This Is the John Cowper Powys Page of the Blog
"To encounter Powys is to arrive at the very fount of creation."
(Henry Miller)
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| 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.
(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."
*****
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.
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| Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet, his work includes poetry, short stories, novels, & an autobiography |
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| 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
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
Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.
(John Cowper Powys)
To philosophize is not to read philosophy; it is to feel philosophy. The raw spikes and jagged edges, the sour-tasting dust and wind-blown debris of superficial real life have to be deliberately comprehended, or at least evaded, before the more secret rhythms, the more recondite patterns of Nature, her humours, her tragedies, her poetry take shape in the mind.
(John Cowper Powys)
Photo Credits:
Photos #1 and #2--Images suggested by the novel Rodmoor, by John Cowper Powys, thanks to Bruno Gaultier, Systar du Systeme a L'Etoile
Photo #3--"A Welsh Village" thanks to Pr Mark Henderson
(During the 1980s, after Wolf Solent, Weymouth Sands, and the Autobiography, I then read Ducdame. I followed that with Maiden Castle. I felt that I had gone over to another world, no mirror needed, no low door in the wall, but merely the further opening of my mind to a literature and a mythology that was bigger than anything I'd ever read before.)
"What came over the mind of the heretic priest at that moment was a certain day, years and years ago, when, in the wretched playground of a second-rate preparatory school, he had watched a couple of his companions throwing handfuls of cinders taken from a galvanized iron ash bin at the body of a dead rat. He had been the laughing stock of the school even before that day for his inability to conform to their standards, but after that day his loathing for every aspect of youthful high spirits hardened into a misanthropic mania." (p. 198)
"Netta pressed instinctively closer to the clergyman's side; for the figure that followed the voice, from what seemed the very depths of a watery ditch, was strange enough to scare the most preoccupied
mind. It was that of a woman so old as to be almost beyond human recognition. Her face was not so much the colour of ashes as the colour of the inside of a white eggshell that has been exposed on
the top of a rubbish heap for many weeks. Out of this face looked forth a pair of ghastly sunken eyes, colourless now in the darkness, but possessed of some kind of demonic vitality that made both Hastings and Netta shrink and draw back, as if from the presence of something malignant and dangerous.
"'Betsy must have known 'ee was coming dearie! What else was I nursing my old bones for on way home from town? 'Twas so when the gentleman from London brought his sweetheart this way fifteen years agone. These things be writ in the stars, sweet lady; they be writ in the stars.'" (P. 201)
"Between his soul and all this enchanted spaciousness there arose a reciprocity he could not analyze, a feeling that had the irresponsibility of despair and yet was not despair, that resembled loneliness and yet was not loneliness. It was almost as if, just behind all this etherealized chemistry, there really did exist something corresponding to the old Platonic idea of a universe composed of mind-stuff, of mind-forms, rarer and more beautiful than the visible world." (p. 3)
(Glimpses of the Dorset countryside in which the novel Ducdame takes place.)
"The red coals in Lexie's grate seemed to lose something of their power. The rosy glow reflected from Lexie's crowded bookcases seemed to fade. The little blue fire devil that danced like a demon butterfly on the top of the colas flagged and drooped. A great blind streaming face was pressed against the window--the gray featureless face of the rain. It was as if a corpse-cold cloudy arm, wavering and shadowy, fumbled and plucked at those two dripping figures; as though, drenched as they were, they belonged to the drowning fields outside and not to this warm human interior."
(p. 31)
[All selections from Ducdame are courtesy of the Village Press edition, London, 1974. First published by Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1925.]
It was as though he had suddenly emerged, by some hidden doorway, into a world entirely composed of vast, cool, silent-growing vegetation, a world where no men, no beasts, no birds, broke the mossy stillness; a world of sap and moisture and drooping ferns; a world of leaves that fell and fell forever, leaf upon leaf;
a world where that which slowly mounted upwards endured eternally the eternal lapse of that which slowly settled downwards; a world that itself was slowly settling down, leaf upon leaf, grass-blade upon grass-blade, towards some cool, wet, dark, unutterable dimension in the secret heart of silence!
Lying upon that rank, drenched grass, he drew a deep sigh of obliterating release. ...Ah! how his human consciousness sank down into that with which all terrestrial consciousness began!...
He was a leaf among leaves...among large, cool, untroubled leaves.... He had fallen back into the womb of his real mother... He was drenched through and through with darkness and with peace.
(From John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent, Chapter 18, "The School Treat")
The following essay is from a website called "The Lectern." I am indebted to the author, who refers to himself simply as Murr, for allowing me to reproduce his erudite and insightful literary excursion through one of the most brilliant and beautiful books of the 20th century--John Cowper Powys' "Wolf Solent." You can access his website by clicking here. I hope you enjoy it.
"Wolf Solent" John Cowper Powys
Nomos and physis
This book operates on two distinct levels. The first level is a Lawrentian story of adultery and cuckoldry in a small English country town. Wolf Solent arrives in the town where he was born, after an absence of many years, to take up the post of secretary to the local squire. He falls in love with and marries Gerda, the daughter of the local stonemason. At the same time, he develops an ineluctable passion for the daughter of the local bookseller, Christie. His young wife is carrying on an affair with her childhood sweetheart, while Christie is fighting off the incestuous advances of her own father. Meanwhile, the squire is feuding with the vicar, and both are feuding with the local poet. There is lots of social observation, village fetes, afternoon tea, walks down leafy lanes, and a wealth of eccentric and eccentrically named characters. The novel is focalised through the eponymous protagonist, a highly educated, morbidly sensitive young man, the possessor of a 'mythology', and the story is largely about how he loses this personal mythology and becomes socialised in the world, a Dostoevskyan tale of how a young ego grows up and comes to terms with the disillusionment consequent on greater maturity and experience.
The second level, however, is really about something much deeper: man's relationship to nature, and the tension between human culture and society, and the natural world and its cyclical processes. On his journey to his hometown, Solent reflects on religion: ...It seemed as though all the religions in the world were nothing but so many creaking and splashing barges, whereon the souls of men ferried themselves over those lakes of primal silence, disturbing the swaying water-plants that grew there and driving away shy water fowl. Here, human culture, symbolised by religion, symbolised by creaking barges, floats on top of the primal lake of nature, barely disturbing it, but leaving no real lasting impact or impression. The book is really about the age old tension between nomos (society) and physis (nature), a tension first articulated by the Greeks.
The tension between these two, nomos and physis, is presented in two ways: by Solent's thoughts, and by the narrative voice, including plot and description.
Solent's Thoughts
Solent, as an educated man, sees the world in terms of Greek mythology. At times of stress he utters the Greek lament: Ailinon, Ailinon (Woe!) from Aeschylus, and he is aware of nymphs, dryads and other mythical creatures lurking in the undergrowth. Powys underpins all his novels with a mythical foundation, usually Arthurian or from the Mabinogion. Wolf Solent is unusual in using classical Greek mythology as a foundation, underlining further the nomos - physis dialogue.
Solent is acutely aware of nature, and of his position as a consciousness- endowed being in nature: nature was always prolific of signs and omens to his mind; and it had become a custom with him to keep a region of his intelligence alert and passive for a thousand whispers, hints, obscure intimations that came to him in this way. At key moments in the novel, he succumbs to reveries about nature and his position -as a representative of humanity- in nature. He has the ability, shared with the squire, to see things stripped of the mischief of custom. He constantly has flashes of intuition, in which the social world appears as superficial, and the natural world as the only reality: my world is essentially a manifold world. He exists in a kind of suspended state between cosmic immensity, and microscopic detail, a kind of Blakean vision of the whole world in a grain of sand. In the face of the primal silence of nature, the social conventional dilemma in which he finds himself - married to one woman but in love with another - appears meaningless and trivial, a creaking barge, merely the mischief of custom.
In a key passage, Solent engages in an imaginary dialogue with the skull of his dead father (the disembodied head is a key motif for Cowper Powys, and one that comes from the Mabinogion). Wolf asserts that reality is an illusion caused by consciousness, while his father asserts that the only reality is the natural world: "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, " asserts Wolf. "Ho! Ho! You worm of my folly," laughs the skull, "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's in the eyes of weasels and the nose of rats and the pricks of nettles and the tongues of vipers and the spawn of frogs and the slime of snails."
Wolf believes that every human being is the possessor of a 'life illusion', a motivating force that underpins all interactions with the world and which defines the character of each person. To a certain extent, the novel is about how Wolf loses his 'life illusion' and ultimately sees that the real purpose of life is to forget and to enjoy, to endure and to escape, to surrender nomos in the face of physis. This takes place in the arena of a struggle between his mother, and his father. His mother represents nomos: What's the use of tilting against conventions? It's more amusing, it's more interesting, to play with these things. They're as real as anything else, she says. His father represents physis: "Life in me still, you worm of my folly, and girls' flesh is sweet for ever and ever; and honey is sticky and tears are salt, and yellow hammers' eggs have mischievous crooked scrawls."
The Narrative Voice
In the plot, the nomos - physis tension exists, as we have seen, in the social conventions of Wolf's marriage and the various adulteries surrounding it, and how these conventions appear when set against the natural world of physical love and procreation. Another key area in which this tension exists is in sex.
Nomos sanctions certain kinds of sexuality, and outlaws others, while physis has no attitude at all towards them. From the point of view of physis, all kinds of sexuality are natural, and sexual identity is seen as much more complicated than a mere hetero-homo duality. Nothing is against nature. That's the mistake people make, and it causes endless unhappiness. The minor characters all embody different kinds of sexuality: the bookseller Malakite and his two daughters embody incest; Wolf's own father, a promiscuous but now dead figure, embodies rampant heterosexuality uncomplicated by convention; the squire's obsession with Wolf's predecessor, the young man Redfern, represents a suppressed necrophilia; there are various homosexual relationships suggested between the vicar and the local poet, and Wolf himself is aroused by the sight of two village youths swimming naked in the local pond. One of these youths is his wife's lover, and Wolf is fascinated by the sight of the young man's genitals floating on the surface of the pond. His jealousy is tinged with envy. Celibacy is represented by the hideously ugly spinster Selena Gault who nurtures an undying but unreciprocated passion for Wolf's father; conventionalised sexuality is represented by Wolf's mother. Considering the book appeared in 1929, Cowper Powys was way ahead of his time both in his ideas about sexuality and in his depiction of it.
The book balances descriptions of social life with nature, and it is in these last that the enduring power of the book lies. No other prose writer in the language comes close to the power of Cowper Powys's writing on nature. His prose descriptions of the natural world can best be compared with the nature poetry of John Clare, Blake and Dylan Thomas. Cowper Powys can take us in one sentence from the furthest reaches of cosmic space to a drop of water on a frog's back.
His writing has an intensity of vision that lingers in the mind long after the book has ended, and which enhances the way we view our surroundings. If greatness in art is measured by its ability to rattle us, to change the very way we perceive the world, this book is very great art indeed.
My 'I am I' is no hard, small crystal inside me, but a cloudy, a vapour, a mist, a smoke hovering round my skull, hovering around my spine, my arms, my legs. That's what I am, a vegetable animal wrapped in a mental cloud, and with the will-power to project this cloud into the consciousness of others.
"The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, 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."
MAIDEN CASTLE
"At the centre of the novel is the aptly named Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a yearlong unconsummated marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer, into his home and heart. ...As the characters in Maiden Castle struggle with the perplexities of love, desire and faith - readjusting their sights and affections - it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives." (text courtesy of the Powys Society official website)
From p. 75 of the text, Colgate University Press edition, 1994:
He knew well how frightened he was, for his fear totally transformed, as they stood there at the bottom of those steps, the normal processes of time and space. His fear had the effect of making each single second, each tick of the eternal watch in the pocket of the Creator, transmute itself, like a vision in a magician's mirror, into a shifting impression that was composed of space as well as of time. The "space" of this transmuted experience, this vision over which a psychological magnifiing-glass was being projected back and forth with every breath he took, was the trodden grass and clinging mud of the fair-field; but the time-element in these magnified fear-seconds extended itself so far beyond the present as to throw a magical desirableness over both a past and a future that were free from the engrossing panic of the moment. He was even able, while his feet were still on the steps of the caravan, as much did the nervous fear he suffered extend the content of the passsing seconds, to tell himself a story about living in unruffled peace forever, with the "eidolon" of his wife visiting him daily while both Wizzie and Thuella melted into thin air.
[Photos: Maiden Castle is the largest Iron Age hill fort in Europe and covers an area of 47 acres, a large area, equivalent to 50 football pitches. 'Maiden' derives from the Celtic 'Mai Dun' which means 'great hill'. It is situated just 2 miles south of Dorchester in Dorset. The earthworks are immense, some ramparts rising to a height of 6 metres (20 feet) today, they have previously been even higher. Sometimes called The 'War' Cemetery--bodies of 38 Iron Age warriors were uncovered during an excavation in the 20th century. This is evidence of a Roman attack on the fort. One of the burials had a Roman spearhead embedded in the spine. (Text courtesy of www.photographers-resource.co.uk, photos courtesy of BBC.)]
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| "...with the 'eidolon' of his wife visiting..." (an eidolon is an image, idol, double, apparition, phantom, ghost of a person, living or dead) Photo courtesy of Dave McAleavy, Glasgow, Scotland. www.mcaleavy.org |
This is a sample of J.C. Powys’ natural world--it is that surrounding nonhuman electricity that becomes aware of human comings and goings. It is just a small example of what glues me to his literature, what binds me to his mythology.
“What John and Mary really did was to make love like vicious children; and this was due to the fact that they were both very nervous and very excitable but not in the faintest degree tempted to the usual gestures of excessive human passion. The rationalism of analytic logic has divided erotic emotion into fixed conventional types, popular opinion offering one set of categories, fashionable psychology offering another. As a matter of fact, each new encounter of two amorists creates a unique universe. No existing generalisation, whether of the wise or of the unwise, covers or ever will cover a tenth part of its thrilling phenomena. In one respect this love-making by Dye’s Hole was the most childlike that the spot had ever witnessed; in another it was the most cerebral. The nervous excitement manifested by these two was so free from traditional sentimentality and normal passion, so dominated by a certain cold-blooded and elemental lechery, that something in the fibrous interstices of the old tree against which they leaned was aroused by it and responded to it.”
(The edition cited is A Glastonbury Romance, Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1987, pp. 70-71)
Foulden Bridge as mentioned on p.68.
"Another superb description of the river is to be found in John Cowper Powys' novel A Glastonbury Romance (1932). The novel, which is widely regarded as Powys' best book begins in Norfolk.... The book explores Arthurian grail legends. However, in one of the early chapters John takes a trip down the river with his cousin Mary.... The writing is of extraordinary quality."
For the section on the River Wissey click here.
For the section on Northwold (Norfolk) click here.
