David Wheldon
poet, novelist, pathologist
novels
The Viaduct
An allegory of life as travel
and expectation. A man leaves his past and walks away from his
city along an abandoned railway. He discovers that the track
has become the home of innumerable travellers: the railway, in
its disuse, has become a linear metaphor of the human world.
Strangeness and unfamiliarity stretch away at either side of
the familiar onward perspective.
On this book’s first publication the critic of the London
Times said ‘The Viaduct is strange, original, gentle
to read. Long ago but never far away Dante and Bunyan took journeys
more identifiable but not so very different.’
‘The Viaduct is really
a remarkable novel.’
Graham Greene
‘It is a fascinating
and original work of art. I still remember the book long after
reading it; this is the real test of fiction.’
William Trevor
‘The Viaduct is a
mysterious gripping allegory — spare, accomplished and mature.
— a remarkable achievement.’
Janice Elliott, The Sunday Telegraph
‘It will be very interesting
indeed to see what this exceptional and accomplished writer does
next.’
Miranda Seymour, The Spectator
The Viaduct won The Triple First Award in 1982.
The final judges were the renowned authors Graham Greene and
William Trevor.
The book was published by The Bodley Head, Penguin Books and
the Book Club Associates in London and by George Braziller in
New York. The editors were Euan Cameron and Catherine Carver.
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The Course of Instruction
This book is a study of the freedom and development of a life
within a human hierarchy. A message arrives for a young researcher
at his lodgings: it has a peculiar meaning for him which is at
once intensely personal and beyond the power of words to describe.
In following its directions he leaves his familiar surroundings,
both mental and physical. Rationality becomes superficial and
ultimately selfish. ‘Even as recently as [the moment of
the letter’s arrival] he had never known how precarious
a state of mind self-confidence must be.’
Simply and sparely written, rapid in its progress, often very
funny, The Course of Instruction has been compared to
the satirical novels of Jonathan Swift. It gives a good entry
into David Wheldon’s work.
[PDF files of the text are available: see below.]
‘— a prose that
is spartan and scrupulous. . . . one suspects an urge on the
part of the author to give the matter and manner of fiction a
purer impulse. . . . a strange and deceptively unemphatic work.’
Paul Keegan, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The Course of Instruction
is about questioning what is taken for granted. . . by the end
of the novel, that complexity, that level of significance for
the everyday, is no longer peculiar or irrational, but is the
very logic of the narrative. By implicating you, the reader,
in that logic, Wheldon has achieved the feat of forcing you into
a reexamination of the basis of your own.’
Deborah Philips, City Limits
‘Things are rarely
what they seem in Kafka's world, or in David Wheldon’s;
but they are not strikingly different, either, at least on initial
acquaintance. It is possible at the outset to reconcile the small
discrepancies with a temporary laissez-faire engendered by eagerness
to conform; to participate: and with that first concession the
subject is committed far beyond his own foreseeing. Acceptance
becomes automatic as Alexander, [the researcher], is no longer
aware of the fundamental change in his situation. The book remains
enigmatic and absorbing to the end, leaving all options open
for the reader's individual interpretation.’
Marese Murphy, The Irish Times
‘Memorable surrealist
scenes. . . but the book's real excitement is that, like a Kafka
novel, it invites a continuous succession of interpretations.
We surround all our experiences, David Wheldon seems to say,
with unjustified assumptions, but without these we are lost.
So Alexander is lost without the course which he expected, or
when the servants do not behave like servants. Such an interpretation
only scratches the surface of this strongly recommended novel.’
Thomas Hinde, The Sunday Telegraph
‘The
very evasiveness and repetitiveness of the dialogue contributes
to an effect of hypnotic power.’
James Melville, British Book News
The Course of Instruction was published in hardback by The Bodley
Head and in paperback by Black Swan
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A Vocation
'From a tower in the mountains
the bells ring out, without prediction, at uncanonical hours...a
communication real enough but with no apparent purpose. The peasant,
who has heard the bells while still within his mother's womb,
seeks to find no meaningful sound beyond the elements of a system
by which he may live; the magistrate, an educated man, a representative
of the state, finds in the unpredictability only an arbitrary
and meaningless communication from above.
The landscape, both physical and spiritual, of David Wheldon's
strange and mysterious new novel, is seen through the eyes of
a foreigner who is both lost and ill: Thomas Colver, a traveller
through this land, who though he knows nothing of the place he
is in, sees the predicament of the magistrate as though it were
a parable, a paradigm of his own condition: in the attempt to
gain understanding, all logic becomes the logic of superstition.'
(The publisher's jacket description.)
'It is one of those books that
bypass the head and goes straight to the raw edge of consciousness
evoking an irresistible and disturbing response'
Janice Elliott, Sunday Telegraph
'Fascinatingly readable. . . whether taken as a meditation on the nature of signs or on the inescapability of faith, it is a book which is likely to echo disturbingly in the reader's mind.' Brian Firth, The Tablet.
'Now, to say that I could not
put this book down would be untrue. I did put it down frequently,
not from boredom but to savour and consider what I had just read.'
Peter Vansittart, BBC World Service, Book Talks.
'I was very impressed by Wheldon's
first novel, The Viaduct. He has a very distinctive style, private,
making no concessions to the reader, but with a peculiar and
convincing logic of its own. His new book, A Vocation, is equally
impressive.'
Michael Pountney, Publishing News.
At the Quay
A messenger arrives by boat at a river-port; his aim is to deliver
his message and be free. But the message — the content of
which is unknown to him — constrains him. From the first
strange formality of the opening moments of this book, the delivery
of a letter becomes the structure of a life, and, in a deep sense,
the totality of a person.
Throughout the story there hangs the parallel (and unasked) question:
can an individual's personhood be more than the partly-understood
formality of experience within a culture?
‘There are deep metaphysical
insights here.’ Iris Murdoch
‘It has the resonance
of ancient myth, and persuades us that profound mysteries are
inherent in the simplest questions.’
Kevin Loader, The Sunday Telegraph
At the Quay was published by Barrie and Jenkins, London
Days and Orders
This novel is a study of the nature of an individual within the
accommodation of an age. Little is taken for granted — not
even the fact of name or shared history. The novel itself can
be read as a modern translation of a work of a distant age and
is thus open to endless interpretations depending on the reader's
cast of mind. All is brought into question: even the cultural
nature of asking a question.
The protagonist, Gesso, arrives at an inn; he believes that he is searched for by an unknown man who arrived here with a message for him, but who has now left. Through a series of dialogues with a young serving woman, Mima, he attempts to elucidate the identity of the searcher and the nature of his message — but all that his questions are able to do is to show him that he has himself begun a search that is in some way parallel to that of the unknown stranger.
Unstated though troubling questions emerge. Is the world constructed by an unknown (and unknowable) part of oneself to stand interpretation by a knowable and known? Is this where the idea of one's own self begins? Is personhood a reality that transcends time or is it continually construed by the timeless love of another?
Days and Orders is a philosophical novel which, for
all the shifts of its internal consistency, makes considerable
demands on the reader. It has found no mainstream publisher,
and has been published by the author. The full text is available
by email (see contact page).
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poetry
The Uncompliant Stranger
The Muffled Drum
Drawings
The Uncompliant Stranger is a sequence of fifty-one sonnets.
These are universal creation poems—of person, of age, of
world.
In the printed edition the sonnets are arranged singly on each
page. Thirteen of these poems face dark and arresting drawings
by Sarah Longlands. Poem and drawing are related in sense or
mood.
The
Uncompliant Stranger (complete text)
The Muffled Drum
This is a sequence of thirteen poems, irregular, moody, contrasting
strangely with the metrical sonnet sequence they accompany. Thirteen
diverse voices — including those of Crazy Jane and an emigrant
— speak. Silence follows.
Titles, first lines and extracts
The Uncompliant Stranger and The Muffled Drum are presented
in a single volume.
The Present Perennial
contains the sequence Penrhos Garnedd, written in North
Wales; this is given here in full.
Titles,
first lines and extracts
Language in a Narrow Place
This is a collection of fifty-seven poems including the sequence
Senses and Elements. The question is asked: is it possible
to distinguish between the way of perception and that which is
perceived?
Language in a Narrow Place contains poems which seem foreign
to the culture of the age but which hold it up for examination
as though it were weightless.
Titles, first lines and extracts
A Road Assumed
This collection of poems was published in January 2000. It includes
the sequence In Eleusis, a developing metaphor of a life
as both day-break recalled and last-light presaged.
Titles, first lines and extracts
Night Altitude
This is a collection of 41 poems, personal and reflective; many
of these poems are meditations on the subtle and ever-changing
boundary between person and world.
Titles,
first lines and extracts
A Lens to the Sun
The poems in this collection range from the title-poem, A
Lens to the Sun, with its lapidary surface-simplicity, to
Neutral colour, ungendered touch, where thought is placed
astride the border of the physical and mental worlds. Both poems
are given here, together with When he had proved to them that
knowledge is innate, a commentary on Plato’s Meno
but equally applicable to our own world.
Titles,
first lines and extracts
The poems examine the ambiguous
and elusive nature of identity. Though they are various in style
— from the freedom of the six-line poem ‘The senses
change with hours’ to the formality of ‘The boundary
never to be crossed’ — each has a claim to be the title-poem.
Titles, first lines and extracts
drafts
have their own life, incomplete, unfinished,
fragmentary, seldom seen — perhaps this is for the best.
But the lack of conscious syncretion stands at an edge.
annotated poemsrecently written poems, with notes
made at the time of or shortly after writing. An author’s
view of his own work, of no more value than the view of another.
Details of conscious influences are given.
problematic poemsdifficult
poems which stand different readings in different moods. These
brief poems have a shifting interior life. A reading is helped
less by annotation or commentary than by a study of like-minded
poems by this and other writers.
Traduction Francaise
Contact
page(with
details of available texts)
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