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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 5, Winter 1944-1945
Page 96
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96 FANTASY COMMENTATOR thwarted the lovers; not until they have learned that lesson will it be possible for them to be together in time. But my readers will grow restless. Those who wish may look up for themselves Nevil Shute's An Old Captivity in which a modern aviator flies over the route he covered with Leif Ericson a thousand years ago and finds the rune stone which he and his beloved had placed on the coast of America. They may look up Elizabeth Goudge's Middle Window where the modern woman returns to the scene of a previous life and meets again the man who was her husband in the time of the Young Pretender. At that time she had unwittingly caused his death, and the horror of that memory must be exorcised in the present life. Most of Elizabeth Goudge's novels hint at the idea of previous lives. Joan Grant's Life as Carola and The Winged Pharaoh are, of course, novels of reincarnation, but they show no shift in time and therefore do not belong here. All of these novels shift backwards in time, but there is one novelist who prefers to make her characters move forward, and has apparently drawn some of her inspiration from the idea expressed by Ouspensky that the sixth dimension is the line of actualization of the possibilities which are contained in the preceding moment which were not actualized. This is what March Cost has attempted to work out in two of her novels. Her first novel, A Man Named Luke, fired a heavy broadside---clairvoyance, reincarnation, and some moving about in time. With The Dark Glass, a novel which bears rereading, she controls her story more skillfully. Miss Cost's third novel, The Dark Star, takes up in fuller detail the lives of two of her favorites of The Dark Glass. Reincarnation is introduced with restraint in the three March Cost novels; the clairvoyant journeying forward in time is the dominant motif. It is wrenching a point to include Nathan's Portrait of Jennie in a discussion of English novels, but its treatment of time makes it a fourth-dimensional novel, and apparently I shall have to wait a long time before I shall collect enough American novels of the genre. The legend here is deceptively simple, but the handling of time is, in my opinion, more subtle than that found in any of the novels I have mentioned. This is not, as one reviewer put it, a story in which people grow up at different rates of speed, nor is it merely a daydream. The fact that Jennie's dress---fashionable some years back and reminiscent of portraits by George Bellows and others---is carefully described shows that she grew up at a perfectly normal rate, but that in some way she has managed to cross over time and space to meet her lover. Although this would seem to be an application of the concept found in Ouspensky that the life of man can occur in one place in time and simultaneously at another place in time, I believe that the genesis of Jennie is to be found in J. W. Dunne's little book, An Experiment with Time. Now, many of the writers I have discussed refer to Dunne's book, which is concerned primarily with the problem of dreams in which the dreamer's mind seems to range forward into the future, and with what Dunne calls the "serial universe." Dunne suggests that in the fourth-dimensional time-space, the future co-exists with the present and past (as we have seen in many of the novels I have outlined). But most significantly, he quotes from H. G. Wells' Time Machine: "For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, three-dimensional representations of his fourth-dimensional being which is a fixed and unalterable thing." And again, says Dunne, "If the field of an observer A lagged behind that of an observer B, and A were to intervene in B's substratum which were level with A, then B would find its experience in his field miraculously altered." In these quotations, I believe, we have the clue to Jennie. Living in her own present, she has at intervals moved into her own future (perhaps in dreams) crossing into the artist's life in his present. (Eddington's hourglass
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96 FANTASY COMMENTATOR thwarted the lovers; not until they have learned that lesson will it be possible for them to be together in time. But my readers will grow restless. Those who wish may look up for themselves Nevil Shute's An Old Captivity in which a modern aviator flies over the route he covered with Leif Ericson a thousand years ago and finds the rune stone which he and his beloved had placed on the coast of America. They may look up Elizabeth Goudge's Middle Window where the modern woman returns to the scene of a previous life and meets again the man who was her husband in the time of the Young Pretender. At that time she had unwittingly caused his death, and the horror of that memory must be exorcised in the present life. Most of Elizabeth Goudge's novels hint at the idea of previous lives. Joan Grant's Life as Carola and The Winged Pharaoh are, of course, novels of reincarnation, but they show no shift in time and therefore do not belong here. All of these novels shift backwards in time, but there is one novelist who prefers to make her characters move forward, and has apparently drawn some of her inspiration from the idea expressed by Ouspensky that the sixth dimension is the line of actualization of the possibilities which are contained in the preceding moment which were not actualized. This is what March Cost has attempted to work out in two of her novels. Her first novel, A Man Named Luke, fired a heavy broadside---clairvoyance, reincarnation, and some moving about in time. With The Dark Glass, a novel which bears rereading, she controls her story more skillfully. Miss Cost's third novel, The Dark Star, takes up in fuller detail the lives of two of her favorites of The Dark Glass. Reincarnation is introduced with restraint in the three March Cost novels; the clairvoyant journeying forward in time is the dominant motif. It is wrenching a point to include Nathan's Portrait of Jennie in a discussion of English novels, but its treatment of time makes it a fourth-dimensional novel, and apparently I shall have to wait a long time before I shall collect enough American novels of the genre. The legend here is deceptively simple, but the handling of time is, in my opinion, more subtle than that found in any of the novels I have mentioned. This is not, as one reviewer put it, a story in which people grow up at different rates of speed, nor is it merely a daydream. The fact that Jennie's dress---fashionable some years back and reminiscent of portraits by George Bellows and others---is carefully described shows that she grew up at a perfectly normal rate, but that in some way she has managed to cross over time and space to meet her lover. Although this would seem to be an application of the concept found in Ouspensky that the life of man can occur in one place in time and simultaneously at another place in time, I believe that the genesis of Jennie is to be found in J. W. Dunne's little book, An Experiment with Time. Now, many of the writers I have discussed refer to Dunne's book, which is concerned primarily with the problem of dreams in which the dreamer's mind seems to range forward into the future, and with what Dunne calls the "serial universe." Dunne suggests that in the fourth-dimensional time-space, the future co-exists with the present and past (as we have seen in many of the novels I have outlined). But most significantly, he quotes from H. G. Wells' Time Machine: "For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, three-dimensional representations of his fourth-dimensional being which is a fixed and unalterable thing." And again, says Dunne, "If the field of an observer A lagged behind that of an observer B, and A were to intervene in B's substratum which were level with A, then B would find its experience in his field miraculously altered." In these quotations, I believe, we have the clue to Jennie. Living in her own present, she has at intervals moved into her own future (perhaps in dreams) crossing into the artist's life in his present. (Eddington's hourglass
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