The human world of a novelist is, in varying degree, of necessity linked with the author's own experiences. Scarcely any books exist which do not contain pen-portraits inspired by the writer's circle of friends. In Lindsay's case, this circle was a very limited one. At the time of his death in 1945, very few could claim to have known him at all well. He lived on the fringe of a society that he had rejected. He had not made any effort to make friends. He never sought social, or personal, relationships, preferring to withdraw himself within a life of solitude which, it seemed to him, offered a protection against the deceits and platitudes of social contacts. Both by nature and as a matter of principle, Lindsay showed himself distrustful of this human world, whose image, throughout his writing, is presented as particularly negative. His attitude was critical, justifying solitude, and, on the philosophical level, was a denunciation of all association of individuals, which he regarded as being an attack upon the Sublime. The attraction of the hereafter, the moral strictness, the creation of characters in many respects out of the ordinary, all explain why there will be no shortage of readers likely to find his books inhuman.

HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

The theatre

Lindsay's first book begins with an account of a spiritualistic séance. Some dozen people meet in the living-room of a wealthy London merchant.