kaos

Grant. Does Spare imply in The Focus of Life that it contains a picture of Mrs Paterson?
No he doesn’t, neither the text nor the titles of the plates mention Mrs Paterson by
name or give any hint that might suggest her. It appears we are reliant on Kenneth
Grant’s sayso that Spare said one of the nude drawings in The Focus of Life was of Mrs
Paterson. Similarly, we have only Grant’s assurance that the picture referred to in Man,
Myth and Magic is of Mrs Paterson.
Spare published his last pre-Grant work in 1924, Anathema of Zos. He published
nothing afterwards. He met Grant in 1947 and supposedly began work on the Zos
Grimoire in 1948 and continued until his death in 1956. So he wrote nothing for 24
years after Anathema of Zos. Why did he begin to write again? In a footnote in the
introduction to the Book of Pleasure Spare mentions many drawings and chapters that
were left out of the book; in Outer Gateways Grant explains:
Spare had intended using the illustrations but he never wrote the chapters suggested by
them. Their substance, in the form of notes inspired by Yelda Paterson, was destroyed
during World War II. When I got to know him, I persuaded him to reformulate the lost
material. He did so, and it survives in the form of the Grimoire of Zos, parts of which I
included nearly thirty years later in Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare. [p 29]
The question remains, to what extent is the Austin Osman Spare we know from the
writings of Kenneth Grant a fictional product of Grant’s mind? Personally, I find the
portrait of Spare that emerges in Frank Letchford’s book far more engaging. Take for
instance this wonderful observation on Spare’s home life in contrast to his earlier social
pretensions and brief flirtation with an artistic salon:
What was the attraction to this circle for a youth fresh from working class surroundings?
Was he hypnotized by the charm and social courtesies? The democratic outlook, was it
genuine? Would it not have been a strain on his nerves to keep up a pretence, or was he
behaving in his natural manner? Certainly he must have maintained a false front on
social etiquette for it was his habit to eat cake off The Evening Standard in later years.
[p 61]
I also enjoyed a letter Spare wrote to Letchford on October 15, 1939, in which he
enclosed a sigil he had drawn but noted that he was unable to say whether the sigil was
“bollocks or something touching a reality greater than we know and only badly expressed,
so far, in ancient Fairy Tales”. [p 183]
JOEL
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