Uncle Stephen

By Forrest Reid

Left in the care of his unloving stepmother after his father’s death, sixteen-year-old Tom Barber has a vivid dream one night in which he sees his Uncle Stephen, whom he has never met and who is rumoured to have been mixed up in scandal and the practice of black magic. Unhappy at home and not knowing what to expect when he arrives at Uncle Stephen’s manor house, Tom runs away, hoping to live with his uncle. In his depiction of Tom’s initiation into Uncle Stephen’s mystic creed, his illicit love for the poacher Jim Deverell, and his adventures with Philip, a mysterious boy with a strange and fantastic connection to Uncle Stephen’s past and Tom’s future, Forrest Reid’s artistic vision finds its fullest expression. 

The first in Reid’s Tom Barber trilogy, Uncle Stephen (1931) is both a tale of boyhood adventure in the tradition of Mark Twain and a story of the supernatural in the vein of Sheridan Le Fanu and Walter de la Mare. This new edition of the book E. M. Forster considered Reid’s masterpiece features a new introduction by Andrew Doyle along with never before published photographs and archival materials.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781941147443

Book preview

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UNCLE STEPHEN

by

FORREST REID

‘O that I might have my request; and that God would grant me the thing that I long for!’ – The Book of Job.

With a new introduction by

ANDREW DOYLE

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Uncle Stephen by Forrest Reid

First published London: Faber & Faber, 1931

First Valancourt Books edition 2014

Copyright © 1931, 2014 by the Estate of Forrest Reid

Introduction © 2014 by Andrew Doyle

Previously unpublished materials are copyright © 2014 by the Estate of Forrest Reid and are reprinted here with the permission of Queen’s University Belfast.

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

Cover by Henry Petrides

INTRODUCTION

On 10 October 1952 a small ceremony took place on the drive of 13 Ormiston Crescent, Belfast, the last home of Forrest Reid (1875-1947). A number of friends, fellow authors and local dignitaries had gathered to unveil a commemorative plaque. It was a modest affair, although the attendance of the Lord Mayor ensured a police presence.¹ During E. M. Forster’s address he acknowledged the inherent difficulties of categorizing Reid’s work:

This isn’t the moment or the place to sum up his genius, and in any case it is not a genius easily summed up. He was elusive and sensitive, yet at the same time he was tough and knew his own mind. He preached no dogma, and yet all his work is characterised by what he himself has beautifully called a sort of moral fragrance. Its final impact is ethical. Behind nature and the indwelling power in her, behind the Lagan and the Ulster countryside, behind Celtic or Hellenic fancies, behind his sympathy for youth and young people, for animals, for birds, there lurks that moral fragrance. Not moral precepts but moral fragrance. There is a profound difference. His books have a tendency to make people better – they scarcely know why. I see this ethical tendency as the heritage he received from his Presbyterian forebears although he did not inherit their creed.²

It is precisely this elusive quality that ensures Reid will never attain widespread commercial appeal. It is also the reason why his work is so valuable. His writing evokes experiences and sensations that are at once numinous and indefinable, an effect perhaps closer to music than to prose. As Forster notes elsewhere, Reid’s novels ‘must be classed not as transcripts but as visions before they can be appreciated, and their vision is that of the hierophant who sees what lies behind objects rather than what lies between them, and who is not interested in the pageants of society or history’.³

To many this is a source of frustration. Reid is seemingly apolitical, stubbornly insistent on his own esoteric worldview. Furthermore, the autobiographical elements of his novels are inseparable from the formation and execution of his artistic vision, a point that does not sit comfortably with the poststructuralist orthodoxy of contemporary academe. Reid’s memoirs Apostate (1926) and Private Road (1940) are not mere adjuncts to his corpus, but vital components of it.⁴ Fiction and non-fiction alike are vehicles through which his intangible ‘secret world’ might be glimpsed.⁵ In the Tom Barber trilogy – Uncle Stephen (1931), The Retreat (1936) and Young Tom (1944) – Reid came closest to realizing his goal. Like his creator, the boy Tom is a visionary who simultaneously occupies two realms: the corporeal and the oneiric. He can, on occasion, be ‘more than half out of his body’; he is an interloper in a ‘dark unconscious world’, one that exists ‘below his dream-world’. Tom’s experiences in this regard are a direct recreation of the author’s, and it is for this reason that readers unfamiliar with Reid’s fiction will find Uncle Stephen a good place to start.

The novel opens in the midst of the funeral of Tom’s father. Having lost his mother some years before, Tom’s immediate family now consists entirely of those with no biological ties: his father’s second wife, her brother Horace, and Tom’s step-siblings Jane, Eric and Leonard. The new Mrs. Barber feels little affinity for Tom, who in turn makes no effort to conceal his contempt for his surrogate family. Like Hamlet he is ‘too much i’ th’ sun’, resenting the continual ‘uncleing’ and ‘mothering’ that has been imposed upon him. At the house in Gloucester Terrace Tom initiates a conversation about his great-uncle Stephen Collet, much to the irritation of Mrs. Barber. Although he is Tom’s last living blood relative, Stephen is a pariah; he has written abstruse tomes on Greek religion and spent some time abroad where he was involved in ‘a scandal of some sort’. Ever since then he has been living as a recluse in the remote village of Kilbarron. A series of dreams hastens Tom’s decision to run away from home so that he might find his uncle. On his arrival, it is apparent that Stephen has somehow anticipated his visit, possibly through supernatural means.

When Forster came to write his review of Uncle Stephen for the News Chronicle, it was at this point that his synopsis of the plot halted. His tone was one of surrender: ‘here the reviewer feels inclined to lay down his pen. For what follows is too strange and too gentle to be described’.⁶ It is true that the story veers into unique and unexpected territory from here on in, and it would be unsporting to reveal too much. Suffice it to say that Uncle Stephen is one of Reid’s most intriguing explorations of the themes closest to his heart: the impermanence of youth, the interconnectedness of dreams and reality, and the conflict between sacred and profane love. Little wonder, then, that Reid had originally dedicated the novel to Hermes who, as messenger of the gods, represents the bridging point between the mortal and the divine, and whose statue takes pride of place in Uncle Stephen’s bedroom.⁷

Reid’s deft negotiation of these dualistic spaces – past and present, dream and reality, sacred and profane – is one of the great achievements of Uncle Stephen. Its success lies in one of the novel’s most prominent symbolic conceits, that of the two properties on the estate in Kilbarron. In addition to Stephen’s ‘Manor House’ there is a deserted building known as ‘the lodge’ which is so ‘densely coated with layer upon layer of ivy’ that to Tom it appears to be ‘alive’ and ‘breathing’.⁸ As so often in Reid’s work, the location is based on real life. In this case, Reid has drawn on two sources. The house itself is modelled on Burrenwood Cottage in Castlewellan, County Down. The lawn, the balustraded steps, and the pool with its statue of a naked boy are a faithful replication of the grounds of ‘The Moat’ in East Belfast, a Victorian mansion owned by Reid’s friends Mr. and Mrs. Frank Workman.⁹ Here Reid would practise his croquet – he was one of the most accomplished players in the United Kingdom – and on the stone steps by the fountain he composed much of the original draft of Uncle Stephen.

As Tom makes his way along the path that leads through the undergrowth from Stephen’s home to ‘the lodge’, the imagery takes on a magical and revelatory quality. It would seem that Tom has stumbled, albeit temporarily, into his ‘dream-world’.

Chequered bands of golden fire splashed on the moss-dark sward. A stilled loveliness breathed its innocent spell. Then suddenly a hare bounded across the path, and the trilled liquid pipings of hidden thrush and blackbird broke on his ears like the awakening of life. The music came to him in curves of sound. All the beauty he loved best had this curving pattern, came to him thus, so that even the rounding of a leaf or the melting line of a young human body impressed itself upon him as a kind of music.

This experience marks a turning point in Uncle Stephen. It coincides with Tom’s first encounter with Philip Coombe, a mysterious and fiercely independent boy who has taken up residence in the deserted house. The more the story transcends the usual con­strictions of time and reality, the more important Philip becomes.

Uncle Stephen was the first of Reid’s books to originate entirely in a dream. As he notes in Private Road: ‘from beginning to end, it was composed in sleep – or perhaps I should say lived, for I undoubtedly was Tom’.¹⁰ The connection between Reid and his creation became more pronounced during the writing process. Tom became so vivid to Reid that, on occasion, he would seem to materialize. ‘I knew the tones of his voice’, he later recalled. ‘I caught glimpses of him in the street, and one evening, after finishing a chapter, I put down my work to go out for a walk with him’.¹¹ The image of Reid walking through the streets of East Belfast with a recreation of his younger self seems a fitting metaphor for his life as an artist. For him, the past was another ‘dream-world’; it was the idyll of his childhood that he strove to reactivate through his fiction. The composition of Uncle Stephen, therefore, was ‘less like writing a book than living in one’.¹² It is perhaps this experience that lies behind a story that Reid had planned but never wrote, in which a man meets a small boy in a graveyard and gradually understands that the child is ‘himself as he was then’.¹³

There is little doubt that of all his boy heroes, Tom Barber is the closest approximation of Reid’s own self, or at least an idealization formed through the indistinct and unreliable distortions of memory. Like Reid, Tom hails from a middle-class family, but feels no compunction in associating with working-class boys. When Uncle Stephen laments that there are no fit companions for Tom in Kilbarron because the only boys of his age are of a lower class, Tom’s cry of ‘That doesn’t matter’ clearly echoes the attitude of the infant Reid, whose mother had disapproved of his choice of friends. ‘I dismissed it as mere prejudice,’ he recalls in Apostate. ‘I had plenty of prejudices myself, but they were not of a kind to prevent me from making friends with an errand boy if I happened to like him, as was quite often the case.’¹⁴ Likewise, Tom shares Reid’s prudishness, as evinced in his displeasure at finding sexually provocative postcards on sale at a local stationer’s shop. Moreover, Tom’s love of animals cannot fail to bring to mind the author’s own enthusiasms. In the words of Reid’s protégé Stephen Gilbert: ‘Loyalty was, in his eyes, the most important of virtues. It was the reason he gave for preferring dogs to humans’.¹⁵ In Uncle Stephen the value of ‘faithfulness’ is repeatedly and explicitly asserted.

Uncle Stephen is based on the romantic premise that there exists an irreconcilable antagonism between sacred and profane love.¹⁶ For one to flourish, posits Reid, the other must be abandoned. Tom’s elevated and chaste love for Uncle Stephen and, later, the boy Philip Coombe, is offset against the homoeroticism of his relationship with the poacher Jim Deverell.¹⁷ Reid’s description of their first encounter on the bridge near the Manor House sets a tone in which danger and sexual desire are inextricably linked.

For the young man’s stare was persistent, and Tom could not escape from it, even though he kept his own gaze averted. Nor did he altogether like the brown surly face upon which short black hairs showed a weekly shave to be nearly due. There was something in its expression to which he was unaccustomed – something boldly investigatory, vaguely predatory.

The scene that follows is laced with erotic subtext – the lingering eye-contact, the stilted dialogue, the moments of embarrassment, Deverell’s chivalric insistence that he carry Tom’s parcel – all of which contributes to an atmosphere of flirtation and sexual possibility. Tom is both attracted and repelled by this older boy, resigning himself to his company for ‘he might as well have tried to out-distance a leopard or a wolf’. The animal imagery locates Tom as the innocent prey, yet there is something of the faux naïf in his diffidence. The frisson of physical contact is unmistakable as Tom trips and is ‘steadied by a firm grasp round his body’. The phrasing is quite distinct in tone from that describing the intimacy between Tom and Stephen, which is portrayed as a natural extension of their indissoluble bond.

Although it would be reductive to see Tom as a straight­forward replication of the author as a boy, Reid has undeniably invested his creation with many of his own psychological traits. As such Tom is identifiably gay, a point seized upon by Colin Cruise in his argument that Reid’s work constitutes a defence of homosexuality.¹⁸ In Uncle Stephen, Tom is at the very age at which Reid felt his innocence was lost to the taint of sexuality. ‘I had reached the age of puberty,’ he writes in Apostate, ‘with its momentous discovery of the sexual impulse as a kind of restless goad driving the herd of dream and waking thoughts into disquieting paths’.¹⁹ In his lifelong recurring dream of ‘a garden overlooking a stretch of sand, with the sea breaking on it’ Reid was fixed at Tom’s age, somewhere between fifteen and sixteen. As Reid confided in a letter to André Raffalovich, his novels are an attempt to return to that ‘mysterious garden’.²⁰ Furthermore, this vision is specifically prelapsarian. Sex is the obviating factor: ‘I believe if the physical side of life had remained unknown to me I should not have lost this power’.²¹

From Reid’s perspective, the intrusion of sex had not only disconnected him from his dreamland, but had marred his entire life. This accounts for his celibacy in adulthood, and his view of masturbation as ‘unnatural’.²² As Stephen Gilbert points out, Reid ‘strongly disapproved’ of all sexual relations between males, and reserved his most vehement condemnation for ‘any or all men who interfered sexually with boys’.²³ For him, the conditions of youth and innocence were inseparable. Reid makes this clear in an earlier letter to Raffalovich: ‘The most satisfactory friendship is one in which the mistake is not made: all others are doomed’.²⁴

It was a mistake that Reid had made in his youth, if the tentative allusions in Apostate and the letters to Raffalovich are anything to go by. To Gilbert he had confessed his masturbatory habits as a boy which had involved ‘putting a pillow between his legs’.²⁵ Gilbert’s account of this frank conversation provides compelling evidence for Reid’s self-loathing attitude with regard to his own sexual orientation:

I used to imagine a boy. Some boy I’d seen in the street perhaps. A boy I was at school with. It’s no good. When I was young I used to be glad I wasn’t heterosexual. I felt that we were better, more alive, more sensitive, more affectionate, perhaps even braver. We’re not. We’re not as good. We’re not as trustworthy. We’re not as strong. And we can’t be happy. We can’t have a permanent relationship. So if you have any tendency to homosexuality in you, try to get rid of it.²⁶

Such a bleak outlook is best appreciated in the context of the ignominy associated with same-sex love in the early twentieth century. That said, Reid’s views were conflicted, and did not dovetail neatly with any prevailing contemporaneous discourse of homosexuality. His was an individualistic creed informed by a consciously desexualized interpretation of Platonic love. In spite of Reid’s self-confessed paganism, his sense of sexual rectitude was closer akin to that of the Presbyterianism against which he defined himself. In Uncle Stephen, Tom’s ‘profane love’ for Deverell is represented as a threat to the ‘innocency of mind’ so cherished by Reid.²⁷ In rejecting Deverell, therefore, Tom is succeeding where Reid failed.

Of course, in order for Tom to renounce his homosexual instincts, he must first have experience of carnality. This presents a problem for Reid, who had been ‘repelled’ by the consummation of gay love depicted in Forster’s Maurice.²⁸ Reid’s early poetry was predominately homoerotic in nature and as such he later rejected it, presumably destroying the manuscripts. A surviving poem dated March 1905 – ‘The Room’ – offers a tantalizing glimpse into the kind of sentiments Reid had expressed. The speaker portrays an evening with his lover; they embrace by the fireside after a long journey, secure in the ‘whisperless concord of love’. The final stanza is especially suggestive:

This then is a dream – this darkness – this night that creeps up and enfolds me – your voice?

But your voice speaks again, and your arms are about me, close clasped,

And your mouth on my mouth. . . .

And we two in the night are drawn closer and closer together

In passionate joy.

There is little doubt that this poem is based on Reid’s relationship with his friend James Rutherford, for whom he had developed an intense affection. That this poem survives at all is remarkable. In a letter to Raffalovich dated 20 May 1920, Reid makes clear that these early poems will never see the light of day: ‘It is possible to write a poem to a friend, but it must not be a love poem. Even the faintest tinge of eroticism in such a thing would strike me as a deplorable error in taste; & bad taste is always ugly.’²⁹

In Uncle Stephen, Reid successfully finds a way to explore the ‘profane’ love of Tom and Deverell without offending his own moralistic sensibilities. For the most part, this is achieved through evocative lacunae in the text. The most significant instance occurs in Chapter XVII. Having been observed breaking and entering, Deverell has pleaded with Tom to lend him money so that he might escape the authorities. Tom has agreed, and meets him at Mrs. Deverell’s cottage. After the money has been exchanged, the tone grows more intimate:

Deverell rose and began to clear away the tea-things. Tom helped him. When at last everything was tidied up the young poacher turned to the boy. He laid his hands heavily on Tom’s shoulders. From this position they moved round till they clasped the back of his head. And Tom remained absolutely still, his face curiously grave.

‘Wish me luck, Mr. Tom,’ Deverell said at last.

‘Yes, I wish you good luck.’

Deverell’s hand passed awkwardly over his hair.

‘You can kiss me if you like,’ said Tom simply.

Deverell bent down.

‘You’d better go now, Mr. Tom. I must go soon myself.’

Tom without another word went out into the sunshine, nor as he walked away from the cottage did he once look back.

The reader cannot fail to recall their first meeting on the bridge. The dialogue is similarly stilted; Tom’s ‘Yes, I wish you good luck’ has the quality of an automaton mindlessly echoing its master’s request. The ‘clasped’ head in this passage is reminiscent of Deverell’s ‘firm grasp’ around Tom’s body during the earlier episode, both gestures conveying an abrupt tactility that recalls the ‘close clasped’ arms of Reid’s unpublished poem ‘The Room’.

This exchange between Tom and Deverell reveals how Reid illustrates the binary opposition of sacred and profane love both thematically and linguistically. The distinction between tenderness and concupiscence is starkly defined in Reid’s lexicon, a point made apparent when one compares this passage with the physical intimacy of Tom and Uncle Stephen. For example, it is notable that once Deverell has ‘laid his hands heavily on Tom’s shoulders’, the subject shifts from the boy to his hands – ‘they moved round till they clasped the back of his head’ – almost as though Deverell has relinquished control of the action, surrendering to his erotic impulses. In Reid’s depiction of Uncle Stephen’s caress of Tom’s hair in Chapter XIII, the precise opposite is the case: ‘The fingers of one hand twisted Tom’s coarse, dry, brown hair into little locks, but absent-mindedly, and presently he withdrew them to turn another page’. Here the subject is modified in the second clause; the agency is returned from the fingers back to Stephen. His act may be instinctive, but unlike Deverell’s salacity it is not an instinct that entails a loss of will. The contrast of adverbs is also telling: ‘absent-mindedly’ in the case of Stephen, but ‘awkwardly’ in the case of Deverell. The intimacy that originates in ‘sacred’ love is natural, unconscious, an extension of the spiritual. The ‘profane’ equivalent is perfunctory, gauche, hopelessly temporal.

The hiatus in the passage is the most telling aspect of all. Time is suspended; we have no way of knowing how long Tom and Deverell have spent together, or whether the kiss has initiated further sexual activity. Although Reid is a master of the allusive silence, there are grounds here for suspecting self-­censorship. After all, The Green Avenue, Reid’s projected novel on a homosexual theme, was jettisoned due to his fear that it might bring shame upon his friends.³⁰ Careful scrutiny of Reid’s extant manuscripts and drafts reveals that, in some cases, passages have been removed for similar reasons. Uncle Stephen is no exception. In a letter dated 21 December 1930, Forster laments the excision of certain sections: ‘I hope, when I read it, you’ll let me read what you’ve cut out as well. It’s wretched when stuff that’s made itself vital can’t get printed’.³¹ Three months later, he wrote again: ‘I hope that sacred love didn’t quite absorb profane in Uncle Stephen. I wish you hadn’t had to omit some poacher passages’.³² Unfortunately, the only surviving manuscript draft, entitled Great-Uncle Stephen: A Romance, does not include the passages to which Forster refers.³³

By contrast, the pedagogical relationship between Tom and Uncle Stephen resists erotic interpretation. It is an ideal drawn from Athenian culture, a kind of erastes and eromenos model, albeit desexualized in accordance with Reid’s undeniable Puritanism. Just as William Blake assimilated select elements of Biblical tradition into his own mythology, Reid borrowed from Hellenistic culture according to his needs and principles; he followed no creed wholesale. From the Greek paradigm he took his pantheistic love of nature, his aesthetic values, his adoration of youth, and his elevation of male friendship as the ideal form of love. Predictably, therefore, Tom is drawn to Greek literature and culture. In Chapter XXII he remembers the ‘infinitely lovely’ opening scene of Euripides’ Ion:

It was as if the sunlight of that morning long ago had been caught and imprisoned in the words, to burst out with renewed glory when their spell was whispered. And all this loveliness was eternal. It could never fade until the earth grew cold and dead, or some cloud descended on the world, darkening men’s minds until nobody was left who sought for and loved it. . . .

Stephen’s education of Tom is based on the very texts that Uncle Stephen seeks to embody, at least in terms of the values they represent. Such intertextuality draws attention to the novel’s own function as a reification of Reid’s ‘dream-world’. Elsewhere Reid insists that we can ‘get closer to truth through fiction than through fact’, affirming that the success of Uncle Stephen is due to its ‘inner truth’, one that accurately reflects his own philosophical outlook. ³⁴

Throughout his life Reid believed that he had been born in 1876, not 1875, a fitting symbol for a man whose stories constitute a kind of affront to the very concept of Time and its constraints. Appropriately enough, Uncle Stephen is the first of a trilogy that moves backwards through time: in this novel Tom is almost sixteen years of age, in The Retreat he is almost fourteen, and in Young Tom he is ten.³⁵ When the three novels were published in one volume in 1955, the decision was made to present them in chronological order, so that Uncle Stephen is the conclusion of Tom’s story. In a sense, the original regressive structure is more in keeping with Reid’s artistic vision. As Forster observes, in Uncle Stephen Reid ‘grapples with that most intangible of all things – Time – and makes it talk sense’.³⁶ It is one of the reasons why Forster dubs Tom ‘Forrest Reid’s most important creation’, and Uncle Stephen ‘his masterpiece’.³⁷

Inevitably, Time was the eventual victor. In spite of his achievements, Reid is a relatively unknown writer. The shelf life of an artist is determined as much by fashion as anything else, and Reid was rarely one to compromise his work for the sake of public expectation. With the exception of three years as a Cambridge undergraduate, he spent his entire life in Belfast, in spite of various inducements to move to England and immerse himself in the fashionable literary scene. As Forster recalls, he ‘belonged to no clique and did not know how to pull wires or to advertise himself’.³⁸ To paraphrase George Eliot, he lived a hidden life and rests in an unvisited grave. Yet his works stand as monuments to his unique worldview. In Stephen Gilbert’s copy of Uncle Stephen Reid has written the following lines, clearly inspired by W. B. Yeats’s ‘When you are old’ (1892):

When you are old your eyes may chance to light

Upon this book, and in the quiet night

Beside the drowsy fire memory may weave its spell.

Then shall the writer enter like a ghost,

To stand beside his all-unconscious host,

Summoned from dim far fields of asphodel.³⁹

The ‘fields of asphodel’ are the flowers that, according to Homer’s Odyssey, flourish in the underworld. The literary allusion is not a testament of pagan faith, but an acknowledgement that the afterlife of an artist lies in the work he leaves behind. Uncle Stephen is the keystone of that legacy.

Andrew Doyle

October 17, 2014

Andrew Doyle is a playwright and stand-up comedian. His plays include Borderland (national tour for 7:84 Theatre Company, Scotland), Jimmy Murphy Makes Amends (BBC Radio 4), and The Second Mr Bailey (BBC Radio 4). He has previously written the introductions to several works by Forrest Reid and Stephen Gilbert for Valancourt Books.

NOTES

1 According to E. M. Forster, at one point the police were sent off to investigate the incessant noise of a car horn. See E. M. Forster’s introduction to Forrest Reid, Tom Barber (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955), pp. 7-10. The most likely identification of this culprit is Stephen Gilbert’s daughter Kathleen, who had been left in her father’s car and had grown bored.

2 ‘Address by E. M. Forster’, Forrest Reid Memorial: Addresses Delivered at the Unveiling of the Plaque at 13 Ormiston Crescent and Afterwards at the Luncheon (Foxton: Burlington Press, 1952), pp. 3-6. See pp. 5-6.

3 E. M. Forster, ‘The Work of Forrest Reid’, Nation (10 April 1920).

4 This thin line between fiction and non-fiction in Reid’s oeuvre is made apparent by the plot similarities between his novel Demophon and Apostate. See Brian Taylor, The Green Avenue: The Life and Writings of Forrest Reid, 1875-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 111.

5 Forrest Reid, Apostate (London: Constable, 1926), p. 4.

6 E. M. Forster, ‘On a Novel That Stands Apart’, News Chronicle (6 November 1931).

7 Reid eventually withdrew the dedication to Hermes ‘because of the weakness that dreads ridicule’. Forrest Reid, Private Road (London: Faber and Faber, 1940), p. 235.

8 In Chapter X Stephen describes this building as ‘the lodge’, although he points out that it is ‘[n]ot really a lodge of course, but that was what it was called to distinguish it from the Manor House’.

9 Mrs. Frank Workman was the dedicatee of Reid’s novel Pender among the Residents (1922).

10 Private Road, op. cit., p. 235.

11 Ibid., pp. 235-236.

12 Ibid., p. 236.

13 The outline of the story was left among Reid’s papers at the time of his death. The full synopsis reads as follows: ‘Man comes after many years to old graveyard in Ballinderry. Sees small boy & talks with him. Come away together hand in hand. Pass out through gate & the child gets farther & farther away. It is himself as he was then though only gradually he realizes this.’ Forrest Reid, story notes, unpublished manuscript (Special Collections, Queen’s University Belfast, MS44/3/8).

14 Apostate, op. cit., p. 44.

15 Stephen Gilbert, ‘A Successful Man’, Threshold 28 (Spring 1977), pp. 104-114. See pp. 110-111.

16 One of the first to intuit Reid’s intention on an initial reading was the publisher Geoffrey Faber, who wrote to ask Reid whether Uncle Stephen was concerned with ‘the relationship between ideal & physical love’. Letter from Geoffrey Faber to Forrest Reid dated 30 October 1931 (Special Collections, Queen’s University Belfast, MS/44/1/42).

17 Colin Cruise argues that the name of Reid’s poacher was taken from J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Guy Deverell (1865). See Cruise’s introduction in Forrest Reid, Uncle Stephen (Leyburn: Tartatus Press, 2001), pp. v-xvii. For the reference to Guy Deverell see p. xiii. Cruise’s argument is doubtless correct, as Reid had borrowed a copy of the novel from Dr. J. S. Crone in May 1930 when Uncle Stephen was still in its early stages.

18 Colin Cruise, ‘Error and Eros: The Fiction of Forrest Reid as a Defence of Homosexuality’ in Éibhear Walshe (ed.), Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), pp. 60-86.

19 Apostate, op. cit., p. 203.

20 Marc-André Raffalovich (1864-1934) was a poet and prolific writer on the subject of homosexuality. He never met Reid in person, although their correspondence, dating from 1911-1931, is notable for its candour and intimacy.

21 Letter from Forrest Reid to André Raffalovich dated 20 May 1920 (Special Collections, University of British Columbia, RBSC-ARC-1129).

22 Stephen Gilbert, unpublished autobiography, undated typescript (Special Collections, Queen’s University Belfast, uncatalogued), 4 vols. See vol. III, p. 146.

23 Letter from Stephen Gilbert to Colin Cruise dated 5 June 1997. This letter is currently in a private collection.

24 Letter from Forrest Reid to André Raffalovich dated 6 May 1920 (Special Collections, University of British Columbia, RBSC-ARC-1129).

25 Gilbert, autobiography, op. cit., vol. III, p. 145.

26 Ibid., p. 147.

27 The phrase ‘innocency of mind’ is from Reid’s letter to Raffalovich dated 20 May 1920, op. cit.

28 The first draft of Maurice was finished in 1914, although