The Adelphi, founded in 1923 by J. Middleton Murry and others, was a monthly journal usually dominated by essays on economics, sociology and international affairs. Much of this makes dusty reading now, though it did publish George Orwell’s early journalism under his own name of Eric Blair. The earnest material was alleviated to some extent by short stories and poems, though even some of these are rather portentous. It is not, shall we say, the sort of place one would first look for fantasy or vivacity.
However, in the issue for October 1935, price sixpence, in pale yellow covers, there is a most curious item. Not ‘The Money Muddle – And A Note on Alberta’ by N.A, Holdaway, nor ‘Socialism, 1935’ by Murry himself, nor yet ‘As We See It’ by ‘Politicus’, sound, serious reading all, I am sure. There is also ‘The Ideas of Lord Torridon’ by ‘The Hon. Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr’, no doubt (we might think) a discussion of the political thought of an eminent Caledonian statesman.
The opening does not quite disabuse us of this notion. ‘Lord Torridon believed that the objectivity of abstract ideas is not a presumed but a real objectivity.’ Is that so? we murmur, wondering if there is any P G Wodehouse later on in the journal. There is a bit of engaging biography: Torridon was an eccentric, ‘impervious to ordinary social approach’, with ‘a fine but rather forbidding-looking old castle on the west coast of Scotland’ and a house in the extreme west of England. He also enjoyed visiting Paris. His simple needs were met by man and wife servants and an odd job lad. He once called his servant to help him look for an Idea he had lost.
It transpires Torridon is a devotee of the Platonic Ideas, or Images: ‘he believed firmly . . . that they lived in space as it were by themselves, but radiate to earth and us men types of themselves, which are the abstract ideas we encounte[r] in intellectual life.’ Torridon’s aim was to ‘establish a working connection with the ideas in the absolute’. He thinks this ‘might be done by means of the types’, and here he directed his ’speculative energies’, recorded in his unpublished manuscript ‘Adventures Among the Ideas’.
Evidently Torridon was an abstruse and original thinker. And this line of thought has a particular interest because, only a few years earlier, Charles Williams had also explored the Platonic Ideas in his novel The Place of the Lion (1931). Williams portrays the startling results when an esoteric mystic attempts to bring the Images of the Ideas literally down to earth. Torridon’s aim is quite different: he does not want to materialise the Ideas on the mortal plane, he wants to encounter them where they are, in their more ethereal domain. Might not this attempt also have untoward consequences? Torridon thought that the types of the Ideas on earth must ‘ever tend towards the absolute’ but that the attainment of such perfection ‘is also the occasion and the moment of disintegration’. Whether there was any direct link between Williams’ novel and this work I do not know, but it seems curious that two such fictions with similar ideas should appear around the same time.
Fictions both? Yes, because although Erskine’s apparent essay is presented as a memoir of an eccentric Scottish laird and philosopher, the piece is—probably—a work of fiction, an ingenious fantasy. For when I searched for more information about him, there was nothing else whatever to be found, either about him or his book. It is true Torridon is the name of a Scottish loch, mountain range, glen and village in the Highlands: that much is authentic. But there seems to be no record of any title associated with these.
Who then was the author of this unusual, rather peculiar work? Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr (1869-1960) was a keen Gaelic language campaigner and Scottish nationalist. He was originally named Stuart Erskine but adopted the Gaelic name later. As Stuart Erskine he had founded and edited, with the adventurer and bon viveur Herbert Vivian, the literary journal The Whirlwind, which had a pronounced devotion to the Jacobite cause: Erskine also ran a Jacobite society.
Arthur Machen contributed some of his earliest short fiction to The Whirlwind in December 1890, including ‘A Wonderful Woman’, ‘The Lost Club’, ‘An Underground Adventure’ and the first chapter of ‘The Great God Pan’ as a stand-alone story. John Gawsworth describes the journal as ‘a paper advocating Jacobite principles, run by two young gentleman who had managed to keep it alive since the previous summer’. Alas, they could not afford to pay: and even a legal action by Machen did not yield any money (The Life of Arthur Machen, 2005, pg 106).
This background raises the possibility of a Lord Torridon whose title is from the Jacobean tradition, not the conventional one, especially since some of these titles were clandestine. Perhaps a Lord Torridon really existed, was a friend of Erskine’s, and the use of the title in the piece was a private amusement between them, or a courteous acknowledgement of an ancient allegiance. Indeed, it would be rather splendid if this were so and the great thinker was also a secret cavalier. But I think that fiction is the likelier explanation.
It would not be Erskine’s only fiction. He was earlier, in 1901-10, the author of a series of decadent detective yarns written in Gaelic for his own Gaelic language journal, as discussed by Petra Johana Poncarová in her paper ‘Snake Women and Hideous Sensations: The Strange Case of Gaelic Detective Short Stories by Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar’ (Scottish Literary Review, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2020). I am afraid my Gaelic does not quite stretch to enjoying these picturesque tales.
Still, the Torridon piece is well worth having. I like its literary trickery and I also admire the way in which a most interesting concept, with some distinct affinity to the Williams novel, is presented to the reader in such a brief, singular work. It is a beguiling way to convey a quite rarified concept. If Williams had not got there first, it might have made an exciting occult thriller. And it is a mark of the skill of the piece that I still have lingering doubts: is it, after all, fiction? Perhaps in some remote, turreted, corbie-stepped Highland castle the manuscript of ‘Adventures Among the Ideas’ may yet be found.
(Mark Valentine)
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