The Retreat

By Forrest Reid

The Retreat opens with a vivid dream about an evil sorcerer and his boy apprentice. The dreamer is Tom Barber, age 13, who, like many intelligent and sensitive children, moves between the world of everyday life and that of the imagination. “I pretend things, and all at once they become real,” Tom says, and they become real for the reader as well, as we follow him over the course of one summer during which the lines between reality and fantasy are frequently blurred. In his depiction of Tom’s fantastic adventures in an unseen world – his attempts to thwart the malign influence of the cat Henry, whom he has observed scratching cabbalistic symbols on the gravel path; his meetings with the beautiful boy-angel Gamelyn; his conversations with animals; his experiences in the Garden of Eden – Forrest Reid’s delicate artistry is at its finest and most delightful. 

The second of Reid’s three novels featuring Tom Barber, The Retreat earned universal critical acclaim when first published in 1936. This edition includes a new introduction by Andrew Doyle and numerous never-before-published photographs and illustrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781941147511

Book preview

THE RETREAT

or

The Machinations of Henry

FORREST REID

There’s tempest in the sky.

– The Three Little Kittens

With a new introduction by

ANDREW DOYLE

VALANCOURT BOOKS

The Retreat by Forrest Reid

First published London: Faber & Faber, 1936

First Valancourt Books edition 2015

Publisher’s Note: The present edition is reprinted from the copy of the 1936 first edition owned by Forrest Reid and incorporates his handwritten corrections pencilled in the margins of that copy.

Copyright © 1936, 2015 by the Estate of Forrest Reid

Introduction © 2015 by Andrew Doyle

Previously unpublished materials are copyright © 2015 by the Estate of Forrest Reid and are reprinted here with the permission of Queen’s University Belfast.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

The Retreat begins in a dream. It is after midnight; an old man stands by the window, calling his cat’s name. His young apprentice stirs. He has been sleeping on a stool in the corner of the room, and now he watches his master with a mixture of curiosity and fear. The old man is a magician, or possibly an alchemist. He has the gift of pyrokinesis, and as he intones a few inaudible words a fire ignites in the hearth. We understand that the boy is here under duress. Privately, he hopes that the cat has escaped.

There are two dreamers here. The first is Tom Barber, the hero of Forrest Reid’s novel Uncle Stephen (1931), now two years younger and on the cusp of adolescence. The second is Reid himself, for the opening of The Retreat is the exact tran­scription of a dream that prompted him to write the book in the first place.1 In Reid’s first autobiography Apostate (1926), he discusses at length his conviction that as a child he occupied two distinct spheres of existence.2 His dreamland was no more or less real to him than his waking life. Tom shares this quality; he carries his dreamland into his everyday experiences, and for this reason The Retreat is punctuated with ostensibly magical epi­sodes. That is to say, the oneiric atmosphere established in the open­ing sequence lingers throughout the novel, infusing Tom’s story with a broad sense of unreality.

Our instincts urge us to identify these dream figures, but Reid affords us no such narrative security. The magician’s apprentice resembles Tom and is roughly the same age, though he has been brought up in the Catholic faith whereas Tom comes from a Presbyterian family. In a later vision of the magician’s house we are told that the apprentice is Tom and yet not Tom. His identity is fluid; Tom is both participant and observer. As for the magician, one would be forgiven for supposing that he is a foreshadowing of Uncle Stephen, a man Tom has yet to meet. Certainly there are physical similarities, but the druidic paraphernalia does not dovetail comfortably with what we know of Stephen’s Hellenistic creed. Moreover, in Reid’s earlier novel Stephen is associated with intellectual enlightenment and the supremacy of sacred over profane love. This magician, on the other hand, is linked with the forces of evil. He recurs through­out The Retreat in various oblique forms. He can be glimpsed in the ominous paper man that Tom makes in the loft, or in the entity with two white eyes of fire who materializes in Miss Jimpson’s geometry class. He is the embodiment of the darker side of Tom’s psyche. More specifically, he is a portent of the in­comprehensible landscape of adulthood, and the imminent threat it represents to Tom’s innocence.

Most of The Retreat takes place in the fictional district of Ballysheen in South Belfast, where Tom lives with his parents. He is a sensitive and introspective child with a love of nature and animal life. The exception is Henry, the Barbers’ pet cat, for whom Tom feels a profound mistrust. He considers Henry to be an essentially malevolent being, bursting with plots and secrets: a sleek black green-eyed phantom who plays tricks with the household, destroying the furniture and casting magic spells. He is in some way connected to the magician of Tom’s dream, perhaps even a kind of familiar.

Tom’s closest friend at school is Pascoe, a practical and sci­entific boy with whom he has little in common other than a mutual fondness for racing caterpillars. They spend a holiday together in Greencastle, Donegal; the Barber family stays at the Fort Hotel, Pascoe with his Aunt Rhoda at the nearby Manor House. During their time in Greencastle the boys enjoy a number of small adventures: they explore the coast, go lobster hunt­ing, meet a stray dog (christened Chrysanthemum due to Pascoe’s hobby of pressing flowers), and light a bonfire in Aunt Rhoda’s back garden that eventually blazes out of control. Such typical schoolboy fare is offset dramatically by the visitations of an angel called Gamelyn who eventually transports Tom to the Garden of Eden. Here he encounters the serpent of Genesis and steals apples from the Tree of Knowledge.

After the holiday the Barber family return to Ballysheen. Tom takes a walk to a local graveyard where he encounters Henry with a number of other cats, each one perched upon a tomb­stone. Faced with such a peculiar spectacle, Tom senses that he has strayed inadvertently into an unknown and fantastic world – a world not human, but feline and necromantic. Disorien­­tated, Tom runs from the graveyard only to get lost in the woods, and eventually finds himself at the door of the magi­cian’s house. The narrative appears to have come full circle.

The plot of The Retreat is slight: deliberately so, for Reid is less concerned with storytelling than he is with conveying the psy­chology of his lead character. Reid understands that chil­dren live in a realm between the real and the unreal, that their ima­ginary adventures and imaginary roles are as formative as any authentic experience. His purpose is to recapture this vision­ary quality of childhood. Whether the novel succeeds or fails, therefore, depends upon the extent to which the reader accepts this concurrence of the fantastical and the mundane. As John Boyd notes, the Tom Barber trilogy is essentially poetic in con­ception: he wishes to communicate the child’s experience of beauty in all its freshness; he wishes to present life as seen through the eye of innocence.3

The forces of good and evil vie for prominence throughout The Retreat. The magician’s antithesis is the angel Gamelyn, and Henry’s is the dog Chrysanthemum, who reappears in the Garden of Eden, and later as the woolly sheepdog who helps Tom to defeat the crouching beast at the magician’s house towards the end of the novel. This final battle is the reification of Tom’s internal struggles, although what lies at the heart of these strug­gles is left unspecified. In itself it was nothing, says Game­lyn of the vanquished beast, only the image of your fear, which you brought to life. In this estimation, the beast is another ima­ginative construct, like Gamelyn himself. "I am you, the angel tells Tom, the beast that is gone was you; do not think about it, but go to sleep". Just as reverie and reality overlap, so too the forces of darkness and light.

The interpretative possibilities are myriad, but given Reid’s Puritanism it is probable that Tom’s baleful visions sym­bolize the onset of puberty and the sexual instinct. In a letter to Walter de la Mare, Reid explains that the sense of an approaching hor­ror in the opening dream sequence is connected to cer­tain things in my life which would be weighed against me.4 This is most likely a guarded reference to Reid’s homosexuality, an orien­tation that Tom evidently shares. The idea is illustrated symbol­ically in Tom’s journey to the Garden of Eden in Chapter XV, in which the serpent – the incarnation of bourgeoning sex­uality – is seen to dispel the influence of the albatross, who takes the role of the stifling mother figure, quite literally taking Tom under her wing. Tom’s scrumping from the Tree of Knowl­edge – an image falling somewhere between whimsy and sacrilege – is not, as in the case of Eve, the consequence of the serpent’s temptations. Tom behaves like a teenage boy, and so his Fall is perhaps even more inevitable than that of the progen­itors of humankind. If there are any apples on that tree, he says, I’m going to have one.

Having partaken of the forbidden fruit, Tom is able to under­stand the language of Eden’s animal inhabitants. He meets a variation on Chrysanthemum – in this world he is the first-ever dog who, conveniently enough, goes by the name of Dog – and is joined soon after by the albatross and the serpent. The latter is an alluring and tactile figure who at first mistakes Tom for the now departed Adam. Don’t let him fascinate you, warns the albatross, but her words are redundant. Tom does not warm to the albatross, but allows the serpent to coil around him, twining about his naked body like a climbing plant, bringing to mind William Blake’s tempera of Adam Naming the Beasts. Tom is intoxicated by the serpent’s sensuality, and as he utters Tom’s name it is in a low breathing sound that was half a love word.5

The connotations here are unsurprising. Reid disapproved of all forms of sexuality. He believed that his own innocence had been tainted by his early forays into carnal love. It is for this reason that the serpent is portrayed as both captivating and de­structive. It is the serpent’s embrace that draws Tom into another vision of the magician who, as we have seen, represents the perils of oncoming adulthood. The point is empha­sized in the cover artwork for the first edition by C. Walter Hodges in which the magician’s house is the most prominent feature.6 We see Tom and Henry approaching a door bearing a pentagram, a traditional symbol of neopaganism. However, in Hodges’s orig­inal draft the connection between the magician and the serpent is made far more explicit.7 This earlier design is unambiguously rooted in the dream world; in this version Tom is wearing his pyjamas, and the magician’s house has become curiously frag­mented, forming a wall to the Garden of Eden beyond. The Tree of Knowledge is clearly visible above the doorway, coaxing the boy to enter and taste its ripe fruit. It is an invitation to trans­gression. This original design, then, emblematizes that which is most fundamental to The Retreat: the condition of innocence and the inevitability of its corruption.

It is this concept that accounts for the novel’s title, an allusion to Henry Vaughan’s poem of the same name, the first fourteen lines of which are cited as an epigraph.8 It is a poem that harks back to the days of angel-infancy, before the inevitable taint of iniquity that comes with the transition from innocence to ex­perience: Before I taught my tongue to wound / My conscience with a sinful sound, / Or had the black art to dispense / A several sin to every sense. Reid’s selective quotation means that Vaughan’s theological premise is mitigated: namely the principle that each soul exists in a prenatal state of grace to which it will return when this dust falls to the urn. Reid also deviates from tradition in not capitalizing the personal pronoun in the phrase his bright face. In Vaughan’s poem this is a reference to God, but Reid’s first Love is the imaginary playmate of his youth. He made the same changes when transcribing the poem for his friend James Rutherford in 1905.9 For Reid, Vaughan’s poem is not a declaration of Christian faith, but a paean to the purity of youth and a sanctified form of same-sex love.

The origin of Reid’s imaginary playmate is a recurring dream of a garden by the sea that he experienced throughout his child­hood:

I was waiting for someone who had never failed me – my friend in this place, who was infinitely dearer to me than any friend I had on earth. And presently, out from the leafy shadow he bounded into the sunlight. I saw him standing for a moment, his naked body the colour of pale amber against the dark background – a boy of about my own age, with eager parted lips and bright eyes. But he was more beautiful than anything else in the whole world, or in my imagination.10

This boy recurs as a prominent leitmotif throughout Reid’s corpus. Willie Trevelyan in The Kingdom of Twilight (1904) is most con­tent in solitude with a book, or with some figure of his dreams – the dream of dreams, the dream of a perfect love.11 Peter Waring in Following Darkness (1912) mentions an imagi­nary playmate and indulges in private fantasies that he might find a magic door leading into a strange world that was yet quite close at hand.12 Richard Seawright in At the Door of the Gate (1915) has similar yearnings: What I used to pray for was to have a friend of my own, and sometimes I dreamed that I had one, a friend I could talk to as I am talking now to you – in dream­land – now and then – a dream only. . . .13 The figure also appears in the quest narrative of Demophon (1927) in which the titular char­acter seeks his lost playmate, Hermes.14 In The Retreat, it is the angel Gamelyn who fulfils this role.

It is feasible, therefore, to see Reid’s novels as exercises in imaginative autobiography. Peter Burra opens his review of The Retreat by acknowledging this aspect of his writing:

Connoisseurs of Mr. Forrest Reid’s novels will know that one of the incidental pleasures which they provide is a game of de­tection – detection of the author’s own personality in his books. The game is, in Mr. Reid’s case, organized by the writer himself; for in Apostate, an autobiographical study of his childhood, published ten years ago, he provided abun­dant evi­dence and clues for deriving the material of his fic­tions from his own career and character.15

The trend continues in Reid’s second autobiography Private Road (1940), in which he claims that much of The Retreat is drawn from real life.16 For instance, Tom’s encounter with the cats in the graveyard in Part Three is based on a similar event which took place whilst Reid was staying at E. M. Forster’s flat in Bruns­wick Square, London.17 Like Tom, Reid had also sung the Spirto Gentil from Donizetti’s La Favorita as a child; although, growing up in the pre-gramophone era, he had not heard the Enrico Caruso recording upon which Tom bases his rendition. The account of the bonfire in the garden of the Manor House actually took place in Belfast, the result of Reid’s childish antics with a local boy, Desmond Montgomery.18 In addition, both Pascoe and Brown are studies of two of Reid’s schoolmates, and Pascoe’s father’s shop is identified as the premises of Alex For­rester, a wine merchant based at 7 Arthur Street, Belfast.19

The influence of Reid’s protégé, the novelist Stephen Gil­bert, is also apparent in The Retreat. The Barbers’ house in Bally­sheen, for example, is modelled on Tildarg, the property in Ken­sington Park where Gilbert lived with his family until his father’s death in 1935. The staunchly unionist gardener William is based on John McDougal, who worked for the Gilberts until they relocated. Tom’s father bears a resemblance to William Gilbert, Stephen’s father.20 Henry has his origin in the Gilbert family cat, Jacob.21 The novel’s second epigraph, taken from The Three Little Kittens, is an indirect acknowledgement of Gilbert, as it was he who first introduced Reid to the poem.22 Reid was so enchanted that he later wrote a French translation and sent it to his protégé as a gift.23

Throughout the nineteen-thirties Gilbert would accompany Reid on his holidays, an annual routine that only came to an end when Gilbert enlisted in the British Army Reserve in September 1939. Their favourite destination was the Fort Hotel in Green­castle, and the events in Part Two of The Retreat, therefore, carry especial autobiographical weight. Anyone who has ever visited Greencastle can testify to the accuracy of Reid’s depiction of the Fort Hotel and its environs. For those unfamiliar with the area, there are the series of postcards that Reid sent to his friend J. N. Hart on 30 June 1937, collectively entitled Illustrations to The Retreat. Reproduced here for the first time (see Appendix), they show Reid’s penchant for imaginative adaptation of real locations. It was for this reason that Gilbert, who disliked Uncle Stephen intensely, was more appreciative of The Retreat. I found it good fun he wrote to Colin Cruise in 1997, and indeed was involved in some of the incidents.24 It was he who originally chewed the wine-gums and raced the caterpillars, according to Reid’s inscription in a copy of The Retreat presented to Gilbert on 5 March 1936.25 It is also likely that he was present at the ap­pearance of Chrysanthemum, described by Reid as the most prehistoric dog I have ever beheld, with a fringe over his eyes, and a coat so densely matted that small birds might have been tempted to build their nests therein.26

The Fort Hotel is known for its distinctive Martello tower situated at the west side. This is the oldest part of the building, one of ten forts erected in 1801 around Lough Foyle and Lough Swilly to defend against Napoleon’s forces. The circular struc­ture of the tower enables heavy artillery to be installed at the top so that it can be fired in any direction. There are two floors within which include space for living quarters (readers will re­call that Stephen Dedalus shares this kind of accommodation with Buck Mulligan in James Joyce’s Ulysses). After the Battle of Trafalgar the tower at Greencastle was expanded into a mili­tary base for soldiers, work that was completed in 1812; the date etched onto the keystone of an archway is still visible. Its val­uable strategic location, with a glorious uninterrupted view over Lough Foyle to the Magilligan peninsula in County Derry, also of course accounted for the Fort’s popularity when it was even­tually converted into a hotel. It was from Magilligan Point that Reid and Gilbert would take the ferry to Greencastle every year. Directly opposite the Fort ramparts are the old ruins (see post­cards II and IV) where Danny McCoy sees Tom and the angel. Further down the coastline to the east is the Manor House (see postcard III), the home of Pascoe’s Aunt Rhoda where Tom starts the bonfire. To visit Greencastle is to step into Reid’s fic­tional domain.

Yet the ravages of time are inescapable. The lough and the surrounding countryside remain unaltered, but the view from the Manor House (see postcard III in appendix) is now marred by new property developments directly below the Fort Hotel. As for the hotel itself, it has been derelict for many years. Van­dals have left their mark in the form of graffiti and broken fur­niture. The restaurant that once overlooked the croquet lawn through the bay windows is now strewn with debris and broken glass. Tom’s bedroom by the Martello tower (marked with a cross by Reid on postcard I) is still accessible, but since a serious fire at the hotel in 2013 the structure is unstable and dangerous. Thanks to details provided in Stephen Gilbert’s unpublished autobiography, we know that this is also the room in which Reid would stay every year, with Gilbert next door.27 Through Reid’s bedroom window the lough and the ramparts are clearly visible, and it is easy to see why he could be so inspired by this location. The landscape has an undeniable potency, a timeless­ness that would appeal to Reid’s instinctive pantheism.

That Reid should relive his own experiences through his fic­tional hero is entirely in keeping with his character. As Angela Thirlwell has pointed out, even in middle-age, Reid still con­vinces us that he can think and feel as a child.28 Perhaps we can put this down to Reid’s self-diagnosed mysterious form of arrested development.29 Through his range of adolescent male characters Reid is effectively attempting to resurrect his lost youth, one that he mourned at the very moment of its pass­ing. After leaving school in 1891 Reid had felt a profound de­pression. Convinced that suicide was a preferable option to embarking into adulthood, he took an overdose of laudanum. The thought that I was growing older tormented me, he writes in Apostate. I wanted to be a boy always; I would have given gladly the remainder of my existence to have had the past five years over again.30

All of which explains how Reid is able to evoke the mindset of childhood without having recourse to the kind of glutinous sentimentality one usually associates with the genre. The Retreat is not overwrought with a sense of nostalgia because its author has retained a child-like perception of reality. Tom is Reid, and this connection is made all the more potent by the semi-autobiographical construction of the novel. If it is some­times un­clear where Tom’s imagination ends and the real world begins, it is only because Reid himself did not accept the dis­tinction. As he writes in Apostate:

There were two worlds, and it never occurred to me to ask myself whether one were less real than the other. It did not seem to me that either was unreal, that either was my own creation. I lived in both, and the fact that I should open my eyes night after night in precisely the same spot in dreamland was no more surprising than that I should open them morn­ing after morning in my bedroom at home.31

When Tom considers the possibility that some day an instru­ment would be invented for recording people’s dreams, it is tempt­ing to think of Reid’s novels as serving precisely that purpose. Almost seven decades after Reid’s death, his work sur­vives as a testimony to his unique artistry and his vision of a perfect love in a garden by the sea. In the pages of The Retreat a reader may trespass in his dreamscape.

Andrew Doyle

November 26, 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.

1 Forrest Reid, Private Road (London: Faber & Faber, 1940), p. 239.

2 Forrest Reid, Apostate (London: Constable, 1926), p. 72.

3 John Boyd, A Critical Study of the Writings of Forrest Reid (Trinity College Dublin, B. Litt thesis, 1945), p. 92.

4 Letter from Forrest Reid to Walter de la Mare dated 23 August 1935 (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Walter de la Mare collection, box B108).

5 This vivid scene invites comparison with Reid’s account of his early attitudes to his parents’ faith. I hated Sunday, he re­calls. I hated church, I hated Sunday School, I hated Bible stories, I hated everybody mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments, ex­cept perhaps the impenitent thief, Eve’s snake, and a few similar characters. Apostate, op. cit., p. 19.

6 According to Reid, Rex Whistler had originally been secured to design the cover art. It is unclear as to when Hodges took over the commission. See letter from Forrest Reid to J. N. Hart dated 19 December 1935 (Libraries NI).

7 I discovered this early draft of the design inside a copy of The Retreat once belonging to Stephen Gilbert. It was slipped under­neath the jacket so was not immediately obvious. This copy is in the possession of Tom Gilbert.

8 One surmises that the name of the Barbers’ pet cat is a further allu­sion to Henry Vaughan, although it may be a gesture towards Walter de la Mare, whose novel Memoirs of a Midget (1921) features