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Nicholas Hagger Literary Author / Man of Letters |
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2. Writer of Prose
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A. Short Stories Four volumes were published by Element between 1995 and 1999. A fifth volume is included in Collected Stories (see 6 below), a one-volume edition of 1,001 stories published by O Books in January 2007. Nicholas Hagger’s very short stories create a new genre: the symbolic or miniature story. Each story expresses an eternal truth through an image conveyed in a vivid title, and can provide the reader with a complete literary experience in a few minutes. They make ideal reading for the train, in bed, in hospital or as a classroom text. Each volume covers a decade, starting with the 1960s and ending with the 2000s, while each story stands on its own but chimes to a theme, the development being from horror to acceptance.
Published by Element in 1995
The first volume in a series of four includes the stories Nicholas Hagger penned during the 1960s and early 1970s. They state the horror of the materialist outlook and seek meaning. Vivid, compact and uplifting, these deftly crafted short stories by a scholar and writer of rare intellect and learning are supreme vignettes of human life. Written in the tradition of Hemingway’s The Revolutionist and Cat in the Rain, Nicholas Hagger’s portrait miniatures lift the veil on the lives of men and women in all walks of life. Writing with masterly economy, he reveals and illuminates the essential truths of mankind. Their brevity, strongly reminiscent of Joycean ‘epiphanies’, makes these short stories perfect travelling or bedtime reading.
2. A Smell of Leaves and Summer Published by Element in 1995
The stories in this second volume cover the period following Nicholas Hagger’s life-changing and shattering experience after he embarked on a unique quest to find the reality behind the universe. They emphasise spiritual reality. The world he depicts in these pithy, acute stories teems with vitality. His enlightened vision of men and women and the lives they lead brings us penetrating and compassionate insights into the human condition. Revealed, too, is the reality beneath the surface – the Being behind the becoming – that is never very far away. Nicholas Hagger offers us a unique, synthesising vision within everyday life of the aspirations that have shaped history down the ages.
3. Wheeling Bats and a Harvest Moon Published by Element in 1999
In this third collection Nicholas Hagger explores belief, harmony and acceptance through observing people from many walks of life in everyday social situations. Awareness of ultimate reality is never far away. His illumined approach reveals a fresh, solid universe in which we live our varied lives under the enduring One, like bats wheeling backwards and forwards across a harvest moon. Nicholas Hagger’s world is alive with significant detail captured in memorable images. Observant, penetrating and compassionate, he sees to the heart of situations and has developed the story in miniature, at once vivid, economical and revelatory, into a genre uniquely his own.
4. The Warm Glow of the Monastery Courtyard Published by Element in 1999
In volume four Nicholas Hagger portrays a world teeming with vividly-drawn characters who live under the shadow of mortality but have a predominant sense of homecoming to an elusive reality. In his work the universe is bathed in the warm glow of the Light and the miraculous is never far away, like the unembalmed but strangely undecayed body of the saint in the title story. Nicholas Hagger’s situations are alive and fresh, and he reveals the truth about his people with a penetrating insight. A D-Day soldier and a fisherman, the owner of a castle and a pauper are all observed with a deep sympathy that relates them to ultimate reality. These stories have the exquisite detail of the carefully crafted, sharply-observed miniature, a form he has made uniquely his own.
In Greater Detail Nicholas Hagger’s illumined, painter’s eye reveals a fresh, concrete universe in which people go about their multifarious, everyday lives – their social existences – against the background of the enduring One. The art is in the economy; the balance between the fresh, concrete everyday world and the eternal, as well as in the logic of the images, which culminates in perception or revelation. It is akin to Holbein’s method in his famous painting The Ambassadors (1533). There, two French ambassadors, one ecclesiastical and one secular, stand on the high altar pavement of Westminster Abbey, the mystical centre of the English Church, on the very day Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome. All the literal and symbolic details of the painting combine to give a sense of unease at the impending division of Christendom. Just as the artistic eye of Holbein reveals both the particular and the universal truth of a situation, so these mini-stories use vivid images to suggest disquieting and serene events. Ultimately, their appeal lies in the author’s poetic approach to experience, which illuminates mundane everyday reality through glimpses of a something beyond.
5. In the Brilliant Autumn Sunshine In Collected Stories (see 6 below), published by O Books in May 2007 Nicholas Hagger's fifth volume of stories brings his total tally of stories to 1,001.
A Thousand and One Mini-Stories or Verbal Paintings Published by O Books in May 2007 ISBN 1846940273 Price £29.95/$59.95 Paperback
This book includes the previous five volumes, 1,001 short stories in all. See press release at end. At conception/proposal stage A selection of stories from all five volumes.
B. Autobiographies
A Spiritual Autobiography Published by Element in 1994
A Mystic Way is a spiritual autobiography in which the author shows how his life gave rise to his writings up to 1993. He concentrates on his growth as an artist and the business of creation rather than the social fabric of everyday life or the complexities of character. In this “Portrait of the Artist” Nicholas Hagger presents the development of his Universalist vision as a metaphysical process, including the profound religious experience in September 1971 which has inspired his subsequent work. Events are not presented in the ordinary narrative manner, but rather as an incidental to the great flux of thought and feeling which shapes the destiny of an exceptional individual. The philosopher uses them to explore an interior landscape, for he himself is in the process of Becoming as he moves towards Selfhood, and it is this spiritual evolution or journey of the soul that the author evokes with such force.
In Greater Detail A Mystic Way tells the story of how Nicholas Hagger’s literary works up to 1993 came to be written and of his growth through the traditional stages of the Mystic Way: purgation, illumination, a Dark Night and enhanced perception to a unitive vision. There are detailed accounts of Nicholas Hagger’s experiences of the Light (e.g. pp195-99) and of the way the Light has shaped Nicholas Hagger’s life. Nicholas Hagger’s poems and philosophy can be seen growing out of his life. The book details Nicholas Hagger’s meetings with literary figures, including Blunden, Ezra Pound, Heath-Stubbs, David Gascoyne and Colin Wilson, and also his role in founding the Heroes of the West (to reverse the work of the Cambridge Apostles and oppose Communism, Solzhenitsyn’s position) and the Universalist Philosophy Group (to reverse the work of the Vienna Circle). It also describes how Nicholas Hagger came to own one Essex school, which he attended as a child, and to found a second one. The Metaphysical Revolution itself can be seen as emerging in the late 1970s, and Universalism towards the end of the 1980s. By quoting from 30 years of Diaries, Nicholas Hagger is able to show his thinking and perceptions as one flow, as a process which is perpetually growing and developing. A Mystic Way is the story of a unique quest for truth set against the background of our Age and a finding of the reality behind the Universe. It traces the author’s mystic journey from his awakening in 1950s Oxford, through a period of purgation in 1960s Iraq and Japan, where he began to discover himself as a poet, to a Dark Night in Libya and then a month of profound mystic illumination by the Light in London in 1971, and eventually to a metaphysical outlook and the unitive vision that shines through his poetry, his unified view of history and his philosophy of Universalism. This is the story of a unique quest for truth against the background of our Age and of a finding of the reality behind the universe. In this it recalls St. Augustine’s Confessions. In the course of his journey, Nicholas Hagger reconciles the active life of his teaching and (then) ownership of two schools to the contemplative life of a philosopher, historian and poet. He finds a pattern in his life which may be attributed to the workings of Providence. A very rewarding book with many perceptions and observations. This work shows how his poems and stories grew out of his life and reflect his search for truth and his attempt to understand the Age in which we live.
Diaries 1958-1967 Published by Element in 1994
Awakening to the Light is volume 1 of Nicholas Hagger’s Diaries and covers the ten years from 1958 to 1967. As with A Mystic Way, it attempts to describe the author’s evolving vision of Reality and his discovery of himself as an artist, and can also be defined as a work of process philosophy. In the tradition of David Gascoyne’s Journal, 1937-1939 – Gascoyne spoke at the launch of Nicholas Hagger’s Selected Poems – and holding a similar fascination to Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals or Franz Kafka’s Diaries in that they enable us to see the artist at work, Nicholas Hagger’s Awakening to the Light offers us an account of his progress towards his metaphysical vision of the universe. Nicholas Hagger has kept a daily Diary since 1963, and this volume covers his early years, including all his time in Japan and the Zen and Taoist influences in his work. It shows how his long poem The Silence (which is as important in Nicholas Hagger’s poetry as The Waste Land is in Eliot’s) grew over a year and a half, and records how his poem about the decline of Europe, Old Man in a Circle came to be written. Reading Nicholas Hagger’s early Diaries offers many insights into the emergence of his metaphysical vision in the crucial formative years. These Diaries document the background to his early poetic works and short stories. Nicholas Hagger has led a full and varied life in both the West and the East, and his work reflects the pressure of real events that have shaped our Age.
3. A new work of autobiography At conception/proposal stage This work will be about the main themes in Nicholas Hagger's life, and will include the time from 1994 to date and cover the writing of Classical Odes, 1994-2005 and Nicholas Hagger’s tenure of Otley Hall, a historic house in Suffolk. It will give the background to The Syndicate and The Secret History of the West and all the books covered in this website.
4. A new work of selected diaries At conception/proposal stage This work will select key passages in Nicholas Hagger’s Diaries from 1968 to date, and cover the progress of his Mystic Way and his spiritual, artistic/poetic and philosophical development.
5. A new work on Epping Forest At conception/proposal stage
1. The Last Tourist in Iran Published by O Books in February 2008
This book covers Nicholas Hagger's visit to Iran in January 2007, when he travelled from Tehran to Shiraz, Persepolis and Pasagardae, Yazd, Isfahan, Natanz, Kashan, Qom and Hamadan. The book focuses on the history and culture of ancient Persia and Islamic Iran, and includes visits to Ayatollah Khomeini's living-rooms in Tehran and Qom and to the Jamkaran well where the Hidden Imam is expected to return soon.
This book gets inside the soul of modern Iran in an accessible way, and touches on all the themes in Nicholas Hagger's other books.
The Back Cover Says The first book on Iran to combine travelogue with in-depth historical reflection/getting to the heart of the Iranian Islamic mind, this is a reflective look at the cultural heritage and present nuclear crisis in Iran.
Iran's cultural and spiritual heritage is now threatened by policies that may trigger international intervention. A source of Western civilization, it may be destroyed by its main beneficiary, Western civilization. This travelogue is a tour of Iran and explores the rich history of this pivotal country. The Islamic idea is caught by observations of the well of the Hidden Imam and of its expression through the architecture, tiles and calligraphy of historical mosques. The Revolution is brought to life by visits to Ayatollah Khomeini's living rooms in Qom and Tehran, and to the Shah's White Palace. And the confrontational policy of contemporary Iran that threatens to engulf Iran's cultural heritage in the same way that Saddam's policy wreaked havoc on Iraq's cultural legacy is caught in a drive past the nuclear site at Natanz.
2. The Libyan Revolution To be published by O Books on 25 September 2009
This is still being written. The book will assess the origins and legacy of the Libyan Revolution and will include texts of the illustrated two-page spreads purportedly by "The Barbary Gipsy" which Nicholas Hagger wrote for the now defunct Daily News in Libya in 1969. The book will coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Libyan Revolution.
Three novels; a body-mind-and-spirit trilogy.
1. The Tree of Knowledge Set in Iraq. A young man encounters evil in the Iraq of the early 1960s. Finished.
2. The Soul-Destroyer Set in London. A study of the consequences of disbelief in the soul. A young brain physiologist kills a man while looking in his head for the roots of the mind and the soul.... Finished.
3. The Lost Englishman An ex-weapons inspector with the IAEA disappears in Vienna and is found in Iran, where he disappears again to live a life of the spirit in the desert. Nearly finished.
Three novels, a trilogy, about revolution.
1. Red Star Set in China during the Cultural Revolution and today. The "Red star" helps liberation movements in Tanzania, where the Chinese are building the Tan-Zam railway.
2. The Age of Cartoon Set in Essex during the Vietnam War. A young revolutionary Englishman during the 1967 student unrest.... In draft.
3. Chains Set in Libya. A young man caught in Gadaffi's revolution. A study in treachery. In draft.
A quartet about law and anarchy during the collapse of moral certainties and the decline of traditional England. All at proposal or draft stage
1. The Bone House Set in Essex.
2. The Lotos-Eaters Set in Oxford.
3. The Younger Riseth (or The Visit) Set in Suffolk involving a clash of two generations.
4. The Clay and the Sea Set in Cornwall.
Three novels, a trilogy about land and landlessness.
1. The Pond
2. The Road (or Pikey)
3. The Sitting Tenant
Unpublished novels.
1. Mandalas 1961.
2. High Hopes 1976. Set in London.
3. The Desert Rose 1977. Set in Libya.
Plays written in youth, unpublished.
1. The Molten Owl's Song February 1961.
F. Satires, Fables, Parables, Fairy Tales
Unpublished Works
Satires 1. The Fountain May 1974.
2. In Praise of Folly At conception/proposal stage.
Fables 1. A a novel about a Utopia. 2. A novel about a dystopia.
Parables 1. Parables about ancient Egypt.
Fairy Tales 1. The Garden September 1974.
Selected Letters At conception/proposal stage.
This book will include all letters written by Nicholas Hagger that contain comments on or have shaped his literary, historical and philosophical work. Letters are currently being assembled but completion of the book is some years off.
1. Literary Essays At conception/proposal stage.
Literary essays on individual poets (including Shakespeare) and prose writers and on "classicism" and "baroque" in literature. To be entitled The Chestnut Tree.
2. Collected Shorter Prose
A collection of all Nicholas Hagger's prose works that do not appear in other titles, including a children's story.
Gosnold’s Hope Finished but not yet published. This is about the founding of America at Jamestown. It follows the career of Bartholomew Gosnold, who died at Jamestown in 1607 aged 36. Film scripts written in youth. 1. Tristy 1962. 2. The Busman 1968.
The Essential Hagger At conception/proposal stage
This will be a selection from all Nicholas Hagger's writings to convey the vision that governs his current outlook and posture. All Nicholas Hagger’s works interlock. They are like pieces of a jigsaw which offer a total picture of our teeming Age within a mysterious universe. Our historical and philosophical context is stated in terms of our civilization and ideas in his history (in The Fire and The Stones, The Light of Civilizations, The Rise and Fall of Civilizations, The Secret History of the West, The Syndicate and The Secret Founding of America) and philosophy (in The Universe and the Light and The One and the Many), and is given situational vividness in his poems, verse plays, short stories and autobiography. Collected Poems, Overlord, Classical Odes and Collected Verse Plays show Nicholas Hagger to be a major 20th century poet. Collected Stories complements his insights in prose. A Mystic Way is in a genre of its own, like T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom; besides its many insights into the mystic life and Nicholas Hagger’s poems, it shows how a boy born in ordinary circumstances can grow into a philosopher-poet who can launch:
His poetic and literary works give Nicholas Hagger an indisputable place in late 20th-century and early 21st-century English letters, where he is unique in having something new to say. The Essential Hagger will convey this through excerpts from his collected prose and poetry.
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