Drafts of I Saw Water are to be found in twelve thick folders (TGA 929/2/1/31) in the Colquhoun archive, housed in the Hyman Kreitman Research Centre, Tate Britain, London. The folders also contain Colquhoun’s contemporaneous dated transcripts of many of the dreams that she incorporated into the novel and some that she considered for inclusion but did not use, notes containing alternative schemes for the novel’s structure and possible names for the characters, calendars of saint’s days, and other related documents. From the evidence of Colquhoun’s letters to publishers, the final typescript on which we have based this first published edition dates to around 1967. It is very clean, with only the occasional autograph correction. We have retained the author’s punctuation (including her use of quotation marks) and British English spelling.
With regard to the previously unpublished essays and poems included in this volume, drafts and typescripts are also housed in the Hyman Kreitman Research Centre. Several drafts often exist for the items we have selected, but the author’s final intentions are always clear. For the published pieces, we have kept to the texts as published. Every reasonable effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the texts printed here. The editors wish to thank Quest for permission to reprint “The Openings of the Body”; the Hermetic Journal for permission to reprint “The Zodiac and the Flashing Colours”; and Peter Owen Publishers for permission to reprint “Love-Charm II.”
The centerpiece of this book is the previously unpublished novel I Saw Water. Written by the author and artist Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988), it is set on the island of Ménec, where Sister Brigid inhabits the Ianua Vitae Convent. She is an unconventional nun, but it is soon revealed that the convent itself has an unconventional mission. It belongs to the Parthenogenesist Order, ostensibly Roman Catholic, but whose purpose is more reminiscent of certain schools of alchemy than of Catholicism. Its aim is the unification of the separated genders, the achievement of which will signal the transmutation of fallen, sinful humanity to a state of spiritual perfection, restore nature’s equilibrium, and confirm the unity of the hermetic cosmos. In tandem with this alchemical undercurrent, many aspects of conventual and ritual life on Ménec have more in common with pagan nature worship than with Christianity. Ménec itself is an unusual island. It is the Island of the Dead, and all the inhabitants, nuns and laity alike, have died and are now in transit, working their way toward their second death. The concept of the second death presented in this novel differs from that of Judeo-Christian eschatology. It has no place in Catholic theology, being more associated with Eastern spiritualities that would have likely reached Colquhoun through the teachings of the Theosophical Society.
Sister Brigid’s cousin, Charlotte, is also on the island, having just taken her own life. Before her suicide, she was the mistreated wife of a homosexual husband. Despite the personal vulnerabilities that she carries with her, she is as much a spiritual guide to Brigid as are the convent mistresses. Another influence on Brigid is a local landowner and heir named Nikolaz, who bears strong similarities to Adonis, the mythological vegetation god. He entices Brigid from the convent but dies by drowning (inevitably, as it will come to be understood) before they can leave the island together. Nonetheless, eventually Sister Brigid is able to cast off her personality and human emotions and achieve a state of disembodied peace. I Saw Water is narrated in a matter-of-fact style that recounts as commonplace a remarkable series of events, including an encounter with a subhuman baboon girl, rituals dedicated to sacred wells, a pagan snake dance, the circulation of a powerful heirloom, the touch of an ectoplasmic hand, and even a demonstration of the power of bilocation by the convent’s novice mistress. Naturalistic passages are juxtaposed with lengthy sequences derived from dreams, resulting in dislocations of time, place, and logic.
As this brief summary shows, the novel is not mainstream fiction. It is forgivable that in the mid 1960s, when it was written, no publisher felt confident enough to add it to their list, especially as Colquhoun required that each chapter be printed on color-coded paper to evoke its occult structure. Today, with more widespread knowledge of the spiritual traditions of East and West, deeper appreciation of dreams and their imagery, and greater awareness of the importance of the occult in modernism, some of the surface strangeness has mellowed. Even so, there is still much to challenge the nonspecialist reader. One purpose of our introduction and notes is to explain concepts and terms that occur within the novel and might be unfamiliar. Another is to suggest important lines of analysis.
Although Colquhoun is well known to two groups of people—those interested in the history of surrealism in England in the years leading up to World War II and those interested in ceremonial magic in the mid-twentieth century—outside of these groups (neither of which is extensive) she remains almost entirely unknown. Much of her written work is unpublished or appeared in “little” magazines that can be difficult to access. Similarly, her artwork is largely in private ownership or stored in archives and is rarely seen in public. So, in order to place the novel in the context of her work and to show how it fits within wider historical influences, we have included a small but representative sample of her images and other writings. Through this book we hope to bring her extraordinary work into wider knowledge and appreciation.
BIOGRAPHY
Margaret Ithell Colquhoun was born to British parents in Assam, India, where her father held a senior position in the Indian Civil Service. She was brought to England as a young child, the family eventually settling in Cheltenham. There she attended a well-known private school, Cheltenham Ladies College, and the local college of art, and then moved to London in October 1927 to study at the Slade School of Art, at that time the foremost art school in England. The Slade had been instrumental in the nascence of modern art in pre-WWI London. It had taught such painters as Augustus John—known for his espousal of postimpressionism—and a younger generation that included Mark Gertler, Christopher Nevinson, and Paul Nash. The important Bloomsbury painters Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington enrolled at the Slade, as did the vorticist artists Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, and David Bomberg, who published their anti-Bloomsbury and anti-Victorian little magazine Blast just a month before the outbreak of war. Colquhoun entered the Slade during the interwar period, only a few years after Eileen Agar had left it for Paris. As a measure of her skill and potential, Colquhoun shared the school’s prestigious Summer Composition Prize in 1929. She graduated at a time when, as it had been shortly before World War I, British art was being revitalized by its engagement with continental art movements, to which it had initially been slow to respond.
In the 1930s, the intellectual and artistic movement that left the greatest mark on the British scene was surrealism. Its watershed event in London was the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries. From June 11 to July 4, 1936, it attracted some one thousand spectators per day. The exhibition featured works by the major continental surrealists, supplemented by a program of talks and readings. Colquhoun attended a lecture by Salvador Dalí, during which, while bolted into a deep-sea diving suit, he very nearly suffocated. The poet and essayist André Breton, the movement’s leading figure, spoke to a crowded house. A young Dylan Thomas wandered about the gallery serving cups of boiled string.
Colquhoun was drawn to surrealism by the work of visual artists such as Dalí, but more importantly by the writings of Breton. Breton elaborated a theoretical framework for surrealism in which automatism, poetry, psychoanalytic theory, trances, and the study of dreams were used to challenge accepted