'The
Ridge' and the Other
John Cowper Powys's ridges are all ancient and endurung places, usually
crowned by Scots firs or having fir trees near them. They are places of
magical influence and possibility, where the earth -- always held sacred
by Powys -- has been mysteriously charged with human history, benign or
malign and correspondingly to be feared or revered. Powys descibes the
ridges, and the hills and mountains which share their properties, as
'heathen'.
Apart from his Journals 'The Ridge' is his only autobiographical narrative
work. The ending could only have been fictional, so it is unfinished.
Written in about 1952, probably after a walk on Berwyn Ridge, Corwen, it
is an obscure work. Berwyn Ridge itself, a far less powerful entity within
the poem than its fictional predecessors, is associated with them by two
compelling themes -- the climber's will to the destruction of tyrannical
power and his hope for reunion with an unidentified platonic 'Other'. In
other works by Powys, before and after, these themes are linked and
combined.
In 'The Ridge', Nature is described in her moods and minutiae, but nowhere
with the reciprocal sense of Wolf Solent's insights as he looked toward
Somerset, or Rook Ashover's ecstatic visionary moments in an enchanted
Dorset lane. Nature is, rather, the background to thoughts and memories;
to a prolonged gesture of challenge and endurance. The poem marks a time
when poetic imagination begins to give way to fancy. The style that
emerges is an uneasy confessional rhetoric.
In Autobiography Powys writes of a 'Druidic hypnotism of speech' he
used for Geard of Glastonbury, 'derived from the sacred hills of
Glastonbury Tor, Cadbury Camp… from the peak of Snowdon'[1]; it
was the voice he used as a lecturer to conjure up a rapport with
his audiences -- a magician's and an actor's voice. But the words of the
climber in 'The Ridge' seem not to arise from the imagination which
created Geard of Glastonbury and A Glastonbury Romance. He blurts
notions and memories as they come to his mind. His audience is the
solitary reader.
Porius,
published a year or so earlier, shares 'The Ridge' 's theme of tyranny --
the power of God and religion, of established authority and all that can
rob individuals of such happiness as chance might otherwise allow them.
This particularly applies to family. But, where Porius brought a
feeling of resolution at its close -- Myrddin Wyllt had spoken of the
limited duration of any tyrant's rule and spoken fiercely against family,
Taliessin had looked forward to an 'ending forever of the God sense, the
guilt sense' -- these things still revisit the mind of Powys as he climbs
the Ridge. God has appeared in earlier writings as the author of a bungled
creation, as a dualistic First Cause whose own good and evil answers that
of His creation; and as a man-made deity whom -- considering Powys's
conviction of the power of mind to effect, if not to create -- it might
have been easier to set up than bring down, even by the concerted howl of
all creation.
Powys was generous in his own response to Christianity and the priests of
the Church. He could see happiness in his son's Catholicism, and Wolf
Solent would seem to speak for his author with:
How extraordinary it would be… if there really were an incredibly tender
and pitiful heart… just outside the circle of time and space! … But did he
want such a thing to exist? Not even to want Him… would seem an outrageous
cruelty to all the Tilly Valleys in the world… "And yet I don't believe I
do want Him," he murmured aloud, as a sparkling of cold raindrops fell
upon his clasped hands from the tree above.[2]
The calmness of Wolf's admission contrasts with the climber's restless
questioning. The God Powys reviles and would have dead is the God whose
priests are Drom in Porius -- 'his kiss enslaved the person kissed
to the person kissing… the kiss of everlasting peace, the kiss of
unutterable sameness, the kiss of pure divinity, the kiss of anti-man…'[3];
and, within a classical context, Enorches in Atlantis, whose
mystical Eros/ Dionysus love and intoxication render unimportant 'ordinary
self-control, ordinary kindness, ordinary decency… ordinary generosity…'
[4]; and the repellent and sadistic Gewlie in The Inmates,
whose utterance 'One God… Instead of life there will be only God'[5]
reveal him as a mean sharer of the faiths of Drom and Enorches (some
aspects of which Powys may have come across, in gentler and more innocent
guise, at school and at home).
*
Two-thirds of the way through 'The Ridge' are the words:
I tell myself there's a hope -- though God and Universe mock it
That when I have reached the ridge I shall find my love once more
For the wretchedest thing alive has its own mysterious 'other'
Its other that answers its howl, its other that answers its groan,
Its other that's nearer to it than brother or father or mother
Its other that out of a million worlds is for it alone.
And, later in the canto:
I had a true love once but they took her away for thinking
Thoughts against God and for making me think the same.
But in my dreams she comes back and now life is sinking
Perhaps she'll come back for good. I've forgotten her name.
Reunion with the platonic 'other', the missing half of the self, the
anima, is a dream perpetuated by longing. The meetings of the
purest Powys 'others' -- Wolf and Christie in Wolf Solent, John and
Tenna in The Inmates -- are marked by a low-key ecstasy, not found
elsewhere in Powys, though in mood resembling the prolonged sexual
ecstasies of John and Mary Crow, the cousins in A Glastonbury Romance.
The Platonic dream, as a union of self with (almost) identical self,
is of its nature incestuous and likely to be discouraged by convention. In
'The Ridge' the identity of the Other is coded, not surprisingly in an
author who self-censored his autobiography to exclude all women
(gentlemanly good manners should perhaps not be discounted as one reason
for this).
Richard Perceval Graves writes of Eleanor Powys, John's sister who died of
appendicitis at the age of thirteen:
Despite the seven years between them, she was mature for her age, and he
felt strongly drawn to her, recalling that: 'My ideal future was to be a
famous actor living with Nelly and always acting with Nelly, for she and I
were alike exactly in our mental life, our emotional life, our
imaginative life and our erotic life. We turned from one to another of
these and kept them apart.'[6]
The language here is intense though it is always as well to remember John
Cowper Powys's cerebrality. Nelly's death, recalled in Ebony and Ivory,
tells of John's announcement to Llewelyn that Nelly had been 'taken away
by the angels'. This is also recorded in Confessions of Two Brothers,
where Llewelyn remarks, 'I know now that it was only the way he put it,
that he does not believe in angels and never did.'[7] It took
an ear as innocent as Llewelyn's to miss what might well have been
grief-stricken sarcasm. Sixty years on, in 'The Ridge', 'they took her
away' echoes these words which themselves have their echoes. Visions
and Revisions, published in 1915, contains Powys's probing appraisal
of the correspondences and profound differences between himself and Edgar
Allan Poe.
I was a child and she was a child
In that kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winge'd seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me…
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me…
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we,
And neither the angels in heaven above
Nor the demons under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee…
Love is a word Powys treats with care since Wood and Stone, where,
together with 'sacrifice', he opposed it to power and pride. 'Has it been
noticed,' he asks in his essay on Poe, 'how inhumanly immoral the great
poet is?'[8] For Powys, usually undismayed by the droll
differences in people's lives, particularly their sex lives, and
refreshingly disinclined to explore their psychological origins,
'immorality' is a strong word, referring almost always to cruelty and the
exercise of power. He sees it in Poe as the longing for the object of
possessive love to become unchangeable through death and enshrined through
fantasy -- a chilling mixture of love and control. It implies denial of
change -- for him a denial of life itself, going against his deepest
convictions, against the Homeric way, the Tao, and his own natural
promptings.
Like everything that happened to John Cowper Powys, Eleanor's death will
have been absorbed into the power-house which was his imaginative genius:
widening his scope, intensifying his sensibilities, adding to the
complexity and richness of his work. Like Poe, he had a morbid
imagination. It is hard to imagine that his sister would not have remained
the erotic companion of his solitude; and that her memory, if he had
allowed it, could not have made of her an idea locked in time -- a
metamorphosis delicious to Poe but distasteful to Powys. It is quite
possible that by changing the person and character of the 'other' from one
great novel to the next, he diminished the power of actual memory. From
the time of Ducdame the invasion of the platonic dream by the
shadow of death is not dispelled but is treated with great care. After
Rodmoor -- a decidedly Gothic story -- Powys counteracts what he names
in Poe 'death hunger' with humour: in Wolf Solent the necrophiliac
overtones of the grave-digging scene are dispelled by an air of mediaeval
comedy. By the time when he wrote 'The Ridge', vivid memories may have
broken through his wisest censorship.
*
Ducdame
is the first of the great novels where a ridge appears in a magical
ambiguous role to be repeated through most future works. Heron's Ridge is
central to the novel which, set in Dorset, yet has the ambience of
Montacute. The hero, Rook Ashover, views Heron's Ridge with feelings of
kinship and apprehension -- it is the focal point of stifling ancestral
power. The clay heart of the ridge is a vehicle for the fanatical will of
his mother and uncle who, descending the hill, she southward, he
northward, arrive at a point where 'an electric current sent in a bee-line
through the clay heart of Heron's Ridge would have connected the figures.'
What Rook 'required of life was not an impassioned love with an equal
mate, but certain faint, vague, elusive ecstasies that were entirely
unspiritual, and entirely de-personalized.'[9] Though not to be
seen as his 'other', Rook's dying brother Lexie would seem to answer this
need better than any of the women in the story. Their close bond reflects
John's closeness to his brother Llewelyn, and the 'twist of fate' which in
Ducdame causes the younger brother to outlive the elder excludes, at a
stroke, any sentimentality that could otherwise have attended the death of
Lexie.
Wolf Solent and Christie Malakite are the first unmistakeable fictional
Others. Their intense unspoken brother-and-sister relationship has exactly
the quality John Cowper described when speaking of his sister Eleanor.
Family pressure in different forms overshadows both Wolf's and Christie's
lives: for Wolf in the legacy of his parents' strife, for Christie in
incestuous family complications. They both suffer the quiet meddling of
well-meant self-appointed authority.
As Wolf looks out from Poll's Camp, two images contend for the mastery of
his thoughts: the camp where he is standing, and Christie's window. He
contrasts the ancient hill and the valley of Somerset -- 'the thing I love
best of all' -- and ponders on the powers of Poll's Camp, unable to
understand the 'nature of what it threatens'. But Wolf Solent is a
story of Wolf's illusion, which he recognises and prizes within a world
skewed by his 'mythology' -- the notion of himself on the side of good
against evil. His most unperturbed and lucid moments are in conversation
with Christie. Their times of philosophical talk are times of rare and
unparalleled happiness. Wolf's ecstatic vision of Saturnian gold near the
end of the story is not unlike Rook Ashover's state of changed
consciousness in Ducdame. His earlier conjectures and broodings
over what Poll's Camp threatens are now irrelevant: the threat to himself
came only from himself. But this state of enlightenment could not possibly
have happened if he had allowed Christie their longed-for night together.
Not because Christie is, as has been suggested, aligned with evil,
certainly not because she is associated with incest -- a circumstance
which, in itself, Wolf is relatively relaxed about -- but because she is
associated with death, its presence signalled by 'whiteness', a green
lamp, a mirror, and the evocation of a dead mother and sister, while
Christie lies with her hair spread loose about her. Wolf refuses this
consummation, and even if his motive seems obscure and his action
perverse, as Christie declares it to be, the book ends on the note of
wholeness which Powys's judgment infallibly dictates.
The Inmates
was written around the same time as 'The Ridge' and is the last of the
novels to include a 'Powys hero' -- a character recognisably John Cowper
Powys. It is also the first (Morwyn being a special case) to
include surreal, rather than merely eccentric or grotesque characters.
These weird creations express opinions and arguments set out in earlier
and later works, and seem simply to show their maker's move from the
guidance of imagination to the play of fantasy in old age. The unnamed
ridge in The Inmates -- 'an ancient fortification surmounted by a
couple of gigantic Scots firs' -- is ever-present and benign, and can be
seen from the east window of Glint, the insane asylum where John Hush and
Tenna Sheer have been committed. Looking back on his first day there, John
Hush recalls how he'd seen Tenna's face with the ridge and the two firs as
its background in the Spring twilight, and they'd first exchanged words.
In a moment of crisis he says the syllables of her name as if it were
'some ancient prehistoric evocation understood at once by dehumanized
presences, hovering about the ridge of the two Scots firs.'[10]
Tenna is in no way associated with death, though very much with rebellion
-- against the father she has tried to kill. The rules of Glint separate
John and Tenna most of the time, perpetuating the platonic dream and the
mood of inaccessability their romantic exchange requires. So it is that
when they emerge from Glint, to face the sun rising between the firs on
the ridge -- in the company of a spaniel dog, off to join a travelling
circus -- though they have defeated sadistic power and evaded goodwill in
the form of rescue by helicopter, their optimistic departure together is
somehow disappointing.
The Mountains of the Moon,
written some years later, is a fantasy of old age, taking place in a realm
where everything is subject to the storyteller's surrealistic whim. 'The
Ridge' 's quest for the death of God -- sketchily resolved in Up and
Out when a humorously perplexed Deity asks the advice of two young
people on remaking His destroyed world -- has been abandoned; but the
quest for platonic union prevails and is exactly described.
The voice of a fey Elemental named Helia reaches sixteen-year-old Rorlt
through the heart of the Moon's ridge -- just as the imaginary bee-line
connected the family-obsessed couple in Ducdame. Unlike Rook
Ashover, the owner of the voice has been totally free of all parental
presence since the very time of her birth: she is the child of the Sun and
the Moon. The diminutive runnel through which her voice reaches the young
climber was once the path of a stream flowing through to her garden. The
two set off to meet on the summit of the moon's ridge.
As Rorlt approached the summit:
He felt as if he were himself a portion of all he looked at, and
yet he felt that, looking at himself… he was all the same only looking at
half himself … And the other half, the half with whom it was now the
one imperative need of his life, of his being, of his body, of his soul to
unite, was the girl whose voice he had heard and had answered!... She
redeemed him from insane loneliness.
The moment of their meeting was 'a moment of death in life and life in
death, where a new being came into existence who was neither a new boy or
a new girl but was a fresh experience of that energeia akinesis…
that makes for us the blessedness of the unknown.'[11]
In In Defence of Sensuality Powys devotes half-a-dozen pages to a
description of this kind of encounter, identical in many of its terms to
the one in The Mountains of the Moon but clearly prompted by a
present or recent experience of his own. He had met Phyllis Playter a few
years before. If his sister Nelly was no longer the constant companion of
his living world, her 'coming back' more fleeting in time, yet the memory
of their extraordinary friendship can never have lost its potency and, it
seems likely, overtook him on his walk on Berwyn Ridge. 'I've forgotten
her name' looks, at first reading, like a transparent untruth, but makes
sense as the remorseful reaction we feel when a vivid memory overtakes our
forgetfulness.
When Rorlt's journey began he it was not Helia he was seeking, but his
incestuously desired sister. His sister has found a lover, someone she
knew long ago; this pair make love and talk metaphysics and he tells her
how he longed for 'someone, anyone, of my own age, with whom I could
exchange ideas and talk about everything and discuss the whole business of
life on this crazy orb.'[12] The mountains of the moon are
clothed with mosses and ferns and lichens, with herb-Robert, potentillas
and self-heal. Like Rhun and Morfydd in Porius the lovers recall a
badger's sett in a hollow fir. The moon, their hearth and home, is really
the earth of our world.
Two pairs of 'platonic Others' have met on the Ridge of the Moon. Anyone
visiting John Cowper Powys's home at Corwen may have seen a diminutive
tunnel where a stream appeared and ran through Phyllis Playter's garden:
an irresistable thing for a storyteller like John. When he wrote of the
electric line through the heart of Heron's Ridge, thirty years earlier, he
had not yet seen this stream; but as it has been noted of JCP, he
sometimes saw things before he saw them.
Cicely Hill
March 2008
NOTES
[1]
Autobiography
,Macdonald 1967, Picador 1982, p.462 (chapter 10, 'America').
[2]
Wolf Solent, Macdonald 1961, p.412; Penguin Classics p.427-8
(chapter 19, 'Wine').
[3]
Porius, Colgate 1994 p.658; Overlook 2007 p.574 (chapter 27, 'The
Homage of Drom').
[4]
Atlantis, Macdonald 1954, Bath 1973, p.192 (chapter VI).
[5]
The Inmates, Macdonald 1952, Village Press 1974, p.262-3 (chapter
14, 'Midsummer Dawn').
[6]
The Brothers Powys,
Routledge & Kegan Paul 1983, p.31; quoting letter to Philippa Powys also
quoted in 'White' by Diane Fernandez, in Essays on John Cowper Powys
ed. Belinda Humfrey, Univ.of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1972. See Letters to
Sea-Eagle, p.228.
[7]
Confessions of Two Brothers
(1916), Sinclair Browne 1982, p.184-5.
[8]
Visions and Revisions (1915), Macdonald 1955, p.198.
[9]
Ducdame, Grant Richards 1925, Village Press 1974, p.306.
[10]
The Inmates
as above pp. 265, 280 (chapter 15, ' "On all fours" ').
[11]
Up and Out/ The Mountains of the Moon,
Macdonald 1957, Village Press 1974, pp.211, 214.
[12]
as above, p.191.
From The
Powys Society Newsletter, No 63, April 2008
