The house is tall, too tall for the little boy. There are six flights of stairs, and his bedroom is at the very top. The lambent gaslight fails to drive away the ghosts; they take shape within the shadows, poised in every corner, watching him as he takes ever more frightful steps towards the yawning darkness of the upper floors. A door creaks open and long white fingers emerge. The boy hurries on and pretends he has seen nothing.
These nightmarish visitations took place at 20 Mount Charles in Belfast, the house where Forrest Reid was born 150 years ago. The building still stands, although there is no commemorative plaque to indicate that one of Northern Ireland’s foremost novelists was born within its walls. Like the ghosts of his childhood, Reid has vanished. His faded legacy is proof of the fickle nature of literary trends.
And yet, at the time of his death in 1947, Reid was widely considered to be a significant literary figure. He was a founder member of the Irish Academy of Letters, recognised with an honorary doctorate at Queen’s University. His novel Young Tom won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1944. The poet John Hewitt described him as Northern Ireland’s foremost novelist. E.M. Forster called him “the most important man in Belfast”. He was hailed as a “genius” by Walter de la Mare and his work commended by D.H. Lawrence, L.P. Hartley and John Betjeman. Yet even in Belfast, the city Reid loved so much and in which he is buried, one is unlikely to find his work in any bookshops.
“For Reid, in the battle between Mammon and the Muses, the latter must always prevail.”
Reid was a visionary, the type George Bernard Shaw had in mind when he wrote of those “people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure”. His books are infused with the supernatural; the spirits of nature tremble on his pages. His was an animistic creed, and the pre-industrial Victorian Belfast of his boyhood is the living, palpitating character at the core of all his work.
His Apostate must rank as one of the finest, and least read, autobiographies of all time. It exceeds even Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) for its unflinching interrogation of the psychology of youth and the repudiation of conventional faith. The key moment is Reid’s account of a defining vision which took place in Belfast’s Belvoir Park. He had taken some books to an isolated spot, but then: “a strange thing happened. For though there was no wind, a little green leafy branch was snapped off from the tree above me, and fell to the ground at my hand. I drew my breath quickly; there was a drumming in my ears; I knew that the green woodland before me was going to split asunder, to swing back on either side like two great painted doors… And then – then, I hesitated, blundered, drew back, failed”.
This alternative reality that Reid had so nearly reached was a recurring feature of his infant dreams. “There were two worlds,” he writes, “and it never occurred to me to ask myself whether one were less real than the other.” All his novels are driven towards the same singular vision, a recreation of the dreamworld of his youth, the magical “garden by the sea” that he could visit in his sleep. “My books are really an attempt to get back to my mysterious garden”, he told André Raffalovich. It was, to Reid, a lost Eden: what he called “a kind of crying for Elysium”.
Such was Reid’s distress at the prospect of becoming an adult, that at the age of 16 he attempted suicide with an overdose of laudanum. Yet this condition – a kind of adolescence in stasis; “a mysterious form of arrested development” – is precisely why his novels are so successful. As a writer he has retained his child-like perspective, but is able to convey it with the mastery of an exceptional prose stylist with decades of writing experience.
There is no other writer who has captured so successfully the experience of boyhood in fiction. Reading his coming-of-age stories, such as Following Darkness (1912), At the Door of the Gate (1915), or The Retreat (1936) is like stepping back into a lost mindset. The recreation is precise and eerily authentic; Reid somehow manages to convey that wonderfully naïve, part-idealistic, part-solipsistic realm of the imagination that is eventually obliterated through the process of maturity.
It is there most starkly in Following Darkness — a daring bildungsroman that departed from the convention of mawkish and idealised depictions of youth and antagonised critics. Anne Macdonell of the Manchester Guardian decried its lead character, the adolescent Peter Waring, as “a subject for the pathologist rather than the novelist”, a figure with “evil tendencies” who “unutterably disgusts”. The exploration of Peter’s burgeoning self-awareness, both sexual and spiritual, was shocking for the time, but its power is undeniable and it sparked a trend of books that took a similarly unsentimental approach to adolescence, including Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1913), W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
That intense focus on childhood, however, has led to speculation about Reid’s private life. In his 1980 biography, Brian Taylor asserted — without evidence — that Reid had a sexual interest in young boys. The claim, rooted in instinct rather than fact, has been repeated uncritically by commentators ever since. In truth, Reid’s private letters suggest the opposite: a puritanical man who, though openly homosexual, reviled sexual activity in all its forms. His protégé Stephen Gilbert later recalled that Reid reserved his most vehement condemnation for “any or all men who interfered sexually with boys”.
Yet the power of rumour is difficult to withstand, and in our current climate accusations are often taken as proof. Perhaps that is part of the reason Reid fell into obscurity. That and the fact that the literary world has always adored its taxonomies; it struggles to know where to place authors of such originality. Reid’s complete disregard for nationalism or politics frustrates attempts at simple classification. Rooted in the landscape of Ulster, his stories are nevertheless underpinned by ideals closer akin to Hellenistic paganism than any observable Celtic tradition. Many readers simply don’t know what to make of it.
The shelf life of an artist, though, is determined as much by fashion as anything else, and Reid was rarely one to compromise for the sake of a public who, for the most part, did not share his vision. Aside from three years as a Cambridge undergraduate, Reid spent his entire life in Belfast, in spite of various inducements to move to England for the sake of his career. E.M. Forster noted that “he didn’t want to be in London literary society. He didn’t care for the success that is attained by entering cliques and pulling wires.”
In his excellent critical study of W.B. Yeats (1915), published long before the poet was virtually canonised by the literati, Reid explained that “great art is essentially lonely. It is not inspired by the chatter of schools and movements, and when it is connected with a school at all, it is usually because it has founded one. The work that counts is more likely to be conceived in a rectory on the Yorkshire moors, or in a cottage in the lake country, than in the self-conscious atmosphere of literary circles.”
Such a view would seem alien to most authors today. It is widely accepted, albeit perhaps grudgingly, that commercial success is not simply a matter of producing the best work, but making the right connections, attending vogueish literary salons and, increasingly, modifying one’s vision in accordance with the ideological demands of publishers and “sensitivity readers”. Reid would have rejected this entirely. At a cultural festival for young writers in Larne in 1930, Reid gave an address in which he cautioned that the writer could choose one of two incompatible aims: “He may look upon his work as an art to be practised with sincerity, and in faithfulness to an ideal; or he may regard it as a commercial experiment”. For Reid, in the battle between Mammon and the Muses, the latter must always prevail.
Reid’s devotion to his art, in other words, came at the expense of his legacy. He is one of those who, to borrow George Eliot’s words, “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”. And yet a resurgence of interest in this forgotten visionary is not out of the question. Many of his novels have been republished in recent years by Valancourt Press, and his autobiographies Apostate and Private Road have been reissued by Faber. With a renewed interest in discourses of masculinity, it might be that the novelist who most authentically captures the experience of male adolescence will find a new readership.
