Walter Evans Wentz: The Greatest Fairy Hunter of Them All?

Simon and Chris follow in the mystical footsteps of Walter Evans Wentz, who journeyed from New Jersey real-estate hustler to theosophic acolyte to roving collector of fairylore in the deep west. Tramping through Ireland, Scotland, Man, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, Walter sat by many a peat fire hearing tales of fairy nurses, stolen brides, knockers, pixies and the Gentry — and Chris wonders what these narrators really made of such a singular American. Along the way there is fairy seer extraordinaire Barney Crystal of Grange, Walter’s crush on W. B. Yeats, the spelling of Cambridge, the problem of fairy shorthand, and the question of whether Walt was a cold fish, a sociopath, a bully or an all-round good guy. There is also the strange afterlife of The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries in the Age of Aquarius (and just a tiny bit of the Tibetan Book of the Dead).

Transcript

[Chris] Alright, well, we're going to be talking about Walter Evans-Wentz's The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries today. When did you read this book? Was this something late in your fairy career?

[Simon] No, it was at the very beginning. When I was 17, I travelled down to Cambridge. I wrote an inscription in the front of my copy of Walter Evans-Wentz that I'd bought in Heffer's Bookshop in Cambridge. And I was essentially going to the university to see if I could get a place, something that I managed to do a couple of years later. But the bit I most like about looking at the dedication I wrote into the book is that this genius 17-year-old couldn't even spell the word Cambridge correctly. And I had this sensation reading it that the first part, it was just like running downhill. It was just extraordinary. All these accounts of fairies and meeting people who'd had this happen to them, or this happen to them. And then it became really quite dense with theory. And I remember in that very insecure way that teenagers have, just thinking, oh my God, this is just too clever for me. But soldiering on. Whereas today, when I read that second half of the book, I just shake my head at Paul Walter's delirium. What about you, Chris? When did you first come across Walter?

[Chris] Oh, probably 12 years ago. Ran across in one of your posts, blog posts, and got the book. And like you, I'm not a theory fan. So I enjoyed a bit of it. And then I actually gave it away to a friend. And I don't have a copy of it anymore. Shocking, I know.

[Simon] Wow. So we had really quite different experiences of this. For me, it was a foundational text. And for you, it was this curiosity that ultimately you couldn't find room for on your bookshelves.

[Chris] Right. I thought, I don't really have a use for this. It's Christmas. Let's send it to this friend who's interested in the subject.

[Simon] Now I'm anxious. So when occasionally I've sent you books that I've written, are they still on the bookshelf?

[Chris] Yes, they are. No, no, don't worry about that. Those are sacred.

[Simon] If this was done on video, Chris, I would now turn the camera to show you my wooded shelf. I mean, it really is a wooded shelf because with all your haunted Ohio's, I can sit over there. Anyway, they're all snug and safe.

[Chris] Okay, very good. Well, you'll have to will them to some institution. Perhaps Cambridge would like.

[Simon] Yeah, Cambridge, but not with an internal E. Remember this, Cambridge.

[Chris] Oh, dear.

[Simon] Why don't you kick us off with a reading,  to get into the wonderful world of Walter Evans Wentz.

[Chris] This is called Encounters with the Gentry. When I was a young man, I used to go out in the mountains over there to fish for trout or to hunt. And it was January on a cold, dry day while carrying my gun that I and a friend with me, as we were walking around Ben Bulben, saw one of the gentry for the first time. I knew who it was for I'd heard the gentry described ever since I could remember. And this one was dressed in blue with a headdress adorned with what seemed to be frills. When he came up to us, he said to me in a sweet and silvery voice, the seldomer you come to this mountain, the better. A young lady here wants to take you away. Then he told us not to fire off our guns because the gentry dislike being disturbed by the noise. And he seemed to be like a soldier of the gentry on guard. As we were leaving the mountains, he told us not to look back. And we didn't.

[Simon] You've picked, as is usual with you, Chris, an amazing passage there. This is actually from my favourite Irish source in Evans Wentz. This is a gentleman who Evans Wentz describes as B.C. With a little bit of crafty research, I've established that this was a gentleman in the area named Barney Crystal. And Barney had lifelong relations with fairies. He had lots of conversations. And my favourite bit of this particular account is actually the frills around the fairy's head. Because Walter Evans Wentz, I seem to remember in a footnote, suggests that these are actually the magnetic, colourful aura that the fairies give off. That seems incredibly unlikely to me. But anyway, I don't want to get into an argument with Walter yet.

[Chris] So who was Walter Evans Wentz who collected all these stories?

[Simon] the best way to think of Walter Evans Wentz is through his name, because he was a man of many names. When we first come across him in his early 20s, he went by the name Walter Wentz. And in his early 20s, with his father, he was making quite a lot of money on the East Coast, both in New Jersey and Florida, in building speculation. He then, in his later 20s, moved into education. He'd made quite a lot of money. And he went by the name Walter Yeeling Wentz. Yeeling seems to have been a surname back in the history of his family. And probably he was trying to be a little bit more waspy than the rather Slavic surname Wentz. In his very late 20s, 29, he travelled across to Britain and he went to Oxford. And there he changed his name from Walter Yeeling Wentz to Walter Yeeling Evans Wentz. Now, the reason for this was that Evans was one of his mother's names, and it was a very Welsh name. And it was Walter Evans Wentz's way of saying, I have a Celtic ancestry. And he was studying under John Rees, the great Celticist. So it had a kind of a sense. And when, in 1909, he published his first thesis at Rennes University in France, his name was Walter Yeelings Evans Wentz. But when, a couple of years later, he published, let's say, the final version of his fairy dissertation, he had become Walter Y. Evans Wentz. And after leaving behind the fairy world, after he put together this extraordinary publication in November 1911, he had a few years that he basically messed around in Britain. Then he travelled out to the continent, spent the First World War in Egypt, and then subsequently travelled to India. And Chris, I don't think we'll be talking about his later life much today. I hope we can focus on the fairies. But he did publish a number of Buddhist works, particularly, most famously, the Tibetan Book of the Dead that he basically funded and edited the translation, though he didn't have the ability himself to translate. And if you look at the front cover of that book, he is Walter Evans Wentz. The Y has now disappeared. And it's Evans Wentz with a hyphen.

So, this is someone who came a long way from being a hustler in New Jersey, Mr. Walter Wentz and his dad, all the way to Walter Evans Wentz, who published the Tibetan Book of the Dead all those decades later.

[Chris] It's interesting how much he kept altering who he was to suit his audience, as it were. You know, the Evans hyphen Wentz, it's more scholarly, it's more Oxford University, it's more academic, I think. And as you say, a link trying to prove he is one of the Celts.

[Simon] I wouldn't want people listening for the first time hearing this name, to think he's some kind of sociopath, in the sense he wasn't changing his name every two years. But there is a definite development as we go through. He's slowly defining who he is. And like you say, this Celtic element, the more scholarly hyphen coming in later on, it speaks to someone who is a work in progress. Maybe that's a good way to think of it.

[Chris] That's a fair, I think that's fair. Yes.

[Simon] And so with this, we come really to the fairy years. And I mean, what have you picked up from the book? What do you make of his collection of fairy accounts?

[Chris] Well, you know, I've read something about him as being kind of a cold fish. He was just kind of a different person. I don't know whether you would say today he's on the spectrum or something. But what did the people who he was associating with and trying to collect these stories from think of him? What did they think of this dashed American? Did they later say to their friends at the pub, you should have heard what I told that guy asking about fairies. He swallowed it whole. I can't square this cold fish with the idea that he met people and they immediately opened up to him about their fairy experiences, because this was what 1909 he was collecting 1908.

[Simon] Yeah, so he begins actually 1907. He starts collecting. Sorry, but he's at Oxford in 1907. So you're right, he starts collecting in 1908. And this goes all the way through to 1909. And in that time, he's trudging through what he considered to be the Celtic nations. So Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, man, Scotland, and of course, Ireland. And in that time, he's speaking to lots and lots of people. Now, my friendlier way of thinking of it is that actually Evans Wentz had this. He was able to get on with people. He was able to go into a tavern and start chatting to people. And I think he had a real passion for just getting to know people. He also had that great virtue of so many Americans coming to Europe that he lacked the easy snobbery of Europe and perhaps particularly Britain. So this was someone who would talk to anyone. It could be the vice chancellor of the university, or it could be this guy who's sleeping in a hut by the side of the road. And so I like to think of him as having a special gift, but I love your take on this. So Chris, you would argue that actually some of these people were perhaps having fun with him.

[Chris] Right. Reading the accounts, they fall into the standard patterns, a lot of them. And there's a few things that are completely outlandish, in my opinion, but most of them do follow the usual patterns. So maybe I wrong him, but he came from a family that was interested in theosophy. He was interested in theosophy and spiritualism. And those, to me, mean that his worldview was skewed by those beliefs. So he wasn't just collecting this as a folklore expert. He was collecting them because he believed.

[Simon] His father and Walter, he unfortunately lost his mother quite early, were both very interested in theosophy. Walter Evans Wentz, for instance, remembered reading Madame Blavatsky as a teenager and being incredibly excited. However, I think if we had given him this as an introduction, he would have said, no, but that's not true with my work on the fairies. Of course, I have a general spiritual worldview, which is my own and is a matter. But the book on the fairies that I published was independent of this. It was, a word that Evans Wentz likes a lot, scientific. And he would claim that he had transcended his narrow spiritual worldview to create something that was much more durable in time. Now, what we think of that, who knows, Chris? Personally, I think you often come across theosophic vocabulary in the book that he probably isn't even really aware is theosophic. And there were also a series of witnesses who are clearly from a theosophic point of view.

[Chris] Right. Yes, there were several. There was at least one that was unidentified. 

And I'm like, is that AE? Is that Yeats? And I find that's a flaw with the book. I love the anecdotes. I was walking along and I saw this lady in front of her pretty cottage and we talked about her garden and then she tells me stories all night. That's one thing. But then you get into the later parts of the book with all of this, I call it theosophical blather. It's like he's trying to force it into the fairy collections that he's made. 

[Simon] This is a reasonable take again. Once more, Evans Wentz himself would be rather upset that you'd said this. He had strong feelings that he had made the second half of this book very scientific and that so he was making a logical argument without trying to parody him too much. The conclusion for the book. And remember that this was published by Oxford University.

[Chris] I know.

[Simon] I know that is so unlikely that the conclusion for the book, Evans Wentz basically says. And so after these long chapters, we have concluded that fairies do in fact exist. And this may or may not be the case, but I really do not think that Walter Evans Wentz proves this one way or the other. He proves a series of his own prejudices. And if I could only go back in time and speak to poor Simon, the teenager in bed, reading this oh so difficult stuff, I would just say to him, look, you can't spell the word Cambridge yet, but take this on trust. You've read the first half of the book. Just shut the book. And if you're going to get this book after listening to us today, maybe find an online PDF or get in touch with one of Chris's friends for a cast off, then you will find that the first part of the book where he is actually wandering through these five nations is really, really quite exciting reading. It's the kind of thing you could pick up on a plane and three hours have gone by and suddenly you're landing and you're still in the middle of it. Whereas the second half of the book, I would describe it as a slog.

[Chris] Yes, absolutely. But also, I mean, I've noticed in the first part, I don't quite know what to make of this. It seems as though there's a certain amount of condescension living on the simple wholesome food of the peasants. And the Celtic peasant is still uncorrupted by this, that or the other thing. And he's comparing them to indigenous peoples in Australia or in Native Americans. If our Celtic peasant has psychic experiences, or if he sees an apparition, it is useless to try to persuade him that he is under a delusion, etc, etc, etc. He talks about them as nature's natural children who believe in fairies. It just seemed a little condescending.

[Simon] So I'm not in any sense a Celt. Maybe my feelings on this are somewhat beside the point. But let me defend him a little bit. First thing I would say is, I think that this kind of behaviour would have felt much worse coming from an English person, say, in 1910 or 1911. Walter Evans-Wentz gets away with a lot because he has a thick New Jersey accent. Passing through County Sligo or County Tipperary with an English accent in 1910, you could get a black eye. Whereas I think this guy, just whistling in the dark, walking along with this American accent, people are a little bit more patient than they would otherwise have been. And when you read his diaries that are now Oxford and haven't been published, again, there's this great interest in just chatting to people, and it seems to come quite naturally to him. The other point I'd make about condescension, and I don't know if this makes it better or worse, but Evans-Wentz really believed he was a Celt. For him, Celt meant the blood in your veins. It was very much, and this of course is deeply unfashionable today, but it was very much, let's say, a racial or ethnic category. It was about the DNA you carry. Yes, definitely. And he had this sense, and Chris, personally, I have little sympathy with this view of the world, but in his defence, lots and lots of people, including some of the very best read people in the world at that date, felt the same thing. And they particularly had this notion that the Celts, in some ways, were spiritually gifted. Now, I guffaw into my ginger beer when I hear this. Perhaps we can talk about some of the reasons for this later, but Evans-Wentz was not making this stuff up. He was jumping on a bandwagon.

[Chris] Well, he does say, being by birth an American, I was in many places privileged to enter where an Englishman or a non-Celt of Europe would not be. And my education under the free ideals of a new world democracy always made it possible for me to view economic, political, religious and racial questions in Celtic lands apart from the European point of view and the European prejudices. So, he does admit that he has sort of a different viewpoint and he has access where perhaps others wouldn't.

[Simon] Yeah, I think he's absolutely right about this. And in the same way that when I've travelled in North America as an outsider, I see things that probably to you aren't particularly striking because you're a fish in water, you don't recognise the peculiarities of your environment. If we transfer Chris Woodyard back to 1910 and send you off walking through County Sligo, you'll probably see many more things than a Simon from 1910 would have been able to.

[Chris] That's true, that's true. At any rate, I find the condescension a little bit unsettling. It was a piece, you know, it was of the time.

[Simon] It was of the time, Chris. Walter Evans-Wentz had very strong feelings about, quote-unquote, the Celts. Today, we're a little bit more reluctant to use that label in anything bar languages. So, in terms of culture, in terms of archaeology, in terms of history, it's a little bit of a beehive and I don't want to particularly kick the beehive. But the way I would interpret the number of Celtic fairies in the book is this, that in the areas that he was travelling, it is true that there was probably more supernatural beliefs to be found than in many non-Celtic areas. By non-Celtic, I mean areas that had been speaking English for centuries and centuries, or in the case of Brittany, French. But I think the real key to understanding this is that Celtic languages had survived in the most rural and isolated parts of Brittany, in the case of France, or what we call sometimes the Celtic fringe in the case of Britain and Ireland. What you're really seeing is not the survival of fairy beliefs in Celtic lands. You're seeing the survival of fairy beliefs in isolated rural areas. And if Evans Wentz had got off his high nationalist Celtic horse and had gone to some valleys in Yorkshire, he would have actually found many very interesting fairy beliefs from the same period. This Celtic classification was just a useful way for him to identify certain rural and isolated areas. And we can be incredibly grateful that this guy recorded so many fairy accounts from the Isle of Man, from Cornwall, from Scotland, etc., that we wouldn't otherwise have.

[Chris] I associate it also with the Celtic Twilight, that Irish literary revival, because he sort of was sucking up in the dedication to Yeats. Perhaps he would have not admitted to being influenced by it. But all this Gaelic mysticism, I really think he was at least subliminally influenced.

[Simon] At Stanford, where he studied in the US in his mid-late 20s, he'd actually been to lessons. Yeats was a visiting professor. And he later visited Lady Gregory when Yeats was staying at a house in Ireland. And I think he spent three days there. And he had a couple of other appointments with Yeats. As you noted, A.E. appears in the book as a witness. So he definitely came into contact with these people. And in his diary, I remember one late entry where I think he's walking in Dublin by the side of the river, and he spots Yeats walking. And it's at the time of trade union activity and protest against the British. And the way he writes about Yeats, he had a crush on the man. So it was very, very strong. And I think Evans-Wentz was very happy to be part of this broader Celtic Twilight movement. For Yeats, it was above all about Irish nationalism and the independence of Ireland, something, of course, that Yeats lived through. For Evans-Wentz, though, it was about a wider consciousness. Evans-Wentz, and this is very theosophic, was not particularly interested in the nitty gritty of politics. He was more interested in the high lofty ideals. And so he has an amazing essay on Celtic nationalism where he suggests bringing together in one of the Celtic countries a meeting place of all the Celtic peoples where they will meet for special Celtic festivals and the Druids will come together. And I mean, yeah, that's my view, but he was paid up. Well, we've talked about the man, we've talked about the Celts, we've talked even a little bit about the witnesses he spoke to, but let's talk about the fairies. What is your general impression here?

[Chris] I think there are a lot of just sort of standard issue fairy stories. I mean, you've got the nurse and the ointment, the fairy midwife who get, you know, and when they get blinded, you've got brides taken, you've got tiny people wearing red and green, you've got knockers and pixies. So to me, it's wonderfully put together in terms of transcribing the speech as the stories were actually told. But most of the stories seem to be pretty much standard issue.

[Simon] My dominant feeling in reading these accounts is gratitude, because I feel that in many of the cases, these are stories that would not otherwise have arrived. And I've recently been looking at a book that the bank scholar Stephen Miller is putting together on the fairy lore of man. And Stephen is a really careful, persistent collector of fairy lore. And I'm not saying that Evans-Wentz is 40% of his fund or anything like this. But clearly Evans-Wentz is one of the important sources. And for me, of the five sections, the one that I've used the most over the years is the one on Cornwall. And there too, he's getting us accounts that otherwise would have been lost, whether they are standard or not. I would also push back a little bit. I'd say there's lots of stuff that is rather unusual. And here, I think that Evans-Wentz had tastes a little bit like our own. And he liked these more 40 and experiential accounts, where we don't just have tales, we actually have people drop down into a situation who live an experience, like poor old Barney on the mountain, who you were describing before.

[Chris] I wonder about Barney. It sounded like he was well known as a local eccentric. What did his neighbours actually think of him? Did they think he was, you know, oh yeah, he's just one of those people that hears voices? Or did they really believe that he was in touch with the gentry?

[Simon] Evans-Wentz was absolutely fascinated by Barney. And he went to Grange in Sligo, where Barney lived for the first time in 1908. And he met Barney, and he also spoke to many of his friends. And in Evans-Wentz's own rather strange way, he was very scientific about the collection. So he talked to Barney for a long time. And you can imagine Evans-Wentz's joy at finding someone like Barney, because the experience that you talked about was just one of 20 or 30 that this guy claimed to have had in his life. For instance, he claimed that he was rescued when he fell off a boat by the fairies, stuff like this. But he also talked to Barney's friends and wrote down their impressions. And Barney's friends, there's a lovely little bit of Irish snobbery there about how, yeah, you know, he's a strange man, but he comes from a good family that's fallen on bad times. And there were a couple of stories around Barney that evidently circulated in the community. And this one, and I give you this, not because it's particularly dramatic, but because we see how Evans-Wentz works. Evans-Wentz recorded that three of Barney's friends were going to travel with him to Sligo, probably to go to the market there. And Barney said, look, I just need a little bit of money. Someone's coming along to give me some money. And at a certain point, these three men saw a stranger go up to Barney, give him something. And minutes later, Barney comes trotting down the road and says, come on, lads, off we go. Now, in a very Irish way, no one talked about what had happened while Barney was there. But the other three were convinced, or at least thought it likely that this stranger had been a fairy. Remember that we're in a rural area here where you know everyone. I mean, who is this guy you've never seen before? What I find fascinating here is that in 1909, Evans-Wentz came back to Grange. It was very strange of him to return to the same place. And he looked at the stories again. And ultimately, this story that he had put into his university dissertation at the University of Rennes, he left out of his Oxford doctorate. And it doesn't appear in the book that then comes out with Oxford University Press in 1911. In other words, Evans-Wentz had decided that it wasn't reliable enough. Because remember, he's not interested in what the neighbours think. He's interested in whether fairies exist or not. From our point of view, I would say to what you said, Chris, it does suggest that the neighbours felt something strange was going on around Barney. And thanks to Evans-Wentz's extensive notes, we can establish that. 

[Chris] Okay, now you said, you said recorded. He recorded this story. How did he do that? Did he have shorthand? He obviously didn't have a tape recorder. How accurate? Did he take down notes while he was talking to these people? Or did he do it after he went back to his own place?

[Simon] I have been through Evans-Wentz's diaries and notebooks at the University of Oxford. And I think I've read them all at least once, and some of them a couple of times. Many of these notebooks and diaries were destroyed, apparently because of a flood. I'm not sure what the background is there. Anyway, we do not have everything. It seems to me that what happened was that Evans-Wentz had two ways of recording. He had his diaries, where he gave more general reflections. For example, when he's in Grange, he describes meeting these people, but doesn't particularly go into their experiences, and actually talks more about a calia, an anti-British concert that was put on in the town that he went and attended. And then you have the notebooks, where we don't have the notebooks from Grange, unfortunately. But we do have some other notebooks with material that is then recorded in the book. My impression is that he listened very carefully and then went home and wrote it down. So, there might be five, six hours between him actually listening and going back and writing it down. Maybe he had a piece of paper that he was writing very basic notes on before he wrote up his notes. I don't know.

[Chris] I was just curious if there was any information on his actual technique.

[Simon] There's no information given by him, and one would hope that a modern ethnographer would do better in that respect, if they were to publish a book like that today. The only thing we can do is reconstruct it from the books and diaries that were not lost in this awful flood.

[Chris] Now, I was looking in the newspapers for stuff about Evans-Wentz, and I found this really interesting article from the Trenton, New Jersey, one of the Trenton, New Jersey papers, 1912. And it was headed, Chris Wentz's son publishes a book. And it talks about Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, formerly of this city, has recently published a very interesting and scholarly volume titled The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. And much of the rest of the article is a lot of family gossip about the family living there and where they moved and all that. Mr. Wentz is a great walker. His friends here will watch with interest his literary career so auspiciously begun. But it mentions, after it talks about The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, he has another book along similar lines nearly ready for the press, which will shortly appear. Do you know what book that was?

[Simon] there are three different things that are going on, of which we have two. The first one is 1909. His Thesis at Rennes is actually published and is available out there. And it does have some fairy accounts that don't survive into the doctorate that is then that we don't have. But the doctorate, I think, is 99 percent what becomes the book in November 1911. So if that article had been two or three years earlier, then we would have an easy explanation for what's going on. But 1913, that can only mean that Evans Wentz had mentioned to someone back in New Jersey, yes, I'm planning another book. Now, the bottom line is we do actually have a lot of material from Evans Wentz messing around, particularly in Britain, in the months and the immediate years leading up to the Great War. And by 1912, 1913, 1914, Evans Wentz had become a kind of C-list celebrity in Britain. And when someone wanted a view on fairies, he was the person you rang. And not many people did want a view on the fairies. But sometimes he was asked to speak at societies. He also wrote a couple of articles defending the existence of fairies. But I don't think we have any clue of a book. At this time, Evans Wentz, I think, really believed he was in it for the long run, as often happens with people studying fairies. It's this fascinating field. And oh, my goodness, it's so interesting. And there's no sign in those years leading up to the Great War that something was changing. But he then disappears. He goes to travel in Europe for a long time, and he ends up when the Great War is beginning in Egypt and stays there for several years. And I think that that next phase of his life is kind of the years that the locusts ate, in the sense that this is between his great work on the fairies, and then also his important work in India on various Buddhist texts, again, with this theosophic background. And there's a decade or so of lost time there. I once read a reference that in Egypt, he collected some folklore, and he was hoping to publish that. We never hear anything else about that. And there's nothing in his notebooks or diaries there. I suspect like many of us, he was someone who had projects, and maybe he actually managed one in three of his projects, which isn't bad. And probably in this very interesting article, from what you're saying, probably we're hearing about one of these plans that didn't come to fruition.

[Chris] All I can think of is Marie Campbell, telling Catherine Briggs that she's got these six or seven books ready for publication.

[Simon] But to be fair, there we have someone who personally, I think, confabulated over years and years. I think this is Evans-Wentz just casting off an idea. I mean, I'm sure if I recorded conversations with Chris Woodward over the last 10 years about her plans for publications, there are several books that you thought about, where today you can't even recognise the title.

[Chris] I don't know. I'm pretty consistent with what I want to get done.

[Simon] Well, I am less so. So I have some sympathy for Evans-Wentz. One thing I will say is that when he published the book, he was very, very confident in how important and big a book this was. And he was looking for reviews because he wanted to take the really quite unusual stance of answering the reviews. And you and I know that if someone writes a snotty review for one of your books, maybe you go and have a bath and cry. Maybe you drink whiskey and don't. But in the end, you just let it be because this is the nature of publishing. Evans-Wentz took things very, very seriously. The thing that really deflated him was this heartbreaking moment. And imagine what this does to this rather supercilious, relatively young American. He writes to Oxford University Press talking about the success of the various people that he's been chatting with about the book and the relatively positive reviews. And he says that he's got plans for the second edition. And OUP write back in this killer letter that just says, Dear Mr. Wentz, thank you very much for this. I think you should know that we have so far sold 34 copies and that it is therefore very unlikely there will be a second edition. You're sincerely XXX. And yeah, poor old Evans-Wentz. Of course, he wasn't to know that a century in the future, you and I would be dedicating an entire and precious podcast episode to his book. And it's become one of the classics. But back in the 1910s, that didn't seem to be the case.

[Chris] Okay, that's very interesting to hear. 35 copies. The nature of academic publishing.

[Simon] I must say that being an editor of an academic press series, I'm always astounded at how few copies are sold. I mean, it really is very, very striking. But 35, even by today's standards, is pretty poor.

[Chris] Okay, we've been talking about his legacy and his book not selling, but when did it actually break through to be a popular book?

[Simon] I think it really breaks through with the age of Aquarius. I think it's one of those things that in the 1970s, as people are tuning in and dropping out and all this nonsense, this is a book that suddenly reappears. It comes out in cheap editions. And in 1990, I bought maybe the sixth or seventh different edition in one of these small popular presses. And so from then on, it became central in the growing number of new ages, ageing hippies, various generally, and it became a classic. And so that's when the book comes through. And it's always worth remembering, if you're out there and you bring out a book that you've spent a decade on with lots of source material, and you feel, oh, my God, I've sold 35 copies, this has just been such a waste of time. I mean, just make sure that that book has an afterlife, because if it has lots of original material, and this is what makes Evans-Wentz special, it's the interviews with all these witnesses. If it has that material, there's always the chance it will flower a generation or two generations later.

[Chris] Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I had one of the 1970s editions, it was a hardback, and I wish I could remember the press because they reprinted a whole bunch of spiritualist and ghost type books from earlier that were in the public domain.

[Simon] What's a little bit sad is that Evans-Wentz went to India, he became more dedicated to theosophy. And for him, looking at medieval Buddhist texts, even though he didn't deign to learn the languages became his way of doing this. By the end of his life, Evans-Wentz had pretty much decided that his earlier dalliance with the fairies was just a slightly weird and eccentric part of his past. Not something that he was ashamed of at all, but it wasn't what he was really about. And most people who write about Evans-Wentz are writing about him as a scholar of Buddhism. They're also surprised by this crazy two or three years with him walking up and down hills in Scotland and the Isle of Man. But I just wanted to say, for me, the sad thing is this, Evans-Wentz dies in 65. He died a little bit too early to see the regurgitation of his Oxford thesis and how important it would be. And again, Chris, then over to you. If I could say one word to Evans-Wentz, if I have a Ouija board or he came back from the dead, I would just say, thank you.

[Chris] He was interested in general in, as it were, airy-fairy spirituality. And he just kept moving in a different direction with Buddhism and all the tantric book of the dead, etc.

[Simon] He would have seen it as a progression and surely we do too. I mean, it's one thing if you study fairies and then 20 years later, you start studying the intimate details of 14th century wool exporting. But obviously, there is a line that goes from him as a teenager reading Madame Blavatsky late into the night, from him walking around Tipperary talking to people about fairies, and from him bullying various Tibetans into translating their holy texts. 

[Chris] Did he bully? 

[Simon] Sorry, I probably shouldn't have used that word. There is some resentment that he's very much an outsider. And he doesn't know the Tibetan languages. And he is basically commissioning and editing people who know the language to translate so he can actually make the edition in English. And part of us today would think it's a little bit unfair that it's just his name on the book cover. And I'm sure that Tibetan scholars are grateful for at least the fact there was this early book that came out, another book that would do very well in the age of Aquarius. He died too soon.

[Chris] Well, I look at him as a bit exploitive myself. I mean, he wasn't paying his witnesses. I don't if he paid his translator for the Book of the Dead. I assumed there must have been some kind of compensation. But I don't know. I still just think he's a little bit... He ended his life as a hermit, basically, living in this hut in Ojai, California. And I'm like, okay, you chose that. You chose this ascetic life. And then you're talking about these peasants and their simple food. They didn't choose that. So I'm just thinking he's just a touch exploitive.

[Simon] One thing that you and I have in common is I suspect we're fairly, let's say, cynical people in that we have a fairly low view of human nature. And yet here I have to disagree a little bit. I think that Evans Wentz meant well. Now, that might not be enough, but I think he had a good heart. I'm not a huge fan of Theosophists, as you well know. Something else that perhaps we have in common. He had a good heart. He got things done. Sure, he did it a little bit brashly, perhaps sometimes in a rather vulgar fashion. To talk about being exploitative, maybe, Chris, that's too far.

[Chris] What about the rent boys?

[Simon] Oh, God. Oh, please. Are we really going to get into this?

[Chris] Well, that just struck me as exploitive, perhaps a little prurient interest, even if he didn't have actual connections with these young men, he was obsessed.

[Simon] So here we're moving into one of Theosophy's several Me Too moments. And the story here is that when Evans Wentz left Britain and travelled in Southern Europe and then before he crossed to Egypt, he became absolutely fascinated by male prostitutes, particularly around Nice on the southern coast of France. And he seems to have been really quite upset by their condition. And he recorded in his diaries a series of conversations with them. We don't know anything about Evans Wentz's sexuality. But we should say, though, that in his notebooks, there is one book called Sexual Inversion. Now, of course, Sexual Inversion is a rather 1940s way of talking about homosexuality. And it's possible that this was something that Evans Wentz, that he was perhaps homosexual. If he was, we have no evidence that he ever acted on these desires. And of course, the ascetic side that you've already talked about, it's possible that he was able to control his desires. I mean, defending him in this specific instance, I would say that it's very possible, human nature being what it is, that he did have some kind of fascination for these young men. But we have absolutely no evidence that he did anything incorrect.

[Chris] So, further readings.

[Simon] There was a man named Ken Winkler who brought out a book called Pilgrim of the Clear Light, the biography of Dr Walter Y. Evans Wentz. I think the book originally came out in the 1990s. Now, I have this book somewhere on my shelves, but irritatingly, I can't find it. But I've read it, and it's a serviceable, if very short, biography. It does tell us something important about Evans Wentz, though Ken Winkler doesn't put it in these terms. There's little to talk about. I mean, this is someone who had an incredible life. But in terms of his personal life, his close relationships, and here, perhaps, we justify your claim of the cold fish. It's almost as if there's a hollow at the centre of his life. Now, I don't think for a second that Evans Wentz was hollow, but probably his private life remained very private.

[Chris] Yeah, that's what it seems like. We really don't know the man.

[Simon] Do you have any other suggestions for readings on Evans Wentz?

[Chris] I don't. As you say, there's not much out there other than his own books and people writing introductions to them. But no, I've got nothing.

[Simon] If you want to know more about Evans Wentz, you have to forget about The Fairies, at least initially, and go and look at the Tibetan scholars' writing, because they've dug down much deeper into his work in that way. Having said that, we need, for the English-speaking world, a really good, long, 10,000-word chapter with full notes on Evans Wentz. And maybe part of that can be the issuing of some of his notebooks from Oxford, not all of which have been published, some of which still remain unedited.

[Chris] Okay, well, there's your next job.

[Simon] Yeah, I can see my summer flying by. Chris, why don't we go to a final reading?

[Chris] Right. Well, this comes from Neil Colton, who was 73 years old, and he lived on the shores of Loch Derg, County Donegal. One day just before sunset in midsummer, and I a boy then, my brother and cousin and myself were gathering bilberries up by the rocks at the back of here, when all of a once we heard music. We hurried around the rocks, and there we were within a few hundred feet of six or eight of the gentlefolk, and they dancing. When they saw us, a little woman dressed all in red came running out from them towards us, and she struck my cousin across the face with what seemed to be a green rush. We ran for home as hard as we could, and when my cousin reached the house, she fell dead.  Father saddled a horse and went for Father Ryan. When Father Ryan arrived, he put a stole about his neck and began praying over my cousin and reading psalms and striking her with the stole, and in that way brought her back. He said if she had not caught hold of my brother, she would have been taken forever.