Alwyn the novelist is unknown to the world beyond Alwyn, Mary (who typed the manuscript), the agent entrusted with its future, and the publishers that declined it. All Things Corruptible remains that most unkind of works, the unpublished fiction. Alwyn told Brian Murphy, ‘I have written a novel, which my literary agent read with enthusiasm and said he wouldn’t have the slightest difficulty in placing with a publisher. Alas! It remains shamefacedly in MS and I haven’t had the heart to re-read it.’ Its fate seems sealed; taking up the book thirty years after it was written its commercial possibilities do not jump from the page, but its value lies elsewhere. Slow to take fire, dense with descriptive passages of a moribund landscape, this is a book that gradually reveals much of Alwyn, the man he saw himself as and the man he wanted to be. In its way, this draws closer to truth than his intended autobiography-proper Winged Chariot. Headed by a quotation from Goethe’s Faust – ‘All things corruptible / Are but a parable; / Earth’s insufficiency / Here lies fulfilment’ – All Things Corruptible is in part an indulgence, celebrating the author’s past, his parentage, his passion for music, his adoration of the female body, and his obsession with the idea of that body assuming its perfect, water-fetched form, Undine. In the poem of that name, published in Mirages in 1971, the same vision that perhaps underpins his novel is plainly seen: ‘She comes to me / at night / when the rain drums on my window / and the wind whimpers in the eaves / and the candle flickers / and the wick gutters / and shadows mope in my room / and I am alone / Suddenly / she is there at the window / naked in the rain / pale in the veil of the rain / her face the tears of the raindrops / her breasts water-lily cups / with stamens of crimson / her hair spungold / streaming on her shoulders / in a torrent of fire / and her eyes are the eyes of wonder / of desire matching desire.’