'Sometimes you did see me' : Forrest Reid's Demophon

The writings of the Ulster novelist Forrest Reid hark back to his childhood as well as to that of humanity — the Greco-Roman period. As one critic would relate, "[Reid] sought, in Belfast, to live in accordance with the spirit of Greek Mediterranean culture." Reid's Demophon: A Traveller's Tale (1927) shares bountiful biographical resonances with his first autobiography, Apostate, published only a year before. In Apostate, Reid writes: "[In childhood] my deities were the Arcadian gods, the lesser gods, Pan and Hermes," and especially "Hermes was a kind of divine playmate." Similarly, for adult Forrest Reid his protagonist Demophon (as well as Tom, the young protagonist of his magnum opus The Tom Barber Trilogy) "grew to be extraordinarily real," which, in the case of Demophon, was intensified after the British printmaker Stephen Gooden expressed an interest in providing engravings for Reid's chronicle of this Greek boy's search for his beloved Hermes.