AYRTON, Michael. The Maze Maker.

AYRTON, Michael. The Maze Maker. London: Longmans. 1967.

8vo. Original grey cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust-jacket illustrated by the author; pp. [6], 282; small dust mark to lower edge of page block, jacket rubbed and nicked to upper spine tip, light rubbing to corners; else a near fine copy in like wrapper; inscribed by the author in black ink to front free endpaper.

A bright first edition of Ayrton’s only novel: an ‘autobiography’ of Daedalus with a revealing presentation inscription to Bryan Magee.

From the early 1960s until his death in 1975, Michael Ayrton, the English painter, printmaker and sculptor, was preoccupied, haunted even, by the figure of Daedalus, mythical inventor of the labyrinth at Knossos and maker of the waxen wings by which he and his son Icarus sought to escape Crete. Ayrton’s sculptures and paintings inspired by the myth led inexorably to this unusual extended prose work (the only such work he completed). Published in 1967, The Maze Maker was described by the publisher as a novel, but Ayrton tellingly describes it as an ‘autobiography’ of Daedalus. Written as an attempt to escape the labyrinth of his own obsession, he found himself delving further and deeper. The complex, first-person portrait of Daedalus that emerges recreates both character and myth with great imaginative force. The descriptive precision of Ayrton’s prose in turn led back to visual art, and commissions to design a giant maze in the Catskill Mountains and, in New Zealand, to recreate the Golden Honeycomb that Daedalus made for Aphrodite on Mount Eryx.

The book was well received, winning the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award for 1967. William Golding, no less – for whom Ayrton had designed book jackets – described The Maze Maker as ‘[a]n engrossing study of the archetypal Maker. Here, at last, mythology is acknowledged and accepted in all its beauty, brutality, unreason and terror. Mr. Ayrton has written a unique book.’

On 12 May 1967, the English philosopher (and sometime Labour MP) Bryan Magee devoted a half-hour slot to the book on the ITV arts programme This Week the Arts. This copy of The Maze Maker was most likely inscribed for Magee on that occasion: ‘For Bryan / an autobiography of / the author? / from the author / Michael Ayrton / May 1967’. It is a tantalising inscription – the question mark notably small – lending further weight to the suspicion that the book is, indeed, a veiled autobiography of the artist.

SKU: 2125797