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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