G Wilson Knight

When I told Eric Bentley about my excursions to Knight's residence in Caroline House, Bentley said that he had been there with his communist friend Arnold Kettle. When I told Ruby Cohn about my affiliations with Knight, she described said him, "Oh, that madman".


Knight's biography THE TARZAN OF ATHENS tells us things untold and uknown to us before about the man and his family. The family which was to expand into having two children, Frank Jackson and George Richard, originally came from Gloustershire. Neighbours were very familiar with daily shouts and yells coming from the Knights' house. Father and mother were at continuous rows. Mother Caroline was clairvoyant and practised necromancy and geomancy. She was the stronger and more influential character than the father, and that is why son Frank gave her name to the house he bought in Exeter later. Dick himself used to refer to her with reverence, and out of love and yearning to her, he himself practised necromancy to contact her, and he could communicate with her spirit

He was so because Dick found in Timon the perfect image of the solitary man, and the solitary man was Dick's icon, because the solitary man is the free man. Dick, although sociable and welcoming, was, deep in his heart, a recluse, so Timon provided him with the ideal model of the recluse. Besides, Dick was a life-long masturbater, so he imagined that Timon, being away from society was free to masturbate, or indeed, masturbation freed Timon then Dick himself from need for society and thus could live the desired reclusive life. There seem to be no women in Timon's life. He only kept stag company. When Timon later encounters the three prostitutes he rejects them altogether. There is no hint to any homsexuality in Timon. So, Dick concluded that Timon aired his sexuality chiroplatonically. In his lecture which I attended in Leeds in spring 1972, later included under the title "Masturbation and Mysticism" in the book published under the title, NEGLECTED POWERS, Dick promotes masturbation and he considers it as the best way to purify the self from any tendecies to cruelty. In my home in Exeter, he told me that if Israelis and Arabs sat and masturbated together, they would reslove all their disputes and become friends. He also told me that there were monks and priests who masturbated by imagining the image of Christ and sometimes holding a statue of Christ during the process of masturbation. When I asked him if he was still practising masturbation, Dick said, "No energy left."

Knight's favourite Shakespearean character was Timon of Athens. Knight had a one-man show of Shakespeare's play TIMON OF ATHENS . On mantlepiece of his Caroline House, I saw placed there a bronze statuette of Knight as Timon, in a Tarzan costume. No wonder a biography of him appeared posthumously in late 1980s titled the THE TARZAN OF ATHENS with Knight's pictrure as Timon on the cover. I borrowed it from Mustansiriyah University Library, Baghdad, Iraq in 1993