Original
“Little Blue Books” are scarce: their staples are rusty, and their cheap
acidic paper is brown and crumbling, but in their day millions were sold
throughout America. John Cowper contributed ten titles, and David
Goodway’s introduction to this new edition of The Art of Forgetting the
Unpleasant (1928) includes fascinating information about this
extraordinary left-wing publishing venture, in the causes of civil
liberties, pacifism and racial and sexual equality, and propagating great
literature.
This is
Powys at his most populist and indeed politically committed, and he seems
to have found political engagement altogether easier in America than in
England, speaking out in the defence of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti
and the trade unionist Eugene Debs.
Powys’s
tone is never more pressingly intimate that when he is addressing the
broad masses, and he specifically appeals to individual readers among the
crowd. He is perpetually conscious of reading as a solitary, often
“furtive” activity, and the tiny, genuinely pocket-sized “Little Blue
Books” would have been ideally suited to anyone who, like Powys, liked to
carry books about as cherished talismans and read them in incongruous
places. (This is interesting to do: Milton in Pizza Hut; Bashō on
Thameslink)
The title
essay of this booklet, “The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant”, is also
intensely personal – how can psychological equilibrium be maintained in
the face of enemies both inner – “the howling mandates of conscience”, and
outer – “the raw material of horror”, “the maggots and the lice, the
torture-chambers and the slaughter-houses.” In Wolf Solent, the
sinister Mr Malakite shrieks on his deathbed the word “forget”,
contradicting Wolf’s unctuous suggestion of “forgive”. “The Art of
Forgetting the Unpleasant” was written at the same time as Wolf Solent,
and explores philosophically many of the themes of the novel – the
struggle for personal “life illusion”:
“Such a
‘vision’ need not be any traditional religion. It need not be any social
panacea. It need not be any intellectual or esthetic dogma. As long as it
emanates from the spontaneous integrity of our unique self, as long as it
is ours, ours entirely and not another’s, all will be well. We need ask no
more of it that that it should be our very own, the expression of our
inmost identity both for good and evil. And that it should bring with it
the sacred art of forgetting.”
This new
edition of The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant also includes the
four other essays of the original booklet, two republished here for the
first time. “The Real Longfellow” identifies the poet’s authentic “faint,
magical notes” that are almost swamped by his “moralistic bathos” – the
problem being that “Longfellow could never bring his piety into harmony
with his imagination”.
“The
Perfect Gentleman” attempts to adapt an aristocratic ideal to a democratic
philosophy. Aristocrats are made by good manners, and “the greatest of
all American aristocrats was Walt Whitman”.
“Walled
Gardens” is an essay in psycho-geography or perhaps feng shui,
about the supposed effects of different building styles and materials on
human relationships in England and America,
“The Wind
that Waves the Grasses” is a rhapsody on the subtle intimations carried on
the air to sensitive ears, but the essay’s exuberance overpowers its
evanescent subject.
Powys on Hardy is a selection from John Cowper’s Autobiography,
letters, and literary criticism. Glen Cavaliero’s introduction describes
the contrasting temperaments of the two writers against their common
Dorset background, and Kate Kavanagh provides a narrative thread
connecting the extracts. In 1896, the young Powys sent his first book of
“copy-cat verses” to Hardy, and received an invitation to Max Gate. Hardy
subsequently visited Montacute. “That morning I remember announcing to my
father and to all the family that the greatest writer then living on
this earth was coming to visit us! Powys recalled his powerful
impression of his first meeting with Hardy in his Autobiography,
nearly forty years later. “Frail as an elf Mr. Hardy was, but his hands
were the hands of a master-craftsman and his great greenish-black eyes,
dark as those of Leo XIII, gleamed forth like the eyes of a ger-falcon
over his hooked nose and military moustache.”
The images of Hardy as “elfin”, alert to the caprices of chance, and
“hawk-eyed” recur in Powys’s essay on Hardy in The Pleasures of
Literature, reprinted here. It is one of his most eloquent pieces of
literary criticism, intrepid in its philosophical sweep. Powys allies
Hardy with Shakespeare as the great pessimist of our literature: “The
main driving force of his genius is a philosophical arraignment of the
ways of God to Man.” Powys praises Hardy’s “indignant sympathy with a
suffering world.” “He saw the ivy killing the tree, he saw the weasel
killing the rabbit, he saw the trees strangling each other as they
contended for light and air, he saw the sportsman wounding the pheasant
and the collector bringing down the rare migratory bird.”
Often the qualities that Powys admires in Hardy are those that he learned
to cultivate himself. Hardy’s landscapes, writes Powys, “are the
landscapes rather of a draughtsman that a colourist”, emphasizing outline,
silhouette, relief, and the presence of the “half-abstract, half-concrete
entities” of dawn and twilight.
It is a pleasure to find this widely-scattered writing on Hardy brought
together in such clear focus. The booklet forms a tribute by a great
Wessex writer to the master he revered, and is an ideal introduction to
the many lovers of Hardy, who may be unfamiliar with John Cowper Powys.
John
Hodgson
From The
Powys Society Newsletter, No 58, November 2006
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