Writers

Forrest Reid

Apostate (1926) North-west Ulster and Belfast

'I had arrived at the Greek view of nature. In wood and river and plant and animal and bird and insect it had seemed to me there was a spirit which was the same as my spirit [. . . ] Had I not, even in this land once blessed by St. Patrick, caught a glimpse of that ill-mannered boy who, mocking the great Demeter while she drank, was straightway transformed into a lizard? The landscape was the landscape I loved best, a landscape proclaiming the vicinity of man, a landscape imbued with a human spirit that was yet somehow divine.'

TIMELINE

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Born in Belfast on Midsummer’s Day 1875, Forrest Reid was the youngest of twelve children, of whom six survived. His father Robert, was a middle-class Presbyterian shipping merchant, and Reid was the last child of his second wife, an English woman from aristocratic stock. His father died when he was five, and Reid formed a strong attachment with his nurse Emma Homes. He attended Hardy’s Prepatory School in 1887, Belfast Academy in 1888 and later after serving as an apprentice in a tea company, entered Cambridge in 1905.  Though finding Cambridge a ‘rather blank interlude,’ he met the novelist E. M. Foster whom encouraged his literary ambitions and later noted that Reid’s writing had the ability to ‘make all the surrounding landscape intelligible’ (1) As an adolescent, one of Reid’s past times at school had been to write prose fiction:

'It was all, in truth, less like writing than a form of day dreaming, in which I rebuilt the world after my own fashion -rebuilt it so I could find a place there' (2).

Completing his studies at Cambridge, Reid returned to his native  ‘awful, rainy and smoky Presbyterian city’ (3) of Belfast, where he wrote virtually all of his phantasmagorical style of fiction. Situating himself in a provincial city of  the British empire,  he ‘sat very lightly to the Irish Literary Revival’ (4) Reid’s rural landscapes of Ulster reside within a topography transposed with  fantastical and neo-pagan images that emerged from his imagination, and his study of classical texts.  Although Reid’s  work was dismissed at times as escapist fiction coloured by a fantasy world of  ‘beautiful boys in beautiful landscapes,’ his narratives were solidly grounded in the soil of  his native Ulster. These idealisations were perhaps Reid’s reaction to the sectarianism of Belfast and its resultant social malaise.  He utterly rejected the shroud of Christianity, which had been rent asunder in the province,  and  instead his novels reflected an  ‘element of pagan symbolism . . . the idea of a ghost or revenant, some shade of a lost culture or a guilt appearing out of the past [that] is often found in Irish literature. [Reid] was a genuine pagan. He stayed [in Belfast] as if in hiding . . . it was odd to find a mystic, deep in  [William] Blake and Yeats among the linen mills’ (5)   In 1931, Denis Ireland remarked: ‘the cultured Protestant Ulsterman with a literary bent either goes to London and submerges himself in the stream of English literary life, losing all real contact with his native soil – or he stays in Ireland and becomes a Nationalist. There seems to be no half way house.’ Reid’s interests were not polemical. He opted for a life of the mind and literature, instead of joining his brothers in the family Linen and Tea business. Reid lived a quiet and cloistered life in a council house at 12 Ormiston Crescent in Belfast, until his death in 1947. 

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Place is represented in Forrest Reid’s fiction as a palimpsest of history, memory and fantasy. His novels though conceptualised in the bourgeois environs of leafy south Belfast, transposed fantasist, quasi-mystical and  neo-classical visions upon the graveyards, ruins and manors of County Down and the rocky cliff-shores of County Donegal. Upon these landscapes he imprinted his mystical leitmotif  of  ‘ghostly houses -and ghostly small boys.’ (1) The second section of  his  novel The Retreat (1936)  is set near  Glenagivney Bay on the north-eastern tip of the Inishowen peninsula in County Donegal. The narrative concerns a young Protestant boy named Tom whose luminous experiences of the cliffscapes and shorelines in the Gaelic fringe of Ulster blur the distinctions between the quotidian and the mystical.  One summer morning  Tom,  sets out on a solitary excursion into hills of the peninsula, where in Reid’s story  he encounters an angel-boy named Gamelyn and the grey ruins of a fourteenth century citadel: ‘The castle had been built in 1313, Daddy said, and little remained of it now except the lower walls, and here and there the fragments of a spiral staircase.’ (2)  Placing Tom amidst the ruins on the promontory of a cliff face, Reid depicts the psychological element of landscape construction and the role that history and memory play in an individual’s subsequent perception of place:

Reid’s narrative soon juxtaposes Tom’s imaginative dreamscapes with myths and representations drawn from the Donegal cliffscapes. His more rationally minded friend Pascoe joins him on holidays and following a discussion on religion and spurred on by the opportunity to earn a six-pence a chapter, decide to read through the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelations.  As a result, Pascoe ‘by means of logic and pure mathematics [. . . ] actually deduced, not the area indeed, but the exact shape of Eden.’(4) Tom’s biblical reading produces a different effect. Asleep in bed, the angel Gamelyn arrives and takes him to the ramparts of the Fort, above the ruins of the castle, and then to the Garden of Eden. He encounters a talking menagerie of animals named by Adam, and under the Tree of Knowledge, has a discussion with a serpent who hypnotizes him with the secret that ‘Time is an illusion.’(5) Some weeks later, a few days before the end of their holidays and the return to Belfast, Tom and Pascoe are in a boat on Glenagivney Bay, with a local old man named Danny McCoy who: ‘lived alone in a thatched cottage at the end of the village, and the country people said he was odd because he had been “away” when a boy. This meant [. . .] that he had been taken away by the fairies.’(6)  As he rows the boys across the bay:

The shore glided slowly past: the Manor House glided past; the Fort was gliding past, when Danny rested his oars and gazed at it [. . . ] ‘Strange things do be on the sea at night,’ Danny pronounced slowly, ‘and strange things on the land. I’ve seen a light rising out of the sea like a thousand holy burning candles, and I’ve climbed the hill to Glenagivney and seen a glory of saints and angels in the sky.(7)

Reid’s rural landscapes of Ulster reside within a topography transposed with  fantastical and neo-pagan images that emerged from his imagination, and his study of classical texts.  During his adolescence, at the time of his confirmation, he rejected Christianity, stating: ‘temperamentally I was antagonistic to this religion, to its doctrines, its theory of life, the shadow it cast across the earth.’(8) His literary interests at the time had drawn him to the dialogues of Plato, Mackail’s Selected Epigrams of the Palatine Poets, Sappho, Theocritus,  and Giorgione’s Fete Champetre, and he recalled: ‘I had no learning; this paganism was a subjective thing, bearing no closer relation to reality than my imagined Greece, which was merely a glorified reflection of my own countryside.’(9)

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