The Crying of the Wind

The Crying of the Wind (1955), though purportedly a book about a journey around Ireland, is the experimental novel the surrealist artist and occult biographer Ithell Colquhoun never knew she had written; and its more self-aware successor, the 1957 account of her life in Cornwall’s Penwith peninsula, The Living Stones, may yet work a magical transformation on your relationship with any landscape around you.

Both books are now impossibly expensive in their legendarily scarce original editions, and both were many decades out of print until now. How I envy you if you are about to read either, or both, of Ithell Colquhoun’s gnostic travelogues for the first time, for soon you, too, will be post-Colquhoun, and everything will seem ever so slightly altered.

Born in British India in 1906, Colquhoun is best known as a surrealist painter and, latterly, as an occultist, eventually writing a difficult allegorical novel influenced by her interests, entitled Goose of Hermogenes, and a biography, Sword of Wisdom, of the would-be Hackney magus Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who was born a few minutes’ walk from the kitchen table where I first began writing this introduction.

If you’ve ever wandered the aisles of the Royal Cornwall Museum, the Southampton Art Gallery or the Victoria and Albert Museum, you’re probably aware of Colquhoun’s art without realizing it and would find her better-known paintings strangely familiar. I scour auction sites online, repeatedly missing the affordable ones by mere months.

I assume I must have picked up The Living Stones, and my first-edition copy of the book’s predecessor The Crying of the Wind, in now-long-gone bookshops somewhere in the 1990s, far from home, away doing stand-up comedy shows.

Their author-etched archaeological drawings and cryptically vague titles probably meant they looked to me, in my intuitive ignorance, as if they fitted the longstanding folk-mystic second- hand book bender I’m still on. They must have cost less than a fiver apiece, too, or I’d have passed on them in my youthful frugality. And then they probably sat unread, on shelves full of other good intentions, for years before I tackled them, unaware of the treasure within.

I know, however, that I had definitely read my ex-Torquay Public Library first edition of The Living Stones by the middle of 2007. Of this I am certain, because later that year we were on a sudden summer holiday with our five-month-old firstborn in a rented net loft in Mousehole, and the faerie voice of Ithell Colquhoun bustled at me from the hedgerows all week. My new wife became bored with me repeatedly quoting fact and opinion from The Living Stones, as it dawned on her what a tiresome man she was now shackled to.

Colquhoun had journeyed to her new home in the post-war wilderness of West Cornwall alone, charmed the suspicious natives, carved out her patch of ground, decoded the folk customs and sacred symbols around her and recorded her experiences. And in that Cornish Indian summer, for me, the stories within The Living Stones lived again.

The Mousehole house called the Lobster Pot, for example, that Colquhoun’s much admired ‘great beast’ Aleister Crowley had briefly occupied, was still there; and the branches of the trees that vaulted the once largely untravelled lane down to Lamorna Cove, alongside which Colquhoun had dwelt alone in her Spartan Vow Cave studio, were reshaped now by the daily battering of motor vehicles, whose increasingly detrimental effects she had noted in 1957 with prophetic environmental anxiety.

The mass-marketed metal images of a lucky Cornish pixie – based on a witch called Joan the Wad – which had amused Colquhoun had become ubiquitous, and we recognized the ongoing monetization of supposedly antique authenticity all around us in souvenir shops; and when I remembered how her Lamorna idyll was interrupted by newfangled radio noise, Colquhoun worrying that technological opportunities for ‘indis- criminate listening’ would render us incapable of appreciating anything, I wondered what she would make of the backpackers’ mobile phones that buzzed even within earshot of the sacred rocks of Mên-an-Tol, interrupting my intended reverie.

And when I told my wife of how Colquhoun, too, had been unconvinced by Tintagel’s gauche attempts to turn the gaseous King Arthur myth into solid financial reality, she smiled a little at least, as we stood, like our spirit guide half a century before us, admiring mock-historic portraiture in the ‘debased Victorian academic style’ beneath the opportunistic 1930s arches of the ersatz King Arthur’s Hall.

Meanwhile, all along the moors, standing in circles or pointing skywards, the living stones themselves lay largely intact half a century later, monuments to man’s eternal need, as exemplified by Colquhoun in all her endeavours, to make artistic, philosophical and magical sense of our environment. Colquhoun’s time-travelling survey of Cornwall’s culture and history brings ghosts and dead landscapes to life all around you, doing for the westernmost county what Arthur Machen did for London, what Alan Moore does for Northampton and what Frank Waters did for the American South-West.

And, like Machen lamenting the London of literary legend he arrived too late to live through, and Johnson and Boswell regretting the real Highlands that they missed by mere decades, Colquhoun senses the land she loves is fading.

‘It seemed that my way home was marked out by ancient stones,’ she writes, as she approaches the book’s final chapter. And there we meet Albert Mellor, a pedlar who never learned to read or write, a soon-to-disappear denizen of Lamorna’s ‘vanishing seclusion’. For the woodland thins, ‘Marauders have come with saws’, laments Colquhoun, ‘and raided the land for firewood.’

Though a superficially similar catalogue of traveller’s tales and historical and geographical observations, The Crying of the Wind is a very different book to its successor, The Living Stones. Where The Living Stones begins with an explicit treatise, Colquhoun aquaplaning through snake worship, Atlantean myth and saints’ feast-days to declaim a unified theory of human apprehension of the landscape, The Crying of the Wind begins poetically with a description of a ruined Irish manor and its decrepit owners that we are left to respond to as we see fit and which sets the tone for the stark contrasts between the two works.

The Living Stones is weighty with detail and qualification, but the earlier The Crying of the Wind shrugs off its characteristic absence of hard fact. ‘I am glad I am not to be an archaeologist,’ Colquhoun writes at the opening of the chapter called ‘Tara of the Kings’, ‘for my lack of status allows me simply to enjoy myself among antiquities. I can interpret them according to my own morphological intuitions without reference to current ortho- doxies or deference to any school of thought – even without strict regard to evidence.’

(It’s worth noting that, despite Colquhoun absolving her-self of the responsibility to interpret detail scientifically, her 1954 stabs at the purpose and function of ancient sites in the Boyne Valley and the Loughcrew Hills, on the slopes of which I proposed to my wife in 2006, were more or less in line with subsequent archaeological opinion.)

While The Crying of the Wind responds to Irish history and landscape intuitively, The Living Stones is more analytical. And while the Cornish Ithell Colquhoun of The Living Stones seems gay and content, her Irish counterpart of three years earlier is fearful of tombs, darkly affected by decaying homesteads and the sufferings of wayfaring tinker children and occasionally vicious towards sections of society she dislikes.

In the chapter entitled ‘Roundstone’ Colquhoun describes, when drawing outside, how lashings of rain ‘spattered on the lines of ink, producing lovely effects that I did not intend’. Where The Living Stones is controlled, The Crying of the Wind is unmediated, working the elemental and the unpredictable into the writing process.

And while the author of The Living Stones is documenting a landscape in which she is happy and where she intends to stay, the Colquhoun of The Crying of the Wind seems haunted and restless. And, though I didn’t notice it the first time I read the book, upon rereading the chapter ‘Night Life’ it seems that Colquhoun finds a brief sojourn with bohemian Dublin friends quietly questionable.

During an evening at the famous Gate Theatre she decides that the sainted Oscar Wilde merely ‘made the cult of insincerity socially acceptable’, before drinking too deeply and too late in the family home of theatrical friends, who stain their absent parents’ carpets with red wine and accidentally set fire to the lid of their piano.

In neither of the travel books does Colquhoun offer any obvious clues to her personal history. The character of the narrator of The Crying of the Wind arrives from nowhere, without context, experiencing her surroundings in the moment. One paragraph in the chapter ‘East to West’ leapt out at me as I read the book again, now older and more emotionally vulnerable than when I first enjoyed it as an impregnable younger man.