THE DORSET PROUST
Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys
By Morine Krissdóttir
(Overlook Duckworth 480pp £25.00)
THE LITERARY REVIEW
It is not hard to understand why John Cowper Powys has never had
the recognition he deserves as
one of the twentieth century's most remarkable novelists. Until
he was nearly sixty he earned his living
as an itinerant lecturer, much of the time in America, where he
thrilled his audiences by his seeming
ability to transmit, medium-like, the inmost thoughts of the
writers he loved. For a time Powys's
electrifying performance as a kind of literary magus attracted a
considerable following. His admirers
included some of America's best-known writers - Theodore Dreiser
was a notable supporter, for
example - but Powys's method of 'dithyrambic analysis' never
caught on. An idiosyncratic exercise
that he described as 'hollowing himself out' so he could become
the writer he was interpreting, it was
too obviously adapted to the needs of the lecture circuit and
the quirks of Powys's personality to have
any lasting influence. Powys removed himself further from any
kind of critical acceptance when, in an
effort to generate an income that would enable him to give up
lecturing, he published a series of selfhelp
manuals. With titles like The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant
and In Defence of Sensuality,
these forays into popular psychology were refreshingly
unorthodox in their prescriptions for personal
happiness; but they reinforced the perception of Powys as an
eccentric figure flailing about on the
outer margins of literary and academic respectability.
In fact, respectability was never one of Powys's goals. Both in
his writing and his life he scorned
conventional standards of success and followed his own,
frequently conflicting inclinations. Easily
moved by sympathy and always recklessly generous with money, he
could at the same time be
extremely cunning in satisfying his own needs, which were often
strikingly bizarre or perverse. In his
Autobiography (a tour de force of shameless self-revelation that
has been justly compared to
Rousseau's Confessions), Powys wrote that all his life he was
pursued by fear - fear of the world and
other people but above all fear of his own manias, 'perpetual
forms of madness' that dogged him
throughout much of his life. From his earliest years Powys
believed he possessed 'some obscure
magical power' to realise his desires, but many of these
involved sadomasochistic fantasies which
filled him with horror and of which he was able to rid himself
only after many years of effort.
Describing himself as an 'anti-narcissist' who spent his life
running away from himself, Powys escaped
from his manias - which included a loathing of spiders and a
horror of his own shadow among many
other besetting anxieties - by employing 'an elaborate
psycho-analytical psychi-psychiatry of my own
invention'. Tapping his head on stones and trees, praying to
assorted deities on behalf of suffering
creatures human and animal, long peregrinations with named
walking sticks as his regular
companions - these and other compulsive daily rituals allowed
him to forget his psychic and physical
ailments (he was plagued by ulcers and chronic constipation) and
freed him to write.
Born in 1872 into a clerical family with literary and
aristocratic connections as the first of eleven
children, two of whom - Theodore and Llewelyn - also became
highly original writers, Powys grew up
in the stifling gentility of a Victorian country vicarage. Yet
he is in some ways the most modern of
writers, taking the dissolution of orderly society for granted
and focusing on the shifts and turns of the
solitary consciousness with an intensity reminiscent of Proust.
As in Proust, Powys's central
protagonists are introverted, almost solipsistic figures, who
find relief from the sense of being
'contingent, mediocre, mortal' in sudden epiphanies, which they
try to preserve in memory. However,
whereas Proust's epiphanies occur always indoors in a
self-enclosed human world, Powys's were
found in the open fields and coastal vistas of his native Dorset
- a more-than-human landscape that
frames his greatest novels. In Wolf Solent and Weymouth Sands,
perhaps the most accomplished of
the Wessex series of novels that includes the panoramic
Glastonbury Romance, Powys evokes the
floating world of moment-to-moment awareness as found in a
collection of characters living on the
edges of society, struggling to fashion a life in which their
contradictory impulses could somehow be
reconciled. The fusion of introspective analysis with an
animistic sense of the elemental background
of human life which he achieves in these books is unique in
European literature.
More than most writers Powys used his memories to create his
fictions, but the greatest of these
fictions was his own personality. As Morine Krissdóttir shows in
one of the most arresting literary
biographies in many years, Powys - a 'sworn hater' of dreams,
which he loathed for the revelations
they contained of his only half-successfully repressed
obsessions - gave himself over to the
conscious creation of a fantasy world in which he could live as
the magician he had imagined himself
to be as a child. The problem with inhabiting such a dream
world, of course, is that it unavoidably
contains real people who may not be willing to act the part
given them in the fantasy-script. Powys
struggled constantly with this fact, which bedevilled his
relations with the women in his life. Having
made a conventional marriage to the sister of a Cambridge
friend, apparently mainly in order to
please his family, he went on to spend most of every year in
America. It was there that he met the two
women he loved - the 'girl-boy' Frances Gregg, lover of Ezra
Pound and Hilda Doolittle, with whom he
began a stormy relationship in 1912, and Phyllis Plater, whom he
met in 1921 and who became his
lifelong companion.
It was in his relationship with Phyllis - a slight, nervous,
intensely creative woman he called 'the T T',
or 'Tiny Thin' - that the tension between Powys's dream world
and the reality of other people became
clearest. Phyllis loved the social and intellectual stimulus of
big cities, while Powys craved a
sequestered existence in a peaceful rural landscape that
reminded him of his Dorset home. Krissdóttir
writes that Powys viewed Phyllis as 'his slender Welsh fairy
sylph, his elemental; but elementals are
designed for dancing in the midnight air, not for washing
floors'. Certainly the sylph was Powys's own
creation, a figment with only a passing resemblance to his flesh
and blood partner, who found the
drudgery and isolation of life with him - first in upstate new
York, then Dorset and finally Wales, to
which Powys moved in 1935 and where he died in 1963 - hard to
endure. Yet the fact remains that
the two were together for over forty years, during which Phyllis
made a profound contribution to
Powys's most innovative and enduring work. In the end Phyllis
may have shaped Powys - the selfstyled
shaman - more than he shaped her.
Using a mass of new material, Descents of Memory is an inspired
study of the tangled and precarious
life of an absurdly neglected writer. Unsparing in her
description of his exotic array of neuroses and
the ways in which he manipulated people to sustain his
dream-life, yet full of admiration for his
dauntless energy and generosity of spirit, Krissdóttir is
clearly deeply torn in her view of the man. She
never doubts the extraordinary quality of his best work. Like
Powys himself, she sees his vast prose
poem Porius - one can hardly call it a novel - as in some sense
the culmination of his life's work. For
the first time published in the unabridged form Powys intended,
this rambling fairy tale of the Welsh
dark ages presents Powys's mythic world of animate nature and
magical transformations on an epic
scale. Written in early old age, Porius is an enchanted
labyrinth reminiscent of Finnegan's Wake. For
most readers the Wessex novels offer a more accessible way into
this Dorset Proust. Seeking a sort
of salvation in distilled sensation, Powys turned to memory in
an attempt to master time. Whether or
not he achieved any kind of personal redemption (Krissdóttir's
biography suggests otherwise), he
came as close as any modern writer to capturing the inner flux.
The Monarch of All
The fantasy world of John Cowper Powys
Roger Boylan
Boston Review
March/April 2008
Since his death in 1963, John Cowper Powys’s reputation has
ridden the usual dead-writer
rollercoaster of obloquy and oblivion, rediscovery and
restitution—with a vengeance. Few
who knew him, either personally or through his work, were
indifferent. Ezra Pound, once an
amorous and professional rival, called him “a windbag” and
“Jesus C. Powys.” (JCP
reciprocated by calling Ezra a “pond newt.”) To Philip Larkin,
Powys was a “gigantic
mythopoeic literary volcano.” But the critic George Steiner once
claimed that Powys was the
only twentieth-century English writer on a par with Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky. Margaret
Drabble, the distinguished English novelist, believes, “we need
to pay attention to this man.”
The fantasy world of his novels, she says, is “densely peopled,
thickly forested, mountainous,
erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited
than Tolkien’s, but it is as
compelling, and it has more air.”
And, after reading Powys’s gigantic masterpiece A Glastonbury
Romance, Henry Miller (yes,
that Henry Miller) wrote, “My head began bursting as I read
[it]. No, I said to myself, it is
impossible that any man can put all this—so much—down on paper.
It is super-human.”
Theodore Dreiser, J. B. Priestley, Will Durant, and Iris Murdoch
were devoted admirers. And
today, the keeper of the flame is Dr. Morine Krissdóttir, a
trained psychologist and Powys
scholar (the two go together like bread and butter). She has
written a fine biography of this
controversial figure: Descents of Memory. Writing it was
hard. “I have spent the last five
years of my life,” she says, “writing the biography of an author
whom many critics loathe.”
But love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him; Krissdóttir
has no doubts on this score. She
says, “[His works] both attracted and repulsed me—they still
do—but the greatness of this
wayward writer I have never questioned.”
She has done an outstanding job. More even than Powys’s own
landmark Autobiography,
hers is the definitive analysis of his life.
The early part of that life was standard Victoriana. John Cowper
Powys was born in 1872,
eldest son of the Rev. Charles Francis Powys, vicar of Shirley,
Derbyshire, whose sprawling
brood of eleven so epitomized the Victorian age it could have
been written into existence by
Trollope, a volume per child. The vicar’s wife, Mary Cowper
Powys, was a gifted amateur
pianist doomed to creative frustration, like so many Victorian
wives; the reverend had a tin
ear, alas, and no time for suffragists. Mary Cowper’s was a
dreary life. But she was
descended from the poets John Donne and William Cowper, so art
ran in her blood and in
that of her children, five of whom became artists of one kind or
another, and three of whom,
John Cowper, Theodore Francis (“T.F.”), and Llewellyn, went on
to become writers. John
Cowper became something more; I’m not quite sure what.
Like his father and brothers, he was educated at the ancient and
prestigious Sherborne School
in Dorset, where he succeeded in keeping bullies at bay by
aggressively playing the fool,
a skill he honed by practicing on his younger brothers. After
Sherborne, still in the family
footsteps, he went to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge
University. There he associated
with few, bar one or two fellow misfits; he kept a revolver in
his rooms as a deterrent to
excessive socializing. After graduating with a second-class
degree in History, he married and
fathered a son, and—having failed dismally at various kinds of
teaching—he signed on with
the Oxford Extension public lecture program which, in 1904, sent
him off on his first lecture
tour of the new world. Although he never became in the slightest
bit American, America was
the making of him. He stayed for 25 years until, driven by
financial necessity, homesickness,
and the need to be near the graves of his ancestors, he returned
to Britain. He died in the
mountains of North Wales at age 90. In his long and erratic
career he published 23 novels, 17
biographical and autobiographical works, 10 books of literary
essays, 16 books of
philosophical essays, and 9 books of poetry and drama, as well
as dozens of essays and
reviews in magazines and newspapers. His best-known books are
Autobiography, Wolf
Solent,
Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, Maiden
Castle, and the sprawling Arthurian
epic Porius. His finest, in this reader’s opinion, are
the first three.
All this and much more Morine Krissdóttir chronicles in her
biography, with the painstaking
devotion of the acolyte, or martyr.
During his lecturing years, John Cowper Powys became one of the
best-known public
speakers in America. The early 1900s were the age of the
Chautauqua public education
movement, that flamboyant combination of evangelism, pedagogy,
and freak show, and
Powys was a natural. The only more popular speaker was William
Jennings Bryan, whose
topic was usually politics, temperance, himself, or a
combination thereof, whereas Powys, by
contrast, spoke almost exclusively on literature, in a
throbbing, high-church kind of voice,
with many dramatic gestures. He lectured in every state in the
Union, and drew huge crowds
that included such celebrities as Charlie Chaplin, Theodore
Roosevelt, and Isadora Duncan
(with whom he had a fling). He became a star of the lecture
circuit partly through his acting
talent—which was considerable, in a hammy, high-Victorian
way—but mostly because he
communicated a genuine passion for his subject. Great books, to
Powys as both reader and
writer, were far more than highbrow soap operas. They were as
vital to life and well-being as
exercise or sunlight. To spread this gospel, he traveled all
over the United States, raising high
the banners of Homer, Rabelais, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Shakespeare,
Dante, and other
luminaries, exhorting ignorant provincials (most of whom were
“staggering illiterates,” in his
words) to join the legions of the enlightened. Of course,
Americans have always been up for a
dose of that old-time revivalism, with a dash of P. T. Barnum,
but– literature? And the
bringer of literary wisdom to Utah and Texas and South Dakota a
gangling Englishman with
a plummy accent and bizarre tics? That was the freak-show part,
no doubt heightened when
he fell down onstage, as he did often, overcome by emotion and
chronic gastritis. The crowds
roared, delighted by the theatrics, and in awe of Powys’s gift
for entering his part completely.
When he spoke to them of Dickens or Hardy, the spirit of those
writers seemed to inhabit
him.
It is the way I always go to work in literary criticism, and it
gives me the power, I will not say
of becoming the personality I am dealing with, but at
least of diffusing my identity through its
identity and of realizing myself through the medium of its
sensibility. The thing in its essence
is a kind of spiritual eroticism and in my case it is intimately
connected with my vice as a
voyeur.
This passage quoted in Descents of Memory says much about
the man. He reveled in selfanalysis,
even to the point of self-abnegation; just as he had preempted
being bullied at
school by playing the clown, so he sought to ward off criticism
by getting in the first blows to
himself, con gusto. He may or may not have been a real
voyeur, for instance (although the
heroes of his novels tend to be), but he was certainly a great
looker-out-of-windows,
especially if a “sylph-like” girl was on the other side. And
“spiritual eroticism” was his ticket
to the cosmos, a sublimation of all earthly obsessions. But for
all his eccentricities he exuded
a kind of ancient magic to which the unhappy, forgotten people
of his day responded.
And he gave them what they wanted, year after year, adhering to
a rigorous lecture schedule
across the North American continent throughout World War I (he
was exempted from the
military for health reasons) and into the twenties. But by 1929
Hollywood was displacing the
Chautauqua circuit as prime-time popular entertainment, and the
Great Depression was
lapping at the nation’s feet. So—incredibly, given his essential
otherworldliness—Powys sat
down and wrote a bestseller.
It was called Wolf Solent. It was the chance discovery of
that novel in a bookseller’s
clearance bin that led me to Powys’s work in the first place.
Misled by the cover blurb
(Dorset setting, philosophizing rustics, life-and-death drama)
into expecting Thomas Hardy
redux, I soon discovered a world of difference between Powys and
Hardy as writers, and,
indeed, between Powys and anyone else. Where most writers are
oblique, at least to some
degree, Powys writes from such a personal standpoint that all
his heroes can be seen as
projections of himself onto the screen of fiction. As
Krissdóttir remarks:
He had little patience with those critics who point out the
danger of seeing the creative work
as a reflection of the life. So far as he was concerned,
criticism of literature which has
nothing to say about the impulses that drive a writer forward
‘becomes as dull and
unenlightening as theology without the Real Presence.’
Take that, Jacques Lacan!
No prodigy, Powys had published his first novel, Wood and
Stone, at 43, and four more had
followed. All sank into the swamp of critical indifference.
Wolf Solent was published in 1929,
when he was 57 and still making a part-time living from his
mobile lecture show. An
unsparingly analytical, intensely poetic character-study of the
kind that became his specialty,
it was his debut as a mature novelist. Here are all the elements
of standard Powysian
psychodrama: a conflict between brothers; the hypnotic eroticism
of girls; depraved elders;
and the remains of innocence. Wolf Solent is no nostalgic
pastorale. Powys, who eulogized
the beauties of Nature, never balked at revealing its horrors.
His work is full of implications
of violence. To him it was a mistake not to see what he, in a
somewhat Zen manner, called
“the necessity of opposition”: Good and Evil; Male and Female;
Life and Death; Appearance
and Reality. All these, he says,
have to be joined together, have to be forced into one another,
have to be proved dependent
upon each other, while all solid entities have to dissolve, if
they are to outlast their
momentary appearance, into atmosphere.
The novel, on the surface, is a fairly straightforward story of
a native son’s return, along the
lines of Hardy’s Return of the Native. Wolf, the
eponymous hero, returns to his hometown on
England’s South Coast after suffering a mental breakdown in
London. But instead of
recovering his innocence at home, he loses it completely. He
becomes entangled in various
affairs, romantic and professional, and uncovers horrible truths
about some old friends and
neighbors. In the end he returns, disillusioned, to the
anonymity of London. You can’t go
home again
sums up the novel in a nutshell; but a nutshell is far too small
for Powys. It is
what throbs beneath the surface of this novel, and all of
Powys’s novels, that matters. “The
mood [of Wolf Solent],” says Margaret Drabble, “is
charged with a strange psychic intensity.”
And biographer Krissdóttir observes:
The entire novel is studded with images taken from poetry,
plays, classical myth, folklore,
nursery rhymes . . . This vast literary undercurrent is in part
what gives his novels their
richness and complexity . . .
Powys’s books are all about the importance of the personal
mythologies, or “life-illusions,”
as he calls them, that are needed to block out the world’s
ugliness, to which Powys is always
sensitive. Incest and sadism are onstage together with beauty
and sensuality; the trickery of
our “life-illusions” is all we have to sustain us. But the good
news is that we can find this
sustenance anywhere. In one scene in Wolf Solent, for
example, an imaginary conversation
with the skull of his father, from whom he was long estranged,
gives Wolf insight into his
own, appropriately Hamlet-like dilemma. The language is
biblical; the sentiments, pagan; the
resonance, Shakespearean.
Wolf . . . lifted up his worm’s voice within that mocker and
cried out upon its lewd clay-cold
cunning, “There is no reality but what the mind fashions out of
itself. There is nothing but a
mirror opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round
crystal, and a sky in water
opposite water in a sky.”
“Ho! Ho! You worm of my folly,” laughed the hollow skull. “I am
alive still, though I am
dead; and you are dead, though you’re alive. For life is beyond
your mirrors and your waters.
It’s at the bottom of your pond; it’s in the body of your sun;
it’s in the dust of your star spaces
. . .”
It moves him, ultimately, to return to the all-embracing,
indifferent metropolis.
In another scene, a bluebottle fly is a character. Insects and
rocks and deep wells play a
central role in Powysland. They all have names and voices. Much
is made of the evocative
power of moss on stones, and felled branches, and dripping
eaves, and a rook’s call, and the
swelling tide. Forgotten memories and long-ago sensations come
back to life; youth’s
squirming discomfort and squalid yearnings are reborn, but so is
youth’s exultation at life’s
wonders. Those everyday marvels and long-ago memories form a
kind of synthesis of
Proust’s “involuntary memory” and Joyce’s “epiphanies.” Nature
is ubiquitous. The rank
richness of cow manure and rain-soaked soil seems to rise from
the pages. The reader senses
the presence of a disturbing universal reality that, in the
author’s own words, resides
somewhere “between the urinal and the stars”; a spooky, almost
God-like all-knowingness, in
fact, that includes an obsession with sensuality and eroticism.
Wolf, like all Powys’s
characters—like Powys himself—survives by embracing those
“life-illusions.”
Lying upon that rank, drenched grass, he drew a deep sigh of
obliterating release. It was not
that his troubles were merely assuaged. They were swallowed up.
They were lost in the
primal dew of the earth’s first twilights. They were absorbed in
the chemistry, faint, flowing,
and dim, of that strange vegetable flesh which is so far older
than the flesh of man or beast . .
This “onanistic ‘obliterating release,’” remarks Krisdóttir, “is
not just an escape from
possessive love, but also an escape from the unhappiness of the
world, from the drudgery of
work. It is a way of ‘losing oneself’; more importantly, this
kind of ecstasy demands nothing
in return.”
The success of Wolf Solent enabled Powys to escape awhile
from his own unhappiness and
drudgery. He quit his lectures, bought an old farmhouse in
upstate New York, and named the
place Phudd Bottom: the bottom of a hill he had christened “Mr.
Phudd.” (All his life he gave
“magical,” frequently silly, names to people, places, and
things.) Under such benign
circumstances, his creative forces peaked and in little over a
year he wrote his masterpiece, A
Glastonbury Romance.
This is the novel George Steiner had in mind when he compared
Powys’s work to that of
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. More like Dostoevsky, actually; this is
Powys’s The Idiot. It teems
with religion, myth, sex, and symbolism. Krissdóttir (who in her
thoroughness seems to have
read every letter her subject ever wrote), quotes from a letter
Powys wrote to his publisher. In
it he says that in Romance his intention had been to
describe,
the effect of a particular legend, a special myth, a unique
tradition, from the remotest past in
human history, upon a particular spot on the surface of this
planet together with its crowd of
inhabitants of every age and of every type of character.
According to legend, Glastonbury, Somerset (a place Powys knew
well in his childhood), is
where the Holy Grail itself ended up, carried there from the
Holy Land by Joseph of
Arimathea. John Geard, mayor of Powys’s Glastonbury, tries to
revive the town’s fortunes by
exploiting this legend with a pageant modeled after the
Oberammergau passion play.
Meanwhile, Owen Evans, a freaky antiquarian with S&M tendencies,
seeks redemption at the
pageant through suffering—as Jesus suffered on the cross. At
this point, the reader might be
tempted to tune out, but persistence pays off. An immense
teeming spectacle is slowly
revealed, with a cast of thousands that out-DeMilles DeMille and
out-Dickenses Dickens. To
name a very few: the resident “Perceval,” Sam Dekker, lecher and
holy man; Persephone, icy,
beauteous daughter of the earth mother; Phillip Crow, a ruthless
capitalist; Sergeant Blimp, a
stolid policeman; Capporelli, a creepy French or Italian clown;
disgruntled elders; and
legions of excessively folkloric country folk with names like
Zoyland, Weatherwax, and
Stickles. But Powys maneuvers this mob of personalities with the
precision of a maestro.
Indeed, Jane Austen, with whom he shares an ability to fuse the
comic and the dramatic,
could have done no better. But Austen’s characters are all of
this earth, whereas in Romance
we are put on notice right from the start that other forces are
in the wings. “Invisible
watchers” observe Glastonbury. All objects and beings have their
own points of view. Above
and beyond it all is the First Cause, a.k.a. God, who steps in
on page one:
At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there
occurred within a causal radius of
Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of
emptiness between the uttermost
stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the
creative silence of the First Cause
which always occur when an exceptional stir of consciousness
agitates any living
consciousness in this astronomical universe. Something passed at
that moment, a wave, a
motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too
subliminal to be called spiritual,
between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging
from a third-class carriage
of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic
soul of the First Cause of
all life.Powys is so distinctive a writer that any paragraph
taken at random contains within it
the essence of all others. In this paragraph, he takes a banal
enough scene—someone arriving
somewhere by train—and reads every possible meaning into it,
from the most minute to the
most cosmic. Throughout the novel—all 1120 pages of it in the
Overlook edition—Powys
sets up a series of confrontations and culture clashes, not only
among the more than forty
main characters but also between disparate local groups, each
representing a single aspect of
twentieth century civilization. In one corner are the mystics,
led by the mystical/mercantile
mayor; next to them, Crow, the greedy capitalist who wants to
turn the town into a silver
mining and industrial center; and sundry anarchists and radicals
(“Bolsheviki”) intent on
turning Glastonbury into a kind of autonomous kibbutz, or
commune. By the end of the novel
everyone has obtained at least part of their desires: the
commune exists; the mystical mayor is
busy promoting his Grail tourism; and industry is taking hold.
But that cunning old First
Cause, with all his “divine-diabolic soul,” has other ideas; in
a magnificent passage, He
shows His hand by raising the Atlantic Ocean and steering it to
flood.
Up the sands and shoals and mudflats, up the inlets and
estuaries and backwaters of that
channel-shore raced steadily, higher and higher as day followed
day, these irresistible hosts
of invading waters . . . There was a strange colour upon them,
too, these far-travelled deepsea
waves, and a strange smell rose up from them, a smell that came
from the far off mid-
Atlantic for many days. They were like the death mounds of some
huge wasteful battlefield
carried along by an earthquake and tossed up into millions of
hill summits and dragged down
into millions of valley hollows as the whole earth heaved . . .
Many of these incoming deepsea
waves had curving crest-heads that were smooth and slippery as
the purest marble, heads
that seemed to grow steadily darker and darker as they gathered
toward the land, till they
added something menacing to every dawn and to every twilight.
In one of the many essays on literature Powys reworked from his
lectures, he said of Balzac:
“A thundering tide of subterranean energy, furious and titanic,
sweeps, with its weight of
ponderous details, through every page.” He could have been
thinking of his own work, and
probably was.
Alas, like Moby Dick, with which it can reasonably be
compared, as a mythological, titanic,
waterborne work of genius, Glastonbury was a commercial
flop. For a while Powys brooded,
depressed, in his farmhouse; but soon enough, cheered by his
isolation, he recovered his
spirits, partly because he had new projects to work on, partly
because his isolation at Phudd
Bottom was not complete. With him was his mistress and lifelong
companion, the woman of
his life, Phyllis Plater, or “T.T.” (for “Tiny Thin,” another of
Powys’s nicknames), whose
existence he and his numerous friends and siblings strove
mightily to keep a secret from his
wife and son in England. This endeavor was successful until
1934, by which time wife and
husband, son and father, had been separated for at least half of
each of the previous eighteen
years, and it hardly mattered. Still, Powys was always
punctilious in sending home half his
pay, and when his father the reverend died, he promptly signed
over his considerable share of
the inheritance to his wife and son (who, incidentally, became a
reverend as well; Powys the
pagan was bookended by clergymen). It was his way of buying them
off. He never quite
succeeded in silencing the inner voice of his own guilt, but
guilt was John Cowper Powys’s
natural habitat. It was the devil that drove him.
He said as much in his Autobiography, a remarkable
achievement—I am tempted to say, one
of his best novels. It is, at least, the most accessible of his
books; yet, ironically—for Powys
believed all his life that he was never less than brutally
honest with himself—it is also the
most disingenuous. Krissdóttir points out that Powys’s memory
“was always skewed by
defences against too much reality.” In short, he was a novelist
first and last, and he saw
everything, even his life, as a form of his own fiction. In
Autobiography he claims to recall
the most minute details of his life, and he parades a good
number of them, some of
astonishing obscurity, some doubtless true; but others are made
up out of the fictioneer’s
whole cloth, whatever best suits the overall pattern.
The book’s opening sentences are stately, resonant, and very
English, like the first movement
of Elgar’s Cello Concerto.
The part of Derbyshire which centres around the Peak is like the
boss of a shield. Dovedale
must be included in the circumference of this Omphalos of
England; and with some largess of
extension, like the elaborate margin of a Homeric shield, the
little pastoral villages around the
country town of Ashbourne might be regarded as coming into this
formidable circle.
Indeed, the entirety of Autobiography is structured like
a concerto or symphony, with motifs,
themes, and subthemes stated and restated. This, too, is ironic
because, despite his musical
mother, Powys had no ear for music at all. But he could
structure a theme in words. Vladimir
Nabokov said the true purpose of autobiography is “the following
of . . . thematic designs
through one’s life,” and life recalled from the distance of time
exposes its major themes more
clearly, like the shoals of a bay seen from space. But this does
not preclude a certain
elaboration; life, too, is art, in the right hands. One of
Powys’s motifs is madness, with
himself as clown at school, idiot savant onstage, and Druidic
elder, babbling to the trees.
We must cherish our mania, or our madness if you prefer that
word, as we would cherish a
second self; for our madness is our second self.
But this madness is a subtheme, the main theme being fantasy:
the identification with fools
and jesters and ancient wizards such as Taliesin and Merlyn, all
the “life-illusions” that fight
off despair. Powys saw himself as a shape-shifter, a warrior, or
a king.
My dominant desire during the whole of my school life . . . was
to lead a double existence,
and while just “getting by” in the School Dimension, to find my
real happiness in a secret
subjective Dimension where I was “monarch of all I surveyed.”
Famously, Autobiography contains few women, whereas
Powys’s life contained a good
many. Readers have long puzzled over this, and Powys may have
intended them to for
publicity purposes. But the omission may also have arisen out of
a genuine desire to spare the
feelings of the most important women in his life: his wife
Margaret, and his mistress Phyllis.
When he was planning the book Powys wrote to his sister,
I shall not only avoid hurting feelings whether of the dead or
living but steer clear of any risk
of such a thing . . . This book . . . will contain No Women at
all—not even Mother . . .
But then he adds, “Nor will it deal very much with Men either.”
It may be that he simply couldn’t spare the psychological energy
for anyone but himself:
In this ticklish business of writing an autobiography I am going
to play safe—so fantastically
& exaggeratedly safe indeed that from this ‘safety’ itself will
emerge a quite special sort of
irony . . . of a kind for which at present there is no name.
The memoirs of Casanova and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were his
models, and Powys rivals
them in his sometimes hilarious descriptions of his own follies.
These outbursts of frankness
are intended to distract from his evasions, his inconsistency,
and emotional intensity. But as
we read further, and encounter prostitutes, fishermen, priests,
ticket collectors, publishers,
poets, and all the hoi polloi from a thousand railway journeys
and lecture halls and bars and
ocean voyages, we begin to appreciate the underlying generosity
and life-democracy (to coin
a Powysian term) of this book and its author. We are never
manipulated toward a social or
political message. Powys sees relationships as meetings of
solitudes; he has no interest in
social hierarchies, politics, worldliness, or ambition. He never
moralizes about sex. And he
has no time for religions and creeds that lack aesthetic
qualities; to him, religion is art, or it is
nothing.
Krissdóttir says the reader “can be forgiven for thinking that
Powys is describing his own
autobiography” when he writes elsewhere of Rousseau’s “mania for
self-exposure” and
“passion for self-humiliation.” Humiliation there may be, but
there is humility too, and
pride—all part of Life itself.
Now, . . . when I look back at the path behind me and the path
before me it seems as if it had
taken me half a century merely to learn with what weapons, and
with what surrender of
weapons, I am to begin to live my life.
As the narrative of one man’s uncertain pilgrimage, this book is
a fine work, evasiveness,
fabrications, delusions, and all. Tolstoy (himself a fairly
creative memoirist) once said, “The
aims of art are not to resolve a question irrefutably, but to
compel one to love life in all its
manifestations.” This Powys does.
Powys scholars such as Krissdóttir have stressed the importance
of the circumstances under
which he worked on the book. He was relatively content (despite
his chronic gastritis), retired
from the lecture circuit, writing copiously and well, and he had
found his ideal mate in
Phyllis Plater. In short, he was living out his “life-illusion”
at his remote farmhouse. “Phudd
Bottom,” says Krissdóttir, “gave him that wonderful combination
of physical and psychic
freedom that writers long for and seldom have.”
So what could be more natural than for him to give it all up and
move halfway across the
world?
In fact, there were sound reasons, not the least of which was
monetary. He was going broke.
Although Wolf Solent had been a bestseller, none of its
successors—Weymouth Sands (which
also became the object of a libel suit), Maiden Castle
and A Glastonbury Romance—had sold
well, or, at least, not well enough to compensate for Powys’s
thoughtless spending habits and
apparent determination to wreck his own interests. (When his
publisher, Simon & Schuster,
generously offered to sell Glastonbury to “the movies,” a
gesture that could have made
Powys’s fortune, he imperiously dismissed all notion of dealing
with “unspeakable
Hollywood vulgarians.”) Krissdóttir makes the dry remark “Powys
never let money get in the
way of his principles.” But those same principles impelled him
back to Britain, where, he
said, life would be financially cheaper and psychologically
richer; and anyway, as Krissdóttir
writes,
America had served its purpose as a place of exile. Powys knew
his Odyssey at least as well
as James Joyce did; he once wrote that he read it daily as a
breviary.
Also, he had in mind a majestic Welsh chronicle or two, so it
was time for the old chthonic
forces to work their magic. Only in Wales, land of his distant
ancestors, could he write his
intended magnum opus. So he sold Phudd Bottom and sailed for
home. After a stint in
Dorset, he settled in his long-desired ancestral home of Wales
in 1935, with Phyllis (having
come to a more-or-less amicable settlement of his long-dead
marriage) at his side. He found a
welcome in the home of ancient Powyses. In May 1936 at the
Corwen Eisteddfod, the Welsh
national festival of literature, he was invested with the title
of Bard. This greatly pleased him,
although others received the same honor that year, which pleased
him less: for all his selfcriticism
and showy humility, Powys never had any doubts about his own
genius. Other
honors slowly came his way; so did vilification, but he achieved
sufficient serenity of spirit to
ignore it. Admirers such as Henry Miller made the pilgrimage to
North Wales to visit the old
sage. He received them courteously, but never went abroad
himself again. Buried in his hills,
he continued writing until he was 90, and produced two more
notable novels: Owen
Glendower,
a strange and compelling historical fiction about the Welsh
national hero; and,
stranger still, Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages, a
mystical, poetic epic of ancient Britain
best reserved for Powys initiates: If you’ve read Glastonbury,
you’re ready for Porius. The
world, unfortunately, was not; the book sold poorly, but has
recently been reissued. Powys
wrote little of significance after Porius; a sketch here,
a pamphlet there. He died on June 17,
1963, aged 90. A photograph taken of him not long before his
death shows him wearing a
cloak and peering at distant mountains, and looking, says
Margaret Drabble, “like a cross
between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child.” Which is a pretty
fair description of the man.
English literature, like English history, teems with inspired
dreamers and eccentrics: Bunyan,
Blake, Hazlitt, Tolkien, and others, but none is quite as much
of an all-rounder as Powys. He
is as spiritual as Bunyan, as fantastical as Blake, as
down-to-earth as Hazlitt, and every bit as
much a fabulist as Tolkien. He is a unique necromancer of
literature. He comforts and
discomfits in equal measure. The word weird might have
been invented just for him. Whereas
Joseph Conrad contended that “it is impossible to convey the
life-sensation of any given
epoch of one’s existence . . . its subtle and penetrating
essence,” this is precisely what Powys
succeeds in conveying. Henry Miller, who put so much so badly,
put this well:
I had an unholy veneration for the man. Every word he uttered
seemed to go straight to the
mark. All the authors I was then passionate about were the
authors he was writing and
lecturing about. He was like an oracle . . . Leaving the hall
after his lectures, I often felt as if
he had put a spell upon me.
It is that spell that weaves its magic in the pages of Powys’s
novels, and it hovers yet over
Morine Krissdóttir’s splendid biography.
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