Reactions to the written word can be extraordinarily diverse and
startling. I have been taken aback by replies to e-mails I have
sent, for instance. Critical evaluations of literature often
tell you more about the critic than the text. Judgements about
irony, sarcasm, sentimentality and so forth are quite
subjective. I find that one’s reactions to a piece can alter,
according to time, place and mood, or, even more intriguing, one
can hold two different feelings about a writer simultaneously.
I was interested to note in Anthony Head’s excellent
introduction that the poet John Wain judged one of L. Powys’s
books to be the ‘corniest’ book he had ever read. I can
empathise with that reaction, and had a streak of that judgement
as I read some of the essays collected in the book. L. Powys
tries hard to tug the heart strings, and waxes eloquent in a
florid, almost Euphuistic style at times. One could easily
parody and satirise his writing.
However, more strongly, I felt a personal closeness to the
experiences of the author and the views he expresses. For one,
he lived in Africa for five years, somewhat paralleling my own
decade or so living in Zambia in my childhood. He also has an
abiding love of the culture and nature of the English
countryside, which I share, though bowing to his much greater
knowledge and experience. His reverse Pilgrim’s progress away
from what he sees as the syrupy delusions of conventional
Christianity, has many points of contact with my own
philosophical journey. The debilitating and serious disease he
suffered from finds a kinship in my heart, given my own medical
problems. Lastly, his love of Laurence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’
and of the beauty of the stars are big recommendations for me
too.
Head has made a judicious selection, covering many topics and
the broad sweep of his life, in Dorset, the USA, East Africa and
Switzerland; only one of which I have read before – ‘Bat’s
Head’. The first essay ‘A struggle for life’ introduces us to
the central tragedy of his life, his contraction of pulmonary
tuberculosis, diagnosed when he was only 25 years old. This
damaged the rest of his life, eventually killing him, but did
not hold him back from enjoying his time on earth to the full.
This essay is written in an unsentimental and un-self-pitying
way, that is admirable.
The four essays on aspects of his life in Africa are vivid, but
reveal a colonial callousness. He shoots leopard and hippo
without any compunction, all the more surprising given his
otherwise tender nature, and the later essays ‘Christian
Fingers’ and ‘Barbarians’, in which he criticises hunting and
cruelty to animals.
His time in America seemed to have sparked little creative
writing, though he mentions a striking image of him sleeping on
the roof of buildings in New York, looking up at the night sky,
and waking covered with light snow.
The philosophical essays appealed particularly, though I find
his attitude to religion inconsistent and unstable. He often
refers to God, admires aspects of Christian culture and
expresses sentiments close to conventional religious opinions,
yet he professes himself an atheist at other points. In the
essay ‘The Epicurean Vision’, he declares his adherence to a
joyful, sturdy enjoyment of the simple physical pleasures of
life. He criticises ‘Christians at prayer’ as ‘obsequious’,
‘sycophantic’ and ‘craven, unhealthy, neurotic’. Strong words!
He dislikes the creed of the church in trying to discredit life
upon earth, with all its talk of absurd Trinities, fables about
ascensions, dead men rising from the grave and a focus on a
mythical heaven. Powys follows the teachings of the ancient
Greek philosopher Epicurus, wanting us to look at the world we
live in now, to make the best of it, with unfaltering loyalty to
our senses. He urges us to “enjoy our hour of sunshine”.
Powys’s philosophy of life is expressed even more eloquently in
‘The Aebi Wood’. He stared at this green wood for many hours
from the balcony of his sanatorium in Switzerland, and is came
to symbolise the immediacy of the physical life and world we
inhabit. He writes “Make no doubt of it, it is matter that
matters. In all else there is mirage, man himself, for all his
vaunts, being but a cheap and accidental phantom of cleaver
clay. There may well be other dimensions, but in so far as we
allow the suspicion of their existence to dim our worship of
what is, we suffer ourselves to be entangled in a cloud-net of
folly. Our paradise, our hells, are here and now, we shall see
no other.”
His most powerful chapter is ‘Reflections of a Dying Man’.
Somebody suffering from worsening Tuberculosis, with no cure in
sight, has a right to record such reflections, I don’t find this
passage ‘corny’. It is unblinking and objective, rejecting easy
solutions, recognising mankind is blessed with self-knowledge
“on a rainbow planet that is tumbling through a physical
universe of inconceivable dimensions”. He preaches joy in what
we have, and an admirable stoicism: “It is by the rarest chance
that we have ever lived, and does it then become us to grudge
when the hour arrives for us to walk the way of all nature?
Surely to look at the sunlight for the last time should rather
be an occasion for the trembling of our marrow bones with
gratitude."
Dec 2010 • pb
9781847491695
• 224pp • £9.99
For more reviews by John Vernon's you can read his blog
here
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