RECENT CHAT WITH DANIEL STANIFORTH OF
SKYLIGHT PRESS
It strikes me that your work is now
coming to a second perhaps third generation of readers who perhaps aren't quite
as aware of your background. You have retired from public service but
continue to be a prolific author on quite a few fronts. Tell us a little
bit about how you work and what you are up to these days.
Third generation? Yes, sounds a bit
awesome. Especially when I reflect that my first book, A Practical Guide to
Qabalistic Symbolism, and still going strong, was written fifty years ago. Having
reached my ninth decade most of my esoteric activities these days are done sitting
at a computer keyboard. And a lot easier that is, I must say, compared to the
old days of hammering away at a secondhand typewriter with three carbon copies
jammed in the roller. Correcting a mistake was a real hassle, a messy job with
an India rubber applied to all copies. I feel lucky that people still seem to
want to read my work and that Skylight Press is there to design it so well and
distribute it.
It has come to my attention that you are
a pianist and lover of music, particularly Jazz. Is music an escape or
release from your work or is it a part of the mystical experience? What
are your listening or playing habits?
The best thing about music making is doing
it along with other people. I led a traditional jazz band in my misspent youth,
spent summer weekends playing flugal horn and glockenspiel with a local brass
band in my middle years, and until recently filled the piano chair in a
rehearsal big band playing anything from Count Basie to Stan Kenton. I also had
a go at writing band arrangements, somewhat a bit off the beaten track, such as
modern jazz or old ragtime numbers for the brass band, including a cheeky
version of “The Stripper” (never to be played on Sunday afternoons or at church
fêtes!).
I still play the
piano a bit at home, and would be what might be called an improvising musician
– never playing anything the same way twice. As for listening, I like any jazz
from ancient to modern – pianists Jelly Roll Morton to Thelonious Monk, and
with a particularly soft spot for cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. Classical music
does not do a lot for me although I have recently been smitten by the astonishingly
gifted and lovely virtuoso Alison Balsom playing baroque trumpet.
You have written on the Oxford
The magical imagination has been best
demonstrated and theorized about by nineteenth century romantic poets – a fact
I learned from the former Hawkwood College principal Bernard Nesfield-Cookson,
from the poet Kathleen Raine, and from reading What Coleridge Thought by
anthroposophist Inkling Owen Barfield. I simply took the hint and plunged in.
I have always had a
leaning toward the French and when I retired from work took an external BA
degree in French at the University of London which gave me the ability to
translate a few interesting texts – introducing the faery Melusine of Lusignan
to the Anglosaxon world and getting closer acquainted with early Arthurian
romancers such as Chrétien de Troyes.
My introduction to your work was through
Experience of the Inner Worlds, which was first published almost 40 years ago.
Recently, you have worked on quite a few new editions of texts from your
early days, which must be quite an experience. Can you tell us what it is
like going back to these works? Do you feel that you have changed or
grown across the arc of your books?
The one I would really like to get back
to is A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism as it is showing its age
in some respects – most of the occultism is all right but there are some
embarrassing social comments which I would no longer identify with. I was able
to go some way to make amends with a new Introduction to the paperback edition
in 2000, although I am not sure that many people read Introductions!
As for my later
works, it may sound a bit complacent or conceited but I have not found much
need to revise them – in fact I have been quite awed by my former erudition.
Did I really read and comment on all the works of C.S.Lewis,
J.R.R.Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield for The Magical World of
the Inklings? So in all honesty it is not so much with a big head as
realizing I might have passed my best! Not likely to pull off that kind of
thing again, any more than doing unscripted weekend workshops off the cuff.
Time to pull in the horns a bit and play to what remain of my strengths. And I
share the experience of Dion Fortune in having, more than once, picked up a
book and read it with interest before realizing it to be one of my own!
Many readers might not know that you
spent many years working in the publishing trade both as a submissions editor
for a large publishing house and a proprietor of a small press. A lot has
changed since then. How do you see the current publishing world in
comparison to those days? What advice would you give to an aspiring
writer in your field?
I think large publishing houses are much
the same apart from getting larger and multinational in place of the old family
firms that had thrived for the previous couple of hundred years and more. When
I was with Longmans it was still run by the family since its foundation in
1724. In the modern world a middle sized publishing firm finds it hard to make
ends meet.
On
the other hand small publishing is a lot easier with the advance of technology
making short print runs feasible, and with increased distribution and promotion
opportunities via the internet. In my early days when printing was done with
slugs of hot metal in a Lynotype machine the only way I survived was by
scrounging money from generous benefactors and having a specialist mail order
bookshop on the side as a customer base. Mind you, publishing is still not as easy as it might
look!
As
for advice on writing – read a lot and write a lot. Read the very best in your
chosen genre, whether it be highbrow literature, journalism or pulp fiction.
And write at least a thousand words every day – most of it will be rubbish for
the first hundred thousand words or so but paper is cheap and recyclable. Above
all enjoy it, don’t give up the day job and be lucky! Very lucky! If getting rich
is your object you might do better to play the national lottery. Chances are
about the same, and you can use the money that you might have wasted on a
creative writing course.
Much of what you write is sought out by
what seems to be a robust 'specialty' or 'niche' audience of practitioners,
theorists, students and neophytes. But in a mainstream sense it is all
lumped together in the 'New Age' or 'Mind Body Spirit' sections along with
Alien conspiracy theories and blissed-out Angel picture books. What is
your sense of your readership - who do you write for?
I suppose I more or less write for
myself. A personal quest to research into something and hope a reasonable
number of like minded souls might care to pay the cost of a book to be looking
over my shoulder, so to speak. Which is not a very good formula for earning a
living but I have only ever looked upon it as a congenial hobby. The esoteric
world is a very fragmented one – with almost as many “isms” as there are
readers to go round. Just look at the shelves on a specialist occult book shop.
And then cast a glance at the occult shelf of a big book store to see a
smattering of elementary books geared to the lowest common denominator.
As perhaps the foremost 'elder
statesman' in the Western Mystery Tradition and yourself a part of Dion
Fortune's legacy do you have strong notions of lineage within the community?
Is there a core of new writers and thinkers to be excited about or have
things become too diffuse in our digital age of 'anything goes'?
As to lineage I suppose that I am a Dion
Fortune man. I was bowled over by her books when I first came upon them, and
learned my occultism in the society she founded, and have continued on from
there as the path has opened at my feet – for details of which see I Called
It Magic, my esoteric autobiography. Some people now talk of a “Dion
Fortune/Gareth Knight tradition” so I suppose I must have done something right.
However, the tradition is wider than that, and flourishing in many ways with
some very bright people coming through. For specific examples of which consult
the list of authors at Skylight Press!
Finally - people often comment on the
vast range of your subject matter and expertise - can you give us an inkling as
to what you're working on at the moment? What new topics can we expect?
Currently girding up my loins to cope
with the proofs of my forthcoming blockbuster The Book of Melusine of
Lusignan in History, Legend & Romance. On the translation front I am
two thirds of the way through another book by André Lebey, L’Initiation de
Vercingetorix a fascinating
evocation of the Celtic world of two thousand years ago, probably to be called Druids
against Caesar.
As for the next bit
of original work I am teetering on the edge of an ambitious and possibly
foolhardy attempt, if I should live so long, to cast some esoteric light on the
modern scientific world, or scientific light on the modern esoteric world, with
the provisional title of Stellar Alchemy & Magical Harmonics. Might
as well aim high and end with a Big Bang rather than a whimper.