The most disturbing section of the collection is one called "The Other World". Here allegory — as one supposes it to be — comes thick and fast. Fuller is exploring the sea, which has swept up on to the beach, and characteristically "has found nothing and understood nothing". He grows fins that propel him through the sea, and he becomes, he says, the herdsman and protector of a darting shoal of fish that he follows. He goes deeper down and finds "silent herds" with "winking antennae, jaws like basins of teeth, whole bodies turned inside out".
At this point I suddenly felt "What are you doing to us, John Fuller? Are you trying to drive us mad with your puzzling allegories?" I recalled Wordsworth's description of Isaac Newton, "voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone", and I thought it was very applicable to Fuller here. But there was a difference between the two men. Newton brought back lucid and rational ideas.
I decided that it was no use looking for rational correspondences to Fuller's adventures in the sea. You had simply to treat these prose pieces as surrealist works. In de Chirico's paintings of sinister piazzas with shadows encroaching, you just have to take in the general feeling of the pictures, and then let the odd toys, bananas and busts lying in the piazza mean whatever they can to you. Similarly, with Fuller's underwater adventures, all you can do is to share the swimmer's strange, contrasting feelings of fear, and at the same time of an affinity with this mysterious watery world, and take all the things that he finds in the ocean for whatever meaning, if any, you yourself can find in them. There will be no further help forthcoming from Fuller.
There is a variety of other pieces in the book. There is a series of paradoxical paragraphs about a figure called "The Great Detective", who concludes bitterly that the greatest crime in the world is insoluble, and has in practice become a law. There is plenty of food for thought, whether about God, mankind or the Devil, in that. And there is an entertaining but still quite complex passage of speculation, a kind of coda to that difficult dice game, which argues that the discovery of the cube, with its six faces that did not interfere with each other, taught men a new, more civil kind of relationship.
In 1970, Fuller wrote a very useful Reader's Guide to W.H. Auden, one of his great heroes. Anyone wanting to write a Reader's Guide to the Later Works of John Fuller will have a more daunting task.
At this point I suddenly felt "What are you doing to us, John Fuller? Are you trying to drive us mad with your puzzling allegories?" I recalled Wordsworth's description of Isaac Newton, "voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone", and I thought it was very applicable to Fuller here. But there was a difference between the two men. Newton brought back lucid and rational ideas.
I decided that it was no use looking for rational correspondences to Fuller's adventures in the sea. You had simply to treat these prose pieces as surrealist works. In de Chirico's paintings of sinister piazzas with shadows encroaching, you just have to take in the general feeling of the pictures, and then let the odd toys, bananas and busts lying in the piazza mean whatever they can to you. Similarly, with Fuller's underwater adventures, all you can do is to share the swimmer's strange, contrasting feelings of fear, and at the same time of an affinity with this mysterious watery world, and take all the things that he finds in the ocean for whatever meaning, if any, you yourself can find in them. There will be no further help forthcoming from Fuller.
There is a variety of other pieces in the book. There is a series of paradoxical paragraphs about a figure called "The Great Detective", who concludes bitterly that the greatest crime in the world is insoluble, and has in practice become a law. There is plenty of food for thought, whether about God, mankind or the Devil, in that. And there is an entertaining but still quite complex passage of speculation, a kind of coda to that difficult dice game, which argues that the discovery of the cube, with its six faces that did not interfere with each other, taught men a new, more civil kind of relationship.
In 1970, Fuller wrote a very useful Reader's Guide to W.H. Auden, one of his great heroes. Anyone wanting to write a Reader's Guide to the Later Works of John Fuller will have a more daunting task.
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