"Olaf Stapledon - Bio" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

journals, Stapledon’s earliest literary aspirations were poetic. His first book was Latter-Day
Psalms, published in 1914 by Henry Young and Sons, Ltd., of Liverpool. It is believed that
Olaf’s father paid for its publication; he was a good customer of Young, who owned a Liverpool
bookshop. Of the 500 copies believed to have been printed, the large majority are said to have
been lost when the business went up in flames as a result of German bomb action during World
War I.
There are strong notes of atheism, social revolution and the plight of the working man in this
rare book of blank verse. There are also two antiwar poems, possibly showing that it appeared
after the war began, and certainly showing that Stapledon’s pacificism did not (as has been
suggested) stem from his own war experiences, which occurred later. We find here, as well,
material that is strikingly similar to that in his final work, The Opening of the Eyes. In the first
poem in Latter Day Psalms, "The City," Stapledon says, "I went into the city to see if there be
God." He sees a distraught, harried people, some of them half-starved, with death facing them.
"The men and women were loathsome, for they had forgotten love." He continues: "I said in my
pride, ‘If there be God, he shall be no God of mine. I will go my way, and live according as my
soul wills."’ Then, in the poem immediately following, "Spirit," he sees the lights of the city
tremble, the heavens’ beauty, and "her murmur was music." Some spirit within him seemed to
say that there was a God. "But I looked upon the city and rejected comfort, saying, ‘Surely thou
only art God who dwellest in my heart. And thou rulest the stars."’
The Opening of the Eyes, forty years later, shows Stapledon wrestling with the same dilemma.
Is this perhaps hell’s most exquisite refinement, that one should be haunted by the ever-present ghost of
a disbelieved God?

No! For there is a blacker hell, not of privation but of present horror. The vacuum itself is hell, the dumb
and frightful presence of sheer nothingness. It is all around. It creeps into the soul. It licks and loosens and
dissolves the firmest tissues of the soul. . .

I chose after much heart-searching, vain heart-searching; for you, my divine hallucination, have fallen
silent in my heart. And so at last I chose with a shrug of the shoulders.

Either I ride forward on the fiction of your existence, and attempt a deed more formidable, with
consequences more far-reaching and more painful; or I choose freedom, discard my illusion of you, and
slink back into my lair of safety, but of desolation...

And to go back is to betray only an illusion.

Yet I choose to go forward. [But only "on the fiction of your existence."]
 Writing poetry interested Stapledon all his life, though this interest seemed to grow less as he
grew older. Poetry is found in all his works, and it ennobles them powerfully. Poems by
Stapledon have appeared in a number of publications, including Poetry, A Magazine of Verse,
Comment and Criticism. This British magazine was edited between 1917 and 1930 by another
master of science fiction, S. Fowler Wright. (Stapledon’s acquaintance with Wright suggests that
the two men were familiar with each other’s science fiction.) Wright included poems by
Stapledon in two of his anthologies, Poets of Merseyside (1923) and Voices on the Winds (1924).
A sheaf of unpublished Stapledon poetry still exists.
Olaf Stapledon married Agnes Zena Miller, a first cousin from Australia, on July 16, 1919, at
Friends Meeting House, a Quaker establishment at Reigate, Surrey. Agnes, the oldest of four
children, was born in New Zealand on May 25, 1894, the daughter of Frank Edward and
Margaret Barnard Miller. Frank was a brother of Olaf’s mother, Margaret the daughter of
Charles Barnard, headmaster of a Quaker school in Yorkshire. Both parents were British