The memoirs that follow are peppered with letters: letters exchanged between writers; letters crisscrossing the Atlantic; letters from a teenaged boy in a boarding-school to his parents; war-time love letters from an ambulance driver in Belgium; letters on expensive, heavy stationery and others written on flimsy aerogrammes; a furious letter from someone whose decades-old love affair had been discovered and a classified letter initialed by a U. S. president; a batch of letters left unread and meant for destruction. All those letters, as I think about them now in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, seem quaint, or exotic, in the age of emails and texts, instagrams and tik-toks. They represent a form of personal communication now mostly abbreviated, if not quite vanished. Those letters belong to the story of a life that began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and ended at the middle of the twentieth. They contributed to—in many ways made possible—a biography published more than thirty years ago, about which I have a few confessions to make.

I’ll start at what for me was the beginning. I spent much of 1981 corresponding with an 87-year-old woman in a village on the Wirral peninsula, southwest of Liverpool.  Agnes Zena Miller Stapledon, an Australian by birth, was the widow of Olaf Stapledon.  I had mailed her copies of twenty-six letters, some with whimsical drawings, written by her husband to H. G. Wells in the 1930s and 1940s, that I read in the Wells archive at the University of Illinois.  She responded with letters from Wells that had been sitting untouched in a drawer of her husband’s desk since 1950.  As I enjoyed my transatlantic back-and-forth with Agnes Stapledon I asked her once, “Is anyone writing his biography?”  “No,” she replied. “Would you like to do it?”

I confess that I had no credentials to be the biographer of someone most of whose work, apart from his two most famous works of fiction and those 26 letters to Wells, I had not yet read. But I was in the first half of my thirties, freshly tenured, and looking for an undertaking that might justify my lifetime tenancy on the academic payroll. In one of his letters to Wells Stapledon drew a black bird perched outside the cages of “Homo Proletariensis” and “Homo Religiosus”; in the margin he wrote, “I am the jackdaw, free but uncertain.” The more I learned about that jackdaw the more intrigued I became by both his modesty and the ambition of a provincial Liverpool educator, social activist, and philosopher making his way through the thickets of the modern era without a guide.  He had a boundlessly fecund imagination, but it wasn’t until the ripe age of forty-four that Stapledon came into view in 1930 with Last and First Men, a remarkable chronicle of the next two billion years narrated by a “last man” in the far future. Stapledon called the strange works of fiction he published in the 1930s and 1940s “romances,” not “science fiction.”  He prefaced several books with variations on the caveat, “this book is not a novel.” His writing was simultaneously mythic and modern, fantastic and pedagogical, unmoored from quotidian life and culturally observant, spiritually inquisitive and scientifically grounded.  

When Last and First Men first appeared the Shakespearean scholar John Dover Wilson called it “a new kind of book & the world of Einstein & Jeans is ready for it.” Reviewers invoked the name of Wells so often that Stapledon was prompted to write an apologetic letter for failing to acknowledge him. Wells was having none of it, and, like many other people getting the book’s title wrong, shot back: “It is all balls to suggest First & Last Men (which I found very exciting) owes anything to my writings.”  As Stapledon continued writing speculative fiction—Last Men in London, Odd John, Star Maker, Sirius—he acquired admirers as different as Virginia Woolf, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Koestler, and J. B. S. Haldane. But the distinguished audience was not a wide one.  Stapledon’s books were full of ideas—philosophical, biological, political, psychological, cosmological—but he lacked Wells’s populist gift for storytelling. Rebecca West nailed the problem in an ambivalent review of his Darkness and the Light (1942): “The effect is as if Milton had sent the completed manuscript of ‘Paradise Lost’ to be rewritten by the author of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide.”  After his death in 1950 Stapledon remained a luminary only to a few venturesome readers and writers of science fiction, a genre he had scarcely heard of. When Brian Aldiss in his landmark 1973 history Billion Year Spree characterized Star Maker as science fiction’s “great grey holy book” his words implied a book more revered than read, the treasure of a priestly caste. By 1980 when I read his correspondence with Wells Stapledon had been largely forgotten.  A biography was his widow’s fantasy.

Nevertheless, when Agnes Stapledon offered the opportunity I leaped. And here is my second confession:  before and during the writing of Stapledon’s life I sought out no books about biographies and how they’d been researched, nor did I read what other biographers had to say about their craft or its challenges.  Myopically self-sufficient, I proceeded unschooled about the sandtraps and ha-has that would interrupt my course; about the vexations of writing on one side of the ocean with nearly all my material and personal sources on the other; about my inexperience as an interviewer; and about whether my own diffident personality was a good fit with the role of biographer.  I was stunned years later to encounter my fictional doppelganger in the feckless graduate student Phineas G. Newton in A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale. He jumps unprepared but with urgency from the necropolis of poststructuralist literary theory onto the whirligig of life-writing. “One amongst my many disadvantages as a biographical researcher,” Newton reports, “is a horror of initiating phone calls.”  How often had I sweatily gripped a telephone handset while rehearsing what to ask an archivist or prospective interviewee.

To keep things in balance I must also confess that anxiety and drooping confidence were not constants in my pursuit of biography. There was the boozy elation of unexpected finds: Stapledon’s World War I love letters, preserved by Agnes but unknown even to her son and daughter; his detailed notes, meticulously filed, for forty years’ worth of adult education lectures; a manuscript in the Balliol College archives of his student talk on Joan of Arc’s voices; and, most improbably, classified documents in the U. S. National Archives and the files of the F.B.I.  Biographical curiosity overcame (or at least pushed aside) worries about competence for the task.  But my memoirs would be incomplete without admitting how ill-equipped I was for the outbursts of one person who didn’t want to be discovered, who didn’t like biographers, and who said that my excavation of letters she thought no longer existed left her feeling “like Miss Bordereau in the Aspern Papers.” 

Still another confession is in order: I had never read much of Henry James, so I went looking for a copy of “The Aspern Papers.”  That mortifying story of a biographer in search of sensational information about his dead subject terminates in his interruption while rifling a desk by a furious Juliana Bordereau. Appearing in the doorway in her nightgown she glares at the biographer and hisses, “Ah you publishing scoundrel!”  James’s story likens the biographer to a violator of the dead.  Stapledon’s friend, the novelist Leo Myers, put things more vividly. Shortly before committing suicide in 1944, he disparaged biographers and their “way of boiling up the bones of the second-rate dead.” Myers put a crimp in my biographical research by burning Stapledon’s hundreds of letters to him. When I contacted the Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison, a frequent correspondent of Stapledon, to ask for her memories of him she put me in my place: “Poor dear Olaf with all the vultures descending, however kindly, on his corpse.” Whether visualized as tomb-robber, ghoulish soup-maker, or carrion bird, a biographer who picks at the bones of a forgotten author is a writer in search of an audience.

The end of the biographical process was as disquieting as its beginning was inauspicious. Twelve years after I started my work, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future was produced by Syracuse University Press, a welcoming home after a long campaign to find a publisher willing to consider my scoundrelly work. Rejections had accumulated from both commercial and academic presses. One editor, in a memorably cutting rebuff, returned my unread prospectus with a note: “Frankly, I’ve never heard of Olaf Stapledon—and if I haven’t heard of him I’m not interested in publishing his biography.” I was innocent of the existence of Geoffrey Wolff’s 1979 essay “Minor Lives” that addressed the value of biographies of “the second-rate dead.” The eccentric poet and publisher Harry Crosby, the subject of Wolff’s Black Sun, was a minor figure in twentieth-century culture but his name had enough notoriety to attract readers to his biography. But the question I heard most often in my years tracking Stapledon was “Olaf who?” Blithely, I imagined that a biography might somehow lift its subject from the second to the first rank.  But more than thirty years after its publication my biography has performed no such miracles.  And so I have been pondering the allure and the uses of biography, the ethics as well as the messy processes of its making, and the limits of its applications.

***

My official start as a biographer of one of the giants in the evolution of science fiction began with a jolt. Just before I was to fly to England in June 1982 to meet Agnes Stapledon face to face for the first time, she suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized.  Her daughter Mary Shenai phoned me to insist that, despite this health crisis, she and the rest of the family, including Agnes, still expected me.  I would be given the keys to “Simon’s Field,” the Stapledon house in the village of Caldy.  I could live there on my own for my two weeks in England, with unfettered access to whatever I found in Stapledon’s study. The only condition was that I had to commit to visiting Agnes every day in the nursing home where she was recovering.  With a bicycle offered by one of the Stapledon grandsons I could make the five-mile trip from Simon’s Field to the nursing home. It was a frankly astonishing gift of trust which I had done nothing to earn.

'Simon's Field', the Stapledons' home in Caldy. Photo©Robert Crossley

Stapledon’s study on the second floor of his plainly-styled house was overstuffed with books and cartons that dwarfed a writing desk whose drawers were packed with papers. The room opened onto a tiny balcony with a garden view where, I was later told, Olaf liked to sit naked as he wrote. For over thirty years Agnes had kept the study as it was when he died suddenly on September 6, 1950.  She had removed the finished manuscripts of his best-known books to the University of Liverpool, but everything else remained intact: drafts of published and unpublished works; files of correspondence; outlines for his Worker’ Educational Association classes and for talks with the troops during World War II; pocket diaries for every year from 1900 to 1949; offprints from philosophical journals and popular magazines; newspaper clippings; drawings, charts and photographs; and his sizable personal library, much of it annotated.  Standing in that cluttered shrine to Agnes’ husband, I knew that I needed to write about him. In later years I would discover that Sylvia Townsend Warner had felt a similar compulsion.  Unsure whether to accept an offer to write T. H. White’s biography, she visited his house and it seemed haunted by his presence: clothes still hanging in the closet, his sewing basket with a half-finished hood for one of his hawks, a collection of fishing-flies, suitcases ready for travel at the foot of the stairs, cheap souvenirs and knickknacks scattered around the house, tidy bookshelves.  “It was all there,” she wrote in a 1967 letter to William Maxwell, “defenceless as a corpse.”  She agreed to do the book.

As I sat at Stapledon’s desk I made my initial plan. Anticipating my tape-recorded meetings with Agnes, I started reading the annual pocket diaries.  I would need detail and context to put flesh on the barebones of their entries, and she, better than anyone still alive, could help interpret the often-enigmatic notations. When Olaf started keeping diaries he was fourteen, and in the waning years of Victoria’s reign they were a teenager’s journal, detailing, among other notable events, his thoughts on the final illness, death, and funeral of “the old queen”; progress reports on experiments in imaginative writing; and adolescent anxieties about new sexual urges.  This journalizing overflowed into the top, bottom, and side margins of diaries small enough to slip into a jacket pocket. In his adult years, after studying history at Balliol College, Oxford, Stapledon’s diaries lost their narrative density, being employed almost exclusively to record appointments, to list train schedules for teaching gigs for the "Workers’ Educational Association," to itemize books he had read, and to remind himself of tasks for the day. These unelaborated chunks of information generated lists of names and places I could ask Agnes to identify and prompted questions about both routine and unusual activities her husband recorded:  Who were the various persons from Liverpool University with whom he lunched?  Do you remember his reaction to seeing Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at the Merseyside Film Institute? What about the London production of Karel Capek’s Insect Play? How often did he go to the Liverpool Philharmonic, visit the Walker Art Gallery, hike in North Wales, go birding along the River Dee, take the train into London? And, by the way, who were Evelyn and Diana?

The name of Evelyn occurred frequently in the 1930s and early ‘40s, and Diana’s in the later ‘40s. Neither appeared in the diaries with a surname. I had not gone to England expecting to sniff out information about love affairs.  Truth to tell—and these are confessions after all—I had perhaps more than a touch of hero-worship and wanted to believe that Stapledon would turn out to have been a more faithful spouse than Wells had been. While I stayed at Simon’s Field I was scrupulous about the unconditional freedom I had been granted to explore the contents of Stapledon’s study; I didn’t spy into cupboards or closets or boxes anywhere else in the house.  (If I had, I might have discovered on that first visit the two suitcases under Agnes’ bed containing his many hundreds of World War I letters, some with gaping holes made by the scissor-wielding military censor.) But after reading through the pocket diaries, I had some loaded questions to ask Agnes when I dismounted from my bike outside the nursing home.

She was propped up in bed, thin and weakened, but her large blue eyes were alert, her memory unimpaired, and her words as pungent as fresh slices of garlic. I heard the same wit and animation that had come through in her letters to me.  I tried to be cagey by randomly inserting “Evelyn” and “Diana” into lists of names I was less curious about.  We might have finished discussing Stapledon’s correspondence with the Danish art historian Aage Marcus, and I’d ask offhandedly, “Can you tell me anything about someone named Evelyn?” “Evelyn.  Oh yes. That would have been Evelyn Gibson. She was a colleague of Olaf’s in the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals.  They sometimes worked together in London on political causes.  She was quite a progressive individual.” I wasn’t sure if there was a bite of snark in the last sentence, but it became clear that I wasn’t going to get much more.  I asked how I could get in touch with Evelyn Gibson, but Agnes said she had died long ago. So I found myself stuck in one of the cul de sacs that punctuated my biographical journey.

On the next day’s visit I worked the name “Diana” into my agenda of questions.  This time Agnes was more voluble.  Diana Gurney was Olaf’s painting teacher during the last five years of his life, and she told me where I could find one of his paintings in the house.  When I asked if Diana was still alive, Agnes gave me her address in London and assured me that Mrs. Gurney would be happy to talk with me.  (And, indeed, I called on Diana Gurney before I left England on that visit and heard about Olaf’s progress with watercolors—but not much else.) I didn’t suspect at the time that the fragile woman in the hospital bed had been cagier than the interviewer.  I had yet to learn that biographical sources, even the most receptive and hospitable ones, can lie.

For several years I retained my suspicions that Evelyn Gibson and Diana Gurney had been Olaf’s lovers, but I had only circumstantial evidence.  Why, for instance, was there a notation in the 1949 diary, when Stapledon traveled to New York, to bring back nylons for Agnes—and for Diana?  One day in the later 1980s I brought up the name of Evelyn Gibson to Stapledon’s 65-year-old son John, and to my astonishment he began singing.  He recalled a day when a Mrs. Gibson had come to the house and how his father had asked him, then a teenager, to set a melancholy poem of hers to music.  Remarkably, almost fifty years later John, who had studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal Academy of Music, still knew the tune and the words that began: “When it’s time for me to die /In the river I shall lie.” Why had Evelyn come all the way from London to Caldy village for a visit?  And what about that poem? This sounded like something more than Progressive League committee work. 

Four years after Agnes’ death in 1984 I decided to test the truthfulness of her assertion that Evelyn Gibson had died “a long time ago.” If Evelyn were still alive I had no idea where in England (or in the world) she might be.  Remembering a distinctive feature of letters to the editor in The Times of London—the writer’s home address was always printed with the letter—I scoured the newspaper’s indexes. My search yielded a single letter from an Evelyn Gibson in 1963; the topic was consistent with the social issues associated with the old Progressive League. The address might be useless some twenty-five years later.  Nevertheless, I wrote. Months later a response came from someone whose name was new to me.  My letter had made its way to Geoffrey Wood, Evelyn Gibson’s brother.  He was sorry to report that his sister had died just a few months earlier. Evelyn, Wood told me on my next trip to England, had been open with her family about her place in Stapledon’s life. He showed me a striking photo of his red-haired sister from the 1930s and, more unexpectedly, a previously unknown pencil draft of Sirius, the 1944 novel that Stapledon’s usual publisher, Methuen, had declined as “obscene.” A note attached by Evelyn to the manuscript told her relatives that Stapledon had given it to her because she was the model for its heroine. Wood knew little about how his sister, separated from her husband at the time, met Olaf or the details of their affair, but he was certain she would have welcomed my questions—if only I had been smart enough to track her down sooner. Agnes had been as sure that Evelyn would talk as she was that Diana would give me a warm welcome and little else.

My breakthrough in the matter of Diana occurred when Mary Shenai told me that she had been looking at something she found among her mother’s belongings several years earlier: a manila envelope marked by Agnes with wording almost too melodramatic to believe: “To be destroyed if necessary.”  Amazingly, Mary (lacking, I suppose, a biographer’s curiosity) had never opened that envelope until I began asking questions again about Evelyn and Diana. She handed it over to me, remarking that she had looked through its contents and had decided against destruction. There were not only letters to Olaf from Evelyn and Diana but letters between Olaf and Agnes about the two affairs, letters pleading on his part for holidays from matrimony and on her part articulating the pain of being asked for her approval. 

Evelyn’s mysterious poem, preserved only in a faint pencil transcript in John’s copy of one of his father’s novels, now became clear. She had threatened to throw herself into the River Severn after Olaf refused to let her bear a child. It was the biographer’s unforeseen task to break the news to John Stapledon about the identity of Mrs. Gibson, her role in his father’s life, and the story of her successor, Diana Gurney.  Never having guessed that Olaf had lovers, John burst out, “I can’t believe my father was such a bloody fool.” Later, John’s Sicilian wife Sarina revealed that she had known about Diana ever since 1946 when she arrived in England as a war bride.  Knowing more English than Olaf and Agnes guessed, she had overheard enough to know that their marriage was troubled and the reason was someone named Diana. But for forty years she never told John what she knew. Sarina was the only family member who tried, charmingly and transparently, to shape how I would interpret the facts. “Couldn’t you write that she was in love with him but that he wasn’t in love with her?” As Hermione Lee put it, in one of her essays on biography in Virginia Woolf’s Nose, “For the biographized and for their friends and family, there is a fight from [sic] the death over facts, between the participants in a life and the writers of it.”

Diana Gurney appears in my biography as “N” and it was she who, when I wrote to her in 1989 about what I knew of her relationship with Olaf, responded—her rage jumping off the page—that I was a scoundrel and that I’d better come see her the next time I was in England. I arrived at her flat, a peace offering of flowers in my hand that she set down without thanks.  Over the course of nearly five hours we went back and forth, her words sometimes icy, sometimes tearful, as she emphasized how unwelcome my curiosity was. Years ago she had burnt all but one of Olaf’s letters to thwart such a creature as me who might appear on her doorstep. She was furious that Mary Shenai—whom she had known as a London neighbor and friend for decades—had read her letters and handed them over to me.  Diana had been a war widow in her twenties when she met the 60-year-old Stapledon at a conference in 1945. By 1989 she had had half a century to brood over her affair, bitterly relating to me how aging male artists needed “refreshment” from young women. She still harbored the memory of her discomfort during her nights with Olaf over the third person she imagined standing at the foot of the bed. 

Unlike Evelyn, Diana told her family nothing about Stapledon except that he had been her painting student.  She dreaded the embarrassment she would suffer if the facts were made public. “I am not just archeological evidence.  Archeological evidence doesn’t have feelings.” That afternoon I agreed not to name her in the biography.  My choice of the letter “N” signified “nomen”—an unspecified name.  Until now I have not felt free to disclose Diana’s identity.  I can do so because Richard Stapledon, Olaf’s grandson, has developed his own case of biographical curiosity. In 2023 he emailed me about a discovery he had made. After Diana Gurney died at age 97 in 2014 her executor quietly deposited the surviving materials on her relationship to Stapledon, including my correspondence with her, in the author’s archive at the University of Liverpool. In death, it seems, N allowed herself to become archeological evidence.

***

Revisiting Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future three decades later, I can say that sex, while inarguably of interest to me and my few readers, is not the issue in biographical writing that now preoccupies me. Neither Evelyn Gibson nor Diana Gurney will ever become household words—any more than the name of Olaf Stapledon has achieved that status. The reason is simple: not many people have read my biography, and the number is unlikely to grow much in the future. My inflated ambition to generate a Stapledon renaissance through the telling of his life was, deservedly, brought down to earth some time ago. A biography, however thoroughly researched and well-written, cannot create readers for an unknown author. The question “Olaf who?” persists.  Although my audience has been primarily a handful of literary scholars, graduate students, and science-fiction enthusiasts, I am content that the project was worth a dozen years of my life.  But lately I have been reviewing my quixotic adventure in the context of more general musings on the nature and value of literary biography, for by now I have done what I chose not to do earlier: learn what other biographers have had to say about their experiences.

I’ve read Richard Holmes’s wonderful Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. From age eighteen Holmes began visiting sites that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s writings. It was an effort, he wrote mordantly, to foster “the growth of an imaginary relationship with a non-existent person, or at least a dead one.” A biographer may begin by identifying with his subject, but eventually must suspend empathy to experience his subject as other. And in the end the biographer has to stage a kind of resurrection. “Somehow you had to produce the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact.” Unwittingly, I had enacted a typical biographer’s romance, shadowing Stapledon and walking in his footsteps just as Holmes had with Stevenson. I had lived in his house and worked in his study. I stood beneath the unpolluted night sky in Caldy at 2 AM stunned by the spectacle of the infinite starscape, as Stapledon represents himself at the opening of Star Maker. In Liverpool I searched for two paintings in the Walker Art Gallery that Stapledon often told Agnes represented their own romance, Rossetti’s Dante’s Dream and Henry Holliday’s Dante and Beatrice. I hiked the coast of North Wales until I found what I believed to be the very cliff from which he had watched seals luxuriating in the waters below and had “a vision” that sparked Last and First Men.

Stalking the ghost of Stapledon was not without unplanned comedy.  His diaries told me that when in London he often met Naomi Mitchison, Gerald Heard, and L. H. Myers, who constituted an informal literary coterie, at the Café Royal. I found that it still existed, and on my second visit to England in 1983 I went there for lunch, hoping to conjure the atmosphere of the 1930s.  The place was grand and intimidating—more royal than café—and I sensed immediately that I was out of place carrying my yellow legal pad.  A waiter handed me a menu, and I gulped. I ordered the least expensive appetizer and planned a quick escape.  A beautiful plate of lettuces arrived, surmounted by a large whole artichoke and escorted by a dish of buttery sauce.  I had only ever eaten artichoke hearts out of a jar and had no idea how to attack this thing.  Nearby a berobed sheikh was dining with his English girlfriend, and he had an identical plate in front of him.  I watched, incredulous, as he pulled a leaf off the artichoke, dipped it in sauce, and languidly pulled it through his teeth.  Who knew? I was nearly as clueless about vegetables as I was about writing biographies. 

When I interviewed Naomi in her nineties—by then Lady Mitchison, the only member of the coterie still alive—I told her I had visited the Café Royal (omitting the tale of my Humiliation by Artichoke). I asked why a group of socialist writers would gather at a place like that. Naomi, without missing a beat: “Oh, of course we never ate at the restaurant. We went upstairs to a room with comfortable red banquettes and ordered off the cheap menu.” So I had emptied my wallet and injured my pride without walking in Stapledon’s footsteps at all. As I got deeper into the project I had no trouble balancing my effort to “channel” my subject with Holmes’s dictum of required otherness. For all of Stapledon’s ordinariness he was a different animal from his American biographer. I am not the son of a wealthy shipping magnate; I don’t have an Oxford pedigree or accent; my knowledge of philosophy is shallow; I have never written fiction; as far as I know I have not been tailed by the F.B.I.; and I confess (whether you believe it or not) that I’ve never taken an extramarital holiday.

But before assessing my achievements and failures I must return once more to the early 1980s, the period when I surrendered my virginity, if not my naiveté, as a biographer.  Like Scrooge McDuck swimming in his vault of dollar bills, I had begun to luxuriate in a sea of discoveries: Stapledon’s unknown early essays on Wordsworth and Browning in an obscure educational journal; a nine-page character study of a crusty sea captain tucked into a letter to his mother; newspaper evidence of his meeting in Liverpool in 1949 with one of his heroes, Paul Robeson. Private discoveries aside, however, I was not working in isolation. Three books about Stapledon appeared as I began my research; all had an impact on my work, two of them enormously helpful and the other decidedly not.  Olaf Stapledon: A Bibliography, produced by Harvey Satty and Curtis Smith in 1984, is a scholar’s tool, technical in its details of print runs, bindings, dust jackets, and textual variants.  It was the indispensable starting point for getting the big picture of the literary output of a neglected writer.

The second volume was Patrick A. McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon (1982), the first book-length study of the major works and most of the minor ones.  Here and in subsequent essays McCarthy pivoted from the “honored but uneasy position” Stapledon occupies within the field of science fiction (the author of Aldiss’ “great grey holy book”) to a broader assessment of his literary art, putting his fiction into dialogue with work by Dante, Milton, and Dostoevsky, and discerning his affinities with and differences from the Modernists who were his contemporaries. McCarthy’s pioneering criticism cleared the ground and enabled me to focus on narrating my subject’s life rather than constructing a ponderously dual Life and Works.

But the third book caused headaches.  Leslie Fiedler’s Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided appeared in 1983. With its Oxford University Press imprint it got more attention than McCarthy’s book—and more than my biography received eleven years later.  This was not surprising. Fiedler’s name had been in the public arena since 1948 when Partisan Review published his provocative essay on homoeroticism, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’n, Huck Honey!” Fiedler’s Stapledon purported to be a life and works, but it was a life concocted from tendentious readings of the works.  The book is naked of footnotes; Fiedler never interviewed Stapledon’s living family members and associates; he didn’t visit the formative sites in Liverpool and Wirral; he never dug out documents, articles, and manuscripts available at the British Library or Liverpool University. Apart from secondhand notes borrowed from Harvey Satty, Fiedler skipped research.  He made “intriguing deductions” from Stapledon’s fiction: that his marriage to his Australian cousin Agnes Miller was “a quasi-incestuous union”; that a streak of sadism and masochism disturbed Stapledon’s private life; that he could be diagnosed as manic-depressive; that a late novel was the product of “male menopause”; that he suffered hallucinations during “the darkest hours of his life.” A typically leading question asks, “Why, for instance, does one of his most patently autobiographical characters end up in the madhouse?” No grounds are given for thinking the narrator of The Flames autobiographical. When I arranged to interview some old friends of Stapledon I was greeted warily. To these elderly British skeptics I might be another shady Yank trying to dig up dirt for another book like Fiedler’s.

I had, then, two books that opened my path towards a Stapledon biography and one that booby-trapped it. I needed to concentrate on collecting facts about Stapledon’s life—and not just his love life.  Two problems became paramount. One was to investigate the “political Stapledon” and the other to plumb the workings of his unprecedented imagination.  The latter was the more obvious task since Stapledon’s claim to a modest fame resides in the half dozen or so works of speculative fiction he published between 1930 and 1947. Whether Stapledon was a political as well as a literary phenomenon would not have occurred to most of his readers. But suddenly near the end of his life his face appeared on the front pages of English and American newspapers as well as in a spread in Life magazine. Stapledon’s politics became a public, if short-lived, conundrum. Unraveling that mystery involved the biography’s most absorbing detective work.

Stapledon emerged as an unlikely public figure in March 1949 when he was the sole western European delegate admitted by U. S. authorities to an international peace conference in New York organized by the astronomer Harlow Shapley but believed to be a propaganda instrument for the U.S.S.R.  This was an “Olaf who?” moment.  Who was this birdlike man, as one journalist described him, shown stepping off a transoceanic plane? What was Stapledon doing at that conference, and why did he come alone? These were questions that had never been adequately answered, and I relished the mission to find out if this was an anomalous event in the 63-year-old author’s life or if it had deep roots. Throughout the 1980s I gradually pieced together diaries, teaching notes, letters to editors, institutional reports, snippets from regional newspapers, classified files, and private writings; a mosaic of political Stapledon took shape.

His social conscience, in part an inheritance from his parents, began to mature while he was an undergraduate volunteering at a boys’ club in the Oxford slums; in the last years of his life he joined anti-apartheid and pro-Indian independence activities. In between, even during his busiest writing years, Stapledon never abandoned his commitment to social progressivism. He worked at the Liverpool Settlement before World War I, drove an ambulance for the Quakers during the war, taught adult-education classes on poetry, philosophy, and psychology to railwaymen, housewives, and dockworkers, and gave talks to British troops during the second war about the future of society.  He dueled in the Liverpool Post with a right-wing antagonist who used the pseudonym of “Ignotus.” He often spoke at antifascist rallies throughout the north of England and chaired a large gathering at St. George’s Hall in Liverpool on Black Americans’ civil rights. But nearly all his political work took place in and around Liverpool and went unreported in the London press.  Much like his personality, his role in leftist activism was provincial, subdued, and self-effacing.  And always, like the jackdaw in the cartoon he sent Wells, the political Stapledon observed freely but uncertainly.  An anxious neighbor telephoned him when the news came over the radio of the atomic bombardment of Hiroshima. “This might be the event that will finally unify the world,” he reassured her. But she pressed him, “Is that what you really think?” And the jackdaw answered, “Yes, but it may be a totalitarian world.”

Coming to terms with Stapledon’s politics, I had to make sense of his notoriety when he traveled for the first and only time to the United States in 1949. In the weeks preceding the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, visas were issued to delegates from western Europe, from Russia and the eastern bloc nations, from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The conference was scheduled to open on March 25. On March 22 every visa of every delegate from western Europe was revoked on a blanket order from the American Secretary of State.  Then on the 23rd Stapledon’s visa was restored—but no one else’s.  Instead of being part of a British delegation, he traveled alone and was questioned for over two hours by an immigration officer at La Guardia Field before being allowed to enter the country. Using the Freedom of Information Act, I made a two-year slog through the bureaucracies of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (which had a transcript of the airport interview), the F. B. I. (whose agents followed Stapledon throughout his visit), and the State Department (whose classified documents revealed the internal discussions about the propaganda value of admitting him to the U.S.).  The xeroxes I finally obtained were heavily redacted but they opened windows into Stapledon’s political temperament. The evidence led me to make a structural decision. I would start the biography not with his ancestry and birth but with a single day in the year before he died, March 24, 1949—the day he landed in New York as a mysterious singularity whose identity and beliefs were the subject of speculation and interrogation. Highlighting that day enabled me to offer a dramatic and political framing of the question, “Olaf who?” 

A scanned photo from the 4 April 1949 issue of Life magazine, showing Stapledon with Shostakovich at the World Peace Conference in New York.

In New York Stapledon was photographed alongside Dmitry Shostakovich and dined with Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets at the Waldorf. He lectured in Newark, Baltimore, and Boston. But to the average American onlooker he seemed a nobody. Why had the State Department taken such an interest in him? What did the immigration officer want to find out before letting him in? Why did the F.B.I. document his every move the entire time he was in the U.S.? And why was there a letter in the State Department files initialed “HST” that gave the president’s approval for his visa? I confess to some vanity about the success of my efforts to unlock these mysteries. Thanks to the detailed paperwork of government agencies, especially the F.B.I. reports, I could more fully document the movements and words of Stapledon during these ten days than for any other period in his life while evoking the hulking paranoia of Fortress America as the Cold War got colder.

If I can claim success in shining a light onto Stapledon’s politics, my other major effort ultimately failed. Connecting the person to the writer is the holy grail of literary biography, and in the end I composed largely a disconnect. I was initially drawn to Stapledon’s ordinariness, but his ordinariness was my undoing.  I took inspiration from his unfinished “Letters to the Future,” written in the late 1940s and addressed to a fantasized great-grandson in the twenty-first century. Reflecting on his literary career—"a texture of good luck and bad management”—Stapledon accepted that his brief celebrity had passed.  And yet, he wrote, “it is just possible that my very obscurity may fit me to speak more faithfully for my period than any of its great unique personalities.” Not a Wells, not a Joyce, not a Woolf, Stapledon the unknown writer from Merseyside might play the role of an everyman journeying from Victorianism into modernity.

Now, well into the twenty-first century that Stapledon had imagined, I find that what I wrote didn’t convey much that is memorable about his ordinariness, and the partition between the common man and the uncommon writer remains largely intact. These are two separate disappointments.  One thing I now recognize is an absence of lively, quotable speech that I could attribute to my subject.

Famously, Boswell brought Samuel Johnson to life largely through the dialogues Johnson participated in and the pronouncements he made.  A review of my biography cited Wells’s response to Stapledon’s apology for failing to acknowledge his influence on Last and First Men (“It is all balls to suggest [it] . . . owes anything to my writings.”) The reviewer, Robert Philmus, observed that nowhere in my biography does “Stapledon come across as vividly as H. G. Wells does in a single brief utterance.” Confession: when I read this review in 1995 I felt angry and deflated; now I appreciate the justice of its finding that the uneventfulness of Stapledon’s life is not illuminated by any “verbal brilliance” or the presence of a “luminous personality.” Philmus suggested that I could have taken “novelistic liberties” and put better words into Stapledon’s mouth, but I remain content that I resisted that Fiedlerian temptation.

The mystery of the workings of Stapledon’s imagination was another matter. Hamlet derided the feckless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for failing to “pluck out the heart of my mystery.” I never could unlock the door to that part of Stapledon’s mind where his creativity lived, never figured out what enabled him to think up the most daring inventions of his fictions. How did this seemingly colorless man, who had never written anything of consequence until he was 44, suddenly produce the astounding future history of Last and First Men? Archival research provided some tantalizing clues. I found huge, immensely detailed, color-coded charts for his history of the next two billion years (now in Stapledon’s archive at the University of Liverpool). They suggest his methodical design of what is essentially a plotless chronicle of the rise and fall of eighteen distinctive human mutations.  In an era not yet known for interdisciplinary thinking, Stapledon brought sociology, anthropology, biology, political theory, and religious inquiry into alignment to project visions of the future of humanity.  Searching back earlier in documentary history I found notations in his diaries from 1901-1903 that revealed titles of the books the teenager was reading for his own pleasure: The Story of the Heavens, The Story of the Planets, The Romance of  Geology, The Universe, Recent Advances in Astronomy, The Course of an Ice Age, Astronomical Myths. In a letter to his father he wrote, “Science will always be a recreation subject for me, especially astronomy.” Just before taking the Oxford entrance exams, he wrote in his diary, “I did not get to sleep before midnight owing to contemplation of the stars.”

A partial view of the large set of time scales Stapledon constructed during his composition of Last and First Men. Courtesy of the Estate of Olaf Stapledon and the University of Liverpool Library.

It was easy enough to recognize foreshadowings of the great adventures in ideas that underpinned his fiction. But how did Stapledon make the leap as a writer from the banal neoVictorian verses he was turning out in the early 1920s to the glorious prose that began to appear a decade later? The transition resulted in the dazzling and sometimes degenerate metamorphoses of our species in Last and First Men, and in Star Maker’s cosmic journey into the terrifying abyss of creativity itself. At the end of his odyssey through time, space, and infinity the narrator of Star Maker lies on the heather of Caldy Hill—near the space known today as Stapledon Wood—and tries to sort out the visions he has had: “Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man’s science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition.” It is the recognizable voice of Stapledon the jackdaw. But the biographer, aiming to pluck out the heart of Stapledon’s mystery, got trapped in the thick haze and fog of creative genius. Stapledon’s imagination is just as hard to fathom as the creative mind of his Star Maker. I peered and peered at the jackdaw but could not make it sing.

In many aspects of his life Stapledon was a late bloomer, and I search now for the right metaphor for his literary emergence: what psychological trigger or brainwave or road-to-Damascus illumination accounts for how Stapledon went from poetaster to artist? As a young man he wondered casually in a letter to his fiancée what goes on in a dog’s head, but how so many years later in Sirius did he get deeply inside the canine mind and sensibility, capturing the frustration of a dog with human intelligence but lacking the dexterity of human hands, seeing the world and its human masters from a dog’s point of view? How did he conceive and depict the alien cultures, multiple universes, and competing theological myths in Star Maker, the spiritual voyage scholars consider his masterwork, a modern variant of Dante’s Comedy?  How did these fantastic marvels—always linked to philosophical inquisition and never merely exotic—materialize from the brain of so unprepossessing a man?  I could not answer these questions. As I think back now my work seems like that of a film conservator trying to splice together the fragmentary remains of a lost silent movie.  The bits and pieces don’t add up to a complete moving picture. And I can’t hear a voice. I am left to conclude that the relation of Stapledon the man to Stapledon the writer is nothing less than a miraculous act of transubstantiation.

I take some comfort from Justin Kaplan’s account of his wrestling with the writing of Whitman’s biography. Nothing like Leaves of Grass had appeared in nineteenth-century American literature. “The paramount mystery,” he wrote in his essay on “The Naked Self,” was the creative act, and it was ultimately insoluble. “One does not try to explain a miracle but only to describe, with as much precision, credibility, and passion as possible, the moments and years preceding and following the miracle.” Accurate chronology, after all, is not a minor achievement in biography. Kaplan’s is the best formula I’ve found for both the task and the limitations of the biographer’s art. 

Biographers poke around in other people’s lives scrupulously or recklessly, reverently or skeptically, and create a portrait, a partial likeness, from whatever they uncover in their excavations, from hints and scraps of data. Novelists frankly make things up, and the fabrications of skillful novelists create an illusion of truth, a roundedness that can elude the biographer. The tribute often paid to the work of even the most fantastical novelist—Dickens or Le Guin, Kafka or Tolkien—is to claim that it is “true to life.” The scoundrels who write biographies inevitably fall short of that degree of truth. Boswell, who obsessively recorded every utterance of Johnson, thought readers could “see him live” through wall-to-wall transcripts of his conversations, and still he lamented the incompleteness of his massive biography: “Had his other friends been as diligent and as ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved.” But that sounds like the biographer as taxidermist—at least as ghastly as the images of the biographer as vulture or boiler of bones. Partial views, tentative speculation, incompletion all belong to the nature of the biographical endeavor. And that’s the truth of it.

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Robert Crossley is a biographer, critic and literary historian. His most recent book is Epic Ambitions in Modern Times: From Paradise Lost to the New Millennium (2022). Over the past ten years, his essays have appeared in The Hudson Review, Raritan, Southwest Review, The Sewanee Review and The Massachusetts Review.

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