AT first glance, the poetry of Cyril Scott would seem to be the antithesis of his music, which was considered advanced in his day. In music he was thought of as an iconoclast, breaking all the rules and flouting convention. His poetry, by contrast, harks back to the Victorian era in which he grew up, abides by all the rules, and would not be out of place beside the poems of Swinburne, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel and Christina), or his favourite, Ernest Dowson, twenty-two of whose verses he set to music.

Even so, Scott stated that ‘were he not a musician he could not be a poet, and were he not a poet he would compose a very different sort of music.’ It was the German poet Stefan George, whom Scott had met while a music student in Frankfurt, who introduced him to the poetry of Dowson, and, but for that, Scott wrote, he might never have become a poet. Until that time poetry had not interested him in the least, but thereafter it became almost a passion.

For ten years, between 1905 and 1915, he was a prolific poet. He published The Shadows of Silence and the Songs of Yesterday (c. 1905), The Grave of Eros and the Book of Mournful Melodies, with Dreams from the East (1907), The Voice of the Ancient (1910), The Vales of Unity (1912), and The Celestial Aftermath (1915). In addition, he translated Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal in 1909, and in 1910 a selection of poems by his friend Stefan George, ‘The Awakener within me of all Poetry’, as Scott's dedication to him in The Grave of Eros reads.

In 1915 he ceased writing poetry altogether for almost thirty years, but in 1943 he selected what he felt were his best poems, taken mainly from The Shadows of Silence and The Grave of Eros, added sixteen new ones and completed a final collection, The Poems of a Musician (unpublished). A short note at the beginning reads:

THIS book is divided into chapters. Chapters 1–7 give some background to the work of my father, Cyril Scott; Chapters 8–16 are concerned with his music in its entirety; Chapters 17–23 deal with his writings; and Chapters 24–6 are reminiscences from those who knew him personally. To put the rest in context, this brief biography outlines the more significant events in his long life.

Scott's story as a composer is not unfamiliar. He achieved early fame as a modernist, acclaimed both in Britain and abroad, then mainstream music went in another direction until by the end he had been almost completely passed over. Thirty years after his death in 1970, however, a revival and re-appraisal of the music began that is still continuing today. Yet music was only the foremost of many other activities. He also wrote two autobiographies, My Years of Indiscretion in 1924 and Bone of Contention in 1969. An extraordinarily versatile man, he believed that the more subjects he became interested in, the less chance there was of being unhappy. Those subjects included poetry, philosophy, playwriting, painting and health.

Scott was born on 27 September 1879 to middle-class parents in Oxton, a suburb of Birkenhead, a ferry-ride across the Mersey to Liverpool. His mother was very conventional and a devout Church of England churchgoer. As Scott relates in his early autobiography, she entered a theatre only twice in her life and both times felt most uncomfortable doing so. His father was more open-minded. Professionally he worked in the shipping industry, Liverpool at that time being one of the busiest ports in England, but his real interest was in the study of ancient Greek. As Scott remarked, ‘he spent too much time studying the Greek Bible to accept the narrow interpretation of any one Church or clergyman.’

As a boy, Cyril showed a precocious talent for music and was fortunate in having a family that not only encouraged him but was wealthy enough to send him to the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, a young institution that had begun taking students in 1878, just a year before Scott's birth. He first went to study piano in 1891, stayed there for eighteen months, then returned to England and began teaching and performing.

THOSE two quotes from Doctors, Disease and Health sum up almost everything Cyril Scott had to say in all the books he wrote on the subject. He not only provided advice on medical matters, but also offered a spiritual answer to the troubling question of why one person could be healed and another not. One may think it unusual to find philosophy and therapeutics together in the same volume, but Scott was a most unusual man, whose philosophy embraced both the physical and the spiritual and whose motto was Unity in Diversity.

Over a period of thirty years, beginning in 1939 and ending in 1968, he published a total of ten books and pamphlets: four books on doctors and medicine, a book and a pamphlet on cancer, and four pamphlets on a variety of other health topics. The first book, Doctors, Disease and Health, was by far the most comprehensive, and Scott thought it the best book he wrote. The other volumes are mainly shorter and revised versions of this first publication or, in the case of the booklets on black molasses, cider vinegar and constipation, variations of passages within it.

The book includes chapters on the cause of disease, on diet and nutrition, on vaccination and inoculation, on constipation, on commercialism and on alternative systems of medicine, and also has one chapter on astrology and another on reincarnation, because the human body, in Scott's view, was an instrument of the soul, ‘to be made as efficient as possible for preliminary steps towards mental and spiritual evolution’.

What caused him to turn to writing therapeutic books Scott explained in his Simpler and Safer Remedies for Grievous Ills:

IN 1921, when Rose Allatini married Cyril Scott, she was awaiting publication of her sixth novel, When I was a Queen in Babylon and he had just returned from a successful tour of the US and Canada.

A very talented woman in her own right, Rose produced forty novels, publishing the last one at age eighty-eight and jotting down notes for yet another, before dying two months short of her ninety-first birthday.

Rose Laure Allatini was born on 23 January 1890 in Vienna, at number 8 Plösselgasse, to a wealthy, cultured Jewish family. Her father, Roberto Allatini, was Italian-Greek, born and raised in Salonika. Her mother, Bronislava (Bronia) Rapoport von Porada, was Austro-Polish, the family originally coming from Warsaw.

In 1895, when Roberto Allatini was posted to the Italian embassy in London, the family found a house at 18 Holland Park, an elegant and secluded street. This was a world away from the busy thoroughfare of Holland Park Avenue, where Rose was to live later, after her marriage to Cyril broke up at the beginning of World War 2.

Her happiest times as a young girl were visits to her glamorous, sophisticated relatives in Vienna, and her memories of that romantic city before 1914 remained embedded deep in her consciousness, and featured in several of her novels.

Love and romance are important in her work, but to consider her merely as a romantic novelist is seriously to misread her writings. Though the tone is often comic, Rose had a serious purpose. Unusually among fiction writers, the spiritual was as important to her as the temporal. Her skill as a writer of fiction enabled her to engage readers with an engrossing tale while also discussing, questioning and illustrating what mattered to her in ways a formal essay never could.

Reincarnation, including karma, was central to her beliefs and a major factor in bringing her together with Cyril Scott. It would be interesting to know what led her in that direction – certainly it was not her very conventional parents. Whatever the reason, from her second novel on reincarnation became a dominant theme in very many of her books, especially as it related to the problem of healing. She was plagued with ill health all her life, so it was of more than academic interest for her.

CYRIL Scott produced five volumes all on the same subject. They are The Way of the Childish (1916); Childishness: A Study in Adult Conduct (1930), Man is my Theme (1939), The Rhymed Reflections of a Ruthless Rhymer (unpublished but completed c. 1943–4) and finally Man the Unruly Child (1953). In addition to these five books, there is another one to be considered: The Real Tolerance. The question arises as to what induced him to repeat the same basic premise for almost forty years? The answer could be he was so aware that the problems he pointed out in the first book had been totally ignored, as had his suggestions for resolving them; perhaps he saw himself as a present-day prophet crying in the wilderness, compelled to proclaim his warnings even though his audience was heedless to them.

Despite the devastation and horrors of World War 1, adults, Scott insisted, continued to behave like children. Could a post-war generation do better? The basic argument never alters. It can be summed up in a passage from The Way of the Childish:

Scott published a number of books anonymously and sometimes a little detective work is needed to ascertain if he is the author. For instance, The Way of the Childish appears to have been written by Shri Âdvaitâchârya, but on the flyleaf below the title in smaller letters we find: ‘Written down by the author of The Real Tolerance’. Five years later, in 1921, it ran to a second edition, but this time the flyleaf read ‘Written down by the author of The Initiate’. Clearly both books were written by Cyril Scott.

The Way of the Childish is significant because it is the first notice we have of Scott's interest in theosophy. He explains that the book had been dictated to him and states: ‘The great Initiates, known as “Masters” in the Theosophical literature, instruct their pupils mostly from another plane but there are lesser Initiates who instruct them by word of mouth.’

ADAPTATIONS excepted, Cyril Scott wrote plays with one thought uppermost: how to expand his audience by presenting his ideas in a different format, a format that gave him scope to write prefaces and programme notes to amplify his message. He wrote thirteen plays and three adaptations. His first original play Prigs in Clover, written 1926–7, was set to be produced in the West End the following year with one of the leading actors of the day, Dennis Eadie, but circumstances prevented that from happening, and Eadie unexpectedly died before it could be rescheduled.

A Victorian comedy set in the 1880s, the play's major theme is ‘What will people think?’ It deals with a stereotypical Victorian couple who demonstrate many of the qualities the Victorians were thought to have, among them conventionality, sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy. Scott's ‘ideal’ man, a character who also features in some of the later plays, makes his first appearance. Tolerant, easy-going, totally unprejudiced, eminently reasonable and unconventional, he is always in contrast to the rest of the cast. Here called John, he discovers that his wife, Evelyn, has fallen in love with another man. He is unperturbed:

He then gives Evelyn a speech that has real feeling and is the most genuine in the whole play:

CYRIL Scott wrote this memoir between 1942 and 1944. It exists, like The Poems of a Musician, only in typescript. That he was unable to find a publisher for it is not entirely surprising, for while the material itself is of great interest, it is also excessively long-winded and self-conscious. Though some of the content was used in the later 1969 autobiography, Bone of Contention, much of it is new and does not feature in any of his other writings, making it, despite the style, an essential document for any serious student of Scott's work.

The war years, 1939–1945, were a very bleak period for Scott. He was almost sixty- five, depressed and unwell, firmly convinced he would not live to see seventy. He had been largely passed over as a serious composer, remembered for short piano pieces but not for any of his major compositions.

When the war began he and his wife, Rose, separated, leaving their London home to avoid the bombing. He went for a short time to his sister Mabel's in Somerset, while Rose went to stay with Melanie Mills in Sussex. After leaving his sister's home Scott spent the rest of the war in a series of guest houses, rootless and restless. He had little money, no piano on which to compose, and lacked the guidance and support of his spiritual master, which had always been so important for him. Nevertheless, he managed to continue working as hard as ever. He completed not only the volume of poetry referred to above, but also a sixty-three page document, The Rhymed Reflections of a Ruthless Rhymer, written entirely in rhyme on one of his favourite topics: adult childishness. He also wrote four full-length plays and two adaptations of well-known novels.

Near The End of Life is not, as he said in his Introduction, an autobiography in the sense of being a history of life events; it is concerned more with his mental and creative attitude during a difficult period. It is not a diary hastily scribbled in moments of anger or depression, but a carefully composed document intended for publication. He wished, he said, to ‘express myself relative to matters concerning my creative efforts and my many transgressions, before I arrive at that state of disembodiedness which will render such an undertaking no longer possible.’

CYRIL Scott wrote a number of books on the occult, beginning in 1920, and by 1950 had become fairly well known as a writer on the subject. He was therefore not surprised one day to receive an unusual document on an occult topic that aroused his curiosity and interest.

Unlike other unsolicited manuscripts, this one was not asking him to suggest a publisher, nor was the author in any way seeking publicity, wishing instead to remain anonymous. The manuscript had been sent to him, he maintained, by the author's widow, with a note explaining that the author asked only that it be given to someone with a known interest in the occult. Scott decided it should be published, wrote an Introduction, Notes and Afterword, and sent it to Neville Spearman, who produced the first edition in 1953. What intrigued him, he explained, was that the manuscript was in the form of a diary – a diary written by a boy who, judging from the vocabulary, was about eleven or twelve years old and who initially had no idea his ability to hear and see spirits was anything out of the ordinary.

The date of the diary is 1885, making Scott and the Boy very close in age. Scott was born in 1879, and even the most cursory examination reveals many other parallels. Both came from conventional, middle-class, church-going families from the north of England; both were extremely sensitive to music and prone to weeping at sad hymns in church. Both had sisters three or four years older (Mildred in the Boy's case, Mabel in Scott's), who liked to tease and torment them. More significantly, there is a spirit that frequently visits the Boy, whom he originally thinks is Jesus. This highly evolved individual later suggests the Boy call him E. B. or Elder Brother – the same name Scott used for such souls in his An Outline of Modern Occultism. Obviously, the author of The Boy Who Saw True is Cyril Scott himself.

Scott's An Outline of Modern Occultism was published in 1935. Since then, World War 2 had intervened and attitudes had radically changed. Maybe Scott felt that it was time for another book on the subject, and, instead of revising the old one, decided he would try an entirely new approach.