Э. Х. Визиак: писатель и мистик

English writer

Edward Harold Physick (20 July 1878 – 30 August 1972) was an English writer, known chiefly as a critic and authority on John Milton; also, a poet and fantasy writer. He was using the pseudonym E. H. Visiak by 1909.

He was born in Ealing, London, the son of Edward Joseph Physick, who married in 1877 Maude Searcy, daughter of John Searcy. His grandfather Edward James Physick (1829–1906) was a sculptor, and secretary of the Congregationalist Paddington Chapel; the sculpture business was taken over on his death by Edward Joseph and another of the sons. William Henry Helm, writer and critic, who married in 1881 Ada Emmeline Physick, the youngest daughter, was his maternal uncle. Physick went to Hitchin Grammar School (now Hitchin Boys School), and also had some private tutoring. He became a clerk with the Indo European Telegraph Company, working in London's Mincing Lane and also for a period in Manchester. He published a poem in 1917 in The Ploughshare, the journal of the Socialist Quaker Society, edited by William Loftus Hare, and Hubert W. Peet, another conscientious objector. Visiak's father died in 1921, and he then lived with and cared for his mother. They moved to Hove in World War II; she died in 1952 at age 98. The summer 1967 issue of the Aylesford Review was a "Homage to E. H. Visiak". Contributors included the poet Kenneth Hopkins (1914–1988) and Wilson. At the end of his life, in 1971, Visiak published a poem in the ADAM International Review edited by Miron Grindea.

Taking on the pseudonym Visiak, he contributed poetry to The New Age. He was among the broad based group of writers in the New Age who followed Mary Gawthorpe's lead and contributed to Dora Marsden's Freewoman in 1911–2. His poetry appeared "all over" the magazine, according to Bruce Clarke, who considers it "undistinguished". It was noted by Rebecca West, as from the only other literary contributor. During the 1930s Visiak's poetry was published in Edwardian Poetry and Neo Georgian Poetry edited by John Gawsworth. He collaborated on short stories, with Gawsworth in particular. A friend of and enthusiast for the Scottish novelist David Lindsay, he provided an introductory note for Lindsay's novel A Voyage to Arcturus. He wrote three short macabre novels of his own, The Haunted Island, Medusa and The Shadow, and the autobiography Life's Morning Hour. The Shadow was incorporated in Gawsworth's anthology Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (1936), which also included Visiak's story "Medusan Madness".

His novel Medusa: A Story of Mystery (1929) became popular in the 1960s. Mike Ashley describes Medusa as Visiak's "premier achievement". An essay on the novel by Karl Edward Wagner appears in the anthology Horror: 100 Best Books (1988; revised edition 1992). China Miéville has also expressed admiration for Visiak's work.

Harrison Barbet, Anthony (Introduction by Colin Wilson). E. H. Visiak: Writer and Mystic (2007), Nottingham, England: Paupers' Press