This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
There came a moment in the mid-1980s when, a week before Gregory Halting took his leave from Peterhouse, Cambridge, an English don came across him in a crowded room and demanded what he intended to “do”.
Gregory drew himself up to his full height of five feet seven inches and said, “Actually, Dr Smith, I intend to write an epic novel which will establish me as one of the greatest writers of our age.”
As nothing in Gregory’s three innocuous years at Cambridge had foreshadowed this remark, none of his eavesdroppers quite knew what to make of it. On the other hand, those present agreed that the words were quite devoid of irony.
After this, nothing was heard of Gregory for quite some time. Then in the early 1990s he was discovered to have written a novel with the somewhat unpromising title of “Rain Falls on the Stony Ground”. If some way short of an epic — in fact it amounted to a bare 157 pages of large-print type — the book was well reviewed and won two literary prizes; a photograph of Gregory appeared in the Sunday Times.
On the strength of this, he was handed a substantial advance by the publishing house of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern and told to go away and write the masterpiece of which he was so clearly capable.
All this happened nearly 30 years ago. There were reports that Gregory had gone to live on a Greek island, the better to pursue his dream, that he was holed up in a log cabin in the Iowa cornfields or living incognito on the Isle of Man.
The long silence was eventually broken by a lavish feature in the Observer, sometime in 2007, headed “‘Genius’ author set to deliver”. In it Gregory explained that the novel, entitled Magisterium, several hundred thousand words long, would be published the following spring.
When Greg had not been for a decade, the novel entered into publishing legend
Gregory’s agent revealed that he had read a part of the manuscript and was “awed and humbled” by its titanic levels of accomplishment.
Magisterium duly appeared in messrs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s catalogue, but the literary editors who rang up in search of advance copies were sadly disappointed. Greg was said to be rewriting certain crucial passages. He was said to be adding a final section encapsulating the novel’s philosophical message. He was said to be on holiday in Tunisia.
After two or three years of this, by which point Greg had not been seen in public for the best part of a decade, the novel entered into publishing legend.
Its author was variously reported to have gone mad in his efforts to perfect it, to have set fire to the manuscript or never to have written any of it in the first place.
Just now Greg is living on his own in Cumbria. Although a much-pruned version of Magisterium is thought to exist, there is little chance of its ever appearing.
According to the former Mrs Halting, who divorced him in 2002, “It’s all down to this personal myth he has of himself. In the end I think he’d prefer to be known for not finishing the bloody book than actually seeing it in print.”
