Deluge

Notes

NOTES SFW = Sidney Fowler Wright I N T R O D U C T I O N 1. SFWused "Fowler Wright" in its entirety as a surname, and it continues to be used thus by his family; some of his descendants hyphenate it, although he did not. It is by no means unknown for English families to use compound surnames without hyphenating them; notable examples contemporary with SFWinclude the prime ministers David Lloyd George (1863-1945) and Andrew Bonar Law(1858-1923) and the writer SirArthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). 2. It is worth noting that many other significant contributors to the distinctively British genre of scientific romance born in the nineteenth century were also freethinking sons of devout fathers. Grant Allen (1848-99), George Griffith (George Griffith-Jones, 1857-1906), Fred T. Jane (18651916 ), M. P. Shiel (1865-1947), C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (1866-1944), J. D. Beresford (1873-1947), Cyril Ranger Gull (1874-1923) alias "GuyThorne," William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918), and Gerald Heard (1889-1971) were all the sons of clergymen, and John Gloag (1896-1981) described his father as "painfully religious." Members of SFW'S post-Darwinian generation tended to accept—although their fathers often would not—that a fundamental change had taken place in the attitude that a reasonable person had to take to the Church's mythology and network of beliefs. Much exploratory speculative fiction consists of attempts to reconceptualize the earth's place in the universeand humankind's place in nature—thoroughly revising the obsolete models formerly promoted by the Church—and to examine the moral and intellectualcorollaries of the new perspectives thus produced. 3. Truda, who was born in Plymouth on 22 January 1893, was nearly twenty years younger than SFW, onlya little older than his eldest children. There was, inevitably,a certain tension between some of the six children of the first marriage and SFW'S second family. 4. This project—recalled by Esther, Lady Blair-Kerr, in a letter that was 3°7 read to me by the late Nigel Fowler-Wright when I visited him in 1982 — suggests that although SFW'S literary tastes were determinedly traditional, he was not entirelyunsympathetic to the Aesthetic Movement; the fact that he translated Pierre Louys' Songs of Bilitis (see n. 8 below) lends furthersupport to this contention. 5. Jean-JacquesRousseau (1712-78) shot to fame when he won a competition organized by the Academyof Dijon with his Discours sur les sciences et les arts. Whether his decision to argue that the sciences and their resultant technologies had had an injuriouseffect on human life was motivated by an awareness that nobody everwon a competition by arguing the same case as everybodyelse or by his natural inclination to oppose any and all suppositions that were widelytaken for granted, he was stuck with it thereafter . He extrapolated it in a Discours sur 1'origine d'inegalite (1755), his treatise on education, Entile (1762); and the summation of his political philosophy , Du contrat social (1762). 6. J. E. ClareMacfarlane's 1958 lecture on SFW, the text of which can be found on the family website, claims that most of the lyric poetry he wrote before 1918 was "buried" (metaphorically, one presumes) with his first wife. Macfarlane,a stalwart of the Empire Poetry League, knew SFW well, so it seems likely that he had this direct from SFW. 7. Poetry 3, no. 6 (August 1920): 150. 8. Pierre Louys (1870-1925) represented Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894) as a translation of work by a female poet of the third century B.C. The hoax worked well enough, according to Jennifer Birkett (writing in TheNew Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed. Peter France) to give "scholarly respectability to erotic fantasies in which morbid, misogynist violence is veiled in classical style" (p. 474) as well as creating a best-seller. SFWcollected his own versions in Some Songs o/Bilitis, issued under the Poetry imprint in 1921. SFW certainly approved of the erotic quality of ancient and modern poetry—another of his early projects was the "reconstruction" of the Somj of Solomon similarlyissued by Fowler Wright Ltd. In the FebruaryMarch issue of Poetry SFW lamented the fact that Algernon Swinburne was not considered suitable for study in schools, coupling the judgment with an attack on the illiberal morality promoted by the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson—of whose reinterpretation of Arthurian legend he strongly disapproved. 9. The change of title took effect in the June 1925 issue. 10. William...