For Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, the sudden-seeming end to the war meant a collapse of the forces which had conspired to keep them half a world apart: now, after waiting for so many long months and years, they could marry without further delay. Or so they hoped.
A week after the armistice–when the fact that the war was really over hadn’t quite sunk in–Olaf had written to Agnes in disbelieving bliss.
18 November 1918
. . . I can’t realise the great change that has taken place in our affairs, nor the fact that you may be even now definitely determined to come soon. I wish I were free now. I wish the armistice were a fixed peace & my turn had already come to be demobilized. I wonder whether I shall go home & wait a little for you, or go home and go out to you, or go home and find you there. . . .
Stapledon’s account of his final reward for nearly four years of service in the Friends Ambulance Corps was appropriately low-key:
What next? Oh yes. This afternoon I was formally presented with my croix de guerre. The ceremony was simple. Brown, the second in command and acting chief, came along while I was going to tea, dug a packet out of his pocket and said, “Oh, glad I’ve met you: I can get rid of this.” A piece of tissue paper enclosed the bauble, a bronze cross backed by two crossed swords, with a tiny head of La République Frangaise in the centre, the whole hanging on the ribbon of which I sent you a snippet, and in the middle of the ribbon the modest bronze star…
So Olaf, though a pacifist, is also now a decorated veteran, and ready to come home and await his bride. But this is–this was–a modern war, and it will take a while for it all to wind down.
Olaf’s letter of today, a century back, finds him still in France, and it reminds us of the size of the gulf which they are striving to close. Our other lovers and married couples were only a few days away from each other by Royal Mail; for Olaf and Agnes it has been a matter of months.
SSA 13, 6 January 1919
…Well, girl, a dear letter came from you yesterday telling me about your interview with a benevolent gent on the subject of a passport. I laughed and could have danced for joy at that delightful incident, especially over the secret fact that the famous letter that you showed was the one I subsequently said I wished I had never written. But in case of further difficulties–Agnes Miller, I do ask thee to be my wife. Agnes Miller, I ask thee to come straightaway to England to marry me. Agnes Miller, I implore thee to come. Agnes Miller, I love thee more than I love any other soul… I, Olaf Stapledon, need thee Agnes Miller, and beg thee to come to England at once…[1]
She will do her best, and this letter, joyfully fitting the Quaker form of address to the requirements of government officials, is the last to be sent to her home in Australia. Yet it will still be two months before Agnes departs: she will end up waiting for a Blue Funnel Line ship (Olaf’s father had an interest in the company) and sailing west, stopping in India and going through Suez rather than east and overland through America, as they had originally planned.
Nor will Olaf have a quick ticket home. Just as his arrival in France was delayed by appendicitis, stomach troubles of a different sort will delay his return. He has developed a hernia–driving crank-started ambulances with no power steering is hard work–which he had been ignoring. But now it is serious enough to require surgery, by the very same doctor who had removed his appendix.
So today, a century back, there is joy on the horizon, but the lovers must wait for a blue funnel and a surgeon’s knife…
But who better to peer further into the future with than Olaf Stapledon? Always a dreamer, he will become the most original voice of mid-century science fiction, looking further into the future of humankind than anyone else. His most influential books–and although he will never quite become a household name, Stapledon’s influence on other writers will be profound–take the form of visionary future histories of the entire universe. His earnestness, curiosity, and speculative zeal let him pull off what, from most writers, would be vapid and unreadable self-indulgence. Adopting a “cosmic” point of view, speeding through aeons on every page, he will ask, with intense sincerity, what aeons of potential human experience might reveal about the human condition… yes, these books are very hard to describe.
Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) will be a surprise hit. It is part philosophy and part prognostication, part imagined history and part metaphysical poetry… and it will earn raves from, among others, Arnold Bennett (“There have been many visions of the future… But none in my experience as strange… Mr, Stapledon possesses a tremendous and beautiful imagination.”) and Virginia Woolf:
Dear Mr. Stapledon,
I would have thanked you for your book before, but I have been very busy and have only just had time to read it. I don’t suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can’t help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.
Many thanks for giving me a copy,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf[2]
Perhaps this recommendation will win him more readers.
In any event, Stapledon escaped the backlash that often strikes out-of-nowhere literary innovators when it turned out that he was not just a dreamy dilettante but an accredited philosopher. While working as a volunteer adult educator–and relying on dividends from family investments (an irony for a socialist but one he acknowledged, writing “the system on which I live must go”)–Stapledon earned a PhD from Liverpool University in 1925. He wrote several more works of speculative fiction which were openly influenced by H.G. Wells but more profoundly by Spinoza. Even as Stapledon remained active in antiwar, socialist, and internationalist anti-nationalist causes, he wrote reveries not just on international brotherhood but on the oneness of all human and meta-human experience, of striving toward an understanding not just of humanity, or humanity and the natural world, but of the place of the human mind in the universe.
While “science fiction” is a particularly inadequate term for writings which ended up arguing, essentially, for the oneness of human intellect, the cosmos, and the divine, this was the community that was most open to Stapledon’s ideas. He had no idea of his influence in the United States until, after the second war, he was sent there with a group of British cultural ambassadors. Though ignored by the more conventional writers (and, because of his politics, attacked in the American press and tailed by the FBI), he found a fervent community of admirers not among philosophers but among science fiction fans, and spent one long evening discussing his work with the members of the Hydra Club. Many of the writers of this circle–who were more taken, perhaps, with the scale of his future history, in which galactic empires rise and fall, than with the theological arguments that emerge from it–would go on to write large-scale fictions of their own. There is a direct line from Last and First Men and 1937’s Star Maker to Heinlein, Asimov, and George Lucas.
Back home, his influence faded. Stapledon was admired by many, but attacked by some of those admirers, including C.S. Lewis, who objected to Stapledon’s “desperately immoral outlook” and wrote the ham-handed “Space Trilogy” as a response–a first step toward establishing his particular brand, combining the forms of speculative fiction with orthodox Christian apologetics. Lewis would go on to write a more famous series of fantasy books in response to another Great War veteran’s books–those of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien’s books, of course, were neither “immoral” nor heretical, and in style and form they are about as different from Stapledon as two masterpieces of “Speculative Fiction” can be. Yet they have an essential kinship. Young men who read deeply and dreamed intensely–and who had seen the horrors of the war–they each set about making their own worlds, and tended to them with total commitment and complete indifference to the disdain with which this sort of intellectual play was treated. Lewis was a convert who became a popularizer, cobbling together worlds to expound an established tradition in a new way; Tolkien, a lifelong Catholic, had confidence in his God–that is, faith–and so made his own world, vast but enclosed, as a loyal “sub-creator;” Stapledon, lapsed Quaker and reinvigorated pantheist, was a searcher, and he wrote his fiction to explore the immensity of future possibility.
Most of us would rather embrace some ready-made hagiography of boy wizards or charismatic lions than read through an account of an ordinary man striving to understand that which is infinitely greater than himself. But this struggle, this desire to know, this conviction that even when empirical evidence is scarce rational explanations are still within reach—this is the spirit that has propelled mankind forward for centuries, and it must continue to be ours: The key to human evolution, Stapledon would argue, is to cultivate an open mind.[3]
So, yes, Olaf Stapledon, ambulance driver, will go on to an interesting literary career. But what about Olaf Stapledon, ardent lover? Isn’t that the man whose letters we’ve been reading?
It’s a good story–mostly happy. Agnes Miller did catch that boat and finally arrived in England at the end of the spring. There was an immediate crisis: she, a young woman on her own for the first time, had fallen half in love with an officer on the months-long voyage from Australia. But, with the help of some time apart and then some supervised time together again on a family holiday (they are, remember, cousins) in Wales, this unconsummated dalliance was forgotten and forgiven, and the plans for the wedding went ahead.
Olaf and Agnes were married in the Friends’ Meeting House in Reigate, Surrey, on July 16 1919. They drove off for their honeymoon in the Lake District in the same Sunbeam ambulance which Olaf had driven to the war and back. They were young and happy and they figured out the physical side of things quickly: their daughter Mary was born in May 1920, with a son, John, following in 1923. (If a quick internet search found the right John David Stapledon, then he died a great-grandfather in 2013, and Agnes and Olaf have reached the future at least as far as a fifth generation.)
It wasn’t all smooth. I haven’t read Robert Crossley’s biography (I’m working largely from the notes to his earlier publication of the letters, Talking Across the World) and I can’t really speak to the long-term health of their marriage. In one article discussing Crossley’s book there is a disheartening mention of a later phase in which Olaf apparently declared that he, still young in body while she had aged (she was eight years younger), should be free to seek an “open marriage.” I don’t know if this lapse into conventional male physicality indicates a time of trouble that was overcome or a harbinger of doom.
Olaf Stapledon died suddenly in 1950, at the age of 64, only a year after that dinner with his American fans. He was soon more or less forgotten by the larger literary community, and fell out of print. He was influential to and beloved by a core of fans, but that was not enough to make him a subject of study or to win republication of his books in the sixties and seventies, when science fiction began to go mainstream.
So here’s the last anecdote. Agnes outlived her husband by thirty-three years: their relationship had begun as a strange figment in Olaf’s mind and it ended as a slowly attenuating mountain of memories in hers. He nurtured a love for his nine-year-old cousin until she grew up and returned his love and came across the world to marry him; and after he died she preserved what she could. When Robert Crossley came to see the widow Stapledon, only a few years before her own death, she handed him the keys to her late husband’s study, and there it was, completely unchanged for three decades. It was arranged for Stapledon’s working papers to go to the University of Liverpool, but it later turned out that Agnes had kept two suitcases back. These too eventually came to the young American scholar. “Inside,” wrote Crossley, “tied into neat bundles with coarse brown twine, were many hundreds of letters from Olaf Stapledon to Agnes Miller,” along with many many–though far fewer–of hers to him.