David I. Masson

David Irvine Masson, librarian and writer: born Edinburgh 6 November 1915; Assistant Librarian, Leeds University Library 1938-40, Sub-Librarian in charge of the Brotherton Collection 1955-79; Curator in charge of Special Collections, Liverpool University Library 1945-55; married 1950 Olive Newton (one daughter); died Leeds 25 February 2007.

David I. Masson was an eminent specialist librarian for 40 years, and an explosive writer for as many months. In his decades with Liverpool and Leeds universities, he enjoyed a quiet but substantial career as the highly competent curator of several rare book collections, and as an inspired acquirer of new material for his libraries, from incunabula to runs of Stand. He was respectable, though mildly eccentric; his bibliographical and critical papers were regarded highly.

As an author of science fiction, on the other hand, Masson rather had the effect of a stealth bomber. One day he was there; a year or so later, he stopped, more or less cold. The seven stories he published in New Worlds magazine between 1965 and 1967, and assembled as The Caltraps of Time (1968), explore with quite extraordinary literary intensity a very wide range of subjects. Not one story resembles any other, except for the implacable polish that characterises everything he wrote. Caltraps reads like a selection of the best stories from a very long career; but Caltraps is all he wrote.

David Irvine Masson was born in Edinburgh as the First World War began to bite, and had a distinguished lineage in science and literature. His father, Sir Irvine Masson FRS, became Professor of Chemistry at Durham and Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield; his grandfather Sir David (O.) Masson FRS was Professor of Chemistry at Melbourne; and his great-grandfather David (M.) Masson was Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh and a friend of Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and the Pre-Raphaelites.

The young David's education was at Oundle School and then Merton College, Oxford, where he read English Language and Literature. In 1938 he was appointed an assistant librarian at Leeds University, but he spent the years 1940-45 in combat with the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Immediately after the Second World War, he became Curator in charge of Special Collections at Liverpool University - the Science Fiction Foundation Collection has been housed there since 1993 - where he also began to generate technical and critical works, his first (very specialised) publication being Hand-List of Incunabula in the University Library, Liverpool (1949). Of wider interest were several studies in phonetic linguistics as applied to the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, William Shakespeare and William Butler Yeats.

In 1955 Masson moved back to Leeds as curator of the Brotherton Collection of Leeds University Library, a highly important - though slightly miscellaneous - assemblage of (mainly) English literature, including manuscripts and printed material from medieval times to the present day, and based on the extraordinary collection bequeathed by the chemical manufacturer Lord Brotherton in 1930. Before his retirement in 1979, Masson had overseen the expansion of the collection's facilities, and had through judicious purchasing managed to increase the number of books held by about 25 per cent, improving in the process its overall focus as a representative holding.

Masson does not seem to have written any fiction during this period, until 1965, when he burst on to the London scene with his first and most famous story, "Traveller's Rest", a virtuoso study of the skewing of reality in the perceptions of soldiers in mortal combat on a useless front in an unnamed war. In science-fiction terms, which Masson carefully articulates, what occurs in the tale is a literal time compression wherever reality itself becomes intolerably dense.

But "A Two-Timer", published a few months later, is entirely different: told in what seems to be a faultless imitation of late-17th-century prose, it describes in Swiftian terms the revulsion felt by a Restoration man who has been plunged into the 20th century.

These stories, and five more, appeared in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds. After Moorcock rejected an eighth, as it was too essayistic for his remit, Masson politely departed the scene. The three tales published over the next few years have an air of afterthought, but fit neatly enough into the 2003 version of his only book of fiction.

After his retirement, Masson lived quietly in Leeds. He was a man of archaic courtesy whose mind remained acutely attuned to the present: a good description, perhaps, of a civilised man today. In a short preface to the 2003 edition of Caltraps, he welcomes readers back to a world just prior to "the Sixth Major Extermination of Species", and to tales he once told of "the chaos at the heart of language; the fires beneath us . . . ; the fragility of civilisation".

John Clute

Interesting? Click here to explore further