Why is Forrest Reid so unknown?
There are a number of reasons why a novelist can fall out of fashion, but in the case of Forrest Reid, the story is rather more interesting. Here are the main reasons why you may not have heard of him before.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Reid felt strongly that youth was a period of innocence and perfection, and the transition into adulthood a form of corruption.
When he turned 16, he attempted to take his own life, rather than face the experience of growing up.
Aside from a few sexual experiences in his teens, he remained celibate for the rest of his life.
This is why he repeatedly idealised youth in his novels and depicted sexuality as a grotesque and evil force. For many readers, this kind of puritanical mindset can be quite off-putting.
HOMOSEXUALITY
As a child, Reid saw Oscar Wilde in the flesh, when the great writer paid a visit to Belfast.
After Wilde’s trial for gross indecency in 1895, there were few gay writers who would risk broaching the subject.
Reid seemed oblivious to such pressures, and wrote a fictionalised homoerotic account of his sexual experiences at school in his second novel, The Garden God, a book which so scandalised Henry James that he cut off all
forms of communication. Even Reid’s autobiography, Apostate, makes it clear that he fell in love with another male apprentice during his time at Musgrave’s tea and sugar merchants.
There is little doubt that this quality in his writing was likely to limit his widespread appeal, especially given the homophobic backdrop of the time.
ACCUSATIONS OF PAEDOPHILIA
In Brian Taylor’s 1980 biography of Reid, he made the false assertion that Reid had a sexual inter- est in small boys. Even though there isn’t a shred of evidence for this, many academics have made the mistake of accepting Taylor’s claim uncritically and repeating it ever since.
The truth is that Reid despised sex of all kinds, but he reserved his most fierce condemnation for those who abused children.
Critics who claim otherwise are either unfamiliar with the documented evidence, or are simply advancing their own agenda.
In either case, such accusations are not to be taken seriously.
LACK OF AMBITION
Reid was an artist, first and foremost. He was not interested in pleasing the public, or moving in the kind of fashionable literary circles that would benefit his career.
As E M Forster recalled, he “belonged to no clique and did not know how to pull wires, or to advertise himself”.
Without this inclination to network, Reid was closing himself off from further success.
A SINGULAR ARTISTIC VISION
In spite of the elegance of his prose and the accolades he received in his lifetime, Reid’s work tended to alienate most readers.
He repeatedly wrote stories about boys who shared his own peculiar paganistic outlook — idealised versions of his younger self — and almost always set his stories in Northern Ireland.
Although a contemporary of the Irish Literary Revival, Reid’s work stands apart. His disregard for nationalism, and politics, frustrates attempts to classify his novels.
Rooted in the landscape of Ulster, his stories are nevertheless underpinned by ideals closer to Hellenism than to any observable Celtic tradition.
Such stories were hardly ever likely to fly off the shelves.