David Lindsay (fiction writer)

Fiction Writer

  • Born: March 3, 1876
  • Birthplace: Blackheath, England
  • Died: July 16, 1945
  • Place of death: Brighton, England

Biography

David Lindsay was born in Blackheath, England, just outside of London, in 1876, the son of Alexander and Bessy Bellamy Lindsay and the youngest of three children. After Lindsay’s father left the family, Lindsay was forced to curtail his education after attending Lewisham Grammar School in London and a secondary school in Jedburgh, Roxburgh. Thus, like many other science-fiction writers of the time, he became an autodidact, concentrating on philosophy, particularly the works of the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. George MacDonald, like Lindsay a Scots-descended fantasy writer, was also an influence.

Lindsay worked at Price Forbes, an insurance brokerage in London, from 1894 to 1916, when he entered the Grenadier Guards, serving for the remainder of World War I. In 1916, he also married Jacqueline Silver, twenty years younger than he, whom he met through a mutual love of literature. They had two daughters, and it has been inferred from Lindsay’s writing about men and women that their marriage was not entirely happy. Some of the tension was monetary, for although Jacqueline encouraged Lindsay’s ambitions as a writer, none of his books were financially successful. The Lindsays lived in Cornwall from 1919 through 1929, when they moved to Sussex, but not until they bought a boarding house in the coastal resort town of Brighton did their circumstances grow more comfortable.

Lindsay’s first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, is by far his most famous, championed by writer C. S. Lewis, among others, who admired Lindsay’s visions while deploring their content. Lewis adopted the novel’s method of interplanetary travel for his own novel, Perelandra (1943). A Voyage to Arcturus has been classified both as science fiction and fantasy. It relates the adventures of the transparently named hero, Maskull, on Tormance, a planet circling the eponymous star, in his search for chief god of the planet, Crystalman. Even admirers of the novel admit that its allegory can descend into inscrutability, which probably accounts for its status as a genre classic that not many people have read.

Lindsay’s next novel, The Haunted Woman, is about a haunted house that allows the title character to communicate with its owner on a heightened plane of consciousness impossible during everyday life. Sphinx probed the nature of dreams and their relationship to reality, but its few readers found the meaning as enigmatic as the title creature. Like other unsuccessful writers before him, Lindsay then tried to write a deliberately popular novel, The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly, given an even more commercial title in the United States, A Blade for Sale. This historical set of adventures set in the France of Louis XIV was not successful on either side of the Atlantic. Lindsay’s last novel to be published during his lifetime, Devil’s Tor, is a return to a more allegorical fiction and describes a quest to bring a new deity to Earth, Avatar, involving the Earth Mother, a magic stone, and a virgin birth. The Violet Apple, Lindsay’s last finished novel, was published posthumously and concerns the title fruit, apples from the Garden of Eden that grant spiritual visions.

Lindsay died in 1945 in Brighton from complications from an abscessed tooth. His tragedy is that his literary tools were never able to transmit the grandiosity of his ideas.