Wolf Solent was the first Powys novel that I ever read...

Wolf Solent was the first Powys novel that I ever read, and I knew I was hooked on the whole philosophy and the thick oceanic love of literature and language, his literature and his language. It propelled an already steaming and obliterating love of books, more intravenous than genetics and more self-consuming than the sun.

WOLF SOLENT is a protean, inexhaustible, exhilarating book."

— George Gurley, The Kansas City Star

Wolf Solent is the first of the great novels of John Cowper Powys and caused quite a stir when it debuted in 1929, garnering praise from many of the top writers of the day including Conrad Aiken and Theodore Dreiser; Angus Wilson, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch and Simon Heffer are among the faithful. 

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973)
American novelist and poet,
his work includes poetry, short stories,
novels, & an autobiography

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
American novelist and journalist

"The only book in the English language to rival Tolstoy."

— George Steiner

"I particularly admire John Cowper Powys.

I particularly like Wolf Solent,

A Glastonbury Romance, and Weymouth Sands."

--Iris Murdoch

This novel, says writer Lawrence Millman, "...concerns an extremely introverted man, Wolf Solent, and his courtship of two very different women. The supporting cast includes a lecherous sausage-maker, a peddler of antiquarian pornography, a homosexual clergyman, a voyeuristic country squire, a teenage boy who kisses trees, and a mad poet. Here, I thought, is God's weird plenty. "*

(*) Lawrence Millman is an Arctic explorer as well as a writer.



Here is the paragraph that caught me 30 years ago--

"He recalled the figure of a man he had seen on the steps outside Waterloo Station. The inert despair upon the face that this figure had turned towards him came between him now and a hillside covered with budding beeches. The face was repeated many times among those great curving massess of emerald-clear foliage. It was an English face; and it was also a Chinese face, a Russian face, and Indian face. It had the variableness of that Protean wine of the priestess Bacbuc. It was just the face of a man, of a mortal man against whom Providence had grown as malignant as a mad dog. And the woe upon the face was of such a character that Wolf knew at once that no conceivable social readjustments or ameliorative revolutions could ever atone for it--could ever make up for the simple irrmediable fact that it had been as it had been!" (From Wolf Solent, Chapter One "The Face on the Waterloo Steps")

"A stupendous and rather glorious book...as beautiful and strange as an electric storm."

— V. S. Pritchett

"The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys: Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, and Maiden Castle, must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language."

-- A.N. Wilson

"It brings to mind the...romantic ferment of the film 'Les Enfants du Paradis'

or...one of the works of J.M.W. Turner."

— Anthony Bailey, The Observer

The next book was Weymouth Sands. Some of my favorite and unforgettable literary characters can be found in this book. This was and still is an extraordinary experience. Characters such as Adam "Jobber" Skald, Magnus Muir, Perdita Wane, Mr. Trot, Miss Guppy, Larry Zed, and let's not forget Dog Cattistock and Sylvanus Cobbold. I love this book and can't recommend it more strongly than flying over the most populated sites of the world and dropping pamphlets encouraging the readership. 

Weymouth Sands is described thus: "...the story of Jobber Skald--a large, somewhat brutish man, obsessed with the urge to kill the local magnate of the town because of the man's contempt for the workers of the local quarry--and his redeeming love for Perdita Wane, a young girl from the Channel Islands.  ...an epic tale which depicts the power of Eros, the inscrutability of the universe, and the nature of madness, while highlighting Powys's deep sympathy for the variety, eccentricity, and essential loneliness of human beings."**

(**) The editors at Overlook Press.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the book:



"The sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave.  Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach, was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth's ancient antagonist.
     Such at any rate was the impression that Magnus Muir--tutor in Latin to backward boys--received from the waves on Weymouth Beach as in the early twighlight of a dark January afternoon, having dismissed his last pupil for the day and hurriedly crossed the road and the esplanade, he stood on the wet pebbles and surveyed the turbulent expanse of water."

(From Weymouth Sands, Chapter One "Magnus Muir")

There is an outstanding website with beautiful and romantic photographs of the Weymouth Sands that Powys wrote about. I draw your attention to
A Visit to the Weymouth Sands of John Cowper Powys. It is so well-done, that those out there who have read the book will appreciate it significantly.


The following is from the chapter entitled "Hell's Museum":

"And all this while, like an evil blood-clot upon his brain, the thought kept coming back to him of the vivisection he felt sure went on in one of those buildings of iron and glass and pale brick, where Dr. Brush studied pathology among the inmates of Hell's Museum, and he suddenly began telling himself a story about the spirits of the old tribes who had raised this huge earth-fortress, and how the captive souls from the Brush Home might at least in the liberation of sleep come flocking out through the night to Maiden Castle and be there protected and safe, along with a great ghostly pack of couching, whimpering, fawning, cringing, torture-released dogs, all crowding close behind theses phantom-warriors, as wave after wave of their enemies poured up the slope, trying in vain to repossess themselves of them."

"An intricate, provocative, and living example of the novel which takes people as it finds them.... The cool, calm impersonality of Weymouth Sands, and the author's all but diabolical power to peer beneath the surface, combine to make it a book of moment."

— The New York Times

To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation.--Henry Miller

"To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation."

(Henry Miller)

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)

 

“...a cross between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child.”

(Margaret Drabble)

"A genius – a fearless writer, who writes with reckless passion."

(Margaret Drabble)

John Cowper Powys was a prolific novelist, essayist, letter writer, poet and philosopher, and a writer of enormous scope, complexity, profundity and humour.

A powerful orator, he spent over 30 years as an itinerant lecturer in the U.S., during which time he wrote his first four novels. In 1930, he retired to upstate New York and turned to full-time writing: it was here that he produced such masterpieces as his Autobiography, A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands.

He returned to Great Britain in 1934, settling in North Wales in 1935, where he wrote the historical novels Owen Glendower and Porius, the critical studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, and The Brazen Head.

Other notable novels are Wolf Solent and Maiden Castle: ...rich in characterization, psychological analysis, and evocation of place.

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 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.”

(All above text courtesy of the Official Website of The Powys Society)

(From noted writer Lawrence Millman): "What struck me when I reread Wolf Solent recently was not its weirdness but its compassion for the down-and-out, the aberrant, and the misbegotten. What also struck me was its casual attitude toward polymorphous sex. 'Natural or unnatural,' one of the characters says, 'it's nature. It's mortal man's one great solace before he's annihilated.' I can't imagine anyone else of Powys's generation writing those words. Certainly not D. H. Lawrence, who compared with Powys was a reactionary about matters of the flesh."