Forrest Reid’s name may not be widely known to readers today but in his time he was a culturally important author of 17 novels, two autobiographies, essays, literary criticism and translation work. Born in Belfast 150 years ago, on June 24th, 1875, Reid was the youngest of 12 children – six of whom survived – and came from a middle-class Protestant family.
His father was the manager of a felt works, later becoming involved in a failed shipping venture. On his mother’s side he could claim descent from Catherine Parr – the last of the six wives of Henry VIII – and a source of pride to the young boy.
Reid was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (known as ‘Inst’) founded in 1810. However, he was unable to continue with his education owing to his family’s difficult financial circumstances, and in the early 1890s became apprenticed to the tea trade but found the work boring. His father died when he was young, and following the death of his mother in 1901, he inherited a small legacy which enabled him to enter Christ’s College Cambridge graduating with a degree in medieval and modern languages.
The Kingdom of Twilight, Reid’s first novel came out in 1904, while his coming-of-age novel Following Darkness – known under the literary genre Bildungsroman – was published eight years later in 1912. A leitmotif in his writing is childhood and the loss of innocence.
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Reid developed lifelong friendships with illustrious figures in the literary world, and by extension the Bloomsbury Group, made up of artists, writers and intellectuals who it is said ‘“ived in squares and loved in triangles.” He became a close friend of the poet and novelist Walter de la Mare, writing a critical study of him.
In 1912, E. M. Forster, whom he met at Cambridge and whose novels include The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, and A Passage to India, wrote to Reid praising his third novel, The Bracknels, stating, “the book has moved me a good deal”. For 35 years the two corresponded through several hundred letters and cards showing mutual affection in discussing literature and culture, as well as political crises such as the debate over the Third Home Rule Bill (1912-14).
Letters from the American-British author Henry James offered Reid writing tips along with suggested book recommendations. But their friendship turned hostile after Reid dedicated to him his homoerotic novella The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys. In a review of a biography of Reid published in 1980, the novelist V. S. Pritchett, noted that James “was embarrassed and angered by the platonic eroticism of the book and broke off the relationship in a panic.”
Aside from his novels, Reid published translations in the form of Poems from the Greek Anthology (1943) while his analysis of the work of W. B. Yeats (1915) is regarded as one of the best critical studies of the poet. A founder member of the Irish Academy of Letters, Reid was made honorary Doctor of Literature by Queen’s University Belfast in 1933.
For many decades his books disappeared from the literary canon, but this century has seen a renaissance of interest in his writing with at least 10 of his novels reissued in fresh editions since 2007. Several of his novels have been republished in the Faber Finds series which has also reprinted Sean O’Casey’s Autobiographies.
In Reid’s autobiography, Apostate (1926), which he described as his “chronicle of a prolonged personal adventure”, he evokes locations around Belfast in the early 1880s. He recalls the subdued notes of a band playing in Ormeau Park, the sensory experience of a hot summer’s day on the banks of the River Lagan, and a walk with his nurse through the Palm House Conservatory in Botanic Gardens which he called “a tropical landscape”; all of this fed into his memories, expressing the dream visions of his rhythmic prose.
A second autobiography, Private Road, was published in 1940 with an account of his Cambridge years, and of his meetings with the author, poet, and critic AE, the pseudonym of Geroge Russell. In that book he also scorned Henry James’s “strange moral timidity” in rejecting his earlier dedication.
Reid penned essays on other writers including the playwright and novelist Seamus O’Kelly. Although he never attained huge commercial success, his work was well received. Irish authors, such as John McGahern, recognised the quality of his writing, admiring the way his prose captured specific scenes in his book Brian Westby (1934).
In 1944 Reid’s novel, Young Tom, was awarded the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best work of fiction in that year. Three years later, on January 4th, 1947, he died of peritonitis at Warrenpoint in Co Down. Today a plaque marks his last Belfast home while his memory survives in his old school where a Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for Creative Writing is awarded each year.
