‘I must have some TEA…’: Drink, drugs and defiance in the novels
of John Cowper Powys
A talk by Tim Blanchard
at the 2009 Powys Society Conference
Each novelist has their own world
of things. Not just places and people, but objects, the most
minor and ordinary of things which are most likely to bob to the
surface of their imagination while writing. Such as the worn-out
boots in Thomas Hardy. Dostoevsky's dirty handkerchiefs.
Tolstoy's nibbled sugar loaf.
In the writing of John Cowper
Powys this characteristic is more striking and perhaps more
important than for any other novelist. As Margaret Drabble
observes, picking on just one of his peculiarities: "More bread
and butter is consumed and more tea drunk in the novels of John
Cowper Powys than the whole of the rest of English Literature."
Tea is strangely Powys-like. In a
way there seems to be no need for reflection or analysis of the
point, any consideration of where and when tea is important in
his writing - it just suits him. A cup of tea is the liquid
equivalent of an exclamation mark. Its little jolt of caffeine
brings a sensation of heightened awareness to what might
otherwise be something banal, and both tea and exclamation marks
appear to be used in his novels as liberally as the other.
But for a novelist with such an
obsessive feeling for the inanimate, can the prevalence of
tea-drinking be just a writer's tic, a lazy reflection of his
own days or the facts of early twentieth century life in
England?
Contrary to first impressions, tea
is really only prominent in two novels: After My Fashion and
Wolf Solent. This paper explores why tea drinking is so
important in those novels and the relevance to Powys's thinking
- as well as what might have brought about an end to its
importance so early in the run of Wessex novels.
It considers the importance of
tea-drinking to plots; as one of the many drugs in the novels,
and finally, as one of his many tools of defiance.
*
Tea-drinking has been an
institution of English life since the 18th century, and is said
to have reached its peak of popularity in 1931, when a typical
person would be consuming nine and a half pounds of tea leaves
each year.
But tea has not been a simple,
monumental institution during that time. Its tangle of meanings
provide some clues as to why Powys may have been attracted,
consciously or otherwise, to the rituals, symbols and purposes
of tea.
On its very first introduction to
the general public in the middle of the 17th century it was
advertised enthusiastically as curing anything from headaches
and fevers to poor eyesight. But popularity changed the nature
of attitudes to tea-drinking. For example, a pamphlet of 1706 by
Dr Duncan has the title Wholesome advice against the abuses of
hot liquors particularly of coffee, chocolate, tea, brandy and
strong waters; and this was followed in 1757 – and perhaps
illustrating how a degree of ferocity had entered the debate
over the issue in the meanwhile - by Jonas Hanway, and his An
Essay on Tea Considered as Pernicious to Health, Obstructing
Industry and Impoverishing the Nation. This is one example of
the tone of that essay:
To what a height of folly must a
nation be arrived, when common people are not satisfied with
wholesome food at home, but must go to the remotest regions to
please a vicious palate! There is a certain lane near Richmond,
where beggars are often seen, in the summer season, drinking
their tea. You may see labourers who are mending the roads
drinking their tea; it is even drank in cinder-carts; and what
is not less absurd, sold out in cups to haymakers! He who should
be able to drive three Frenchmen before him, or she who might be
a breeder of such a race of men, are seen sipping their tea!
From its first introduction, tea
was regarded as being a harmful influence on the lower classes.
As a drink at breakfast it was said to be not substantial enough
to see them through the long working day, and in the afternoon
only kept workers engaged in idling and gossip. William Cobbett
in 1821 described it as "an enfeebler of the frame, an
engenderer of effeminacy".
Tea was even said to be more of a
danger to the moral welfare of the masses than gin and ale.
Perhaps this was because it was such a new and insidious drug,
suspiciously foreign, and appealing to a much larger proportion
of the population than alcohol - where at least the appeal and
effects were so much more roguishly honest. But more likely -
the disapproval was due to the way tea upset the economic
balance of the nation. Tax revenues from the taverns were hit
badly, and governments responded in a serious way. The duty on
tea rose to 119% by the middle of the 18th century.
Over time, tea was co-opted by the
upper and middle classes as a means of distinction. How tea was
taken, when, where and among what type of company, made a
powerful statement about the social status of those involved.
The smallest details mattered. It became possible to be
derogatory about someone's character, just by suggesting they
might be the sort of person who put their milk in first. There
was "afternoon tea" in the homes of the wealthy: an opportunity
to display a fashionable elegance, the best china and its dainty
assortment of tea plates. While among the majority of the
population, there was "high tea": the main meal of the day, with
platefuls of meat and veg and great pots of tea served like a
kind of gravy to wash it all down.
The association of tea with the
nineteenth century temperance movement and the non-conformist
church was important in changing its reputation from social
threat to a symbol of decent living. Its respectability as a
past-time became a key to allowing entry for women into more
public places, across a wider social sphere. The tea-shops which
began to appear from around the time of Powys's birth - the
Express Dairy, Kardomah, and from 1894, Lyons - were among the
first public places where women could go out without the need to
be accompanied.
Tea-drinking, therefore, may have
been respectable on the surface, but was also a licence of
freedom and the possibility of adventure - and transgression -
for women who had previously been confined to the home or at
least by the presence of a husband or chaperone.
*
The history of tea, then, is full
of contradictions: both a threat and a benefit to health. A
drink and a ritual that has been super-refined by "civilised"
society but which always basically remains the drink of the
masses. A form of social freedom, and also, through the creation
of a tea-shop culture with its own conventions and economics, a
bourgeois trap. This perhaps explains part of the instinctive
appeal to Powys of tea-drinking, because its presence contains
so many different barbs of meaning capable of lodging themselves
into the minds of both writer and reader.
On one level, tea is just a
feature of the novels which is a reflection of ordinary life -
of course it is.
Powys is a highly realistic
writer. What he called the "Marvels and Wonders", sometimes
included in his novels, are not indulgent flights of fancy but
specific challenges to conventional thinking. They are conscious
and purposeful aberrations in what is otherwise a relentless,
sometimes grim, attention to the real. The vision may be
distracted, intensely Romantic, but the intelligence behind it
is committed to facing the petty doubts, vanity and failures of
reality. Characters do not get away with anything. So it is
unsurprising that details of everyday life are replicated, even
if those routines may be basically uninteresting and undramatic;
even if those details are a painful reminder of his own
existence. Powys is certainly drawing on the facts of his own
life for characters like Richard Storm in After My Fashion,
whose dependence on a diet of bread and tea leads to the same
agonies of dyspepsia.
*
Going further, tea-drinking could
be seen as an important element in the making of the plots of
Powys's contemporary novels. If a writer is fundamentally
uninterested in the machinations of action, of overcoming
adversity, of worldly success, where else does dramatic
structure come from? Tea gets people into the same room without
the need for a particular reason.
A good example is the "Tea-Party"
chapter of Wolf Solent. What else would have brought together
the grand dame Mrs Solent with the Torps quite so
straightforwardly? The instruments of tea-making are brandished
like flags of reassurance, that this is neutral ground, a place
of tea:
'There's mother!' [Gerda] cried at
length. 'Fetch the kettle, Wolf!'... Wolf, with teapot in one
hand and the kettle in the other, vociferated a boisterous
welcome, drowning the politer words of his mother.
But once together, the tea-making
ritual itself acts as a clear gauge of the social divide between
them – for example, through the great heapfuls of sugar at the
bottom of each teacup, which makes Mrs Solent so alarmed. As a
direct result of staging the tea-party, and by bringing the new
character of Mrs Solent up to date with events and characters,
Powys is able to create an effective focal point for what's
happening in the plot as a whole, and highlight the crossing
currents of the two families: the social pretensions, and the
creeping insect-like threat to this new socially acceptable life
from the "young grocer" Bob Weevil. Here's a sample of the
atmosphere that builds through the sips of tea:
"What's Lobbie been doing lately, mother?" enquired
Gerda...
"Lob do 'ee say? Thee may well ask what Lob be doing,
the young pert-mouthed limb! He be bringing his dad's hoar hairs
down to Bedlam, and mine wi 'em, that's what the owl pellet be
doing!"
Gerda hurriedly enquired in a ringing voice whether
Mrs Solent wanted any cake. "Pimpernel hadn't any fresh kinds
except this. I expect you are so used to London confectionery,
Mrs Solent -- "
"Sons are troublesome beings, Mrs Torp," [said Mrs
Solent], "but it's nice to have them."
"What has Lobbie been doing?" enquired Wolf, heedless
of Gerda's frowns.
"He's been going over with that imp of Satan, Bob
Weevil, to Parson Valley's. His dad told 'en he'd lift the skin
from's backside if he did it; but he was see'd, only last night,
out there again."
"It sounds very innocent, Mrs Torp," remarked the
lady, "visiting a clergyman."
Tea is what makes scenes possible:
enlightening, ironic, toe-curling scenes, like the meeting of
Mrs Solent with her husband's hideous lover Selena Gault, or
Wolf and Mr Malakite after discovering his incest. It's the
acceptable means of overcoming the barriers of private and
public concerns, of creating a convenient intimacy. In After
My Fashion, Nelly and a stranger are able to reach the stage
where they can discuss what’s called the "secret of life" as a
consequence of the moment that cups of tea have given them.
This argument of tea-making as
structural device falls down, however, in the face of a broader
view of the novels as a whole. There is not enough consistency.
There are more of his contemporary novels where tea is barely
mentioned, let alone relied upon for plot, and Powys is more
likely to use the idea of tea for no dramatic reason, or as the
actual cause of drama to be snuffed out. Like this from Richard
Storm:
As for the 'what next?' which must naturally follow this
soul-snatching, he did not at that hour, so pleasant were the
fumes of Mrs Winsome's tea, give a thought to the matter.
Instead, tea is important because
it is one of the many forms of drug which occupy Powys's
writings, one of the ways in which people, things and the world
are bewitched: a device of everyday magic.
*
Drugs in themselves are explicit,
implicit and a part of the experience of reading Powys. Whether
intentional or not in the way they are devised, it could be said
the novels are a form of drug in themselves, mildly addictive in
how they provide sensations that can excite and soothe a
literature-loving mind, a reader susceptible to philosophical
ideas or a sceptic of the conventions of modern life. More
specifically, a range of drinks -- along with cigarettes --
which can both excite and deaden, both "uppers" and "downers",
are used throughout the novels.
These are especially obvious at
moments of important decision-making or formative experiences.
Alcohol, for example, is used as part of a ritual of crisis.
Nelly of After My Fashion marks the break between her old
life and the new with an unholy libation of port wine, drunk
from a silver christening mug with the remainder spilt onto the
earth. Johnny Geard comforts the terrors of Tittie Petherton
with a glass of punch, not by letting her take a drink, but by
hurling the glass to the floor in a startling offering to God.
Wolf Solent makes his questionable
deal with Squire Urquhart over a bottle of ancient Malmsey, an
event significant enough to be singled out as a focal point and
the chapter title of 'Wine'. The "nectareous" Malmsey is like a
medicinal potion with powers to be exploited:
Wolf laid his hand on the stem of
his wineglass and stared sombrely at the rich, purplish umber of
its contents. Never had he tasted such wine! He felt irritated
with Urquhart for not letting him enjoy it in silence - savour
every drop of it - draw it into his heart, his nerves, his
spirit...
The idea of the historic and
exceptional drink is pursued at one of the dramatic peaks of
Glastonbury. When Mr Evans finally gives in to his sadistic
fantasy of an iron bar crushing a human skull, the arrangement
is toasted at the Pilgrims' tavern. He does it with a previously
unheard of "full tumbler" of "Our Special", what Powys calls "a
species of old sack that the years had converted into a liquid
gold that was heady and heartening to a degree unparalleled”.
However noble, in this context the Old Special has the potential
of evil, described as the "Drink Perilous", a "deadly
nightshade".
But however ambiguous alcohol is
made to appear, it is not a poison. For example, when Sylvanus
drinks the whimsical "Meliodka", a concoction made by the young
girl, Melia, based on her readings of Russian history:
No one but Sylvanus, who
seemed to have the digestion of a sea lion, would have prepared
for the most important meal of the day by even sipping such
stuff; but Sylvanus disposed of no less than three whole
liqueur-glasses of it, while the three girls stood in a row
before him, watching him with a mixture of pride and
consternation.
And Glastonbury's Tom
Barter plans to replace all of his dinners with a diet of
whisky, after what he describes as "a delicious drowsiness which
flows through him like a ripple of warm etherealised honey".
Compared with the potency of these
various brews, tea seems fairly insipid. But Powys would agree
with Thomas de Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium
Eater, where he argued that
tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse
nerves, or are become so from wine-drinking and are not
susceptible of influence from so refined a stimulant, will
always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual.
Drunkenness may be a consolation,
a heavy bludgeon of a drug when an escape is needed, but it is
also portrayed as dulling the ability of the drinker to respond
to life.
In novels based on a philosophy of
the sovereignty of heightened awareness over any other kind of
experience, "progress" or material gain, the crudity of alcohol
is a problem rather than a solution. For Powys, there is already
more than enough which is dull and ponderous in bourgeois
existence. For example, champagne only makes Richard Storm feel
"helplessness and weakness", as he makes what’s called a "feeble
effort" to pull himself up from the effete luxuries offered by
Elise Angel.
The devilish villains of Owen
Glendower are made careless and impotent by alcohol, as when
Hywel Sele loses political influence at Court by his "rambling
attack", when he’s "too drunk to gather [the] import" of what he
hears, eventually having "imbibed so much that he was forced to
withdraw himself for a moment".
The hero Rhisiart is similarly
caught out, as "from [his] muddled wits the fumes of that fatal
metheglin dissolved like smoke". Netta in Ducdame ruins
herself with alcohol, corrupting what had been natural and
untouched in the eyes of Rook Ashover: "Her breath, heavy with
liquor, spoiled the scent of that divine air, which floated in
upon him as if over thousands of leagues of newly sprouting
grass."
JCP has also been explicit about
his attitude to the limitations of powerful drugs in A
Philosophy of Solitude, where he says:
If there is a malevolent spirit in
the cosmos... the best revenge upon such a spirit is not to cry:
'Hell! Let's have a drink!' but with Machiavellian cunning to
slip aside from the crowd and allow those simple, primitive,
eternal aspects of nature which require no sophistication to be
your healing draughts of Lethe... Violent alternations of ennui
and pleasure destroy, as by degrees they do destroy, our power
to respond to the magic of the universe.
*
In its unsophisticated way, tea
assumes a unique position. Other non-alcoholic drinks simply do
not work, even those with similar effects. There are no
lingering raptures over coffee, it is merely a functional thing
and part of a social event. Anything else is dismissed. For
example, Mrs Shotover in After My Fashion when she sets
out to condemn the the land of Coca-Cola: "What's their word for
those horrid mixtures they all swallow?” she says “ 'Soft
drinks'! ". And so, the characters of Powys's novels seek out
tea and its modest, ordinary heightening, in the same way as
they look to the sky, to windows and old fence posts, for fresh
draughts of happiness.
Tea is not used as anything as
obvious as a symbol or metaphor in the novels we are discussing,
but something more informal and suggestive, the kind of
recurring element that provides a rhythm to he story.
In its rudimentary appearance, its
vegetable leaves, the relation of tea to the natural world is
evident to see. In this way tea is a means of imbibing some of
the pure, unfussy qualities of nature. This relationship is
suggested by many of Powys's descriptions which echo the same
sensation of infusion and absorption. Wolf describes his
"mythology" as being like an "escape into a deep, green, lovely
world where thoughts unfolded themselves like large, beautiful
leaves growing out of fathoms of blue-green water". Richard
Storm is affected by an "encroaching spell of sheer physical
well-being, emanating from every object within sight, [which]
covered him with a pleasant cloud of leafy vegetable
contentment." At one point, Storm is almost dunked like a tea
bag:
He bathed himself in the beauty of
those rolling hills and those rich pastures. He drank in,
through every pore of his skin, that magical air, those blue
skies, those soft languorous mists, those warm, fragrant rains.
*
After My Fashion
is surely the peak for tea-drinking in terms of its career in
the novels. At moments tea becomes the fuel of the novel, the
subject of longing, of quests. Like this:
A desperate desire for tea awoke in the heart of Richard Storm.
It occurred to him very strongly that a considerable part of his
present depression arose from the absence of this
beverage..."Tea I must and will have," he said firmly to
himself, "but heaven knows how I'm going to get it! I can't
quite shake the old fellow to bawl in his ears, "Get me some
tea!"”
Later in the novel, Nelly suffers
the same desperation: "I must have some tea," she cries. And
when fulfilment comes we hear about the enjoyment of it in terms
of connoissieurs. Nelly’s nature-loving father drinks "enormous
cups" of it, "sugarless" and "milkless"; in his tour of
tea-shops and those hospitable farmyards, Richard Storm enjoys
what he says is "cup after cup of the divine nectar" and looks
forward to "the epicurean pleasure of a carefully considered
discussion as to where they should have tea".
The deep yearning expressed in
this way in the novel is closer to the spiritual than the
physical or material. Tea-drinking is basically used to
demonstrate a proposition that life is at its richest and most
significant when experienced in its simplest forms, as described
in this morning scene from the same novel:
It was always a luxurious and pleasant moment for Nelly, when
after a knock as gentle as her round knuckles could administer,
the all-competent Grace brought her hot water and tea. It was
delicious to lie with closed eyes, still half-wrapped in the
filmy cloud of sleep, while the sweet airs floated in through
the open windows, mingled with the crooning of the dove and the
reedy call of the blackbird.
Lack of desire for tea is a sign
of a weakening grip on life itself. We can only expect the worst
for the novel's hero in the final pages of the book when Storm
is offered tea and Powys tells us, ominously, that he is
"only... able... to swallow... a single cup".…
*
The thread of spiritual emotion
inspired by tea-drinking is continued into Wolf Solent.
Wolf responds to the "faint rarefication of thought", the
"heightening of life that came from his tea drinking", not only
because of its gentle stimulant, but the memories found as a
result of taking part in the practice itself. Here, Wolf is
drinking tea alone:
drinking it from a particular china 'set' belonging to his
grandmother, a 'set' called Limoges. Beside him was a book with
a little heap of entangled bits of seaweed lying upon it, which
he was separating and sorting. There came a moment when he
suddenly realised that the book, beside which was his teacup and
upon which was the seaweed, was The Poems of Wordsworth.
But it's the closing section of
Wolf Solent that suggests a further level of significance for
tea-drinking. The final words of Powys's novels are typically
momentous, the conclusion of a human tragedy or the spectacular
reaching for worlds which live just beyond the possibilities of
words. And yet here, in what is no less a book of philosophical
struggle and complexity, the conclusion is this: "Well, I
shall have a cup of tea.... "
Is it an uncharacteristic ending?
It could be argued that the reference to tea makes the ending as
heavily-weighted in significance as any other. The resignation,
specifically related to tea-drinking, is a determined act of
defiance.
The lines of contest are marked
out throughout the novel, pitching the luxuries of the
high-class tea-rooms of Pimpernel's against Wolf's solitary,
anti-social ecstasy on the other. At the same time as Wolf loses
the battle over his mythology, he also loses to the conventions
of modern life and its aspirations. The trips and orders from
Pimpernel's are all part of his wife’s desire to domesticate, to
aspire, to join a respectable bourgeois world. It is a world
personified by the all-careless and all-comfortable Lord Carfax,
who signals the completion of Gerda's social adventure in a
single visit at the end of the book. He finally makes Wolf's
isolation complete, sitting down for tea and Pimpernel cakes,
Gerda sitting on his knee. Even his mother has decided to open
her own "grand and new" tea-shop, thereby making what had been
an elemental and sentimental pleasure of family life, rich in
resonance, into a business venture.
"Well, I shall have a cup of
tea...", says Wolf. The "I" is important. It is not a case of
joining anyone for tea, of assimilating any part of himself; he
does not care whether Lord Carfax is still there or not. His tea
is solely for his own enjoyment, anti-social and an offence
against society. The Powys-hero characters consistently avoid
the crowded tea-rooms. Richard Storm is said to “hesitate for a
moment between two rival tea shops which faced one another
across the narrow street. But there were cheerful citizens of
Selshurst drinking tea in both of them, and he continued on his
way." Wolf feels "sick with dismay" at the thought of his
mother's shop filled with "tourists from Exeter".
Tea-drinking is an act of defiance
against convention, against those "modern inventions" of
science, when drunk in isolation or among sympathetic,
understanding minds, when a world of powerful sensations can
still be accessed through its simplicity.
The tea fetish in these two novels
is meaningful, suggestive and playful, but not serious. Like
much of Powys's writing, it is a set of ideas and meanings which
are part of his ironic vision of twentieth-century life. Tea and
its social rituals -- whether dressed up or stripped down to the
basics, celebrated or revolted against -- are part of a joke.
Amidst the most delirious rapture, the plunges into dark
psychology, the realisation of the headiest truths, what matters
to the characters of Powys's novels -- and to people in general
-- are the details of real life. So they sit alongside each
other, the ordinary and the extraordinary, making one and the
other both sublime and ridiculous at the same time. It is the
kind of bathos which Powys finds irresistible.
Perhaps inevitably, as an idea,
tea finally runs out of magic in Powys's novels - long before
he turns to writingabout cultures of a distant past. After My
Fashion and Wolf Solent were both written in America,
during his time as an itinerant lecturer, travelling from city
to city. All the novels of this period of living in America are
immersed in memories of an English countryside. In the same way
he calls upon an English ritual in tea-drinking, as a way of
recapturing a particular way of life -- not to romanticise it,
but to savour its contrasts, especially between its relationship
to a class system and the snobbery of some aspects of English
life, rubbing up against and putting into relief his own
philosophies and experiences.
Powys
appropriates one of the major social components and symbols of
English civilisation, and does a "malice-dance" all over it.
That's why he's swigging cup after cup of the stuff --
extracting any kind of enjoyment he likes from it. He's mixing
with all the wrong types -- he’s snubbing the posh tea shops --
he’s making tea only for himself, drinking it alone.
In the end, the argument is
completed. Powys doesn't need to make the point any longer, he
doesn't get the same sensation from its memory or its presence
as a joke and a jibe. Or perhaps it's even simpler than that,
and he just doesn't find the joke funny anymore.
Tim Blanchard
[Tim Blanchard,
a former journalist, is now a consultant for a specialist
education communications company, working with universities,
business schools and research bodies. He came upon
A Glastonbury
Romance in a bookshop in 2000, and, like many
admirers of John Cowper Powys, found a writer whose ideas were a
strange and intoxicating echo of his own most secret thoughts.
Tim has an MA in Cultural History from the University of York.]
From The Powys Society Newsletter, No 68, November 2009
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