Powys Society meeting at Dorchester, 14th June 2003
introduced by David Gervais
T.F.
Powys: Fables
Welcome to what it is hoped will be the first of a series of seminars on
particular Powys books. The Powyses are probably unique among important
modern authors in having an audience that is divided between aficionados,
like the members of The Powys Society, and general indifference. Unlike
Joyce, Lawrence and others they have, for instance, never been prescribed
as 'set texts' in schools and universities. Years ago, I 'did' A
Passage to India for 'A' Level and then had to read it again at
university. In time, it became a film and a best‑seller. Meanwhile, Powys
books were regularly dropping out of print. The danger in this is that, if
books are not studied critically, they are never properly tested against
the culture they belong to. For some of us, today will be the first
occasion when we have ever sat down to examine a Powys book closely and
share our views on it with other readers. One hopes there will be other
such opportunities in the future. Critics cannot create readers, of
course, and works of art do sometimes slip below the horizon ‑- Donne took
three hundred years to come into his own and Botticelli had to be
rediscovered by a late Victorian -‑ but a writer's admirers still have a
responsibility to ensure that they get a proper hearing and figure as an
experience and not just as a name.
Fables
appeared a year or so after Mr Weston's Good Wine, in 1929. The
first edition sold out before publication. It belonged to the great
flowering of T.F.Powys's art in the years before he stopped writing
altogether, in 1933: the period of Unclay, The Only Penitent and
the late novellas and tales. A better word for the book than 'fables'
might be 'parables', because each of the stories remains equivocal and
open to interpretation. They do not proceed to clear, black‑and‑white
resolutions or offer us any moral conclusions that we can pocket for their
practical good sense and use in other contexts. There are no worldly‑wise
maxims to assure us of the author's experience of life, such as we get at
the end of the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine. In so far as a Powys fable
has a moral at all it is one that is set down obliquely and asks to be
treated with circumspection. Far from making us feel complacently knowing,
it is likely to leave us with the sense that we are floundering in
quicksand. Though Powys is thought of as an allegorist, a follower of
Bunyan, we always need to be on our guard against the allegories
themselves. Often, it is far from clear whether we are meant to take them
literally or ironically. How can any tale convey Truth when Truth itself
is such an elusive, shifting thing? Such, at least, is the basic
assumption of The Soliloquy of a Hermit (1916), the book which
provides the spiritual blue‑print for all Powys's fiction:
If a man is sincere he
will change his opinions with every mood, at least about the things that
belong to the spirit .... 1 change my mind most in what I believe ....
unbelief is the only good soil for the believing mood to grow in .... How,
I should like to know, can 1 know the Truth when God Himself is always
contradicting it?
(pp.36‑7)
Thus, though the tone of Fables is often intensely serious
and sometimes attains to grandeur and solemnity, the book also has a
pervasive air of humour and even whimsy about it. There are moments when
we wonder whether what seems serious may not be facetious too. On the
lookout for some profound and cryptic moral we sometimes suspect the
author of telling surreptitious jokes. Whatever moral the stories enact
clearly has little relation to the received wisdom we expect from
conventional religion and morality. Though Powys was a deeply religious
writer his work has rarely appealed to clerics or believers themselves. He
is religious, rather, in the antinomian spirit of the Blake of The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell. For instance, in the Soliloquy the
wish for immortality is seen as a form of decadence, a greedy desire to
preserve the goods of this world into the next. In the fiction, therefore,
Powys's clergymen tend to be either helpless innocents or grasping
monsters. God Himself is the most unforgivable of sinners for having
created a fallen world. Thus, for Powys, a religious fable inevitably
flourishes on paradox. His stories remind us of those of Kafka. Their
setting in Madder and Dodder may be very different from the setting of
Metamorphosis but the conclusions they reach can be equally unnerving
in the way they sweep the ground from under our feet. For example, one
does not expect to hear a dead man in his coffin pleading with God not
to be resurrected. I mention Kafka because Fables is not, as is
sometimes supposed, a throwback to an older kind of fiction like Bunyan's
but, just as Kafka's is, an advance on the realism of the nineteenth
century novel. What Walter Benjamin (in Illuminations) said of
Kafka would apply perfectly to Powys too: 'His parables are never
exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable
precautions against the interpretation of his writings.'
The most striking thing about Fables on a first reading is
that they appear much bigger than their modest length implies. The stories
seem slight but their implications are momentous. Each of them has a way
of resonating in the mind after it is over. This effect is partly due to
the extraordinary concentration and simplicity of the prose, the way Powys
uses language not for its own sake but for what it can point towards.
There is prose‑poetry there but nothing that is poetical, no consciously
fine writing. As early as 1906 Powys had written in a letter, 'I cannot
see the use of many words .... It is man's conceit that has made him
explain so much.' A singular opinion, coming from a writer. Clear
thoughts explain themselves; explaining things too much prevents a writer
from evoking them. Moreover, the things Powys writes about are by their
nature inexplicable. As Glen Cavaliero says of the way he writes about
God: 'God simply is ‑ no more can be said by way of definition.' A
novelist cannot explain God in the way that Jane Austen could explain what
sort of bonnet Emma was wearing or how elegant the grounds of Donwell
Abbey were. More than in most fiction, with its lust for detail and
verisimilitude, in Fables we have to look for meaning not in the
lines themselves but between them. Fiction bent on exploring a thought, as
the fables do, has to beware of being side‑tracked into too many
illustrations. The purpose of Fables is not the invention of
an imaginary world, like BaIzac's Paris or Dickens's London, but the
articulation of thoughts that are clear enough to be contemplated for
their own sake. In other words, what Mr Pirn sees is more important
than what Mr Pim is. His material setting is merely a prelude to
the immaterial idea it discloses. He is the tale's occasion, not its
subject.
The typical
movement of a Powys fable begins from some quirky or genial reflection on
human nature which is then explored by analogy in the feelings of either
animals or common physical objects. Out of this a dialogue develops, often
deceptively light in tone, until the issues raised come to some sort of
crunch. At this point, the story tells itself and its implications are
expounded with an ineluctable finality that takes us by surprise. A tale
that began by seeming humorous and urbane may suddenly become tragic or
shocking. By the end, we are left contemplating not the characters, the
Clout and the Pan or the Hat and the Post, but simply the naked thought
that their talk has conducted us to. The story is only a stepping stone,
designed to transport us beyond its own premises. Thus, 'John Pardy and
the Waves' begins as a wryly melancholy tale about the family
ne'er‑do‑well but ends as an eloquent meditation on death. This procedure
is quite unlike that of most novelists. For instance, the first part of
D.H.Lawrence's The Rainbow may appear to describe the same sort of
rural world as Mr Weston's Good Wine does but, whereas Lawrence
charts the way England is changing through the various generations of the
Brangwen family, Powys presents Folly Down sub specie
aeternitatis. There is no suggestion that its rural way of life is
subject to any other kind of decay and change than has obtained ever since
the Fall. The social changes that concern Lawrence hardly seem to interest
Powys at all. His perspective on life seems closer to that of Sir Thomas
Browne or Jeremy Taylor than to that of any modem novelist.
If this is so, how are we to explain the fact that Powys's
concentration on universals does not make his fiction seem nebulous and
abstract? For, to all appearances, he was going against the very grain of
fiction itself and thereby condemning his work to seem marginal and out of
touch with his times. Yet, in fact, Fables is notable for its
precision and almost uncanny limpidity, a perfect adjustment of means to
ends. In the endings of the stories in particular ‑- for Powys was always
good at endings -‑ every word counts and there is never a single word too
many for what has to be said. Take 'John Pardy and the Waves' where the
last sentence is the utterly simple: 'John Pardy walked into the sea.' The
terseness of this suffices Powys but most writers would have devoted a
paragraph to telling us what was going on in John Pardy's mind as he
walked into the sea. That is something Powys leaves us to infer for
ourselves: what really interests him is not his character's mind but the
refrain of the waves themselves. In this respect, he is as precise and
concrete as the next writer would be. It is simply that he is not precise
about the same things. John Pardy's psychology is not the point since the
waves might say exactly the same thing to any of us. The force of their
appeal ensures that we don't take him literally as an ordinary suicide.
What was it, we might ask, that made this extreme concision
possible in a form so much more noted for profusion and repetition? One
explanation is that Powys, unlike more realistic novelists, was still able
to ground his fictions in a mythology, a common framework of thought and
belief that extended over centuries of English writing. Most days, before
he sat down to write, he would read the Bible for half an hour. He did not
take it literally, of course, or use it as an infallible yardstick, but he
found in it a source of reference and allusion on which he could rely. A
fable like 'The Dog and the Lantern', for example, depends for its
effect on the reader's knowing the Gospels. The tale's paradoxes are
launched from a common starting point which is a guarantee that they will
not seem simply obscure or arcane. The tale itself partakes in a much
larger discourse that has already preceded it. To appreciate the surprise
endings of Powys's fables this common culture needs to continue to be
accessible to us. The less secure our grasp of it, the more the stories
will seem eccentric and weird. More mainstream modernist writing may also
depend on allusion but, in this respect, Powys is unique. Joyce did not
expect his reader to have the Odyssey at his fingertips and Eliot
did not expect his readers to know the Upanishads by heart (they
probably relied on their not knowing them) but Powys did write for readers
who had read the Bible. The fact that today's readers know the Bible less
well than readers in 1929 did may explain why Powys's work is less
well‑known than it deserves to be. Formally, it strikes me as more modem
than most novelists of the period are, so suspicion falls on its content.
Anyone who has taught Milton recently will probably have met students who
have no idea what the Trinity is. What hope, then, that they will
understand a story like 'The Only Penitent'? Take 'Mr Pim and the
Holy Crumb', one of the finest of the fables, a tragi‑comic
meditation on the mystery of the eucharist. Here is the final page or so:
|
'But
every one wants to rise again,' remarked the Crumb, 'even the
clergy.'
'Clergymen', observed Pim, 'baint easily satisfied. They do keep
servants, and often a little dog. They do eat mutton and rice
pudding, stretch out their legs before the fire and listen to music
being played.'
'Say',
inquired the Crumb, 'do people ever talk about me here? Do they name
me at all?'
'Thee's
name be useful,' murmured Pim.
'For
what?' asked the Crumb.
'Shepherd do shout thee's name to 'is dog, Carter Beer do damn wold
Boxer wi' Thee, and Mr Tucker do say Thee baint no liar.'
'And
yet 1 made the green grass, Mr Pim!'
"Tis
plain Pim with the clergy,' remarked the clerk.
'Mr Pim!'
'Yes,
Holy Crumb.'
'Mr
Pim, 1 am disappointed with you. 1 hoped you would have wished to
dwell with me, for, to tell you a truth, 1 made heaven glorious for
you and for John Toole.'
'But
Thee made the earth too, and the sweet mould for our bed, and
Thee'll have Miss Pettifer in heaven, who be a lady.'
'But
you, Mr Pim, who have never eaten of the tree of knowledge: 1 had a
mind to be happy with you for all eternity.'
'Ha!
Ha! Ha!' laughed Pim, 'I do see the fix Thee be in, but baint 'Ee
God?'
'Yes,
alas so!'
'Then do 'Ee come and be a rotted bone by John and 1. But allsame
Thee needn't hurry 1 there. 1 have a mind to eat a spring cabbage at
Easter.'
'Mr
Pim, Mr Pim, you are exactly what 1 meant myself to be. When 1
consider the troubles I have caused,' said the Holy Crumb in a low
voice, 'I almost wish 1 had entered into a mouse instead of a man.'
'Hist!
Hist!' whispered Pim, 'Thee may do thik now, for a mouse do live
under the altar table who do creep out when all's quiet.'
Pim
moved to the front pew, winked at the Crumb and remained silent. A
little mouse, with a pert prying look, crept out from under the
altar and devoured the Holy Crumb.
The epigrammatic precision of this ending, the way the thought is
embodied in the surprise twist to the action, should be apparent to
any reader. But if our understanding of the ritual is sketchy or
second‑hand the ending is not likely to seem much more than
ingenious or cerebral. The lightness of the tone is deceptive: under
the irony there is awe and even horror. The humour has the effect of
de‑stabilising us. Is this God in everything, even a crumb, or are
we left contemplating the dead God of Nietzsche? There is more than
one way of reading this ending but one wonders if it is possible to
take in its full force if Powys's religious allusion, so real to
him, is dead to us. One should not under‑estimate the extent to
which his fiction translates us to an utterly different world from
that represented by the latest contestants for the Booker Prize. |
I'm not sure this is a reservation about Fables itself or
simply a reflection of the cultural breakdown of its period. Some readers
would say that T.F.Powys paid a price for being cut off from the world
around him; for others, he had the same right that Blake had to plough his
own religious furrow in his own way. Setting that debate aside, I will
simply end by sticking my neck out and claiming that Fables is
Powys's most characteristic and successful book. Mr Weston's Good Wine,
superb as the best things in it are, moves more slowly and sometimes
seems like a series of short stories stitched together into a novel, but
in Fables there is no padding or repetition, nothing but a
concentration on essentials embodied in language that itself strips
everything down to essentials. It is hard to believe that writing of such
purity could ever be dated, whether we respond to its subject‑matter or
not. What we do need, rather, is a willingness to take these stories at
another level than that of social realism, as little Platonic dialogues or
philosophical epigrams that are quite separate from the English novel of
manners.
Discussion
Among
the points that came up in discussion were: TFP's use of 'cliches' from
the Bible and Prayer Book -- His ideas (ironic or otherwise) of 'sin'
(pride, cruelty) and its defining opposite Innocence (usually shown as
simplicity, and strongly signalled, as if with a halo) -- Is this a
specifically Christian view, or not? John Pardy in his Fable has a
different sort of innocence -- really a scrounger -- a traveller -- type
of the Prodigal Son?
TFP's
affinities with Buddhist thought -- Being over Doing -- non-achievement a
'virtue' in contemplatives.
The
mysterious end of
John
Pardy and the Waves -- Is it suicide? Revenge? Merging with the
infinite? A homecoming? But why is he pleased -- or is he -- at what the
Waves offer -- the chance to destroy? -- with TFP you feel always on the
verge of understanding. We might expect the Waves to represent
indifferent Nature, but their philosophy trips us up. You can't confine
TFP to exact symbols -- the Waves could be seen as a mystical other
dimension -- as death -- as a place beyond creation or destruction -- as
the Mother we return to. We need to redefine continuously. Is John
Pardy seeking Happiness by walking into the waves? Does this mean he has
achieved some form of wisdom, yielding up his personality, or is it a sign
of his continuing folly, still expecting some reward? Are the waves
projections of himself -- or spokesmen for the author? Or just like waves?
TFP's
dark endings -- the Moods of God include bad moods, and inscrutability --
possibly also under-achievement -- God making mistakes. The Bible
contains all experience, TF believed. His morality may be equivocal, but
his style is hypnotic: those waves are seductive...
TF's
affinities with Blake -- Blake's
Book of
Thel about a child questioning clouds, etc., but escaping to life:
Blake's version of Christianity. Is TF more nihilistic, or agnostic?
Or pietistic, letting the Moods flow through his stories -- expressing
through art not doctrine.
In
Mr Pim
and the Holy Crumb, what's the attitude to traditional religion? Mr
Pim's (mis)understandings of what he's been told (by the vicar), and what
he's observed of the ways of the gentry, against his primitive, almost
vegetable-like, chatting to his old friend in the grave -- the Holy Crumb
offers him heaven, but is rejected.
The Dog
and the Lantern -- a cruel story. Meant to be funny? A satire on
religiosity, as in the 'Light of the World' painting? Unusually, in this
Fable the wicked get their just deserts (like Mrs Vosper in Mr
Weston). The brutality of village life -- true to life, as villagers
told TF. Blake's Tyger -- 'did he who made the lamb make thee?' Old
Testament punishment -- Sodom & Gomorrah.
TFP's
refusal to be pinned down -- a philosophical method. Dialogues in the
Fables
are low-key, dispassionate, gentle, polite. Strategies and tricks in
the writing -- changing gear at the end -- leaving the ball in your court.
Most
of the Fables end in death: somtimes a release, sometimes not. But TF
isn't lugubrious or morbid -- why not? There's a lot of humour --
sensuous beauty too (description of a boat with seaweed waving below --
TFP used to row under the cliffs).
Did he
enjoy teasing readers with gloom? exaggerating it -- or offer oblivion as
really preferable (in a deeply un-Christian way). His affinities with
C17 'Metaphysical' religious poets (Vaughan, Traherne) -- death both
familiar and mysterious. In
The
Corpse and the Flea -- the flea as Christ?
Was he
writing for people who thought like him, ambiguously, or aiming to shake
up conventional people? To understand him, do you need to be a believer
or at least a spiritual seeker, the sort of person who'd read Eckhart or
Boehme? Or is he aiming to entertain, with a simple moral, as Bunyan did.
His
control of dialogue (arguing with himself?) -- a sense of shape, building
through jokes, turning on the tap at the end. The short form of
Fables suits him -- no room for character development -- compare
Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying', full of decadence, error, etc -- TFP deals
with 'Everyman', with the universal Nature of Things -- no point in
psychotherapy here -- characters like chess pieces, no angst. 'Parables'
is correct. You can read him like a poem. The more often, the better he
gets.
Kate Kavanagh
From The
Powys Society Newsletter, No 49, July 2003
