things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. Ah! Books are galvanic. They touch the nerve-centre of the whole being so that the reader receives an almost palpable physical shock. A tremor of excited perception ripples through the person.
Ah! Books don’t come all that often, at least not my way. André Malraux’s The Psychology of Art was one of them. It was published just after the war. It was too expensive to buy, but I located a copy of this luminous book in the Manchester Art Gallery; and I had to make several journeys by motor-cycle, often through sleet and snow, until I had finished it. From time to time I wanted to get up on the table and proclaim its truth to all around me, or slap my desk-neighbour over the back and say, ‘There you are; just get hold of that!’ Once I nearly did but, just in time, I noticed that he was reading a text on the structure of plastics. By now, of course, I know that some people can get as much aesthetic pleasure out of contemplating the formula for a long molecule as others do from beholding a mural by Piero della Francesca. Technologists have their Ah! moments, too!
Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision. For they are essentially Idea-creating, in the sense that Coleridge meant when he described the Idea as containing future thought – as opposed to the Epigram which encapsulates past thought. Ah! Books give the impression that you are opening a new account, not closing an old one down.
So for me, at any rate, this is an Ah! Book, and has been since the manuscript first came my way; from the very first sentence, too. ‘The diffrense from a person and an angel is easy. Most of an angel is in the inside and most of a person is on the outside.’ A few seconds’ thought and then – the tingle in the mind. I remembered the poet Norman Nicholson, as a young man on the cricket field, newly come to T. S. Eliot’s use of common speech in poetry, incanting between overs, ‘The young man carbuncular arrives … on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’ That was a sentence which gave a fresh look to language. This was one which gave a fresh look to holiness.
It was the repristinizing of religious language which struck me forcibly when the manuscript of this book first came into my hands; except, of course, that there was by no means what a publisher calls a manuscript. There were a few pages hesitantly and anonymously offered by a friend of the author who wished to remain humbly and unobtrusively in the background. But these were enough to show that, whoever he was, the writer, though by no means an accomplished literary man, had a quick eye for the human scene, a warm regard for his fellows and, above all, a mind of great originality which appeared to have either escaped from or never been subjected to the processing which normally marks people who write about such matters. I read those first few pages over and over again until I was pursued by Fynn and Anna as a kind of literary puzzle. I tried to make an Identiwrit picture of the author and his background: a man certainly thinking his way through to the frontiers of thought; a scientifically trained parson or a theologically astute scientist; in any event someone who was attempting to communicate a message of some sort, and was finding that purely logical forms would not bear the burden of his meaning; an inventor of a mini-myth. For Alice in Wonderland read Anna in Bethnal Green. Whoever he was, the few dog-eared pages sharpened the appetite for more. I could hardly wait for the following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T. B. Macaulay walking from Cambridge to meet the London coach bearing the next instalment of the Waverley Novels. (Much to the disgust of his father, incidentally, who believed that novels were no fit occupation for a scholar and a gentleman!) There grew in me a mastering curiosity to meet the author, if only to confirm my guesses.
We met. And I was wrong – at least in large part. Fynn disguises nobody but Fynn. At the time of writing I have known him for a couple of years. But there is another way in which I have known him all my life. For there is about him that transparent vulnerability which makes for a total and immediate correspondence with anyone who is prepared to throw prejudices to the wind and celebrate life as a lump of mysterious and joyful awe. But all the speculation about a trained scientist or theologian with imaginative leanings and communication problems was pretty wide of the mark. Fynn, thank God, was not trained as either of these. Intelligent to the eyelashes and with a gargantuan appetite for knowledge, Fynn was early advised to eschew (may his adviser rest in peace) universities and other institutions for the purveying of processed thought. So most of his formative thinking took place far from the quads and colleges and punted rivers amongst the small streets, warehouses, and canals of the East End. But with his modest job and his Woolworth’s do-it-yourself laboratory he produced thought to which few PhDs have approximated. If in doubt, thumb through the theses lodged in the libraries of the universities: ‘Four Methods of Washing a Cup’, ‘The Social Life of the Sperm Whale’, ‘The Water-absorbing Properties of Pink Geraniums’! It is no disrespect to sperm whales, or for that matter tea-cups and geraniums, to say that Fynn has produced something qualitatively different from PhD-thinking and which would probably not have emerged if during those critical years he had had to attend twice-weekly tutorials on logical positivism which was then raising its airy-fairy head.
Fynn is a large man; tall, and once on a day enormously strong; and not only physically large but mentally very masculine, with a bold aggressive intelligence compounded of that mixture of credulity and scepticism which is always prepared to abandon well-trodden ground for intellectually virgin territory. But on the other hand he has a strongly developed feminine side which can only be described as skin stretched over tenderness. I remember sitting with him one night talking about his early experiments with mirrors and Meccano. (Now he uses computers made up from surplus W.D. junk.) And then he started discussing people who were maladjusted or had fallen on bad times and with whom he had worked for a large chunk of his life. And he did so with such deep insight and total acceptance that his attitude could only be described as love. As I watched and listened my mind began to search around for some historical person of whom he reminded me: who also had had little formal education, and whose feminine and masculine streaks co-existing made an inner dialectic which produced a creative vitality. At last, as the night folded us in a brotherhood of discussion and debate, the name dropped out of the memory. It was that of Leonardo da Vinci.
Fynn has suffered: suffered not only physically, mentally, and emotionally; but has also suffered spiritually in that total solitariness, isolation, and abandonment which, however close one’s friends and relatives may be, becomes a terrifying experience for the lonely being. The men of the Middle Ages were right to describe it as ‘a dark night of the soul’. Fynn is still partially disabled from a psycho-physical injury. But he is now in process of throwing away his crutches with an almost insolent, hilarious impudence, relying on his own grit and gumption, and the grace and goodness of his fairly recently acquired wife. And all this makes Fynn the sort of person who gives you the impression that though he has been tossed about by life his feet have firmly touched the bottom.
So Fynn is the author of this book; and he is who he was, and who he is. He has an address and a telephone number. He is pretending to be nobody other than himself. But a very real and permanent part of his being is – Anna.
Now, to tell a plain and honest tale, I did not need convincing that the East End had bred and moulded Fynn. I knew the East End thirty years and more ago and the cameos he makes of that rich, gay, almost voluptuous life are cut from the flesh. That marvellous Cockney Mum, the soft-hearted brassy Venus de Mile End, the garrulous Night People; I knew and loved such people by the hundred.
But Anna … She was qualitatively different, and she had me puzzled, not so much because of her flamboyant precociousness, but because I needed a good deal more documentation of her uniqueness. To begin with, I found it hard to believe that anyone could have existed at that age who was so untouched by the constraining type of education available at that time, and whose precocity took the form of devastating challenges to the received way of construing things; and more so, when her nascent philosophy went to the heart of some problems of spiritual perception and the nature of being which are precisely contemporary. And
