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Two reviews: Powys and Emma Goldman, edited by David Goodway. The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Dorothy Richardson, edited by Janet Fouli.
The Real and the Ideal John Dunn evaluates Anarchism and the individual in the letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman.
Powys and Emma Goldman, edited by David Goodway. Cecil Woolf, 188pp, £30, ISBN 978-1897967-84-3
David Goodway has been building up our expectations about the publication of this book over many years and the results will not disappoint. Apart from a brief passing reference to the Powys-Goldman connection made by George Woodcock in his Anarchism (1963), Powys’s anarchist leanings were first seriously brought to light in Goodway’s The Politics of John Cowper Powys in the Powys Review (1985). We were later treated to Goodway’s thoughts on Powys’s individualist anarchist philosophy in the Powys Journal of 2004. Then Powys was given a central position in Goodway’s invaluable history of British anarchism, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (2006). Now Goodway presents the concluding evidence in support of his long running thesis of Powys as anarchist. For here is Powys in his own words, a serious, politically aware writer, in correspondence with one of the best known anarchists of the twentieth century, Emma Goldman or ‘Red Emma’ as she was known, over the four eventful years from 1936 to 1940.
Goodway explains, in his informative introduction, that Goldman had seen the Russian Revolution at first hand and also the hand of Stalin at work in undermining the bid for freedom made by the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution. A succinct biography of Goldman is given, describing her life in the United States as that of an anarchist agitator and her disillusionment with Bolshevik Russia after her deportation there from the United States at the height of the ‘red scare’ in 1918. Thereafter, Goldman was ‘nowhere at home’, until a marriage of convenience gave her British citizenship in 1925. Goodway's introduction details the possible points of contact between Goldman and Powys in the United States before the former’s deportation. However limited these were, Goldman thought she knew Powys well enough to write to him in 1936, having been given his name and address by their mutual friend, Maurice Browne, founder of the Chicago Little Theatre…. and so the correspondence began.
Goodway explains that Powys was not at his best here as a letter writer -- I beg to differ. Whilst not to be compared with his literary backslapping of old and close friends, nor his intimate exchanges with lovers and siblings, the letters to Goldman do have a fascination for what they reveal about Powys as a serious political thinker, quite apart from their value as an historical record of responses by concerned individuals to momentous contemporary events.
In a letter of introduction for Goldman, Powys described her as a philosophical anarchist. In another letter, he compared Goldman’s philosophy with those of Kropotkin, Bakunin and Tolstoy. He later compared her efforts to break through ‘our national peculiarities’ of ‘reserve & timidity & suspiciousness & slow caution’, with those of Edward Carpenter. In other words, Powys was sufficiently politically aware to be able to draw readily upon key names from the libertarian socialist and anarchist canon.
He also displayed an appreciation of what anarchism really meant. ‘How weird it is for Emma Goldman’s friends’, he wrote, ‘to be fighting “for the government” when you think of it!’ This tone of irony, however small, is never entirely absent from Powys’s voice when he is questioning Goldman about what a future anarchist state might be like. If Goldman’s friends were to defeat fascism, how would they face the challenges of being an isolated enclave of anarchism? Which authorities would deal with the imports and exports? Who would divide the profits made from exporting to the other districts of Spain and other countries? These are astute questions from Powys, whose own perception of a post-revolutionary anarchy was that it would be a world system or nothing, a system without buying, selling, or exchange. In this context, his questions to Goldman were telling indeed. This was not the pupil of anarchism at the feet of his master, this was a serious political thinker (anyone who has read The Complex Vision knows as much), not letting on that he knew as much as he did. (Goodway himself notes that whilst Powys expressed to Goldman his ignorance of anarchism and anarchist writers, he had in fact read the individualist anarchist, Max Stirner and had known the libertarian socialist, Erskine Wood.) And how did Goldman answer him? She did so by avoiding the main thrust of Powys’s questions. Of course she was right to respond that anarchism would not have a ‘centralised authority’, nor would it profit from production and distribution. What she failed to answer was how such an isolated Utopia would survive in an otherwise capitalist world. Powys knew anarchism was not possible under such conditions. Goldman, with all her heroic idealism, could not allow herself to think that.
It was Goldman’s ‘saintly’ idealism that ultimately found itself at odds with the old ‘ichthysaurian’ Powys. Nothing could have been further from Powys’s Stirner-influenced egoism than when Goldman wrote that she had found in Spain a way ‘to realize the ideal and ideas for which I had struggled all my life’. ‘Realize the ideal’, how those words must have jarred with Powys. Max Stirner opened the concluding chapter of The Ego and His Own with the words…
Pre-Christian and Christian times pursue opposite goals; the former wants to idealise the real, the latter to realise the ideal.
The point Stirner went on to conclude was that, in striving for the ideal Man, the individual is lost. ‘All higher essences must be shunned if my feeling of uniqueness is to survive. One’s concern can only be with the unique one, one’s self.’ It was probably this dictum of Stirner’s that was at the heart of Powys’s personal philosophy of solitude.
When Goldman requested Powys to contribute a propaganda piece to Spain and the World she was, unwittingly, giving Powys a platform from which to exclaim his own brand of anarchism. The resulting piece was The Real and the Ideal, a work not only with a title lifted straight from the pages of The Ego and His Own, but very likely the most telling and succinct statement of Powys’s political philosophy we have and, therefore of immense importance to Powysians. Goodway astutely includes it in full, chronologically slotted in amongst the letters. The purposeful choice of title is also proof positive that Powys not only read, but was influenced heavily by Max Stirner. In short, even though Goodway does not acknowledge the fact, I believe The Real and the Ideal vindicates his long-held thesis about Stirner’s influence on Powys.
In Powys’s The Real and Ideal it is the individual that counts, not ideals or ideologies. Notably, it is not the engines of destruction devised by tyrants and demagogues that Powys cites as the greatest threat to humanity, but the onslaught of the media.
The unhappy individual who tries to obey his conscience is besieged over the air and through the press by the most crafty, insidious, corrupting, lying propaganda, made possible by wireless, cinemas, and newspapers, that has ever been exerted in the history of our race, to swamp, drown, pervert and hypnotize every attempt he makes at thinking for himself.
Powys emphasised that to ‘think for yourself has become today the one unpardonable sin’, whether the prevailing ideology was communism, fascism or democratic capitalism. The latter was, for Powys, just as much a threat to individual freedom as that of any dictatorship, only more invidious.
Powys comes across as a realist in this piece and the most he could offer Emma, by way of propaganda in this exposition of his own brand of anarchism, was to say that even if the Spanish anarchists were to be ‘bombed into annihilation’, then at least it could be said they had offered ‘a living experience’ to which humanity might return in the future.
In addition to the excellent introduction to this correspondence, Goodway offers the reader copious and scholarly notes to each letter, imparting a wealth of information about the individuals and places included. In the thoughtful afterword to the letters, Goodway states that ‘one problem is the extent to which Powys really did understand the theoretical basis of anarchism….Had Powys…really become an anarchist?’ Having read these letters, I would say it is now clear that Powys did have a theoretical understanding of anarchism before he corresponded with Goldman.
Goodway has done future studies of John Cowper Powys an enormous service in expanding widely upon Woodcock’s passing reference to the connection between Powys and Goldman. There can no longer be a balanced understanding of Powys’s life and work that does not take his political thinking and closely related philosophy into account. The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman, is not only a joy to read, but beautifully produced and a pleasure to hold. A short read it might be, but it possesses enough stimulating and important content to make it priceless to anyone with an interest in Powys’s politics, philosophy and thought.
John Dunn. From The Powys Society Newsletter, No 64, July 2008
'The noblest and most intellectual woman'
Marcella Henderson-Peal is moved by the 'unorthodox orthodoxy' of a profound friendship.
The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Dorothy Richardson, edited by Janet Fouli. Cecil Woolf, London, 2008; 272pp., £35; ISBN 978-1-897967-27-0
Out of all the John Cowper Powys correspondence series edited by Cecil Woolf, the 76 letters he wrote to Dorothy Richardson, 'the noblest and most intellectual woman ' , and the 64 letters and 40 postcards he received from her between 1929 and 1952 (also including excerpts from John’s diary), are among the most touching, caring and revealing ever written. They make up the story of bosom minds befriended in mutual understanding, despite geographical distance and World War II, between two of the twentieth century’s most unusual authors. Both Phyllis Playter and Alan Odle from their self-appointed background positions discreetly but genuinely shared this friendship in twin kinship.
The letters encompass all aspects of both writer’s lives and thoughts, small domestic details and 'merry chat', such as DMR advocating All-Bran and eye-massage and JCP quite openly mentioning his enemas, the female mind, spiritual issues and comments on world and family news. Both authors participated in the proof-editing and critical reading of each other’s manuscripts, with related concerns over publishers as well as informative discussions on the art of narrative. Also included are their views on contemporary authors and well-loved writers, poets and philosophers such as Wordsworth, Dostoievski and Rabelais (to name but a few).
This exchange triggers discussions on the throes and pleasures of writing their ongoing books. 'How could you discover that about the later portion of the book [Glastonbury] being in some way less organic than the earlier portion' (JCP 22, p.64); and again 'Glastonbury….opposing Glendower as one mighty headland opposes its fellow across the bar. But if I could keep only one, that one would be Glendower. For here is the theme made to your own hand. …what I do find amazing…is the depth & the width of the imaginative sympathy there revealed. (DMR 64, p.190). Yet Dorothy was not such a fan of JCP’s work as her husband truly was and would conceal this by using her pen to convey Alan Odle’s appreciation. After reading The Pleasures of Literature -- and she much preferred John’s essays -- Dorothy writes 'John, write no more novels…keep now to unmitigated human history, experience, the tale of tales, irreversible, not to be monkeyed with even by the magician of magicians'. (DMR49, p.152)
John Cowper's own respect for Dorothy’s work and her influence on him runs deep when he writes in his first letter: ' ...except for Wordsworth & Walter Pater it is from your philosophy that I have, among our English writers, got the most for my furtive cult of pure sensation...'.
John Cowper and Dorothy share his 'elementalism', 'the worship of the Inanimate as the best substitute for God', and this is also illustrated by charming and deeply felt descriptions of situations, places and details of nature beautifully expressed as early as in DMR’s third letter to JCP (p.17) when describing the Walnut Tree inn on Romney Marsh: '…with a rich dark-brown-varnished-wood bar parlour and low windows where the ripe autumn sunlight comes in through leaves – comes in green-&-gold into the rich dark interior – gold light reflected from old brown varnish, you know John. But without people, the first having being one’s little lonely self, what would that absolute gold be? '
Dorothy Richardson (just as Phyllis) has the ability of drawing JCP out: she prods and questions his mind, his spirituality thereby exposing her own, and these discussions on philosophy and religion are possibly the most fascinating of all. Here is Dorothy commenting on 'The Bible as Literature': ' ...all the study-labour, & tough-labour of your life is projected alive …in emphasizing the humanity of Jesus, his human limitations…you still leave Him, for me, at the Centre, as the centre…the meeting place of Man & God .' (DMR 50, p.155). Or again, on Solovyev: '…he is …more sharply aware …of the necessity of orthodoxy together with the need for ceaseless development and reinterpretation…. excelling in seeing the error of Thomism & the dangers of formal logic' (DMR 86 p.221). She challenges the self-named 'John, John, the parson’s son' (p. 202) for '…your repudiation of ‘Deism’ & amply tolerant of as many ‘Gods’ as you choose to muster ' (DMR 83, p.218). John writes earlier on: '…I do think I have exhausted my own interest…in this question of the dualism of Good and Evil – But….merely to approach such a provocative place as Glastonbury wd set me off again! However, I suppose I could deal with a certain vein of the mystic – not exactly the occult – but just, just stopping short of that !' (JCP 3, p.19) -- to which Dorothy replies that 'L. [Llewelyn Powys] and I agreed that the artist’s link with religion is nearly quite entirely aesthetic…It is the artist’s way through what Blake meant when he said ‘A tear is an intellectual thing’.' (DMR 4, p.22).
And again, John on the occult and spritualism: 'Yes, I agree absolutely with every word of what you say about the long memory of larger and older consciousnesses, in some mysterious sort of contact with ours... I’ve got a curious mania for antiquity in continuity in one spot of the earth’s surface… it goes back to total Obscurity and Mythology fading away too slowly to be caught at any point for certain between reality & unreality and between history & legend' (JCP 66, p. 208 & 209).
JCP and DMR definitely felt very comfortable with each other like brother and sister in unorthodox orthodoxy. For nowhere else except maybe to Llewelyn (but certainly not in Autobiography) has JCP ever been so honest and outspoken and divorced from the public eye or any provocative 'showing off'.
May all our thanks be given to Janet Fouli. In editing and giving Powys-lovers and Richardson fans such a gem, in other words Correspondence As Literature, she has given the reader a unique chance of enjoying a holistic appreciation of both John Cowper and Dorothy Richardson, offering a first hand opportunity to find incredibly rich material for thought and research without any of the subjective appropriation that is the unwitting wont of all critics, biographers or academics, however honest and discreet. Here is John’s own voice, John at his best, in other words, John as Himself.
Marcella Henderson-Peal
Marcella Henderson Peal lives in Paris and teaches English at Paris 12 university. She is currently working at the Sorbonne on a PhD on John Cowper Powys: “Spiritual Tension, Sensation and Reality”. She is married with two daughters. From The Powys Society Newsletter, No 64, July 2008
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