The Angel of the West Window

of the many mysterious statements from the spirits is “The Tree is sprung of a graft” and another, “He that is before is a Gardener”. From this kind of material Meyrink builds up the mysterious figure of Gärtner/Gardner, the imagery of the rose-trees and grafting and the whole mystic brotherhood into which the hero is taken up after his death. The real Kelley had had his ears cut off (for counterfeiting) before he met Dee, he was knighted by the Emperor Rudolf and he did die when he fell while attempting to escape from prison. He did also lust after Dee’s young (second) wife, but the details of that episode are stranger than Meyrink’s version: Kelley transmitted (invented?) orders from the Angel that they were to have all things in common, including their wives (Kelley was also married). When Dee demurred, he refused to take part in any more séances and left. After a while he returned and Dee had become so desperate for Kelley’s clairvoyant skills that he agreed to the wife-swapping arrangement; they even drew up a contract for a mariage à quatre which Meric Casaubon included in his edition of Dee’s records of his séances, A True and Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers Between Dr John Dee ... and Some Spirits published in 1659.

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In The Angel of the West Window there is a great difference between those parts of Dee’s life that take place in England and those that are set in Prague. The Castle of Mortlake could be a castle anywhere, it is merely the indistinct background to Dee’s experiments in alchemy and spirit-raising. Prague, on the other hand, is so vivid – both visually and in atmosphere – that is it almost a protagonist in the story. The castles of Hradcany and Karlštejn have a physical presence lacking in any of the English settings, a presence as powerful and as brooding as anything in Der Golem. The same is true of the two monarchs: both have an incalculable capriciousness, both rule in an atmosphere of suspicion, but whilst we see this in Elizabeth merely through Dee’s complaints about the way he is treated, in Rudolf it is there in the detailed physical description (including the famous Habsburg lip) and the repeated image of the bird of prey. Even today one can follow Dee and Kelley round those of the streets of old Prague that still survive, along the Street of the Alchemists, say, or through the Old Town Square. The Ghetto, where he goes to visit Rabbi Löw (who is also one of the main figures in Der Golem) has disappeared, but lives on in the imagination through its recreation by writers such as Meyrink. In spite of the figure of John Dee, The Angel of the West Window belongs to Prague, not to Prague the Czech capital. but to that Prague of the mind where the “other” world seems to make its presence tangible and in the creation of which Meyrink’s stories and novels played the most important role.

My New Novel

Sir John Dee of Gladhill! A name that few people will ever have heard of! It was about 25 years ago that I first read the story of his life – a life so adventurous, so fantastic, so moving and terrible that I have never found anything to compare with it. The account so etched itself on my soul that as a romantic young man I used to wander up to the Street of the Alchemists on the castle hill in Prague and daydream of John Dee coming out of one of the dilapidated doors of the crooked little houses and speaking to me of the mysteries of alchemy; not of the alchemy by which man seeks to solve the riddle of how to make gold from base metals, but of the occult art by which he strives to transform himself from mortal clay into a being that will never lose its self-awareness. There were months on end when the figure of John Dee seemed to have been purged from my memory, but then, often in dreams, it would reappear, distinct, clear and ineradicable. These dreams were rare but regular, not unlike the 29 February in a leap year that you have to imagine composed of four separate quarters before you can call it a whole day. We are all the slaves of our ideas, not their creators, and later, when I became a writer, I knew for certain that John Dee would not leave me in peace until I had resolved to record his life-story in a novel. It is now two years since I made the “resolve” to start the novel. But whenever I sat down at my desk I would hear an inner voice mocking me, “You’re going to write a historical novel?! Don’t you realise that all historical material gives off the stench of the grave, a sickening smell of mouldy feathers with nothing of the freshness of the living present?!”

But as often as I decided to give up the plan, “John Dee” would call me back to the work, however much I tried to resist. Finally I solved the problem by hitting on the idea of interweaving the story of a living, contemporary figure with that of the “dead” John Dee, of making the work a double novel, so to speak. – – Am I that living, contemporary figure? The answer could be yes or no. They say an artist painting a portrait always involuntarily puts something of his own face into the picture. It is probably the same with writers.

Who was John Dee? That is what the book is about. Suffice it to say he was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth of England. He advised her to make Greenland – and North America – subject to the English crown. The plan had been approved, the military were waiting for orders, but at the last minute the capricious Queen changed her mind. The map of