- The Guardian,
- Saturday August 12 2006
The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.
Powys's work is full of paradoxes and surprises. He was extremely prolific, yet a late starter; his manner was heroic, yet bathetic. He was a writer of tragic grandeur and of everyday comedy, of sexual perversion, and of bread and butter and cups of tea. (More bread and butter is consumed and more tea drunk in the novels of John Cowper Powys than in the whole of the rest of English literature.) He wrote poems, and essays, and gargantuan epic fictions, and manuals of self-help, and innumerable letters. Words poured from him, and he was famous for never rereading any of them. It is left to us, the readers, to lose ourselves in his creation, and to try to emerge from it and to make some sense of it. It is no wonder that mainstream literary critics have avoided him, and that a handful of scholars and addicts have clustered round his oeuvre. He is so far outside the canon that he defies the concept of a canon.
During his lifetime, he was admired by writers as diverse as Theodore Dreiser, Henry Miller, JB Priestley, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson and that unconventional scholar LC Knights (who was fond, as he wrote in later years to Powys, of performing Shakespeare wearing as few clothes as possible). Powys continues to attract acolytes. In 2002 the educationalist Chris Woodhead delivered a remarkable paper to the Powys Society describing how he had been influenced as a schoolboy by the chance purchase of a Penguin Classic of Wolf Solent, and AN Wilson has recently written a new Penguin introduction to the same novel. Yet it is hard to know how to tempt new readers into the charmed stone circle. His six major novels - Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), Maiden Castle (1936), Owen Glendower (1940) and Porius (1951) - are formidably long, and not always in print, although they reappear in various guises with a stubborn regularity. Most of his shorter novels are too bizarre to do him justice, although they have paragraphs of dazzling originality - his science-fiction anti-vivisection novel Morwyn (1937), which contains much abstract debate about the nature of sadism, also provides arresting descriptions of the behaviour of his dog that justify the whole crazy enterprise. But Morwyn, despite the portrait of "Old Black", does not make a good point of entry into the Powys world.
The most accessible of his important publications is probably his Autobiography (1934), one of the most eccentric memoirs ever written. Powys states elsewhere (Confessions of Two Brothers) that he takes Pepys, Casanova and Rousseau as his models, and his autobiography has justly been compared to Rousseau's Confessions. It rivals them in its frankness and its evasions, in its inconsistency and its emotional intensity, in its egoism and its self-abasement, and in its keen response to the natural world. Both Rousseau and Powys make compelling reading. Rousseau notoriously reveals much about his sexual deviations, embarrassments and social humiliations, yet fails to dwell on the fact that he, the preacher of natural childhood and domestic love, fathered five children by his servant and left them all in a foundling home. There is an even more startling void at the heart of Powys's apparently open and detailed account of his childhood, family life and sexual adventures. He writes much about his father and his many siblings (he was the oldest of 11, two of whom, Theodore and Llewellyn, were to become distinguished writers), but hardly mentions the existence of his mother, his wife or the woman with whom he was living in America while he was writing this volume, and with whom he was to live for several decades until his death, in his 90th year, in 1961.
The woman-free story that Powys chooses to tell us offers great riches to the analyst in all of us - and unlike Rousseau, Powys was well-acquainted with the works of Freud and Jung and Kraft-Ebbing. (He preferred Jung, but he read them all.) His recall, of what he chooses to recall, is astounding. Although his works identify him as a Wessex man with Norfolk blood, who in later years reinvented himself as a wizard Welshman of the line of Merlin and as a descendant of the Neanderthals, he was in fact born in 1872 in Derbyshire, where his father was then vicar at Shirley, near Dovedale. Powys writes of the landscapes of his infancy with a lyric clarity, and he also records the earliest infantile manifestations of the temptations towards sadism that tormented him violently for most of his life, and which he was to satisfy largely through reading French pornography. He insists here and throughout his writings and correspondence that his only physical indulgences in this mental vice involved tadpoles and worms and small birds, but one may well wonder whether he protests too much.
Moving from Derbyshire to Dorset, the growing family soon settled in Somerset, in the vicarage at Montacute, one of the most beautiful and historic villages in England. This was a setting of exceptional natural and architectural beauty. Here the Powyses pursued a life of comfortable upper-middle-class eccentricity, of botanising and sermonising and antiquarian research. The Powyses were not rich, but they were well born, and had some private means. Mrs Powys claimed literary ancestry, through the poets Donne and Cowper, and was said to have inherited Cowper's melancholia.
John Cowper, now known as Jack, was sent to Sherborne School, and he describes his experiences there with a sense of heightened and not always convincing horror. It is a classic tale of public-school nightmare, with bullying, beatings, flirtations and long-remembered injustices, and we see Jack in the process of forging his adult persona of orator and defiant clown. He learned early to use words as his armoury, and extravagant behaviour as a defence. From Sherborne he went to Cambridge, which made less impression on him (he disliked its "parrot-like" teaching), and from Cambridge he embarked on a curious freelance career as an itinerant lecturer on English literature, supported in part by a small allowance from his father. Under the auspices of the Dickensian agency of Gabbitas-Thring, he began speaking in girls' schools and colleges in the south of England, much taken with the slender beauty of the flurry of "sylphs" he encountered, but soon, thanks to the Oxford Extension Society, he was covering the length and breadth of the country. He was entertained in private houses, where he learned much about class and society: "There was one weekly or fortnightly round ... that caused me to leave Newcastle on Tyne before six in the morning when I used to see the sun rise over the bleak Northumberland hills, lecture in Lewes, after I had seen the sun set over the South Downs, and get to my home in West Sussex that same night."
Or so he says. He does not give the impression of being a reliable narrator; his chronology is far from linear, though rarely confusing, and many of his dates have been questioned. His biographer, Morine Krissdottir, who is presumably attempting to distinguish fact from fiction, has set herself a daunting, perhaps impossible task. But at least some of his bizarre stories about his adventures must be true. He loved to be on the move, and writes of his wanderings through Britain, and later through America, with infectious zest. He enjoyed walking in the open air, and travelling by train, and exploring the less obvious corners of towns and cities: his liking for tramps and vagrants was as strong as his dislike of the police. He is a great topographer. Although he was fascinated by the intricacies of his own perverse personality, there is nothing claustrophobic about his story. He sympathises with the whole of creation, with insects and birds and cows and plants and trees and stones. There is something Whitmanesque as well as Wordsworthian in his love of the open road. His godson was to say of him, memorably, that he was "more plant than animal; more mineral than either. He was dust and rock and feather and fin talking with a man's tongue" (Seven Friends, Louis (Marlow) Wilkinson, 1992).
It was during his vagrant lecturing career in England that Powys married the sister of a close friend (on April 9 1896, to be precise, which he rarely was) and in 1902 his wife gave birth to a son. This was achieved, we gather, with difficulty and needed some form of medical intervention. Powys openly admits, again and again, in his autobiography, in letters and, by implication, in his fiction, that he found the notion and practice of normal penetrative sexual intercourse deeply repugnant, and could not understand how his brother Llewellyn could go in for that kind of thing. ("I have a horror of 'fucking' as it is called" was one of his many comments on this matter.) He insists that he is not a "homosexualist", though he has no objection to those who are. He liked girls of the demi-monde, and prostitutes, and slim young women in men's clothing.
His notions of sexual satisfaction centred around masturbation, voyeurism and fondling. He liked girls to sit on his knee, and he also got sexual satisfaction from reciting poetry at them. The comic aspect of this was apparent to him, and it bothered him not at all. There is a grandeur in his indifference to the norm. His appetite for food was as unusual as his appetite for sex: he became, nominally, a vegetarian, but eschewed most vegetables, surviving for years, he claimed, on a diet of eggs, bread and milk, with occasional treats of guava jelly. This gave him severe gastric trouble, and he had to endure a painful form of surgery that he labels "gasterenterostomy". In his later years, he depended for bowel function entirely on enemas, a procedure of which he highly approved, as it facilitated meditation.
We would not have known about all of this if he had not told us about it, but he recites his woes with such relish that his prose becomes charged with rapture. During a sojourn in hospital he says that he invented the trick of concentrating on variously coloured angels - "purple ones let us say ... vermeil-tinctured ones perhaps" - which he would direct towards his fellow sufferers, and "in this way, as I lay in the great White Ship of Suffering, I felt that I was not altogether wasting my time". Convalescing in his garden at home, he at last found relief in vomiting a "whole bucketful - forgive me, dear reader! - of the foulest excremental stuff possible to be conceived ... of a dusky sepia tint, a colour I had not so far hit upon for any of my tutelary angels". Reality, in his own phrase, lies "between the urinal and the stars".
A memorable autobiographer, but what of his status as a novelist? He did not start to publish fiction until he was in his forties. In 1904 he had sailed to America, where he was to be based for many years; he lectured to vast audiences in New York and across the continent (though never invited by the grandest universities), and at times, somewhat randomly, he earned very good money, with which he supported his wife and son at home. His first novel, Wood and Stone, was published in New York in 1915, to little notice: he published two more, but they did not receive serious attention. Another early novel, After My Fashion, written in 1919, was based in part on his unlikely friendship with the American dancer Isadora Duncan: his acquaintance was large and extremely eclectic. This did not find a publisher until Picador brought it out in 1980. Once it was rejected, he did not bother to pursue its fate, but let it go. He was remarkably uninterested in the practicalities of publication, and was unworldly to a degree that was later to cause him trouble: his bibliography is a nightmare, owing to differing publication dates and titles in the US and England. This has made all his works collector's items, but has hardly smoothed the path of his reputation. He was a showman, a performer, in his own words a pierrot and a charlatan, but he lacked the basic instinct for marketing and self-promotion.
Wolf Solent (1929) was the first of his six masterpieces, and it brought him some recognition. Set in the West Country, although written in America, its physical recall of landscape and townscape bears some kinship to James Joyce's written-in-exile Ulysses. (Powys, incidentally, appeared as a witness for the defence of Ulysses when the Little Review was prosecuted in 1918 in the US for serialising it; he was described on this occasion, as he liked to boast, as "the English degenerate".) The eponymous 35-year-old hero of Wolf Solent, who has been teaching for some years in London, returns home by train, accompanied in his railway carriage by an important and persistent bluebottle, and introduces us to the mysterious heart of the Powys universe, which is and is not Wessex. Hardy's Wessex (of which Powys was keenly conscious) has an epic dimension, but in Powys the distance from mundane reality is even greater.
It is hard to describe how the peculiar thrill of this work is generated. Fields and riverbanks, flowers and trees, cottage interiors and manor houses, graveyards and small town shops and country inns, are described with meticulous precision, as in a mid-Victorian novel, but the atmosphere in which they exist is charged with a strange psychic intensity. The mood is not Gothic, although the plot has Gothic elements; nor is it romantic, although the conflict of Wolf's sexual yearnings is a central theme. Wolf's sensibility and "fetish-worshipping" thought processes are portrayed with a quivering, compulsive immediacy unlike anything else in fiction. The visions of a William Blake illuminate the domestic realism of Cranford, and are subjected to the remorseless psychological analysis of a Proust. On nearly every page there is an epiphany. Wolf, walking through a dull small autumnal end-of-alley village garden, with patches of parsley and drooping chrysanthemums "that seemed to have their very souls washed out of them", is suddenly gripped by the sight of a stone "covered by a species of vividly green moss, small and velvety, that seemed enjoying a vernal prime of its own, in the midst of the universal dissolution. In a moment, like a rush of warm summer air, there came sweeping over his mind the memory of certain pier-posts at Weymouth, covered with small green seaweed ..."
Wolf Solent, which is largely the exploration of one man's spiritual journey, was followed by A Glastonbury Romance, which was conceived on an uncompromisingly huge scale, with a cast of hundreds, and a backdrop of metaphysical and mythic speculation that bears comparison with Dostoevsky. The plot rambles, but the cumulative force is powerful, and the set pieces - particularly the carnivalesque crowd scenes - are astonishing. The events centre on the Grail legend, which haunted Powys all his life (Jessie L Weston's From Ritual to Romance, 1920, was one of his inspirational texts), but he also manages to cram in many of his other obsessions and interests: vivisection, pornography, Welsh mythology and nationalism, magic, the nature of evil, Nietzsche's philosophy and the communist doctrines preached by labour leaders of the day. It is not a historical novel. The setting is contemporary, and its free handling of imaginary Glastonbury inhabitants - in particular the fictitious manager of Wookey Hole, Philip Crow - gave rise to a libel action from the real-life manager, Gerald Hodgkinson, who enforced subsequent disclaimers. But in Powys, the contemporary is ancient, and the distant past is modern. Time is interwoven, and epochs coexist.
The central 55-page chapter, "The Pageant", halfway through this immense novel, is a narrative tour de force. The action takes place on Midsummer Day, and involves not only the 50 and more named characters whom the reader has already come to know, but a cast of thousands. The whole town of Glastonbury, overlooked by the numinous Tor, is either taking part in or providing the audience for a community drama that mingles Arthurian legend with a Passion Play. Visitors have gathered from all over Europe to watch a spectacle on the scale of Oberammergau. Roman legions march, medieval knights in armour parade, a mob of strikers from the dye works causes mayhem, and the Lady of Shalott calls caressingly for the Taunton police. Welsh antiquarian Owen Evans takes on the role of Christ, and nearly dies in the act on his great oak cross. And through this panoramic, multitudinous perspective Powys evokes the entire history of Glastonbury, from Neolithic times to the present day.
The tone of this extraordinary chapter is as striking as its content. Powys combines tragedy and comedy and burlesque in an improbable and daring fusion. There are moments when the death-wish of Mr Evans and his fainting upon his self-imposed cross recall nothing more strongly than the trans-historical Life of Brian - a film that now seems sadder, less farcical and more ominous than when it was first shown. Powys was out of time, and ahead of time. Unlike Miss La Trobe, the pageant-maker in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941), Powys deliberately embraces the ridiculous to tell his tale.
The two novels that followed are also Wessex based, and both are topographically accurate to an uncanny degree. Weymouth Sands, like its predecessor, risked running into legal difficulties because of possible identification of local officials, and was renamed Jobber Skald for publication in England. This was not good for sales. Powys, although he had felt able to give up lecturing and commit himself to writing, would never grow rich: he seemed to persist in creating professional difficulties for himself. (By now, he and his equally unworldly American partner, Phyllis Plater, had moved to England, where they settled first in Dorchester, and eventually in Wales.) Weymouth Sands is a celebration of the seaside town Jack had loved as a child, but its tone is far from innocent. The novel features a sinister clown figure and Punch and Judy shows: Powys was not one to shy away from the suggestions of violence and child sex abuse that are now routinely associated with such entertainments.
The sexual aberrations in Maiden Castle (set in Dorchester) are largely those of the Powys-like protagonist, Dud, who had never managed to consummate his marriage with a wife who died young, and who purchases, in his forties, a runaway circus girl who is willing to submit to his impotent caresses. (The act of purchase is a conscious reference to Hardy's Dorchester-based Mayor of Casterbridge.) This girl is eventually revealed as the mother of a child, born as a result of her rape by a repulsively bald and aged circus manager (horribly named Old Funky), but - and how Powys can surprise even with such mildly obscene and melodramatic stuff - this incidental child is described with loving and affectionate care, and with an intense delight in child behaviour. Little Lovie, self-willed and surviving, greedily eating bottled pears, licking her fingers, earnestly playing with her crumpled paper doll, absorbed in her imaginary world, is more alive on the page than most children in fiction.
Powys's last two great novels are deeply Welsh, reflecting his increasing sense of what he thought of as his bardic heritage. Owen Glendower celebrates the life of the great 15th-century semi-legendary national hero, who, like Arthur, will one day come again. Eccentric though its treatment of history may be, it seems a conventional tale when compared with Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages, a work that beggars description. He thought it his best. Set in October in 499 AD, it is more like a mountain landscape or an epic poem than a novel. Its characters include King Arthur, a Pelagian monk, a Roman matron, a Jewish doctor, the shape-shifting Myrddin Wyllt (otherwise known as Merlin), the bard Taliessin and a family of completely convincing aboriginal giants, who live on the slopes of Snowdon. We also meet the Three Aunties, grey-haired princess survivors of the old race. In this twilight of the gods, the cult of Mithras, the old faith of the Druids, the fading power of Rome and the rising force of Christianity do battle for a week beneath a waxing moon, while Powys's characters intermittently find time to reflect on past times, and congratulate themselves on being so modern. There is comedy, Miltonic sublimity, chaos and confusion in equal measure.
On the dust jacket of the copy of Porius I finally managed to purchase, at some expense, there is an indistinct photograph of the great man himself, gazing into the misty cleft of a mountain range, wearing what could be an old rug, or an old cardigan. He looks like a cross between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child.
