by sovereign nations, had persuaded him that the idea of sovereignty had to be jettisoned. Although he disputed details of Streit's proposal (including its American focus), the idea of a planetary community fired up his cosmopolitanism, and in a letter to the *Liverpool Post*, he preached a crusade for global unity. "Men and women throughout the world, all true democrats, all true progressives, whether Liberals or Socialists, and also, I suggest, all true Conservatives, must work to create it." On the day his letter was printed, the *Conservative Post*, surprisingly, editorialized on behalf of the Federal Union and thanked Dr. Stapledon for ventilating an idea that "thoughtful men in many countries" could not lightly dismiss.[19] By the end of 1939 over a hundred local chapters of Federal Union had sprung up in Britain, and Olaf chaired the Merseyside branch. His analysis of federalism and a plea for welcoming Russia into the Union was published in a 1940 symposium on Streit's book.[20]

¶1034The last of his three 1939 books, *New Hope for Britain*, his most radical analysis of society, could not have had a less auspicious context for publication. The product of his decade of opposition to British foreign policy, his unextinguished utopianism, and his recent campaign on behalf of Streit's Federal Union, *New Hope for Britain* tops off the critique of patriotism and the vision of a Wellsian cosmopolis he had been developing since World War I. He finished the book late in the spring, but the declaration of war eight weeks before it came out on 26 October made most British citizens rally round the Union Jack and left Stapledon without an attentive audience. The argument of *New Hope* is complex—probably too complex for most people to absorb under the circumstances, despite a one-page preface inserted in page proofs to underline the book's continuing pertinence in wartime. The passions of war, Stapledon urged, must not obscure intelligence. The of British "demoplutocracy” was as necessary in the long run as the defeat of Nazism. “Nothing short of abolishing, not only imperialism, but national sovereignty itself, and creating a World Federal Union of peoples, can establish peace.”[25]

¶1040This kind of assessment of the strengths and limitations of his nation's past was to preoccupy Olaf straight through the war and into the postwar period. In a 1941 lecture to a military audience called "Is There an English Spirit?", he denied that the "biological Englishman" had any more reality than Hitler's Aryan. But he affirmed a cultural tradition of nine hundred years' standing that England stood for a humane spirit, for conventions of forbearance toward differences, and for moral indignation in the face of brutality. The tradition had been violated often enough, but there was enough truth to it to make it worth preserving. He summarized his English inheritance in a litany he put together for an article, most of which was cut from the printed version:

¶1041One may reasonably be proud of being English, so long as one is also ashamed. I am proud to be the fellow-countryman of Shakespeare and Newton; ashamed of the slave-traders, the industrial exploiters, the imperial adventurers. I am proud of Milton and Keats, Darwin and Kelvin, Arkwright and James Watt, Robert Owen and the Tolpuddle Martyrs; ashamed of the Black and Tans, of the Amritsar Massacre, of the treatment of the unemployed; proud of English gentleness (some call it squeamishness), and ashamed of our vile snobbery.[28]

¶1066"The War and the Peace" disappeared into Olaf's desk drawer. "My pamphlet on the war was never published, as G. D. H. Cole produced a much better one and forestalled me," he wrote early in 1940, in his last communication with Aage Marcus until 1946. "My mind turns away from politics just now, having produced a semi-political book. Moreover I have such a lot of speaking to do on Federal Union that I want some compensation."[3] With *New Hope for Britain* and *Saints and Revolutionaries* failing to reach large audiences and his pamphlet failing even to find a publisher, Olaf sought compensation in several senses. He wanted relief from political writing and speeches, he longed to return to literature, he looked for new sources of emotional vitality, and he was worried about money.

¶1068"Stapledon's Factory," some of his friends called the house behind his back, both for the industrial look (to British eyes) of all that glass and for the plain, functional appointments of the rooms. The one striking piece of decoration was on the ceiling above the stairs and landing where, on a diamond pattern of pine boards and battens neatly spliced at the angles, there was a green-and-white painted design in which an *A* nestled alongside an *O*—Agnes and Olaf, Alpha and Omega.[5]

¶1099In that season of renewed hopefulness in the middle of 1941, Olaf worked on a book for Secker and Warburg's series of blue-jacketed paperbacks known as "Searchlight Books," little volumes "designed to blueprint the post-war world."[33] With a direct reference to the world's amazement at Russia's "titanic battle" against the Nazi war machine taking place as he wrote, Stapledon shone his "Searchlight" on three major changes that needed to come out of the war: an effective world government, the creation of a social welfare state, and a new ethics of human living. All three, he argued, were interdependent, but the last was fundamental. He told Mary he might simply call his book *Human Living*, but eventually it was titled *Beyond the "Isms"*[34]

¶1101"Mr. Stapledon knows all the answers," a Church of England reviewer remarked sarcastically. The nondoctrinal approach to spirituality in *Beyond the "Isms"* caused Charles Williams to see him as "called to the Way of Rejection" and the pseudonymous John O'London to complain that "to Mr. Stapledon the mere word 'spirit' seems to be a kind of abracadabra—a charm or spell against all error."[36] Even approving critics, however, passed over an intriguing aside in the preface to *Beyond the "Isms"*. This was not the book his publisher had bargained for, the author stated; in its making it became "a much more personal book than I had planned."[37] A remarkable instance of the insertion of his own life into the book's argument occurs in a passage on Nazi atrocities. Stapledon described a feeling "that the universe is no more than a huge desert of matter with here and there an equally futile, and a tortured, living dust. I, at least, have recently faced this despair. Events in my personal life have perhaps quickened my perception of it, and forced me also to see beyond it."[38] Such autobiographical mumbling is rare in his nonfiction, but the private difficulties he alluded to had had a uniquely disruptive effect on him.

¶1155The War Office's provision for lectures, discussion groups, and short courses arose out of concern over the boredom of troops stationed for long periods of time at home bases. Much of the teaching was done by military officers through the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, but there was a demand for trained civilian tutors as well. Regional Committees for Education in H.M. Forces operated as lecture agencies, matching requests for courses or single talks with the available pool of civilian volunteers. At its busiest, the program had four thousand courses running during a six-month period in 1943, and over sixty thousand individual lectures were delivered. Many of the lecturers, like Olaf, were veterans of the Workers' Educational Association.[18] He, however, was not moved by official calls for improving morale and keeping soldiers from getting "browned off." Stapledon's utopian aim was to form a critical mass of thoughtful activists who would apply their experience in the world war to the making of a healthier postwar world. Lecturing to troops thrown together in a relatively classless camp was an experiment in democracy. For almost half a century, the WEA had been an educational laboratory for a small proportion of the population; the huge conscripted force allowed the experiment to be tried on a much larger scale. "We shall never have a real democracy," Olaf wrote of his reason for teaching in the forces, "till masses of ordinary people are educated for democratic citizenship."[19]

¶1156Rarely did audiences display an immediately visible interest in the scheme. A lecturer found that the men or women being addressed had had no say about attending, and some showed their resentment by refusing to join the discussion. Even the most polite troops typically began with the assumption that lectures were a waste of time, and the speaker would have to cajole them out of silence. Trained in the voluntary tradition of the WEA, Olaf at first found teaching soldiers forced to be students distasteful, but by the end of the war he had changed his mind. He felt there was a strong case for making education a compulsory part of military service:

¶1157No doubt from the lecturer's point of view it is much more pleasant to talk to volunteers than to educational conscripts, but he should accept the situation as a challenge to his teaching ability. It is up to him to create the right relationship with his audience, and make them glad they were compelled to come. Another reason for compulsory adult education is that only by compulsion is it possible to reach the people who need adult education most, the people who would never dream of taking the initial plunge freely.[20]

¶1172By mid-1942 the brunt of the war, which had pushed Britain near to collapse the year before, was shifting to other parts of the world, but rotating duties in Caldy's Air Raid Precautions corps and the struggle to extract two tons of potatoes and more cabbage than he could tolerate from the uncongenial acre at Simon's Field continued to define the rhythm of Olaf's war. He was drawn into the fad for "brains trusts"—the combination of information and entertainment made popular in BBC broadcasts in which a question master put sometimes serious, sometimes teasing posers to a panel of amiable and articulate know-it-alls. Olaf became one of the resident brains trustees in Liverpool, where on Monday nights he fielded topics ranging from the charms of the Liverpool accent (he admitted losing his at Abbotsholme) to systematic prejudice against people of color in local housing, recreation, employment, and education. He appeared frequently in a variant on the brains trust format, "In the Witness Box." Each week a single "witness," an expert in some field of knowledge, would have questions fired at him that demanded pointed, knowledgeable, and preferably witty replies; the witness box moved all over Merseyside and Lancashire and was sometimes taken to military bases, including American camps.[33] Between shows his formal lectures to troops, between victory gardening and a renewed effort at political campaigning begun in 1942, literary work often got squeezed out of Olaf's daily routines. But in the last quarter of 1942, *Sirius* once again clamored for attention.

¶1206Perhaps Olaf asked for it by challenging Toynbee's review. Other, unsolicited letters treated *Sirius* royally. From Julian Huxley he heard, "It is something that I think only you could have done—or would have done!—or both. Anyhow it brings home in a unique and arresting way the uniqueness of man, and also of individual minds treading out beyond the everyday." Eleanor Farjeon found it "piercing & valuable" and wondered, like many readers since, "Why is Plaxy called Plaxy?" Jack Haldane thought the book "far more plausibly futuristic" than anything else Stapledon had written, and anticipated a day when human beings would "make animals into colleagues rather than pets, food producers, or beasts of burden." A characteristically insightful note came from Naomi Mitchison on Stapledon's narrative rhythms: "It was like you always are, sometimes jogging along like a nice reasonable scientific paper, and sometimes suddenly becoming very moving." Arthur Koestler, reserving only the scene in which Sirius sings canine tunes in an East End church, called it "almost a great book" and admired "both the courage and execution." "[I] hope with all my heart that it will find the great success it deserves and the necessary paper for a dozen reprints."[64]

¶1216Maurice survived. In December 1944, six months after *Sirius* appeared in print, the destroyer *Aldenham*, to which Dibs Stapledon was assigned, was torpedoed nd sank off the coast of Italy; for almost an hour David swam in the wintry waters, hoping for rescue. He was among the fortunate third of the ship's crew to survive the explosion and the exposure to the cold.

¶1217About that time, Olaf began writing a fantasy about the death of a youn RAF rear gunner and the six fellow crewmen of his bomber. The transferenc of his naval radio-mechanic son to an RAF gunner is indirectly acknowledged in the final pages of *Death Into Life* in an authorial afterword on parenthood that recalls the departure of David for the navy:

¶1242By the end of May 1945 he had finished *Death Into Life*, and the clanging bells of V-E Day, 8 May, sound throughout the latter half of the book. Even for Stapledon this fantasy had only the slenderest narrative line, however. The promising first chapter details the mission of a seven-man British heavy bomber blasted apart over Germany, its entire crew incinerated. The central consciousness, of nineteen-year-old gunner, undergoes absorption into the composite spirit of his six dead colleagues. The disembodied seven join still larger communal entities: they are linked to all the dead of the war, then to the dead of the previous war, to the universal "Spirit of Man," and at last to the Cosmic Spirit. "It is rather different from my other books," Olaf told Aage Marcus before *Death Into Life* was published, "and is mainly concerned with the survival or annihilation of the individual after death."[11]

¶1246What he could observe of cruelty and degradation at first hand in the slums of Liverpool or London was augmented by the horrific revelations at the end of the European phase of the war. With Graham White, the Liberal M.P. for Birkenhead, he viewed films of what British soldiers had encountered when they liberated the Nazi camps. Those visual images of Buchenwald were never erased until his death. In *The Opening of the Eyes* he has the Star Maker, whose artistry he had once mythologized, challenge the agnostic piety that everything that is in the universe is right:

¶1250Two days after the first atomic bombardment, a scientist writing for a Sheffield newspaper recalled how two decades earlier Olaf Stapledon had "brilliantly described" the risk of global catastrophe from the misuse of atomic energy. Death by atomic war and accident was part of the varied program of destruction in *Last and First Men*, and in the "gigantic mushroom of steam and debris" rising over Lundy island in his fictional version of the first atomic test he foresaw the definitive image of the nuclear era. In the days just after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, other columnists and correspondents also cited the prophecies of Stapledon and Wells, though none seems to have recalled how the doomed freaks who represented the first tentative stage in the evolution of *homo superior* immolated themselves at the end of *Odd John* in a blazing atomic flash.[19]

¶1251At home on the Wirral peninsula, friends and neighbors turned to Olaf for perspective. On 6 August, Margaret and Norman Cullen were having a garden party at their house in Heswall when news of the instant cremation of a city came over the radio. Like many who learned of the American use of atomic weapons, the guests in Heswall were stunned and afraid. After a few minutes of dispirited conversation, Margi finally said, "We'd better ring up Olaf and ask him about it. He'll know what to think." Olaf was at home and had heard the broadcast. When he picked up the phone and heard Margi's anxious questions, he was silent for a moment. "Don't feel too gloomy. This might be the event that will finally unify the world," she recalled him saying. Unsatisfied, she pressed him further. "Is that what you really think, Olaf?" There was a longer pause this time before he continued: "Yes, but it may be a totalitarian world."[20]

¶1261The aftermath of August 1945 plunged Olaf into a dark mood observed by many of his friends. Doomsday became a recurrent theme of his conversations and his public speeches. Worried by Stalin's perversion of the revolutionary spirit in the USSR, he worried even more about a swaggering United States, unscathed in comparison to the nations of Europe and Asia, unleashing a new, possibly terminal, world war. When his West Kirby neighbor, the economist George Allen, returned from a tour of Japanese industrial facilities for the British Foreign Office, he fueled Olaf's suspicions of an untrustworthy America: "He says that Japan was really quite beaten *before* the atomic bombs were used. The American Government is evidently feeling guilty about the use of those bombs, as they have hushed up all accounts of the damage done."[30] In Liverpool seven months after V-J Day, he made a bitter prediction. "America needs these islands as a base in a conflict with Russia, and if there is another war in the next few years—or weeks—it will be goodbye Britain." The world was being twisted out of shape as the emergent superpowers muscled their way forward to eye each other across Europe. "Let us face up to the unpleasant truth that we are no longer a great Power," Olaf told his hearers. "People speak of the "three great Powers,' but there are not three, there are only two and a half. We are the half."[31] He did not mourn the shrunken old empire; he wanted, if anything, to its end. Decades of ground swell for a boundary-less European community, he said, "I am convinced that if we do not get a United Europe, then I am afraid we are pretty well doomed to war."[32]

¶1266If Olaf was too much on the margins of the literary world to be a helpful guide to writers looking for a way in, he still had the personal magnetism to draw other young people to him. He was in demand with political groups and university audiences. At a summer school for the Independent Labour party just after the war ended, he promoted his unorthodox view that Lenin was the outstanding saint of the century. “Despite its anti-religious thought, the Russian revolution was the greatest religious event of modern times,” he claimed. The Oxford Socialist Club gathered an audience of several hundred to hear his analysis of the philosophical problems of Marxism; although there were scattered charges that the lecture was “reformist” and “Menshevik,” most of the students applauded the directions he laid out for Marxist thought and action. Only at Manchester University, where a mostly Catholic audience turned out to hear him debate the broadcaster Father Agnellus Andrew, did he find young people openly hostile to his ideas. At the end of the debate, widely reported in the Catholic press of England and Ireland, the students voted overwhelmingly against Stapledon’s position that doctrinal religion was not necessary to human progress; when he suggested that their attitude was archaic, the audience laughed at him.[36]

¶1269In 1946 attention was more muted than in the heady days when the author of *Last and First Men* and *Odd John* was lionized in newspapers and on radio. His following was smaller now but perhaps more loyal than those who had been attracted by a flashy review in 1930. His new readers were likely to have discovered him by accident or in out-of-the-way places. The physicist Freeman Dyson picked up a tattered copy of *Star Maker* from a bookstall in Paddington Station, and it led him down the path to his pioneering research in artificial biospheres. C. S. Lewis sent his followers scurrying to secondhand shops when he announced in a preface to *That Hideous Strength* (1945) his debt to Stapledon's imagination (though not to his philosophy).[39] Anyone happening into Conway Hall in London's Red Lion Square, where Olaf often spoke on politics or ethics or religion—or on some typically Stapledonian combination of all three—heard a voice that still awakened minds. His platform manner, like his prose, was deliberate, unembellished, low-key, free from the histrionics that broadcasting had made popular in the various tones of Churchill, Joad, and Lord Haw Haw. Preferring a comradely air of participation, never invoking expertise or authority, he could enter gracefully and instructively into dialogue with the cleverest or the most naïve of listeners. He had the charisma that only speakers who shun affectations of style earn, and those drawn to Olaf in the postwar years felt, as Lilian Bowes-Lyon told him, that he was "speaking to today's people—& also to people on the precipice edge of today, who half belong to tomorrow already."[40]

¶1270That was the audience Olaf had in mind for one of his least-known books, *Youth and Tomorrow*. Conceived as a sixth-former's textbook that he expected Nelson to publish in 1944, it was nearly another casualty of the paper shortages and altered publishers' schedules of the war. *Youth and Tomorrow* finally appeared, lightly revised to take account of the Labour victory in the 1945 election, in a miserably printed edition from the tiny firm of St. Botolph in mid-1946, over two years after it had been finished. It was, in fact, probably too idiosyncratic to be marketed effectively as a school text, but its very unbookish medley of personal anecdote, historical outline, cultural critique of the past seventy-five years, and speculation about the immediate and more distant future gives it energy and eloquence. J. H. Blackham, in its only lengthy review, regretted Stapledon's inordinate fondness for abstractions like "personality-in-community," but welcomed "the outlook of a mellow genuine progressive who has lived through the attack on the Victorian Age and the nihilism of the Twenty Years' Crisis and has forgotten nothing and learned a great deal."[41]

¶1276Barely reviewed outside the left-wing press and educational newsletters, *Youth and Tomorrow* was the sort of book that had to be picked up by chance or recommended by word of mouth. The numerous typesetter’s errors and almost unreadable print on the cheapest paper were additional discouragements. Ernest Martin, who at the time was finishing the first major essay on Stapledon as a philosopher, wrote angrily, “I could wish that the St Botolph people had realised that your work was worthy of a better presentation. Damn it, it v shocking!”[46] The physical condition of the book, coupled with its lack of publicity, led Olaf to write it off, even though it contained some of his finest social analysis of the decade. When an editor in the summer of 1946 offered to help arrange French translations of his works, Olaf made many suggestions about suitable texts but thought *Youth and Tomorrow* “not the sort of thing to recommend.”[47]

¶1277With *Death Into Life*, published two months after *Youth and Tomorrow*, he remained pleased, although its fantasy was far less coherent than his personal tour through yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Aage Marcus and the visionary painter Fay Pomerance, both of whom shared Olaf's growing fascination with psychic phenomena and mystical experience, were enthusiastic about *Death Into Life*, but other friends tactfully limited themselves to praise of the autobiographical Interludes. Speaking as one writer to another with her customary candor, Naomi Mitchison (who hadn't seen him in six years) wrote from Scotland that Olaf should write either straight philosophy or a real novel. Ignoring the main narrative—"the latest installment of your myth," she called it—Naomi identified what remains potent in *Death Into Life*. "Actually, I was so much interested in what it told me about you and your life and how you are dealing with this awful business of getting old."[48] When he was detailing the personal toll of mutability, *Death Into Life* rang true; the more it reached for the immutable and the eternal, the more it felt like a thesis-ridden exercise. Olaf believed there was an organic connection between the Interludes and the rest of *Death Into Life*: "Art (of any sort) must feed through its roots in concrete life. And the more cosmical or universal its theme, the more of that concrete food it needs if it is to avoid being lost in abstraction. In my book the Interludes symbolize the roots."[49] But most readers found the roots more attractive than the flower.

¶1278Olaf had always been a writer alert to paradox; in *Death Into Life* he produced only a contradiction between his voice and his message. Many reviews refrained from detailed criticism, sticking to perfunctory and noncommittal summaries of its spiritual thesis, but some critics were less kindly. To Valentine Ackland it was "confused and overworded." Another reader described it as the psychical flotsam of a philosopher "communing with his own ego." The *New Statesman*'s Rayner Heppenstall found a delicate power in the articulation of symbols vitiated by leaden abstraction and narrative clumsiness. His frustration with *Death Into Life* glosses with unequaled precision the author's never-resolved uncertainties about his talent and identity: "How bitterly the artist and the thinker have struggled for the soul of Mr. Stapledon."[50]

¶1281A still pricklier political issue centered on the question of ostracism of writers who had collaborated with the Nazis. Olaf was not surprised that it was a Dutch delegate who introduced the motion to blacklist authors (many of them by then living in Switzerland, Spain, and South America) who identified by the PEN center in their native countries as collaborationists. The U.S. delegates, confirming Olaf's belief that as the Russians always erred on the side of discipline, the Americans could be counted upon to sacramentalize individual liberty, took an absolutist position on freedom of expression and opposed the motion. The greatest support for the Dutch resolution from delegates whose countries had been occupied, and when it became clear that the British were going to waffle, someone remarked caustically that England had only had a calling card in the form of the V1 and V2 rockets but had not known the sound of the Gestapo knocking at the door. Hermon Ould took the floor to argue vehemently against the blacklist, but Olaf reluctantly spoke on its behalf, with memories of his visit to Holland still fresh. Ostracism was a dangerous tactic to use against fellow writers, he said, mindful of the inconsistency between the inclusive nature of his own resolution on the Russian writers and the repressive implications of a blacklist. “But the right course is always dangerous,” he concluded. In the end, against his advice, the divided British delegation fell back on abstention. As Olaf wrote in a report on Stockholm for the *New Statesman*, there are times when intellectual allegiance to abstract principles must yield to emotion and experience. It was too easy for the Americans and some Britons not to want to sully literature with political considerations. “Throughout the discussions, the cleavage was mainly between those who had suffered under tyranny and those who had not. The terrific experience of inhuman oppression and heroic resistance, though to some extent it had clouded judgment, had also burnt into many minds a lesson which the more fortunate could learn only at second hand, and through the exercise of imagination.” After the Society of Authors asked him to write about Stockholm, its chairman gulped over Olaf’s text (“It is not quite on the lines I had expected”). In fact, he took an even harder line than in his *New Statesman* article, this time in a journal that held the writer’s independence sacrosanct: “While humanity is still in the mere chrysalis stage, there will still be occasions when the ‘sword’ has to be called in, whether in the form of state discipline or private blacklists.”[53] Olaf’s role in the PEN congress served as a rehearsal for the more widely publicized international peace conferences of 1948 and 1949 when he at last had his chance to meet Russian writers and musicians and sample the effects of Soviet state discipline. By the time of Stockholm, Stapledon had begun such a binge of conferences and lecture tours that in the last four years of his life, imaginative writing was relegated to scarce odd moments. After he had *The Flames* typed in April, he wrote almost nothing for the rest of the year, except for commissioned book reviews, occasional pieces of journalism, and an allegorical story that became another occasion for autobiography. Peter Albery, whose London discussion group known as “The Four Arts League” Olaf often attended, asked him for a 5,000-word piece for the literary miscellany *Here and Now* he and his wife Sylvia Read were editing. Albery wanted writing that caught “a sense of the rhythm of life, of ‘the substance of things unknown.’ ”[54] Olaf took this open-ended invitation as an opportunity to create a parable about his own career as writer and social activist, about the uncertainties of his

¶1283What Olaf wrote for Albery, initially titled “The Journey” and in a later draft “The Peak and the Town,” was a Bunyanesque pilgrim’s progress that reprised his own intellectual and ethical struggles in the context of an allegorical history of his generation. The old oppositions between saints and revolutionaries, being and doing, the perspective of the slums of Toxteth and the view from Caldy Hill that had exercised him all his life were clothed in an account of life’s journey, sometimes pursued in solitude and sometimes within a vast crowd of fellow travelers, in which the call of the city, squalid and full of life, alternates with the lure of the peak, whose clear, cold prospect offers both vision and death. Nearing the end of his journey, torn by the dilemma of competing obligations, the traveler is offered a solution by an old watchmaker. “It is quite simple. You want to be in two places at once, living two lives at once. Duplicate yourself.” One can continue to work in the town while reserving a portion of the mind for scaling the peak. “There is no satisfactory life,” says the watchmaker, “but the double life.” The traveler adopts “this marvellous duplicity,” but the parable closes with him lost and weary in the foothills as darkness falls with the peak still distant. In the earlier typescript the narrator wonders, “Perhaps I shall never reach the high valley. Perhaps I shall die frozen and frustrated on the mountain, stifled and ineffective in the town.” But later Olaf excised the gloomier notes and added a more upbeat conclusion. “Well, what matter? Perhaps some others of our party, more fortunate or more clear-headed, will find their way to the heights, will at last bring the Peak to the town and the town to the Peak. For me, the only thing is to press on. The day is not yet done. And death even here would not be wholly defeat.”[56] Albery found the allegory too obscure and asked for something else.[57] In rejecting “The Peak and the Town,” he failed to appreciate either the intellectual stoicism or the emotional vulnerability of one of Stapledon’s most piercing self-revelations.

¶1284The metaphorical journey in “The Peak and the Town” was not merely a metaphor. As he passed sixty Olaf was constantly, increasingly on the move. The big international expeditions to Sweden in 1946, to the South of France and Poland in 1948, to New York and Paris in 1949, and again to France in 1950 are only the most visible stops in an almost unbroken succession of conferences on political, religious, scientific, philosophical, paranormal, but seldom literary topics that took a huge toll on his energy. During 1946 traveled around England for a variety of one-, two-, and three-day meetings sponsored by the World Unity Movement, the World Union of Freethinkers, the Scottish Architectural Society, the India League, the Association of International Clubs, the London Personalists, the Oxford Rationalists, the Chester YMCA Army School, the Council for Education in World Citizenship, the Langdale Conference on Education, the York WEA, and the Save Europe Now Committee. One of the most significant of these smaller meetings—and in personal terms even more momentous than the PEN congress at Stockholm—was a remarkable gathering at Exeter, organized by, as an anonymous participant put it, “a small group of queer people, parsons, psychiatrists, social workers and others” to consider the present state of the human species.[58] Over two hundred people, many of them new to conference routines, showed up for a week in August for what was billed as the Present Question Conference.

¶1285The prime mover behind the conference was the Jungian psychotherapist Heinz Westmann, who enlisted the aid of two colleagues, the army psychiatrist Brigadier Alfred Torrie and Eric Graham Howe, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, who chaired the conference and whose books Olaf came to scorn as “embroidery without any coherent tissue of cloth behind it.”[59] In the summer of 1945, the three psychologists conceived of a “yeast group” who would concentrate on the evident tensions and anxieties of the postwar world and ask: What is the present question—“the growing-point of new experience”—that human beings most need to cultivate in order to reconstitute a healthy society?[60] As they invited others into the yeast group, they sought a dialectic between the opposing viewpoints of science and religion, and particularly of psychologists and churchmen. Out of those informal discussions came the idea for a meeting at Exeter University with both plenary speakers and carefully focused study groups that would explore the same “present question” from a variety of angles. Stapledon was invited by the organizers to give a talk and co-direct, with the Cambridge theologian Bishop Stephen Neill, the study group on the religious approach to the question.

¶1287A third woman, in her late twenties and a war widow, had been drawn unwillingly by a friend into attending the conference. She listened to Olaf's long speech on agnostic piety, full of his trademark formulas of "evolutionary humanism," "mental symbiosis," and "vessels of the spirit." With some irritation she tried to follow the shoptalk in the technical questions he put to other speakers. The young woman, N., thought to herself, "What a pompous bore!" Later, seated next to him, she found herself in conversation with a far more interesting person than she had guessed he could be.[64] Over the next three years their correspondence and meetings in London blossomed into a last great but troubled love in Olaf's life and gave a fresh turn to his autobiographical musings on growing old in springtime.

¶1300But Olaf was getting restless. The previous year he and Agnes shared the platform at Conway Hall in London. Agnes read from Shakespeare's sonnets and Austen's *Northanger Abbey*, and Olaf followed with a lecture on "Personal Relations in the Family." He presented one of his typical paradoxes. Monogamy, he said, makes possible the fullest experience of love, but promiscuity adds breadth and vigor to sexual experience. Straining for sophistication, he pitched headlong into euphuism. "Perhaps the ideal is to sip a few flowers before marriage so as to have practice in the difficult art of love before attempting the masterpiece. It is also possible that the masterpiece itself would sometimes benefit from occasional side-line sketches after marriage. Such aberrations, such holidays from monogamy might in some cases revivify the marriage. But in other cases they might merely wreck it." He was careful not to claim such marital refreshment as a male prerogative; the sexes must be "on equal footing in this matter." Married women, imprisoned in their homes, were so unhealthily identified with their children that when they grow up and leave home, he said, "an important part of the mother's personality is destroyed." He proposed a national system of day-nurseries so that women would no longer be "stranded without any valuable external interests."[11]

¶1341Psychic power was a Stapledonian issue of long standing, going back to his 1908 Oxford paper on Joan of Arc's voices, but his heightened and studious interest in the subject after the war was not peculiar to him. Investigators of the paranormal (and a variety of quack hypnotists and mediums) seemed at large everywhere. The Progressive League, with which Olaf had continued an intermittent association since the mid-1930s, made inquiry into the paranormal one of its principal occupations after the war, culminating in a national symposium at Brighton in February 1949—the first large-scale conference on the topic in England in twenty-five years. Through the League and London's venerable Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, Olaf met G. N. M. Tyrrell, H. H. Price, and other scholarly researchers on telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis, as well as more dubious figures like Lawrence Hyde and Graham Howe. The lure of parapsychology drew in incautious and sometimes unstable devotees, and psychical experimentation became so fashionable a topic that Heinz Westmann's *Present Question* group chose it as the focus for its second conference, at Birmingham in the summer of 1947. Although papers by Herbert Read and G. Wilson Knight gave the PQ sessions a respectable sheen, Olaf was put off by a "high proportion of cranks—astrologers, numerologists, and so on." The general run of speeches, "beating the air, scrabbling after something sure to hold on to," disappointed him. His agnostic-skeptic side found the effort to get "the lowdown on the Whole" to be "both impious and comic."[34]

¶1348When the big Brighton Conference on Psychical Research was held in 1949, Olaf was asked to be commentator, making the final summation of the conflicting views that had been advanced by the leading British researchers. He did not commit himself on the substantive theories of any of the speakers. Instead, he reminded the audience that no matter what emerged from study in this field, certain “perennial principles” of human behavior would not be altered. And the issue of life beyond death, which had most intrigued the conference, was to be approached with special caution. Whether consciousness survived destruction of the body—and the evidence seemed to him less strong than some claimed—made no fundamental ethical difference. The big metaphysical questions would always fascinate, but they might bear little on how people conducted their daily lives. “We should not derive our values from the ideas of survival or of a divine personality. The values of love, wisdom, and creative action did not depend on anything except ordinary experience.”[39] The medium and the telepath would never render the philosophical temper obsolete.

¶1355IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1948, Stapledon struggled to finish a novel begun in 1946. When Fredric Warburg promptly rejected it, Stapledon decided he had “quite lost interest” in *A Man Divided*. Not finally published until 1950, *A Man Divided* was his last effort as a writer of fiction. When Aage Marcus asked him late in 1948 what his new project was, he admitted, “Agnes and I always busy rushing from meeting to meeting. I have got into a bad habit of giving innumerable talks to local and other societies, frittering away far too much time.”[1] The defining event of 1948 for Olaf, one that thrust him into a political rather than a literary spotlight for the rest of his life, had come in August when he accepted an invitation to a “World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace” in Poland.

¶1356Under the joint chairmanship of the biologist and director of UNESCO Julian Huxley, the French Nobelist Irène Joliot-Curie, and the Russian novelist Alexander Fadeyev, the congress at Wroclaw was the largest assembly of artists and scholars since the war. The British delegates included J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, and C. H. Waddington among the scientists, the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Christopher Hill, the novelist Louis Golding and the journalist Kingsley Martin, and assorted architects, painters, and musicians. Unlike PEN’s Stockholm gathering two years earlier, this congress was not a creature of Western Europe and North America. Besides twenty-three delegates from the Soviet Union and contingents from the Eastern European satellite nations, there were West Africans, Algerians, Iraqis, Brazilians, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Israelis, Uruguayans, and Chinese. The Polish government supplied air travel, lodging, and food, and Hermon Ould of PEN naïvely exclaimed that

¶1372Between local peace rallies and planning for the big international conferences of 1949, Stapledon had little time left over for imaginative work. Among his papers for this period there are false starts, abortive manuscripts, projects sketched but not drafted, and occasional bits accumulated for an untitled “prose-poem” intended to sum up his fully evolved philosophy. The one notable excursion of 1948 into his well-trodden territory where literary, philosophical, d futurist imaginings converge was a lecture. It dealt with pilgrimages on a vaster scale than the ones he was making, and it was the most famous and often-reprinted talk he ever gave. "Interplanetary Man?" originated from the invitation of a young man who would shortly become the best-known English science fiction writer of the second half of the century.

¶1377For two and a half hours, in the formal lecture and in a discussion moderated by Clarke, the Interplanetarians who gathered at the Charing Cross Road Art School on Saturday evening, 9 October, heard the quintessential Stapledon. "Interplanetary Man?"—Olaf's typical question mark was usually omitted when his title was cited—received extensive coverage in the world press, but journalists seized on exotic details that could be readily lampooned. A London cartoonist had fun visualizing "homo jovianus," a man reengineered for life on Jupiter as a low-slung quadruped with its head pushed back along the spine, protruding eyes, and a long proboscis ending in sets of fingers. *Time* magazine chortled over the "altitude record" for "high-flying thought" in the prescriptions for colonizing alien planets. A colorful piece in a London review emphasized Stapledon's "romantic glamour" and "whoosh of the imagination," but found his assumptions about the future "mostly morbid."[22]

¶1391Lilian was urging Olaf to say exactly that to Agnes. His wife’s sacrifice, Lilian told him, would “enlarge the liberty of your love with her.”[33] But Olaf’s pursuit of an extramarital love that he wanted to enjoy without concealment and without risk to his marriage came with a price tag. Agnes was willing to make the sacrifice but unwilling to disguise the fact that it *was* a sacrifice; his liberty, she reminded him, was being purchased at the expense of her diminishment. On the way to Sheffield for a lecture after a tearful parting at Caldy Station, Olaf wrote pleadingly, “Don’t grieve because I am still capable of wild oats. Just laugh at me. Despise, if you must, but *don’t* be brokenhearted. I can’t bear it.” When Agnes could not adopt a mood of lighthearted acceptance, he became distraught. “My mind is going all jittery under the emotional strain,” he said, and he predicted what would be the ultimate resolution of his and Agnes’s and N.’s mutual unhappiness in the “triple union” of his fantasies. Perhaps, he recognized just one week after he and N. became lovers, nothing short of breaking off the affair would do. “But it would be a defeat, and I seem defeated all round.”[34]

¶1396Oblivious to these political shenanigans and the degree of paranoia that American officials and journalists would expend on the Peace Congress, Olaf spent most of February and March 1949 going about his usual business of freelance lecturing, addressing architects in Glasgow, philosophers in London, and miners in Swansea. At a memorable party after a talk in Sheffield, he boggled minds during a long debate with a tipsy Shakespearean professor, John Danby, over the question, "If you can't kill your father and then eat him, how can you ever become a father yourself?"[39] In early March Olaf began writing a talk for a panel on religion and ethics, which he expected to be his chief venue at the three-day meeting in New York. Preoccupied with his personal life, he wanted to give New York as little thought as possible, but by the second week of March he was complaining mildly about the "official fussations" that were consuming huge portions of his days, along with the nuisance of repeated trips to the consulate to inquire about his visa.[40] Still, he did not anticipate the storm of controversy about to overtake him. Having booked his flight to New York, he calmly went about keeping long-standing commitments, including a talk on “Man Today and Tomorrow” at Hull on 22 March, the night before he was to leave England.

¶1443With *A Man Divided* in press at Methuen, he revealed, in a rare interview, that he was writing his definitive philosophical work, an old man's book designed to sum up his career. At a lunch he told E. V. Rieu about the book, with a sense of assurance and content that his longtime editor had rarely seen in him. "He had reached the goal of his thinking," Rieu recalled Olaf saying serenely. To his daughter he said simply that with that book, titled by Agnes after his death *The Opening of the Eyes*, he would be finished with writing.[8]

¶1471*The Opening of the Eyes* grew literally into a Book of Revelations, an Apocalypse that peeled back the veils of illusion obscuring the heart of reality. The lack of a satisfactory resolution to this incomplete book may have been inevitable no matter how long the author lived.

¶1478Back at Simon's Field at the end of August, Olaf worked steadily at *The Opening of the Eyes*. With his typical mixture of confidence and self-deprecation, he had told Naomi in June that it was going to be his "only really worthwhile book" on the subject of religion. "It's semi-poetry, very short, and of course profound. But when it is in print I shall discover that it's not profound at all, but just a stepping stone"[34] Even though he had not found a conclusion for the book, in the first week of September he began making a fair copy of the entire manuscript—his usual procedure before sending a new book to his typist. When he wasn't working on the manuscript, he returned to his easel. In France he had begun a nude of Agnes, but September in Caldy was too chilly for Agnes to pose comfortably. He turned to other subjects, and Agnes later remembered how "he seemed to be painting almost feverishly during his last week as if he knew he would not have much more time."[35]

¶1484Every sudden death is shocking; only hindsight discloses its inevitability. In Olaf's case an almost uncanny appearance of physical freshness belied his sixty-four years, and his reputation as a vigorous climber and swimmer left mourning friends mystified. For most of his years, he himself had worried more about the prospect of aging and senility than premature death. At forty he wrote of "the dumb scream of our dying youth" and the terrifying "first gray hair / encountered on the morning after love's night."[37] In one of the notebooks for *The Opening of the Eyes*, he boasted of "my body, a sturdy nag, mettlesome but seldom unruly." But in the summer of 1950 he knew he had not been feeling right. In a late passage in *The Opening of the Eyes*, he portrayed himself as "already rather old and tired, and soon perhaps to die."[38] He worked determinedly, as if by adherence to a literal internal deadline, to bring the book into final form. As congestion in his chest and shortness of breath tired him in his last weeks, did he find himself remembering earlier intimations of coronary trouble? A diary entry from 1907, when he underwent a physical examination by the college physician before a rowing match at Oxford, provokes the question: "I went to Dr. Collier at 10.15. After a lengthy examination he said I was a border case. I have not a weak heart or anything but he does not know if my heart's strong enough for racing."[39] If there was some weakness, generated perhaps by a bout of scarlet fever among his long succession of childhood illnesses, it may have been compensated by his passion for exercise, but a lifelong weakness for cream, butter, eggs, and tobacco undoubtedly took a toll.

¶1485Olaf lived zestfully and had not been afraid of dying. He measured individual lives against a cosmic scale, insisted on placing the flickering light of human consciousness in the context of the cold, remote, and impersonal light of the stars. Worried as he was about the cataclysm of atomic war, he went on hoping that human beings would see the back of the moon "in a few decades." His last article, published a month after he died, foresaw new horizons opening out so long as people worked to "get round these dangerous corners." And astronomical speculation provided cold solace for the otherwise unthinkable alternative: "If we blow this world to pieces it will centuries of human adventure, but I find a certain comfort in the thought that there are millions of worlds like ours."[40] He accepted his own mortality calmly. For him the extinction of species and of cosmoses was more profoundly tragic than any individual death. In a chapter written sometime in his last two years and designed for an unwritten book on humanism, he imagined the finale of London:

¶1486The London streets will not always be crowded. Sooner or later the tide of human life will recede from them. An atom bomb, or bacteria, or sheer starvation, or causes still inconceivable, will some day destroy this ant's nest. What ruins will remain, weed-possessed or sterile from radiation? Or if by some freak of history this city is to be inconceivably long-lived, what unimaginable ruins will in the end be snow-blanketed in the final glaciation of the planet, or blown into space in the planet's shattering death agony? In one way or another there will surely be an end to this daily thronging. And even if man escapes to other worlds, to other stars, he will not escape the ultimate freezing out of all life in the cosmos. This, not individual death but universal death, is for the awakened mind the probability to be reckoned with.[41]

¶164079. The early records of the Holt company were destroyed in the Liverpool blitz of 1941. When Crompton died in Paris in 1908, OS was at Oxford and wrote in his diary: "It would appear to be he that did most to get Father into the OSSCo at L'pool" (OS, diary, 30 Sept. 1908 [SA]). Crompton and WS had known each other for nearly twenty years as members of the Positivist Church of Humanity in Liverpool.

¶181849. "Captain James Walker" manuscript (SFP). 50. OS diary, 22 Mar. 1912 (SA). 51. OS to ES, 29 Mar. 1912 (SFP). 52. OS to ES, 1 Apr. 1912 (SFP). 53. *OJ*, 191. 54. OS to WS and ES, 8 May 1912 [misdated 1910] (SFP). 55. OS made a lexicon of his shorthand symbols in the endpapers of his 1912 diary (SA). 56. OS to AM, 22 July 1912; OS to ES, 21 June, 5 July 1912 (SFP). 57. OS diary, 30 June, 2 July, 3 July, 5 July 1912 (SA). 58. OS diary, 8–9 July 1912 (SA). 59. A shorthand draft of the epic's invocation survives in the 1912 diary (SA). 60. OS diary, 17 Aug. 1912 (SA). 61. I have found two published poems from this period: "The Builder" in the *Old Abbotsholmian* 3, no. 11 (1912), 169, and "A Prayer" in the *Highway* 5 (Oct. 1912), 5. Other poems may have appeared in provincial newspapers. Of the prose pieces, only the last exists in finished form: "The People, Self Educator," *Old Abbotsholmian* 3, no. 12 (1913), 203–207. OS's interest in eugenics dates to his Oxford years; he published an encomium on Francis Galton's proposals for the "Improvement of the Human Breed" in "The Splendid Race," *Old Abbotsholmian* 2, no. 8 (1908), 212–16. 62. OS to ES, 23 Jan. 1913 (SFP). His diary entry for the same date (SA) indicates he knew that he and Dot were responsible for his mother's "flight." 63. OS to ES, dated "Thursday night"—probably 23 Jan. 1913 (SFP). 64. OS diary, 12 and 18 Jan. 1913 (SA). 65. OS to ES, 12 Feb. 1913 (SFP). Letters from ES to her husband in the 1890s express a wish for more children. 66. OS, manuscript, "Letters to a Militiaman" (SA). 67. OS, from a self-portrait written for the dust jacket of *PL*.

¶209624. "The Last Judgment" appeared in Haldane's *Possible Worlds* (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927); OS's copy (SA) was the 1928 printing. Sam Moskowitz discusses its relevance to *LFM* in "Olaf Stapledon: The Man Behind the Works" in *FFC*, 35-37. Of *The Ascent of Humanity* (1929), OS told Naomi Mitchison it was "helpful, though there is much in it that seems to me unjustified. I feel very doubtful about his theory of 'co-consciousness,' and about spiritualism" (20 Jan. 1931; NLS). In *PL*, vol. 2, pp. 457-58, he criticized the presentation of evolution in the *Ascent*.

¶21456. OS to Aage Marcus, 22 Nov. 1934 (SA); he spoke over the BBC at 11 AM, 3 Dec. 1934.

¶22165. Naomi Mitchison to OS, undated [but probably summer 1933] (SA); Mitchison, letter to author, 27 Feb. 1985. *NM*, first printed in England in 1976, appeared in the U.S. with another incomplete manuscript as *Nebula Maker and Four Encounters* (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1983). The 100-page, handwritten discarded manuscript is in SA.

¶225139. *PL*, vol. 2, p. 460. *The Idea of the Holy* is on a list of books read at the back of OS's 1933–34 diary (SA). On the impact of Dante on *Star Maker*, see Robert Scholes, *Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future* (Notre Dame, Ind: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 1975), 64–66, and chap. 4, "Divine Tragedy," of Patrick A. McCarthy's *Olaf Stapledon* (Boston: Twayne, 1982).

¶24713. *DIL*, 146; "The Core," *Windmill* 1 (July 1945), 112.

¶248719. *LFM*, 37. T. S. Douglass, “To the Moon by Atomic Power,” *Sheffield Telegraph*, 8 Aug. 1945, p. 2; R. L. Mégroz, “The Atomic Age,” *Time and Tide*, 18 Aug. 1945, p. 688; T. R. F., “The Prophecies of ‘Scientifiction,’ ” [London] *Tribune*, 24 Aug. 1945, p. 12. OS’s “After the Bomb: Our Stupendous Future,” [London] *Leader*, 18 Aug. 1945, pp. 9, 22, was accompanied by a boxed inset on the destruction of Lundy in *LFM*.

¶253264. Interviews with author, 23 Aug. 1983, 16 Oct. 1989. The person designated here and hereafter as N. does not wish to be identified.

¶254411. OS, "Personal Relations in the Family," *Monthly Record of the South Place Ethical Society* 51 (May 1946), 10-11. The lecture was given 7 Apr.

¶263357. Sam Moskowitz, "Peace and Olaf Stapledon," *FFC*, 267-68. Newark newspapers made no mention of OS's speech, and Moskowitz' detailed but politically unsympathetic narrative is the chief record; I have also used the account "Communists Tour of U.S. Called Off," *Worcester Telegram*, 30 Mar. 1949.