A SORCERER DWELS: Original typescript of his unpublished first novel.

A 150-page typescript containing the complete "missing" second draft (more accurately, the second version) of Simon Raven's first novel, written in 1951 (eight years before the appearance of 'The Feathers of Death'). The typescript is in good or better condition, the edges a little creased and nicked, but clean and very well preserved. It is housed in a black cloth-covered chemise inside a quarter black morocco solander box, with five raised bands lettered and ruled in gilt, all custom-made by the Chelsea Bindery. Also included are a comb bound facsimile of the typescript (only one copy of which has been produced for ease of reading) and a fine, signed and dated first edition of 'An Inch of Fortune', the 1980 published version of the novel complete with the author's entertaining and informative preface. The typescript of 'A Sorcerer Dwels' uniquely restores a significant gap in Raven's bibliographical (and indeed biographical) record.

In his biography of Simon Raven, Michael Barber notes that by the end of his second year at Cambridge, Raven was "heavily in debt". £75 had to be paid "on pain of banishment to lodgings in the town". By chance, Patrick Wilkinson, College Tutor at King's, had been asked to recommend an undergraduate to be employed for the summer as private tutor to a sixteen-year-old boy, or as Raven later wrote, "bear-leader to the erratic and erotic son of an hysterical millionairess". Barber includes a pair of entertaining letters sent to Noel Annan at the time in which Raven details some of his adventures while in tow with "Mrs P[leydell]-B[ouverie] (please call me Audrey) [,] a neurotic and dynamic woman who has been through three husbands and picked up a good deal of money on the way" and her son, Angus, "extremely good-looking and very bright in the head; the trouble being that he is never, properly speaking, his own 16 years at all:—he is either a good 18 (existentialism, extra-sensory perception, Beardsley) or, more often, a bad 12— toy soldiers, American comics, all the keys of an upbringing in a cosmopolitan Swiss 'school'" and, not least, one "Dr Csato, an Hungarian £30 per diem psychiatrist, who is coming to vet the boy." The following summer, Raven wrote up his experiences at home and abroad with the P-Bs as a short novel entitled, with a nod to Forster (who Raven later befriended), 'A Passage to Biarritz' ("Mrs Pleydell-Bouverie favoured Biarritz", Barber writes, "for snobbish reasons: it was here, at the Hotel du Palais, that the Windsors and their entourage, spent August."). He submitted the manuscript to his friend Roger Lubbock at Putnam, "who very properly refused to publish it on the ground that it was libellous. I had barely troubled, as he pointed out, even to change people's names", although he was given hope of future publication if he completely rewrote it. By the end of 1951, he had done this, but it was rejected again despite changing the names, the principal setting (from Biarritz to Venice) and much else besides. 'A Sorcerer Dwells' is that completely rewritten second draft (the final page dated "11. 11. 51") which, according to Raven, vanished completely after he abandoned the project. He possessed no copy (which may explain the absence of its title – from Milton's 'Comus' – in later accounts of the work's evolution) although he did retain one of the first draft which, safely after the death of Mrs P-B, was published in 1980 as 'An Inch of Fortune' (the title from Shakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra'). A hitherto unknown variant of Raven's first attempt at prose fiction, differing substantially both in structure and countless particulars from the version eventually published, the typescript (with a few holograph emendations) fills a notable gap in Raven's bibliographical record, as well as the long-lost missing link in the wonderful story of the novel's slow journey to publication. (Michael Barber, 'The Captain: The Life and Times of Simon Raven', London, 1996).