The Powvs Review NUMBER SEVENTEEN

The Powys Review

Editor Belinda Humfrey

Reviews Editor Peter Miles

Advisory Board Glen Cavaliero Ben Jones Ned Lukacher

Correspondence, contributions, and books for review may be addressed to the Editor, Department of English, Saint David's University College, Lampeter, Dyfed, SA48 7ED.

Copyright (c), The Editor

The Powys Review is published with the financial support of the Welsh Arts Council.

We are grateful to Mr Francis Powys and Laurence Pollinger Ltd., for permission to quote from the writings of John Cowper Powys and T. F. Powys, and to the late Mrs Evelyn Elwin for permission to quote from the writings of Llewelyn Powys.

The Powys Review may be obtained from Booksellers for £2.50, or from Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed, for £2.50 plus 60p postage.

The Powys Review is printed by J. D. Lewis & Sons Ltd., Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed.

Enquiries about advertisement in The Powys Review should be made to James Dawson, 99 Corve Street, Ludlow, Shropshire. Tel. Ludlow (0584) 2274.

Contents

Roland Mathias Reviews John Cowper Powys and 'Wales'. A Limited Study 5 Gillian Clarke Selected Poems Colin Style ANN STEVENSON 63 On Hardy's Sacred Ground: Gwyn A. Williams JohnCowperPowys's Weymouth Sands 27 When was Wales? A History of the Welsh Wynford Vaughan Thomas Peter G. Christensen Wales: A History Middlemarch: A Point of Reference in PAUL BENNETT MORGAN 64 Weymouth Sands 39 John Cowper Powys Margaret Moran Paddock Calls "Premonitory Hints and Embryo ANTHONY HEAD 67 Suggestions in J. C. Powys's Wood and Stone and Rodmoor 48 Valentine Ackland For Sylvia: An Honest Account CLAIRE HARMAN 70 G. Wilson Knight: The Editor's Preface 56 Kenneth Hopkins, ed. The Letters ofGamel Woolsey Francis Berry To Llewelyn Powys, 1900-1939 The Collected Poems of Gamel Woolsey G. Wilson Knight: His Life and Work 58 JOHN HARRIES 72 Reviews 63 Richard Taylor, ed. Emma Hardy Diaries Letters to the Editor 81 BARRIESAYWOOD 74

Notes on Contributors 83 ' Patrick Parrinder James Joyce WILLIAM BAKER 76 Kenneth Hopkins Bertrand Russell and Gamel Woolsey CARLSPADONI 79

The Powys Review Number 17 1985 Volume Vi John Cowper Powys: Corwen. A photograph from Louis Wilkinson, Welsh Ambassadors, 1936. Roland Mathias

John Cowper Powys and * Wales'. A limited study

In an essay entitled "The Sacrificial Prince: A south lands in silence and alone, noting their Study of Owen Glendower'' which I wrote swelling feminine breasts and the dramatic for Belinda Humfrey's Essays on John bareness which seems to whisper continually Cowper Powys (1972) I came to certain con- of the . . . Celts or pre-Celts who once were clusions about 'Powys and Wales' which, to there and now are not, might—according to an extent, I now regard as impressionistic background and disposition—either share JCP's sense of deprivation in Wales or rather than well-judged. I commented, first, breathe a sigh of relief. The chalk is an empty that in Wales "the animal and vegetable arena in which the first achievement of man in levels of sensibility, so intermingled with his emergence from the savage has audible the human in other Powys novels" are echoes. They are there, whispering around rapidly squeezed out and that what results is overt memorials like Stonehenge, the Cerne "a relatively thin diet of 'atmospheric' Giant or the White Horse, and there, even food".1 Secondly, Dinas Bran, the ancient more, in the mute unapologetic pride of the 5 grass-covered fortress which crowns the Earth-Mother. mountain above Llangollen, although it Wales, in comparison, was poor and back- appears to Rhisiart, the homecoming ward and could be seen by Powys only as a student who has something of the 'home- mountainous refuge, in which "the rough coming' John Cowper in him, "the castle of masculine nature of the terrain . . . speaks his imagination" and "not less [but] more 6 2 of defence, not of an opulence of power." than the picture he had in mind", is soon I call this verdict impressionistic because revealed as little more than marginal to the it is partly visual, partly historical, and liter- thrust of the narrative and ultimately lost in 3 arily based, with less than complete care, on a confusion of symbols. "Tis our wold one book. Defence, and even more defeat, Corfe, looks 'ee", declares Jimmy generates its own myths and J.C.P., accust- Mummer, "Ees, 'tis wold Corfe to the 4 omed to evasion, propitiation and defeat, image this toomble-down pleace", but this was fascinated by them. Nothing was attempt to import some of the Dorset magic farther from his interest than "an opulence is unconvincing. Thirdly, except perhaps in of power". Even a reading of Owen the Forests of Tywyn, the 'emanations' of Glendower less concerned with the improb- landscapes in Wales—despite one or two ability of the Prince's successes might have fine naturalistic descriptions—are on the noticed more carefully his refusal of the whole perfunctory and minimal in compar- ultimate victory at Woodbury Hill in the ison with those found in J.C.P.'s Dorset Abberleys, where his camp overlooked the novels. I continued as follows: Severn crossing at Holt: the landscape of Wales and its myth-impreg- His chance had been given him; and some- nation . . . did not afford JCP the degree of thing in his own nature had balked. He thrust sustenance which he had readily obtained his hand under his pillow of rugs and touched from the chalklands of his childhood. This the rusty bronze that had been the death of . . . need not be matter for surprise. Anyone that old peace-maker of Dinas Bran; and as he of sensitivity who has contemplated those did so the impression came over him . . . that

*A revised version of a paper delivered to the Powys Society, August 1985. 6 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" he and his people could afford to wait, could wrote while actually living in Dorset, a afford to wait till long after his bones were matter of some importance if one is to dust and Henry's bones were dust. He knew measure the maturity of response as between how his own soul could escape, escape with- 7 a Dorset novel and a Welsh one. Where out looting cities and ravishing women . . . Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance and C. A. Coates thinks this the answer to the Weymouth Sands were evocations, from "historical puzzle"8 of why Owain wasted Phudd Bottom, Hillsdale, New York State, this opportunity amongs others. Any of the remembered landscape of youth, historian of the period, however, would embroidered with the richer patterns of make it entirely plain that the retreat from mature emotion and later reading, Maiden Woodbury Hill was a matter of military nec- Castle was face to face, so to speak, an essity. No ultimate victory was possible. entirely contemporary response to the Glendower's decision in the book was as excavations of Mortimer Wheeler on the site Powysian as the description of the Prince in of the title. C. A. Coates comments that "the rich complexity and physical density of his last hiding-place under the Gaer-mound: 10 the land of Wales, says our author, is the the earlier novels is missing" and goes on preserve of the mythology of escape: to echo G. Wilson Knight by describing the Dorchester of the novel as "a vague if unspec- This race avoids and evades, pursues and is ified locality", a verdict which, in any context pursued ... Alone among nations it builds no other than that of Powys's own work, might monuments to its princes, no tombs to its be remarked as odd. For my part, I would prophets. Its past is its future, for it lives by describe Maiden Castle (after due allowance memories and in advance it recedes. The for cuts) as the most closely controlled of all greatest of its heroes have no graves, for they J.C.P.'s novels: the cast of characters is will come again. Indeed, they have not died; 9 limited, the narrative stripped of unneces- they have only disappeared. sary digressions and, comparatively speak- This is a very particular Wales, with a ing, of irrelevant ideas: and the insertion of mythic charge apparently quite different the mythic element into the concerns of from the one that John Cowper gave his more normal society (though what Powys- Wessex landscapes. It is necessary, I think, ian society is ever truly normal?) is gradually to examine the whole question again. and carefully done. Those hostile to my thesis here may well argue that it is in What emerges may well be a more confus- Maiden Castle that John Cowper comes ed answer, as confused indeed as J.C.P. closest to reading like another and more sometimes seems to have been himself. It ordinary novelist and that that in itself is must be said, however, that the re-examin- damning. I would reply that it is in Maiden ation offered here takes place within very Castle that he demonstrates for the first time limited parameters, for in extenso the nature some of the elements of novelistic technique and meaning of Powys's relationship with missing earlier—such as imagining the Wales might well be worth as many as three shape of his story from the beginning, or four critical essays. What I have done is to knowing how much one may reasonably get add a close examination of Maiden Castle to into 496 pages instead of carrying on like "a that of Owen Glendower and to draw tog- Stonehenge Bard of Interminable Prose ether a few threads from A Glastonbury 11 Narrative", and curbing his authorial Romance, Porius, Autobiography, Letters self-indulgence in the interest of developing to his Brother Llewelyn and Obstinate characters who are neither embodiments of Cymric. I chose Maiden Castle because it an idea nor simply aspects of the Powys ego. was the last novel J.C.P. wrote before leav- 12 Angela Blaen has written very revealingly ing Dorset. If it was completed at Corwen in of the way in which Maiden Castle is based North Wales its inspiration and theme are on the Celtic calendar, pointing out, mediated entirely by his native area. It is also amongst many other things, how Dud meets the only one of his major novels that he John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 7 Nance in the cemetery at Samhain, the beg- have been his father's last patriotic gesture inning of the Celtic month of the dead, and, warmed to them at all. When Louis Marlow in the last section called 'Full Circle', returns entitled his book on the Powys family Welsh with her to the same spot the November foll- Ambassadors Bertie called it "pretending owing. There is a tightness about this that is and false"17 and it was characteristic of untypical of Powys's other works. Llewelyn that he liked it most of all because Let me, however, begin my topic at the in some shires 'Welsh Ambassador' was a 18 beginning, with what J.C.P. tells us in Auto- name for a cuckoo. Marlow, however, biography. It was at Shirley in Derbyshire stuck to his guns, declaring that every that he declared himself to be "the Lord of member of the family was more Celtic than Hosts"13 and first desired to be a magician. Saxon and that It was at Shirley too that his father's eyes burned, because I have no Celtic blood, because I am Saxon and Latin, and entirely gentile... I feel with a fire that was at once secretive and . . . John Cowper the most Celtic and Jewish blazing, like the fire in the eyes of a long dis- of his family ..." crowned king, when he told us how we were descended from the ancient Welsh princes of The latter blood-trait supposedly descended Powysland. From an old Welsh family long from a maternal great-grandmother. ago established in the town of Ludlow in This childish Welsh patriotism of John Shropshire in what were formerly called the Cowper's would have been squeezed out, Welsh "Marches" we undoubtedly did— one might think, by the pressures of living, Princes or no Princes—as the genealogies put learning and working in England. But no. it, "deduce our lineage"; and I am inclined to When he was living at Burpham it flared up think that there has seldom been a mortal again. soul—certainly no modern one—more obstinately Cymric than my own.14 ... I suddenly acquired a passion for every- thing Welsh. I bought Welsh grammars, There are as many as four oddities about this Welsh dictionaries, Welsh modern poetry. I development. The first is that the "obstin- bought an elaborate Welsh Genealogy, called ate, incurable romanticist"15 was Celt- "Powys-Fadoc'', and mightily chagrined was icised not by anything Welsh but by hearing I when I found no mention of my father's his father read from Aytoun's Scottish ancestors in it! I bought everything I could lay Cavaliers. The second, perhaps not so odd, hands on that had to do with Wales and with is that John Cowper caught from his father the Welsh people. Alas! I had not learnt yet not the staid connection with Ludlow but . . . that Providence had deprived me of the the blazing fire that called up princes— least tincture of philology. I soon gave up trying to learn Welsh. But the idea of Wales something he joked over afterwards rather and the idea of Welsh mythology went drum- than acknowledged. The third is that ming on like an incantation through my Charles Francis Powys should have cher- tantalized soul. I had no vision so far—that ished any such distant genealogical trad- was still to come—of myself as a restorer of ition, for as Littleton, the brother second to the hidden planetary secrets of these mystical John and the only other who might have introverts of the world, but the gods having noted that same fire, pointed out, "the made me, instead of a conscientious scholar, family had been in England for four hund- an imaginative charlatan, I resolved to realise red years and that, in spite of its name, there with my whole spiritual force what it meant to was no real proof of Welsh origin".16 The be descended—to the devil with "Powys Fadoc"—from those ancient Druidic fourth is the probability that C. F. Powys's 20 pride in his supposed origins was never again chieftains! shown so clearly as at Shirley to his eldest This rebirth of the passion was connected son, perhaps because of shyness as the with the birth of his son. John Cowper was family increased, for of John Cowper's thirty, his father sixty. It was time to revert brothers only the Llewelyn whose name may to thoughts about ancestry. But his recourse 8 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" to the six volumes of Chevalier Lloyd, as he Professor of Celtic at Jesus College, was called,21 did not need to disappoint him Oxford, and the greatest of the pioneer unless his concept of the Wales he was scholars of Wales at the end of the nine- looking for was already well developed; for teenth century.24 From his major works, in Powys Fadog, named after Madog ap particular The Welsh People (1900) which Gruffudd, was no more than a northerly he wrote in collaboration with David Bryn- part of Powys created in the early thirteenth mor Jones, and Celtic Folklore, Welsh and century, the centre of which was Dinas Bran Manx (2 volumes, 1901 and recently reprint- above Llangollen. It may be argued from his ed in paperback) we may discern one of the disappointment that the Bran connection main bases for the shape that John Cowper was already forming in his mind, but the Powys took for his refuge-land of Wales. more immediate meaning that Wales had for Broadly, Sir John argued that the compre- him was that of refuge or hiding-place. He hensive Brythonicisation of Wales was com- wondered whether he should not sell his paratively late: it did not take place, in his house and retire there with his family, the opinion, until the coming of Cunedda from more urgently when he had a quarrel on his Manau Gododdin (the region about Stir- hands. How his friends would be confound- ling) at or towards the end of the fourth ed! century A.D. Before that time, in Wales as in what we now call southern England, the Two battlecries, so to speak, kept sounding dominant power was vested in the Goidels, on in the background of my misanthropic an earlier wave of Celtic invaders, under heart. One was: "I have a son, a son, a son, whose rule substantial numbers of aboriginal who, as he grows up, will take my side against inhabitants, in whom Rhys was more than the world". The other was: "I have Wales, Wales, Wales, to take refuge in, where I can ordinarily interested, not merely survived send my enemies to the Devil and possess my but reasserted their cultural ethos. By the soul in peace".22 time of the Roman invasion, he concluded, only the Ordovices amongst Brythonic tribes It is impossible not to believe that in these had penetrated Wales: their settlement early groans and imaginings lies the beginning covered mid-Wales as far as the western of the mythology of escape with which he coast. Both north and south Wales, there- endowed Wales. The Welsh became what he fore, were for as many as four centuries was himself, avoiders and evaders, pursuers Goidelic rather than Brythonic, with a con- and pursued, guerillas on the edge of the tinuing proportion of aboriginal inhabitants great orthodoxies. higher than would be found later in those How John Cowper's reading on Welsh parts of England affected by Scandinavian subjects went is not afterwards documented settlement—an argument that has a bearing in Autobiography, but the impassioned on J.C.P. 's view of Wales as the last refuge. reference-list of Owen Evans in A Glaston- Largely on philological grounds, Sir John bury Romance, which was published in was inclined to identify the aboriginals with 1932, reveals that he had not been idle in the the Picts and was disposed to believe that the field.23 The Book of Taliesin, The Triads, whole story of Bran (or Bendigeidfran) and Dafydd ap Gwilym, Lady Charlotte Guest's his sister Branwen, narrated in the Second Mabinogion, Sir John Rhys, The Red Book Branch of the Mabinogi, was Pictish in of Hergest, the Vitae Gildae and The Black origin. He was, indeed, prepared to widen Book of Carmarthen—I present them in the field further: "the stories", he wrote, Owen Evans's order—were all within his knowledge, but of these the work of Sir John Rhys, referred to again in Maiden which I have loosely called Goidelic may have been largely aboriginal in point of origin, and Castle, seems to have been the most by that I mean native, pre-Celtic and non- influential in shaping his concept of Wales. Aryan.25 Sir John, who died in 1915, was the first John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 9 That almost every tenet of this thesis of ation and held it throughout his vision of the Sir John's has been discarded by the scholar- union he made of himself and Wales. ship of today is not our main point here. His Before I come to explain and describe the views constituted what was available to phenomenon of The Head, however, let me John Cowper in the twenties and earlier and remove from major consideration what our interest should be directed, first and some may well regard as an essential part of foremost, to what the latter made of them. It my subject. I called this "a limited study" is plain that John Cowper was even more and one of the things I mean by that is that I interested in the aboriginals than Rhys was: shall be concerned only peripherally in this for him their imagined community was paper with those aspects of the Arthurian anarchistic, unaggressive, unambitious, cycle of stories that appear far from any prepared to go to the wall rather than resist origin in Wales. It will not be my business, (choosing Death rather than Life as Broch for example, to consider the Grail in any of puts it in Owen Glendower):26 they lived by its appearances. These are essentially Brit- feeling and imagination rather than by ish, in the old sense of that word—though in intellect and will (something which he claims their provenance they are Norman, Breton, later for the Welsh on the basis that they are French and finally English. They belong, as mostly aboriginals):27 if attacked or used by John Cowper, to the Glastonbury of subjugated, they evaded and propitiated his Romance. Again, it will not be my until, as time passed, they could free them- concern to discuss the significance of John selves within their new community to live Crow's vision of a sword resembling King their lives as they wished. Another point Arthur's falling into the Brue not far from made by Rhys in this context interested John Pomparles Bridge. On the other hand, the Cowper: he drew attention to the wholesale difference in demeanour between John desertion of the Church of England for Crow and Owen Evans at the aboriginal more democratic forms of organisation and monument of Stonehenge does fall within worship from the eighteenth century on- John Cowper's parameters of Welshness wards in Wales, as in Cornwall and the high- and is therefore relevant to my investi- lands of Scotland, a desertion for which gation: so is Evans's view of Glastonbury as England offered no clear parallel. J.C.P.'s the Land of Annwn, yrEchwyd, "where the interest in this relates to his main thesis: shores are of Mortuorum Mare, the Sea of unattracted by any prescriptive form of the Departed".29 In A Glastonbury Dissent or even of Democracy, he contrives Romance the later Arthurian and Sangreal to see in this historical development the elements, of course, are treated as "all of a Welsh defending themselves against both piece" with the earlier Welsh and in the local Rome and Canterbury. It was "a triumph of context they do follow on: close observ- community religion over ecclesiastical ation, however, reveals that Owen Evans, religion".28 the Welshman, is usually concerned only with those elements that truly belong to It is not necessary to labour the respects in Wales. In that sense he is intrusive both as a which this aboriginal stereotype reflected character and as an interpreter. John Cowper's view of himself: but as an ideal it was compromised for him by the The facets of his heritage and his philoso- name Welsh—historically applied to phy which John Cowper found difficult to invaders whom Sir John Rhys saw as both reconcile one with another were, as we have late and more oppressive than their pre- seen, the princely or chieftainly and the decessors—and by his own imaginings of escapist. The one required a territory and princely forebears. For the moment I wish power, the other a terrain in which to find only to register, in preliminary fashion, the refuge. It is important, I think, that we do not reconciling focus of The Head of Bendigeid- dismiss the former as irrelevant or acci- fran, that portion of Welsh mythology dental. John Cowper's descent from the which most seized John Cowper's imagin- Princes of Powys may seem more jokey than 10 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" real, but there had been imagination in it desire for a Church which was Welsh rather from the beginning. In Owen Evans, the than Roman, the closeness to bards and first Welsh exemplar he produces, the pre- soothsayers—and realise that what we are dominating elements are pride and a kind of being asked to discern is the smudged port- humourless poetry. Owen and his sister rait of rex semi-mortuus, the Concealed Megan, Johnny Geard's wife, are of the Head without which the realm could have House of Rhys—that is, of the House of neither peace nor joy. It is time now to set Dinefwr, the rulers of Deheubarth in south- out briefly the story of the Head, without west Wales30—but Owen's dreary, which much of what follows would remain introverted sadism is a version of the unexplained. persona which John Cowper liked to put Bran, or Bendigeidfran (Bran the forward as his own. When, later, he moved Blessed), was the giant King of "the Island on to the struggle of another chieftain, of the Mighty" depicted in the Second Owain Glyndwr, popularly elevated to Branch of the Mabinogi.32 As he waded prince, there were, of course, reasons for across the sea to Ireland to avenge his sister doing so which went beyond the personal. Branwen, he was seen by the alarmed Irish " I am fortunate here in Corwen ", he writes, like a mountain moving alongside the ships which carried his men. Later, when his army to live in the very heart of the Owen Glen- dower country. In their passionate cult of had to cross the unbridgeable river Llinon, Owen Glendower—who is as definitely the he laid his own body from bank to bank to national hero as William Tell is of the Swiss, enable his men to march over along it. "A fo William the Silent of the Dutch, and Joan of ben bid bont", he said. "Let him who is a Arc of the French—the deep-suppressed leader be a bridge"—an aphorism which at hero-worship of this race of mythologists least one modern politician has seen fit to finds its apotheosis. Glendower wanted to quote in recent years.33 After many vicissi- base his rule on the masses of the people, he tudes, Bran, with seven others (of whom his wanted to give to Wales universities of her sister Branwen was one) escaped from the own, he wanted a Welsh Catholic Church free Ireland they had laid waste, but he had been from alien interference, he was always enlist- wounded in the foot by a poisoned spear and ing on his side the bards, the sorcerers and the prophetical soothsayers; and whatever may gave instructions to his friends that one of be said of his methods of carrying on warfare, them should behead him. The head, carried there was clearly something about the man, with them and carefully preserved, would some mysterious indefinable quality, that ensure the forgetting of all sorrows to those embodied—as Shakespeare, who had what who loved and survived him, so long as they might almost be called a "mania" for the obeyed his commands. At Gwales in Welsh, clearly perceived—along with the Penfro34 there was a great hall overlooking strange magnetic fascination of this people, the sea. some occult power which exalted him even when it often betrayed him.n And they went into the hall, and two doors Glyndwr was, it may be argued, a given they saw open; the third door was closed, that subject. John Cowper had come to live in towards Cornwall. 'See yonder', said Glyndwr country. But it was also Powys, Manawydan, 'the door we must not open'. and Powys Fadog at that. There was, it And notwithstanding all the sorrows they had would seem, a primary attraction to the seen before their eyes, and notwithstanding all that they had themselves suffered, there figure of the prince, even in historical came to them no remembrance either of that circumstances which really did not allow for or of any sorrow in the world. And there they the kind of prince John Cowper wished to passed the fourscore years so that they were portray. In the description of Glyndwr just not aware of having ever spent a time more quoted we may note the determination to joyous and delightful than that. It was not draw out the aboriginal elements—the more irksome, nor could any tell of his fellow identification with the ordinary people, the that he was older during that time, than when John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 11 they came there. Nor was it more irksome been trying to identify, to translate this having the head with them then than when 35 somewhat as follows: 'I could be an abor- Bendigeidfran had been with them alive. iginal and yield everything, but my lust One of them, of course, had, in the end,, to needs power, even when it works only in the open the door towards Cornwall and the imagination. I must retain my droit de fullness of their sorrows came back. But seigneur'. But this is nevertheless to limit the when at length the head was buried under problem. The aboriginal needs power too, the White Mount in London, no plague the power to bear defeat, the power to trans- could cross the sea to this Island so long as form suffering, the power to survive. The that concealment remained. This Bran was prince had to be something more than the talismanic: where the Celts in their pre- prince of lust: he had to be the invisible datory, pre-Roman days on the Continent bridge, the concealed consoler. John had set as weathercocks or preserved as Cowper, seeking the impossible consensus, drinking-vessels the skulls of their enemies had a role for his princely imaginings no less in the belief that by so doing they continued than for the evasions and propitiations that to control the spirits of those dead foes, the he justified in his own nature. Concealed Head represented the response of I turn now to Maiden Castle, to discover that cult to defeat. In the sad days what was how far these seeming opposites persist. Let needed was the control of their own spirits, us look first at Dud No-Man, for in him and the gradual easement towards acceptance his purchase of Wizzie from the Circus we and death. John Cowper, with his insistence have a more modern analogy with Porius on contemplating the sorrows of existence and the Gawres. Dud, we find, provides a and his emphasis on the virtues of defeat, large part, but not all, of the composite could not divest himself of this powerful figure that John Cowper's view of the vision. potential consensus demands, and this part, For when he came to write again upon a incomplete as it is, must nevertheless be Welsh subject, whom did he choose for his labelled Welsh. With his club and "his quiescent hero but Porius, the Dark Age awkward figure with its long arms, bony prince of whom no more is known than the countenance and close-cropped skull" like that of "some necrophilistic Cerne brief epitaph, 'Homo Christianus fuit', and 37 whose caviosenargising inactivity allows Giant" he appears an aboriginal: but in him only one decisive action, the pursuit and his imaginings he is "some reincarnated rape of the Gawres. Why a prince again? Bronze Age invader . . . selecting from Why not Myrddin Wyllt? Or the Derwydd? among the girl-captives of the older Stone- Or even Taliesin? All these were aspects or Age the particular one that appealed to his affinities of the Powys mind. The question erotic fancy" (81)—an image that recurs cannot be answered except, perhaps, from again and again as the narrative develops. the shape of John Cowper's 'life-illusion'. This insistence on the Bronze Age creates a And possibly the particular activity allowed difficulty and some separation from Rhys: if to Porius picks out part of the shape of the this aspect of Dud is intended to be Celtic, as natural and philosophical problem John I am inclined to argue, a more strictly histor- Cowper was seeking to resolve. In Maiden ical analogy would have portrayed an Iron Castle Dud No-Man, buffeted by the Mai- Age invader picking out a Bronze Age girl- Dun wind, mutters to himself: captive. Dud could be read simply as embodying John Cowper's contradictions ... I could struggle . . . after the Secret... I within the aboriginal, so to speak—as the could drop the entire world and live for the lust occasionally taking over from the evasion Spirit, as long as I was allowed my imagin- —but the word invader and Dud's later real- ative lusts!36 isation of himself as "a double-dyed Welsh- man" (199) (for all that this arises from It would not be unreasonable, in the terms another strain in him) suggests the contrary. of the Powysian opposites this paper has 12 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" When he and Wizzie are making their even in its second or two-circle phase—the dilatory way after the others to Mai-Dun on one which brought in the blue stones from Midsummer's Eve, he spends time trying to Preseli—is thought to go back to 2100 B.C. prove (again) that "they are like each other or thereabouts and Avebury to at least a in so many ways" (349)—chiefly on the century earlier.38 Maiden Castle is therefore basis that they had both lost their mothers plainly intended by J.C.P. to be seen as an and had never seen their fathers (part of aboriginal creation, but it is always spoken which Wizzie denies). This seems tometobe of throughout as dun, the fortress of the one of the several attempts in the book to Celts. A little later Uryen declares that his unite the Celt with the aboriginal: it is also name, an echo in Dud of the orphan status of is no Celtic word but far older—a word Enoch Quirm and his cousin Cornelia. belonging to that mysterious civilisation of Maiden Castle, it is clear, is not to be the the dwellers in Dunium and in the great cities book of the Lineal Prince. If Dud No-Man is about Avebury and Stonehenge and Caer the embodiment of John Cowper's lusts and Drwyn and Caer Sidi and Cattraeth and evasions, the would-be aboriginal who Carbonek, that was not Aryan at all, but a cannot quite get inside his role, Uryen is the civilization possessed of secrets of life that ex-princely Consoling Power, the searcher Aryan science destroyed. (254) after the Mystery which will make life as an It would take far too long and be far too aboriginal both possible and happy. This, I difficult to tease out the relationships of all would suggest, makes Maiden Castle more these names (Caer Drwyn, for example, is sophisticated than Owen Glendower: it is the name of the Iron Age fortress above the Book of the Imagination and Taliesin. Corwen): let me therefore concentrate on The combination of Dud and Uryen may one—Cattraeth—which is undeniably Celtic be seen as disposing of all problems about and late: the name is associated with the the word Welsh in John Cowper's mind. But battle fought about 600 A.D. in which the the reader is scarcely likely to understand three hundred horsemen of the Gododdin their respective qualities as symbols until the perished.39 It is, as we shall see presently, end of the novel, if then. It was necessary, the necessary link with the historical Urien much earlier, for the author to work away, and it is intended to support and justify both in terms more historical or pseudo-histor- the name and the assertion that Enoch ical, at the identification of aboriginal with Quirm, the unrealised Uryen, was a Welsh- Welsh. Let us see how Enoch Quirm, now man. self-styled Uryen, pursues the equation. The reconciliation between Celt and abor- Having revealed himself to Dud as his iginal is attempted again in a passage where father, Uryen argues that Mai-Dun, on Uryen describes himself to Dud as, which they both stand, was a civilised polis the Power that's older than all these new gods long before the Romans came. "You must . . . the Power that's got Death in it as well as remember, lad", he says, Life . . . we're talking of the civilisation that built which fact is, Stonehenge and Avebury. Why should the dwellers in Mai-Dun be regarded as wretched the key to Uryen's country . . . the land of earth-burrowers, when their contemporaries Rheged and Cattraeth. (252) could raise such monuments? (239) Explanation for "the Power" and its nature Now it is inconceivable that John Cowper, must wait upon the full realisation of the erratic scholar as he sometimes was, could Bran-Uryen identity: it must be sufficient have imagined that the Celts had anything to here to reiterate that the Bran-figure is to be do with the building of Stonehenge and regarded, after Sir John Rhys, as aboriginal, Avebury, despite some niggles about the if not Pictish, and that John Cowper here identity of the Beaker-Folk: Stonehenge, deliberately associates this figure with the John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 13 historically Celtic Rheged and Cattraeth. up, lose that semi-mortuary look, and let his Uryen, we learn, has in him that, face subside from the majestic into the handsome (221-22). A great seducer of old magic of the mind which, when driven to women in his youth, though not in the time bay by the dogs of reality, turns upon the mathematical law of life and tears it to bits of Dud and Maiden Castle, he has a final . . .the magic which the Welsh, alone among distinguishing mark (which Dud is obliged, the races, hid... instead of squandering.(252) unwillingly, to feel)—the scar on his very hairy chest which he says is the raven or crow There it is! There is the clincher! It is from —bran in Welsh—he has had since he was a the aboriginal majority who survived, not child, a scar which, when in proximity to merely in Wales but in western Britain, that someone in mental pain, hurts "like a fiery the Welsh have acquired those peaceable beak pecking at me" and yet is "sweet as an mysteries and what Ernest Renan called ecstasy" (253). 40 "the invincible need for illusion". They The reader's first reaction to this bran- are not the authors of their virtues, but they mark may be that it seems a very crude way are certainly the keepers. of establishing a dual identity. Why, in any It is time now to look more closely at the case, bother to call Enoch Quirm Uryen name Uryen and at Enoch Quirm who either rather than Bran? Solely for reasons of chose it or had it posted to him out of anti- euphony? These questions cannot be ans- quity. That he is the Consoling Power while wered except by tackling head-on a declar- he flourishes we must assume now and prove ation which at first sight is even more con- later. But that he is physically Bran we can fusing. For Quirm alleges that, surely recognise very quickly. On his first appearance he is described (55) as swarthy of King Pellam, and Urban of the Black Thorn, and Yspadadden the father of Olwen and feature and majestic of head—"brow, nose, Uther Ben the father of Arthur are really, mouth, chin, all. . . modelled on a scale of every one of them, just local names for the abnormal massiveness" but with eyes that 'Uryen' in me, as I was incarnated down the are "dull, lifeless, colourless, opaque", as ages. (254) though he wears "a great antique mask with empty eye-sockets" into which someone This is not a direct quotation from Sir had fitted glass marbles. His hair is black, John Rhys, whom Quirm quotes as his growing in small, stiff curls—Dud, on authority. Nor is it even a summary of his another occasion (162), thinks it looks like views that a modern reader could accept. moss—and several of the other characters, But there is no question that the source at different times, opine that he is about material for the statement John Cowper sixty years of age. His first function in the puts into the mouth of Enoch Quirm is to be narrative is as a master of drugs, which he found in Rhys's Studies in the Arthurian mixes in order to recover the heart of his wife Legend (1891) and in particular in that chapter entitled 'Urien and his Congen- Nance—a very clear symbol of the kind of 41 Power he is: he washes himself by putting his ers'. This is the source, too, for the head over and over again into a basin of reference to Urien made by Owen Evans in water while he says his prayers—"I don't A Glastonbury Romance as he works know what prayers, I'm sure", says Nance himself up after the news of Young Tewsy's (275)—and his general appearance is that of catch of "the girt chub of Lydford Mill", "a half-vitalized corpse" (55). As seen by declaring that Glastonbury, Dud in the light of the lantern in the barn, he has always been set apart... from the earliest has "a skin full of blotches and creases ... a times . . . Urien the Mysterious, Avallach the monstrous and sodden face" (171). The Unknown, were Fisher-Kings here... and for wearer ordinarily of old and smelly clothes what did they fish?42 and given to slouching as he walks, he can on .occasion—as at Cumber's party—smarten Before this or any other question about Urien can be answered it is absolutely neces- 14 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" sary, I think, that he should be realised as a Arthur at Camlann in 537 A.D. or there- legendary and historical character. abouts. So successful was he that he was In Malory, Books I and II, he appears as besieging the Angle invaders in their last King "Uryens of Gore"43 or stronghold on Ynys Medgawdd, the Isle of "Goore"44—one of the eleven kings led by Lindisfarne, when he was assassinated by an Lot of Lothian and Orkney who refuse to agent of Morcant or Morgan, a rival of his accept the beardless boy Arthur as their amongst the Brythonic kings. over-king. Apparently one of the senior, or This historical placing, all the same, is not less personally active, kings on the battle- without its difficulties. In 573 A.D. there field—he is not one of the kings in the was fought a mile or so north of Longtown, narrative several times unhorsed and re- itself not much above a dozen miles from horsed45—he is nevertheless central to the Carlisle, the battle of Arfderydd. The com- conspiracy: when the eleven kings are at batants on the one side were apparently length discomfited they retire "unto a cite Peredur of York and his brother Gwrgi, that hyght Surhaute, which cite was within Dunawd the Stout and Cynfelyn the kynge Uriens londe".46 Later, after a Leprous, and on the other Gwenddolau mab further encounter between Arthur and the Ceidio, one of the princes of the Selgovae, rebels, King Uryens, accompanied by his who ruled the region surrounding the con- wife Morgan le Fay, Arthur's half-sister, fluence of the rivers Esk and Liddel.50 This attends the funeral of King Lot, struck battle has been represented recently as one down by King Pellynore.47 Morgan le Fay, between the Christian forces of northern however, has a lover called Accolon whose Britain and a tribe, still pagan, which had welfare she sets before that of either Uryens for shaman, witch-doctor and prophet none or Arthur.48 Uryens, besides being cuckold- other than Merlin.51 When Gwenddolau ed, has the air in Malory of a character of was killed and Merlin became a fugitive in secondary importance: he is usually intro- the woods, the latter's fear, often repeated duced as the father of the much more re- in his verse, was of Rhydderch Hael, King of nowned Uwayne and in age he must be at Strathclyde, who had established his Christ- least ten years older than Arthur and ian bishop Kentigern at Glasgow.52 Rhydd- possibly a great deal more. erch may or may not have taken part in the This portrait of him, of course, is part of battle, but he certainly exercised suzerainty the enormous fiction that the French, in over Coed Celyddon, the region in which particular, had developed from the vaguely rise the rivers Annan, Clyde and Tweed. historical beginnings available in Welsh or Where, in all this, was Urien? Why did he in the Latin of Nennius. Nevertheless, his not take part in a battle so close to, and designation as king of Gore led antiquarians perhaps within, his frontier? Or if he was and early historians, Sir John Rhys equivoc- already dead, where was his son Owain, king ally among them, to identify him with of Rheged in his place? Urien was described Gower, with the possibility that Surhaute by Taliesin as Urien Yrechwydd, might even be in the Scilly Isles.49 In the . . . the chieftain, the paramount ruler, work of modern historians the picture is 53 quite different. There is no question now the far-flung refuge, first of fighters found. that Urien's real kingdom of Rheged stret- Yet it may be necessary to conclude that his ched from what we would call southern territory was restricted northwards, perhaps Scotland as far south and east as Gatterick to a strip along the north shore of the Solway in north Yorkshire, the Cattraeth already Firth—the territory of the Novantae—a sit- referred to. With his court at Carlisle, he uation very different from that granted to was one of the most successful kings of the him by mythology and the references of invasion period—that is, he is thought to other poets. have been at the peak of his power some There are nine awdlau to Urien or his son forty years or more after the death of Owain which modern scholars are prepared John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 15 to accept as written by a contemporary Tal- Rheged by sorrowing companions, he pos- iesin. In The Book of Taliesin, however, in tulates from these and a likeness between the which these awdlau are found, there is a colour of Urien and that of Uthr Ben (black much larger number of poems, religious, or dusky) a divinity called The Wonderful prophetic and legendary, formerly attribut- Head, of which Bran and Urien are seen as ed to Taliesin, which can now be seen as con- aspects. King Pellam gets into the argument siderably later in date. It is from this mater- because of the Triad of the Three Dolorous ial that some of the mythological narratives Strokes,56 but the reasoning behind the appertaining to Urien are derived. The inclusion appears faulty: Pellam's land lay poems written in Urien's lifetime and waste after Balyn's stroke, but Bran's did shortly after it, however, are devoted solely not and there is no evidence that Urien's did to the themes expected—the king's generos- either. Dolorous Strokes may be collected in ity at court, particularly to his bards, and his threes but not thereby made identical in ferocity on the battlefield. On the face of it, effect. With Urban of the Black Thorn the the historical Urien seems a less than satis- argument goes farther afield still. Rhys's factory choice for J.C.P.'s purposes. point is that all the characters named, tog- Although reputedly a just ruler and a gen- ether with Yspaddaden the father of Olwen, erous patron, he lived amongst the over- are in his view aspects of a dark or sable tones of warfare. It could be said of him that divinity, amongst which that of Bran, he was "the Power that's got Death in it as unmentionied in Irish mythology, may be well as Life'', if one is prepared to misunder- seen as the most junior. Urien, on the other stand that pronouncement, but hardly that hand, as lord of yr Echwyd (the Evening) is he was "a great death-lover''54 like Broch o the oldest and loftiest. Meifod, the Bran-figure of Owen John Cowper makes full use of this con- Glendower. He is, moreover, a lineal prince, clusion. He is not greatly concerned with the and Maiden Castle is not devised as the book detail of Rhys's argument. Nor does he of the lineal prince. Urien, however, celebrate the Urien whom poems in The becomes Bran, as we have seen, and the Book of Taliesin call "the Gold-King of the prince is a prince of the imagination. One of North" and ruler of Moray, that is, Alban the usefulnesses of the name, questions of from Loch Lomond (with its sixty islands) to euphony apart, is that it enables John Caithness, even though the geography of Cowper to bring in enough history to scatter this offers a strong Pictish identification.57 indubitably Celtic names like Rheged and What he chooses to emphasise is the Urien Cattraeth over a background that is intend- of yr Echwyd, whose function is edly aboriginal. In this way the adjective encapsulated in a gnomic stanza from the Welsh can contain both its Powysian same Book (252), in the translation of which meanings. he displaces the translation of "supreme The significance of Urien in Maiden gwledig" (or chieftain), offered by Skene Castle, however, lies chiefly in mythology and Rhys, in favour of the much more and Sir John Rhys. Let us return to the Bran- elastic "supreme power", and substitutes mark, which on the breast of a resurrected for "principal pilgrim" (Skene) and "pristine companion" (Rhys) the greater god named Uryen still has a slight air of the 58 ridiculous. But one of the Taliesin poems immediacy of "principal companion". does indicate that the historical Urien was so The effect of these changes is to present marked. From this Sir John Rhys argues, Urien as the traveller who has passed first rather less than convincingly, that the Bran- into the evening and stands there to welcome Urien identification goes much further.55 and assist those who in their turn come to his Drawing on the murder of Urien by Llouan shadowland and abide amongst the dead. It Llawdivro, otherwise unknown (and why also enables the Uryen of Maiden Castle to should he not be?), and linking this with claim with justification that he is ' 'the power references to the return of Urien's head to that's older than all these new gods . . . the 16 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" Power that's got Death in it as well as Life" the air, what with the fluttering of the (252). One cannot help feeling, however, exultant ravens and their croaking"60 — that it is from Bran rather than Urien that but this may be due either to the irony of the John Cowper's Consoling Power takes his presenter or to an ignorance caused by the force when he has his Uryen cry out about late date of the story's composition.61 It "the necessity" he is under "of bearing the appears very possible that the soldiers of pain of the world, the pain of what beats Rheged were nicknamed ravens because against the wall" (251). And the definition they bore raven badges on their breasts, and of the pain—sterile love which turns to hate the author of 'The Dream of Rhonabwy', —owes little to any mythology save that of if indeed he did not know this, is no more John Cowper. The need to' 'break through" ridiculous in making his description of them to the secret, however, can be interpreted in literal than have been the many historians of two ways: it is possible to think that Uryen, comparatively modern days who made a because he is Lord of YrEchwydonly in the meal of the entry in the Easter Annals which strength of his imagination (a point which reads: will be developed later), has not achieved the full ability to Console: much more likely it is Bellum badonis in quo arthur portavit crucem domini nostri jesu christi tribus diebus & that John Cowper is merely echoing the 62 limitations of pagan philosophy in recog- tribus noctibus in humeros suos. nising that the mental pain of living is dulled In this case, as in that of the ravens, the rather than removed by the Bran/Urien div- explanation lies not in miracle or myth, but inity and that the secret of living happily and in the badge or insignium. At the end of the painlessly remains undiscovered in the tale of 'The Lady of the Fountain',63 empyrean. whose hero is Owein of Rheged, this Owein Analysis of the origins of the Uryen of ceases to be captain of Arthur's war-band Maiden Castle does not, of course, answer and goes, all the questions, and it is apparent that this to his own possessions. Those were the Three curious re-incarnation has been shaped by Hundred Swords of Cenferchyn and the J.C.P. with some freedom. It may be of Flight of Ravens. And wherever Owein went, interest, however—if unquestionably dig- and they with him, he would be victorious. ressive in terms of literary criticism—that The Ravens, in other words, were Owain's there is another and quite unmythological war-band. Guy Ragland Phillips, in his explanation possible of the bran -mark on diffuse but highly stimulating Brigantia Urien's chest. In 'The Dream of Rhon- (1976), points to the existence of some abwy', a late and obscurely ironic story fifteen Raven names—from Raven Seat included amongst the Mabinogi, a quarrel Moor on the north side of upper Swaledale breaks out between the squires and men-at- to Raven's Barrow on Cartmel Fell, Raven arms who owe allegiance to Arthur and the 59 Crag overlooking Eskdale and Ravenstone ravens of Owain of Rheged. Owain and on the shore of Bassenthwaite Lake—which Arthur are ostensibly engaged in a campaign "form something that looks remarkably as together against the Saxons, but in the story if it might be a boundary line of Rheged".64 they are entirely inactive, sitting not far In other words, the Raven-places would have from the Severn and playing gwyddbwyll, been military posts or look-out stations and each in turn ignoring the messages brought the Rheged enclosed, though small in terms to him and refusing to call his followers off. of many of the claims made for it, might The author of this narrative makes it quite have approximated to the Kingdom of the plain that the ravens are birds—when Owain later and more embattled days. Not a single gives the order to counter-attack they "let raven-name occurs within the circle wind into their wings" and, after their described, "a coincidence", as Phillips puts success, "there was a great commotion in it, "which it is not possible to ignore".65 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 17 Another and late reference66 tells us that maddens" (466) him. It is the spirit of Owain received his warrior-birds from his 'Carridwen', as Dud would have explained grandfather Cynfarch Oer (Cynfarch the it. Any kind of love is love.And can be used Cold) and that Urien his father never posses- to break through to whatever is at the sed or led them. This, however, is probably universe's heart. I think this aspect of the an illustration of the tendency of later gen- novel reflects more than John Cowper's erations to credit their heroes—of whom gloss on the spirit of his modern Welsh abor- Owain, like Arthur, was one—with friends, iginals—"A communistic matriarchy is our contemporaries and possessions, not to secret ideal of human life":67 behind it is his mention stories, that were not, and often knowledge of the women's rights written could not have been, strictly theirs. Urien, I into the laws of Hywel Dda (each woman to think, bore his raven badge just as his son have her sarhad and her testimony to be did. accepted in sexual matters against that of the 68 This historical excursion has now ex- man, if both are unsupported' and behind hausted whatever excuse it may have had. I them again the rich tombs at Vix and must return to Maiden Castle and attempt to Villeneuve-Renneville, evidences that the explain what John Cowper intends the aboriginals of the sixth and fifth century reader to learn from his rex semi-mortuus, B.C. in the valleys of the Rhone, the Seine and the Marne had turned their Celtic over- his Uryen disguised as Bran. And how in 69 particular does this resurrected divinity lords towards the veneration of women. exemplify Wales? My second point is less clearly evoked in There are four points to make, I think, Maiden Castle than I could wish, although which I shall take in reverse order of import- in one respect the narrative depends upon it ance to the theme. The first is Uryen's sym- for its climax. Uryen is the master of secrets pathy for women (though there are hints of and, what is more, Druidical secrets. Owen wife-beatings which Nance suppresses). Evans prepares the ground for this when he That this sympathy takes in lesbianism is challenges John Crow at Stonehenge: obvious. Uryen seems to Dud to be suppres- sing "a mighty glow of triumphant exult- 'It's very English,' said John. ation" (165) when Thuella fondles and The man turned and gave him a strange kisses Wizzie: he assumes indeed "an ex- indignant glance. pression like that of some grandly modelled 'Is it English then to hide your great secret?' imperturbable idol—an expression of he cried excitedly. 'Is it English to keep your secret to the very terrifying complacency". When the two end?'70 girls are together again on Midsummer's Eve on the summit of Mai-Dun, Uryen, who His demeanour, John thought, was that of has to go off to the excavations with "a mad dissenting minister"71—a nice Claudius and Teucer Wye, exchanges a look touch which brings the Druidical down with Wizzie which seems to mean approval through the ages to the Parc/2-dominated of their proximity: it says, "Don't worry Eisteddfod of John Cowper's day. But the about me. We understand each other per- Druidical element—the patriotism, the fectly" (359-60). Wizzie, meanwhile, under divination, the hieratic wisdom, the human the impression that he is as consumed with sacrifice, together with that insistence on love for her as she is for him, finally gets to learning everything by rote, writing nothing sit on his lap, but after he has "touched with down and revealing nothing to those not his forefinger the tip of her left breast... a within the secret, first commented on by gesture the extreme opposite of a sensual 72 Julius Caesar —is thinly represented in one" (446) he makes it plain, in his broken- Maiden Castle. In the strict sense it occurs down state, to both Wizzie and Thuella that only in one throwaway paragraph. Uryen he has tried to use the latter' s love for Wizzie "to break through into the Mystery that mentions an unearthly smell coming at some seasons from Mai-Dun: "I think," he says, 18 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" '... they must have burnt some special kind of grasper at the Secret, John Cowper has tilted wood there in old days. It isn't the smell of the balance of the novel towards disbelief. burning flesh; but I've smelt that smell more In a modern society pagan dreams wither than once, and this is quite different.'(227) and die. Unrealistically, no one makes any further With the third point we discover the main- enquiry or comment. spring of the theme. Maiden Castle is the In the matter of secrets Uryen is prepared book of the image and the imagination. It is to discuss with the other assembled charact- not the book of the lineal prince but that of ers the 'three-horned' bull already excav- the orphan brought up by an aunt at the ated from Mai-Dun, but this is in pseudo- lodge-gates of the park once possessed by his scientific fashion, which he probably ancestors. That does not prevent Enoch equates with disguise. He reveals the full from being gwr bonheddig in the Welsh basis of his ideas to his newly-recognised son manner, but the park is the first image of the Dud, plainly with the intention of drawing Secret, something he sees but does not him into the secret but with no prohibition possess. about passing it on: and he has certainly explained himself, if perhaps only in part, to Not by willing a thing but by imagining a thing Thuella, who protests to Wizzie: does the thing come true, declares John Cowper in "My Philo- 'It's Uryen's ideas that fascinate me. I can't 73 bear the smelly clothes'. (362) sophy", and it is at the level of imagination that Uryen-who-was-Enoch Yet the writing about those same ideas for lives much of his life. There is some of the Cumber's newspaper (one of the less well- child in it: when he sees three-year-old handled parts of the book, this) ultimately Lovie with her paper Gwendolly he knows at destroys him. Wizzie thinks it is the money once that Lovie and Gwendolly are going to that does for him: see the Queen. Lovie, without bothering herself how he knows, recognises that, 'Wherever money enters it kills life! , , , and when you started writing those articles for Cumber you blew your soul away like a here was someone who treated existence dandelion-seed . . . You gave him your ideas exactly as she did, that is to say, who regarded —one by one for his money.' (372) what you were pretending as the only real real- ity in your life. (319) But it is not the money. Uryen himself, in extremis, explains: It is the extent and depth of Uryen's imagin- ation that separates him even from Dud, 'When I kept my secret here'—and again he who is some way ahead of the others in open- struck himself on the chest—'where I've had ness to his world. it written from my birth ... I was strong in my faith. When I told my son I was strong in my 'No, my lad, my gods aren't as real as your faith. But when I wrote of it for the world the stick, or as the mole on your belly that your virtue went out of me!' (369) mother used to tell me about', (234) But he goes on to blame them all, his son argues Uryen, insisting that the control lies included. Not one of them has the Hiraeth with him. for the Secret. Which means, in the terms of the novel, that he has no witness to pro- 'I might believe absolutely in my gods and yet nounce on and for him. refuse to sacrifice anything to them ... they'd have their own kind of reality—all that gods Dud agreed with Nance that by publishing his can have, or ever do have, or ever will have life-illusion he had 'killed his heart'. (482) . . . They don't need your damned all-or- But this is a verdict from those who have nothing truths'. (234-35) either not fully accepted the Secret or have As he becomes more excited, he opens his not been told it. In not providing another heart to Dud. John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 19 'Fumbling about in the roots of the past I follow Uryen through it to possess "the found wh'at I was, what I must be, to be the power that's got Death in it as well as Life" thing I am! Everything's in the mind. Every- (252). But that power is not to last in Uryen. thing's created and destroyed by the mind When, much later, publication of the Secret . . . You think it's madness to talk of the old has killed it, Uryen is urgent to get back the gods of Mai-Dun? You think I ought to be interested in their excavations, and their head he relinquished, and, on receiving it, proofs that human beings lived in this place hugs and slobbers over it in the hope that it like hyenas in holes among bones... I tell you can still be the means to the Secret's renewal. we, I and others like me, are the gods of Mai- 'It—He—I always had some creature that was Dun—the same yesterday, today and forever the body of our longing, of our hiraeth, of our . . . Don't you feel this whole great fortress desire, the incarnation of our power to break ready to shake, shiver, melt, dissolve? Don't through . . .' (449) you feel that you and I are behind it, making it what it is by the power of our minds?' (250) he tries to explain. But the image no longer works. It is important, I think, to recognise the John Cowper, however, is not content part played in this pagan imagination by the with this outline. He provides a philosoph- image, Christian and Welsh as it may be ical commentary on the significance of the (John Cowper thinks "the Cymric nation image. Claudius expounds the idea of ... by far the most purely Christian nation progress, the identification of the image as in the world'').74 The two hieratic bed-posts the past: are "ancestral"—that is, they belong to the 'Evolution means Scientific Excavation at family of which Enoch and his cousin one end and Scientific Experiment at the Cornie were members in Wales: Enoch stole other. The more you know about what was, one from Cornie's bed when they quar- the faster you can create what w///be'. (126) relled. The one which remained with "the To Uryen scientific research into what he woman from Wales" (17) was passed on to her son Dud who, while not understanding calls "the Power of the Abyss" is "the what physical form or forms the head on it Devil's joke" (448). Teucer Wye, on the represents, has come to realise that it stands other hand, is given leave to outline the Plat- for desire—that hiraeth that Uryen cries out onic position: about when near his death, the desire to '. . . the soul feeds on invisible, not visible penetrate the mystery of the cosmos. Cornie things! The soul is a wayfarer through matter in her lifetime showed no wish or intention only to learn the trick of shaking matter off! to return to Wales but worked on one of her Of course matter affords symbols of the soul, woollen covers, possessed by Dud, a picture and of the soul's journey from one level of spiritual beauty to another, but there's of a stately manorial gate flanked by two nothing divine in matter, except the Divinel hieratic heads like the one she still possessed. The symbols that matter casts up are like the This is the second image—the imagination bubbles cast up to the surface of a stream separated from its source but still powerful when a glittering fish passes by. It's because and intact. And Uryen, when still strong in of the passage of the soul through its inert his power, can afford to return his stolen resistance that matter produces symbols at head to Dud to make a pair again for him, all! (367). . . These precious discoveries must doubtless in hope that his son too, provided not bind us to earth'. (374) as he was provided, will be moved to the Urye'n, however, in his only studio expos- hiraeth. Dud, however, having got as far ition, refutes both the scientific and the Plat- with his single head as to identify it with Malory's Questing Beast, to be identified onic position as he speaks of the 'three- further, perhaps, from his reading of Rhys, horned' bull dug up on Mai-Dun, which has with Taliesin's Dor-Marth, the Door of two human torsos impaled on its horns and Death (114-15), cannot—or will not— another on its up-curving tail. "It is one of those things", he says, addressing Thuella, 20 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 'that go deeper into life than anything in your is, in the later folk-tale known as Hanes Tal- Dad's Plato . . . It's not classical symbolism iesin, believed to belong to the ninth or tenth anyway, it goes back further; and when you century, much more imaginative material. It talk of science you must remember that these is the tale of the servant-boy on whom the things are like dark-finned fish embedded in drops from Ceridwen's cauldron fell and ice. They have life in them that can be revived. And I must say this to you, Mr. Cask: it is not blessed him with the gift of poetry. Pursued science that can revive them . . . Besides, the by the furious Ceridwen through a number secret escapes you! What you and your kind of shape-changes and finally re-born from call Evolution I call Creation'. (167) her own womb, the boy is found by Elf fin ap Gwyddno Garanhir in his weir-net, renamed Even to Dud, Maiden Castle, "this Titanic Taliesin and ultimately taken to the court of erection of the demented mould-warp man Maelgwn Gwynedd, where he silences the . . . this mystical city of Dunium" (230), court poets by his magical powers. Sum- takes on monstrous forms. Creation ... Re- moned by the king to speak, he answers in creation ... Imagination: for J.C.P., as for verse. I quote a few lines from the trans- Uryen, they are bound up together. He lation of Lady Charlotte Guest, the one that would argue, though he does not say so perhaps John Cowper first read: precisely, that this approach to life is Welsh/ aboriginal because it is "ancestral", handed I was with my Lord in the highest sphere, down, present in the consciousness of indiv- On the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell: iduals if not wholly so in the community, I have borne a banner before Alexander; and because "the very essence of the Welsh I know the names of the stars from north to spirit" is to seek' 'an escape by feeling rather south; than a conviction by understanding".75 I have been on the galaxy at the throne of the That is, he has an Annwn to retire into, a Distributor; hedge of mist to keep the heart secure, an I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain; echwydto look upon in prospect, whenever I conveyed the Divine Spirit to the level of the 76 vale of Hebron; "the rubble of objective truth" falls too I was in the court of Don before the birth of heavily on his consciousness. The danger Gwdion. over, he emerges again to re-shape his exist- I was instructor to Eli and Enoc; . . . ence in accordance with the continuum of imagination. I was at the place of the crucifixion of the merciful Son of God; The fourth and most important point of I have been three periods in the prison of all is simpler to expound. Uryen is the heir to Arianrod; Taliesin. Now Taliesin, historically, was a I have been the chief director of the work of late sixth century poet of 'the old North' the tower of Nimrod; and, as we have seen, the writer of a number I am a wonder whose origin is not known. of eulogies to the historical Urien, King of Rheged. An early eulogy to Cynan Garwyn, I have been in Asia with Noah in the ark, however, has persuaded some modern I have seen the destruction of Sodom and scholars that he (Taliesin) was a native of Gomorra; Powys and unquestionably John Cowper I have been in Jndia when Roma was built, I am now come here to the remnant of felt him and saw him on that ancestral n ground. He reveals that after he came to live Troia. at Corwen he used to go, early in the morn- One may comment, digressively, that the ing and on an empty stomach, to pray at "a last lines quoted must date this poem later lichen-covered rock which has come to than 1136, but no matter: John Cowper, like represent for me the great spirit of the myst- 77 David Jones and Vernon Watkins among erious Poet Taliesin". It was not, Anglo-Welsh poets, was fascinated by this however, the eulogies of the historical Tal- vision of the spirit reincarnated in every age, iesin that John Cowper found use for. There disappearing like Owain Glyndwr, Owain John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 21 Lawgoch and the other Welsh leaders whom tains to Wales, to wrap it around the the bards remember, but disappearing only aboriginal core and to suggest that its speak- to re-appear, in time, in political or military ers are more than keepers of aboriginal victory. This is, of course, a Welsh, and secrets. It may also imply, however unhist- therefore more aggressive, version of orically, that the language, as it emerged in J.C.P.'s concept of the aboriginals who Taliesin's day, embodies the modifications could afford to wait, but marrying the two of the aboriginals, that, in a word, the prop- presented no great difficulty. The choice of itations and the world sadnesses of those the name Enoch was a beginning: for Enoch who have been here from the beginning sound through. walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.79 There, then, is the Welsh motif of Maiden Castle, the book of the Imagination and Tal- When Enoch has long been Uryen he tells iesin. It presents, in my view, the most con- Dud: sistent and unified vision of one aspect of 'Now do you begin to see the truth about my Welsh tradition in any of the works of John name? I didn't change it to Uryen because Cowper Powys. The extent to which this has Uryen's a prettier sound than Enoch, but not been understood is remarkable: to the because I found, in incarnation after incar- writer of a recent article on the novel which nation, that I've actually been Uryen'. (252) is very perceptive about the feminine aspects of the narrative Uryen is no more than It is to this aspect of Uryen's mystery that Nance's "mad, smelly husband".80 The Dud is most resistant, especially when Uryen Editor of The Powys Review remarks that claims that, "a whole cycle of ancient gods the "atmosphere... to some readers is often . . . connected . . . with the worship of the clammily morbid"81 and Richard Perceval great goddess Carridwen" continually re- Graves finds "the sinister tone of Maiden incarnate themselves (247). But when Dud, Castle ... an unpleasant shock after the still turning over in his mind the extraordin- magical healing of the Grail in A Glaston- ary nature of his sonship, has laid his finger bury Romance and the nostalgic enchant- unwillingly on' 'the seal of Uryen'' (255), he ment of Weymouth Sands".82 What we are turns away into the wind which has myster- hearing here, I think, is the response to John iously got up, hears his companion mutter- Cowper's 'mortuary' trappings for a resur- ing something which he thinks is "probably rected god, not to the ideas expressed. It is Taliesin's chant to the wind" (257) and says not true, for example, that Uryen tries to to himself: "break through" by "exploiting the 83 This old Welsh must be the most primitive of impotent love of people close to him" all tongues. It sounds as if human inventions, unless lesbian love is automatically to be human necessities, human thought, barely regarded as impotent. Due notice should be entered into it; as if its rhythm were identical taken, despite his erratic literary judg- with the orchestration of the planet, whose ments,84 of John Cowper's own only notes are the motions of air and water declaration, while he was still writing it, that and its only burden the ancient sorrow of the his "Dorchester book" is "a book far more earth. What he's muttering now must be what deeply and obstinately and indurately made the spirits of space must have heard, rising up of me wone antick notions and chin-dig- night by night, day by day, through millions 85 of ages, from an earth that as yet knew no ging obstinacies . . . than any other", organic life. (257) despite his admission that he has, so to speak, been beaten back into this position by It is not unreasonable, I think, to see in this his experience of litigation.86 One view of tribute to the ancientness of the Welsh Maiden Castle, moreover, might take in a language an attempt, not merely to carry it happy ending for all its major characters back beyond the aboriginals but, in terms of except the dead Uryen and the deserted Dud: that part of the novel's thesis which apper- 22 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" Thuella and Wizzie are away to America, an ancient or medieval subject for his next 'doing their own thing' (however improb- novel. We should note also his observation ably painting and a life in the circus may of "the non-existence of the social class concur): Jenny and Claudius have entered which of all others gives the dominant note the realm of physical conjunction and have to life in the south-west of England", Lovie to look after: Teucer Wye has come to namely, "the upper-middle class".91 For live with the daughter he favours: only Dud this was the class in which his personal is desolate, and even he has the passion of experience of life lay, the class about which Nance in the offing. The ending, indeed, has he had most consistently written. It was some resemblance to the plan for Auto- asking a lot of him to enter a new society and biography John Cowper wrote of to his shape Corwen shopkeepers and estate work- "darling Lulu": men into the modern aboriginals he theo- rised about. That society, moreover, was The only Villain of the curious fairytale will 87 largely Welsh-speaking, and John Cowper, be John his wone self. despite his book-Welsh, seems to have been But I digress again. How does all this relatively incapable in conversation and relate to the view I presented in "The Sacri- little disposed to try. Most of what he ficial Prince"? Not at all simply, I have to learned about his neighbours came from his answer. If that previous view was right at all far more outgoing companion Phyllis. The (which is highly doubtful) it was so for the obvious solution beckoned—to take a hist- wrong reasons. orical subject. All the pressures were In the first place, John Cowper himself towards Glyndwr. denies it. In Wales, he says, Glyndwr, nevertheless, was a mistake. Not a field, not a hill, not a river-bank, but Some of the reasons for this judgment are there emanate from it, wavering, fluctuating, relatively minor. A great deal of historical ebbing and flowing like mountain-rain, research was needed: John Cowper's legends and rumours of an unbelievably re- reading was widened from the mythological mote past.88 into the historical. His earliest extant letter to Iorwerth Peate, dated 13 October 1937, The first thing he noticed on coming from gives us a tiny insight into the new areas he Dorset, he continues, was, had to be concerned with: the almost complete obliteration here of the I am not over worried by finding that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Mabinogion is still our best authority on curious emergence of twentieth century life 89 costumes for I shall be spared further out of a remoter and more romantic past. research & moreover . . . shall be free to use my imagination to the limit! ... I must work At King Eliseg's Pillar at Valle Crucis he felt n the spirit of the remote past more powerfully hard at Owain. than even at Glastonbury.90 Where, then, By 22 November 1938, he had reached page are the 'emanations' in Owen Glendower 900—"in my own handwriting . . . which is and why do they die away? very large as thou seest".93 He was deter- It may not be necessary to take John mined to reach 2000 pages and in the end Cowper's assertions at face-value, for to produced 356,865 words or thereabouts, "a have delivered himself otherwise would little bit shorter than Glastonbury".94 have denied his' 'life-illusion'', but there are How is this relevant? In two ways, I think. answers more important than any sophistry First, the new reading bulks large: history of his. We have seen how living at Corwen pushes out mythology and emanations. The directed his attention to Owain Glyndwr: we writing is full of new doctrine and ideas: see now, in his reference to the disappear- Walter Brut the Lollard, Iolo Goch, Mad ance of the eighteenth and nineteenth Huw, Crach Ffinnant, Pascentius and many centuries, the pressure he felt on him to take more—if they do not have their say, and John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 23 most of them do, then their positions are John Cowper had, in Owen Glendower, described. Second, because John Cowper run out of mythology and the old Bran was escaping into history and felt 'safe' theme did not serve. Or, to put it another from misrepresentation and litigation, his and more penetrating way, his abiding inter- writing is self-indulgent and inconse- est was in his aboriginal theory of living and quential: a number of the minor characters he had found nothing else in Welsh myth- are there, it would seem, to indulge their ology to serve his purpose. If the Wales he author's sexual fantasies. Gone is the depicts there lacks the texture and feeling of stricter, self-imposed framework of Maiden the Dorset he knew so well, it is because he Castle: within a historical plan of time and was still a newcomer to the valley of the Dee, action which J. C. P. obviously thought of as because, despite an initial attention to Dinas given, as providing the framework for him, Bran, the action of the narrative moves to a he could fit in very much what he liked. The number of sites rather than the single one of brilliance of the writing has its effect from Maiden Castle, because much of his time is time to time, but its purpose is fragmented. spent conceptualising characters and ideas More serious still, as my essay' 'The Sacri- that are English or international rather than ficial Prince" tries to point out, is his failure Welsh, and because, his intellectual grasp to move his mythology away from the Bran- notwithstanding, he chooses to ignore the image. There he is, apparently trying to heart and spirit of early fifteenth century describe a revolt that, with incredible unity Wales in favour of a deep-rooted theory of and loyalty, lasted at least thirteen years, his own. 97 Owain Glyndwr may have positing a de-activated prince who, by seemed to John Cowper inevitable as a mental exteriorisation, sheer inattention or subject, but he was nonetheless a mistake. unrecorded evasion, gives no lead, takes no With whatever brilliance, history is not to be decisions that are not re-active and moment- trifled with in this way—at least in what the arily violent, and is subject at times to irrele- author is pleased to call a "historical vant and inexplicable sexual fantasies. novel". Physically Owen is not Bran: he is indeed, "that great Normanized Celt for whom we Aboriginals shed so much blood":95 he is jewelled and golden, as the Romans des- cribed the continental Celts to be. But his be- haviour is aboriginal: how he contrives to be in rebellion at all is a mystery. Bran makes a separate entry, momentarily, as a legend, wading up through the tide at Harlech, "carrying on his back the ghosts of half-a- dozen bards".96 But the real Bran-figure is Broch o Meifod, whose wife Morg ferch Lug, despite the Celticised form of her name, is disclosed to be an aboriginal. Broch's advice it is that is absolutely necessary to the success of the rebellion, but no meaningful dialogue with Owen appears. Owen, having the spirit of Bran without the flesh, has nothing to learn from Broch, for whom there is no sufficient role. They are altogether too close to each other. Neither of them, together or apart, could, on their be- haviour revealed, have kept any working loyalty going for thirteen years. 24 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" NOTES

'Op. cit., p. 238. 29 A Glastonbury Romance, hereafter referred to as 2 Owen Glendower, 1941, hereafter designated OG, AGR, p. 739. p. 12. 30Historically "the House of Rhys" could only 3Humfrey, pp. 240-41. have been that of Rhys ap Tewdwr, King of 4OG, pp. 375-76. Deheubarth, whose court was at Dinefwr Castle near 5Humfrey, pp. 243-44. Llandeilo, and of his lineal descendant the Lord Rhys. 6Ibid., p. 244. J.C.P. confirms this deduction (LHBL, p. 160), 7OG, p. 821. adding that he had "acquired (in my genealogical and "/o/w Cowper Powys in Search of a Landscape, antiquarian studies in Cymmerodion [sic] paths of 1982, p. 137. remote learning) such respect" for them. It may be "OG, pp. 889-90. noted that in his American days and even the days of 10Op. cit., Preface, x. his early residence in Wales his spelling in Welsh was "John Cowper Powys, Letters to His Brother often careless and faulty. Llewelyn, 1975, Vol. 2 (1925-1939), p. 126. Referred 310C, p. 32. to hereafter as LHBL. 32 The Mabinogion, translated by Gwyn Jones and 12 In "Maiden Castle and the Celtic Calendar", The Thomas Jones, enlarged, illustrated edition, 1976, p. Powys Review, No. 15 (1984/85), 32-34. 34. "Op. cit., p. 12. 33 "And then was that saying first uttered, and it is "Ibid, 26. On 23 May 1935 John Cowper records a still used as a proverb". The modern politician to visit with Phyllis Playter to Bitterley, a village on the make use of it was James Callaghan. slopes of Clee Hill and some eight miles ENE of 34Grassholm, an island off the north-west coast of Ludlow, where had lived Powyses who were "defin- Pembrokeshire. itely our ancestors". Henley Hall, the Powys resid- 35 The Mabinogion, tr. Gwyn Jones and Thomas ence, though in Bitterley parish, was at least three Jones, enlarged, illustrated edition, 1976, p. 34. miles nearer Ludlow, adjacent to the Ludlow- uMaiden Castle, 1936, p. 258. Kidderminster road. LHBL, p. 186. 31Ibid., p. 29. MC page numbers are hereafter "Autobiography, 1934, p. 25. included in the text. 16 Louis Marlow, Welsh Ambassadors (1936), 1975, 38 Vide, amongst several recent attempts to p. 47. synthesise the views of modern scholars, Michael "Ibid. Balfour, Stonehenge and its Mysteries, 1979, "Ibid. This was said to be because the arrival of the especially pp. 108-28 and p. 134. cuckoo immediately heralded the arrival of the casual 39 What is known about this battle comes from a farm labourers from Wales. long poem attributed to the poet Aneirin, a poem "Ibid., pp. 47-48. which is neither narrative nor epic but a series of 20Autobiography, pp. 334-35. elegies to warriors who fell at Cattraeth. Kenneth 21 J. Y. W. Lloyd, History oj the Princes, theLords- Hurlstone Jackson's edition of The Gododdin, 1969, Marcher and the Ancient Nobility of Powys Fadog, is the most complete available. 1881-87. 40 Ernest Renan (1823-92) was a prominent Breton 22Autobiography, pp. 335-36. writer and philosopher. His Essai sur la Poesie des "Op. cit., p. 739. Races Celtiques (1854) influenced the views of 24 Born near Ponterwyd, Cardiganshire, the son of a Matthew Arnold. In Renan's perspective the Celtic farm labourer, John Rhys became first a pupil- nature was reserved and inward-looking, lacking in teacher, then an accredited schoolmaster. At the age initiative and political skills, inclined to fatalism and of 25 he was offered a scholarship to Jesus College, lost causes, but possessing withal a sensitivity and a Oxford. Later a Fellow of Merton, he studied at deep feeling for nature and for all living creatures. German universities, became an inspector of schools "Among the features by which the Celtic races most and in 1877 Professor of Celtic at Jesus College, of impressed the Romans", he writes, "were the pre- which from 1895 until his death he also served as cision of their ideas upon the future life, their inclin- Principal. ation to suicide, and the loans and contracts which 25 Celtic Folklore, WelshandManx, 1901, Vol. 2, p. they signed with the other world in view". They were 552. seen with some awe as "having an understanding of 26Op. cit., p. 539. "Death is the basis of my the future and the secret of death". (The Scott ed. of religion". 1906, pp. 56-57.) 27 John Cowper Powys, Obstinate Cymric, Carm- 411 am very much indebted to Ian Hughes for arthen, 1947, hereafter referred to as OC. Vide his directing my attention to this chapter, which radically essay, "Welsh Aboriginals", passim. The Welsh, he altered my view of John Cowper's debt to Sir John writes, possess "the most conqueror-absorbing Rhys. powers ever possessed by any nation" (p. 12). "AGR, p. 734. 2sIbid., p. 63. John Cowper Powys and "Wales" 25 43 The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene 62 "The Battle of Badon in which Arthur carried the Vinaver, 1954, p. 11. cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for 44Ibid., p. 19. three days and three nights ..." Vide Leslie Alcock, 45King Lot, King Nentres, King Angwysschaunce Arthur's Britain, 1971, pp. 51-52, for the demolition and the King "with the Hondred Knyghtes'', with one of. these objections. It is also possible that a scribal or two others, were in the van of this series of individ- error, the substitution of scuid (O. W. shoulder) for ual contests. Ibid., pp. 21-24 in particular. scuit (O. W. shield) compounds whatever difficulty "Ibid., p. 31. there is. 46Ibid., p. 58. "TheMabinogion, ed. quoted, p. 182. "Ibid., p. 59. MOp. cit., p. 150. 49 John Rhys, Studies in the Arthurian Legend, p. biIbid.,p. 151. 324, 1. "Sorhaut", he writes, "doubtless stands for 66Ragland Phillips, p. 149, quotes this from the some such a form—as Sorlianc—of the name of the mabinogi of Iarlles y Ffynawn. Scillies, called Sorlingues in modern French". 67OC, p. 14. 50 Nikolai Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin, 1984, pp. 68 Vide Melville Richards, The Laws ofHywel Dda, 43-56 in particular, 1954. Hywel Dda died in 950, but the existing texts of "Ibid., pp. 21-43. his Laws are dated five or six centuries later. Sarhad "In the Afallenau Black Book of Carmarthen text, may be defined as 'insult-price': thus—"If amanbeat translated by A. O. H. Jarman and printed by Tolstoy his wife without cause, let him pay her sarhad to her as an Appendix, pp. 252-53) the following extracts, according to her privilege" (which was calculated albeit obscure, illustrate this: according to the privilege of her husband). In cases of "Sweet apple-tree which grows in a glade, rape, where the man denies it, the woman's testimony Its peculiar power hides it from the lords of is accepted: "let her take his member in her left hand, Rhydderch . . . and let her swear to his having committed rape upon Death has taken everyone, why does it not call me? her, and thus she loses nothing of her right" (op. cit., For after Gwenddolau no lord honours me . . . p. 69). "A. O. H. Jarman and Gwilym Rees Hughes, A 6,The tomb of Vix, near the source of the Seine, is Guide to Welsh Literature, 1976, Vol. 1, p. 58. the tomb of a princess or priestess, furnished with rich 54 OG, p. 652. ornaments of gold and the largest crater or drinking- "Rhys, Studies in the Arthurian Legend, pp. 250- vessel of that age so far discovered. Vide Rene 70 passim. Joffroy, La Tombe Princiere de Vix, 1968. 56The Triads of the Isle of Britain (Tiroedd Ynys ™AGR, p. 97. Prydain) are preserved in manuscripts from the nIbid., p. 98. thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, though a few are 72 "They are said to learn by heart in their studies a found as early as Y Gododdin and The Book of great number of verses, and so some remain twenty Taliesin. They represent that fondness for triple years under instruction. And they do not think it right groupings characteristic of very early Celtic to commit these things to writing, although, as a rule, mnemonic and educational practice and together they in other matters—in public and private provide an index of legendary characters and documents—they use Greek characters". De Bello happenings. The particular narrative referred to here Gallico, Book VI (tr. A. A. Irwin Nesbitt). is provided in full in Malory Book II ("Balin, or The "OC, p. 139. Knight with the Two Swords"): Balin sought out and "Ibid. killed Garlon, the knight who could make himself 15Ibid., p. 43. invisible: Pellam, who proved to be Garlon's brother, lbIbid., p. 155. then attacked Balin, who, having lost his sword, "Ibid., p. 155. wounded his adversary with the spear he found, "the nOp. cit., (1838), 2nd ed., 1877, p. 482. spere whych Longeus smote oure Lorde with to "the "Genesis, c. 5 v. 24. herte". Pellam "was nyghe of Joseph his kynne" and 80Susan Rands, "Maiden Castle: Symbol, Theme his land lay waste until he was healed in "the queste of and Personality", The Powys Review, No. 15, 28. the Sankgreall". Vinaver, pp. 64-65. uIbid., p. 4. "Rhys, op. cit., pp. 240-48. 82 The Brothers Powys, 1983, pp. 273-74. aIbid., p. 249, where Rhys discusses the renderings 83 The Powys Review, No. 15, 4. given by Skene and himself. 84 Note especially his belief, many times re-iterated, i9TheMabinogion, ed. quoted, pp. 145-150. that Morwyn is the "best and most deeply-felt and by 60Ibid., p. 147. far the most imaginative book I've ever written" 61 The only mediaeval copy of the tale is found in (LHBL, p. 235). The Red Book ofHergest. The story is set in Powys in "5Ibid., p. 209. the reign of Madog ap Maredudd, and dates suggested uIbid. for its composition have ranged from the mid-twelfth "Ibid., p. 159. century to the late thirteenth. 88OC, p. 79. 26 John Cowper Powys and "Wales'" mIbid., p. 77. 96OG, p. 643. mIbid., p. 11. 97 It may be relevant to note that in November 1951 90Ibid., p. 57. he wrote to Benson Roberts about his novel Porius as "Ibid., p. 77. follows: "Personally I think it beats that Glendower 92John Cowper Powys: Letters 1937-1954, ed. book of mine hollow and I can tell you why Ben old Iorwerth peate, Cardiff, 1974, p. 1. crony because of all the ages of mankind the 13th 14th •"Ibid., p. 4. and 15th centuries are to me the most odious 94 Letters from John Cowper Powys to C. Benson detestable and wholly unsympathetic—I even hate Roberts, 1975, p. 37. their costumes and weapons!" Letters to Benson 95OC, p. 12. Roberts, p. 92.

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Dinas Bran: an illustration in J. Y. W. Lloyd, The History . . . of Powys Fadog, Vol. I, 1881. Colin Style On Hardy's Sacred Ground: John Cowper Powys's Weymouth Sands

i Are these the muslined pink young things to whom Time shows no signs of loosening the pro- We vowed and swore prietorial hold that Thomas Hardy has over In nooks on summer Sundays by the Froom, Dorset. That beautiful country has been Or Budmouth shore? carved up, packaged, and frozen in the coll- 'Froom' and 'Budmouth' have no direct ective mind of the English-speaking world in relationship with the death of youth, love the image generated by the great writer's and innocence. They merely add to musical poems and novels. The familiar, obligatory sonority and a vague verisimilitude of local maps of parallel nomenclature continue in association. fresh editions; names that roll easily and It constitutes a paradox that, whilst trippingly off the tongue—Casterbridge, Hardy's leit-motiv is man struggling against Mellstock, Stourcastle, Weatherbury, Shas- the backdrop of a harsh, indifferent uni- ton and Budmouth. That Hardy's topo- verse, the reader yet draws man and an graphy is so firmly etched is not only due to omnipresent country closely together; a his position as a giant of literature. After all, process that tacitly assumes that the uni- place-names in Dickens, Eliot and Conrad, verse does somehow mould and interpene- to draw out some other giants at random, trate man. are far less easily recollected and associated. Such a contradiction in Hardy's position The place-names of Wessex are entrench- would have been well-noticed by John ed by simplicity, consistency, and repetition Cowper Powys. For any author proposing in the series of novels and poems. And this to set a novel in Wessex, a deep and careful familiarization is reinforced by Hardy's study of Thomas Hardy would be obligat- vivid and dramatic use of character and ory. Powys, of course, knew Hardy person- incident. We relate to the places where ally, and was encouraged by him. but, in his Michael Henchard dies, in despair but with novel, Weymouth Sands, he still diverges integrity intact; where Tess is hanged: and, radically fram Hardy.' even, in more idyllic circumstances, the Although it might seem a problem for a seaside where Dick Dewey meets Fancy Day. Dorset writer to find space outside the giant Nonetheless, Hardy's commanding shadow cast by the old master, Hardy's association with geographical Wessex is not, narrative methods and areas of interest in a sense, entirely deserved, since topo- actually reflect the fairly narrowly special- graphy is frequently irrelevant to the ised requirements of his own creative needs, thematic issues. Almost any one of Hardy's and he left large areas untapped for his suc- poems is exemplary of this, like "At Caster- cessors. The explicit exploration of sexuality bridge Fair: Former Beauties": is one obvious untapped area, and Powys These market-dames, mid-aged, with lips certainly exploits this. However, Powys also thin-drawn, directly involves locality, in a way that And tissues sere, Hardy never did, and attempts to reveal in Are they the ones we loved in years agone, Weymouth Sands how the rich promis- And courted here? cuous, multifarious environment of the old 28 On Hardy's Sacred Ground seaside resort profoundly affects and inter- Littleton, asking "for any old tumbled to penetrates human lives. Each character dev- bits guide-books".2 eloped to any length, intones the sacristic He also sturdily blocks any Hardeian landmarks—St Alban's head, the White nostalgia, mourning and regrets; notwith- Nose, the Nothe, Chesil Beach, the Break- standing that he loves Weymouth's water, the Town Bridge, the White Horse, 'ancientness', he never departs from present Hardy's Monument, Lodmoor, King preoccupations in the lives of the towns folk. George's Statue, St John's Spire, and the This is impressive—remembering that Jubilee Clock. These names and places, of Powys loved Weymouth as an idyll where he course, are actual and not fictitious, and the spent many happy childhood holidays. references are so frequent that it is as if Possibly his extremely unhappy years at Powys is seeking to out-Hardy Hardy and Sherborne School plus the memory of a break his monopoly over the Dorset terrain somewhat forbidding father combined to in readers' minds. Indeed, on occasion, the compensate against self-indulgent, retro- cataloguing seems almost obsessional: grade journeys into the past through his characters as surrogates. She left the bridge, passed the front of Trinity Church, followed the North Quay to Sidney Hall, and then hurried along Newstead Road. II She passed the turns into Granville Road, Ilchester Road, and Abbotsbury Road and If Hardy deals with topography and soon after this crossing arrived at Swan Villa. emotion in a typical way, he also has (95) favourite devices in plot which act as a deus Hardy's Wessex has become sanctified by exmachina'm the destinies of his characters. a magic circle in English literature; almost a A common compulsion is the use of the Lyonesse. Yet, it is depicted with a basic, innocent but deadly letter. It is a valentine almost uniform, tincture. Egdon Heath is from Bathsheba Everdene that sets farmer sketched as a pathetic fallacy, the Boldwood onto his tragic trajectory. Then embodiment of a presence compounded out there is the confessional letter that Tess suic- of a certain delicious contemplation of idally keeps trying to press on Angel Clare. 'death, nostalgia for the past, and desol- Powys subverts the device. The townspeople ation. Powys could be reacting against this in Weymouth Sands are also fond of passing and against the wider and longer literary notes and letters. However, the conse- tradition of assuming that human personal- quences are unimportant and can even ity matches landscape in a crude and provide a useful metaphor on the human obvious way. condition. The bi-sexual Peg Frampton It is a convention so taken for granted that secretes love letters to Daisy Lily in a private its basic falsity is seldom questioned. As part post-box. But Weymouth is tolerant and un- of a gratuitous, associative process, fine interested in the lesbian penchants of young writing assumes that there is an objective girls. The indolent and melancholy Rodney ethos in place that must be deferred to: like Loder scribbles on a blank piece of paper, Wordsworth matching the qualities of Gras- "Rodney Loder—at the end of his tether" mere; Hardy the serene, austere, Dorset (185). Daisy Lily is visiting, and when he countryside; Emily Bronte the wild and leaves the room she glances at it. He returns moody moors. Powys reacts against such and feels uncomfortable as to whether she easy connectives, seeking, as he does, myth- has seen the melodramatic message to ology and mysticism through complex himself. But, the paper is in the same plaiting of lives and environment, even position and her manner apparently through the mundane recitation of the unchanged. He supposes she has not seen it minutiae of street directions. When he was but an unspoken bond has grown between planning the novel, he wrote to his brother them which, nonetheless, leads to nothing. On Hardy's Sacred Ground 2S The incident is typical of many eccentric, respect. The physical ambience of the novel serio-comic incidents in Weymouth Sands: is kept entirely to Weymouth. Not only are the complement of characters being more the townsfolk insular and ingrown but all than adequately represented by ineffectual, action is confined to its environs. If a chara- quirky dreamers. cter leaves Weymouth—for example, when They are also quirky in their sexuality. Adam Skald, the Jobber, journeys to next- Powys develops this aspect at some length, door Dorchester—he passes out of sight and and seems to steers a course between Hardy, mind of the reader until he reappears. The and Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River narrative does not follow him out. It is like Anthology. Masters and Powys were friends falling off the edge of the Mediaeval flat and he could hardly have failed to read the earth. This enclosed purview is so rigorously American's contemporaneous bestseller. maintained that the rest of England is not He avoids Hardy's technique of portraying even mentioned. The only exception is the sex as a mysterious event which could have boat that comes from the Channel enormous, even catastrophic, consequences Islands. Perdita Wane, the somewhat for- —for example, Alec D'Urberville's seduct- lorn companion to Mrs. Cobbold, travels ion of Tess. He also avoids Lee Masters's from Guernsey on it. She refers to the rather simplistic aim to show how small- island fleetingly, in her thoughts, before the town lives can be as ugly and sordid as those whole passionate cast of her attention in big cities. Powys's approach is the sanest becomes absorbed by Jobber Skald. The and most naturalistic. He hardly touches on characters are similarly contained. It is physical descriptions of sexual congress. almost a stereotype of popular novels con- Rather, he explores how sexual reveries and cerning remote towns that there is at least phantasies mould the everyday lives of the one character, often a young, budding Weymouth townsfolk. The exposes are un- writer, who yearns to escape. There is a host expected and startling rather than tragic or of Powys characters who dream of altering ugly. When it is revealed that the theatre their circumstances—Curly Wix, Ruth dancer Tossty, who is believed to be the Loder, Rodney Loder, Richard Gaul, Peg mistress of the great music-hall clown, Jerry Frampton, Daisy Lily, Jerry Cobbold. All Cobbold, turns out to be consumed by a have discontented yearnings and impulses. lesbian, incestuous passion for her sister However, leaving never occurs to them as a Tissty, and that Cobbold is actually solution. They have "a patience that involved with his sister-in-law Hortensia approached, if it never could quite attain, Lily, the reader's reaction, probably, is a the faint, dim embryonic half-consciousness raised eyebrow rather than shock or that brooded in the sea-weeds, the sea- sadness. And when Magnus Muir, the shells, the sea-anemones, the star-fish and middle-aged mooning schoolteacher, is jelly-fish, that lay submerged along those ditched by the beautiful shop-girl, Curly beaches and among those rock-pools" Wix, for the town financier Dogberrry (Dog) (190). Cattistock, there is no great wringing of hands. The sadder but wiser Magnus Muir If the more enterprising inhabitants of soldiers on. Which, of course, is what Weymouth want to escape from themselves, generally happens in the real world. there is one place they can release their alter egos. This is at the house of decadent It is difficult to determine what is the 'real delights owned by Dr Girodel the abortion- world' in Weymouth Sands since Powys has ist. Curly Wix escapes here from her solemn more than a penchant for the metaphys- suitor, Magnus Muir, to disport with the ician's probing for ultimate reality. This is handsome young Sippy Ballard. Jerry unlike Hardy who maintains the pessimist's Cobbold escapes from his difficult wife: and fatalist's view of a simple, consistent "With Girodel alone the comedian removed reality. Powys limits himself in another that mask which Perdita had so acutely 30 On Hardy's Sacred Ground divined. To the quack doctor he showed his entering his room; and a strange phantasmal real face, a face which was so sick of life that Weymouth, a mystical town made of a the sight of it would have disconcerted any- solemn sadness, gathered itself about him, a one less heartless than the cynical tenant of town built out of the smell of dead seaweed, a Sark House" (223). town whose very walls and roof were composed of flying spindrift and tossing rain. Weymouth accommodates all conditions Lying in bed in the faint glimmer from the of the mind and spirit. The Ultima Thule for grate he could hear the waves on the beach, the towns-folk is Dr Brush's asylum called and a great flood of sadness swept over him. Hell's Museum: Human hearts seemed all so pitifully frus- trated! (38-9) Merely to imagine that those red-brick buildings contained animals in the process of It is, incidentally, no doubt an being vivisected, and contained also hope- unconscious borrowing that the last two lessly insane people whose death would be a sentences of this extract are a paraphrase of comfort and relief to everyone concerned, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach": was something that gave the spot an atmos- phere of such horror that he fidgeted in his Listen! you hear the grating roar seat and felt sick in his stomach as if he were Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and going to see an execution. (118-19) fling, At their return, up the high strand. The locale can be oppressively intense. Its Begin, and cease, and then again begin, complete circumscriptions dictate that relief With tremulous cadence slow, and bring or variation can only be obtained by geo- The eternal note of sadness in. centrically spinning even more deeply into the centre. In Hardy's Wessex, space is more However evocative, such reflections are elastic. In fact, it is the opposite of essentially limited, constituting a simple claustrophobic or enveloping, and, far from sadness uprisen from the traditional triggers the characters being immobilised by a spirit- of darkness, cold, loneliness, and the sea, in ual centrifugal force, they have problems close proximity. Jobber Skald, however, holding on and not being flung outwards when he stops on the Esplanade to reflect on from the epicentre. The Durbeyfield family his growing interest in Perdita Wane, devel- is evicted from its tithe-cottage after John ops the relationship between the town and Durbeyfield dies. Jude Fawley has to tramp his sensibility with much more depth: the length and breadth of Wessex making a The Jobber's own bodily form disappeared miserable living carving inscriptions on under the tyranny of his thought as complete- headstones. Clym Yeobright, after the cycle ly as did the form of the old king; and in their of tragedy is completed in Return of the stead a procession of mental images and Native, becomes an itinerant preacher. intentions filled that hollow gulf in time and In spite of Weymouth's boundaries being space . . . The hollow statue of the old King intensely circumscribed, Powys's view of now became a sounding-board for the Jobber's memories of his gross erotic life; a the town is not static or stereotyped. He des- life which he had not scrupled to keep on a cribes it with a wealth of analogy and meta- very earthy and a very sensual plane. (65) phor. In this passage, he has Magnus Muir ruminate with Hardeian melancholy: It makes a convenient contrast that Dick Dewey should meet Fancy Day on exactly He . . . pulled the red curtains a little way the same spot in Under the Greenwood Tree: across that familiar oblong space of darkness and wet. The scene was the corner of Mary Street in He then slowly undressed himself in front Budmouth-Regis, near the King's statue, at of the few crimson coals that remained of his which point the white angle of the last house fire, while his candles spluttered themselves in the row cut perpendicularly an embayed into extinction. And as he undressed himself and nearly motionless expanse of salt water the familiar smell of dead seaweed kept projected from the outer ocean—to-day lit in On Hardy's Sacred Ground 31 bright tones of green and opal. Dick and If this is subtle and penetrating, on other Smart had just emerged from the street, and occasions Powys can be irritatingly woolly there on the right, against the brilliant sheet of in his philosophical propositions: liquid colour, stood Fancy Day; and she turned and recognised him. Certain words that have come down to us in the fluctuating borderland between religion Powys and Hardy present completely and philosophy, words such as 'absolute', opposed views of the same scene. In 'essence', 'eternity', 'immortality', conveyed Jobber's perception the Esplanade is when Sylvanus made use of them, a much moulded by the cast of his thoughts and, at more concrete and much more definite mean- the same time, it participates in his inner- ing than is usual with such expressions. By most feelings and sensations. With Dick reducing the sensations of consciousness to Dewey and Fancy Day, however, the the most primitive elements he had at last Esplanade is a fleeting moment, and the arrived at the point of establishing a certain backdrop of the Bay is merely a stage setting rapport between himself and the cosmos to enhance Fancy's beauty, like the palms in which gave him a deeper sense of power and a deeper feeling of satisfaction than most an old photographic studio. people experience all their lives. (271)

Ill The reader is unlikely to stay close to this Nonetheless, the world of Weymouth and other passages possessing a similar Sands is not depicted with consistency. It is vaporousness. They raise a question as to difficult, on occasion, to determine whether the validity of Powys's method and style as a this is because Powys is recognising the novelist and his ambitious attempt to shifting nature of reality or is just pursuing a individuate a subsection of Wessex. It is poetic analogy of the moment: not sufficient to be distinctive without And the obliviousness of Rodney and Daisy offering a commensurate value, and, to to that crying of the gulls above Spy Croft decide this, a series of urgent questions has added a new burden, a new weight, a new to be postulated and answered: What is he quota of insensibility to the age-old indiffer- writing about in Weymouth Sands'!—an ence of so many human souls of the two interpretative, but still basically objective, Boroughs to the objects and to the sounds that portrait of the town and townsfolk? or a had become the tutelary background of the fictive domain created by his imagination place. (189-90) and plastered with topographical references "Tutelary" is distinctly Wordsworthian and to convey verisimilitude? What is Powys's inimical to Hardy's suggestion of a universe central philosophy? What are his notions as that is cruel and unknowing—an ambivalent to the nature of reality? How well does he concept that includes, of course, two represent his theories? logically exclusive propositions. Cruelty is a On the question as to the sort of conscious act. But Powys also contributes Weymouth Powys is writing about, I can his own illogicalities since 'insensible' and rely on some personal knowledge of the 'indifferent souls' cannot respond to a "tut- resort, coupled with sentimental associat- elary background". In fact, Weymouth ions. My own family had been coachmakers Sands conveys an overwhelming impression there for a hundred years, living and of human co-existence with environment working out of premises at the very centre of and nature. Even the episode where Rodney the novel—the Esplanade, Brunswick Loder scribbles the exclamation that Daisy Terrace, and the old, narrow trade streets Lily sees is a subtle metaphor of how we co- lying behind, like Lennox Street, St exist and correspond with the natural world. Nicholas and St Thomas Street. I should Messages are passed that we believe are not say that I visited Weymouth before I read received but which, nonetheless, create a the novel. This is probably desirable. To go, sympathy and union. book in hand, would have drawn me to the 32 On Hardy's Sacred Ground same perceptions and impressions; whereas, timelessly and wait to be recognised. How- reading the book afterwards. I was able to ever, the way they are presented in the novel compare Powys's descriptions with those I puts them out of the province of the time- had noticed independently. Also advant- traveller and tourist, such as myself. They ageous was that both Powys and I shared the interact between themselves, and no trans- same sentimental perspective: he, writing ients are portrayed. It is part of the contain- the book in America from a memory of the ment in the magic circle. idealised scene of his childhood holidays; With the outsider excluded from Powys's and myself, idealising by way of roots Weymouth inhabitants, I received a con- pilgrimage. So, when Magnus Muir feels firmatory impression of the secretive that "it was one of those geographical points opaqueness that he writes about. For a start, on the surface of the planet that would I was presented with a strong metaphor on surely rush into his mind when he came to the closed door of the past when I visited the die, as a concentrated essence of all that life old family premises on West Street. A meant" (23), I could participate in the bomb, in the War, had obliterated many of strength of emotional investment. the houses, and it was now a car-park. The The participation is primarily confined to obliteration of the past is also evidenced by a shared emotional attachment and the the green, moist, idyllic Dorset countryside evocation of Weymouth scenes and places. behind Weymouth. In a different way, I was As the "Note By Author" explains: struck how it flows like a green wave over the past. Headstones crumble and inscriptions All the events and characters in this book are quickly become indecipherable. pure invention, except in the case of Magnus The hermetic lives of the Weymouth Muir and of Sylvanus Cobbold, where certain townsfolk are a barrier against the shifting, characteristics and peculiarities have been taken from the nature of the author himself. seasonal population. Today, so I was told, There is, to the author's knowledge, no such the residents running the boarding-houses Institution as 'Hell's Museum' anywhere in and small hotels, put up their shutters after Dorset, certainly not near Weymouth, and if the season, and winter on Social Security the author has used any well-known Wessex payments. There is, almost, a resentment names for his imaginary persons, it was when the winter's hibernation is disturbed. purely in order to enhance the verisimilitude Like all sectors who traditionally, through of his tale. (15) history, have owed their livelihood to trans- ients, there is a resistence to the outsider. The claim that it is all 'invention' should not Significantly, the novel opens in January be accepted without qualification. There is a when Magnus Muir encounters an unseas- considerable number of novels in English onable Punch-and-Judy Show, run by literature, with uncanny resemblances to Marret Jones and her father, playing to a persons living or dead, which the authors forlorn group of shivering children. Punch claim are pure invention. Somerset and Judy are a mediating symbol through- Maugham's covert portrait of Hardy in out the book of the private, domestic strife Cakes and Ale springs to mind. In Powys's in Weymouth that has to run through the case, the disclaimer deserves a certain system—Jerry Cobbold and his estranged respect, remembering that his immediately wife; Dog Cattistock and Hortensia Lily's preceding novel, A Glastonbury Romance, forthcoming, ill-starred marriage; Magnus had resulted in expensive litigation. There is, Muir and his middle-aged infatuation with however, one problem in accepting that the Curly Wix; Jobber Skald's homicidal characters in Weymouth Sands are unique designs on Cattistock and his redemption products of Powys's invention. As he is with Perdita Wane; the growing restiveness demonstrating how the locale of Weymouth in the town at the juvenile, Marret Jones, moulds the personality and sensibility of the living with Sylvanus Cobbold—albeit that townsfolk, it should breed types who occur their relationship is quite Platonic. On Hardy's Sacred Ground 33 When Powys does, mention tourists, they Powys's infusing it into the exterior world are not essential to the dynamics of the that the senses are absorbing. novel, but rather, adorn it, as in this However, some aspects of Weymouth evocative portrait: that Powys describes I recapitulated to an Those dusky worm diggers were like remorse- almost uncanny degree. I remember sitting less grave diggers of another vanished day of on the Esplanade, near the Jubilee Clock, pure delight. Questions of work and wages one day in the long, hot summer of 1976. For began to heave up their heads. The irrespons- an hour, I felt it was a psychic geocentre, and ible Homeric hour had fled, and in place of it that the essence of my existence was being the sad, austere Hesiodic wisdom had begun concentrated for a fraction in time. It was to prevail. Sand in their shoes, slippery with a sense of confirmatory surprise that I ribband-seaweed in their hands, shell-boxes read, "How well he knew this spot! It was one as glittering as old Poxwell's pressed against of those geographical points on the surface their breasts, tired, crying, scolding, quarrel- of the planet that would surely rush into his ling, vomiting, urinating, with pathetically helpless star-fish and jelly-fish from the free mind when he came to die, as a concentrated sea perishing cruelly in their hot, human essence of all that life meant!" (23). So clutches, many of the holiday people were Magnus Muir ruminates on nearly the ident- already moving slowly down King's Street ical spot to where I sat. That evening, I towards the Station, preferring—or at least looked out of the window from the board- the children's mothers preferring—to sit for ing-house, on the corner of Brunswick half-an-hour on a dusty bench rather than Terrace, where we were staying. It was lose the chance of a choice of pleasant window raining, and the refracted lights on the seats, when the seven o'clock train to Dor- Esplanade and on the boats across the chester was actually ready. (490-91) harbour stirred a wealth of feelings and per- A further element towards the privatis- ceptions. The wet lamps were dripping with ation of Weymouth, and one where Powys a strong, if undefinable significance. At most infuses it with his individual imagin- numerous points in Weymouth Sands, the ation, is through sexuality. The Weymouth different characters attest to the poetry and world is rendered 'glaucous' (a word Powys mysterious, gravitational significance of the uses frequently) and languid by the sexual Esplanade. Powys's passionate sense of phantasies of his characters in which les- place owed something to a distancing bianism, incest, and voyeurism figure. process. He wrote Weymouth Sands sub- Many are sexually avid but curiously with- stantially when living in Phudd in up-state drawn. Ruth Loder, Peg Frampton, Curly New York. He lovingly remembered how he Wix, Tissty and Tossty, Daisy Lily, and would swim out of his depth off Weymouth Perdita Wane phantasise but are reluctant, to savour the feeling of becoming part of or slow, to enter outward relationships. This land, sea, and air. So, it is possible that has an opiate effect on the natural world: Powys's refracting Weymouth, through childhood and geographical distance, and 'Did she want him to?' she wondered to her- myself, through sentimental family lives, self, letting her eyes wander across 'the wet could result in seeing the same things trans- sand' and across 'the dry sand', to the white muted into the same level of mystical sig- wall of the esplanade. There was a young man nificance—different processes securing the sitting on a bench on the esplanade, and Marret indistinctively let her clothes drop same results. Another explanation might be down. 'Did she want him to?' (334) that the arrangement of the buildings and objects on the Esplanade might match and Whilst it is possible to argue that this is a arouse some emotional, aesthetic state in the personal interpretation peculiar to Powys's unconscious. It is fortuitously populated vision, it is, nonetheless, also true that with symbols and archetypes that can touch sexual phantasies are part of the universal the inner core. human psyche. The only uniqueness is in 34 On Hardy's Sacred Ground This is a line of thought that can dissipate into a dangerous vagueness. To be con- vinced of this interpenetration of Wey- mouth town and townsfolk, the reader should find a hard residuum of sense and truth that can be communicated. It is insuf- ficient to propound a sort of polytheism and make reference to 'the presence in things'. Roy Campbell has satirised other writers and poets, as in "A Veld Eclogue": . . . reader who are we to tell them, 'No!' We, who have never heard the 'call', or felt The witching whatdyecallum of the veld? It could add to a communication problem that Powys can be both cryptic and extrava- gant. He feels a joy in the poetry of exper- i ience, and enjoys the romantic's sense of the values of the liberated, even eccentric, style • ' of life. By the same token, it is difficult to decide ! if Sylvanus Cobbold is truly a 'mystic', as j described in the dramatispersonae prefixing j the novel, or just a highly eccentric j bohemian. Powys's appeal would probably ! be wider in general readership if he curbed ! his flood of perceptions with touches of lucid but penetrating vision. Articulating what readers have half-noticed, but not expressed themselves, creates a readiness to search trustfully in obscurer metaphysical passages. Hardy, of course, possessed the knack of the neat, simple but penetrating, observation. "The Darkling Thrush" in December, flinging "his soul / Upon the growing gloom" which suggests to the poet "Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware'', is just one illustration. The combination of vivid, dramatic chara- cterisation, poignant and tragic incidents, and crisp, terse observations and analogies, contribute to Hardy's dominance of Wessex —particularly when placed in context of repetitiously-used place-name coinages that are, nonetheless, easily matched with real names and locations. Powys does possess a quiver of insights but, most often, they are presented with luscious diffusion: On this occasion that sudden whistle of the Cherbourg steamer produced a very queer On Hardy's Sacred Ground 35 impression on his mind. It was an impression laws of nature; the elan vital and striving as if the whole of Weymouth had suddenly upwards of organic matter against inert become an insubstantial vapour suspended in matter; the Heraclitean concept of a world space. All the particular aspects of the place in harmonious flux contrary to static known to him so well, the spire of St. John's appearance. One or other of these frag- Church, the rounded stucco-facade of mentary statements can be credibly fitted at Number One Brunswick Terrace and of Number One St. Mary's Street, the Jubilee almost any point in the novel. Particularly Clock, the Nothe, the statue of George the Bergsonian is how Powys seems to view Third, seemed to emerge gigantically from a Weymouth as part of the living psychic past: mass of vapourous unreality. This hallun- cination, or whatever it was, lasted a very She was herself removing with her gloved short time. (25-26) fingers a few of Mortmain's black hairs from the blue edging of her jacket; and as her It irresistibily suggests a Turner landscape brother watched her he suddenly had a and seems to express a fairly common exper- mystical feeling that he had seen her make this ience—that feeling of dissociation and sense precise gesture in some dimension of Time, where neither Spy Croft, nor even Weymouth of unreality induced by a sudden change in itself, had any reality. (181) external stimuli. But such diffuse, poetic writing needs anchoring to a systematic set of metaphysical beliefs to be persuasive and IV credible. Powys's informing philosophy Chapter 13, "Punch and Judy", is part- seems to owe much to Bergson and the icularly important. Here Powys expatiates Ionian Heraclitus; the vitalism of the past; on the imagery of sand and indicates its sig- the influence of the spirit on matter through nificance in being elevated into the title of memory and perception; the original and the novel. He develops the difference spontaneous action of psychic states on the between wet and dry sands and their

I 36 On Hardy's Sacred Ground symbolic importance, both in terms of might constitute the intractable surrounds, Bergsonian philosophy on the nature of the rim of the pot, with ether at the centre— reality, and, for purely artistic analogy, the the Esplanade. As the Jubilee Clock is poetic structure of the novel. "Dry sand" is Janus-faced, so Powys is ambiguous, equated with gross matter, and "wet sand" echoing the Rubaiydt: with the "printless feet" of spirit—it is the And, strange to tell, amongst the Earthen Lot infusion of spirit into things. It is the sea Some could articulate, while others not: washing and making deliquescent the sands And suddenly one more impatient cried— of dried-out relationships; perhaps it is the 'Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?' conversion of the dry past into the viscous present, or vice-versa. Whichever, it is the Powys, incidentally, was no more Christ- redemptive infusion into a reality grown ian, or, at least, monotheistic, than Hardy. stale and unviable. However, he escapes such charges as G. K. Powys eclectically adapted from other Chesterton flung at Hardy as a "sort of writers. There are intriguing echoes in Edgar village atheist brooding and blaspheming Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology—like over the village idiot", largely because he is Beelzebub's declamation from the essentially optimistic and his characters are generally cheerful and enduring. He permits "Epilogue": a redemptive goodness in the world. Starve him, shame him, fling him down, That the same symbols, analogies, and Whirled in the vortex of the town. metaphors are repeated belies the superfic- Break him, age him, till he curse ially sprawling nature of the novel—it trav- The idiot face of the universe. els in wide, discursive circles of poetic Over and over we mix the clay,— extravagance of phrasing and analogising What was dust is alive to-day. but keeps a consistent centre. It was a Weymouth Sands reacts against the black constraint he was conscious of when he pessimism of both Spoon River and Thomas discussed rewriting "from the very start my Hardy. However, "Whirled in the vortex of Weymouth Romance: for I'd made it too the town" seems a neat sumnation of what big, too long & since Glastonbury won't sell Powys is attempting. Elsewhere in Spoon I must write shorter . . . this foundation . . . River, "Davis Matlock" says in his epitaph: was huge . . . and I must get all the stones nearer the Centre now".3 Well, I say to live it out like a god Sure of immortal life, though you are in doubt, V Is the way to live it. The reader, grappling with Powysian If that doesn't make God proud of you metaphysics, is likely to find him most Then God is nothing but gravitation, accessible in his beliefs regarding society and Or sleep is the golden goal. the individual. In The Meaning of Culture, It adduces to the centrifugal effect of Powys writes: "Culture aims at producing a Weymouth Sands that equating God with free spirit, in the deepest sense: free, that is gravitation is not disparagement. It equates to say, from the fanaticisms of religion, the with Heraclitean ffux and the interpretation fanaticisms of science, and from the fanatic- 4 of matter as being of the same stuff but isms of the mob". In Suspended varying in density between spirit as ether and Judgments, he writes of "Utopian absence of heavy matter such as stones and inanimate any government. . . whereof all free spirits 5 objects. Weymouth is a potter's wheel in dream". Weymouth is idealised in that the which the elements are whirled and shaped. paraphernalia of law and order and moral Ambiguously, spiritual ether (vide human censure is minimal. True, Sylvanus Cobbold spirit) might be flung outwards and the is committed to Dr Brush's Hell's Museum heavy settle at the centre; or, heavy matter after Marret Jones goes to live with him and On Hardy's Sacred Ground 37 her father complains. However, apart from The depth and detail of their thoughts this, the town seems delightfully to run suggest a biographical infusion from itself. Jobber Skald is able to go round the Powys. There is a truth and intimacy about public houses, threatening homicide to Dog them and, since so many of the Weymouth Cattistock without restraint. The most characters think and feel in this uniformly appealing feature is the highly democratic original, even eccentric, way, one sees and unsnobbish behaviour of the towns- Powys's highly idiosyncratic imagination folk. Marret Jones runs after the middle- spread like a skin over the whole cast of aged Sylvanus Cobbold; Magnus Muir falls characters. Comparison with Hardy on this for the shop girl, Curly Wix; Dog Cattistock consideration is not to Powys's advantage. and Jerry Cobbold, respectively the richest Hardy, whilst he cannot, more than any and most famous man in the town, frequent other writer, completely suppress his the public houses and the disreputable private, symbolic repertoire of personal doctor's Sark House, mixing and drinking experience and beliefs, controls it and writes with the hoipolloi. (It reflects Powys's own of his gallery of characters in a more public egalitarian temperament. As a Cambridge way. It is his high Victorian suppression that undergraduate, with a temporarily strong results in the incisive clarity and simplicity interest in Christian Socialism, he once allowing him to handle the classical dragged a tramp in to tea at Invicta House, principles of tragedy—one or two crucial Brunswick Terrace, where he was staying.) issues, or flaws, in a handful of dominant, The most sincere expression of equality is in highly individualised, characters. Profiles the way he allows them all to reflect upon life of Weymouth Sands characters, however, and themselves in a profound way. Powys like Jobber Skald and Sylvanus Cobbold, parcels out his philosophy equally amongst are blurred because they all think and feel in them all and bestows a unity on the way the a similar style—this is notwithstanding Weymouth townsfolk think, dream and act. Powys intends to project each as a unique That so many of them happen to be apa- character. thetic dreamers in no small way contributes Reading Weymouth Sands constituted to the poetic, haunting, quality of the book my third return to Weymouth. After that which can, on occasion, deepen into stag- golden summer of 1976, we had gone back nancy. Dog Cattistock, Sylvanus Cobbold, for a second visit in the following Sept- and Jobber Skald, possess a certain energy ember. I should have been warned. Cardinal and passion, but they cannot entirely off-set Newman, I think it was, once remarked, in Richard Gaul, Magnus Muir, Lucinda Cob- one of his essays, that when you take a new bold, Ruth and Rodney Loder, Peg Frampt- route in a walk in the country it is all fresh on, and Curly Wix, who exude the passivity, and exciting. There is benefit in a height- decay and mystery of a museum room of ened, toned sensibility. Recurrent walks specimens. Hardy's Wessex peasants incline along the same road, however, become to a homely sententiousness; but, it is quite dreary and laborious. So it was with Wey- different from the denizens of Weymouth, mouth. It was a dull, cloudy day, with whose reflections carry an almost learned, patches of rain. The cold wind whipped literary quality. Even the mad boy, Larry along the Esplanade. That last summer, we Zed, who is not mad so much as backward, had lodged with a kindly, genial couple on can be judicial: the corner of Brunswick Terrace. This time, we had to make do with a traditionally Larry Zed contemplated this scene, from fearsome seaside landlady with dyed red behind his friend, in dumb amazement. The hair and an aggressive manner. When we white-cheeked girl was bending over the cat asked to bath twice in two days, she exclaim- now and stroking it; and it was borne in upon ed, 'What again!' in deepest displeasure. the mind of the boy how unaccountable both This time, there was nothing fresh to cats and women can be, in their ambiguous moves towards their desired ends. (145-46) discover, and we could only go commem- 38 On Hardy's Sacred Ground oratively over the old ground that, the to it. In carving out a fiefdom deep in the summer before, had been the scene of heart of Wessex, Powys left something out. excited explorations. Is it a determination to set out and caputre Weymouth Sands, however, created the reader's attention—such as one senses in something of that first sense of amplitude Hardy, which, because territorial imperat- and prescribed a realistic attitude. After all, ives are only secondary, succeeds brilliantly Powys does not claim that Weymouth is because of effortlessness? For all his perfect and beautiful—only that, if you are brilliant gifts, Powys's powerful region- looking at it aright, it has a flawed magic and alism fluctuates between transcendent power. It analogises Perdita Wane's feelings vision and eccentric whimsy. He is too for the Jobber: " 'Our love is no ordinary indulgent in extravagant poetry to either, love,' she thought. 'We could quarrel like Hardy, coolly assume topography, or, fiercely, we could separate in blind anger, like the Hindu adept, pursue reality to the but nothing could ever really divide us, now point of being able to present a fait we've once met.'... 'It's funny how I don't accompli: there thou art. really admire him or respect him or even Powys's love for native Dorset was altogether like him!' " (345). unquestioned, and when he died his ashes Similarly, this extract could reflect a prov- were scattered off Chesil Beach. But, the isional attitude to the novel itself. final question remaining is; was a pas- Something remains that is unsatisfactory sionate, detailed regional awareness and needs to be settled, although we return enough?

NOTES

'John Cowper Powys, Weymouth Sands (1934) 'Ibid., p. 335. London: Macdonald, 1963. All references are to this 4 John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture edition. (1930) London: Village Press, 1974, p. 90. 2John Cowper Powys, "Letters to Littleton C. 5John Cowper Powys, Suspended Judgments Powys, 1927-1934", Essays on John Cowper Powys, (1916) London: Village Press, 1975. ed. Belinda Humfrey, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, p. 329. Peter G. Christensen Middlemarch: A Point of Reference in Weymouth Sands

When Jobber Skald goes to Cove House in we can only become impatient with his Chapter 3 of Weymouth Sands, shortly after work.2 Not only is Powys not as concerned his first encounter with Perdita Wane, he with the fine points of moral decision- occupies himself over dinner by reading making as George Eliot was, but his novels Middlemarch. look poorly constructed beside hers. To He ate slowly, turning over the pages of make his case, Cavaliero even goes on to "Middlemarch" with patient resolution— compare a passage by each author—Rosa- one page to about ten mouthfuls—for the mond's attraction to Lydgate in Chapter 11 satisfaction he got from reading while he ate of Middlemarch and Wolf Solent's feelings was not so much in the reading itself—the for Gerda as they walk together through the Jobber could not be called a bookish man— fields. as in the consciousness that he was reading. For he generally liked the idea of reading a Cavaliero does not mention any specific nice solid library book as he ate his supper in relationship between Weymouth Sands and the bachelor parlour. Old Miss Burt, the librar- Middlemarch; perhaps because they seem so ian of that St. Mary's Street Shop, derived unlike, the effort is not worth the trouble. extreme pleasure from assisting 'Mr. However, there is one clear similarity that Adam', for she had known him all his life, in does prompt an investigation. Both Middle- the development of his literary taste; and as march and Weymouth Sands are novels her own taste ran, or she thought it ran, to about an entire town and they include an works far removed from 'this modern extremely diverse cast of characters. I bel- realism', the Jobber had lived to see great ieve it is for this purpose that Powys calls our liners fed by oil without having followed the attention to a contrasting way of describing course of his country's fiction further than the middle of the nineteenth century.' a human community, so that we understand the significance of his abandonment of the There is a certain amount of humour here in great tradition. terms of Powys's own position as a novelist. Middlemarch is based on Coventry, If the world had not moved past George where George Eliot spent many years, but Eliot, then Powys would not have looked as she has disguised most of its particular if he had been left behind by the course of features, and the human, rather than the modern fiction. He would not have been geographical community, moves to the fore- seen by some as a sidelight to be discussed front. We lack any sense of Middlemarch as after Conrad, Joyce, Woolf and Ford. On a unique landscape. Instead it appears more the other hand, why bother to mention often as a representative town of c. 1830. In Middlemarch at all, since Jobber isn't really the novel, most of the important actions that caught up in that novel anyway? take place indoors, not outside, as in Wey- As everyone knows, Middlemarch (1872) mouth Sands. holds a central place in F. R. Leavis's "great Powys offered his own ideas about lands- tradition" of English literature. Some critics cape in an article in the November 1933 issue think of it as the finest English social novel of The Modern Thinker. In the first para- of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Glen Cavaliero comments, if we look at Powys's graph of this essay, "Remembrances", he novels by the yardstick of this great tradition, writes of Weymouth Sands: 40 Middlemarch: A Point of Reference The dominant purpose of this book is to one major controversy about Weymouth show how there is something in human life Sands is developing. Is the novel optimistic that by slow degrees creates a reciprocity bet- or pessimistic? If it is optimistic, wherein is ween itself and any particular scene where it salvation for man? If it is pessimistic, what has existed, and lived and moved and been are the insurmountable causes of man's happy and sad, for a considerable number of years. The book deals in fact with the psychic problems? Knight, Huxtable-Selly, and interplay of spiritual and chemical forces, Collins are most optimistic about Nature. between nature and men and women, in one Cavaliero is in the centre. Cook, Tombs and particular spot. There has been for me a Krisdottir are the most sombre. peculiar interest in writing this book in view of It has been said many times: of happiness the fact that Weymouth, is of all places, and despair there is no measure. Conse- whether of town or country, the one most quently, a look at unhappiness in Middle- constantly familiar to me from my earliest 3 march may give us another standard by infancy. which to think about the misery and sadness The clue here to the difference between in Weymouth Sands. There is plenty of Powys and Eliot is in the idea of forces unhappiness in this town also. The novel, (psychical, spiritual, chemical and natural) however, ends with the happy union of which are quite different from those which Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw, and affect Middlemarch (historical, social and we can easily compare this to the reunion of political). Almost all the critical commen- Perdita Wane and Jobber Skald. Both tary on Weymouth Sands remarks on the Powys and Eliot intend us to examine sense of place. However, there are surpris- whether individual happiness can only exist ingly few attempts to interpret the entire outside of the society to which it owes novel. It is easy enough to read Powys's nothing or whether happiness can only be statement, accept it, and then move on. achieved by creatively harmonizing oneself Powys's friend, G. Wilson Knight, is one with the social order of man. critic who follows Powys's cue about the At first glance, it is easy to say that George novel. David A. Cook, however, objects to Eliot is an author who stresses the import- his description of Weymouth Sands as a ance of a life which contributes to society, happy book. "The whole purpose here," he and that John Cowper Powys is one who writes, "is to show that despite the terrific upholds a romantic mysticism and defence vitalizing power of [sun, stone, and sea], of solitude. However, those critics who have they can no longer redeem in a world gone found Weymouth Sands pessimistic have mad with arbitrary concupiscence, system- stressed the heavy weight of social inter- atic logic, and self-perpetuating gadg- course on the characters, a weight which etry."4 For Susan Huxtable-Selly, the generally stifles them. It is my belief that novel is about the' 'struggle of the individual Eliot and Powys are somewhat closer than soul to come to terms with the cosmos," Cavaliero imagines them to be. They both particularly through the uniting of the agree that love between two people on a last- polarities (e.g., male and female).5 Eliza- ing basis (not a life of good deeds or union beth Tombs finds Powys telling us that love with the cosmos) is, when all's said and is a necessary evil.6 H. P. Collins declares, done, the best this life has to offer. It is easy "[t]he sublimation of humanity by response to say that for George Eliot society is to [the] forces [of nature] is the ultimate cemented by sound marriages such as the message of the novel".7 Morine Krisdottir one between Will and Dorothea, but we considers the novel as the story of a must not forget that marriage to Will keeps magician, Sylvanus, caught between the Dorothea from being destroyed by a society madness of the forest and the loneliness and that really has nothing much to offer her, as cruelty of civilization.8 compared to what it offered some people in more heroic ages. From the above statements we can see that Middlemarch: A Point of Reference 41 A study of unhappiness in Middlemarch George Eliot completely plays down the could deserve a book in itself, but here I wish fact that St Teresa was a mystic, who had to simply focus briefly on the novel's many visionary experiences, such as when a preface about St Teresa ofAvila (1515-1582) cherub pierced her heart with an iron- and how it directs our thinking toward headed spear which had a flaming gold tip. sorrow in the novel. St Teresa's story is pre- For Eliot, Teresa is only the little girl who sented in such a way that it makes Dorothea had books of chivalry read to her and who seem particularly passive and pitiful. grew up to be a church reformer. Eliot forgets that Teresa wrote her own autobio- Theresa's passionate, ideal nature graphy. She did not need a "sacred poet'' to demanded an epic life: what were many- write it for her. She was looking for both volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame God and truth as best she could, but Eliot quickly burned up that light fuel, and fed does not really accept this for what it is from within, soared after some illimitable worth. Indeed, Teresa is seen as a person satisfaction, some object which would never who was lucky to have a society around her justify weariness, which would reconcile self- which provided a natural outlet for her despair with the rapturous consciousness of ardour. The implication is that any cause life beyond self. She found her epos in the may really turn out to be as good as another. reform of a religious order. For Dorothea, "foundress of nothing", That Spanish woman who lived three social reform is also important, and yet her hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who story from her nineteenth to her twenty-first found for themselves no epic life wherein year is basically the account of her disastr- there was a constant unfolding of far- ous marriage to the selfish Mr Casaubon resonant action; perhaps only a life of and her more suitable marriage to Will mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual Ladislaw after she is saved by Mr Cas- grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of aubon's death. The story could have been opportunity: perhaps a tragic failure which reworked to concentrate on her interest in found no sacred poet and sank unswept into social reform. It is not, and we are left oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circum- believing, as much from the structure of the stance they tried to shape their thought and novel as from commentary, that it is mar- deed in noble agreement; but after all, to riage which really has the final say about a common eyes their struggles seemed mere person's happiness. We are not presented inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no with a story of career men and women purs- coherent social faith and order which could uing their goals as single people. perform the function of knowledge for the The last two paragraphs of Middlemarch, ardently willing soul. Their ardour alternated concerning Dorothea, read as if the nine- between a vague ideal and the common teenth century is truly an age of hopeless yearning of womanhood, so that the one was decline, despite the fact we all know it to disapproved of as extravagance and the other 9 have been full of larger than life figures in condemned as a lapse. many realms of endeavour. Eliot is suggesting that, compared to St Teresa, women like Dorothea have been Certainly those determining acts of her life weighed down by "meanness of opportun- were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse ity". Yet, was St Teresa, who was not very struggling amidst the conditions of an imper- well-educated, really in such a better pos- fect social state, in which great feelings will ition? She was from a well-to-do family and often take the aspect of error, and great faith came from the town favoured by Ferdinand the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature and Isabella, but life as a semi-invalid in a whose inward being is so strong that it is not convent really only goes so far—except in greatly determined by what lies outside it. A some rare cases! new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity 42 Middlemarch: A Point of Reference of reforming a conventual life, any more than authorial intrusions as does Middlemarch, a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in these are far less in number. An understand- daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: ing of Powys's view of unhappiness must the medium in which their ardent deeds took come from juxtaposing the major state- shape is forever gone. But we insignificant ments of the author with the attitudes of his people with our daily words and acts are pre- paring the lives of many Dorotheas, some of characters on this matter. As in the case of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than Dostoievsky, as read by Bakhtin, the novel- that of the Dorothea whose story we know. ist's work is polyphonic. This comes as no surprise, since Powys wrote extensively on Dorothea chooses marriage, and it is Dostoievsky also. Let us look at some ideas made clear that such a decision is based to a of unhappiness associated with Sue Gadget large degree on what society had in store for and Magnus Muir and then move on to the women of William IV's time. Yet her salvat- authorial intrusions before finally looking ion is really rooted in this determinism. Her at the reunion of Jobber and Perdita. individual acts of charity in the Middle- It is with Sue Gadget's laments that the march area simply do not add up to enough novel's tragic motifs end. Her awakening to for her in themselves. How much we blame the world's pain is her awakening to woman- Dorothea for not living up to her full pot- hood: ential is a question rooted in the personal values and ideas of each reader, yet it hardly [She] felt as if all the waves of the sea did not seems to make sense to compare Dorothea contain water enough to wash out the pity and trouble and pain and weariness of being alive to figures of legend such as Antigone when in this world. (566) it is real historical forces that Eliot wishes to explore most. In the last analysis, Doro- Sue rushes out of the house and cries out: thea's happiness is not determined by whether the railroads come to the town or 'Oh, why was I born, why was I ever born?' not or whether the Reform Bill of 1832 is [S]he was thinking of no particular man, or boy either, who had turned from her. But thinking passed or not. Consequently, although there of nothing, or thinking of something, she are no twentieth century equivalents of these became at this moment the mouthpiece of changes in Weymouth Sands, the lack of that motiveless, causeless, non-human grief historical detail does not make the novel as in the world, that comes on the wind, that different from Eliot's as we might expect. rises and sinks on the sea, and that seems older In Middlemarch there is an underriding and more tragic than all our human agitations. (567) assumption that life should be worth living and that people need to set intelligent goals At this point, Perdita and Jobber have for themselves. In Weymouth Sands the been reunited, and Curly Wix has left characters don't share as many common Magnus Muir to run off with Dog Cat- social assumptions of this kind. They are by tistock. Yet Sue's lament has nothing to do and large more mentally unbalanced and with her having lost a boyfriend. For her, subject to much more physical pain. Except human misery is mysterious: there is a type for Magnus, we do not even think of them as of grief that is cosmic and only incidentally 'underachieves', no matter what their related to man's deeds. What this grief problems. Nature is another potentially des- actually is can not be easily expressed. tructive force the townspeople have to deal We do not see enough of Sue Gadget in the with. The historical references which really novel to examine how she copes with grief. count are not to the various monuments, but Instead, Magnus Muir, who is present with to the ages of the earths's history which are her in the last scene, and who is the first connected with various promontories and character introduced, is someone often beaches. shown attempting to cope with disappoint- Although Weymouth Sands contains ments, as when in the first chapter he thinks Middlemarch: A Point of Reference 43 of his cowardliness over the course of the physical present, such as this sea-wind now day before falling asleep: blowing into his room, such as these dying coals, such as that bulge of the red curtains, He then slowly undressed himself in front and drawing from it a fresh, a simple, a child- of the few crimson coals that remained,of his ish enchantment—the mystery of life reduced fire, while his candles sputtered themselves to the most primitive terms—that was able to into extinction. And as he undressed himself push back as it were by several mysterious the familiar smell of dead seaweed kept enter- degrees all the emotional and mental troubles ing his room; and a strange phantasmal Wey- of life. (39) mouth, a mystical town made of a solemn sad- ness, gathered itself about him, a town built Despite Magnus's success in fighting off out of the smell of dead seaweed, a town despair we are still left, in the first chapter, whose very walls and roof were composed of wondering if the author endorses his view- flying spindrift and tossing rain. Lying in bed point, since we know so many of Magnus's in the faint glimmer from the grate he could weaknesses. He is unduly devoted to his hear the waves on the beach, and a great flood dead father, pathetically attracted to Curly of sadness swept over him. Human hearts Wix, stricken by hypochondria, and unable seemed all so pitifully frustrated! The pro- to overcome his cowardice. His programme phetic frenzy of Sylvanus; the passionate for happiness is divorced from human intensity of the white-cheeked Marret; the feelings of the Jobber, tossed forth so auto- contact, and human contact is what this matically, as his boat rocked under those dark loner clearly needs. pier-posts; that woman whose face he had To help us think about whether Magnus's never seen, crying herself to sleep at the top of solution for coping with life's trials is the desolate stone house; they all belonged to endorsed by Powys, we now turn to some of something fatal in the world that turns to the major authorial intrusions, of which sorrow and grief as inevitably as the compass- there seem to be less than a dozen in the needle turns to the north! (39) entire novel. The first relevant passage comes when Perdita sees Jobber fling the Magnus's idea of "something fatal in the seaweed and pebble into the water: world" is aligned with Sue's motiveless, causeless, non-human grief". The reader is There are moments in almost everyone's coaxed into accepting this attitude toward life when events occur in a special and curious the world since two widely different char- manner that seems to separate that fragment acters share it. Furthermore, Perdita, Rich- of time from all other fragments. ard Gaul, Sylvanus, Rodney Loder, Jerry, One peculiarity of such moments is the vividness with which some particular human and even Dr Brush and Dog Cattistock gesture limns itself on the sensitive-plate of would probably agree that life is full of our inmost consciousness, along with certain misery. No one counteracts with a radically inanimate objects. It is not with every object optimistic vision of life. It is in Magnus, in the vicinity that it thus surrounds itself, but however, that we see the process of coping with a selection of such objects, which, in with grief in most detail. In the same scene as place of being congruous with the gesture above, we find that Magnus always has one they are accompanying, are often extremely means of resisting hopelessness. He is incongruous. Another peculiarity of these always able to call upon a mysterious power: moments is a sensation as if there were a spiritual screen, made of a material far more But he could no more catch its real nature impenetrable than adamant, between our or even decide whether it was a good or evil existing world of forms and impressions and motion of the mind than he had been able to some other world, and as if this screen had do when he was sitting on that bench in the suddenly grown extremely thin, thin as a wind. Whatever it was, it was clearly dark, semi-transparent glass, through which something that he had inherited from his certain faintly adumbrated motions, of a father. It had something to do with seizing pregnantly symbolic character, are dimly upon some dominant or poetical aspect of the visible. (48-49) 44 Middlemarch: A Point of Reference Perdita experiences something here that If we are permitted by the Holy office of the Magnus Muir does not experience before he Exact Sciences to dally with so-unapprovable falls asleep the same day. She is filled not a fantasy it were a nice point to speculate as to only with a type of nature romanticism and exactly when, in the life of an object adored by a fetish-worshipper, this sacrosanct the feeling that there is a real world of Inanimate becomes animate. At what point essences behind the veil of nature, but also does the idol, the stone, the block of wood, with an intuition that the world of human the doll, father to itself its living identity, and gestures is also involved. It is Jobber's become—as its worshipper certainly feels it gesture of throwing the seaweed and pebble does become—something more than the inert into the water which opens up the possibility substance which is all that reason sees in it? of love between them. (198) Powys's treatment of the theme continues to progress with variations. When Rodney Because Powys questions the stone and the Loder is sitting in Jobber's rooms while block of wood here, we must also question Daisy is at her grandfather's cabin, we find a the sea wind and the dying coals which passage which undercuts the idea of Nature console Magnus Muir. Even though the as a spiritual consolation. latter objects are not presented as fetish objects, there is still the possibility that they It is perhaps hardly strange that human are being endowed by human consciousness beings in their abysmal craving for some over- consciousness that shall record and retain in with a value which is possibly not there. Just memory events and occurrences and words as the question of the existence of God is and deeds and groupings, such as happen problematic, so is the pantheistic force of simultaneously in any spot on the earth's Nature. surface, should have been tempted to attri- Another comment on the possibility of bute a consciousness like this to those finding transcendence occurs much later in symbolic Inanimates in such a spot, that in the novel (in August when five months have our partial fancy we conceive of as fumbling gone by) after Dog Cattistock fails to get their way to some obscure, non-human level of awareness. But it is very hard for the mind married to Hortensia, and Perdita has run to endow a thing like a church-spire or a away from Jobber. About this time, plaster-statue or a harbour-bridge or an Magnus meets Shepherd Rugg, who speaks esplanade-clock or a stone-breakwater, or of "flower-weeds". even a far-stretching promontory, with this sort of consciousness. Thus we are compelled It sometimes happens that a contemplative —although with the loss of a thousand dear person, whose head is full of contrary and indelible affiliations—to have recourse, thought-currents, receives, in a quick, if we are to satisfy this natural craving, to the unexpected revelation, a view of the world as unhomely gulfs of spiritual invisibility. (197) it exists when many separate, far-off moments of insight, that have caught our Powys does not want us to assume that landscape under a large and reconciling light, there is a God informing Nature, as repres- melt and fuse themselves together. (467) ented by the "far-stretching promontory". Instead, he raises the possibility that both In this instance it is the "calm natural and man-made objects serve as monotonous years of his father's life" (467) fetish figures which are endowed with which are gathered up as insight. Once significance by the worshipper. This again, despite the importance of Nature in discussion takes place in reference to Daisy's the novel, it is the feelings of others that are china doll, Quinquetta, which, on the one most important here. In fact, Nature may hand, is allowed to have an "emanation" serve as a catalyst for empathy between accessible to the "clairvoyance" of the people. human heart, but which, on the other hand, Balancing Magnus's moment of illumin- may actually be much less valuable. Powys ation is the despair that Sylvanus feels when asks us: he is imprisoned by Dr Brush in the asylum. Middlemarch: A Point of Reference 45 This is most keenly felt at the moment when leap—like a ponderous beast—when it is in its Sylvanus is separated from George Pounce, last ditch. (526) the mad Phoenix: Two points of view are presented here: In every man's life there are moments when either Nature aids us or else we leap up with a desolation takes possession of him which our vital force when crisis comes. Neverthe- resembles the terrible look which a dead less, the analogy makes the human leap, like planet might turn upon a lonely voyager trav- that of a ponderous beast, almost a force of elling through space. At such a moment the Nature. In the next paragraph, Sylvanus is heart feels as if an abyss of hopelessness had described as saved by Nature, "the mother suddenly been revealed to it through some and accomplice of miracles" (526). He even ghastly crack or crevasse in the buoyant goes beyond Nature in asking overly clever etheric expanse. And it seems to him then as if, questions of Dr Brush. This passage is not at some grim signal, what he had really known all the time had been relentlessly shown him, only the least equivocal about the power of the ancient cosmogonic jest, the old un- Nature independent of human empathy redeemed treachery. Like an infinitely forlorn with it, but it stands directly in contrast to face, stripped of all comfort, this ghastly the experiences of Sue at the end of the novel vision of things limns itself against the sur- and Sylvanus's other experience. rounding nothingness. Nature has piled up all The note of optimism here is continued in her resources to hide the yawning void the last passage of authorial intrusion, through which this frozen look bids us which occurs when we are with Magnus right despair. Viaduct after rainbow-viaduct have our own hearts thrown across this fissure in before the return of Perdita: the familiar landscape, but perhaps it will There is a spontaneous awakening of awe in only be when the Original Jester himself the human soul when a person stands in the repents Him of His Joke and ceases to cry presence of any natural formation of the 'Judy! Judy! Judy!' across our shining sands earth's surface that has no parallel in the that that look out of the void will melt away. whole circumference of the globe. (550) Or perhaps—(519) Unfortunately, despite this moment of In this situation, to see into the heart of illumination, when we last see Magnus in the things is not to understand anything but novel his voice is splitting on the song he is treachery. Nature is not just a veil, but a veil trying to sing. Thinking of Curly, he is placed over a void. We must keep in mind unable to continue properly. He gets ready Sylvanus's desperate situation when we to take Jobber's stone from Perdita to give hear this pessimistic world-view, but the to Richard Gaul to keep the "Philosophy of narrator gives us no other consolation at this Representation" from blowing away. point. Depending on which passages we stress, Then the mood changes. When Sylvanus we can justify either an optimistic or pessim- confronts Dr Brush, he finds some strength, istic tone for the chance for happiness which and the authorial voice offers some more comes from contemplation of and harmony consoling words: with Nature. That is why we need to turn to the union of Perdita and Jobber and find in At certain crises in life Nature Herself this action the answer which is not solved on comes to our rescue by a peculiar power of her the level of conversation or authorial intrus- own—a power that is blinder, swifter, more ion in the novel. In this sense we have a formidable, than even instinct, and without strong parallel with Middlemarch. Despite knowing what we are doing, or why we are all George Eliot's talk of social reform and doing it, we fling ourselves pell-mell, hugger- mugger, helter-skelter into the breach. There the forces of history, it is the final union or are some who call this power impulse, but non-union of the characters which counts what it feels like is an organic leap of our the most. Here she is no different from the whole vital force, something that can only majority of Victorian novelists who worked 46 Middlemarch: A Point of Reference from the same premise. The union of Pip secrates a Nature which may be meaningless and Stella in the happy ending of Great Ex- (as has been suggested before in the novel). pectations comes equally to mind. 'Whenever you hold in your hand,' he was The ending of Weymouth Sands tends to saying, 'a wet pebble by the sea's edge, you present the union of Jobber and Perdita as a must believe you are holding me. Whenever successful example of union with nature and you snatch up a handful of wet sand, by the union with mankind simultaneously. This is sea's edge, you must believe I am holding you. the point of the famous paragraph in which I can never let you go, even if I wanted to!' they rush into each others' arms. It (517) concludes: Sylvanus is attempting to create what It was as if they were not just human lovers, Perdita and Jobber will have. Ultimately, it not just sweethearts finding each other again. fails since he cannot have Marret with him. It was as if they were animals, old, weak, However, it does serve to validate the pos- long-hunted animals, whose love was literally ition that love between two people, in touch the love of bone for bone, skeleton for skele- ton, not any mere spiritual affinity, not any with the forces of nature, provides the mere sexual passion. (565) strongest chance for happiness in the world. When Jobber reads Middlemarch he does The union here is meant to remind us of the not comment on the meeting of Dorothea torso of love in the "Sea Holly" chapter, and Will, their separation (even though they where the union of the figures in the rocks is are not then in love), and their eventual called "god-like, cosmogonic, life-creat- reunion. Nor does he know that separation ing" (353). from Perdita and reunion with her are in Jobber and Perdita are related by various store for him over the space of less than a sea images, and thus there is a special bless- year. Powys arranges the sorrows of ing given to their love when we remember Magnus and Sylvanus in love around those that Dr Brush, because of his conversations of Jobber, just as George Eliot arranges the with Sylvanus, comes to look upon the sorrow of Lydgate and the happiness of communicative possibilities between people Fred Vincy around the story of Dorothea. In in terms of a sea image as well: her "Finale", Eliot writes a summary of her views on marriage by the end of the novel: One of these clue-thoughts that came to the Doctor after analyzing Sylvanus was that not Marriage, which has been the bourne of so only from the surface of that sea within us but many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it from all levels and depths of it we have the was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey- power of coming into contact with one moon in Eden but had their first little one another. It is then, Brush thought, that our among the thorns'and thistles of the wilder- personalities emit luminous rays, like certain electric fish. He came to the conclusion that ness. It is still the beginning of the home epic no generalizations can possibly cover the —the gradual conquest or irremediable loss ghostly, twisted, tangential tricks with which of that complete union which makes the the mind deals with its own submarine devils, advancing years a climax, and age the harvest its sub-tides down there, its sub-reefs, its sea- of sweet memories in common. serpents. It was the unequalled objectivity of Daniel Brush's mind that was the cause of this For Eliot marriage is social cement. For mental 'volte-face'. (506) Powys the marriage-type union is not. For in Weymouth Sands, unlike in Middlemarch, a The "coming into contact with one socially coherent unit is in such decline that another" is what counts the most. Sylvanus there is little that can bring it back together. realizes this also when he tells Marret, in The disjointedness of the plot in Weymouth lines rather well-suited to Wuthering Sands is a good reflection of the loose social Heights, that they can be together through nexus of the community. Modern life is Nature. In fact it is their love which con- something to escape from. It is not surpris- Middlemarch: A Point of Reference 47 ing to imagine Jobber and Perdita existing Powys heroically insists on the sustaining on the fringes of it, since all the characters, force of nature, even if it is a godless void. In single or married, appear to be on the fringe, the final analysis, Nature may sustain, but as is often the case in Dostoievsky's work. only the union of soul and body beyond What is truly striking about Weymouth mere desire offers a chance for true Sands is its refusal to give a pat answer to the happiness. meaning and value of the natural world.

NOTES

'John Cowper Powys, Weymouth Sands (1943), Work of John Cowper Powys, London: Methuen, London: Macdonald, 1963, p. 73. All subsequent 1964. references are given in parentheses. The pagination of 'Susan Huxtable-Selly, "Mysticism, Trivia, and the paper-back, New York: Harper & Row, 1984, Sensations: Observations on Weymouth Sands", The follows the 1963 edition. Powys Review, No. 11 (1982-83), 32-45. 2Glen Cavaliero, John Cowper Powys: Novelist, 'Elizabeth Tombs, "Women in ' Weymouth Oxford, 1973. Sands", The Powys Review, No. 11 (1982-83), 46-55. 3 John Cowper Powys, "Remembrances: 7H. P. Collins, "The Sands Do Not Run Out", in Weymouth Sands (1933)", The Powys Review,No. 11 Belinda Humfrey, ed. Essays on John Cowper Powys, (1982-83), 16-17. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, 205-14. 4David A. Cook, "Between Two Worlds: A "Morine Krisdottir, John Cowper Powys and the Reading of Weymouth Sands", The Powys News- Magical Quest, London: Macdonald, 1980, pp. 100- letter, No. 3 (1972-73), 18-24. See also G. Wilson 11. Knight, The Saturnian Quest: A Study of the Prose Margaret Moran "Premonitory Hints and Embryo Suggestions" in J. C. Powys's Wood and Stone and Rodmoor

If a single passage from Powys's non- seldom seen again so exposed and unem- fictional prose had to be selected to summar- bellished. ize most succinctly the aesthetic view that Wood and Stone is most remarkable for lies behind his mature fiction, this statement the preliminary charting it provides of the from The Art of Happiness would be a entire expanse of the invented universe. The strong contender for the honour: conventional boundaries of fiction are extended to reach from the translunar Art therefore, every form of it, is an eternal escape from actuality; but the strange thing is spaces to the underworld. Once having that it does not become this escape until it has asserted the right to this enormous territory, taken up into itself the very sting and tang and Powys will never surrender it entirely in cobra-poison of the actuality it spurns. succeeding books. But he will find ways to This is the everlasting contradiction; and all make his fictional cosmos more inviting and aesthetic criticism hovers wavering at this hospitable for the reader. The initial auster- cross-roads. Art creates a new world through ity will be lessened as fuller details are which we move at our leisure in large forget- provided about the immediate environment. fulness: but in creating this world it must use For the moment, however, the setting in the —such is the mysterious law—no other mat- close range is interesting only insofar as it erials than those provided by Nature and by acts as the physical embodiment of an in- human nature!' dwelling universal tension. With varying degrees of success and in vary- Nevilton (Montacute) is described as a ing proportions, his romances and his representative spot on this planet where the histories offer a compound of actuality and ubiquitous opposing principles can be artfulness. When Powys began to write, he observed in microcosm. Towering over the was far less conciliatory to actuality. town, and indeed over the book, are two Rather, his first two works appear to be hills: Leo's Hill (Ham Hill) and Nevilton inspired by the determination to show how Mount (Montacute Tor). The former, the much fiction can accomplish when set free place of stone, gives palpable shape to the from a too limiting allegiance to reality. The abstract idea of tyranny; while the latter, the comparative lack of interest in Wood and place of wood, represents love. From the Stone (1915) and Rodmoor (1916) in nature first pages, the author insists that these two and human nature, except as ways to achieve hills are participants in an invisible struggle another purpose, makes these works less between two mythologies. At every level of than fully satisfying. Yet they do have this invented world from zenith to nadir, aspects that are anticipatory of the complete there is an ongoing conflict between the achievement that is to come. Their very balanced opposites of malevolent and starkness allows the underlying pattern of benign forces. Involved in the mythology of Powys's methods to show forth in clear power at one extreme are the sun, the relief at the outset. One such recurring element of earth, and stone. The moon, the pattern is the dependence on balanced element of water, and wood are engaged on opposites. This binary structure serves as the the other side as supporters of sacrifice. undergirding of all the works, although it is The claim that particular places are invol- Premonitory 49 ved somehow in cosmic strife recurs Philip Crow, Dog Cattistock and Dr Brush throughout Powys's fiction. So too does the who are able to hold their communities in attribution of personalities or metaphorical captivity. No one would ever wish to trade values. Glastonbury Tor and Wirra.1 Hill these people for Mortimer Romer's port- are, for example, made to engage in a similar rayal. But the corollary of the adoption of kind of tension between pagan and Christ- the new cosmology that gives rise to the later ian associations. Maiden Castle is alleged to characters is that the early view of villainy contain primal forces that, were they ever to becomes ambiguous. Deriving directly from be unleashed, would threaten the Roman- his theory, first worked out fully in Wolf British civilization of Dorchester. What is Solent, that the First Cause unifies in its own different is that eventually the symbolic level nature the opposites of divinity and diabol- is reached by a much more detailed present- ism is the conception of people as morally ation of the physical features and the history mixed instead of monolithic. The abrogat- of a place. Moreover, this refinement of the ion of the Devil from Powys's universe portrayal is accomplished without any loss means that Philip Crow can be only a of the original poetic intensity. To draw temporal power. He contrasts with Romer, attention to this change is not to imply that whose political and economic tyranny intangible qualities are assigned with com- derives horrifying strength from his cosmic plete arbitrariness even in Wood and Stone. analogues in cruelty. Instead, Philip's The discovery of the Holy Rood of Waltham greatest sins are distinctively human ones at Nevilton Mount makes the attribution of like excessive materialism, narrow prag- Christian virtues and the symbol of wood to matism and unjustifiable arrogance. the hill itself not without a degree of poetic Granted, in his own secret thoughts, he logic. So too, the commercial exploitation admits that he could countenance the elim- of the stone of Leo's Hill allows it to ination of all the citizens of Glastonbury function as a repository of unregenerate with equanimity, if better workers could be capitalism and paganism. found to replace them. But he takes no action to achieve the purge he dreams of Powys retains in his early fiction the habit because he is too practical to imagine that acquired in composing poetry of relying on ideal replacements could ever be found. the juxtaposition of contrasts and comple- ments. He brings to the fictional form the The examination of the political and tendency to think of scenery, people and economic dimensions of Romer's power events as if they were images in poetry to be calls for an enormous cast. The result is the manipulated into patterns. While this dispersal of interest over a large group of practice can certainly be made quite com- stylized characters. Eventually in A Glaston- patible to the narrative mode, it creates very bury Romance, the work that is most severe effects in the beginning when it is used directly affiliated to Wood and Stone, with sketchy portraits of places and people. Powys accomplishes admirably his original In the first book, the symbols of wood and aspiration to bring an entire community to stone are made so paramount that they life. Having by then refined the art of chara- control the presentation of the characters as cter portrayal completely, he is able to make well as the landscape. Almost all the charac- even the least important citizens of Glaston- ters are forced to divide themselves neatly bury intricate individuals. But in Wood and according to their general function as Stone, even the major characters are virt- apparent weaklings (or people of wood) and ually one-dimensional. The main narrative harsh masters (or people of stone). A single thread of Wood and Stone is concerned with obdurate villain, Mortimer Romer, holds the private, rather than the public, manifest- the entire community of Nevilton in thral- ations of dominance. Specifically, Romer's dom by his diabolical contact with the efforts to subjugate his niece, Lacrima, is principle of evil in the universe. He prepares the central concern. the way for other characters like Urquhart, In the unfolding of this scheme, and 50 Premonitory indeed all the others too, the necessity to their fated predilection for good or evil, present human motivation in a credible way later characters have at least the illusion of is obviated by the assumption that people independence. In practice, the most memor- are led to act as they do by forces that are able world views evolved by these individ- beyond their comprehension. If the reader uals are, in essence, not very different from wonders, for example, why Romer, "the that insisted upon by the author here. Wolf manipulator of far-flung financial intri- Solent and Owen Evans, for example, see gues, the ambitious politician, the form- themselves functioning within a bifurcated idable captain of industry,"2 would expend universe. But the observation of this contin- so much effort to gain supremacy over uity should not obscure the remarkable Lacrima, the following explanation is advancement in the conception of charact- offered: er. If Wood and Stone is a manifesto dec- laring the author's right to create a heter- Vast unfathomable tides of cosmic conflict ocosm to be entered and judged on its own drive us all backwards and forwards; and if merits and self-consistency, later works go under the ascendance of Sirius in the track of much further by endowing individuals the Sun, the master of Nevilton found himself devoting more energy to the humiliation of within that fictive world with this same his daughter's companion than to his election creative privilege. to the British Parliament, one can only rem- In the first book, however, the characters ember that both of them—the strong and the are overwhelmed by their macrocosmic set- weak—were merely puppets and pawns of ting and absorbed by the elemental symbol- elemental forces, compared with which, he as ism. Between Romer and the stone of Leo's well as she, was as chaff before the wind. (364) Hill, there is "an illimitable affinity" (373), This passage makes clear that personality in and his daughter Gladys is spoken of as the Wood and Stone has been dwarfed by the child of sandstone or a "Sun-child" (239). book's enormous context. Considered ab- Romer's brother-in-law, Goring, is equated stractly, apart from their fictional contexts, with clay because earth is imagined to be the cosmological assertions of both Wood allied directly to stone. On the other side, and Stone and Glastonbury Romance are Lacrima is water, or "the tears that wash ^probably equally debatable, or even equally away all these things" (722), and Quincunx dubious. Only from their manifestations in and James Andersen are wood. In a climactic the lives of individuals can either system episode at Caesar's Quarry, James becomes hope to acquire force. In Wood and Stone, the literal victim of stone by dashing his the characters seem nakedly archetypal head against the quarry side as he falls to his because value is attributed to the human death. This act propitiates stone's adamant- sphere as the epitome of the entire universe ine demand for a martyr so that a causal of mortal strife, rather than for its own in- connection is made to exist between his self- trinsic interest. In Powys's mature work, as sacrifice and the subsequent salvation of the characters become amplified enough to other long-suffering people of wood. The belong in such a context, human situations symbolism is made so dominant as to dictate will acquire momentousness by their part- even the direction of the plot. icipation in vast universal patterns. Then the Almost everyone is given a name that notion of the individual level as a reflection draws immediate attention to his most of vast cosmic transactions becomes more important attributes. Mortimer Romer acceptable with characters substantial illustrates the deadly constraints imposed by enough to sustain this assertion. Eventually, absolute power such as that of the imperial the characters are even allowed to formulate Augustus. His daughter, the happy but cruel their own cosmological system. Whereas the Gladys, torments her cousin, the sad but individuals in Wood and Stone cannot do kindly Lacrima. Quincunx's odd name otherwise than to take sides according to stresses the submissiveness of a man so inert Premonitory 51 as virtually to be wood; moreover wood in a extremes. Although it is clear enough that precisely arranged grouping. Dangelis, Powys's own sympathies are against the James and Luke oppose Romer's paganism Superman, he tries to avoid overt moralizing by their adherence to the altruistic ethics of so that all possibilities remain worth con- Christianity. The last two, the Andersen sidering. In particular, the resolution of the brothers, also have a special connection story shows his tentativeness. While the through their surname to the fairy-tale weak characters are allowed to escape realm. In other instances, names are assig- Romer's tyranny, his wickedness is undim- ned that are at least idiosyncratic, if not so inished and unpunished. It is possible to clearly allegorical. Such is the case with conclude that the morally mixed characters, Taxater, Wone or Ninsy. like Luke Andersen and Taxater, are most Even when Powys comes in later works to accommodated to the ambiguities of life in portray his people much more fully, he re- Nevilton, for they have internalized the tains to a surprising extent the practice of ethical dualism of their world. using names that are so odd or emblematic Since the narrative grapples with "one of as to suggest unreal or one-dimensional the most absorbing and difficult problems characters. There will be names chosen for of our age,"4 it has a central idea that is meaning (like Ashover, Perdita Wane, Old always clearly in evidence. Lest the point be Funky, Lovie, and Dud No-man) and plenty missed in the narrative itself, the "philoso- that are simply peculiar (like Gerda Torp or phical" preface is included to set forth Curly Wix). Some—like Powys's own name explicitly the major issues and intentions. —are designations that people share with Never again until Morwyn (1937) will a book geographical features (like Solent, Wye or be given such a strong thematic emphasis. Zoyland). There are a great many taken However, Morwyn is actually far more per- from the natural world (like Stork, Rook, emptory in tone than Wood and Stone, and Malakite and Daisy Lily). The technique is it is Powys's only work that can be accused startling when it is applied to major charact- of heavy-handed moralizing. Powys tends ers because novelistic precedent encourages to use the term philosophy to mean the such designations for minor figures, but the cumulative wisdom of the ages that can ease serious characters are normally given more the suffering of the individual's lot, rather plausible names. In Maiden Castle, names than any structured ideology. If there is an acquire even greater importance than ever unusually strong sense of regimentation in because people are allowed actually to Wood and Stone, this arises more from the define themselves by selecting their own single-mindedness with which the topic of names. Here, then, is another indication of domination is examined from every possible the complexity of the characters in the angle, rather than from too much sent- mature works. If some people are intricate entiousness. enough to share with the author the privilege If the personal fictive world created in of cosmos-building, others are sufficiently Wood and Stone might have been erected emancipated as to create themselves. initially as a way to answer Nietzsche, it In Wood and Stone, Powys requires proved immediately to have some purely human characters of polarized types and literary value. The invented world picture a multidimensional world in order to test allows for the establishment of the dramatic Nietzsche's theory that the laws of the uni- clash, between opposites. Moreover, the verse support the Superman. Only in this cosmography is compatible with the idea way, can the reader be challenged to decide that a great deal lies beyond the personal whether the planetary arrangement is more realm in the translunar and subterranean favourable to the weak, to the strong, or to spheres. These are enduring and distinctive those who have made' 'some subtle and diff- features of Powysian work. 3 icult reconciliation" between these two For all its differences from Wood and 52 Premonitory Stone, Rodmoor relies on this binary system always given against the natural backdrop and it also creates the impression of being on of fens, grey sand dunes, marshes, and sea, the verge of breaking through the confines the place is not made rich in particularized of the human world to another remote zone. details. Much less sharply focused than even By dedicating the book "TO THE SPIRIT the places in Wood and Stone, the setting is OF EMILY BRONTE", the author draws used almost exclusively to create a desolate immediate attention to a literary progenitor ambience appropriate for a village poised who set a precedent for stretching the limits tenuously between life and death. The of the conventional novel to include the un- assumption on the part of both author and realistic plane. Because the honour is central character is that Rodmoor's atmos- bestowed on Bronte qua wraith, the inscript- phere is completely incompatible with real- ion tells the reader before the story is even ism. Adrian Sorio says: "Where on earth begun to expect therein an unabashed else, could a man find it so hard to collect his acknowledgement of supernatural powers. thoughts and look at things as they are?" Indeed, such expectations are fulfilled in the (62) This is a sentiment that will be echoed by featuring of visions, ghostly visitations, other Powysian heroes as they find them- witchcraft, omens, spells and the malignant selves disoriented in their turn by the un- operation of Fate. familiarity of a new, dreamlike environ- In its own way, then, Rodmoor is as ment . It is very typical of the author to begin insistent on its own fictitiousness as Wood a work with an arrival so that a character's and Stone. The two works share the same movement into a world may parallel the stylized use of landscape and characters as reader's own initiation. However, in later illustrations for a central abstract dualism. books, the paradox is stressed that while the In Rodmoor, the major tension is between experience of dislocation may make a place the forces of creation and those of destruct- seem phantasmal, it also simultaneously ion, with the elemental antagonism between makes perception more acute and realities earth and water serving as the symbol for sharper. Eventually the need felt here to this opposition. Essentially, land is seen here make a choice between a veracious or a as the comfortable home for man; while the symbolic use of landscape will resolve itself Sea functions as the dangerous but irresist- into a realization that the two are not ible unknown realm. On the human level, the mutually exclusive. primary source of tension comes from the The lack of specificity in the treatment of rivalry between Nance Herrick, who is asso- the setting of Rodmoor may be partially ciated with the regenerative forces of earth, attributable to the fact that Powys has not and Philippa Renshaw, the "furtive child of 5 yet found a "home" for his fiction. marsh and sea". Pulled between the two is Rodmoor is unusual among the books the central character, Adrian Sorio. written before 1937 in being placed outside Although he is at first attracted to Nance of Wessex. (The other exceptions are After because of her power to restore him to My Fashion, set in Sussex and New York normality, the fatal fascination of Philippa City, and the introductory chapters of A soon proves irresistible. In the end, he Glastonbury Romance, set in Northwold.) drowns with her in the Rodmoor sea. Rodmoor is so lacking in any individuating The conflict between earth and water is details that it could have been inspired by made manifest by the setting of the story in a any East Anglian coastal town. Rodmoor is coastal town on the North Sea. Having endowed with its own peculiar weather and suffered "ages of tidal malice" (361) from an endemic biological life only so that these the steadily encroaching water, Rodmoor is natural phenomena may be artificially inte- a sea-blighted place where sanity and grated into the general symbolic back- permanence are said to be under constant ground. Climatic changes are mentioned to siege. Although the events of the book are provide the place with a psychic weather and Premonitory 53 a suitable correlative atmosphere for the side of his obsession is never denied, his tempestuous or passion-scorched state of search for the ideal realm behind life is made the characters. The sky has an alarming to have a heroic dimension. There is some- tendency to form itself at particularly dram- thing splendid about his reckless rush into atic moments into portentous shapes. Even nothingness. When Adrian goes to his death seasonal changes are made to harmonize expecting to be gathered into the artifice of fully with the action so that the book's over- eternity, he cries "Baptiste'', his son's name all plan traces the movement from the Because of the suggestiveness of the name, anticipation of renewal in the London he seems to be praying for a nameless spring to death in winter in the North Sea. baptism, for sanctification by means of When attention is directed to the flora and immersion in the destructive element, and fauna of Rodmoor, the intention is to show for the opportunity to be born again into a that even vegetative and animal life partici- new state. pates in a dim "half-and-half existence" (287). The plant that is said to be most Since Rodmoor is prepared partially to characteristic of this coastal town, the glorify acts of annihilation, the morality is yellow horned poppy, is the kind of growth far less conventional and distinct than that that would be expected to take root on found in Wood and Stone. Instead of the Lethe's wharf. In the thwarted spring, some polarized separation of the goodness malignant influence seems to blight the associated with wood and the cruelty of normal growth of the poplar leaves so that stone, the contest between land and sea is they are suspended between being and not- ethically more problematic. While there is a being. Silvery fish are observed caught in clear enough connection established with nets where they are allowed temporarily to earth and the normal social values of stabil- swim before their inevitable death comes. ity and security, this symbolism does not When a seagull is shot, it is not "properly attribute an unequivocal virtuousness to killed" (207), but doomed to a limbo these qualities. If the sea is made to repre- existence. sent dangers to the ordered codes by which man lives, it is also the metaphor for insat- Nature is made sterile or half-dead to iable yearnings. Indulgence in these conform to the vision of the village as the site desperate longings may be perilous to peace, of an antagonism between creativity and but they cannot simply be dismissed as destruction in which the victory for the wicked. The book recognizes the appeal of forces of dissolution is assured and even the great but impossible aspiration to the welcomed as a release. In such a context, extent that its own sensationalism and human experiences that are usually seen grandiose rhetoric make it a participant in positively as productive or enriching are the very excess that is its subject. blighted. The act of procreation leads to Linda's ruin rather than the birth of new In keeping with these new moral ambig- life; and Adrian's literary inventiveness uities, the characters are less clearly disting- creates a book that he intends to use as a uished as heroes and villains than are those weapon to hurl at humanity. In contrast, of Wood and Stone. There are still plenty of destruction is considered as having a para- examples of struggles for mastery by doxical value, perhaps because it is more in external forces. But there is no need for one tune with the cosmic movement toward overarching villain like Romer, because the nihility that the book seems to endorse. impulse to cruelty and malice is partly Thus, Adrian's commitment to the quest to internalized into the wilful psyches of the break through at any cost the boundaries characters who are victims. In 1916, the year that limit man rather than to reconcile him- of the publication of Rodmoor, Powys self to the human lot is never treated as if it praised Dostoievsky for his understanding were simply an insane attitude. If the mad of, 54 Premonitory the depravity of the spirit, as well as of the like Brand's "Hatchet-pate" (52), and flesh, and the amazing wantonness, whereby Philippa's extraordinarily slender androg- the human will does not always seek its own ynous figure contribute to the sense of realization and well-being, but quite as often 6 sinister inhumanity associated with the Ren- its own laceration and destruction. shaw family. All the people are regularly This insight forms the basis for the portrayal compared to human forms in painting, of Powys's own people. The perception of tableaux, Medieval wood-carvings, or the human personality as divided against marble statues from ancient Greece. They itself would seem to invite, if not necessitate, may even be seen as embodiments of certain a study of the mental life of one or two lines from other works of literature. Such highly complex individuals. However, analogies draw attention to the artfulness of Powys declines to use this means of presen- their conception. Clearly, the intention is tation. Instead, emotional abnormality is that they be viewed as abstract symbols or as treated in such a diffused way that almost all isolated states of mind in human shape, the characters (and even the town itself) are rather than as fully rounded individuals. made to share the hero's morbidity and per- The major difficulty arising from this versity. Thus, the usual boundaries between decision to treat emotional anguish in this inwardness and outwardness are blurred by dispersed and contrived way is that the the mode of portrayal. Powys uses the reader's empathy cannot be properly technique of making the surroundings engaged. We are too close to the characters reflect the man to better advantage when the for their behaviour to be simply shocking central individual can be made multifaceted and not close enough for it to be genuinely enough to provide more variety. affecting. Virtually all the people are made to Never again will all aspects of a book be provide reflections or modulations of each made to coalesce into such a rigorous unity other's torment. Rodmoor is made a con- as in Rodmoor. The multiformity of mood centrated study of the extremes of the found elsewhere in the canon comes from human condition. On a nearly daily basis the fact that, although the abnormally almost everyone is forced to cope with troubled soul never ceases to intrigue doomed love, threats of imminent madness, Powys, his range widens to include as well or uncontrollable suicidal impulses. In their less anguished individuals observed in calm responses to these constant crises, the char- moments, and endearing eccentrics. For the acters appear mysterious and unnatural. latter type, Hamish Traharne and Fingal There is no room in the book for calm Raughty act as shadowy precursors. Being moments of ordinary existence; nor is there out of place in the overwrought atmosphere any occasion for tranquil memories. To the of this romance, they are unable to flourish, extent that these people are given a past, it is and there is something half-hearted about made as turbulent as the present. The prota- the clowning over their collective manias gonist has recently gone through "the for hand-washing, botanizing, and caress- experience of cerebral dementia" (68), while ing rats. But they are the kind of people who the supporting characters, Rachel Doorm prove conducive to fuller development later. and Helen Renshaw, suffer in various ways Many strong minor characters in subse- from decades-old grievances. quent works (like Hastings, Urquhart, Since Rodmoor is a study of a group of Jason Otter, Malakite, Lucinda Cobbold, individuals who suffer nearly unmitigated and Thuella Wye) can trace their lineage perturbation, the book is closer to the night- very directly to the anguished people of the mare world than to ordinary waking reality. Rodmoor world. As members of the sup- There are so few concessions to credibility porting casts, the extremity of their various that even in physical appearance the charac- predicaments is not allowed to be as domin- ters are not allowed to be life-like. Qualities ant as that in Rodmoor. The supreme Premonitory 55 example of a character who actually incor- to the margins of the mind where the incred- porates the dichotomies of both Wood and ible is indeed admissible. This technique Stone and Rodmoor is Owen Evans of A allows the reader's own imaginative fac- Glastonbury Romance. But even the saner ulties to be stirred to creative participation. major characters like Wolf Solent or Dud In other circumstances, he coaxes a gradual No-man are always given a dimension that is suspension of disbelief. If, as is the case in A perverse and irregular enough to be remin- Glastonbury Romance, the citadel of the iscent of the thoroughgoing derangement of reader's doubt is once again assaulted the personalities of Rodmoor. without any preliminary attempts to wear Because of the unremitting focus on down resistance, this is done with a full extraordinary states which are unable to knowledge of the reader's reaction to such move the reader adequately, Rodmoor risks treatment and due allowances are made. The being dismissed as being simply too melo- very excess of the demands on the reader's dramatic to be seriously countenanced. credulity is there turned into a joke against What also brings the book perilously close the tale-teller. to absurdity is that the style, in its strain to Subsequent books show Powys's aware- achieve the sublime, sometimes attains only ness of the grandeurs inherent in familiar the histrionic. Because the language is surroundings and ordinary events. As soon attempting to handle what is inherently bey- as common sights are perceived to be appar- ond articulation, passages of bad writing are elled in celestial light there is more reason inevitable. As Louis Wilkinson demon- than formerly to devote attention to the strated so effectively in his parody, natural world. While later works maintain Bumbore,1 this pretentiousness creates the typically Powysian mythic level of sig- unintentional comedy. In Powys's mature nificance, this often arises from experien- works, his people do not become so very ces, like childbirth, experiences that are much less unusual, nor does his later style readily perceived as both ordinary and always elude the dangers of overwriting. miraculous. There will never be a complete What is different is that he grows immune to surrender to normality or any diminution of the parodist by exploiting the joke himself the conviction that "there are some human and by revelling in his own shortcomings. experiences which the conventional mach- inery of ordinary novel-writing lacks all This change is attributable to a variety of 8 shifts in the narrative tone. Powys's ultim- language to express". Notwithstanding all ate success is partly due to his ability to med- the important differences, Wood and Stone and Rodmoor provide many "premonitory iate between his readers and the odd world 9 they are required to accept. In some cases, hints and embryo suggestions" of the full he comes to rely on suggestion by appealing achievement in Powys's fiction.

NOTES

xThe Art of Happiness (1923) London: Village '"Dostoievsky", Visions and Revisions, London: Press, 1974, p. 20. Macdonald, 1955 and Village, 1974, p. 183. 2 Wood and Stone, New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 'Louis Wilkinson, Bumbore: A Romance, 1915, p. 188. The pagination is identical in the Hamilton, New York: Colgate, 1969. Bumbore is a London: Heinemann, 1917, and in the London: fragment (Chapter DCCCXCIX) in which Onan Village, 1974, editions. All subsequent references are Sadio Jumps into the River Looney while a ruined given in parentheses. privy surveys the scene "unmoved". 1 "Preface", Wood and Stone, p. viii. 8 Visions and Revisions, p. 183. 'Ibid., p. vii. 'Enjoyment of Literature, New York: Simon and sRodmoor, New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1916, p. Schuster, 1938, p. 394; The Pleasures of Literature, 85. The pagination is identical in the London: London: Cassell, 1938 and 1946, p. 527. Macdonald, 1973, and in the Hamilton, New York: Colgate, 1973, editions. All subsequent references are given in parentheses. G. Wilson Knight. The Editor's Preface

Professor G. Wilson Knight died on 20 in every public characteristic, and yet so March 1985. ultimately suited to each other . . . There will be longlasting admiration for Yet rarely did either of these two great many of Wilson Knight's books of English teachers bludgeon us with subjective literary criticism and for his world-wide and overkill. In both, genius remained guided large-scale impact on modes of literary crit- by stern intellect, by deep reservoirs of ical thinking. His important interpretative knowledge, and by paradoxic and freq- contributions to studies of J. C. Powys were uently quite unexpected zones of dis- only a minor part of his whole work. How- passion. And, of course, by marvellous ever, the Powys Society's invitation to Pro- humour. At the same time, unlike most of fessor Francis Berry to lecture on Wilson their contemporaries, both asserted the Knight, his early master, was, no doubt, primacy of certain anomalous cosmic only an initial tribute to its already much powers, to be approached only through missed President. No-one who attended subjective voluptuous searchings . . . Society Conferences is likely to forget Wilson A key to Professor Knight's sagely dis- Knight's incisive questionings and amplifi- criminating literary writings is his repeated cations at the end of lectures; nor will they insistence that he wrote "interpretations", forget his humour and delightful laughter. rather than "criticisms". The differenece The Editor of The Powys Review is one of is fine, but I would dare to hazard that probably many academics who were freq- one discrete and invigorating quality of uently elevated and cheered by the letters these "interpretations" is that special and conversations of Wilson Knight, that personal kindness, for which Knight is so extraordinarily generous and energetic liter- remembered by those who knew him. Re- ary friend. The Editor is undoubtedly one of reading his pages now, it does indeed hosts who will never forget his talks and appear that this penetrating variant of lectures on the English poets, especially "kindness" did illumine and transmute Shakespeare, lectures which in the last their substance. dozen years were visibly triumphs of spirit. Can kindness be a quality of literary The Editor's young daughter will miss the exploration? Indeed: a vital one, provided regular and always appropriate cards and it remains only subtly apparent—a subject- messages from the entrancing, vigorous, ive pungency haunting the more formal ancient [and busy] Professor. context of the work. At its best, a dispos- The second number of Powys Notes, the ition prone to kindness in human terms publication of the recently-formed Powys implies a keen understanding of the inten- Society of North America, carries a tribute ded recipient of kindness, which elicits a to Wilson Knight from Peter Powys Grey benign, hopefully inspired, action which (American son of Marian Powys), who re- could indeed even irradiate the life and members his uncle, John Cowper Powys, de- work of that recipient. In the endeavours clare of Wilson Knight in 1959, "in sudden of kindness, intently focused conscious- benediction and wild thankfulness: 'O, he is ness is implied, as well as ardent exertion such a worthy, worthy, worthy man!' " In and vivifying intelligence. Ultimately, appreciation of Wilson Knight, and in little pretense of dispassion. Channelled affection for him, we take the liberty of into the exploration of great works, such quoting more of the view of Peter Powys enkindening interpretation can, as it may Grey, and extensively, as follows. be illumined, produce a genuine literary To Knight, Powys wrote: "We sure are agape. a pair!" Indeed they were—so different The Editor's Preface 57 At the 1972 Cambridge Powys Confer- into some 'golden centre', as I called it." ence, Wilson Knight referred to an earlier Knight's entire oeuvre (and particularly distinction he had made between "kindly his writings on Powys) stands as a lovely humour" and "derisive humour". "The example of this golden, sacramental kindly humour tends to dissolve convent- centre, as do so many of Powys's kindly ional judgements, taboos, religious or writings to the world. They sure were a moral judgements, or just respectability, pair! Francis Berry G. R. Wilson Knight: His Life and Work An edited version of a lecture given at the 1985 Powys Society Conference

Unforgettable was my first meeting with the Whilst I remained at Dean Close I realized recently deceased President of your Society. what I had lost in the classroom—an intense- It was in the summer of 1929. Wilson ly enthusiastic and inspiring teacher of Knight, then aged 32, was English and English—so, at this point, it seems approp- Classics Master at Dean Close School; I was riate to record a few reminiscences of fourteen and a pupil. Wilson Knight as a young schoolmaster bet- At great speed, as though not to lose a ween 1929 and 1931. The superb and vitaliz- minute, his eyes blazing with exitement, Mr ing lessons on Macbeth were followed by (as he then was) Knight, in his Oxford gown, others, no less exciting in their ways, on entered the classroom. The subject was Julius Caesar, Hamlet and even—for he had Macbeth. Copies of that blue New Hudson a relish for comedy and indeed even pro- edition were opened at Act 1 scene ii, parts duced, and beautifully so, two Speech Day were distributed for reading aloud, at inter- plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and vals the reading was halted for questions to Twelfth Night—Much Ado About Nothing. be put or for explanations or comments The anthology of poems he used was given by Mr Knight. What a marvellous way Bridges's Chilswell Book of English Verse for this one time pupil, who now recalls the and the exploration under Knight's leader- event, to be introduced to Shakespeare. ship of the great non-dramatic poets was no 1929 was the year of publication of that less enthralling. Among prose works he was short book, a beginning to all his later work, obliged to teach, since they were prescribed Myth and Miracle: an Essay on the Mystic as set books for examination, Gulliver's Symbolism of Shakespeare, and the next Travels and Scott's Old Mortality, but here I year was to see the appearance of The Wheel detected there was less investment of his of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakes- personal interest than in poetry whether peare's Sombre Tragedies. This, with an dramatic or non-dramatic. He did in passing introduction by T. S. Eliot, was widely talk about Wuthering Heights, Hardy, acclaimed as an innovatory, brilliant and Conrad' s Nigger of the Narcissus and Moby fertile new approach to an understanding of Dick but these, though not poems, are Shakespeare's art, and led to an offer of precisely those novels which in imaginative Chairs of English at three universities— density, compactness of imagery and Calcutta, Hiroshima, Toronto. He chose symbolism and evocation of atmosphere Toronto and left Dean Close School in 1931 must nearly approach the status of that for Canada where he remained for ten rhythmic and condensed essence of the thing years. During that period Professor Knight, known as a poem. Later, following this your late President, composed a series of temperament-compelled preference, he powerful, original books—books that was to commend to me in a letter from continue to be extremely influential—on Canada, among non-fiction writers of Shakespeare and, also at this time, he devel- prose, the works of Sir Thomas Browne. oped his passionate interest, as producer and actor, in the staging of Shakespeare's As a schoolmaster, Knight's duties plays. included the prescribing of subjects for his pupil's fortnightly efforts at English com- G. Wilson Knight: His Life and Work 59 position. I remember one such subject, con- Pericles, The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, temporary with his lessons on Macbeth. "Is where persons seemingly dead or long lost it wicked to be rich?" was the subject, one are miraculously restored, also mean. They involving such moral and political thought are immortality visions." as fourteen-year olds could be expected to So he was to interpret these four plays, muster and order. I wrote an essay of and later the whole of Shakespeare's twenty-nine pages concluding with eighteen creation, by attention to each play's design. lines of verse to illustrate in poetic terms the Since each, besides proceeding in temporal preceding prose argument. The essays, order from first to last scene in succession, marked out of 30, were returned. I was had a kind of spatial pattern, by a study of awarded 30 minus 1 (for all the ink blots each's individual tone and atmosphere, and and untidy presentation) plus 2 (for the by an analysis of image, metaphor and poem) = 31. Moreover Knight persuaded symbol, the meaning of each poetic and the sixth-form editors of the school dramatic work was translated into terms magazine, The Decanian, to publish the accessible to mere rational understanding. poem. My first publication. The justification of Knight's interpretative I turn next to attempt to explain briefly, method lay partly in its vindication of though their author has done so at length, Shakespeare against charges of improbab- the origin and method of those celebrated ilities, absurdities or irrelevances which books of Shakespeare's 'interpretation'—a previous critics had brought. Time after word he deliberately chose instead of time he demonstrated that those events in 'criticism'. the texts that most annoyed such critics were Wilson Knight told me that he and his in truth required by their creator for brother W. F. J. Knight, classical scholar dramatic and poetic coherence. The unity of and authority on Virgil, had together been Shakespeare's work was restored. Though attending a performance of The Tempest. there were—and are still—opponents of That would have been in about 1927 or 1928. Wilson Knight, in the main his books have Both were entranced by the poetry and the proved to be the most liberating force in the spectacle, and were especially rapt during study of Shakespeare in this century. Mean- the masque built into Act IV sc. i. At Pros- while, complementary to those books which pero's speech, have come to be so valued by the scholar, student and general reader, Wilson Knight, You do look, my son, in a moved sort while in Canada, became increasingly invol- As if you were dismay'd. Be cheerful, Sir, ved in converting his vision of Shakespeare Our revels now are ended. These our actors, into stage practice, evidenced by his Shakes- As I foretold you, were all spirits, and pearian Production and Shakespeare's Are melted into air, into thin air . . ., Dramatic Challenge, intensively in Toronto and later in London, Leeds and elsewhere on a speech which goes on to include, both sides of the Atlantic. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life What he had discovered in his experience Is rounded by a sleep. of Shakespeare he was to apply to other non- dramatic poets. Almost every major English W. F. J. Knight, with cumulated wonder poet became the subject of a full length book at all the strange beauty of what he was or a substantial essay. To list a few: Spenser, seeing and hearing, had turned to Wilson Lyly, Marlowe, Webster, Milton, Pope, the and, almost, gasping whispered, "What Romantic poets especially Byron, Tennyson, does it mean?" with a pause between each Browning, Matthew Arnold, Masefield, word. "That started my work on Shakes- T. S. Eliot. The volume on the Romantics, peare off," Wilson said. "In Myth and entitled The Starlit Dome, is I believe Miracle I tried to show what The Tempest particularly splendid. Knight was unremit- means. And what those other final plays, tingly industrious throughout his life. 60 G. Wilson Knight: His Life and Work It must not be thought that Wilson's those days I have participated in many an departure for Canada in 1931 meant the end intellectual discussion but none I think so of our relationship. Far from it. Corres- lively and exciting as those that occurred in pondence flowed both ways between the small smoking room of Ware's Hotel, Canada and England. I sent him poems as Cheltenham. they were written. He responded generously Soon after the War came in 1939 Wilson with his approval; he guided my reading; he was to resign his Chair at Toronto and reported accounts of his thoughts, writing, return to England, a decision motivated by activities in the theatre, his plans. He anxiety for the welfare of his family and for offered advice, suggesting how I might best his country—for he loved Britain. In 1940 I tolerate an uncongenial situation—for I had was posted abroad and remained overseas been withdrawn from school early and until 1946, mostly in Malta. Mail during this become articled to a solicitor—and devising period was scarce, letters were lost in how I might yet extricate myself from that dangerous transit, and our correspondence situation and gain entry to a university to was much diminished during those years. read English. This hope was eventually ful- Before my return he had secured a senior filled. Nor was this exchange limited to cor- post at the University of Leeds and I was to respondence. For each long summer vac- be appointed to the University of Sheffield ation during the thirties he came to England, in 1947. As comparative neighbours in residing at a hotel with his brother W. F. J. Yorkshire our correspondence resumed its Knight, and daily visiting his ageing mother. early flow and we would meet frequently in During those long summer evenings we the one town or the other. often went for walks, conversing on literary A new direction was now taking place in matters, on metaphysical matters ("but ,: Wilson's literary studies. Previously in his what is time?" he would challenge; and interpretations of Shakespeare and other what is eternity? and how do they differ?"; poets he gave little or no consideration to or' 'The New Testament is not dull. The par- their biographies. Their lives and their ables of Jesus have genuine poetic qual- individual psychologies did not matter. It ities"), and on the development of our was their writings that mattered. But with respective careers. His remarks were often his work on Byron, whose life was well doc- astonishingly wise. For example, when I umented, though certain aspects of it still complained of the drudgery in a lawyer's remain mysterious, Wilson evinces a pro- office and the misery of my home environ- found interest in the personality, psychol- ment, he exclaimed, "But you should not ogy and behaviour of the poet. This was expect to be happy until you are at least 25!" partly no doubt because Byron was a man of He was reporting, as I was later to under- action as well as a poet and the life and the stand, his own experience. poetry seemed to be integral to each other. On other occasions I would call at his Byron lived the substance of his poetry. His hotel to join him and his brother and the death at Missolonghi, preparing to fight in three of us would discourse with an extra- the cause of the liberation of Greece from ordinary animation. The brothers were Turkish rule, was a fitting, even glamorous, devoted and it was clear that each stimulated end for the poet, as Goethe noted. Moreover the mind of the other. Jackson Knight was Byron's outlawry from polite British as absorbed in his classical studies, espec- society, as a result of a scandal concerning ially Vergil, as was Wilson Knight in English his sexual aberrancies, followed by his self- poetry and Shakespeare. Contingent on his imposed exile, his real or assumed misan- passion for Vergil were his brother's lively thropy, suggest parallels in at least two res- interests in archaeology, especially labyr- pects with the hero of Timon of Athens, that inths, anthropology and Roman and pre- Shakespeare play which Knight came to Roman strategic military practices. Since regard as of quite special significance—as G. Wilson Knight: His Life and Work 61 indeed it was personally to him. I saw his was concentrated on poetry and poetic production at Leeds, with himself playing drama. The prose novel did not figure in his Timon; and almost to the end of his life the mind or in mine as important in the sense scene of Timon divesting himself of all his that poetry and poetic drama were. Neither clothes before dying was the culminating at Dean Close nor for the succeeding fifty event in Knight's one man Shakespearian years or more of our friendship did the acting recital performances under the title of names of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens 'Shakespearian's Dramatic Challenge', once occur in all our conversation in speech which continued in England and North or in writing—though the names of Dost- America until he was well past eighty years oevsky and Tolstoy did. And yet before we old. I hold that Knight's interest in Byron's had first met in 1929, the year of Myth and biography, especially the poet's actual or Miracle, Wilson Knight had written three reputed sexual behaviour, his vast admir- novels, which he allowed me to read in ation for the play Timon of Athens and his typescript, none of which were published devotion to the work of John Cowper until one, Klinton Top, appeared in 1984, a Powys are closely connected. year before the author's death. It could also To that devotion I now turn. be noted that of three books by Powys In the collection of letters, Powys to recommended in 1936 or 1937 only one Knight (ed. Robert Blackmore), 1983, could possibly be called a novel. But is it? In Knight—whom I shall now frequently refer his long review-article under the heading to as 'Richard' rather than 'Wilson' since he "Cosmic Correspondences" in The Times officially added in the 1960s the forename Literary Supplement of 11 October 1957, Richard, preferring his friends to address Richard—though in accordance with the him as such, at the suggestion of Powys— paper's policy at that date it was, like all states the facts of his involvement with the contents of the paper, unsigned—wrote that great and formidable writer in an introduct- a reason for the reluctance with which some ory note. readers have felt with respect to A Glaston- bury Romance, "will hardly be elucidated Richard says that when he mentioned by any study of the history of the novel; it is J. C. Powys's books in Atlantic Crossing, far closer to the histories of mythology and 1936, he was "thinking mainly of Wolf poetry". An excellent discrimination. I Solent". He had bought A Glastonbury concur. Why the book, which I have read Romance in 1933, "but was afraid of its four times, fascinated me is that it is more length, and I think also of its challenging than a novel for in it, like important poetry, contents... I then put it aside for some three there is a continual interpenetration of the or four years, attacking it seriously in 1936 natural and the supernatural. It is a novel or 1937. In The Burning Oracle (1939, p. plus and plus and plus. My own inclination 292) I referred to A Glastonbury Romance is—taking a hint from its title—to classify it as perhaps the greatest work of our gener- as a romance or romaunt, a genre distinct ation." It is certainly in my memory that it from the novel. It has indeed narrative was in 1936 or 1937 that Richard adjured me threads, many, but its time, like Malory's to "read Powys's A Glastonbury Romance, book and the romances of the medieval his Autobiography and his Pleasures of period, is the 1920s, 1930s, our present time, Literature—just those three, but especially all times. A Glastonbury Romance!" I did so accord- ingly. Of its many narrative threads Richard It will be recalled that at Dean Close, selected the story of Mr Evans for special apart from a little dutiful attention to Swift focus. Evans's sadistic obsession fascinated and Scott, and to passing mentions of Emily Richard for it corresponded with an Bronte, Herman Melville, Hardy and obsession Richard had that was certainly not Conrad, the whole of our literary discourse sadistic but in some opposite way related—a 62 G. Wilson Knight: His Life and Work fear of exposure and a horror of pain. For Penurious days. Yet Oxford. Then Dean Close: his part Powys, the creator of Mr Evans, But with the Myth and Miracle, the gaze acknowledging "Cosmic Correspond- Into the whelming furnace; next the fire ences" owned that sadistic fantasies had Itself of a Wheel of Fire that was Shakespeare haunted and tormented him over very many Tragic. A key. Key book. And bringing fame As you pursued right through the Imperial years. Certainly Richard's acting of Timon, where he insisted in the finale on presenting Theme. Canada. Hart House. Atlantic. Into the loom himself in the nude, his concentration on And fed the threads of Dante, Goethe, Paul Byron's biography, and his devotion to J. And your own comprehensive parable C.Powys's books and especially^ Glaston- Or Crossing, for your own Atlantic voyage bury Romance were somehow closely Was a voyage of both kinds, like the large linked, but his attraction to that book led to Journey of Dante into hell, purgatory— his mastery of the whole oeuvre. Misery, then hope, then last—the joy "Cosmic Correspondences" led to the You have well earned. For, following a Tempest support of other distinguished men of letters Music ensues, and now the music most You should securely relish. Overcome for the claims for John Cowper Powys. The Is opposition's fury, and the drumm- review, followed by other articles and ing roll of fear, of flinch, distracting blame books, interpretative studies, did in truth an Of those who blindfold struck against your enormous service in promoting the fame of vision. Powys. A fame justly deserved and long And others: Spenser, Milton, Pope and Byron delayed. And Marlowe, Lyly, Coleridge, Tennyson: Powys himself was of course delighted. Their essence you've revealed. More, for the He owned (letter 32) "there will never be Dome another plunge into the depth of my soul like of poetry you've made Starlit to make our home. this". That world was yours made ours. And as for Members of the Powys Society, your late prose: President, my great friend G. Richard Nietzsche and Powys—you're harmonizing those. Wilson Knight was a genius, the most With spirits of the Great you've made compacts powerful thinker on literature of this Shared their profoundest insights in their acts: century. As a person he was sweet- Poems of life and death. And hence the facts tempered, had a delightful sense of humour, Of your own theatre deeds—which are contracts was patient, for he had known suffering, Between a man and superman: diadems was generous, and was unswervingly loyal to Of times and place, transcending place and his vision. times.

* * * You have Neglected Powers redeemed. And Francis, In September 1978, in celebration of his eightieth Who, for your eightieth birthday, has written birthday, I was asked to compose some lines in thus honour of G. R. Wilson Knight. The following Is one in whom you trust, whose work shall last lines were recited and the manuscript then pre- Lifted to honour like an Iron Christ. sented to Knight at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter. The piece is a condensed biography and G. Wilson Knight 'rejoice', as Jack would say, the numerous words in italics refer to some of And celebrate a happy day and a birthday Wilson Knight's publications. At the house called Caroline. Your genius Is now an endowment of our literature's, Sutton, Dulwich, office-work, the Army, and On this occasion, Richard, here's a homage Motorcycles, marvels, enemies and sand, Chess and Kasvin, or India and Iraq, To one who's served rare Vision with rare Then mathematics, prep schools, and the dark Courage. Reviews

Selected Poems, GILLIAN CLARKE.

Carcanet Press, 1985, £2.95 (paperback).

For Gillian Clarke the Sheila na Gig at Kilpeck is not a whore but a mothering earth goddess: Not lust but long labouring absorbs her, mother of the ripening barley that swells and frets at its walls. Somewhere far away the Severn presses, alert at flood-tide. And everywhere rhythms are turning their little gold cogs, caught in her waterfalling energy. Gillian Clarke The little gold cogs of this poet's waterfalling energy find rhythms wherever there is birth or Two rooms, waking and sleeping, death. These late days of the twentieth century Two languages, two centuries of past have not made it easy for poetry to sing of eternal To ponder on, and the basic need things, so one must suppose that Gillian Clarke's To work hard in order to survive. daring to do so is either naivete or a deliberate decision to fly in the face of fashion. There is a There, at the end of "Blaen Cwrt" is the essence third alternative, however, and this no doubt is of Wales itself: its small size and its large ambition, the real source of her courage: I refer to her its circle of elements and its long past; above all, evident and very powerful Welshness. its demand for human satisfaction: "To work hard in order to survive". Since Dylan Thomas there has not been such If Gillian Clarke has worked hard on these an exuberant Welsh poet writing in English. poems, signs of labour are rarely evident. She Roland Mathias is perhaps the nearest equival- has a seemingly natural gift for metaphor, never ent, but he is intellectual and referential in a way allowing a poem to be overbalanced by an image, that relates more to the Welsh-language trad- and yet getting the "feel" exactly right. ition, whereas Gillian Clarke (although she Climbing down to a waterfall in a stream, she knows the language) is faithfully self-referent. comments: She writes almost entirely from her experience, and it is her especial gift to be able to make that Closer to crisis the air put cold silk experience ours. Even the earliest among these Against our faces and the cliffs streamed Selected Poems speak from the particular to the With sun water, caging on every gilded general. A cow gives birth to a calf in a field: Ledge small things that flew by mistake Into the dark spaces behind the rainbows. . . . Hot and slippery, the scalding Baby came, and the cow stood up, her cool It's the sensuous Tightness of "cold silk" that Flanks like white flowers in the dark. communicates the experience there. Of a ram's skull found in the Brecon Beacons, she says: With those white flowers, suddenly the whole experience is intimate; we have seen just such a The blue of his eyes is harebell. cow. Again, a cottage in the deep country Mortality gapes in the craters of his face. Buzzards cry in the cave of his skull . . . has all the first And a cornucopia of lambs is bleating Necessities for a high standard Down the fan of his horns. Of civilised living: silence inside A circle of sound, water and fire, The pun on "Fan" is deliberate, and effectively Light on uncountable miles of mountain presents both landscape and ram. But more From a big, unpredictable sky, noticeable is the generosity of "cornucopia of 64 Reviews lambs", and later the implied glory of "The sun home from the future" which may "take a gen- that creams / The buzzard's belly as she treads eration to arrive"—that is, which may reach her air / Whitens his forehead". The implied philo- children or her grandchildren. In a sense, then, sophy (always implied, never preached) is that the details of the narration, the descriptions, the Nature is abundant even in death. I don't think particulars of home and parish, are presented in there exists a book of poems today so abundant such a way as to belong to all generations—and in its imagery or so generous in its acceptance of not only to Welsh generations, but more uni- the world as it is. versally to everybody's whose imagination and If there is fault to be found in these poems, it is experiences of living she can touch. There is a perhaps that there is too much abundance, too frightening (well, it can be frightening) expanse much acceptance. Like Peter Redgrove, whom of time and space around this poem which will Gillian Clarke resembles in other ways, there is give the lie to any theory of women being able little room to deal with evil in her vision of the only to write small poems. And yet the poem is world. Of sorrow, however, she is unsparing. In about small things—deliberately. And what is so one of her finest poems, "White Roses", a boy is terrifying about small things? I suppose they are dying in a' 'green velvet sitting room" outside of terrifying because they are always with us; they which "white roses bloom after rain". It is a are real in a way big ideas, perhaps, are not. scene painted by Bonnard, bright, domestic in its In a sense, then, Gillian Clarke, by clinging to details: a cat in natural association with "pain's orthodoxies, by remaining a woman with a red blaze'', the least spark of which will burn the woman's view of what matters and what boy "like a straw". The final stanza withdraws happens to people, has initiated a new form of from the scene with hearbreaking tact: "feminism" which in no way attempts to compete with "maculinism". (The very word The sun carelessly shines after rain. sounds ridiculous!) Her strength is her belief in The cat tracks thrushes in sweet her own view and her faith in its importance—its dark soil. And without concern eternal importance, if you like. To my mind, she the rose outlives the child. has written a poem of the first political In poems like this about children, animals, life, magnitude, as well as one of the great women's death, Gillian Clarke draws from the ancient poems of any time. springs of poetry without any touch of senti- Carcanet Press is to be congratulated for mentality. How? How does she manage to treat bringing out these Selected Poems at an themes many other poets would ruin with over- extremely reasonable price, so that they are writing (or clever evasion) so directly, and still available to everyone—schools, students, men move us? Perhaps it's because she is perfectly and women all over Britain. They deserve to be honest and in earnest about what she writes, as read and re-read. well as about the way she writes. Emphasis on technique and originality among contemporary ANNE STEVENSON poets has occasioned a pervasive disregard of the obvious subjects. Or too often a poet, fearful of generalizing, will confront us with details that When Was Wales?: A History of the Welsh, are too private for communication. Gillian GWYN A. WILLIAMS. Clarke's poems are private, personal, domestic —and yet they generalize perpetually. Perhaps Black Raven Press, 1985, £12.95. one definition of poetry would be "that form of language which best generalizes through the Wales: A History, particular". WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS. Gillian Clarke, for instance, lists the paupers in the "black book of the parish" along with the Michael Joseph, 1985, £12.95. recipe for her "best bread" in her most remarkable poem to date, "Letter From a Far Would two works such as these usually be Country". It is not clear who the "I" of this reviewed together? A closely argued academic poem is, but it is surely evident whom that "I" is work and a "profusely illustrated" popular intended to represent. She..." I"... is a Welsh account of the history of Wales? Perhaps not, woman now, looking back to her forebears, yet a comparison is invited, even demanded, by Welsh women of the past, sending them a "letter the circumstances of their genesis. They appear- Reviews 65 ed on the same day at the same price, to coincide for his interest in Wales, is absent from the index with the broadcast of the Channel 4 / S4C series and barely mentioned in the text—yet is warranted The Dragon Has Two Tongues which the two a full colour-plate portrait. The "Celts and authors presented together. The idea must have Romans" chapter carries an eighteenth-century looked good on paper: two contrasting views of drawing of a druid which, the caption admits, the same events, with the audience left to make bears "no relation to reality"—so why include it up its own mind. Professor Williams lending here? The book overflows with images; the re- academic weight; Mr Vaughan-Thomas, a fam- productions of paintings by Turner and Sandby, iliar "talking head". In the event, the prog- Richard Wilson and Ceri Richards are welcome, rammes were more bizarre than provocative: but many of the other pictures seem present imagine a history of England presented by A. J. merely to fill space, to break up the text: P. Taylor with Alastair Burnett trailing at his Jemima Nicholas's memorial-stone? The side, continually breaking in, "... great pageant Mansell family tomb? In this policy of a-picture- of history . . . mother of parliaments. . . chang- at-all-costs the book shares a flaw of the medium ing of the guard . . . Bard of Avon". Despite from which it sprang: television. protestations that he was no professional histor- As with The Dragon Has Two Tongues, as ian, Mr Vaughan-Thomas paradoxically came indeed with the televisual presentation of any over as the more authoritative, orthodox figure subject, there occurs a simplistic visual bias by on the screen (revealing his true professional which significance is invested in a thing relative milieu). Professor Williams, meanwhile, gave to its suitability as a television-tube projection. the strong impression of a scruffy, eccentric little BBC and ITN news programmes have long been bolshie whom his companion kept as a pet (bely- accused of irresponsibility in choosing and editing ing his true reputation as an eminent historian). news-items according to this criterion, but even a The series was described by one reviewer as a not-bad historical programme such as Time- Welsh Last of the Summer Wine with this odd watch (BBC 2) is afflicted by a similar tendency couple strolling past every historical site and to be dominated by the "picturesque" resulting beauty-spot in the country, querulous to the last. in a cruder rather than subtler analysis of the The producers evidently encouraged them to be subject. It is an inescapable problem of the argumentative in order to make "good tele- medium, one which the series did not solve and vision"; the effect, however, was merely irritat- one which is shared by this book. ing. One strongly suspected that here were two A distinction not made often enough these people not greatly in disagreement but play- days is that between' 'history'' and' 'chronicle": acting in front of a camera. The dialectical the former discussing, analysing and interpret- opposition on which the series was built was ing the past; the latter chronologically listing specious, and this unfortunately flawed the events from this past. Mr Vaughan-Thomas's whole project. Far more satisfactory is it then, to book undoubtedly falls into the second category. read separately these books which accompanied This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course—some the series, without the authors being set at each of our oldest and most valued historical docu- other like fighting cocks. ments, after all, are chronicles—but in a work To take Mr Vaughan-Thomas's book first, it which purports to be a history, there is a strong is important to judge the work by its intentions. impression of "one damn thing after another", The introduction states clearly that the author with a hint of 1282 and All That. The major has "no pretensions to being an expert"; his "events", battles, personalities of an era are "modest purpose" is to encourage interest in given, marks apportioned (Henry VII was a persons "coming to Welsh history for the first good thing) and a line drawn before the next era time'' and the book is "designed as a companion thus begun. But life isn't like that. How many of to the series". In this "modest" aim it certainly us, as we grow older, have begun to see our own succeeds, with a product which will not displease past re-presented and distorted in this way? the Wales Tourist Board. The book is literally a One's own memories of the nineteen-sixties, for "hard-copy" version of the images which made example, bear no relation to the usual zany, up the television series; it is packed with pictures, frenetic, psychedelic presentation of them on many of them colour plates—twenty-eight of television (whoever really lived like that?). This castles alone. The illustrations dominate the book too reduces the life of a country to a series book, indeed sometimes have little connection of events, unrelated except insofar as one with the actual text. Charles II, hardly renowned follows another. Despite all the illustrations, 66 Reviews despite the "matey" tone (one can almost hear always stayed the same". This protean thesis is that fruity voice, familiar from so many chat- carefully developed and built up in a way that shows), this is a far less exciting and dramatic actually makes the country work, vivifying it as a book than Professor Williams's denser work. In hundred pictures could not. The illustrations are such a visual volume there are, surprisingly, far fewer than in Wales: A History, but all are none of the colourful block-graphs and pie- apt and often thoughtfully juxtaposed: charts now commonly used in popular works on Rourke's Drift and Bluff Cove; a solemn history and, even stranger, there is a single, far gorsedd and a not-so-solemn Cymdeithas yr from satisfactory, map. Typically, it carefully Iaith demonstration; an archetypal mam and marks every battle-site with crossed swords, but Welsh women protesters at Greenham uses a single symbol for prehistoric and Roman Common. There are too a series of seven author- sites. As if this conflation were not bad enough, itative and informative maps. The image of the map omits many important Roman sites, Wales he presents is a dynamic one: not a geo- even some mentioned in the text. Caerwent is graphical area in which one thing happens after marked, but not Carmarthen, which as MORI- another, but a crucible in which many volatile DUNUM had equal status as a civitas. The elements are constantly interacting: the land; the importance of Roman mineral exploitation at economy; the very different peoples within Dolaucothi and Parys is stressed in the "Celts Wales and their relations with each other, with and Romans" chapter, but no hint of this from England, with the Irish Sea community and with the map. The temporary auxiliary fortress at Y Europe. Pigwn is marked, but not those at Brecon, Caer This Wales is a dirtier, more vicious and less Gai, Caernarfon, Carsws, Gelligaer, Llanio, cosy place than Wynford Vaughan-Thomas's. Caer Gybi, Pennal and Trawscoed. The crucially There is none of that hygienic reverence for the important legionary fortresses at Chester and past familiar from tourist-board publications Caerleon also go unmarked. and encouraged by even so worthy a place as When the battles run out, Mr Vaughan- Saint Fagan's Folk Museum. Professor Thomas seems to lose interest. The treatment of Williams reminds us of the huge shanty-towns Welsh culture and politics in the twentieth which sprang up in South Wales during the nine- century especially, is very superficial. A brief teenth century—as lawless and as squalid as account of Plaid Cymru is mostly taken up with those of present-day Mexico City or Sao Paulo— an account of the Penrhos incident of 1936. The where life expectancy was just twenty years. He body of writing known as "Anglo-Welsh Liter- stresses the stark choice which awaited most ature" is quite ignored but for a portrait of— Welsh women there: hard industrial labour guess who?—Dylan Thomas. Not even a alongside the men, or being drafted into the vast mention in passing for W. H. Davies, Edward army of domestic servants. It is pleasing too, Thomas, Caradoc Evans, the Powys brothers, when reading of familiar things, to be surprised Alun Lewis, Vernon Watkins, Richard Hughes, by new facts: how long Roman patterns of R. S. Thomas, Emyr Humphreys. The biblio- agrarian economy and legal practices persisted graphy is adequate; the index cursory. One (into the eighth century); that the total popul- might ask, without sarcasm, who actually buys ation of Wales never exceeded half a million books like this? until the eighteenth century; that as late as the Professor Williams's book is most definitely 1951 census, the majority of Welsh-speakers history rather than chronicle and, as such, were actually in the south-east. We are reminded succeeds in a way that is as exciting as it is inform- also of the vital importance to Wales of that ative. It stands by itself, apart from the television most despised and ignored stratum of society, series, and has its germ in a public lecture of 1979 the lower-middle class. Both as forces of change also entitled When Was Wales! Professor and of reaction, the 'shopocracy' as the author Williams has a thesis: that there is not a single, calls them—the shopkeepers, craftsmen and continuous thing which can be called "Wales", minor professional people—have played a about which any assumptions may be made, but crucial part in our history. that each generation makes and re-makes its own One of the most impressive aspects of this version dependent on circumstances. "The book is its willingness to discuss things not often presiding spirit of Welsh history", he writes, admitted or faced up to in Wales. It is greatly to "has been the shape-shifter Gwydion the the author's credit that he takes on this often Magician, who always changed his shape and thankless task. As Caradoc Evans protested in Reviews 67 vain, "I do not hate my people. I like them well treatment of politics, culture and literature in the enough to criticize them". The unsentimental twentieth century is extensive and sensitive. The tone of When Was Walesl is set up by two bleak change in Plaid Cymru, for example, from a poems by R. S. Thomas: "Welsh History", near-fascist party to one broadly socialist in out- quoted at the opening of the book and ""The look is carefully and honestly charted. The Welsh Hill Country", quoted at its close. Prof- Welsh Labour Party, however, is not granted the essor Williams notes the prominent part treach- same forgiveness for its complacent and often ery has played in our history: Owain Glyndwr, oligarchic past in South Wales. "Not since the he writes, is quite unique in that no one ever 1940s could the Labour Party seriously have betrayed him; "there is no parallel in the history been considered a socialist party'', he writes, and of the Welsh". He recognizes how much we that is that. One senses a note of very personal think of as Welsh is the product of bourgeois disillusion. mythologizing in the last century. The tone of Professor Williams concludes with a night- modern eisteddfodau, particularly the Eistedd- mare vision of the way Wales might easily go: fod Genedlaethol, he insists, was created by the Victorian middle class who took a working-class A Costa Bureaucratica in the south and a event (often staged at a public house) and Costa Geriatrica in the north; in between, imbued it with their own sentimentality, sheep, holiday homes burning merrily away snobbery and superficial patriotism. Really, it and fifty folk museums where there used to be was a massive translation into Welsh of what communities. might be called "Pooterish'' English culture, the middle-brow values of which have persisted to Early in 1984, when the book was completed, this day. one might have agreed with this bitterly elegiac picture—all too credible as more and more of There is, too, the hot potato of language in Britain is transformed into an "olde worlde" Wales. Professor Williams is at pains to empha- parody of itself, a "tasteful" Disneyland on a size that the "Englishing" of the country has had franchise to the National Trust. The Miners' a positive effect which it would be churlish to Strike of 1984-85, however, provoked a show of ignore. "No one can miss", he writes,' 'the sense unity and vitality in Welsh communities few of liberation which swept over many young would have thought possible any longer. Across people at this time on being admitted to a world barriers of language, geography, politics and language of infinite scope". The abrupt class there was an unprecedented rallying around widening of horizons, from the Edwardian the South Wales miners. It was, ironically, a period especially, he sees as an extension of the Tory government which united and radicalized Americanizing of European culture in the twent- the Welsh as no one else could have done. We are ieth century: "In many ways the 'anglicization' now, it seems, in a period described by that most of popular Wales . . . was a function of the ancient and malevolent of Chinese curses, "May Americanization of popular England". As a you live in interesting times". For an under- "Dowlais boy", the author recognizes how the standing of "interesting times" past and present "arrogant or paranoid" elitism of those who in Wales, one could do no better than turn to this would exclude the English-speaking majority excellent book. from being truly Welsh has produced a bitter legacy of antagonism in the south, dividing the country. A prominent nationalist, he shows a PAUL BENNETT MORGAN keen awareness of how these dragons' teeth were reaped in the devolution referendum of 1979. There is, lastly, the claustrophobia of Wales, "a Paddock Calls, small country where everyone seems to know JOHN COWPER POWYS. everyone else and interests are often parochial, hermetic and suffering". Simply by articulating Greymitre Books, 1984. these negative features, Gwyn Alf Williams does his country a service and participates in the slow In his introduction to what is possibly—except- process of understanding and reconciliation ing a dramatization of Dostoievsky's "The which has begun to take place between the Welsh Idiot"—John Cowper Powys's only surviving and English-speaking communities of the land. play, Charles Lock makes a bold claim. In any In contrast to Wales: A History, this work's assessment of Powys's achievement, he says, 68 Reviews "this play will have to figure, not as an oddity Were we to credit Browne with a modicum of that compromises the novels but, rather, as an critical intelligence we might conclude that accomplished and major work that adds to Powys's plays were at most indifferent in quality Powys's stature". and that Powys himself was merely acknow- Apart from its rather tendentious urgency, the ledging his capacity for aberrant infatuation statement has a compression of assertions and when he suggests in his Autobiography that assumptions which do not rest easily together. writing for the theatre was, as Charles Lock a There is no reason why the potential "oddity" of little sceptically puts it, "a minor diversion from the piece should "compromise" Powys's novels, the main business of becoming a novelist". or any other aspect of his work, any more than Minor diversion or not, it is John Cowper the novels of Henry James are reduced by his himself, in a letter to Llewelyn, who invites "dramatic" writings. Paddock Callste certainly comparison of Paddock Calls with a further token of Powys's variety; whether it Rosmersholm and Hedda Gabler—"those Ibsen will be regarded as "accomplished" and things"—and the invitation is rather rash (Ibsen "major" and as adding to his "stature" remains generally produced a play every two years; to be seen. My own view is that it will not. Powys apparently dashed this one off in three The subject of Powys's early relationship with weeks, in September 1922). drama is, unfortunately, a nebulous one and it is Charles Lock notes a similarity in the estab- difficult to build a detailed or convincing picture lishment of an off-stage location at the begin- of his real involvement with the theatre. We have ning of both Paddock Calls and Rosmersholm as relatively little to go on, and what we have tends "the centre of significance". But a telling differ- to confusion. Thus Charles Lock states at one ence is ignored. In Paddock Calls the nursery point that "For the next ten years (i.e. 1913- from which Lady Sark can see the sea—the sea in 1923)—years of extremely demanding lecturing which Undine Paddock is drowned (already a —drama was as important to Powys as fiction", tenuous link)—is just one of several off-stage and a little later that "Between 1917 and the rooms to which characters retire. It is not felt to summer of 1920 we hear from Powys very little have particular narrative or psychological sig- about play-writing". nificance. The sea, admittedly, has a strong Apart from the demands of lecturing, these invisible presence, but it is not particularized; ten years also saw the writing of the novels Wood there are references to the beach, to storms, ship- And Stone, Rodmoor and After My Fashion, as wrecks, seaweed-covered rocks, but no actual well as the "philosophical" works The War and spot is seen as a "focus of the action". Culture, The Complex Vision, The Art of In Rosmersholm, in contrast, we can Happiness and Psychoanalysis And Morality. immediately "observe", through Rebekka and We do not know exactly how important drama Mrs Helseth looking out of a window, Rosmer was to Powys at this time, despite incidental taking the mill-path ("again") and, more sig- enthusiasm in letters. We do not know how nificantly, avoiding the foot-bridge: many plays he wrote, nor their titles or subject- matter; still less their quality. MRS HELSETH: Of course it must come hard for the master to cross over Given the unsatisfying (though nonetheless that bridge. A place where a credible) explanation that Powys's interest in the thing like that's happened, theatre ceased abruptly in 1923 when a pending it's . . . production of Paddock Calls was prevented by a REBEKKA: They cling to their dead a dispute between the play's commissioner and the theatre patron; given that "the limit of his long time here at Rosmer- success as a produced playwright" was a three- sholm. performance run in New York in 1922 of his MRS HELSETH: If you ask me, Miss, I think dramatization of' 'The Idiot'' (the novel already it's the dead that clings to an established "classic"); given, further, that Rosmersholm so long. Maurice Browne, who after all had made the It is from the foot-bridge that finally, with Mrs Little Theatre a "success", was John Cowper's Helseth, we glimpse Rebekka and Rosmer "intimate friend": is it not a little grudging to throwing themselves into the mill-race, by which refer accusingly to "Browne's behaviour" in time we have come to understand its particular rejecting each of the five or six unknown plays psychological import for both of them. Ibsen which Powys submitted between 1913 and 1917? immediately establishes a significant psycholo- Reviews 69 gical complexity, which not only informs the ALICE: Please don't walk up and mythopoeic development of the main characters down like that! The room but legitimizes the outcome of events. He is a isn't a platform! master of giving the inevitability of his climaxes DAVID: (standing still, trembling a sense of dramatic "rightness", by eliminating with rage): Platforms are my the validity of possible alternatives. lifel Undine Paddock drowns in the sea by slippery ALICE: Don't David—I shall laugh rocks, but there is little sense that her death is and I don't want to laugh! dramatically necessary or that some impelling DAVID: Well! You mock at a man's principle would have been violated had she died work! in a different way, or had the action proceeded (speaks peevishly) along another course. Her death comes out of Platforms] I can't help there the blue and, whilst Powys veils the circumstan- having to be platforms, can ces in typical ambiguity, it creates as many dram- I? atic tensions as it relieves. Certain things have ALICE: (bursting into an uncontrol- been resolved but only temporarily, and a sense lable fit of laughter—and obtains that the play has been left hanging in mid- speaking gaspingly): Plat- air. forms] Oh, David you're Unlike most of Ibsen's, Powys's characters too funny! Platforms! are defined not only by their personal peculiar- ities but also by their dependence on another Elsewhere Powys's dogmatism is contextually character. The play owes much of its cohesion to credible, and memorable, as when the sensualist the fact that the superficial couplings are seen in Sir Robert advises his son, "Don't you see that relation to, and are threatened by, deeper, more the best that any of us can do in this mad world is sinisterly intimate ones: Alice and David by to watch a few sunrises and a few sunsets without Alice and Sir Robert; Horton and Betty by too much malice and stupidity—and then go Horton and Lady Sark; Sir Robert and Lady back where we came from, without making too Sark by Sir Robert and Undine. much fuss!". Accordingly, however, this tends to weaken But such moments are the exception rather the tragic stature of the characters (it is, of than the rule. The Odcombes become irritatingly course, questionable that Powys set out to write intrusive: Durnie's "Norway Niggers" is as a "tragedy"). Alice Sark, for example, in some unrealistic as it is unfunny, likewise Jane's aspects of her nature and situation, bears some "Don't 'ee, my buzzard! Don't 'ee, my piffin! resemblance to Hedda Gabler. In frustration her Don't 'ee, for Holy Gammon's Sake!". This is introspection is exteriorized, humorously John Cowper writing letters to Llewelyn. verbalized. David Jones bores Alice as much as Allowing for tonal variations, nearly all the Tesman bores Hedda. But unlike Hedda, whose characters speak in the same way: emphatically ironies can be as overt as they like and always go and repetitively. Vocatives bombard us— unnoticed, Alice seems to be intuitively under- "dear", "dearest", "darling", and "sweet- stood by her father, and also by Horton, and can heart" occur over sixty times in as many pages. always fall back on them. Add "mother", "father", "daddy", "child", There are good things in Paddock Calls, none- "my little Betty", "you silly little boy", and so theless. The scenes between Alice and David, forth, and the effect is one of almost intolerable and Paddock and Undine, have psychological monotony. Ibsen cared for the ear as well as the subtlety. The "seance" which opens the final intellect. scene—a prelude to the arrival of Paddock and A profusion of exclamation marks is to be Sir Robert with the body of Undine—is handled expected in Powys (I dare not count the number with economy and humour. There are moments in Paddock Calls]). In performance one can tone of genuine comedy, as when the servant Durnie down the exclamatory, but one can do little with Odcombe's contempt for the politician David the plethora of rhetorical questions by which dis- Jones takes the form of a jig and a ditty behind course is moved along in this play (in Rosmer- his wife's back, an amusing contrast to his sholm people admit to not understanding). One unquestioning respect for the gentry. Or this person on a platform speaking in this way might (self-regarding) exchange between Alice and hold an audience for an hour and a half (cf. David: Louis Marlow's essay on John Cowper in Seven 70 Reviews Friends for this span of attention); ten characters begun what was meant to be a period of conval- on a stage might be less fortunate. escence. Soon Valentine too had "what we knew Nevertheless, Greymitre's limited edition of as 'Powys Mania' very severely: everything all of Paddock Calls is welcome (one could have them said was beautiful and wise and true". She wished for fewer typing errors) and it may be that especially revered Theodore, whose restrained some of my reservations would be dispelled in comment on Valentine's husband Richard, who performance, though I do not share Charles had come to Chaldon to ''take her back", dealt, Lock's belief that any director stumbling across as Valentine saw it, the death blow to the a copy "should count himself privileged". marriage. "God had spoken", she says, "I In a letter to Llewelyn, quoted in the intro- cheerfully obeyed". duction, John Cowper writes, "But it is some- Chaldon, at first a bolt-hole, became more thing of a play, Lulu, and I feel now that I really and more Valentine's home and by 1930 she was could write more plays"; and elsewhere, "I living there permanently, sharing the late Miss enjoy this play-writing, you know. I think it suits Green's cottage with the writer Sylvia Townsend my style very well". It is interesting to note Warner. Almost six foot tall, boyishly slim, be- Henry James writing about his plays in similar trousered and Eton-cropped, with the androg- vein to his brother: "I feel at last as if I had found ynous adopted name of "Valentine" (her real my real form, which I am capable of carrying name was Mary or "Molly") she fuelled a long- far, and for which the pale little art of fiction, as running debate in the village about her sex, a I have practised it, has been, for me, but a limited debate too entertaining ever to be satisfactorily and restricted substitute". At that point in his concluded. Late in 1930, Sylvia, the owner of the life James, like Powys, had not "practised" cottage, moved in. Within a week they had fiction a great deal. become lovers and were to live together—bar a In his essay "The Plays Of Henry James", few months—for the remaining thirty-nine years Graham Greene notes that out of his failure with of Valentine's life. But Sylvia doesn't come in to this medium came the great novels: "He was this strange memoir as much as one would never so much of a dramatist as when he had expect. She is mentioned a few times (always in ceased to have theatrical ambitions". On the sole the most reverential tones—the book was written evidence of Paddock Calls, this statement seems during a crisis period) but the main part of the to me equally apposite of Powys, and it is with narrative deals with Valentine's childhood and this in mind that one anticipates a publication of adolescence and the progress of her "drink prob- his dramatization of "The Idiot". lem", a semi-mystical delivery from which provides the book's starting-point. ANTHONY HEAD Valentine makes a great deal of this episode. One autumn night in 1947, having been drinking so that she is "scarcely sensible except of sickness and despair" she falls on her knees by For Sylvia: An Honest Account, her bed "and—with this vertiginous black Eter- VALENTINE ACKLAND. nity surrounding me—addressed Emptiness like this: 'Is God there?' "No reply forthcoming, she Chatto and Windus, 1985, £8.95. goes to sleep, wakes with a dreadful hangover, but by the next evening has become convinced Valentine Ackland was nineteen and on the run that some mysterious transformation has been from an unconsummated first marriage when wrought. " I suddenly realised that I was walking she first went to stay in East Chaldon, Dorset, in in tranquility and with perfect confidence; and 1925. She went there with a girl who was part of a that tranquility and assurance has never left London-based "arty" set which took cottages in me", she writes, two years later. This spiritual the village and had made something of a local crisis seems to have made Valentine take hold of guru of Theodore Powys. At the time, the place her life almost for the first time, but it was was full of Powyses: Gertrude and Katie lived at critical in another, more far-reaching way she Chydyock, Llewelyn and Alyse at White Nose, did not then realise, being the first step of her re- so a five or six mile round trip would take in them entry into the Catholic Church, an undertak- all. Valentine was duly sent on this pilgrimage ing which was to traumatize her relationship the first morning of her stay, ending up at Beth with Sylvia far more than any amount of drink- Car dazed and exhausted, as she had only just ing or casual infidelity could have done. Reviews 71 It is very difficult to judge just how bad Val- reports the "affair" to the Ackland parents after entine's drinking was. She certainly thought of it reading Valentine's love letters: as a severe problem, indicative of her own spirit- ual emptiness, her lack of goodness. She des- On the morning of the day we were to leave cribes herself as a dipsomaniac, but the actual for Eastbourne . . . my father came into my quantities she mentions drinking at her worst room as I was packing and began to question- periods hardly merit the description. As with her me, severely and furiously, about my re- definition of poverty (three hundred a year in lationship with L. I did not understand at all 1927), one senses an exaggerated response and a what he was trying to find out. I told him that readiness to despair which colours everything we were in love. else in her autobiography. The reverse coin of I remember very vividly the expression of this was her equal readiness to rejoice. Her disgust on his face. easily-ecstatic sensibility was set alight by the He became very angry indeed—much smallest things and she was especially sensitive, angrier than I had ever seen him before. He one could perhaps say vulnerable, to natural asked if I knew what a filthy thing I had been beauty. It was this side of her nature which made doing? I answered, No, it had not been at all her poetry essentially celebratory and which filthy. It was something very strange, but not informs it with a desire "to capture and tranfix at all wrong. I thought one or other of us must the true character of the elusive, fleeting have been wrongly made—He asked furiously moment" as Bea Howe says in her excellent what I meant? I said that L. ought to have introduction. It also, later on, made her a form- been a man; I thought she must have been one idably spiritual Christian. in a previous incarnation—He muttered something and rushed out of the room. The story of her childhood and youth is told in rather an off-hand way, rushed along as if it had After this, Valentine's parents never seem to no importance other than "to explain the drink- believe any good of her again, and of course, she ing" . But it is a story of remarkable passivity and soon begins to understand what they suspect her resilience. "I wonder if anyone in the world was of, and to live up to their expectations. Forced to ever so idiotically vile as I was, for the best part part from the innocent first love and keen to of my youth", she says, typically self-deprecat- prove that there is nothing "unnatural" about ing, though the real villains of the piece are her her, she takes her sister's advice and, in the wake nearest and dearest; a rather morose, preoc- of her father's death, becomes engaged to a cupied father, an unpleasantly pious Anglo- planter in Java whom she has not seen since she Catholic mother and a jealous older sister whose was eleven. Meanwhile, a twenty-eight year-old early life seems to have been devoted to making a woman has made love to her: "and this time not mess of Valentine's. This sister had an uncanny to me innocent but to me sullied by reproaches knack of finding things out, and would report and arguments and misapprehensions, but as back regularly to the parents, who must have ignorant as ever; for I knew nothing about les- been very insensitive or negligent or both, as they bianism, except that now I knew it existed and often left Valentine in the "care" of the sadistic was, instead of being something that had mirac- Joan and a succession of frightful nurses while ulously happened to me alone, something almost they were away, which was often. As in a night- commonplace, and something that aroused mare, Valentine would be forced to appear to be loathing and vituperation". This affair lasted in the wrong, and, being a scrupulously honest for six years, right up to the time Valentine began child and always able to find some portion of living with Sylvia Townsend Warner, and prov- blame for herself, was never able to defend her- ided Valentine with some semblance of stability self convincingly. She was also always hoping and continuity during a period when she broke that her sister would suddenly turn into the the first engagement, hurrriedly married a loving companion she craved. homosexual man, left him, became pregnant by Being a lonely and oppressed child meant that someone else, miscarried, got divorced and had Valentine threw herself into love hook, line and numerous extra liaisons, one with the dangerous sinker when the opportunity presented itself. Dorothy Warren. Some of her life as a Bright Her relief at falling in love, very innocently, with Young Thing is amusing to read about—the a nineteen year-old girl when she herself was events surrounding her marriage unintentionally fifteen, is rather painful to read about, though so—but for the most part the reader is relieved to not more so than the dreadful scene when Joan have her settle in Chaldon, trousers or no, and 72 Reviews relieved, too, that she happened to fall in love the guilt at his wife's suffering, they set up with the compassionate and strong-minded debilitating strains. Gamel too had her misgiv- Sylvia at the last. ings: a survivor of one meaningless marriage, she It is an unhappy book all in all, too personal came to see that, even if Llewelyn were able to for comfort. Valentine was obviously familiar, leave Alyse, her own chance of happiness with in theory if not in practice, with the methods and him was small. Had he not made it plain that language of psychoanalysis, and there is a rum- Alyse's well-being must come first? Her inatory, self-critical air to the narrative which, wretchedness as abandoned wife would forever despite purple passages and addresses to The haunt him. At bedrock he did not need Gamel, Reader, leave one thinking that this autobio- however compelling the sexual pull and finely graphy was not primarily intended for public- attuned their imaginative lives. At times she even ation. It reads more like an attempt to "set the felt him to be taking her lightly, with the talk of record straight" before Valentine embarked on her marrying Willie, if his brother were agree- her first serious, deliberate separation from able. Llewelyn was her "Master"; their roles Sylvia. I don't think, in the end, that it is possible were set; she could have no other position in his to read this book simply for the interesting nar- life. rative, the sense of "period", or even for the Even so, their break came suddenly, with sketches of the Powyses and their circle which it much misunderstanding. In the early letters, contains. Valentine's mind and Valentine's soul while trying to justify the separation, Gamel are the real subjects, and soon suck you in. writes with a moving sense of loss. "I don't know how it was but somehow our dreams got CLAIRE HARMAN mixed, and that little figure you loved is still following the horses' hoofs through bracken and POSTSCRIPT: Mrs Lucy Penny has pointed out over mud and stone and in the wash of the sea''. to me that the poem quoted at the end of the Meanwhile she has become attached to Gerald introduction to An Honest Account is not by Brenan, a man much smitten, sensitive to Valentine Ackland but Mary Casey, Mrs Gamel's swirling emotions and patient enough Penny's daughter. She and Valentine used to to endure her painful withdrawal from the send each other their poems, and papers Master's "irresponsible Gothic universe". obviously got mixed up at some time. Whatever their secret need for each other, Gamel and Llewelyn must no longer hurt Alyse, nor will C. H. she hurt Gerald. "You see he feels as you told me Alyse made you feel always, not alone any more, that terrible cosmic isolation gone at last". With The Letters of Gamel Woolsey to Llewelyn Gerald Brenan, Gamel is needed as a wife is Powys, 1900-1939, needed; she feels married, a state Llewelyn could Edited by KENNETH HOPKINS. never induce. Quickly she settles into domestic life, talking Warren House Press, 1983, £10.50. of houses, visitors, Gerald's journalism, Llew- elyn's writings and, more frequently as the years The Collected Poems of Gamel Woolsey, move on, his tragically declining health. This is Introduced by GLEN CAVALIERO. no literary correspondence: there are embedded quotations, references to a few books read, one Warren House Press, 1984, £12.75. vivid impression of Virginia Woolf ("half like a gaunt bird, half like a Victorian spinster"), and By the time these letters begin the high summer on Edmund Blunden a judgment so unequivocal of Gamel Woolsey's involvement with Llewelyn that Kenneth Hopkins must break editorial Powys had passed. They first met in 1927, cover; yet her own poetry is barely mentioned. quickly became lovers and embarked upon a She writes mostly from Spain, where she and menage which, precariously balanced and Gerald settled in 1932 and where they returned in always dependent on Alyse Gregory's tolerance, later years. Visitors continually search them out, could not possibly last. For not only Alyse was disrupting Gerald's work habits. "He has a inwardly distressed. The feelings released by this curious head which he controls with difficulty", young American poetess exceeded any that even comments Gamel, though after six weeks of the questing Llewelyn had known; mingled with Bertrand Russell she too is exhausted. "His Reviews 73 [Russell's] guiding forces are vanity & love of ence. Alyse likewise remained a lifelong friend power and to gratify them he wasted his amazing and we can now, so it seems, look forward to a talent for Mathematics and took to writing his companion volume of Gamel's letters to Alyse books on happiness and marriage, and all the Gregory. Warren House deserves encourage- subjects about which he so evidently knows ment in this for though not crucial to our under- nothing worth saying. But in many things he standing of the Powyses, the letters of Gamel shows great integrity of thought and character. Woolsey are rarely without interest. She writes And I admire him, only I can't really like him". vividly, at not too great a length, about the world Time mellowed her views and the Russells around her and her own emotional responses. became valued friends. "She had no respect for the truth", said Gerald By 1936 civil turmoil in Spain cast its shadow, Brenan, believing that she preferred to tell though the war years turned out for Gamel to be people what they wanted to hear. In matters of something of a liberation, a pulling away from the emotions, and in the affair of Gamel the tired web of human relations. Moderately Woolsey and Llewelyn Powys specifically, how safe at Churriana, protected by Leftist sympath- can we be certain of "the truth"? When she ies and expatriate status, she indulges at times an speaks of feeling needed, of her rescuing Gerald aesthetic appreciation of the conflict; the from "that terrible cosmic isolation", I believe bombing of the fleet is "very pretty to watch and we are hearing it, as when she writes courage- exciting", as is the orderly burning of Rightist ously of her behaviour with Llewelyn "having homes: "fires are so much finer at night. We spoiled forever what could have been secret and found it hard to sleep at all . . .". For fairer imaginative in his [Gerald's] relations with me". assessment of her attitude we need, of course, to Collected Poems comes as a surprise, for look at Death's Other Kingdom, the book (with Gamel Woolsey gains no place in any biograph- a preface by John Cowper Powys) she published ical dictionary of authors. In fact Grant in 1939 and which, despite its public themes, Richards published a selection, Middle Earth, in Gamel regarded as her best, her most personal 1931; "very handsome with heavy good paper work. "There is more feeling & more imagin- and a type I like". Gamel saw the enterprise as a ation in it—I don't mean in the facts, it is all only publisher's indulgence which she hoped would too true to what really happened—but in the not lose too much money—"but I expect it feeling about them ... it is the only thing I ever will". Kenneth Hopkins here reprints that much wanted to have published". The corres- volume, the only one published during her life- pondence suggests an awareness heightened by time, and four others issued in limited editions the turmoil around; Gerald writes regularly for by Warren House between 1977 and 1980. How the London newspapers and she too sends dis- these volumes relate to the chronology of patches, some of which, through Llewelyn's composition is uncertain—the poems are intervention, appear in the Daily Herald. undated—but clearly Gamel wrote steadily Political events in Britain count for little, though throughout her life. Aside from its biographical her dismay is complete when Edward VI interest, her poetry might easily be dismissed as threatens to step outside the mythic world we minor Georgian, conventionally gilded and expect our royals to inhabit. "I think a King of silvered ("silver rain", "silver tongue", "nights England ought not to wish to marry Mrs Ernest of silver and days of gold", "white as the silver Simpson, or if he does, not mention it. The in the swan", "silver grapes"; "silver cab- world is difficult enough". bages" even). But Glen Cavaliero's appreciative introduction points to genuine strengths, includ- There is less talk of the Powys family and ing "the quality of song". Gamel indeed has a friends than one might imagine; Gamel, we good ear and disciplines her lyricism by various remember, had never really known them as a technical challenges: the sonnet is a favoured group. She warms to the idea of Augustus John's form. Hers is a personal voice also, surprisingly painting Theodore (it badly needed publicity), so in its celebration of the erotic: keeps her distance from John Cowper (always "Mr Powys" to her), and is appalled by Llew- elyn's choice of Louis Wilkinson and Ann Reid Feeling this passion in the flesh as confidants. She herself chose Phyllis Playter Is beautiful beyond the dust, in this role and for Phyllis there is nothing but And men have toiled long lives apart admiration; though separated geographically For things not half so fair as lust. the two kept up regular intimate correspond- 74 Reviews We understand why Llewelyn was drawn. would gain from chronological presentation and Time passing changes the tone to inevitable it might be interesting to know of any prior melancholy, a resigned lament in the absence of appearances in periodical form. A first-line joy. As with the letters, the poems relate this index has been compiled, though departure from condition to feelings of alienation and a sense of the standard "nothing before something" rule loss, to the long limbo Gamel felt herself as does not make for easy consultation under letter inhabiting, with physical passion diminished I and T. Proofing oversights affect a few spell- and no significant other, no Llewelyn, likely to ings in the Letters, while in the Poems the sense emerge. of the penultimate line of the "Fern Hill" inspired "I was famous . . . among the barns" This bitterness, to be alone demands "cocks", in the plural. This is small When the soft winds begin to stir, beer. We are indebted to Kenneth Hopkins's When the sun higher rides the sky, commitment and industry for brining about two And something brightens in the air. further volumes from this not the least gifted Through all the winter I have lain member of the Powys circle. With unkissed mouth and empty eyes, Then sleeping deep have felt no pain, Have felt no wonder or surmise, JOHN HARRIS But only turned to sleep again. But now—O, empty are the skies Because I have not found a mouth Emma Hardy Diaries, To dream on mine; a bitter drouth Edited by RICHARD TAYLOR. Has sucked the springs and poisoned them, And poisoned all the summer mood, Mid Northumberland Arts Group and Carcanet Has slain the bird and starved her brood. New Press, 1985, £14.95. Glen Cavaliero mentions a toughness underlying In November 1912, shortly before her death, the nostalgia and the better poems express this Emma Hardy wrote the following brief poem quiet determination, the strength beneath an out of her misery with her illness and her bitter outward vulnerability. sense of neglect by her husband: Though you have altered my poor shape Oh! would I were a dancing child, I am more truly what I was. Oh! would I were again The crystal blown to leaf and grape Dancing in the grass of Spring Is still transparent shining glass. Dancing in the rain Leaping with the birds on wing Dark iron that the miners bring Singing with the birds that sing. From hidden caverns under earth Emerges still the cold hard thing Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford married in From clanging forge and molten birth. 1874 when both were 29 years old. They were married by Emma's uncle, Dr. Edwin Gifford, the then Canon of Worcester. This distinguished You twist and shape me to your will, family connection emphasizes both Emma's I bend to all the moods that pass; impeccable middle-class background and her But I am proud and secret still, strong links with the established church, factors And but more truly what I was. which led to increasing conflict between the A Complete Poems is apparently forthcoming couple in later years. Yet the lost "dancing but Gamel Woolsey's literary reputation would child" of the poem is present in many of the best be served by a judicious, positively pages of these diaries, still alive in the earlier less presented selection. complicated years of their marriage. On matters editorial, Kenneth Hopkins has The diaries contain Emma's rapid and rather arranged the hundred or so letters as near as haphazardly recorded observations and sketches possible chronologically, a task made especially (of which some of the latter, to my untutored difficult by the author's practice of dating none eye, seem quite skilfully executed), and cover the of them. Elsewhere the editorial hand is light and Hardys' travels in France (on their honeymoon, nicely informal. Brief explanatory notes follow September-October 1874); Holland, the Rhine most letters but there is no index. The poems and Black Forest (May-June, 1876); Italy Reviews 75 (March-April, 1887) and Switzerland (June- Whilst these comments reveal her sense of class July, 1897). Whilst it is difficult to agree with distinction, others are redolent of English prej- Richard Taylor's enthusiastic promotion of udice and of the prejudices of the age. She can them as "fascinating reading" since, as with take a child-like delight in the novelty of many diaries and journals not originally intend- unusually shaped door handles or gable-ends on ed for publication, they contain much that is Dutch houses, yet English xenophobia and inconsequential, mundane or merely tedious, middle-class fear of the mob inform her nevertheless they offer us glimpses of a personal- comments on the Tuileries: "It looks rather a ity who was not only interesting because she dull building—& now tells what a French mob happened to be Thomas Hardy's wife but also can effect ... it stands at present like a monu- interesting in her own right. Sometimes she ment of the 'rage of the heathen' " (p. 42). Not appeals as a wide-eyed observer of details of unexpectedly, she scorns the excesses of Catholic foreign life and manners, with an over-active art: "It is silly in effect all of it" (p. 102) is her interest in food (menu lists are a prominent judgment of the depiction of purgatory in St. feature of these diaries); sometimes as a writer Peter's Church, Antwerp. Nevertheless, that capable of distilling considerable effect through concern for religious orthodoxy which was so a graphic pictorial style. In addition to these important in determining her attitude to Jude the talents one feels she was sufficiently ordinary in Obscure impels her on a lightning tour of the her responses to stand as a representative of the principal churches of Milan and results in a Victorian middle-class Englishwoman abroad. lifting of spirits in Venice, when she records The truly "personal'' diaries of Emma—those ' 'Went to three churches Tuesday—I felt better" we should most have liked to read—were (p. 177). It is not clear whether Thomas accom- destroyed by Hardy after her death, the "sheer panied her or whether the following statement, hallucination" they contained, according to "T. H. toothache", indicates divine retribution her husband, being sufficiently potent to for his lack of interest. warrant their destruction. Intimate revelations Despite her fear of "rough persons", at times are not to be found in these surviving diaries; Emma reveals the formidable self-reliance that but, as Taylor rightly says in his introduction, Charlotte Bronte attributed through M. Paul in "They are personal in the best sense of almost Villette to the independent Englishwoman unconsciously exposing some of her perceptions abroad. Whilst in Rome Emma despatches—to of the world". In The Older Hardy (1978), the detriment of her umbrella—an importunate Robert Gittings threw considerable doubts on little shoe-black (p. 138), and records with the aprocryphal story of Emma's admonition to equanimity (if its brevity is evidence) the Hardy to "remember he had married a lady", presence of a "Wolf raging to and fro in a cafe yet these diaries furnish some evidence of halfway up the ascent [to the Capitol]" (p. 140). Emma's concern with class and her reverence for This same fearlessness fails her when she is social status. In Diary 2 (Holland, the Rhine and unable to commit the word "bugs" to paper in Black Forest) Emma records with satisfied describing the infestation of an Italian hotel bed emphasis that they were staying at "A very high (p. 141). class, rich hotel" (p. 83). On the return from Some of the rather thinly scattered delights of France (Diary 1), Emma is struck by the appear- this volume are unintentional—for example, ance of "the lady on the highest berth in the Emma's use of "gurgoyles" for "gargoyles" (p. Steamboat" who has "firm flesh and complex- 80), or the incongruous juxtaposition of detail, ion which can only belong to high-fed & as in "Words on grave-stone very pathetic Here comfortably-living people. The combination lies Keats who in the bitterness of his heart and grand". (Emma's underlining). In conjunction mind etc. Strings of bladders hanging up at with the worship of social elevation (symbolic- provision shops" (p. 145). In this context, the ally reinforced, one feels, by the height of the comment which most took my fancy was made berth!) is a scarcely concealed distrust of and on the Hardys' departure from Venice: "Very distaste for "common people". The lace weary in train", writes Emma, "severe chest workers in Brussels are described as "dull heavy cold from too much gondola at night" (p. 185). ugly weary looking women" (p. 94); on her descent from the tower of Milan Cathedral Of course, Emma may genuinely have thought Emma "felt fear by myself so descended rapidly "gurgoyles" was correct, and what I at first took —lest I should meet any rough person" (p. 187). to be a misprint in the transcript was indeed verified in the facsimile. In his introduction 76 Reviews Richard Taylor assures us that "The textual be disappointed, beyond a few hints of strain specialist need not be disappointed . . . since a arising from Thomas's impatience with Emma's facsimile of the diaries is reproduced in full" (p. physical weakness after long sight-seeing tours. 17). However, the facsimile proves useful not Ultimately, it is difficult to say who will benefit only to the "textual specialist" but to any reader from the publication of these diaries. Their wishing to check the accuracy of the transcript. intrinsic interest is neither sufficient to involve There are numerous typographical errors that the "general" reader, who looks for an enter- one would not expect to find in a relatively small- taining and vivid travelogue, or the "specialist" scale exercise of this kind, particularly when the who looks for further insight into the marital facsimile stands accusingly present throughout. problems of Mr and Mrs Thomas Hardy. It would be tedious to list them all, but within the first few pages one discovers "bue" for "blue" BARRIE SAYWOOD (p. 24), "billiant" for "brilliant" (clearly so in the facsimile, p. 47); and elsewhere in the text "fact" for "face" (p. 159) and "plust" for James Joyce, "plush" (p. 182). There are others. Clearly the "textual specialist" might well feel some disap- PATRICK PARRINDER. pointment. Checking the transcript may be the Oxford University Press, 1984, £20.00 (hard- justification for the facsimile! Beyond preser- back); £6.95 (paperback). ving some of the better sketches there seems little point in including a complete facsimile other Joyce has not been ignored. Critical explication than to increase the Iavishness of a volume that of his writings multiplies at an alarming rate; carries an impressive price-tag. £15 seems a great exegesis is piled upon exegesis. For teaching deal to pay for a book which reproduces the purposes the secondary books I find myself same material twice (with the exception of recommending are Sydney Bolt's A Preface to typographical variants). On the odd occasion James Joyce and Harry Blamires's The Blooms- when apparently genuine textual problems day Book: A Guide through Joyce's Ulysses. occur, as with the doubtful reading of a word Bolt reproduces as illustrations a page proof of from the diary on p. 64, "Saw a cigar ship iron— Ulysses with the author's corrections and a sheet [clads?] etc.", the facsimile clearly shows the of working notes for Finnegans Wake in the word to be "clads". The context of the phrase author's hand: the scantiest survey of Joyce's also makes it a perfectly sensible reading. Why is life, working habits, and awareness of his it, therefore, given the status of a "textual themes, obsessions and motifs reveals him as an problem"? obsessive reviser. The more myopic he became Robert Gittings has remarked, "The tradition the more he revised, the more he deconstructed of [Emma's] virtual illiteracy, so universally his own works. A succinct account with illumin- stressed by Hardy's biographers, aided by his ating illustrations of the state of, or rather the second wife, is simply not true" (Gittings, p. 63). on-going, shifting, moveable text of, Ulysses, is These diaries show the truth of that observation. found in Philip Gaskell's From Writer To In a period when the purchase of postcards was a Reader. There are remarkable parallels between substitute for the instamatic camera, Emma recent developments in Shakespearean textual (herself a frequent purchaser of postcards) is studies and Joycean textual exploration. Prior to revealed as having a good eye for pictorial effect, Hans Walter Gabler's Ulysses: A Critical and which she can translate verbally. Of the Venus in Synoptic Edition published on Bloomsday 1984, the Capitol museum in Rome, she says: and in the making for seven years, there had been ten previous editions of Ulysses, all offspring of She stands in a large recess like a chapel, her the first edition. Most students use the Penguin hand touches her right thigh, fingers being text of 1968, set from the Bodley Head 1960 text. spread our [sic in transcript] naturally both This in turn is a setting of the uncorrected Bodley little toes crumpled under as if she had worn Head 1936 text. In a November 1921 letter to boots, (p. 149) Harriet Weaver, Joyce expressed extreme irri- tation at "all those printer's errors" he had Such touches are characteristic but too infre- found even prior to the appearance of the first quent to keep the attention of readers. In edition. He asked "Are these to be perpetuated addition, if we seek an insight into the personal in future editions? I hope not" {Letters, I, 176). relationship of husband and wife we shall again Reviews 77 Joyce and Sylvia Beach included a note at the third part and thirty-nine pages, and which does front of the first edition calling attention to the consider how the ideas of Derrida and Lacan can errors in printing. Gabler's subject is to establish illuminate the work (pp. 212-13). Freudian ideas and to print the continuous text wanted by in The Interpretation of Dreams (p. 216), and Joyce. (But even Gabler's reconstruction has modern Jinguistic theory (p. 229), are all too already, in a manner Joyce the supreme decon- briefly discussed, although the implications of structionalist would have approved, been quest- Roland McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans ioned by a student-disciple.) Gabler's edition Wake are not ignored (pp. 237-38). shows that the first edition of Ulysses (Shakes- Parrinder's monograph is divided into two peare and Company, 1922) differs from Joyce's parts. The introduction (pp. 1-13), "Joyce and text about five thousand times, and that each of the Grotesque", summarizes Joyce's attitude to the other printed editions collated by Gabler and nationalism, to Aristotelian and Thomist his colleagues differs from Joyce's text approx- aesthetics, to the Book of Kells and to the grot- imately the same number of times, but in different esque—which allows Parrinder to introduce the places. Russian critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. His What are the implications for criticism, for book on Rabelais briefly cited (p. 9), Joyce is interpretation, for explication? It may be that called a "Rabelaisian" and Bakhtin appears the majority of these differences occur in sub- once more in the final section of the monograph stantives, or that the Penguin texts and other as the authority on Rabelais (p. 241). At the con- texts of the past sixty years or so are capable of clusion of "Joyce and the Grotesque" Parrinder being lived with, or that lengthy tracts of notes that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are Ulysses, hitherto seemingly incomprehensible— "pagan to the core and turn conventional and deliberately so ("Scylla and Charybdis")— notions of sacredness upside down. Their author become navigable. Joyce's typographical and excelled as a literary comedian, and was a high stylistic parodies are more—or less—extensive priest of burlesque and profanity. He was also, than had been thought. The capital "Y" at the an Inimitable" (p. 13). end of the text is not at the end of the text, and so Part I has three sections autobiographically on. A pleasure of teaching Ulysses and Finne- focused. The first on Joyce as a student has gans Wake is that in doing so one can introduce instructive observations to make about Joyce's students to the latest critical theories. Ideas of student days and the milieu of University College on-going texts, of revised texts, of parallel text, Dublin at the turn of the century (pp. 18-22). It of a "finished" and "submerged" text, of includes a remarkable piece of information. continuous change, are fuelled by Ulysses and Three of Joyce's closest colleagues at University Finnegans Wake. Both are deconstructionalist College Dublin met "with sensational and texts, both question concepts of "realism", and violent deaths". Of these (Francis Skeffington, both lend themselves to feminist, jungian critic- Thomas Kettle and George Clancy), what Par- ism. Both in their obsession with language and rinder has to say about the first, "the pacifist linguistic devices provide material for post- . . .(McCanninthePor?ra/7)"isofinterest.He structuralist theory utilizing Derrida and "was murdered by a British officer when trying Saussure. to stop soldiers from looting during the Easter All this is a preamble to saying what kind of Rising (this 'treason' became so notorious that Joycean critical monograph I'd find illuminat- members of the English branch of the Skeffing- ing, could recommend to my students to fill a tons, including some of my own relatives, need, and think ought to be written. That is one changed their names)" (p. 20). Such indirect yet which (a) considers the implications of recent personal family associations do not colour the textual developments and reviews them in detail. rest of the work although they might have prov- For, after all, these days it is only the richer ided the foundation for sophisticated analysis of library of higher education which can afford the the motif of betrayal and injustice in Joyce's expensive Garland Press three volumes of writing. Discussion of Stephen Hero is succinct Gabler's Critical and Synoptic edition, and (b) (pp. 32-40), emphasizing the fact that Joyce is re- considers Joyce, in the light of recent critical writing his own experiences. The uncovering of theory. Patrick Pamnder's James Joyce certain- the facade of scholastic terminology direct from ly does not do (a), and (b) only by implication. Aquinas is good (p. 37). The third section con- The most useful part of the monograph is his centrates on Dubliners. There is a tantalizingly study of Finnegans Wake which takes up the brief resume of the implications of H. G. Wells's Reviews (an author Patrick Parrinder is most knowledg- ians", opens with a minute analysis of the able about) comment that in the 1890s short implications of "Mr" in the opening encounter stories "broke out everywhere" (pp. 42-3), and with' 'Mr. Leopold Bloom" who "is the epitome discussion about the specificity of Dubliners (pp. of middle-class man" (p. 143). This is followed 44-8), including exemplification of Joyce's "use by an account of his character and attitudes to of the free indirect style to create a narrative death, meat, biology, his father, history. Parrin- coloured by his characters' internal impressions der's reading of Bloom's attitudes to his Jewish- or mental landscapes" (p. 48). This gives way to ness, and his "incipient Zionism" is curious. a rather lax discussion of "symbolism" (pp. 50- Parrinder writes, "Palestine, he thinks in a 53), thematic analysis (pp. 53-60), language moment of sudden and shocking depression as usage (pp. 60-64), and useful readings of "A he walks back from the pork-butchers' is 'the Painful Case" and "The Dead" (pp. 64-70). grey sunken cunt of the world' " (p. 149). The Forty-one pages (compared with eighty-one passage in "Calypso" refers to Bloom's for Ulysses and thirty-nine for Finnegans Wake) thoughts of the Dead Sea, "Sodom, Gomorrah, are devoted to A Portrait of the Artist and Edom", in which images of Biblical desolation Exiles. The account of A Portrait is straight- —"A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old"— forward, orientated towards stylistic and auto- are juxtaposed with those of an old woman, "a biographical analysis. There are illuminating bent hag" crossing the street from Cassidy's. observations on the significance of sexuality for She is ''the grey sunken cunt of the world", not Stephen, useful footnote references to Richard "Palestine", which Bloom views optimistically Brown's unpublished London University Ph.D. as a centre of regeneration. It is to great Jewish thesis on sexuality in Joyce, and to H. G. Wells's philosophers and prophet^ that Bloom turns note on reading the Portrait that "everyone in after being taunted by Dublin anti-semites. He this story, every human being, accepts as a has more than the passing materialist interest in matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky colonial investment "in the Palestinian planter's and the sea, that the English are to be hated" (p. company" attributed to him by Parrinder. 99). Discussion of Exiles is brief. Unfortunately Bloom's "Jewishness" is much more complex. the superb, moving, lyrical fantasy Giacomo The account of Molly is straightforward, Joyce, which as Parrinder admits "shows its drawing attention to her shrewdness, egotism, author trying to strike a new, though no less pre- sexuality, romanticism and "eye to respectabil- carious sort of balance between sardonic detach- ity" (p. 161). She is unconventional—"an ebull- ment and passionate involvement", receives ient creation" (p. 162). Section four is devoted to only a paragraph's attention (pp. 105-6). "the styles of Ulysses". Parrinder reads Ulysses "along the lines suggested by" Litz in his "The Part II concentrates upon Ulysses. There are Genre of Ulysses" "as a two-part performance five sections. The first, its title taken from in which the modern novel is built up and then Joyce's comment to Stanislaus in 1907 that he disintegrated into its original components" (p. was working on a short book, a "Dublin 'Peer 163). There is a passing reference to recent schol- Gynt'", surveys the idea of Ulysses, Joyce's arly work on Joyce's revisions in the earlier sect- search for a hero, the "allotted timespan of ions of Ulysses, and differences between manu- Ulysses" (p. 118), "absolute realism", and script, serial and book versions. However, the critical approaches to Joyce's "work of fiction main thrust of the chapter is directed towards a masquerading as scripture" (p. 123). Parrinder useful set of six "axioms" used as a framework wishes to have the best of both worlds, the post- to discuss various styles: (i) "narrative is an structuralist with its emphasis on the "hot- artificial structure", that is, deliberate discon- potch", and "the dominant tradition of favour- tinuity, montage—which has become conven- able criticism" stressing Ulysses's order (p. 120). tional in modernist fiction; (ii) "narrative is like a For Parrinder, "like a good journalist, the musical score", the musicality and "deliberate Joycean artist is something of a beachcomber as deformation of language", Joyce's use of com- well as a meticulous designer" (p. 126). The pounds and portmanteau words; (iii) "there is second section concentrates on "Stephen in no objective or neutral style", parody Ulysses: the loveliest mummer". There is a brief ("Cyclops"), "Nausicaa". The former "is the but pertinent discussion of the nature of Joyce's most politically committed piece of fiction that interior monologues (pp. 131-2), and Stephen's Joyce ever produced. Its message is a rejection of theory of Shakespeare (pp. 137-40). Section the violence and hatred engendered by two three, "Bloom and Molly: The Bourgeois Utop- Reviews 79 opposing political systems, British imperialism Bertrand Russell and Game! Woolsey, and Irish nationalism" and "the narrative ... is KENNETH HOPKINS. a complex satire working by means of a double displacement". This is most illuminating, but Warren House Press, 1985, £2.40. not developed (p. 172). Similarly, analysis of the styles of "Nausicaa" and Gerty McDowell's In pursuing his research on the Powys brothers, imprisonment by language (which Joycean cre- Kenneth Hopkins corresponded with Gerald ation isn't?) is illuminating but brief (pp. 173-4); Brenan about Brenan's common-law wife, (iv) "stylistic resources vary from age to age" Gamel (nee Woolsey). In due course Hopkins —"Oxen of the Sun'' with its sequence of histor- obtained Woolsey's personal papers and ical styles is, in addition, a sustained satire; (v) Brenan's permission to publish Woolsey's un- " 'Subjectivity' and 'personality' are constructs published writings. To Powys afficionados arising within the literary text and varying from Gamel Woolsey is known primarily as that one genre to another"—a reading of "Circe" young woman who experienced a turbulent love and "Eumaeus", the former being "avast freak affair with Llewelyn Powys in 1929-30. Shortly show, an encyclopaedia of monstrosities lurking after the affair she decided to live with Brenan, in the underworld of the life defined by Bloom a relationship that lasted until her death in 1968. and Stephen" in which "chapter restraints are It is Hopkins's opinion that in spite of Woolsey's overturned, values are inverted and primitive failure as a creative writer, her life and work are hungers and drives are unleashed" (p. 177). The of sufficient interest to merit public recognition. latter is "one of sincerely struggling to overcome Hopkins's fascination with Woolsey has led him disguise''. The sixth division,' 'There is no 'unity to issue a number of publications by and about of time' in narrative fiction" focuses upon her under the vanity imprint of the Warren Joyce's experiments with time in Ulysses (pp. House Press. These publications include: several 181-6). collections of Woolsey's poems, Twenty Eight Parrinder's account of Ulysses concludes with Sonnets (1977), The Last Leaf Falls (1978), "The ultimate symbol" in the book which is Middle Earth (1979), The Search for Demeter ' 'Molly's 'yes' and the memory to which it refers (1980), The Weight of Human Hours (1980), and —a memory of shared sexual joy, of a marriage The Collected Poems of Gamel Woolsey 1984); proposal, and above all of a kiss" (p. 187). All an edition of The Lettters of Gamel Woolsey to Very bourgeois and rather sentimental. Marilyn Llewelyn Powys, 1930-1939 (1983); and French and H. G. Wells are seen as polarities in Hopkins's Gamel & Rex (1979), a poem written response to the book, the former seeing in it a from Woolsey's perspective about her failed "mysterious sexuality", the latter a "cloacal marriage to the journalist and miscellaneous obsession"—"a draining sewer, or excremental writer, Maurice Reginald Hunter, based on inci- cavity" (p. 193). Shrewdly Parrinder's explor- dents in Woolsey's suppressed autobiographical ation of the kiss symbol sees elements of wisdom novel, One Way of Love. in both views. He steers a middle course. Joyce's Hopkins's recent pamphlet on Woolsey's themes in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are relationship with Bertrand Russell was first pub- "creation and fertility . . . pursued in its linguis- lished in Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand tic, dynastic, and sexual—not merely its artistic Russell Archives, n.s. 5 (Summer 1985). In his —aspects". Finnegans Wake avoids the apoth- reminiscences, A Personal Record, 1920-1972, eosis of Christian revelation. Ulysses concludes Brenan has devoted a lengthy chapter to Russell, with the eating of the seed-cake which can be and in the Life of Bertrand Russell, Ronald W. interpreted as a representation of the Fall of Man Clark has commented on Russell's affection for —a reading squarely within traditional Christian Woolsey. So, one may wonder, what does orthodoxy. In the attempt to explain Joyce, to Hopkins have to say on the relationship that has make him more accessible, it would be unfort- not already been said? In addition to providing unate to play down his uniqueness. Joyce was a biographical information on Brenan, Woolsey, revolutionary genius. and the Powys circle, Hopkins focuses his dis- cussion on the related question of why Russell WILLIAM BAKER loved Woolsey and why that love was not returned. The problem of unrequited love has been the subject of literary reflection since the Middle Ages, and Hopkins is really no more 80 Reviews successful in solving the problem in the case of on the Woolsey-Russell interaction. He draws Woolsey and Russell than his medieval predeces- out interesting references from Woolsey's letters sors. To be fair to Hopkins, he does point out to Powys and to Alyse Gregory, and he makes that Russell greatly admired the haunting good use of the relevant correspondence at rhythms of Woolsey's poetry and that he was McMaster University Library and at the Berg enchanted by her beauty, melancholy, and inner Collection in the New York Public Library. strength. For her part, Hopkins observes, Unfortunately, there are certain embargoed Woolsey highly regarded Russell's intellectual letters in Russell's papers written by Brenan and acumen and integrity, but she disliked his vanity Woolsey to Russell's third wife, Patricia, which and tendency to vindictiveness. "It's queer that I Hopkins was not allowed to see. The story that can never really like him", she tried to explain in Hopkins tells in a clear and engaging style is a letter to Llewelyn Powys. Unlike Brenan's tragic and evocative—of Woolsey's penchant letters to Russell which are long, chatty, and for unhappiness and her misused talent, of enthusiastic, Woolsey's letters are quite short Russell's intellectual triumphs and his emotional and somewhat noncommittal. In the end entanglements. In January 1968 Brenan wrote to Hopkins is forced to the conclusion: "The most Russell that Woolsey had finally died after a pro- we can do is recognize the genuine depth of longed bout with cancer. Much distressed by the Russell's feelings for Gamel, over some part of news Russell replied: "I liked the warmth and the years he knew her, and speculate on the real intimacy of her sympathy, which I shall miss as nature of her feelings for him" (p. 12). long as I live". Hopkins's pamphlet does shed some new light CARL SPADONI

Pthe bi-monthlyN magazine of poetry,REVIE essays, reviews and features W PN Review (formerly Poetry Nation) has pursued a distinctive course over the last decade, in response to the demand for a serious magazine devoted to new poetry, extended discussion and debate — a magazine wide in geographical and thematic range. Each issue includes an editorial, news and notes, reports, essays, interviews, reviews and poetry in English and in translation. As editors we try to succour the general reader and the writer who may feel disenchanted with narrowly specialized magazines and with literary journalism but who is still — or therefore — literate and enjoys the kind of writing which engages a diverse world of language and experience. We aim to set poetry and criticism back in the main stream of cultural concern. The American critic James Atlas described PN Review as the heir to Eliot's Criterion: 'Like its eminent precursor, it seeks to uphold literature as a value, not simply as a mode of expression; and it is the only journal that is doing so today.' Annual subscription (six issues) £11.50/$24 (£14.00/$29 institutions) to PN Review, 208 Corn Exchange, Manchester M4 3BQ, Single copies @ £2.50/$5.00 I should like to subscribe to PN Review and enclose a cheque/p.o. for Name: _ Address: Letters to the Editor

ELEGY (for Ronald Hall, novelist) be the withering of the creative powers that rose in him so freshly and strongly in his youth. A Ingenuity held off the visitors, working-class boy from the streets of Coventry, like a hand, like a mask. he nevertheless made friends through his writing I was lost, looking at you lost. and personal contact with many of the greatest Dear Ron, in the end writers of the day, chiefly John Cowper Powys we were stripped down to our dread. and Henry Miller. His correspondents and Your hope died, then we sat together friendships included Jean Giono, Claude in silence, as if mourning it. Houghton, Alfred Perles, and Francis Stuart. Walking about, you told me His novel The Open Cage was published by you were stunned, unable to get out, Collins in 1970 and met with some critical turn agony into bliss. success. At the time of his death he was working Now it's over. Something with vast arms on a vast historical novel, set in the West came suddenly, to crush Country. and gather you up. The story of his awakening, when a lad of Now, at least you have stopped dangling. seventeen, to art and literature, primarily In that embrace of no life, through the discovery of the works of Powys and demanded like a sunrise, Miller, is vividly and movingly described in his may you rest in peace. preface to the Village Press edition of the Letters to Henry Miller from John Cowper Powys. Forgive me my temporary health There he tells how he wrote his first 'fan' letter to and my unseemly lust, John in 1951. In one of the letters John writes, twisting as pain like yours with characteristic glee, of receiving "the most inside the cage. satisfying fan letter I've ever had" from a 21- With levity, year old Ron Hall and his friend, Phil Callow, at seventeen a bright one, the "Coventry kids". you lit up my mother, brother, me, That letter led to visits to John and Phyllis at each visit loved. their home in Corwen by Ron and Mary and to At a glance you warmed us, an extensive correspondence that still survives, strangers on earth like you. in some American university. Ron frequently You'd laugh. You missed nothing. visited Phyllis, after John's death, on his 'walk- From that childhood on a grid of back streets, abouts', when the pressure of his pedagogical deeply astonished to find a world work became too much for him—as sadly it so as regulated as a barracks, often did. dreaming violently, you were led I am enclosing an elegy by his oldest and by mountains. You even flew with the birds. dearest friend, the novelist and poet Philip As well as books, Callow, and I hope you will be able to find space you read the figure in our carpet. for it in the next Powys Review. Phil felt unable to do this himself. Philip Callow Ron Hall will be missed by those in the Powys Society who knew him, notably Bill Lander, Jack Rushby and myself, a friend of almost It is sad to have to report the death of Ronald twenty years. Hall, at 56, after a sudden heart attack at his home in Somerset. He leaves behind a wife, Ruth, and a son, Joseph. There is also a family Jim Morgan by his former wife, Mary, to mourn his passing. 332 Kingshill Avenue Ron battled for many years against ill-health Hayes and growing depression caused by what he felt to Middlesex UB4 8BX 82 Letters to the Editor In her recent letter (PR16) Theodora Gay Scutt reservations on the subject. Nevertheless the writes to you about "certain quotations" in my similarities between this typescript and the book The Brothers Powys. Her point is that I recollections by Mrs Scutt which have appeared quoted from a book "purporting to be by [Mrs in numbers of The Powys Review were such that I Scutt] called 'A Portrait of T. F. Powys'," and (wrongly) assumed that she must have had a that in her view any evidence drawn from this copy of the typescript in front of her when she source is unsafe, as she herself did not' 'write one was writing the articles. And there seemed to be word of it as far as it went or even read it to make no doubt in her mind when she recently looked sure I was correctly quoted". over the typescript, reading a number of sections Since she wrote to you Mrs Scutt has in fact in detail, that it was an authentic record of her examined the manuscript in some detail. As a memories at the time when Count Potocki wrote result of this examination she put me in touch it. I was particularly struck by the fact that it almost immediately with Professor Lawrence evidently contained some material which Mrs Mitchell of the University of Minnesota, who is Scutt had forgotten during the course of the past currently working on a book about Theodore twenty years, but which she recalled again upon Powys, and who has already uncovered some reading the typescript. interesting and valuable new information about The typescript is a source of evidence which T. F. P.'s years as a farmer. Professor Mitchell clearly needs to be handled with caution, then visited my house with the express purpose especially where it relates to events of which of reading and making extensive notes from the neither Mrs Scutt nor Count Potocki had direct document which (before she had seen it) Mrs knowledge. I therefore used it extremely sparing- Scutt wrote about so dismissively. ly in The Brothers Powys. But where it describes May I now, for the record, give you some Mrs Scutt's personal memories of things which more details about this manuscript? It is, to be she experienced at first hand; or where it throws more precise, the photocopy of a typescript, and some light on matters for which at present there was made available to me by Count Potocki of appears to be no other source of information, it Montalk, a gentleman whose dealings with me cannot safely be ignored. have been characterized by the greatest possible Richard Perceval Graves generosity on his part. My copy is on A4 size 11 Canonbury paper, single-spaced but only using about 54 or Shrewsbury 55 lines to the page. There are 116 pages of text, Shropshire SY3 7AH prefaced by a title page and a page of introduct- ion. The title page states simply: "Portrait of T. F. Powys by his adopted daughter Theodora Llewelyn Powys Gay Powys.'' On the introductory page, which is signed "Potocki of Montalk", and dated Dorset Essays 6.95 "Lovelace's Copse, Plush, Dorset 30 iv 65" we Earth Memories 6.95 are told that Count Potocki: Black Laughter 5.95 Ebony and Ivory 2.95 played the part of a tape-recorder, taking Thirteen Worthies 2.95 down from her dictation paragraphs, pages, sometimes several pages at a time. I have then sorted out all these memories and materials G. Wilson Knight into some sort of sequence, or else gathered all Klinton Top (novel) 3.95 the paragraphs on some aspect of the matter together. What I have not done is to alter her Francis Berry language or her style, as this was not neces- From The Red Fort (Poetry) 4.50 sary, so that in a physical sense I have written down the book, but in her words. The very small part in my words, except where it is obvious that I am speaking or asking a Direct from the publishers. question, is in italics. Prices are carriage paid. Mrs Scutt believes that the word "dictation" is Redcliffe Press Ltd. (D too strong, and I have promised her that in any 49 Park Street, Bristol 1 Redcliffe revised edition of my book I shall include her NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

WILLIAM BAKER is Senior Lecturer in English at MARGARET MORAN is Assistant Professor in West Midlands College of Higher Education. He has English and Research Associate in the Bertrand lectured at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Russell Editorial Project, McMaster University, Ben Gurion University and was visiting Professor at Hamilton, Ontario. Her editions of Russell's work Pitzer College, Claremont, California. He edits the include Contemplation and Action, 1902-14 (with George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Newsletter, is R. A. Rempel & A. Brink), Vol. 12 of The Collected completing the fourth and final volume of an edition Papers of Bertrand Russell, and she has published of George Eliot's holograph notebooks, and is co- numerous articles on Russell and related literature. compiler of an annotated bibliography of writings by and about F. R. and Q. D. Leavis to be published by PAUL BENNETT MORGAN is a research assistant Garland. at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is a regular contributor to The Nabokovian and has FRANCIS BERRY, Emeritus Professor of English, recently contributed an essay to the Universite Paul University of London, prior to his London appoint- Valery Festschrift on Nabokov. He is currently ment held a personal Chair in the University of researching the works of Richard Hughes. Sheffield. Of his nine books of poems, the most recent is From the Red Fort (Redcliffe, Bristol, 1985). His BARRIE SAYWOOD is Principal Lecturer and head literary criticism includes Poets' Grammar, Poetry of English at West Midlands College of Higher Edu- and the Physical Voice and The Shakespeare Inset. cation. His articles have appeared in The Dickensian, TES and various educational journals. PETER G. CHRISTENSEN teaches English and film studies at the State University of New York at CARL SPADONI is Archivist at the Health Sciences Binghampton. He is the author of articles on George Library, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. Sand, Marguerite Yourcenar, Washington Irving, Formerly Assistant Archivist at the Russell Archives, Paul Nizan, Lawrence Durrell and Italo Calvino. he has written extensively on Russell's life. With Margaret Moran he has recently edited Intellect and CLAIRE HARMAN is writing the biography of Social Conscience: Essays on Bertrand Russell's Early Sylvia Townsend Warner. She has previously edited Work (McMaster University Library Press, 1984). the Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1982). ANNE STEVENSON is an American poet who has JOHN HARRIS teaches bibliography at the College lived in Britain for over twenty years. Her seven of Librarianship Wales, Aberystwyth. He has recently collections of poems include Correspondences, edited Fury Never Leaves Us: A Miscellany ofCaradoc Minute by Glass Minute, and The Fiction-Makers Evans (Poetry Wales Press, 1985) and is now engaged which was The Poetry Book Society Choice in the on a study of Caradoc Evans's literary career. summer of 1985. In the past four years she has twice been Northern Arts Literary Fellow at the Universities ANTHONY HEAD works in Japan. His articles have of Newcastle and Durham. Her Selected Poems will be appeared in a variety of journals, including The published by Oxford University Press in 1986. Powys Review, Contemporary Review, Art and Artists, Highlife, and the Review of the Anglo-Japan- COLIN STYLE is a freelance writer and journalist, ese Economic Institute. His poetry has appeared in his special subjects including South Africa (where he English. has lived and worked), the British countryside, and general literary criticism and biography. His articles ROLAND MATHIAS, the editor of The Anglo- and poems have appeared in Stand, Cornhill Welsh Review from 1961 to 1976 and various collect- Magazine, Country Life, London Magazine, PN ions of short stories and poems, including Anglo- Review, The Listener and other well-known British Welsh Poetry 1480-1980 (Poetry Wales Press with and American periodicals, and he has published Raymond Garlick) has produced a wide range of volumes of poems including Baobab Street (Johannes- critical books and articles on Welsh writers from burg, 1977) and Musical Saw (Zimbabwe, 1981). Vernon Watkins (Writers of Wales Series, U.W.P., 1974 to J. C. Powys {The Hollowed-Out Elder Stalk: J. C. Powys as Poet (Enitharmon Press, 1979)) while himself publishing short stories and six collections of poetry, his selected poems, Burning Brambles (Gomer), appearing in 1983. THE POWYS SOCIETY

(President. Glen Cavaliero)

The Powys Society exists to promote the study and appreciation of the work of the Powys family, especially that of John Cowper Powys, T. F. Powys and Llewelyn Powys. Meetings are held three times a year, two in London; the third is a weekend conference in a provincial centre. Members receive copies of The Powys Review containing papers read to the Society and other material. The Review will be published twice a year.

The Membership subscription is £7.50 a year.

Further details may be obtained from

Paul Roberts Susan Rands, Hon. Secretary, The Powys Society, Hon. Treasurer, The Powys Society, 29 St. Mary's Road, Victoria Farm, Sale, Cheshire Bradley Lane, M33 1SB Glastonbury, Somerset.

I enclose £7.50, or its equivalent in my own currency, being my subscription for this year.

(Overseas members are requested to ask their Banks to forward £7.50 to the account of The Powys Society, Barclays Bank Ltd., Glastonbury Somerset; account number 91356011. Alternatively, payment may be made by International Money Order.)

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