Foreword - By Colin Wilson

It was in Hastings, in the Summer of 1965, that I first made the acquaintance of the work of Michael Harrison. It was at the end of a heavy week of journalistic and lecture assignments, and I still had to give a lecture and seminar on existentialism to a class of foreign students. I was beginning to feel tired and sorry for myself. Long periods away from home always produce this effect; I begin to suffer from 'people poisoning', and even places oppress me. I long to be back home, sitting in front of the fire with a book. In this mood, I make straight for the nearest second-hand bookshop. In Hastings I was lucky; I've found many long-sought volumes in the Howes Bookshop, near the seafront. It was there that I found a book with the promising title of London by Gaslight, a history of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, from 1861 to 1911. I have the book by me now as I write, and it still falls open at page 133, an account of the strange series of occurrences known as 'the Vanishings' that occurred in 1881, seven years before the Jack the Ripper murders. This is the paragraph on which my eye lighted:

'The strange aspect of the disappearances, which were mostly centred about the London districts of East Ham and West Ham, was the absence of what we may call an "age pattern". Young girls, young boys, middle-aged men and elderly women - all appeared to be equally acceptable to whoever - or whatever - was whipping the victims away ..."

I can think of no paragraph better designed to make the casual browser read on. I did - throughout the weekend and my journey back to Cornwall.

Incidentally, I have never been able to find any more on the Vanishings, although I have looked and enquired fairly hard.

My old friend Harold Visiak, who was alive at the time of the Vanishings, told me that there was an account of them in Charles Fort; but I've never been able to find it. Apart from this, there is only (as far as I know), a chapter in a book by Elliott O'Donnell called, I think, Strange Disappearances,

There were nine vanishings in nine years; one might suspect Jack the Ripper, except that in the few cases where the victim's body was recovered (one in an empty house, one at the foot of cliffs at Ramsgate) there were certainly no characteristic Ripper mutilations; in fact, the body at the foot of the cliff bore no sign of injury, and the autopsy revealed no cause of death. Modern Flying Saucer enthusiasts will see all the signs of Aliens from outer space ...

What fascinated me about Michael Harrison was his cast of mind - the combination of scholar, antiquary, eccentric and detective; there is a certain resemblance to Charles Fort, except that Fort is hard to read, and Michael Harrison is incapable of being unreadable. I saw at once that Michael Harrison is a member of an increasingly rare breed: the genuinely dedicated writer.

In case that sounds like the conventional compliment of a writer of Introductions, let me elaborate. In the past, the distinction between real writers and commercial hacks was more interesting than today. Montaigne certainly qualifies as a true writer, since he wrote solely to satisfy an inner-impulse. Defoe was, by general admission, a commercial hack. William Blake was a true writer; Doctor Johnson was mostly a hack. (After all, he told Boswell that any man who writes for anything but money is a fool.) Most of the Elizabethan playrights probably qualify as hacks. In the past, 'commercialism' - if that is the word - often produced good literature. Today this has almost ceased to be true. Of the thousands of books published every year, most are purely commercial, and most of them will be forgotten in a few months. In the Victorian age, best sellers were often writers of merit - Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Stevenson; nowadays, the production of best sellers has become a commercial affair, like the production of Cadillacs. I have remarked elsewhere that to say that (for example) L.H. Myers and Harold Robbins are both 'writers' is like saying that both Gladstone and Jack the Ripper were interested in fallen women. There is a yawning gulf between the men who write for money, and the men who write because literature is in their blood. The commercial writer may be a man who has a genuine talent for popularising - history or science or what-have-you - but you would never mistake his product for literature.

Now what interested me about Michael Harrison was that he so clearly belongs to that band of eccentric romantics who regard literature as a necessity, not a luxury, of civilised living; like Southey, he obviously finds 'the mighty minds of old' more interesting than the television news reports. There is a touch of the poetry of nostalgia about most of his books, whether he is writing about the indiscretions of Edward VII or the Duke of Clarence, or reconstructing Roman London, or speculating on the unrecorded adventures of Sherlock Holmes

- or, for that matter, inventing new cases for Poe's Auguste Dupin. When I went to live - and teach - in America for two years, London by Gaslight was one of the few books I took with me; and when I travelled about the country lecturing, it often went with me - together with a portable tape recorder, and tapes of the music of Delius and Elgar. It brought a pleasant sense of home to a great many anonymous motel rooms.

It was August Derleth - the friend and publisher of H. P. Lovecraft - who noticed my copy of London by Gas light, and told me that Michael Harrison advised him on Victorian London as described in his own Solar Pons stories - affectionate parodies of Sherlock Holmes. Derleth gave me Michael Harrison's address, and I wrote to ask him if he could give me any more information about the Vanishings. He couldn't - apart from recommending me to try Elliott O'Donnell; but we began to correspond. And it was shortly thereafter that he intrigued me by telling me that he had Jack the Ripper's death certificate on his desk ... In fact, I think I may claim a small amount of the credit for the remarkable theory of the Ripper's identity put forward in Harrison's biography of the Duke of Clarence

- Queen Victoria's grandson. Michael Harrison was already engaged on research for his biography when a doctor, Thomas E.A. Stowell, wrote an article in The Criminologist suggesting that Clarence was Jack the Ripper. Stowell had told me his theory as long ago as 1960, and I had introduced him to Nigel Morland, editor of The Criminologist. But here, I think, is an excellent example of the kind of 'detective work' that makes Michael Harrison so much more than a cultural historian. He read Stowell's article, in which the suspect is not actually named (but I had been able to confirm that Clarence was meant). Now Stowell had based his own theory on certain papers of Sir William Gull, Physician in Ordinary to the royal family, which had been shown to Stowell by Gull's daughter, Lady (Caroline) Acland.

He had obviously made notes from these papers on the career of Gull's suspect. And Stowell had no doubt that Gull's suspect was Clarence, for Gull had a number of shocked and cryptic references to Clarence in connection with the Ripper. Fortunately, Stowell summarised 'the Ripper's' career in his Criminologist article. Michael Harrison saw immediately that this description did not fit Clarence; for example, Clarence never resigned his army commission, as Stowell's suspect did. In that case, who was the mysterious suspect, referred to by Stowell as 'S'? And how had Stowell come to get the facts wrong? Unfortunately, Stowell had died not long after the article appeared - I suspect of the excitement of gaining sudden notoriety - and so could not be questioned. Clearly, Holmesian deduction was required. Why should Stowell think that Gull meant that Clarence was the Ripper?

Clearly, because the names had been linked in Gull's papers. (Stowell told me that Lady [Caroline] Acland had shown him these papers in the Thirties, and asked his advice on whether they should be destroyed, since they contained compromising material on Clarence - who was also involved in a homosexual scandal; whether Stowell advised that they should be destroyed I cannot remember; but he told me they were destroyed.) And if Clarence was not Jack the Ripper, then presumably he must have been somewhat associated with the Ripper - knowingly or unknowingly - for Gull to mention them in the same breath, as it were.

And so the problem resolved itself into the question: Which of Clarence's friends or acquaintances could have been the Ripper? That is, which of them fitted the description of the suspect 'S'. Michael Harrison soon located a man who fitted in every respect -fitted so closely that it could hardly be coincidence - James Stephen, Clarence's one-time tutor. Stephen died insane, in a mad house. Stowell assured me that Clarence actually died of GPI in an asylum near Sandringham (or Ascot - there seemed to be some doubt), and not, as the encyclopaedias say, in the flu epidemic of 1892; I took Stowell's word for it; but Michael Harrison established that Clarence had died at home, surrounded by his family.

At the time Stephen was Clarence's tutor (and, possibly, lover) it seemed likely that he would make a brilliant career for himself in law or the academic profession; his deterioration began after an accident involving a heavy blow on the head. Poems quoted by Michael Harrison show him to have had a streak of paranoid hatred for women (I found them perhaps the most convincing part of his theory). Does Michael Harrison's theory prove that Stephen was the Ripper? I think not; but I think it proves (as far as it can be proved) that Sir William Gull thought Stephen was the Ripper. (And why did Stowell refer to his suspect as 'S'? Was it pure chance - or did he use the initial that Gull used in his papers?) We still need to know why Gull thought so; and since his papers are, presumably, burnt, we never shall know.

However, Michael Harrison goes on to construct a theory worthy of Sherlock Holmes, involving a poem by Stephen 'to be sung to the tune of Kaphoozelum', a ribald song about the killing of 'ten little whores of Jerusalem'; he argues that Stephen killed a total of ten 'little whores', on dates determined by ... but this preface will become impossibly long if I continue. The theory occupies nearly half the Clarence biography, and readers should turn to the book.

It was in connection with his Ripper speculations that I finally met Michael Harrison - although by then we had been corresponding for two or three years. I presented an item on the Ripper - and on Dan Parson's Druitt theory - on a local television programme, Format, and asked Michael down to argue with Dan. Later, when the Clarence book came out, the three of us appeared on BBC's Late Night Line Up to discuss the Stephen theory. Dan Parson was scathing about it - partly because he is committed to the notion that the Ripper was the unsuccessful barrister, Montague John Druitt, who committed suicide by drowning in December, 1888. But not entirely for this reason.

He objected that Michael Harrison's theory over-proved his case - and I mention this here because it has a certain bearing on the present book, and also on Michael Harrison's general 'deductive' approach to history. Quentin Bell's biography of Virginia Woolf had appeared after Clarence had gone to press; it confirmed Stephen's mental breakdown One anecdote was of particular interest; how Stephen rushed into the nursery at the 'Woolf' home and plunged the blade of a sword stick into a loaf of bread. On the BBC programme Michael suggested that a sword stick might explain how the Ripper had approached and killed his victims. Dan Farsor rightly pointed out that this was unlikely; medical evidence showed that a knife must have been used to cut the throats and inflict the mutilations.

He repeated the objection subsequently in an article in a London evening newspaper, and his readers might have been forgiven for assuming that Michael Harrison's argument had been completely discredited. But the fact is that the whole passage about Stephen in Quentin Bell's biography strengthens the theory that he was the Ripper; and whether or not the sword stick could have been used in the Whitechapel murders, the episode certainly suggests that Stephen's madness could express itself in the form of aggressive behaviour with cutting instruments.

I mention this because it is possible that readers of this present book may feel that his enthusiasm for his thesis may occasionally lead him to over-prove. (For example, my wife has expressed a doubt whether the name of our village - Gorran - is really of Basque origin, since it is named after a Saint Goran.) Having now read half a dozen of his exercises in historical detection - I am thinking particularly of The London That Was Rome — I am convinced that his inferences are usually pretty soundly based.

Because he is not an academic historian, writing for other academics, he does not hedge in his arguments with all the usual qualifications. But the fault, if it is a fault, is to be blamed on the vitality of his imaginative vision which continually reveals new vistas of possibility. And also, I think, upon the extraordinary variety of his interests. When he came down to Cornwall for the Westward programme, he stayed with us for about forty-eight hours, and I think I have never heard such an enormous variety of subjects discussed in such a brief space of time. For example, a chance remark of mine on Poe's obsession with death led to a discourse - in a pub at Ruan High Lanes - on Poe's life and work that contained some astonishing material - material that, if true, throws a completely new light on Poe's psychology.

Basically, I would say that Michael Harrison is a 'bisociative' thinker - to use Arthur Koestler's term; that is to say, his mind suddenly perceives the relation between his thesis and some apparently unrelated subject, which gives his work a continued element of unexpectedness. I open The London That Was Rome, and come upon an example almost immediately. He is arguing that there was no great gap - in time - between Roman London and Anglo-Saxon London, and that this can be seen in the Roman origin of many London place names.

He traces back the history of the name 'Cannon Street', pointing out that it has been called, at different periods, Candle-wick Street, Candlewright Street, and Candelwrichstrete. He then points out that in Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs Gamp pronounces 'candle' as 'cangle', and goes on to argue that the form 'Cangellawr wic' (Old Welsh) developed from the Latin 'cancellarius vicus', 'fenced off area' (or 'out of bounds save to military personnel'). Scholars may quarrel with his etymology; but for me, it is a typical and characteristic touch to bring Dickens into the argument.

His detractors will argue that Dickens has no place in an argument on Roman place names. But on re-reading the passage, I see that Dickens is by no means an essential step, for he mentions that the Latin cancellarius became cangellawr in Welsh, and that in London this became candellawr - enough to establish his point; Dickens is thrown in as a bonus; a typical Michael Harrison bonus which is, for me, one of the most delightful things about his books.

This vein of historical detection - which seems to express so much of his essence - is a fairly recent development in Michael Harrison's work. Due partly to the Second World War and other historical accidents of our century, his literary career has pursued a somewhat zigzag course. From his descriptions of his childhood when he first stayed with us, I gathered that his family background was upper middle class, with vague connections with the aristocracy. Now, where writers are concerned, this is a distinct disadvantage; for a writer is best left to find his own salvation through the pen, and the less he is distracted, the better.

I suspect that this explains why so many of the major writers of the past century or so have been from fairly poor backgrounds - Dickens, Carlyle, Wells, Shaw, Bennett; middle class writers - Proust and Orwell will serve as examples - seem to carry their origins like a ball and chain; and as to upper class writers, they seem to be almost non-existent. Middle and upper class families are too interfering to allow a writer to develop unhindered. Michael Harrison's father decreed that he should be an architect, although all his inclinations were towards writing. (The chief influences, he says, were Sax Rohmer and Rider Haggard.) But in 1932, when he was in his early twenties, the opportunity for escape presented itself; like the hero of Waugh's Vile Bodies, he was asked to write a column of 'white tie gossip' for the Sunday Referee.

The work was hard; the pay minimal; but the smell of printer's ink aroused the half repressed romantic in him, and he decided that it had to be a literary career or nothing. While writing for various 'posh' journals and magazines (including Horse and Hound and Polo Monthly) he produced his first novel, Weep for Lycidas, which was an immediate success. (He now calls it 'a jewelled, meretricious hotchpotch of Harland, Dunsany, Arlen, Firbank and Huxley', but this is less than fair.) But it was, he says, 'stopped in its ninetyish tracks' by a murderous review from James Agate, who was, at the time, quarrelling with the book's publisher, Arthur Barker. Shaw once said that he blessed his stars that his early novels were all failures; Michael Harrison was less lucky.

Having had one success, he continued to try to make a living as a novelist, and discovered that it was heartbreaking work. Unlike Shaw, he had no chance to 'find himself; he was too busy keeping himself alive with journalism, 'film novels' (like The Bride of Frankenstein) and commissioned books. (At one point he decided it might be fun to learn Turkish, and write a 'Teach Yourself Turkish' book as a by-product - until he discovered that the publisher was only willing to pay an outright £25 for the book.) His second novel made him £28. A later novel, So Linked Together (1944) obviously has strong autobiographical elements; its description of the career of a writer makes it painfully clear that the Grub Street of Defoe, Goldsmith and Gissing still existed in the 1930s - as it probably still does. I open it at a typical sentence:

'"I am nothing at the moment," said Tancred. "A few months ago I thought I was a writer, but no one seems to want the things I write".'

Michael Harrison's situation was not quite as bad as this - three novels written during the war (when he was in the army in the Middle East) sold a comfortable 20,000 each - but he was not satisfying the impulse that had made him choose the problematic career of a writer. He was making no use of his strong feeling for the past, of his Huxley-an variety of interests, of his liking for the science of historical .deduction. Fortunately, publishing fashions changed in the fifties; fiction was out, non-fiction was in. His earlier non-fiction (apart from travel books) had been confined to a book on Cagliostro and one on the gambler John Law.

In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes (1957) was an exercise in the amusing game of reconstructing Holmes's biography as though he were a real person. I happen to be a Holmes addict (so was T.S. Eliot, as I discovered when I met him) Holmes addicts read books about him because the cases, as chronicled by Watson, do not satisfy their appetite; they want more of the same kind. In my own view, the 'Holmes stories' of Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr are poor substitutes; and Derleth's Solar Pons stories are simply not the same thing at all. But Michael Harrison's Footsteps is a genuine piece of Holmesiana, for it captures the qualities that make the Holmes stories so re-readable: not only the nostalgia, the atmosphere of London in the Eighties and Nineties; but also the Holmesian delight in facts - often bizarre and remote - and in deducing their consequences.

I think I am right to say that In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes was the book in which Michael Harrison discovered the true direction of his talents, and began to utilise his own highly individual combination of learning, bold speculation and nostalgia for the past.

This brings me to what is his boldest, and perhaps his most important, venture into historical detection, The Roots of Witchcraft. When Michael Harrison mentioned to me that he was writing a book on witchcraft, I experienced a certain misgiving. I had just completed a large book called The Occult, which had involved reading everyone from Margaret Murray and Trevor-Roper to such dubious exponents as the Reverend Montague Summers and Gerald, Gardner.

The great witch persecutions, which may be said to have ended with the trials of the Salem witches in the last decade of the seventeenth century, began with the Church's persecution of the heresy known as Catharism in Languedoc around the year 1200; the 'witches' rooted out and burned by the Church's inquisitors were actually Cathars. Almost everything that is known about those five centuries of persecution can be found in Rossell Hope Robbins's Encylopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. I could hardly see the need for another book on witchcraft. I should have known better. In this book, Michael Harrison makes hardly any references to the five centuries of witch persecution; he is interested in a remoter period. His Roots of Witchcraft should rather, I think, be classified with Robert Graves's The White Goddess - a poet's investigation into the language and mysteries of a pre-Christian religion.

Michael Harrison mentions the 'origin' of his book on page 43 - perhaps it would have been better to do so earlier. He explains that he talked to Professor Geoffrey Webb after the Second World War about some curious discoveries he had made in churches. A bomb had displaced a great stone slab covering the altar of an old church; inside the altar, Professor Webb found a stone lingam or phallus. Webb found that 'ninety per cent of all churches examined, of a date up to, say, the Black Death of 1348 ... had The God (i.e. a ritual phallus) concealed within the altar ..." As long ago as 1921, Margaret Murray had suggested, in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, that the 'witches' who were persecuted were actually adherents of a pre-Christian fertility religion - a suggestion that had already been made in the eighteenth century by an Italian, Girolamo Tartarotti.

Her book, although found unacceptable by many scholars, is still regarded as a serious work of scholarship. This is not true of her later works, The God of the Witches and The Divine King in England, the latter of which argues that many kings of England met their deaths in order to fulfil rituals of this ancient religion. At about the time Michael Harrison was learning about the phalluses concealed in Chris-30

tian altars, my old friend Hugh Ross Williamson was writing a book called The Arrow and the Sword, which accepts Margaret Murray's arguments about the 'Old Religion', and contends that King William Rufus and Archbishop Thomas a Becket were both 'ritual victims' - a view accepted by Michael Harrison in this book.

So the basic viewpoint of The Roots of Witchcraft is close to that of The God of the Witches, The Arrow and the Sword and T.C. Lethbridge's Witches: Investigating an Ancient Religion; and Michael Harrison makes full acknowledgement of the debt. But Margaret Murray's theories are only used as the basis of one of his typical investigations - the kind of thing, I feel, that Sherlock Holmes might have written for a diversion between more narrowly specialist works like the monograph on tobacco ash or the study of the Motets of Lassus.

The amazing variety of information certainly sounds as if it came from Holmes's files: for example, on pages 69-70 we learn from two footnotes that the Egyptians split the granite for the pyramids by drilling small holes in the rock, filling them with water, and allowing the water to freeze by night, and that the actual date of Jesus' birth is May 17, 8 BC, at about 2 in the morning ... I find it almost as much pleasure to read him for the footnotes - and snippets of historical gossip - as for the actual argument of the book, which is absorbing enough. As one would expect from him, there is an enormous amount on ancient Greece and Rome - I can think of no writer since Anatole France who takes such a delight in exploring the classical by-ways and seasoning his work with strange fragments of erudition. But I think it would be fair to say that the originality of the book lies in its linguistic investigations, the attempt to trace the origin of words used in witch's spells.

I have no idea whether he has been influenced by Levi-Strauss and the Structuralists - I have no doubt he has read them, as he seems to have read everything - but the method of The London That Was Rome and the present book could certainly be described as an attempt at 'an archaeology of knowledge'. I confess that I lack the qualifications to judge his thesis, although I am reasonably certain that there are many points at which Professor Trevor-Roper - and other 'atomist' historians - would accuse him of building castles in the air. No doubt the Namier method - examining every fragment of 'historical evidence" under a microscope - is admirable; but it takes so long that the castles never get built. History is too important to be left to historians - to adapt an epigram.

Michael Harrison has brought to the writing of this book the qualities that he has spent a lifetime accumulating: the novelist's eye for human behaviour, the poet's love of the past, the journalist's delight in strange stories (like the one about the modern Arab doctor who killed his patient trying to beat a genie out of his body). In a letter to me, Michael Harrison wrote: 'Where from here ...? Well, given life and continuing health, I see the possibility of a complete emotional release in the type of writing to which the experiments of forty years have, I now realise, inevitably been leading.

My present type of writing gratifies and satisfies, first, that obsessive need to write that I share with every other dedicated writer; second, that desire — now recognised by me as having been evident from earliest childhood - to solve puzzles and to demonstrate the solution's proof; and third, that nostalgia which used, throughout my childhood, boyhood, and indeed, the first half of my life, to trouble me so deeply - but that I now can convert into the richest material of my creative work.' The Roots of Witchcraft seems to me the fullest expression so far of his creative desires; I trust it will be the first of many works in the genre.

In Granada, in the southernmost part of Spain, where the seven-hundred-year rule of the Moorish kings is still recalled in architecture, tricks of speech and the dark North African beauty of the Granadese, there is the impressive relic of a time immeasurably more ancient.

Not long ago, another of those prehistorically inhabited caves was found; those caves in which the whole Spanish peninsula, from the mountain barrier of the Pyrenees to the sea-barrier of the south, so richly abounds. This cave, known colloquially as the Cavern of the Bats, is unlike those other archaeologically famous caves much farther north, in that it has no millennia-old frescoes of Palaeolithic art.

Instead it has what is probably a much more impressive memorial of our ancestors who died perhaps as many as 25,000 years ago. The art of the men who painted the caves of Northern Spain, Southern France, the Atlas Mountains, Rhodesia, Siberia and elsewhere, has much to tell us of their mentality, their hopes and fears. These paintings tell us a lot, not only of their physical activities, but of their spiritual, even of their religious, views.

The Cavern of the Bats, though without 'the illustrated text' of wall-paintings, not only supports the conclusions that we have already drawn concerning the religious beliefs of those who painted their dreams and hopes on the unlighted rock of Altamira. Ariege and Les Trois Freres; the evidence of the Cavern of the Bats permits us to draw conclusions much more detailed.

In the cave, twelve skeletons were seated about a thirteenth - a Master, a Leader, or (as we shall see in this book) a God. He, too, is seated, and he is the dead but surviving human counterpart of those leaping figures from Ariege and Les Trois Freres who wear animal skins. He, too, wears the skin of an animal. The thirteen have died sitting; the floor around them is covered with poppy-heads.

This is a coven of twelve and a Master. It is no different from that described in numberless witch-trials of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and illustrated in chap-books of the period. In the Cavern of the Bats we have, preserved by an accident, the actual ceremony from a religion which is one of the most ancient in the world. How that religion began, and how it ended, is told in this book.