THE INTERACTION BETWEEN LANDSCAPE and MYTH in the NOVELS of JOHN COWPER POWYS by GWYNETH F. MILES MA Bryn Mawr College, 196?
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THE INTERACTION BETWEEN LANDSCAPE AND MYTH
IN THE NOVELS OF JOHN COWPER POWYS
by
GWYNETH F. MILES
M.A. Bryn Mawr College, 196?
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in the Department
of
English
We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
September, 1973 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study.
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Department
The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada i
Abstract
Powys' novels are deeply rooted in a sense of place; much of their conflict develops through the effect of a particular locality upon the characters who live there or come there.
This thesis demonstrates how Powys' sense of place is com• pounded of both a feeling for the physical landscape, and an awareness of the historical and mythical traditions which form its human past. Powys finds correspondences between the scenery and legends of a locality and the psychological states of his personae, and thus uses landscape and myth for symbolic purposes.
The interaction of myth and landscape largely creates the characteristic atmosphere of the five novels studied here.
These novels illustrate Powys' development over a period of thirty-six years, and include both his first novel and his last major novel. The term "romance," as it is found to recur in their titles, is related to Powys' description of the romantic atmosphere, in his essay on Emily Bronte, as com• pounded of scenery and traditions of the human past. Wood and
Stone is taken as representative of the early novels ; A
Glastonbury Romance, Maiden Castle, Owen Glendower and Porius are the four major novels in which the two "romantic" elements of landscape and myth are seen most fully developed and work• ing together.
Although this thesis does not attempt a thorough study of sources and influences, some of the more important ones are indicated — Hardy, the Kabinogion, Sir John Rhys — and il
suggestions made as to how Powys* imagination operated on the material he derived from them. Similarly, brief comparisons are made with the use of myth and landscape by some of Powys' literary contemporaries, Including the regional novelists,
Joyce, Yeats and Eliot.
The second and third chapters consider Powys' use of landscape and myth, respectively, by a survey of all of Powys' novels in chronological orders recurrent patterns and themes are noted and it becomes apparent that there is a shift in emphasis from landscape in the early novels to myth in the late ones. In the major novels, it is argued, Powys' use of landscape helps to give actuality and coherence to his work, while his use of history and myth provides a certain basic structure for some, and confers richness on all by relating present characters' experience to a larger human past.
Even in Wood and Stone the use of landscape for symbolic purposes is overt and quite complex» opposition is set up between two hills, and between the substances wood and stone, and both are related to psychological and philosophical conflicts between the characters. The historical and legen• dary associations of a local topography are richly exploited in A Glastonbury Romance, although no key to the novel's meaning is found in its mythological allusions. Different attitudes towards the past are assumed by the characters of
Maiden Castle and are all ultimately tried against the myster• ious presence of the prehistoric earthwork; Powys' own historical and mythological obsessions are defensively ill
satirized through the central characters. Owen Glendower utilizes a new and diversified Welsh landscape in studying the myth-making process through its semi-legendary national hero and his romantic young kinsman who sees his world in terms of its legendary past. Cronos, Taliessin, Nineue,
Merlin, Arthur and other mythic figures who remained in the background of the previous novels are the dramatis personae of Foriusi large mythological themes are overtly the novel's concern, rather than being sublimated into the personal struggles of the characters, and are reinforced by the sym• bolic landscape descriptions.
The general direction of Powys* fiction is away from realism, and towards the fantastic embodiment in actual people and places of what were ideas or figures of speech in the earlier works. In the novels studied here, however, landscape and myth, realism and fantasy are held in a fine balance, where the suggestions of deep mythic significance are held in relation to the visible world through the rich and detailed evocation of landscape. iv
Table of Contents
Chapter One Introduction p. 1
Chapter Two "Penetrated through and through by the scenery": The Impact of Landscape on Powys p. 11
Chapter Three "Traditions, old and dark and superstitious and malign"t The Mythic Background of Powys' Fiction p.
Chapter Four "Occult Harmonies"! Wood and Stone .. p. 76
Chapter Five A Glastonbury Romance p. 101
Chapter Six "A Monstrous Grotesqueness": Maiden Castle p. 151
Chapter Seven "The Past is the Eternal": Owen Glendower p. 191
Chapter Eight "This huge, composite earth-creature":
pP"^ us P. 21?
Chapter Nine Conclusion p. 267
A Selected Bibliography p. 275 V
Note t Textual References to Primary Sources
Page references to the five novels studied are to the following editions i
Wood and Stonei A Romance. New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1915.
A Glastonbury Romance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932.
Maiden Castle. 1936; rpt. London: Macdonald, 1966.
Owen Glendower: An Historical Novel. 2 vols. New York* Simon and Schuster, 19^0.
Porius1 A Romance of the Dark Ages. London* Macdonald, 1951.
Page references to other works of Powys cited are to the following editions :
Atlantis. London i Macdonald, 195^.
Autobiography. New York 1 Simon and Schuster, 193^-.
Ducdame. New Yorki Doubleday, Page and Co., 1925.
The Inmates. London 1 Macdonald, 1952.
Morwyn; Or The Vengeance of God. London 1 Cassell, 1937.
Obstinate Cymric> Essays 1935-^7. Carmarthen 1 Druid Press, 1947.
Suspended Judgements! Essays on Books and Sensations. New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1916.
Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions. 1915; rpt. London: Macdonald, 1955.
Weymouth Sands: A Novel. 193^-; rpt. London: Macdonald, 1963. ~
Wolf Solent: A Novel. ' 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Chapter One t Introduction
What Is romance? I think it is the instinctive recognition of a certain poetic glamour which an especial kind of grouping of persons and things — of persons and things seen under a particular light — is able to produce .... I think this quality of romance can only be evoked when the background of the story Is heavily laden with old, rich, dim, pathetic, human associations . . . . The characters must be penetrated through and through by the scenery which surrounds them and by the traditions, old and dark and superstitious and malign, of some particular spot upon earth's surface. The scenery which is the background of a tale which has the true romantic quality must gather itself together and concentrate itself in some kind of symbolic unity; and this symbolic unity — wherein the various elements of grandeur and mystery are merged must present Itself as something almost personal and as a dynamic 'motif in the development of plot. ("Emily Bronte," Suspended Judgements. 322-23) '
In this definition of romance taken from his essay on
Emily Bronte, John Cowper Powys gives a valuable explication of two major elements in his own fiction — landscape and myth.
He indicates that landscape and myth may be seen as working together to create a particular atmosphere, "the true romantic quality" which is, although in a somewhat different sense, a characteristic of his work as much as of that of Emily Bronte.
This dissertation is concerned with the functions of landscape and mythological allusions in Powys' fiction, first in general terms and then specifically as they work together in five significant novels.
As much as those of Hardy, the novels of Powys are deeply rooted in a sense of place, and much of their conflict develops 2
through the effect of a particular locality upon the characters who live there or come there. In finding correspondences between the scenery and legends of a locality and the psycho• logical states of his personae, Powys places himself within the romantic tradition which, while it abounds in detailed, realistic depiction of nature, basically views nature in a mystical, symbolic way. Writing of Emily Bronte, Powys defines the "poetic glamour" that is Instinct in the romance as the product of an atmosphere created by the topography and past associations of "some particular spot upon earth's surface."
The two elements essential to romance, then, are landscape and a sense of the past — both the legendary and the historical past. Landscape and the past work together to form the atmos• phere of a place which has "the true romantic quality;" this atmosphere is taken in intuitively, and has its psychological
effect on Powys' characters whether they feel ln harmony with
it (Geard, Uryen), deliberately fight it (John Crow, Rhisiart)
or remain unaware of it (Farmer Goring).
Although reasons of space preclude a detailed study of all
Powys* fiction, it is fair to say that the five novels examined
here are more fully "romances" in Powys' sense of the term
than any of his other books. According to Powys' definition,
the romance must be rich in the evocation of both scenery and
the human past. Wood and Stonei A Romance. A Glastonbury
Romance and Porlusi A Romance of the Dark Ages are designated
romances by their titles or sub-titles, and Maiden Castle is
described by Powys in a letter to his publishers (quoted by 3
Malcolm Elwin ln his Prefatory Note to Macdonald's 1966 1 edition of the novel) as "my Dorchester Romance." In each of these novels a single setting is intensely imagined, in terms of both its physical presence and the particular spirits of the past which pervade It. Owen Glendower» An Historical
Novel is atypical in that there are many changes of setting ln
it, and emphasis is laid upon a succession of historical events rather than upon the individual character of the particular place. But the past is quite as important in this novel as it
Is in the other four "romances"; mythological references are
copious and ingeniously employed, and the atmospheric qualities
of the Welsh landscape are closely observed and integral to the novel's vitality. All five novels admirably fulfil Powys' des•
cription of the romance as showing its characters to be
"penetrated through and through by the scenery which surrounds
them and by the traditions ... of some particular spot upon 2 earth's surface."
The five novels also illustrate Powys* development over a period of 36 years, and include both his first novel and his
last major novel. The early novels, here represented by Wood and Stone, are heavily influenced by Hardy and by the Gothic
tradition. In A Glastonbury Romance and Owen Glendower. the
two major works to be discussed, Powys achieves a unique rich• ness of animistic awareness and mythological correspondence without sacrificing coherence ln plot and characterization.
Maiden Castle and Porlus are more eccentric works, in which
coherence and probability are frequently strained, yet they remain within the traditional novel form and perhaps, with their dark and curious essays at metaphysics, as well as their psychological insights and multi-layered sense of history, help to expand that form.
Owen Glendower and Porlus are both historical novels, and thus present different approaches to the ideas of history which are important themes in some of the earlier novels, par• ticularly Maiden Castle. In Maiden Castle, an exploratory and often grotesque work, various characters are representative of different attitudes to the past — those of the historical novelist, the economist, the philosophic idealist, the anthro• pologist and the mystic. All attitudes are ultimately tried against the mysteries of Mai-Dun, the great prehistoric earth• work which dominates the novel thematically as well as topo• graphically. Owen Glendower, similarly dominated by a hill- fortress of mythological associations, studies the processes of history and the influence of legend through two major characters. Rhisiart seeks to reconcile his Welsh ancestry with his English upbringing in terms of the contemporary struggle of Wales for independence! similar personal and political con• flicts were of considerable significance in Powys* own life six centuries later. Glendower himself is aware that his destiny Is to become a legend, to relinquish political success in order to become a symbol for his race. The complex layers of Wales' past and future, both legendary and actual, form the texture of the novel.
Owen Glendower continues to develop correspondences made 5
in earlier novels between contemporary characters and figures from mythology, but in Porlus these figures emerge from the shadowy background to become active characters themselves.
Going a stage further back in history, Porius recreates the
Arthurian era in Wales with an ingenious blending of twentieth- century psychological realism, historical speculation, and miraculous episodes from Celtic myths. Mythology and history, always closely associated in Powys as the two sources of the
"old, rich, dim . . . human associations" demanded by romance, here are presented as equal in power and actuality.
Landscape in Powys' novels often serves as a bridge between the legendary and/or historical past of the locality and the contemporary characters. Dud NoMan in Dorchester and
Rhlsiart at Dinas Bran, for example, are deeply stirred and disturbed by their physical proximity to places where lived historical characters who fascinated them. But more than this,
Powys tells us in the "Emily Bronte" essay that landscape must
"concentrate itself in some kind of symbolic unity," as "some• thing almost personal and as a dynamic 'motif in the development of plot." The symbolic value of landscape in Powys' own novels
Is evident from the opening passages of the first, Wood and Stone.
These describe the "strange supernatural conflict going on" between two hills, one "the consecrated repository of Christian tradition" exerting its "spiritual influence" upon the neigh• bouring town, and the other an "impious heathen fortress" drawing "its strength from the impulse to Power" (1-3).
Characters align themselves with, or are torn between, the 6
different forces represented by the hills. In their appearance, in their traditions, and in their social and economic function, the contrast between the two hills is sustained, and forms a potent image for the Ideological conflict with which Powys is concerned. This treatment of landscape is developed, with more subtlety and complexity, in A Glastonbury Romance. Perhaps because he is working here with topographical and legendary associations which are part of a great European tradition, rather than being somewhat obscure and personal, the fusion of topography and legend into something of genuine spiritual power and significance is more fully achieved in this novel than anywhere else in his fiction.
Critical studies of Powys have thus far tended to survey i the whole body of his work, and so have been unable to give detailed attention to individual novels. In his examination of the metaphysical aspects of Powys' work, The Saturnlan
Quest, G. Wilson Knight considers some of the major mythic patterns which recur in the novels, particularly the descent 3
Into the underworld and the search for the Golden Age. His identification of these patterns is suggestive and stimulating, and Indicates a great many subjects for detailed research. He is, however, concerned with extracting a broad and all-encom• passing overview of Powys' central philosophy and belief.
Although, inevitably, my study takes up mythic patterns which he notices, my emphasis will be placed upon their significance within the structure of the individual novels rather than their significance to Powys* metaphysic as a whole. 7
H. P. Collins' John Cowper Powysi Old Earth Man considers
John Cowper and his brother Theodore as "England's last real rural writers," and in the final chapter on "The Earth Man and the Novel" discusses the general attitude to nature in
John Cowper's work. But while Collins asserts that Powys "may well have helped incidentally towards restoring some day the love of locality to English fiction, which has become both rootless and subtoplan,"^ the scope of Collins' book prevents him from making any detailed comment on the role of locality in individual novels. Collins' book and Kenneth Hopkins' 6
The Powys Brothers both provide valuable biographical informa• tion and suggestions about Powys' development as a writer, and thus have prepared the way for the closer studies which are 7 now beginning to appear. Essays on John Cowper Powys. edited by Belinda Humfrey, contains two such studies which are particu• larly relevant to the subject of this dissertation! Glen 8 Cavaliero's discussion of landscape in the early novels and Roland Mathias' critical examination of the historical and 9 mythic background of Owen Glendower. They will be commented on in the chapters on Wood and Stone and Owen Glendower.
While Powys' growing skill in the handling of landscape and the more variable handling of myth are evident when the novels are examined in chronological sequence, the concern of this dissertation is not so much with Powys' development as with the integrity, meaning and value of the individual novels.
Introductory chapters consider the changing roles of landscape and myth within the whole of Powys' fiction, but the body of 8
the dissertation treats each of the five novels as to a very great extent a separate entity. Only thus can their individual merits be adequately assessed, apart from their interest to the study of the man and the total oeuvre. This close and critical study of individual works is particularly needed ln
Powys' criticism just now,
Powys' knowledge of European literature was exhaustive, and this dissertation does not purport to comprehend the literary and intellectual influences which acted on him during the ninety-one years of his life. An attempt is made, however, to indicate some of the major sources and influences, and to suggest ways in which Powys' imagination operated on this mat• erial. As Hardy is the novelist most often invoked in connection with Powys, some comparisons are made in the general chapter on landscape between these two Wessex novelists, and also between
Powys and some of the other regional novelists. The great influences upon Powys in his use of myth are, besides his early 10 reading of Tennyson and Malory, the Mablnoglon and Sir John 11
Rhys' Studies in the Arthurian Legend, Some effort is made to explicate the frequently obscure allusions to Rhys within
Powys* novels, and to consider whether or not this obscurity constitutes a serious defect ln them.
The merging of landscape and mythological traditions to create for the setting of a story a "symbolic unity" containing
"grandeur and mystery" and enabling it to act as "something almost personal and as a dynamic 'motif in the development of plot" may indeed be seen to be as much the achievement of 9
the best novels of Powys as it was of Wutherlng Heights.
The individual character of a place, composed as it is of
topography and of vestiges of the human past, forms the great
subject which runs through Powys* major fiction. Through
interaction with the physical and spiritual atmosphere of their
environment, Powys* characters test and develop their individ•
ual attitudes toward experience. With the partial exception
of Porlus, each of the novels is predominantly concerned with
the various reactions of its characters to the spirit of the
place in which they live. By these reactions the characters
reveal the depth of their emotional lives, spiritual penetration and imaginative sympathies. Montacute (Nevilton), Glastonbury,
Maiden Castle and the ancient places of North Wales do indeed
"penetrate" Powys' characters "through and through," and become
the means whereby these characters are defined and developed. 10
Chapter Onei Footnotes
Rodmoor, like Wood and Stone, is subtitled A Romance, but although in it the spirit of place is admirably evoked, it has less of an atmosphere of the human past than does the earlier novel. 2 Two major novels, Wolf Solent and Weymouth Sands. are omitted in this study because they are much less concerned with the past and with mythic tradition than are the four later novels discussed. On the other hand, while Morwyn and the fiction written after Porlus is rich in mythological references, these books are discussed only briefly because they are fantasies, rather than novels, and thus are of less interest to a study of how the elements of landscape and myth may be used structurally and thematlcally in the novel. There is, however, a certain amount of reference to these other works of fiction as they are seen to be related to the five novels under discussion. 3 G. Wilson Knight, The Saturnlan Quest (Londont Methuen, 196^). Hereafter referred to as Satumian Quest. H. P. Collins, John Cowper Powys1 Old Earth Man (London 1 Barrie and Rockliff, 1966), p. 5. Hereafter referred to as Old Earth Man.
5 Ibid., p. 216.
^ Kenneth Hopkins, The Powys Brothers (London 1 Phoenix House, 1967). 7 Essays on John Cowper Powys, ed. Belinda Humfrey (Cardiff 1 University of Wales Press, 1972). Hereafter referred to as Essays, ed. Humfrey. 8 Glen Cavaliero, "John Cowper Powys1 Landscape and Personality in the Early Novels," Essays, ed. Humfrey, pp. 85 - 102. 9 Roland Mathias, "The Sacrificial Prince 1 A Study of Owen Glendower," Essays, ed. Humfrey, pp. 233-62. 10 Phyllis Playter, ln a conversation at Blaenau Ffestiniog in June, 1971, asserted that Powys much preferred Lady Guest's version of the Mablnogion to any other, because of its literary qualities. 11 John Rhys, Studies in the Arthurian Legend (Oxford* Clarendon, 1891). Hereafter referred to as Studies. 11
Chapter Two
"Penetrated through and through by the scenery"i the Impact of Landscape on Powys
The Autobiography suggests many of the influences — biographical and literary — which lie behind Powys' treatment of landscape in his novels. It opens with an account of his earliest sensations in Nature, prominent among which is the memory of Mount Cloud in Dovedale as "a Tremendum Mysterium" producing a "dim feeling of immensity." This is an attitude before Nature which he was to retain all his life — the awed awareness of its immensity and mystery.
How magically sagacious is childhood ln its power of arriving at boundless effects through Insignificant means I For though this eminence — and its name was Mount Cloud — can certainly have been no towering Alp, it will always remain to me synonymous with sublimity. Many aspects of children's days are silly enough; but how often the whole course of our subsequent history becomes an attempt to regain this sorcery, this power of finding the infinitely great in the materially small'. (Autobiography, 1)
As a young child Powys had, he tells us, a passion for erecting replicas of Mount Cloud in the shrubbery by the drive.
It is significant that the first memories recorded in the
Autobiography should be of that Derbyshire hill, for a "conical tumulus" such as he terms Mount Cloud dominates the landscape in many of his novels. The Glastonbury Tor and Dinas Bran are both cone-shaped and isolated. Wood and Stone devotes its opening chapter to a description of Leo's Hill (Ham Hill on 12
the border of Somerset and Dorset) and the lesser "cone-shaped eminence" of Nevilton Mount (Montacute Hill). The hill for• tress of Maiden Castle is the dominant image in the novel of that name, and various hills play important roles in Wolf
Solent, Morwyn and Porius. In their Isolation and their prom• inence these hills seem to suggest certain qualities of the human spirit characteristic of Powys' heroes and of Powys him• self — individuality, strength and spiritual striving.
Whatever generalized influence of impressive forms the scenery of Derbyshire may have made on the consciousness of
Powys as a young child, the scenery of Derbyshire as such plays no part ln his novels. It was in Dorsetshire, and later
Somerset, that Powys developed his sense of place — that inter• mingling of topography with human associations which imbues a locale with the atmosphere of romance. Weymouth exerted a great fascination over Powys as a boy, perhaps because the town was associated both with holidays and with the magic of the ocean. In both Wood and Stone and Wolf Solent important epi• sodes involve journeys to Weymouth, the holiday town, and
Weymouth Sands is perhaps the one Powys novel ln which the physical setting predominates over all other elements of the book.
Physical sensations in themselves, such as the mingled odours of old wood, seaweed and fish ln their Weymouth lodgings and the distinctions between wet sand, dry sand and pebbly shore on the Weymouth beach, were very Important to Powys as a child. But the Imaginative power of another person's 13
feelings about a place were impressed upon him as well, for example ln his account of how his father's stories of rowing exploits along the Weymouth coastline made the area vivid ln his mind before he was ever permitted to explore it himself.
Imagination and sensation, the present and the past, combine ln the child's sense of Weymouth just as they do in the great novels of Powys' maturity.
John Cowper was six when his father became curate of
St. Peter's Church, Dorchester, which entailed a move first to
Weymouth and subsequently to Dorchester, the setting of Maiden
Castle. Six years later the family moved to Montacute, in southern Somerset, where the parents remained for many years.
Montacute is the Nevilton of Wood and Stone; Glastonbury is nearby, and the country between Montacute and Sherborne, where
John Cowper went to school, forms the background of Wolf Solent.
The influence of Powys' father on his own sense of land• scape was evidently great. Like his son, the Reverend C.F. Powys was a great walker, and could identify every local plant and animal. His favourite reading, apart from the Bible, was
Bewick's Birds.
The amateur naturalist taught his son much in a factual way. John Cowper learned to recognize (especially later, ln Wessex) the song of rare birds, the varieties of wild flowers and ferns, the formation of rocks and stones. His own more sensitive and Intuitive love of naturalism achieved precision, which later was to give a needed tangibility and conviction to much of the descriptive writing in his novels.
Moreover, he encouraged the development of John Cowper*s response 14
to different kinds of natural scenery. My Father made so much of these differences, implying rather than asseverating the advantages of his native Wessex over all others, that It was natural enough for the varying quality of landscapes to become as important to us as silks to haberdashers, skins to furriers, wines to dotards and cynics. He brought us up to note every undulation, every upland, every spinney, every ridge, every fen and the effect produced upon all these by every variety of season or weather, (Autobiography, 138)
The influence of the father's sense of landscape is evident throughout the novels of the son.
The father had, however, little patience with the preten• sions of science. His passion for natural history, "the moment
It took on a more recondite scientific form became to him in a curious way absurd and ridiculous! It began to border upon the foolishness of that imaginary bete nolr of his, 'The
Professor' who was always the villain in his never-ended fairy story" (Autobiography, 15). This hostility to analytical science, pursued for Its own sake without any imaginative sym• pathy with the thing studied, seems to have been transmitted to John Cowper. Almost every one of his novels has Its "bete nolr of a Professor" — Dr. Brush, Morwyn's father, Gllles de
Pirogue — who, like the Ruler of Atlantis, take as their "one and sole purpose" the study of "science for the sake of science" and "care nothing about such trifling, frivolous, unimportant matters as faith, hope and charity" or "the happiness of people ... or the pity or the sympathy of people" (Atlantis.
451).
John Cowper's own gift of apprehending the universe was 15
quite otherwise. His animism, his descriptions of lower forms of life and even inanimate things as possessing consciousness and will, may seem perversely irrational and opposed to a modern understanding of the world. Yet his sense of our need for imaginative sympathy, to balance the inhumanity of purely objective, scientific research, is neither perverse nor irra• tional. Jung suggests that primitive men have a sense of mystical participation in the natural world which is lost to modern man, and can operate now only through our dreams.
Most of us have consigned to the unconscious all the fantastic psychic associations that every object or idea possesses. The primitive, on the other hand, is still aware of these psychic properties; he endows animals, plants or stones with powers that we find strange and unacceptable. . . . A tree may play a vital part in the life of a primitive, apparently possessing for him its own soul and voice, and the man con• cerned will feel that he shares its fate. . . . For in the primitive's world things do not have the same sharp boundaries they do in our "rational" societies. What psychologists call psychic identity, or "mystical participation," has been stripped off our world of things. But it is exactly this halo of unconscious associations that gives a colourful and fantastic aspect to the primitive's world. We have lost it to such a degree that we do not recognize it when we meet it again.
Powys, however, had not lost this power, but inherited it from his father who was himself a primitive in some ways.
He was man who derived more thrilling pleasure — a deep, massive, volcanic pleasure — from little natural things than anyone I have ever known. . . . The truth was, his interest in Nature was part of his passionate — but totally 16
subjective — romance of life. . . . Every person of his life, every place he had ever lived in, took on for him the Importance of something tremendous and mythological. (Autobiography, 13, 15).
"Mystical participation," or "the sense of . . . the demonic life of inanimate things" was a quality Powys admired and remarked in other writers he valued. It was the gift of
Dickens, he writes,
To endow the little every-day objects that surround us — a certain picture in a certain light, a certain lock or stove ln a certain shadow, a certain corner of the curtain when the wind moves it — with the fetish-magic of natural "animismj" that ... is what Dickens does .... And that is why, to me Dickens is so great a writer.-'
Elsewhere Powys writes of a philosophy held by Homer, Rabelais,
Laotze and Keats of which the
pervading spirit is animism» I will not say 'the idea that,' I prefer to say 'the reality that,' the earth, the sky, the air, the water, the sun, the moon, and all the multitude of stars with every pond that is dug and every fire that Is lit, are full of living things, full of entities, identities, presences, consciousnesses and spiritual souls > . . . like the souls of very young children, angelically and wickedly and pitifully innocent.^
Powys* first-published fiction, a short story entitled
"The Hamadryad and the Demon" which appeared in a single-copy
Powys family magazine, concerns two "real" characters in love, respectively, with a hamadryad and a stone carving of a demon.
In another story, "The Owl, The Duck and — Miss Rowe. Miss
Rowel," most of the active characters are, paradoxically, 17
6 inanimate. The last novels, or fantasies, of Powys are partic• ularly rich in the depiction of the consciousness of sub-human and often inanimate characters. It could be argued that his fondness for fantastic characterization becomes ludicrous some• times, as in the personalities given to the fly, moth, pillar and Club of Hercules in Atlantis. H. P. Collins notes that among the "strange and anachronous Dramatis personae" of
The Mountains of the Moon "dramatic differentiation has, under• standably, proved difficult."?
But Powys* animism is not restricted to the overt and childlike bringing of inanimates to life and consciousness such as we find ln these fantasies. In the major novels, it involves a profound sense of how men are affected by and inter• act with their environment. "His mysticism is really an uncanny awareness of an actual physical and psychic relationship between Q man and nature." In A Glastonbury Romance the relationships between the supernatural, human and sub-human presences in the town confer a great richness on the novel and actually inten• sify the impression of reality which it conveys. Cordelia Geard, waiting for her lover in Old Jones' curiosity shop on an April day, senses a mystical correspondence between the awakening of the natural world outside, her own sensations of love, and the accumulated debris of the curiosities, In which "the flowing spirit of life" was "caught up, waylaid, turned into silk, satin, brass . . . traps, walking-sticks and weapons"
(A Glastonbury Romance, 355).
While Powys absorbed his father's passion for long walks 18
through the countryside, close observation of nature, suspicion of scientific pretension, and sense of the interrelatedness of man, the lower forms of life and inanimate objects, his early interest ln literature was encouraged by his mother. Herself a descendant"- of the poets Cowper and Donne, she was a great reader, and read as well to her children. Powys claims Walter Scott and an illustrated version of Aytoun's Scottish Cavaliers as formative literary influences on his own treatment of land• scape. He found in both a Celtic aura which "affected deeper than I could possibly make you believe the actual feeling I have when I catch sight of certain rocks and stones and trees and rivers and wooded hills" (Autobiography, 24). Thus Powys absorbed early that romantic identification of emotional states with landscape, which is so dominant a characteristic of his own writing. His own first poem is a Gothic account of two "grisly spectres" at Corfe Castle. Written following a family visit to the castle, it demonstrates Powys' early suscepti• bility to impressions of landscape and in particular to the hilltop ruins which are a recurring image in his novels.
At Corfe Castle when the light Has vanished and the shades of night Steal o'er the ruins grey There is a dungeon from light of day Where now a grisly Spectre holds his sway. Among the shadowy ruins groping creeps he . . . (Autobiography, 63)
Although the early years in Dorset and Somerset were undoubtedly the most significant in the shaping of Powys' sense of place, certain events and aspects of his adult life also 19
shaped his attitude to landscape. The Autobiography describes a moment of revelation and ecstasy brought about by the sight
of a piece of moss clinging to an ancient wall in Cambridge.
This revelation, which he considers "the greatest event in my
life at Cambridge" (182), gave him a vision of the "mysterious meeting point of animate with inanimate" which was to play such
an important role in his novels.
In fact I actually regarded it as a prophetic idea of the sort of stories that I myself might come to write t stories that should have as their background the indescribable peace and gentleness of the substance we name grass in contact with the substance we name stone. (Autobiography, 183)
Powys asserts that although he did not gain much from Cambridge,
he "gained all the world from Cambridgeshire" (168), as he
pursued there the long, solitary walks in which he developed
an awareness of a mysterious and mystical rapport between him•
self and certain inanimate objects. "Posts, palings, hedges,
heaps of stones— they were part of my very soul" (155). It
is this vivid sense of the external world, not simply a sharp
accurate picture but a sixth sense of an additional quality of
life which was later to give Powys* novels their peculiar
richness,
Although experiences at Cambridge developed Powys* feeling
for the countryside and his sense of a mysterious rapport
between himself and certain inanimate objects, the landscapes
of his novels are, with the exception of Wales, the landscapes
known to him as a child. His Itinerant years as a lecturer 20
seem to have strengthened rather than diminished his feeling for the English countryside. All the novels he wrote while in
America are set in the English landscapes of his boyhood; his creative imagination seems not to have responded to the harsher and more dramatic landscapes through which he travelled, just as the bleak grandeur of the Blaenau Ffestiniog area does not appear ln any of the books he wrote there. Wolf Solent, A
Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands, with their details of hummocks, lanes and stumps, were written from memory and with the help of Ordnance Survey maps. Letters written to Littleton at this time indicate the process.
. . . I have got an Ordnance Map of Bridgewater and the Quantocks and one of Wells and the Mendipsi but Glastonbury is just at the edge between these two so that it is rather hard to deal with them together. I have nailed up the one that has Glastonbury on it behind the Stove on the wall of this room. (May 2, 1930)
My idea now is to write my next romance about Weymouth and Portland — so if you have any old tumbled to bits guide-books and books about those places more familiar to us both from childhood than any others you might despatch them to me. (February 6, 1932)
Returning from America in 193^, Powys attempted to settle ln Dorchester, the setting of his current work-in-progress.
During the composition of his last Wessex novel, Maiden Castle,
Powys was for once living in and writing about the same place at the same time, and critics have suggested that for this reason the setting of Maiden Castle is less vividly evoked 21
than usual. It Is Indicative of the nature of Powys' imagin• ation that the novels written in the nostalgia of exile are those which describe Wessex with the greatest detail and feeling.
This is not, however, the case with the novels written during his years in Wales, but of course Powys considered his sojourn in Wales as a home-coming rather than as exile. The three "Welsh" novels — Morwyn (1937), Owen Glendower (19^0) and Porlus (1951) were written in Corwen, where the two histor• ical novels largely take place. Powys' growing sense of identification with the Welsh involved a fascination with the wilder, more wooded, landscapes of North Wales, which were even more isolated from twentieth-century civilization than Wessex was. Although it may and has been considered as escapism,
Powys' withdrawal from active life and his retreat into the heart of one of the least "developed" areas of Britain was really a search and a Journey inwards, towards psychological and spiritual development which must be fostered by solitude.
Topicality and social realism were never among the virtues of
Powys' novels, whereas his residence in Wales did permit a significant development of his feeling for place, for history, and for a somewhat more rugged Nature. In his last novels, his imagination understandably seems to have been stimulated by memory and fantasy rather than by the immediate environment.
Although he spent his last eight years in Blaenau Ffestiniog, the Snowdon area is not used as a setting for the novels written there; these novels are set once more in Wessex, or ln imagined territories of Greece, Troy and even the moon. But the 22
fascination with the little details of nature remains, and the atmospheric power conferred through landscape is occasionally evoked even in these late works.
The place of John Cowper Powys within the tradition of
English writing on landscape is partly, although not entirely, determined by his relationship to Hardy. The early novels are those of a disciple of Hardy, although they differ greatly from the school of "regional novels" also written under Hardy's inspiration. But many of the characteristic Powysian approaches to landscape in the novel —exaggerated, fantasized and Gothic- ized though they may be — are to be found also in the works of Hardy.
An obvious source of comparison is in the Wessex upbring• ing of Powys and Hardy, and the consequent setting of many of their novels in the same countryside. Wolf Solent goes walking through the lanes of The Woodlanders. Dud No-Man and his friends live in Casterbrldge, Owen Evans and John Crow, like Tess, pass an eerie night at Stonehenge, and tourists of Powys* novel think of Hardy in Budmouth. While an entirely different spirit animates the characters of Powys' novels from that which ani• mates those of Hardy's, comparisons and recollections are almost inevitable when landscapes from the fiction of Hardy are recreated by Powys. Powys was highly conscious of the fact that he was writing about Hardy's own country. In Wood and
Stone, Luke Andersen on a visit to Weymouth thinks of Hardy at several points and, recalling the opening chapters of The Well-
Beloved, "could not help thinking to himself how strangely the 23
pervading charm of scenes of this kind is enhanced by personal and literary associations" (5?6). This awareness on his char• acters' part that they inhabit a landscape celebrated by Hardy has the effect of putting Hardy's novels further into the past; they become part of the background, the myths and traditions of the area against which the modern characters are seen.
The relationship between Powys and Hardy is not, of course, confined to the similar locales of their novels. In their treatment of landscape this relationship is to be found in their detailed observation of nature, in their attaching symbolic value to topographical features, and ln their sense of a corres• pondence between human emotions and the changes of weather, colour and light apparent in nature. Both were countrymen all their lives, and the intricate details of nature which were familiar and fascinating to them give a richness of texture and evocative power to their novels, characteristic also of such
"nature writers" as W.H. Hudson, Richard Jeffries and Henry
Williamson. But in Powys' novels, as in Hardy's, the descrip• tions of nature, however abundant and attractive, are always essential to the development of theme and the revelation of character. The integration of nature description into the larger purposes of the novel is achieved by Powys' mingling of such description with the whole consciousness of the observers.
It was along the edge of a small tributary full of marsh-marigolds that they approached the river- bank. Gerda was so impatient to hear a water-rat splash that she scarcely glanced at these great yellow orbs rising from thick, moist, mud-stained 24
stalks and burnished leaves; but to Wolf, as he passed them by, there came rushing headlong out of that ditch, like an invisible Company of tossing-maned air-horses, a whole wild herd of ancient memories I (Wolf Solent, 146)
In the major novels of Powys, no piece of natural descrip• tion is gratuitous, a "set-piece" existing independently of the rest of the novel. The marsh-marigolds are appreciated for themselves, but the purpose of their inclusion is a revelation of the contrasting states of awareness in the two lovers --
Gerda childish and spontaneous, Wolf analytical, introspective and dominated by memory. Awareness of his external surround• ings is a constant element in the thought-process of the Powysian protagonist, and a moment of revelation often fuses itself with some sensory impression which accompanies the spiritual exper• ience. Wolf's awakening love for Gerda is accompanied by the beautiful description of her blackbird song, just as Grace
Melbury's new awareness of Giles Winterbourne is seen in terms of the colours and smells of the cider pressing. Similarly,
Clara realizes Vernon in Meredith's description of him lying under the cherry tree, and Ursula and Blrkin transmit their attraction for each other while studying the catkin flowers.
In Powys as in Hardy, Lawrence and even Meredith, who is not normally considered a "nature writer," the detailed description of a natural scene adds richness to the novel without deflect• ing the novel from its primary concerns with character and theme.
Because of his extensive use of Wessex landscapes Powys has often been termed a regional novelist. But something of 25
the individual nature of his treatment of landscape may be observed from a study of just how he does differ from both the great regional writers like George Eliot and Hardy, and those followers of Hardy who form a sort of regionallst school -- among them Eden Phillpotts, H.W. Bates, Thomas Moult, "John
Treveha," Sheila Kaye-Smith and Constance Holme. W.Y. Tlndall's
criticism of the "regional school" might be, and has been, applied to Powys.
These middle-class refugees from what their class had done to nature found or created vestiges of a more natural past. Tom like their master (Hardy) between Wordsworth and Darwin, and almost aware that in turning their backs upon cities they were rejecting the important reality of their class, they became morbid. And so did their peasants, trees, and flowers.
Tindall is here criticizing the regionalists for a lack of social realism, but in Powys' case, at least, social realism is not the quality aimed at. It cannot be fairly said that Powys idealizes the past or the countryside; the charge of morbidity hits closer, but Poe, Baudelaire and Dostoievsky are also "morbid" writers, and Powys' literary purposes lie closer to theirs than to those of Trollope or Arnold Bennett. Herein lies one impor• tant distinction between Powys and the regionallst school.
Another tendency of the regional novels is to describe life as, in Charlotte Bronte's words, "something real, cool and solid ... as unromantic as Monday morning." Powys, however, finds even Monday morning thoroughly romantic. Dud NoMan's breakfast-making operations are Invested with the atmosphere of historic struggles between royal personages; Wolf Solent and 26
John Crow have visionary experiences while staring respectively at a pig sty and a dead cat in the mud. What might be natural•
istic descriptions, for example of the details of domestic
interiors or repulsive old men, are moved into another category
of literary tradition by Powys' conviction of a transcendental
significance inherent ln the most mundane objects and beings.
While most regional novelists were working basically within the
naturalist tradition, Powys' inspiration was fundamentally roman•
tic, mystical and non-realistic. 12
Phyllis Bentley, in her book on regionalism, suggests that
in the true regional novel the characters' occupations are indig•
enous to the area described, and that the plot depends for Its
functioning upon characteristics of that region. While A
Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands do attempt to deal with
political and economic factors ln the lives of the communities
— Mr. Geard's mayoral candidacy, Philip Crow's "works," the
labour trouble at the Portland quarries -- these issues are kept
in the background, rather than being vividly recreated in scenes
of the novel as they are ln great regional works like Middle-
march, The Mayor of Casterbrldge or the Five Towns novels.
Jobber Skald is alive in his love for Perdita and his obsession
with murdering Cattistock, but we do not really see him func•
tioning as a quarry man, nor can we quite envisage the magnifi•
cent mystic Geard coping with the details of civic office. It
is in Wood and Stone, the novel which is chronologically closest
to Hardy and the succeeding wave of reglonalists, that we find the most convincing depiction of protagonists who are working 2?
men. We are actually shown James chipping stone and Dangelis
painting a portrait. In the later novels, even those charac•
ters who have regular jobs seem to find it disconcertingly easy
to devote large portions of their days to long walks, dalliance
and philosophical debate. Most Powysian protagonists have jobs which allow them a great deal of liberty — Wolf is doing dub•
ious research, Magnus Muir is a tutor, the Cobbold brothers
are respectively clown and itinerant philosopher, Dud is writing
a novel. While minor characters such as the Torps and Weather-
wax may be convincing as working people, virtually all the major
characters in the novels are freed by the nature of their occu•
pations from the exigencies of an ordinary working life.
Clergymen, tutors, writers, antiquarians they are also not
restricted to any particular locality by their kind of work,
and can not be considered "regional" characters.
Nor, on the whole, do Powys' plots turn upon events which
are indigenous to any particular regions. While Lenty Pond,
Weymouth and Babylon Hill play their parts in Wolf's spiritual
crisis, they function symbolically rather than ln some directly
economic way. To.elucidate this point, there is an interesting
comparison to be made between Wolf Solent and The Woodlanders.
In both novels, which are, incidentally, set within a few miles
of each other, the chief character is attracted to two different
members of the opposite sex, and makes a choice which he later
regrets. In both novels, "cosmopolitan" characters (Wolf,
Christie, Fitzpiers, Mrs. Charmond and to some extent Grace)
interact with "regional" characters (Gerda, Giles and Marty). 28
In Hardy's novel, however, much of the crisis is precipitated by regional factors. Local tenure laws, the isolation of the
Hintocks and the seasonal tasks of the woodsmen are all highly local conditions, and are conditions essential to the working out of the tragedy. Wolf Solent certainly reacts to the topo• graphical features of his birthplace, and is aware of Nature and the changes of the seasons, but these influences operate on his intellect and spirit rather than in the practical, economic and physical ways that they affect Giles and the woodlanders.
Even the rustic Gerda Is not bound by any essentially Wessex way of life. While the book itself would have a very different character if transferred to some other setting, the elements of the plot could remain almost unchanged. Wolf could have morbid fancies about a pond in Lancashire, Gerda could whistle like a bird on almost any hill, and Mr. Malakite could make his fateful
Journey to Blackpool equally as well as to Weymouth. The plots of The Woodlanders, or The Lonely Plough or Anna of the Five
Towns could not be so easily transferred to other localities.
To say all this is not to say that Powys' novels are not firmly rooted ln the landscape and traditions of certain regions.
A Glastonbury Romance really is inconceivable in another setting;
Weymouth Sands could not easily become Blackpool Sands, or even
Brighton Sands. But the elements which bind Powys' novels to their particular landscapes are not the economical and social influences of the region upon the details of the plot which are so much a part of the regionalism of George Eliot, Hardy,
Bennett and their followers. Landscape is central to the novels 29 of Powys in the sense that it largely creates their psycholog•
ical atmosphere — the states of mind and spiritual battles of his protagonists which are his true concern. In the sense that
Lenty Pond represents the sinister seduction of negation, des•
pair and suicide, it is an extremely Important image — one might even say force'-.- within the book. Leo's Hill, Lenty Pond and the Forests of Tywyn have a symbolic power comparable to
that of the marshes in Great Expectations or Egdon Heath, even
though their influence on the economic life of the local inhabi•
tants may not be as great.
The best regional novels show the landscape influencing
the characters both economically and psychologically, The Return
of the Native being a supreme example of this. Trevena's
Furze the Cruel (1907) and Sheila Kaye-Smlth's Sussex Gorse
(1916), regional novels roughly contemporary with Powys' first
efforts, do use landscapes in these ways, but both novels are
much more obviously indebted to Hardy (for example, in their
choice of the heath as antagonist) than Powys is even ln his
early works. In these two novels the landscape symbolism is
monolithic; the aspirations of the human characters are set in
opposition to the bleak reductionism of the heath. In Wood and
Stone conflicting aspects of human nature are embodied ln two
hills, one rockyand quarried, the other gently wooded and sur•
mounted by a cross. The symbolism is still quite blatant, but
it is already more complex than that of Furze the Cruel or Sussex
Gorse. In a late novel like Owen Glendower the symbolism of the
landscape has become very subtle and intricately woven into the
treatment of themes and characters. In the two regional novels 30 virtually all the characters are natives, and most work on the land. Wood and Stone has an American painter, two Italian waifs and a cosmopolitan theologian among its personaes rela• tively few of its characters could be considered Wessex "types".
Clearly, something other than rural realism is being attempted.
For the most fruitful sources of comparison with Powys' treatment of landscape it is necessary to look not only to
Hardy, the "nature writers" like Hudson and Jeffries, and the reglonalists but also to the Romantics, the Gothic novelists,
Emily Bronte and certain French contemporaries. Among the romantic poets, Wordsworth and Scott probably had the most in• fluence, although Powys shared Keats' fascination with minutiae and his imaginative sympathy enabled him, like Keats, sometimes to convey the sense that he too actually was the sparrow picking about the gravel. From Scott, and Aytoun as well, Powys claimed to have derived much of his early fascination with historical romance and the glamour of a landscape steeped in associations of human drama (Autobiography. 23-24, 60-61).
Wordsworth's sense of presences among the mighty forms of the hills, working with an inscrutable will upon the human char• acter, is echoed in Powys' sense of the landscape as having some kind of consciousness and will of its own. The malevolence of
Leo's Hill, and the presence of Cader Idris in Porlus owe some• thing to the midnight boating expeditions ln Book I of The
Prelude when
. . . growing still ln stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me. (I, 381-385) 31
Powys lacked Wordsworth's conviction of the benevolence of the "Presences of Nature in the sky/ And on the earthI
Ye visions of the hilist? And Souls of lonely places I" (I,
464-66), but his awareness of these Presences is a notable aspect of landscape description in all his novels.
Unlike those of Wordsworth, the landscapes of Powys often embody qualities of horror and evil. A letter written to
Louis Wilkinson from Virginia shows the kind of macabre fantasy which Powys particularly enjoyed. It describes
a marsh by a sea-estuary among reeds and black decaying tree-trunks and indescribable mud — and on the other side of the water black cypresses .... The place heaved and palpitated with the life of putrescence like a horrible great heart .... It was the cradle of all the physical nightmares that prey on morbid nerves. It heaved with horrible death-in-life . . . with forbidden life. It was like black blood breeding snakes . . .
From Gothic novels Powys learned the art of contrasting pastoral and awesome landscapes to heighten the effect of each, and indi• cating something of the psychological states of the characters through the technique of pathetic fallacy. The midnight esca• pade of Gladys and Lacrlma in Wood and Stone and the discovery of Rachel's corpse with its eyes pecked out by an owl in
Rodmoor are thoroughly Gothic episodes. However, the mature
Powys was less inclined to gloat over horrors. Gothic passages are less frequent in the later novels, and even potentially melodramatic scenes such as the confrontation of Geard with
Merlin's spirit at Mark's Court in A Glastonbury Romance and the pursuit of the giants over the peaks of Cader Idris ln
Porlus have a magical rather than horrific quality — magic 32 which is original to and characteristic of Powys at his best.
Having considered ln a general way the characteristics of
Powys' treatment of landscape, each of his works of fiction may be surveyed individually and ln chronological sequence, in order to Indicate the relationship of the five novels to the development of Powys' work as a whole.
It has already been demonstrated that Wood and Stone and the other early novels were greatly influenced by Hardy. Wood and Stone (1915) is dedicated to Hardy, Rodmoor (1916) to "the spirit of Emily Bronte." These first two novels were both sub• titled "A Romance;" both appeared within a year of the essay in
Suspended Judgements which discusses the importance of landscape as the background of human drama ln the romance. The scenery in which Wood and Stone is set does indeed "present Itself as some• thing almost personal" in the development of the plot. As the introduction and opening chapter assert, the conflict ln the novel is basically between the two hills, animated by opposing
"mythologiesj" the human characters are powerless against these larger forces. A landscape description opens each chapter, establishing its mood with overt symbolism.
Wood and Stone and Ducdame (1925) are Wessex novels, but
Rodmoor, after opening in London, is set in East Anglia. Thus, while the first novel describes the landscape — that around
Montacute — with which Powys had the longest and closest assoc• iations, Rodmoor has fewer personal and autobiographical elements, and landscape is less prominent than usual. 33
. . . Powys distances his theme by putting to a tragic purpose a landscape with happy associations for himself .... The landscape harmonises with the bleakness of the tale. Rodmoor itself is a decaying port backed by immense salt-marshes and eroded by the sea, and the novel is haunted by a feeling of isolation and menace. The geographical notation of Wood and Stone is here reversed. Now it is the woods and orchards and gardens of the inland country which are friendly, and the sea which is the enemy and destroyer* agraphobla replaces claustrophobia.^
Not only the sea but the tidal River Loon, in which the first of the three deaths by drowning takes place, is endowed with a sinister hostility to man. But the Gothicism of Powys is not simply sensational indulgence. It is a means of expressing his acute sensitivity to evil, to the darker side of men's natures and of the impulses which pass between them and the physical world.
Although chronologically much closer to Wolf Solent (1929) and the succeeding major novels, Ducdame belongs with the ear• lier, minor novels of Powys, since in it he is still somewhat under the thrall of the Gothic and regional traditions. Land• scape descriptions are abundant and rich in natural details.
While they do not formally introduce each chapter as they do ln
Wood and Stone, these descriptions of the local scenery as it alters under the changes of season and weather are nevertheless made to correspond with the emotional states of the characters.
A close analysis of how this correspondence between man and nature operates in a typical chapter is given by Glen Cavaliero 15 in his essay on the early novels. Nature does not exert the malign influence in this novel upon man that it did in the two preceding ones. Oppressive images of both the fecundity and 34 the bleakness of nature are counterbalanced by idyllic images.
He remembered one particular June evening . . . as he watched by his brother's side a great orange-bellied newt sink languidly down into the depth of a meadow pond, while the hum of the heavy mowing machine went round the field followed by the scent of newly cut clover and the flicker of careless-winged dragon-flies . . . (167).
The sinking of the newt into the watery depths recurs as an Image of almost mystical joy and completeness in A Glastonbury Romance.
Ducdame and Wolf Solent are the last novels in which Powys, following Hardy's practice, thinly disguised the settings of the novels by altering their place names. Jobber Skald (1934) was issued with that title and with its place names altered, only because of a law suit launched by a Somerset industrial• ist who had believed himself libelled in the person of Philip
Crow ln the preceding novel, A Glastonbury Romance. The book had already been published in America as Weymouth Sands. and a later English edition (1963) restored the title and true place names. There is no doubt but that Powys* novels are enriched by the actuality of their settings, and disguised place names serve little purpose.
With Wolf Solent Powys entered upon two decades of crea• tive fertility and maturity: between 1929 and 1951 he wrote six major novels as well as the fantasy Morwyn, his Autobi• ography and other non-fictional works. In Wolf Solent can be sensed for the first time an independence and confidence in his own vision which enabled Powys largely to dispense with
Gothic machinery. Paradoxically, while Wolf Solent is thus 35
more "realistic" than the early novels, it digresses further from the tradition of the regional novel by its absorption ln the psychological processes of its protagonist. While Wood and Stone did to some degree depict the life of a Wessex vill• age, Wolf Solent is concerned with the soul of Wolf, and with the external world only insofar as it Impinges on or is mirrored in that soul. One significant change from the early novels lies in the relative benevolence, or at least indifference, of the landscape and nature toward the human characters. Partly due to the pruning away of his Gothicism, this new acceptance of the intertwined beauty and ugliness of nature is an indica• tion of Powys' Increasingly tolerant, balanced attitude towards human experience. Lenty Pond has Its morbid fascination, but
Wolf is able to resist it, and achieves acceptance of both the pig sty and the field of buttercups behind it. The protagon• ists of the preceding novels, James Andersen, Adrian Sorio and
Rook Ashover, respectively died by going insane and falling off a cliff into a quarry, by bursting a blood vessel and subse• quently drowning while tied to the body of his mistress, and by being beaten to death with a rake by a mad vicar. In sub• sequent novels the superhuman figures — Geard, Uryen,
Glendower — still die dramatically, but the "Powys figures" make some sort of compromise and live on. Nature, from being a hostile, malign force, Is now a potential source of physical and spiritual ecstasy. Wolf concludes "It's my body that has saved me" inasmuch as It is through the body that the "simplest elements" of sensuous pleasure to which he ultimately clings 36
for a raison d'etre come to pervade his consciousness.
A Glastonbury Romance (1932) is the first of Powys' novels in which a particular landscape is given atmosphere and charac• ter by a coherent body of legend. In Wood and Stone Powys more or less invented, a mythological strife between the powers of the two hills; in Wolf Solent significance is conferred on features of the landscape by Wolf's identification of them with certain personal experiences. But in Glastonbury Powys found a thoroughly developed native tradition giving meaning and resonance to the Tor, Chalice Well, Wirral Hill and Pomparles
Bridge. Powys' insistence on the spiritually symbolic properties of the landscape thus appears less idiosyncratic than it does in other works, and the insistence Itself is not so belaboured.
This novel, and the two which follow it (Weymouth Sands and
Maiden Castle), concern themselves with the topography of a town as much as with the surrounding landscape.
In Weymouth Sands features of this topography -- spire, clock, statue and wishing well — enter into the action almost as personalities. Perhaps because of the glamour which sur• rounded his childhood memories of Weymouth, Powys' presentation of the place is marked by mellow fondness of tone, and an absorption in the sensations of the present. In the
Autobiography Powys observed how
. . . every aspect of the Weymouth coast sunk into my mind with such a transubstantiating magic that it might be said that when I think now of certain things I think with St. John's spire and the Nothe, and the old Backwater and 37
the Harbour Bridge, and the stone groins and the green pier-posts and the dead seaweed and the windrow-flotsam and the stranded star-fishI (39)
The promontory of Portland Is the most arresting topographical image in the book. Like the conical hills of other novels, it thrusts out into another element, here water as well as air.
It becomes incarnate in Jobber Skald who has "a vein of oolite in his disposition" and seems to embody both the remote strength of the rock and the moody potency of the sea (171, 252-53). The presence of the sea pervades the novel. Unlike Rodmoor, the only other seacoast novel, Weymouth Sands is a novel of light and invigorating air. The sea, even during the storm scene, is not a hostile, malignant force; it embodies, rather, the mys• tery of the impersonal forces which control human life but which remain ultimately Incomprehensible.
In Maiden Castle (1936) topographical features are seen almost entirely ln terms of their past, and landscape Is given its meaning by the reaction of the modern characters to the past which It embodies. The town resembles Glastonbury in
"the dignity of its long history" and its ability "to gather the centuries together with a familiar continuity of unbroken tradition . . . ." Like the Dorchester landscape, this novel has always in its background the mysterious and disturbing presence of Maiden Castle, a prehistoric earthwork similar to
Poll's Camp of Wolf Solent. Much more than in the earlier novel, however, the history and original significance of the earthwork are stressed. Uryen Quirm regards Maiden Castle as 38
the repository of some ancient secret of life. The symbolism is powerful but obscure. While the atmosphere of Weymouth is almost entirely evoked by present phenomena, the timeless sea and seashore, the atmospheres of Glastonbury and Dorchester are conferred on them largely by historical associations. Land• scape in itself, apart from its historical and mythological connotations, is becoming less important than it was in the early novels.
In Morwyn (1937), an anti-vivisectionist fantasy, the landscape is literally that of Hell, and the earthly visitors are given a tour of it in an allegorical, Dantesque fashion.
The book is interesting in terms of landscape inasmuch as it gives a spatial location to what remains in the major novels merely a concept — the underworld and the Golden Age. Here the Golden Age and the hiding place of Merlin are discovered, underneath Hell. Morwyn begins ln North Wales, but as yet the
Welsh terrain plays no significant role.
After Maiden Castle Powys wrote only two more major narra• tives, Owen Glendower and Porlus. Both are set ln the area around Corwen, during different periods of Welsh history.
Owen Glendower (19^0) is the most wide-ranging of Powys' major novels, since it follows Glendower's military activities all over Wales and the border counties. The influence of the land• scape is felt chiefly in the person of Rhisiart, who reacts to the historical and physical auras of Dlnas Bran, Harlech and
Tywyn, among other places. As in A Glastonbury Romance, the legendary significance of certain landmarks is blended with 39
the actual physical appearance of the landscape, and the whole aspect of the external environment related to the Internal conflicts and aspirations of the characters.
In Porius (1951) this process is more obscure, as the historical period depicted is little known and the landscape primeval. Those topographical features which do have human associations (St. Julien's Well, Mynydd y Gaer) are the more memorable for the reason that they are surrounded by a virtual wilderness. Like most of Powys' heroes Porius is able to throw out his soul into an embrace of Nature, but he embraces a
Nature rougher and less humanized than is usual in Powys. The intimate association with nature which characterized many of the magus figures and "Powys figures" of the earlier novels here reaches its extreme in Merlin, whose nature "constitutes
'a multiple identity composed of many separate lives,' includ• ing beasts, reptiles, vegetation and stone."^ Thick forests, mists, marshes and funguses are the predominant aspects of landscape ln Porius: they work together with the primitive, racially mixed, often semi-mythological personages of the novel to convey an atmosphere of fertile mystery. Much of the action of the novel takes place on the great mountains — Cader Idrls,
Yr Wyddfa (a peak of Snowdon) and Mynydd y Gaer. The whole book, like Porius and his giantess lover, is larger than life, and to this effect the landscape — purged entirely of Gothic trappings and regional quaintness — admirably contributes.
In his subsequent works Powys breaks with the main tra• ditions of the English novel, and indulges his penchants for 40
fantasy and metaphysical speculation. Landscape, which has hitherto provided the novels with a basis in the normal world, diminishes greatly ln importance as the last novels play with concepts of time and space, and transport their characters to the sun, moon, the Milky Way, outer space and the earth's centre.
The action of The Inmates (1952) takes place mostly inside and in the grounds of a mental asylum, but a climactic confron• tation does take place under a prehistoric hill fort at dawn.
John Hush, like all of Powys' protagonists, finds spiritual sustenance in his relationship with natural and/or inanimate objects, and escapes mesmerism at one point by crawling "on all fours" and thus becoming "a medium for the secret wisdom of all those creatures of the earth, animal, vegetable, min• eral . . ." (281) much as Uryen and Merlin had done in earlier novels (see Saturnlan Quest, 79, 84). The sense of Nature and the earth is still strong, but landscape as such plays little part in the novel.
Landscape does resume some importance in Atlantis (1954), but it is the landscape of an imagined Ithaca and a fantasized" ocean voyage, rather than any familiar locality, which Powys describes. Certain places are given symbolic weight» Arlma is a desolate waste where the polarities of Eurybla and Echidna argue eternally, Kleta's garden is the repository of lost bits of matter, and the sunken Atlantis represents the heresy of science for its own sake. It is arguable, however, that the localities of the novel are so diverse, and the associations given to them so diffuse, that few attain real significance 41
for the reader. The predominant image of the novel, reinforced by suggestions from Homer and Tennyson, is that of Odysseus and his motley company sailing boldly westward.
The Brazen Head (1956) has the same Wessex setting as
Powys' early novels, but its historical setting and its absorp• tion in metaphysical conflicts differentiate it greatly from them. Again, landscape is very much in the background, although the book opens with a description of a sunrise seen from a
Druidic stone circle reminiscent of the sunrise in The Inmates.
The striking landmarks of the novel are prehistoric — the stone circle and the Cerne Giant. This latter figure has been referred to frequently in the novels, and here overtly assumes an occult and phallic power previously just hinted at. Unlike
Owen Glendower and Porlus, The Brazen Head does not attempt to give any realistic indication of the place and era in which it
is set. Features of the landscape sporadically and briefly
become vivid, but apart from the Cerne Giant there is no sense, as there had been in the early and major novels, of the land•
scape as a constant presence and an active force in the
human drama.
There is relatively little to say about landscape in
Powys* last three fantasies. The protagonists of Up and Out
(1957) are on a fragment of earth blown out of the dimensions
of time and space by an atomic explosion. There are some
humourous references to Powys' own haunts — the Blaenau
Ffestiniog Public Library and the ailanthus tree in Patchin
Place, New York City — but the story lacks even that absorption 42
ih natural minutiae which usually marks his work. In The Moun• tains of the Moon, the companion story to Up and Out, these minutiae reappear, and are animated among the cast of charac• ters which thus includes such improbables as the core of the apple from Eden, Jael's Iron Nail, Nero's fiddle-string and
King Alfred's Crust. We have evidently come a long way from
Jeffries, Hardy and the regional novel. Although the late fan• tasies may have little direct interest in the study of Powys* landscapes, it is well to remember the sort of fantastic, ani• mistic and allegorizing qualities of his mind which they affirm.
All or Nothing (i960) is set in a vaguely indent!fiable
Dorsetshire, with excursions to London, the sun and the Milky
Way. Like Atlantis, it describes a sacred territory where polarized entities, here called Bubble and Squeak, debate the meaning of life. The Cerne Giant actually comes to life as a kindly and creative figure. But ln this story, like those immediately preceding it, "mythology" has taken the place of landscape as the primary interest of the book. Whether or not this is attributable to Powys* great age, and a consequent emphasis upon fantasizing rather than observation of the world around him, the change undoubtedly results in a loss of coher• ence and realism. Powys* late works of fiction indicate how important it was that his major works were rooted in a sense of place. The constant, deeply-felt presence of the landscape in these novels helps greatly to counteract the flights of metaphysical and psychological speculation which, however valu• able and intrinsic to his art, can otherwise overbalance it. 43
Chapter Twoi Footnotes
1 Collins, Old Earth Man, p. 11.
2 Carl G. Jung, "Approaching the Unconscious ", Man and his Symbols, ed., Carl G. Jung (New Yorkt Doubleday, 1964), pp. 4-3-45.
3 "Dickens" in Visions and Revisions, p. 97. 4 From a review, apparently unpublished, of Eastward ln Eden by Claude Silve, trans. Evelyn Hatch, ln the private collection of Mr. E.E. Bissell of Ashorne, Warwickshire. 5 Reprinted in The Powys Newsletter, Two, 1971. (no pagination).
^ John Cowper Powys, The Owl, The Duck, and — Miss Rowel Miss Rowe'. (Chicago i Black Archer Press, 1930).
7 Collins, Old Earth Man, p. 116.
8 Glen Cavaliero, "On the Frontlen John Cowper Powys," Theology (Sept. I96I), p. 371. Hereafter referred to as "On the Frontier."
^ Quoted in Appendix I (b), Essays on John Cowper Powys, ed. Belinda Humfrey (Cardiff 1 University of Wales Press, 1972), PP. 325, 329. This book is hereafter referred to as Essays, ed. Humfrey.
10 Malcolm Elwin, Prefatory Note to the 1966 edition of Maiden Castle (London» Macdonald), p. 8,
11 W.Y. Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature (I9475 rpt. New Yorki Random House, 1956), p. 303. For such criticism of Powys see Tindall himself, p. 304, and Lionel Stevenson, The History of the English Novel, vol 11 (New Yorki Barnes and Noble, 1967). PP. 130-36.
12 Phyllis Bentley, The English Regional Novel (London 1 George Allen and Unwin, 1941).
1^ Quoted by Louis Wilkinson, The Brothers Powys (Cinclnattii Auburncrest Library, 1947), p. 13.
14 Cavaliero, "On the Frontier," p. 88. ^ Glen Cavaliero, "John Cowper Powys1 Landscape and Personality in the Early Novels," Essays, ed. Humfrey, pp. 86-101.
16 G. Wilson Knight, Saturnlan Quest, p. 79. 44
Chapter Three
"Traditions, old and dark and superstitious and malign"i The Mythic Background of Powys* Fiction
As I have insisted from the start, my dominant life-illusion was that I was, or at least would eventually be, a magician; and what is a magician if not one who converts God's 'reality' into his I own 'reality', God's world into his own world, and God's nature into his own nature? (Autobiography, 23)
It is evident from the Autobiography that as a child
Powys had a sense of possessing great powers, of moving in a world controlled as much by the strength of his own imagination as by natural and social laws. This conviction never left him, but influenced his lifelong concern with mythological and meta• physical Subjects. Powys' dominant life-illusion in childhood was that he was himself a magician, like such favourite charac• ters as Merlin or Michael Scott of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."
As an infant Powys felt "a living power over matter and over nature," and once startled his nursemaid by declaring "I am the Lord of Hosts" (Autobiography. 11, 25), Such a conception of one's own powers, and of the fantastical quality of the universe, is common enough in children, but Powys both possessed it to an extraordinary degree and retained it, in modified forms, all his life (Autobiography. 55-57).
Powys recalls his father's habit of recounting "an inter• minable story about two mythic personages called Giant Grumble and Fairy Sprightly" (Autobiography, 4); this story evidently directed Powys' imagination very early towards the form of 45
fantasy, just as infant memories of Mount Cloud impressed the power of landscape upon his mind. In Porius a character pro• claims that the human imagination, in its power to tell Itself stories, can create its own reality (44). Uryen in Maiden
Castle declares that "Everything's in the mind. Everything's created and destroyed by the mind .... the truth of life's in the imagination, not ln ashes and urns'." (250). This belief in the magical power of the human Imagination to create Its own reality underlies the treatment of myth throughout Powys' work.
In the fairy tales told by Powys' father, the villain was always a person known as "the professor," and Powys grew up sharing his father's dislike of pedantry and reductionist real-
Ism. He believes that "all the great urges of our spirit come nearest to the secret of the universe when they enjoy Nature with the detachment of a Pilgrim rather than analyze her with the curiosity of a Scientist" (Autobiography. 55). Imaginative literature, like philosophy, presents different possible ways of seeing the world. "To analyze this 'objective world' Is all very well, so long as you don't forget that the power to rebuild It by emphasis and rejection is synonymous with your being alive" (Autobiography. 57). The myths are just that kind of story whose telling can reconstruct our perception of reality.
In his major novels Powys uses myth allusively and sugges• tively, drawing from sources — chiefly Greek, Latin and Celtic
— which he knows in considerable depth. Examining the mytho• logical references In Powys' novels is a formidable task, as 46
Powys read exhaustively in both the Welsh and Greek originals and in critical and historical commentaries upon them. This study does not purport to be a comprehensive treatment of Powys* use of myth, but rather to show how in certain novels mytho• logical references are used thematically and in interaction with the landscape. Although some of the later novels, particu• larly, make great use of classical legends, the novels studied in this dissertation are concerned chiefly with Celtic mythology.
Powys makes extensive reference both to the Welsh legends, chiefly preserved in the Mablnoglon, and to the Arthurian tra• dition which in part developed out of the Welsh material. In considering Powys* life-long interest in the Arthurian legends it is of course also important to remember that the area in which he spent his boyhood was rich in Arthurian traditions.
Montacute lies within sight of the Glastonbury Tor, and walks taken while he was at Sherborne School led to "no less a place than the original sight of the walls and towers of Camelot
.... We were always assured by local antiquaries that
Arthur and his Knights were playing chess in the heart of
Cadbury Hill until the Day of Judgement" (Autobiography. 82).
The theme of a great leader asleep inside a hill recurs in
Powys* fictioni in Geard sleeping in Wookey Hole, Glendower hiding in Mynydd y Gaer and Myrddin Imprisoned on top of Snowdon.
Powys* fascination with his Welsh descent also began early.
The ancestral Powys emblem, the Welsh dragon, was painted over the schoolroom fireplace in the Montacute vicarage, and
Littleton Powys recalls that the old Burke's Peerage "recorded 47
that the family traced its descent through the barons of Maln- y-Meifod and the princes of Powys to Rhodri Mawr, king of all
Wales.*
In the private collection of Mr. E. E. Bissell of Ashorne,
Warwickshire is a manuscript fragment of an unpublished play, probably written about 1900 When Powys was eighteen, on the subject of Llewelyn, Prince of Wales in the time of Edward I.
The play, composed in grandiloquent blank verse and evidently modelled after a Shakespearian history, is full of high lang• uage about the defense of Wales.
When I bow down my head at Edward's feet May Merlin kiss the pale beard of the Christ May Arthur's ghost at reedy Glastonbury Shed woman's tears ...
Thirty years before the publication of A Glastonbury Romance and fifty before that of Porius, the themes of Merlin, Arthur and the Glastonbury legends are thus seen to be working power• fully in Powys' imagination. Among the cast of characters in this play are "The Druid Idris," "The Bard Talavan" and "The
Ghost of Merlin;" the list is not unlike those with which
Maiden Castle, Owen Glendower and Porius are prefaced. The play Is interesting in that it shows Powys' early identifica• tion of himself with Wales, and a familiarity even at this time with Welsh history and legends. Already his interest shows some close reading! he uses fairly recondite terminology, such as "cantref" for the division of land equivalent to a
"hundred." Further, it makes reference to the Arthurian tradition, and manifests its sympathies for the Welsh cause 48
and for the memories of "Cornish Uther's son." Powys' sense of himself as a Welshman, and of the particular values of his
Celtic racial heritage, evidently became deeply rooted in his nature during childhood. Although other members of the Powys
family, which had lived in England for generations, were puz• zled by John Cowper*s obsession with his Welsh ancestry and 2 even considered it an affectation it undoubtedly was a belief which dominated Powys all his life and plays a large part in shaping his fiction. My father's eyes used to burn with a fire that was at once secretive and blazing, like the fire in the eyes of long discrowned kings, when he told us how we were descended from the ancient Welsh Princes of Powysland. From an old Welsh family long ago established in the town of Ludlow in Shropshire ln what were formerly called the Welsh 'Marches' we undoubtedly did —Princes or no Princes — as the genealogies put it, •deduce our lineage;' and I am inclined to think that there has seldom been a mortal soul — certainly no modem one -- more obstinately Cymric than my own. . . . Probably the oldest wisdom in Wales was that wisest and most ancient of all human wisdom; namely that it is within the power of the will and the imagination to destroy and recreate the world. (Autobiography, 24)
Powys' concept of the imagination is here seen to be linked with his sense of affinity with the Welsh.
It was not until he was thirty, however, that Powys' youthful Interest in "Celtic emotion" became transformed into
"a passion for everything Welsh."
I bought Welsh grammars, Welsh dictionaries, Welsh modern poetry. I bought an elaborate 49
Welsh Genealogy, called 'Powys-Fadoc,' and mightily chagrined was I when I found no mention of my Father's ancestors ln it I I bought everything I could lay hands on that had to do with Wales and with the Welsh people . . . . I soon gave up trying to learn Welsh. But the Idea of Wales and the idea of Welsh mythology went drumming on like an incantation through my tantalized soul. I had no vision so far — that was still to come — of myself as a restorer of the hidden planetary secrets of these mystical Introverts of the world, but the gods having made me, instead of a conscientious scholar, an imaginative charlatan, I resolved to realize with my whole spiritual force what it meant to be descended — to the devil with 'Powys-Fadoc' — from those ancient Druidic chieftains J (Autobiography. 306-07)
After this point the Autobiography Is full of references to himself as "a fairy-tale Welshman" (428), a "Welsh Rasputin"
(441),"a deboshed Welsh clown" (448), who is possessed by the "old Druidic spirit" of Tallesin (482, see also 334-36,
422, 499, 518, 547, 567).
Much of the attraction of Wales for Powys lay, of course, ln the Welsh legends, and in the particular atmosphere of romance and illusion which hangs about them. There were other attractions as welli Powys always had a strong interest in the unsuccessful — evident in such heroes as Wolf Solent,
Magnus Muir and Dud— and in Owen Glendower he expresses his admiration for a nation which like those heroes preserves its individual character and inner strength in the face of apparent defeat. 50
We have been, of course, being as harmless as we are, what Is called 'conquered* over and over again. But in our unbelligerent, un-malicious, furtively amused and altogether unfathomable way we have allowed our conquerors to make our laws and our institutions, to clap upon us their Church of Rome or their Church of England, and even to present us with our dictionaries, first of Celtic words and then of Roman words and then of English words, without allowing these energetic authorities so much as even to discover where we have hidden our human soulJ (Obstinate Cymric, 7-8)
As a Welshman living in foreign lands, he could participate in what had always seemed to him "the enchantment of litera• ture in connection with exiles, and with exiles whose own cause seemed irretrievably lost" (Autobiography, 23).
Powys identifies himself in later works not simply with the Welsh, but with the "aboriginal Welsh," the forest-people of Owen Glendower and Porlus who are pre-Celtic. For a man who always had an acute sense of his difference from other men, the Welsh connection provided a justification for many eccen• tricities — his aloofness, his volubility, his love of romance and his hatred of organizations (Autobiography. 307-08). But particularly Powys was fascinated by the kind of vision of the world which he found, or desired to find, in Welsh myth.
In the Autobiography he describes being stirred in childhood by a "peculiar Celtic emotion —Matthew Arnold describes it beautifully, nor is it important whether he describes it cor• rectly — which, like the spirit of Wales itself, is always returning, like water seeking its level, to Its own proud, evasive, Ingrown, interior Being" (Autobiography. 2k). In 51
a lecture on Keats delivered in an Oxford University Extension series, Powys speculates about the "natural magic peculiar to the Celtic races" which Arnold traced through English poetry, and he compares the weird beauty of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" to the same sort of enchantment to be found in the stories of the Mablnogion.^
Powys* ideas are heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's essay "On the Study of Celtic Literature" (186?),** which, indeed, Powys assigned as one of the reference books for his
Cambridge University Local Lecture series on poetry.-'
Arnold compares the Welsh with the Greeks in their potential for conquering their conquerors through the civilizing influ• ence of "the greater delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic peoples;^ he extols the Celtic sensibilityj with its power of quick and strong perception and emotion. The Celt, according to
Arnold, is expansive and eager but lacks measure, balance and patience.^ Arnold's description of the Celtic temperament evi• dently helped to shape both Powys' conception of his own character, and his depiction of the Welsh in his novels. Owen Glendower, particularly, embodies many of the characteristics which Arnold had identified as peculiarly Celtic.
Highly significant in terms of Powys* use of mythology is Arnold*s assertion, quoting Henri Martin, that the Celt is
"always ready to react against the despotism of fact." While the Welsh romances never lose touch with the beauty of the natural, physical world, they conceive of it as pervaded by magic. This sense of "the intimate life of Nature, her weird 52
power and her fairy charm"7 which Arnold Identifies in Celtic literature is one of the finest qualities in Powys' own writing, and perhaps lends some additional justification to his emphasis on his Welsh descent. A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle encourage, although they do not demand, a willing suspension of disbelief ln order that the claims of their magician figures may be fully accepted. Owen Glendower and Porius both are much concerned with the relationship between historical and imagin• ative truth, and whether or not psychic power can indeed triumph over "the despotism of fact."
If Arnold was a major influence upon the development of
Powys' interest in the Celtic character and its effect upon literature, Powys' interest in Celtic myth was fostered and given new dimensions by the work of Sir John Rhys. Curiously enough, in I877 Rhys was appointed to that Chair of Celtic
Literature in Oxford whose foundation Arnold's essay "On the
Study of Celtic Literature" was Intended to promote. Rhys was a philologist and student of mythology whose researches led him to postulate Celtic origins for much of the material of the
Arthurian legend; his familiarity with the early Welsh bardic writings enabled him to link these to references in the later romances. Rhys also interpreted the Celtic myths and Arthurian legends in terms of the concepts of Solar and Cultural Heroes, and had a particular interest in the heroes' penetration into the underworld or otherworld. His Hibbert Lectures On the
Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic
Heathendom study the Celtic myths in terms of the Solar Hero 53
hypothesis? his later Studies in the Arthurian Legend identify the mythological origins of many of the major figures in the 10
Arthurian legends. In his Autobiography Powys describes pur• chasing and studying Rhys' book on the Arthurian legend in order to prepare for his own trial lecture on that subject for the Oxford University Extension. At the time it did not give him
the extraordinary mystical pleasure, I might almost say the sacerdotal excitement, that derived from it thirty years later, when I read it over and over again on ship-board and even learnt passages out of it by heart; but it was, even at that time, a significant though a very obscure and rather puzzling book. (Autob1ography. 26l)
This reverent attitude towards the theories of Rhys underlies much of the mythology in Powys' novels i in A Glastonbury
Romance and Maiden Castle Rhys is referred to by name, as a great initiate, one who understands mysteries and identities hidden from others.
Studies In the Arthurian Legend does not provide a key to unlock the mythological meanings of Powys' novels, but It does illuminate many of the obscure mythological references in them and can be seen to be a source and influence upon Powys' handl• ing of certain characters. For example, in one paragraph on page 36 of Rhys' book the names of three important female characters in Powys' novels are Introduced* these are "ellyll"
(elf) which is the name often given to Elliw in Owen Glendower;
Creiddylad, the name of Porius* giantess; and Cordelia, the 54
name of a leading character in A Glastonbury Romance. Rhys describes the function of Luned ln the Welsh story of The Lady of the Fountain as messenger and confidant of her mistress, which exactly corresponds with the role Powys' Luned plays in
Owen Glendower.11 In Chapter Three of Studies in the Arthurian
Legend Rhys discusses the capture of Gwenhwyvar by Melwas ln
Glastonbury; Melwas Is seen as the dark lord, ruler of the otherworld, and the resemblances to the myth of Proserpine 12 are noted. It Is quite possible that Powys had this theory of Rhys in mind when he has his Persephone taken underground in Wookey Hole and ravished there by the owner, Philip Crow.
As will be seen in a later chapter of this dissertation, Philip is in many respects a dark lord, and he glorifies and repre• sents the forces of mechanism and materialism to which Geard and Powys himself are opposed. Powys seems to have derived the pattern of abduction to a Glastonbury-underworld from Rhys, 13 and used it for his own fictional purposes. Persephone is seduced by the power of Philip; like her, Gwenhwyvar in some of the versions noted by Rhys is not an unwilling captive.
Glastonbury is seen throughout Rhys' book as an other- world or abode of the dead: this idea is taken up often by
Powys in A Glastonbury Romance (see below Chapter V, 44-44).
Rhys refers also to Glastonbury as an island, which it literally becomes once more at the end of Powys' novel. Indeed, the town functions throughout the novel as an island whose isola• tion from the rest of the world is conveyed through the imagery of its mists, and its special nature as a holy place and later 55
as a commune. Rhys sees the Glastonbury Tor as a fairy hill, the abode of Gwyn ap Nud, and Powys takes up this reference also (A Glastonbury Romance, 264).
Castellmarch, on the Lleyn peninsula in Wales, is des• cribed by Rhys as a "fine old-fashioned farm-house which looks as if it had once enjoyed far greater importance than it can 14 boast at present." He suggests that the farm-house, whose name means Mark's Castle, might have some connection with the
Mark-Tristram legends. Powys appropriated this idea of the mysterious old farm-house, remote and in decline from some period of former grandeur, in his conception of Mark's Court in A Glastonbury Romance. The Arthurian connections are im• plied i Mark's Court is associated with Merlin as well as Mark.
Horses seldom appear in Powys' novels, so it may well be more than a coincidence that in the chapter entitled "Mark's Court" a horse figures quite prominently, for Rhys discusses the leg• endary associations of King Mark with horses and the tale that he was endowed with horse's ears.
That the realm of Melwas (Glastonbury) in Chretien's poem was the abode of the dead, Rhys asserts to be proven by the fact that it could only be entered by means of two perilous bridges, the Water Bridge and the Sword Bridge (55). Bridges are used by Powys as symbols of transition, and with full awareness of their Celtic and Arthurian significance. It is on Pomparles Bridge, the Perilous Bridge, that John Crow has his vision of the Sword of Arthmr. Beside another bridge over the River Brue, Young Tewsy catches the great fish whose 56
capture is to signify the raising of the dead. Rhys observes how bridges are an archetype of the transition between this world and the otherworld or afterlife, and Powys' novels also make considerable use of this symbolism. Another bridge men• tioned by Rhys is the Eel Bridge or Bridge of Souls which crosses the snake-river of venom which Taliesin conceived as flowing around the world (56). Powys uses these images in
Maiden Castle, where the River Frome and the underground river are associated with the transition from life to death (see below, Chapter VI).
In Maiden Castle, however, the Influence of Rhys is
chiefly seen ln the conception of the character of Uryen.
Originally named Enoch Quirm, Uryen in his absorption ln the theories of Rhys believes himself to be a reincarnation of that
legendary figure of Urien of Rheged. Rhys postulates also
that Urien and the god Bran were originally one; hence Powys'
Uryen bears a mark shaped like a black crow (Welsh "bran") on his breast. The curious name of Dormarth, given to the bed• post linking Uryen and his son, and its association both with
Malory's Questing Beast and with death, are derived from a passage in Rhys.1'' Further examples of derivations from Rhys
in A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle will be discussed
in the fifth and sixth chapters of this dissertation.
The obsession of Uryen Quirm is an exaggeration of Powys' own fascination with Rhys and his sense that through his
explication of the old Welsh texts Rhys had indeed illuminated
"secrets of life that Aryan civilization has destroyed" 57
(Maiden Castle, 254). Rhys never postulated for his research the claims to large philosophical implications which Uryen, and Powys himself to some extent, find in it. Uryen*s mania is grotesque, and his assumptions absurd, inasmuch as he draws personal implications from what are intended simply as schol• arly theories.
If John Rhys were alive I'd have left you all, years ago, and gone to tell him the whole thing. He'd have understood, for he put me on the track of it. He knew how all Taliesin's prophecies were about me. He knew how all the old bards worshipped what works through me. He knew the mysterious secret of my race, of his race; that straining, that longing, that yearning, that craving, that madness to break through! Hlraeth is our word for it — no other tongue on earth has a word like that! — and he knew what it meant. (Maiden Castle, 46?)
It will be argued later that Uryen*s attitude to Rhys is a deliberate satire of Powys* own reactions; Powys too made personal and philosophical applications of Rhys' studies, but was able to exaggerate and make fun of his own manias.
While Rhys was undoubtedly a principal influence upon
Powys' use of mythological subjects, certain other scholars
Investigating the Arthurian legend ln the first decades of this century also affected his interpretation of it. In his
Autobiography Powys refers to "those deep erotic mysteries
. . . discovered ln the Grail Tradition by the great Miss
Weston" (261, also 309). Jessie Weston's From Ritual to
Romance was published in 1920, and its influence may be seen in A Glastonbury Romance in such passages as that describing 58
the "killing of the Grail" attempted by the male protagonists while the women "nourished the Grail in their sleep" (783, see 778-89). The associations between eros and religion are deeply felt throughout the novel; Miss Weston's recognition of pagan fertility rituals underlying the Grail cult is used by Powys frequently, in such scenes as the Vicarage supper and
Mother Legge's party. In the final chapter of From Ritual to
Romance Miss Weston speculates about the identity of Bleheris, the Welshman to whom she attributes the casting of the Grail
Legend in its Romance form. Bleheris is referred to in this role in A Glastonbury Romance, and also as the Henog in
Porlus.16
The connections pointed out by Sir John Rhys between
Celtic legends and the Arthurian romances were developed further by R.S. Loomls in a book which appeared in 1927. five years before the publication of A Glastonbury Romance. Powys does not make the direct use of Loomls' work, Celtic Myth and
Arthurian Romance.^that he did of Rhys', but he does refer to Loomls along with Rhys In A Glastonbury Romance as one of the scholars who write about the ancient secrets contained in
Welsh literature (8^3). Mr. Evans, like Uryen Quirm, has no doubts about the truth of Rhys' and Loomis' speculations.
The large number of books appearing on the Arthurian leg• ends between the publication of Rhys' Hlbbert Lectures (1888) and Porlus (1951) is indicative of the widespread interest taken ln the sources of the Arthurian material during the time that Powys was working on his own adaptations of it. 59
Alongside the scholarly philological and anthropological works
of Rhys, Alfred Nutt, Loomls and Weston were studies which mingled research witih claims to occult knowledge, as in the writings of A.E. Waite. These scholarly and/or occult works acted along with Malory and Tennyson as stimulants to Powys*
own complex handling of mythological subjects. He was early
intimate with some of the basic Arthurian materials — the
Mablnoglon and Malory (Autobiography, 26l), and his extension
lecture syllabi include lectures on the Arthurian legend and
on Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Powys criticizes Tennyson
for moralizing the legends (Autobiography, 26l). He also read
avidly the early Yeats, and thus was familiar with the Irish 18
forms of Celtic myth. Characters like Mr. Evans and Uryen
Qulrm are, as we have seen, exaggerated representations of his
own interest in theories about Celtic origins of the Arthurian
legends, and of his desire to apply the results of scholarly
research on them to his personal philosophy of life. A cancel
led chapter of Porius, to be discussed in Chapter VIII, shows
Powys himself postulating a theory on the origins of a figure
from the Grail legend. The Henog suggests that his colleague,
the French poet Cretlnloy, may give the unprepossessing
Galahad significance in his history of Arthur's reign by des•
cribing the youth as engaged upon a mystic quest, and also by
linking his unhappiness with that of the mythic Gwair impris•
oned in Caer Sidi. In Powys* version, Galahad is a real
character but his nature and purpose are transformed by the
imagination of the poet. It is interesting to note that Powys 60
may have derived the idea for this scene from a suggestion 19 made by Jessie Weston.
The Celtic and Arthurian legends which Powys, following the theories of Rhys and Loomls, sees as closely related to each other form the most significant groups of myths to which reference is made in four of the five novels under considera• tion here. The fifth novel, Wood and Stone, may be seen as a contrast to the major novels, since it contains no Welsh ref• erences and its use of "mythology" is quite unlike theirs.
One difficulty in writing about Powys' approach to mythology lies in the fact that Powys himself, ln Wood and Stone and
Wolf Solent, employs the word in a somewhat idiosyncratic sense. By his "mythology" Wolf would seem to mean his private, inner sensations of enjoyment of the cosmos, and his sense of a psychic struggle between good and evil in which he mentally takes part. It is essentially this individual, personal mean• ing of "mythology" which is the subject of two essays on Powys 20 — Angus Wilson's "'Mythology' in John Cowper Powys' Novels" 21 and Ellen Mayne's "The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys".
The "mythology" of such a hero as Wolf, which like the
"cavoseniargizing" of Porlus must to some degree be considered as resembling Powys' own personal philosophy, is not, however, the subject of this chapter. The intent is to examine Powys' references to traditional myths, and their significance in the structure of each of the novels, rather than to analyze Powys• personal "mythology."
Certain mythic figures recur ln a number of novels, for 61
example Merlin In A Glastonbury Romance. Morwyn, Porius, the
Cerne Giant ln Wolf Solent, The Brazen Head, Jobber Skald
(though it becomes the WhitB Horse in Weymouth Sands), All or
Nothing, Cronos in A Glastonbury Romance, Maiden Castle, Morwyn,
Porius and Up and Out. Powys feels a strong sympathy for 22
Cronos as a result of his reading of Homer, Hesiod and Keats.
In Porius Merlin and Cronos come to be identified with each other as great sleepers, like the Glendower and Arthur of tradition, whose awakening may bring back the Golden Age.
Other recurring figures may be seen as concerned with erotic attraction and polarities. Androgynous figures appear often, and are identified with classical and/or mythological proto• types — Philippa Renshaw who Is seen as dryad-like, Persephone, the Lamia-like Thuella, Nineue and Drom (see the discussion of "seraphic figures" in Saturnlan Quest). Powys refers often throughout his fiction to "the Mothers," the fertility god• desses of the ancient Celtic cults whom his reading of Goethe led Powys to see as manifestations of the eternal feminine spirit, sympathetic to eros, religion and the quest of the human imagination for some spiritual secret lost to modern civilization. The Celtic "Mothers" ("Mamau") appeared to
Powys as a form of the Cretan earth-mother Cybele, who is powerfully invoked at the end of A Glastonbury Romance.
In the same way, certain symbols also recur throughout the novels, particularly clubs or sticks, cauldrons, shape- shift lhgs or transformations, the otherworld, reincarnation and the concept of the Golden Age. The earth or mother goddess 62
is associated with the female symbol of the cauldron, which ln Welsh myth represents inspiration, wisdom and rebirth. The boy who falls into the cauldron of Ceridwen is eventually reborn as Taliessinj there is thus an association between caul• drons and artistic creativity. Powys was haunted by a memory from early childhood of a "rusty iron Cauldron" (Autobiography,
10). Obstinate Cymric contains an essay on the Pair Dadeni or
Welsh cauldron of Rebirth, and also discusses the Cauldron of 23
Ceridwen as the prototype of the Grail. The club or stick which the "Powys-hero" so often carries is a corresponding male phallic image. While it lacks the clear mythological symbol• ism of the cauldron, Powys gives it significance by relating it to the clubs carried by the Cerne Giant and Hercules, as in Dud's "Cerne Giant stick" ln Maiden Castle, and the club of Hercules in Atlantis.
A chronological study of the use of myth in Powys' novels reveals not only the author's growing interest in it but also major changes in the influence it has upon the structure of the various novels themselves. In the early novels, mythology
in the usual sense of the word is not particularly important.
Wood and Stone contains some references to classical myth, but neither it nor Rodmoor draws upon the Celtic legends which form a major part of the background of most of the later novels.
The "Mythologies" referred to in the opening chapter of Wood, and Stone, those of Power and Sacrifice, might instead be termed "ways of dealing with life." However by identifying 63
these opposite powers with elements of the topography of
Nevilton and by embodying their struggle in certain memorable characters, Powys gives to his abstract principles a colour• ing and a depth of symbolism which perhaps justifies their being termed "mythologies". The struggle between these two
"mythologies" provides the same sort of psychic conflict which is the substance of Wolf Solent•s 'mythology." When in the later book the conception of such a psychic battle is attri• buted to a character, rather than being the declared world- view of the author himself, it is more readily acceptable.
There are a few allusions in Rodmoor to classical myth• ology, chiefly in reference to the androgynous figures of
Baltazar Stork and Philippa, and the location of Rodmoor upon the North Sea brings associations of Norse mythology (21).
Like Wood and Stone, this novel is largely concerned with death, and in a description of the morbid nature of one of its characters there is a curious anticipation of the Cimmerian
Imagery which is so important to the later novels.
Mrs. Renshaw appears to come
from a world different from ours, a world of grey vapours and shadowy margins, a world where the wraiths of the unborn meet the ghosts of the dead, a world where the 'might-have-been and the never-to- be-again'weep together by the shores of Lethe. (438-39)
The last phrase drops off into cliche, but the first lines suggest the eerie atmosphere created in Porius.
Philippa too anticipates later themes in her classically androgynous body and her desire to "pass forth free and 64 unfettered into the embrace of primeval powers" (5D. She appears as "some worshipper of a banished divinity Invoking her god while her persecutors slept, and passionately calling upon him to return to his forsaken shrine" (51). The theme of the return of the banished divinity, later to be identi• fied as Cronos, is implicit in A Glastonbury Romance, explicit and dominant in Maiden Castle. Porlus and the fantasies. In
Rodmoor, too, there is an enunciation of the theme of "the
Mothers," a proclamation of the power of the eternal feminine spirit in human mothers who are "the only people in the world who possess the open secret, . . . the essential mystery" (345).
In Ducdame Powys manifests a strong interest in local
superstitions. Witch-like women figure in many of the novels
— Witch Bessie who puts the evil eye upon Gladys Homer (Wood and Stone, 243-46), Rachel Doorm of Rodmoor, Mad Bet in A
Glastonbury Romance and Gipsy May In Weymouth Sands, but
Betsy Cooper, the witch of Ducdame, has a particularly power•
ful role in the narrative. She possesses the "Cimmery stone,"
a crystal ball in which ambiguous images from the future appear;
it comes from "Cimmery Land" which Rook takes to be "some
unearthly Limbo — some Elysian Fourth Dimension — out of
Space and out of Time" (264). "Cimmery Land" resembles the
shadowy world described in the portrait of Mrs. Renshaw.
The quest for this otherworld, which may be approached through
the insights contained in myths, is an important theme of all
the major novels which follow Ducdame. The resolution of Wolf
Solent comes in Wolf's vision of the field of buttercups
turning to "Cimmerian gold;" Geard passes into a Cimmerian 65 underworld beneath the floodwatersJ Uryen, Glendower and
Myrddin are all associated with the supernatural knowledge of a fourth dimension which is the realm of "old, defeated, long-forgotten gods" (Ducdame, 265). Like Betsy Cooper, Owen
Glendower has a crystal ball, but he smashes it in a gesture of denying occult attempts to influence the future. Instead he embraces the past as containing the secrets of life and eternity. The occult and the past, linked and made access• ible to us through myth, become increasingly more important in the subsequent novels.
The first of Powys' major novels, Wolf Solent is also the first to introduce the theme of Wales. In this novel
Wales is associated with Christie Malakite, whose mother was
Welsh. The motif of Welsh parentage is used to distinguish a character with extraordinary sensitivity, aloofness and a certain other-worldly quality, and it recurs in a great many of Powys' novels. Christie explains that her mother
used to tell us the wildest stories about her ancestors. Once she actually told us she was descended from Merlin. Merlin's mother was a nun. Did you know that, Wolf?' 'No wonder you're a bit inhuman,' he said. (362)
Wolf's"mythology" consists of a sense that he is parti• cipating in a psychic warfare between forces of good and evil.
His self-indulgent conviction that he is himself on the "right" side is shattered by the closer contact with other human beings which develops during the novel. That it should be so shattered is an indication of the difference between this 66
"mythology" and the idea of myth which prevails in the later books. In them, myth is seen as offering true insighti while such prophet-figures as Geard, Uryen, Glendower and Merlin do have doubts about their identities and their roles, they seem on the whole to have an understanding of a larger real• ity than that perceived by ordinary characters. Wolf, a typi• cally ineffectual "Powys-hero," lacks the dimensions and vision of these prophets. His "mythology" is a personal life-illusion, not related to the symbolism of any great mythic tradition.
Because Geard and the others do relate their individual visions to an established mythology, they are confirmed in the sense of their significance, and are not destroyed as Wolf's is by a closer acquaintance with human realities.
Mythology in the traditional sense first becomes a sig• nificant part of the structure of a Powys novel in A Glastonbury
Romance. The novel is constructed somewhat as Joyce's Ulysses is upon the foundation of a well-known legend, to which con• temporary characters and events are compared. Figures from the old legends do not appear in person, and the semblance of realism is maintained, but certain of the characters are seen as fulfilling roles of mythic characters! Persephone is rav• ished underground like her classical namesake. Young Tewsy takes on the function of the Fisher King and Mother Legge appears as one of the archetypal Mothers protecting men from their fear of the unknown. In the major novels to be dis• cussed in this dissertation the mythic references are ln each case grouped around a central event or character. In
A Glastonbury Romance this centre is the Pageant, a reenactment 67
of the legends of Glastonbury's past. This pageant does ln miniature what the novel as a whole does, which is to set up modern characters in the situation of their mythic proto• types. What effect it has on these modern characters to be so measured against the larger figures from legend is, in this novel as in Ulysses, open to some question. John Crow's fail• ure to accept his vision, and the sense of lost promise which accompanies his departure from Glastonbury, should be seen ln terms of the failure of the Grail knights to achieve their quest. Sam, who does achieve the quest, is that much richer and more humorously human a figure because his appearance and circumstances are so unlike those of the Grail Knight of tradition. The scene at Mark's Court greatly increases our appreciation of the powers of Mr. Geard, because they are appar• ently tried against those of Merlin and triumph.
Curiously enough, following after a novel so rich ln mythological association, there are relatively few references to traditional myth ln Weymouth Sands. What "mythology" there is in the novel is again a private mythology, which here invests the topography and monuments of Weymouth with a special clarity and significance resulting from vivid boyhood memories and personal associations. "If Jobber Skald has comparatively
few references to the occult, that is because the spirlt- 24 powers are here housed in an empearled creation." In what is probably the happiest and most approachable of Powys' novels, landscape and its personal associations suffice to give the book its rich atmosphere; Weymouth is a seaside town dominated by the present and timeless elements of sea 68 and sand, rather than by mysterious relics of a legendary past.
In another great reversal of direction, Maiden Castle is a novel completely dominated by the spirit of the past. The interest in Wales and in the Celtic foundations of the
Arthurian mythology in A Glastonbury Romance here becomes the obsession of one of the characters. Uryen Is the centre for the mythological references ln Maiden Castle, and these refer• ences are considerably more obscure than they were in the preceding novels. No one coherent body of myths is referred to, but allusions are made principally to the theories of
Sir John Rhys about the character of the Welsh gods. Powys relates these theories to modern Dorchester through the dis• coveries being made at Maiden Castle. As was suggested earlier, however, the obscurity of Uryen's theories suggest that Powys may be taking an at least partially ironic view of them.
The phantasmagoria Morwyn is the first of Powys' fictional works to be dominated by mythic characters and fantastic situ• ations. It is Indeed not a novel at all, and cannot properly be discussed as such; however, it frequently provides at least a partial explication of mythological themes used in the novels. Morwyn follows the basic mythic pattern of a descent into the underworld! such a Journey is implied frequently in
A Glastonbury Romance, Maiden Castle and Owen Glendower. but ln Morwyn the characters literally undertake it. Powys' pro• tagonists are precipitated into Hell, where they confront certain historical sadists — Nero, Torquemada and Calvin among them. Penetrating deeper into the underworld, however, they pass beneath Hell into the Golden Age, where they find Merlin, 69
Cronos and Cybele the earth-mother asleep near the life-giving cauldron of Ceridwen. This Paradisaic Underworld is the "Cap• tivity of Gwair in Gaer Sidi" to which Powys refers in A
Glastonbury Romance, Maiden Castle and Porius. Taliesin, who acts as the guide, explains that worship in Crete was bloodless, and that Cybele and Cronos, god of the Golden Age, were the ruler-deities there. Ancient Welsh poetry concerns the mysteries of this subterrestrial refuge of the old gods and the otherworld voyages which it describes are in search of this Golden Age.
I suspect that the planetary resting-place to which this descent leads can be reached from the interior of many a Gorsedd Mound in my country. Our enemies, the Norsemen, made Hell conquer Heaven. Our poets, much closer to the secret of the universe, reveal the existence of a Paradisaic Underworld that is beyond both. (Morwyn. 184)
The identification of the ancient Cretan civilization with Wales as the two possessors of the secrets of life which modern civilization has lost was implied also in Maiden Castle and Porius, ln which novel Merlin is made a reincarnation of
Cronos. Many of these ideas are expanded in the essay collec• tion Obstinate Cymric.
. . . one cannot help suspecting that a race as ancient as this — whose ways and customs still retain memories of the Golden Age when Saturn, or some megalithic philosopher under that name, ruled in Crete, and the Great Mother was worshipped without the shedding of blood — must have some secret clues to the mystery of life, some magical ways of taking life, . . . such as have not been revealed, and could not be revealed, to more recently arrived peoples. (83) 70
Mythology ln Owen Glendower once more recedes into the background, where it provides suggestive analogies for some of the characters and events but does not impose any over-all pattern upon the action. The allusions to Welsh myth seem more appropriate and less idiosyncratic here than they did in the previous novels, for here they are a natural part of the
Welsh setting. The centre of these allusions in this novel is the people's own idea of themselvest certain characters, particularly, find significance in the events of their own lives by finding them related to legendary prototypes. With the adolescent characters this attitude to myth is a natural self- dramatization, but Glendower himself is seen to be facing the serious problems of actually being made into a legend in his own lifetime.
Porius, the last of Powys* major novels, resembles Horwyn in that its list of characters contains a number of legendary or half-legendary figures — Merlin, Cronos, Taliessin, Galahad.
These figures are, however, given personality and individual• ity; they do not remain mere ciphers or mouthpieces for Powys' theories as they tend to be in Horwyn and the late fantasies.
But the novel is quite heavily weighted with metaphysics.
Supporters of the number four as the key to the cosmos dispute with the proponents of the number three; Merlin makes a long disquisition about the causes of his defeat when he was Cronos; the Henog, in the cancelled chapter, proposes the fabrication of what is to become a major strand of the Arthurian legend.
One of the most interesting aspects of the use of. myth in 71
Porlus is the mingling of Welsh legends with classical myth•
ology, particularly the Greek. Porlus is the most successful
of those Powys novels which attempt the direct recreation of
persons and events from myth. Those which follow Porlus must
properly be termed fantasies, for while they abound in mytho•
logical interest, their presentation of character and control
of structure have weakened considerably. In Porlus, however, a precarious balance is maintained between the credible and
the marvellous, the humanity of the characters and their
mythological dimensions.
Mythology does not play a significant part in The Inmates;
in this novel "Wales as a source of occult wisdom is replaced 2*5
by Thibet" ^ but no great use is made of Thibetan lore.
Atlantis approaches Greek myth, the later adventures of
Ulysses in particular, in somewhat the same spirit that Porlus
dealt with the Arthurian period. Legendary characters mingle
with others created by Powys, although events take a course
largely Independent of mythological tradition. Like Merlin,
Odysseus has a major role but Is subordinated to a younger
protagonist. The novel concerns Odysseus' determination to
leave Ithaca and continue his voyaging, but manages to bring
in a great many other mythological events as well. There Is
a threatened revolt of the Titans, representatives of the old
order for which Powys has always expressed sympathy; the giant
Nimrod hunts the dragon Typhon beneath the ocean in drowned
Atlantis. Some of the best scenes in the novel introduce
characters from Homer — Nausikaa and AJax among them — con•
siderably older than when they were previously described. 72
But like the lost continent, Atlantis at last sinks under the weight of mythological material which burdens it.
Homeric and mythic characters appear in such profusion that few of them can be treated with any satisfying fullness. The threatened defeat of Zeus by the Titans, and other events of great mythological consequence, are dramatically and all too frequently announced throughout the narrative. But few of them do actually take place or become worked into the significance of the story as a whole? they remain as subjects for discus• sion, rather than events of a coherent plot. Porlus showed this weakness as well* events, such as the mission of Tonwen and Cadawg to Arthur, are announced and begun with great excitement but soon come to nothing and their relevance is never made clear. Perceptive and sympathetic analyses of the significance of mythology in Atlantis are given ln
Saturnlan Quest (Chapter VI) and a paper read by Glen Cavaliero to the Powys Society in 1972, but one must ultimately concur with H.P. Collins' Judgement that "the fantasy runs away with 26 the allegorical coherence altogether."
The Brazen Head is, like Atlantis and the historical novels, a mingling of historical reconstruction and fantasy; as In Atlantis, the fantasy and philosophizing predominate.
The mythological monsters are absent, but the human characters are of grotesque dimensions. Powys' last three works of fic• tion — Up and Out, The Mountains of the Moon and All or Noth• ing show a continued fascination with the journey motif and with the animism which in Atlantis made dramatis personae out of a club, a moth and a pillar. Using the mode of fantasy. 73
Powys approaches directly those large metaphysical concepts which in earlier novels remained only interests of individual characters. In All or Nothing, whose title indicates its abstract concerns, God in the form of a newt and later of a cockroach delivers his opinions on time, space and nothing• ness. Character differentiation is slight, and concepts rather than human personalities control the narratives.
Powys' use of myth may thus be seen to develop from a concept of it as a sort of personal philosophy or life-illusion, in the early novels, to a scholarly intimacy with many of the great myths of Western culture and a desire first to create parallels to them within his own stories and eventually to refashion and add to them himself. Of these three approaches the middle one, which coincided with the years of Powys' matur• ity as a novelist, produced the most satisfactory results ln his fiction. The idiosyncratic "mythologies" of Wood and Stone and Wolf Solent, because they are personal concepts of, res• pectively, the author and the protagonist, lack the resonance of the Arthurian parallels in A Glastonbury Romance and Porius.
The late works of fiction are rich in mythological references, but the fantasy often runs wild. Their profusion and lack of control, along with the tendency to didacticism, gives the late books the atmosphere of a discourse about myths, rather than the atmosphere of a work which itself contains a certain measure of mythic power. This latter quality — the sense of conveying an eternal and archetypal significance to the tempo• ral concerns of the characters — is, however, present upon occasion in the five novels to be discussed now. 74
Chapter Three: Footnotes
Littleton Powys, "The Powys Family," Welsh Review, (Spring, 1948), p. 3.
Such was the opinion of his brother, A.R. Powys, according to Phyllis Playter in a conversation at Blaenau Ffestiniog in June, 1971.
3 Syllabus of a course of six lectures on Shelley and Keats, 1906-1907 (Oxford! Horace Hart), Lectures IV and VI, pp. 11-12, 16. ^ Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, (1867; rpt. Londoni Macmillan, 19n3).
^ Syllabus of a Short Course of Six Lectures on the Study of Poetry introductory to The Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge! University Press, 1900).
6 Arnold, op. cit., p. xii.
7 Ibid., p. 80 ff.
8 Ibid., p. 84.
9 Ibid., p. 132. 10 John Rhys, On the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (London* Williams and Norgate, 1888), hereafter referred to as the Hibbert Lectures.
11 Rhys, Studies, p. 361.
12 Ibid., p. 54.
13 Although Wookey Hole is actually several miles from Glastonbury ln the terms of the novel it is part of the Glastonbury area.
1/+ Rhys, Studies, p. 357.
^ Ibid., pp. 153 ff., see Maiden Castle pp. 31, 114-16 and below, Chapter Six, pp. 28-32.
16 The identification of the Henog with Bleheris occurs ln a passage which was cancelled from the published version of the novel but is extant in the typescript in the possesion of Mr. Bissell of Ashorne, Warwickshire. 75
I? R.S. Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927).
-I o John Cowper Powys: Letters to Glyn Hughes, ed. ; Bernard Jones (Stevenage, Herts.: Ore Publications, 1971), p. 14. 19j, Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: University Press, 1920), p. 189. See below, Chapter Eight, 248. 20 Angus Wilson, "Mythology' in John Cowper Powys' Novels," Review of English Literature. IV, 1, Jan. 1963, 9-20. 21 Ellen Mayne, "The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys," Thirteenth Foundation Lecture, New Atlantis Foundation, Richmond, Surrey, 1968.
22 See Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson. 1935-1936, ed. Louis Wilkinson (London: Macdonald, 1958), P. 319. 23 obstinate Cymric, "Pair Dadenl," "My Welsh Home," p. 75.
24 G. Wilson Knight, Satumlan Quest, p. 48.
2 5 Ibid., p. 82.
26 Collins, Old Earth Man, p. 182. Chapter Four
"Occult Harmonies"! Mood and Stone
In that particular corner of the West Country so distinct and deep-rooted are the legendary survivals, it is hard not to feel as though some vast spiritual conflict were still proceeding between the two opposed Mythologies — the one drawing its strength from the impulse to Power, and the other from the impulse to Sacrifice. A village-dweller in Nevilton might, if he were philosophically disposed, be just as much a percipient of this cosmic struggle, as if he stood between the Palatine and St. Peter's. Let him linger among the cranes and pulleys of this heathen promontory, and look westward to the shrine of the Holy Grail, or eastward to where rested the Holy Rood, and it would be strange if he did not become conscious of the presence of eternal spiritual antagonists, wrestling for the mastery. (2,3)
This large duality, or rather ancient rivalry, lies at the heart of Powys' novel; although it supplies the novel's greatest strength, it is also the source of its most dangerous weakness. It permeates the novel and its characters, and invests them with significance. But at times it overpowers the novelist. Instead of the characters talking, the novel• ist talks, expounding his theories. He knows well what he wishes to do, how the major conflict will occur In the novel and how the landscape and myth will interact. But intention is not always convincingly fulfilled.
In the introduction to Wood and Stone Powys treats the book as a sort of problem novel concerned with the "world- old struggle between the 'well constituted' and the 77
•ill-constituted'" (vii). The real force of the book lies,
however, less in this Nietzschean theme than in a pervasive atmosphere created by what Powys calls "the strange occult
harmonies between the smallest human dramas and their elemen•
tal accomplices" (537). The novel is permeated with a sense
of the intimate relationship between nature and man. This
relationship takes a variety of forms, generally of a power•
ful 'mystic' sort. But Powys Is rooted in his own landscape;
he knows its texture, and because he does, his symbolism is
the more effective. When he writes of "the village-dweller
in Nevilton" he writes of what he knows, and has been himself,
and therefore can depict him and what he sees ln the most
directly realistic terms. Thus he is capable of a straight•
forward realism, as when he shows the socio-economic life of
Nevilton to be centred around the stone quarries of Leo's
Hill. The relationship between men and landscape in this
instance is a very practical one.
But the emphasis of the novel is upon occult harmonies,
the spiritual rather than the practical. Vennle Seldom's
intuition, that influences for good and evil can be absorbed
by human characters from the landscape, is a conception which
prevails throughout the novel and is put forward in respect
to almost every one of the principal characters. Not only
are some characters identified with particular and appropriate
localities — Ninsy Lintot with dark, isolated Wild Pine Ridge,
the demented girl with Auber Lake — but many characters are
held to be attracted or repelled by spiritual qualities 78
Inherent in the physical landscape. And over all is the rivalry of wood and stone. The rival mythologies of Sacrifice and Power rule the landscape itself ln their embodiments in the two hills, and convey a peculiar kind of cosmic dimension to the human struggles with which the novel is concerned.
These are the opposed mythologies of Powys' novel. There
is another, more traditional kind of mythology in the book as well, which is the conventional and/or fanciful recollections of Greek and Latin legends which decorate Edwardian fiction 1 much as they decorated Elizabethan poetry. It occurs chiefly
in the meditations of Dangelis, the American painter. Tending to see the world in terms of art history (113, 121, 127),
Dangelis imagines earth-gods in the mill copse and the woods
(130, 262) and sees Gladys variously as Hyacinth (128),
Ariadne (Chapter XI) and the child of Circe and Dionysus (239).
Powys describes Luke at Weymouth as a Triton surrounded by
Nereids (577). These correspondences between the contempor• ary environment and the classical world are picturesque, and
in the case of Gladys, particularly, have an obvious symbolic
significance. But there is no elaborate parallel to any recog• nized body of mythology worked out, as is the case in A
Glastonbury Romance and Owen Glendower. The classical allus•
ions have a decorative rather than a structural function.
It is the dualist 'mythology' of tension between Power and Sacrifice which organizes the novel. Even in it there
remains some reference to the usual meaning of "mythology" in the "legendary survivals," the implied conflict between early 79
pagan Britain and the beliefs inculcated by Christian mission• aries. The "heathen" exaltation of power, opposed to the
Christian admiration for sacrifice, is fancied to be expressed by the name, appearance and history of stony Leo's Hill, des• cribed as monstrous, sinister, brute, Inert, inexhaustible, mocking and obdurate (3). Subsequently Powys identified a different "mythology" with pre-Christian BritainJ in Owen
Glendower the medieval' Christian prince believes that "the way of life of the first people was far wiser, far freer . . .there were no princes, no rulers then, but only the men of the land, living at peace together and worshipping peaceful gods without sacrifices and without blood" (Owen Glendower, 419). Although the later book is more characteristic of Powys* mature thought on the subject, in Wood and Stone the pagan past provides a convenient locus for the forces of strength and cruelty repre• sented by some aspects of the Nevllton landscape.
But always a forceful image of the rivalry of the opposing hills dominates such traditional ideas, for Powys himself is preternaturally that "philosophically disposed" villager, soaked in rural living, who is also thinker and visionary sensitive ever to the "vast spiritual conflict." In its dual• ism, its sense of a struggle between good and evil, the
"mythology" of Wood and Stone is obviously similar to the 'myth• ology" of Wolf Solent who imagined himself "taking part in some occult cosmic struggle — some struggle between what he liked to think of as 'good' and what he liked to think of 'evil' in those remote depths" (Wolf Solent. 12). But in the later novel 80
the struggle is shown as highly subjectivet it is "an arrogant mental idea" of Wolf's, and by the end of the novel he has had to abandon it. In Wood and Stone the mythology of opposed spiritual forces, embodying themselves in local topography, is the author's own, idiosyncratic belief, and it must be admitted, before its obvious power is analysed, that it is not always entirely convincingly espoused in the novel's terms.
There is too much theorizing; the evilness of Leo's Hill and its psychic sympathy with the personalities of the Romers are asserted when they would have been better shown. Because the
"mythology" is such a personal one, it can seem gratuitous, and the characters themselves are much more Interesting than the various principles which we are told from time to time that they are meant to embody. This first novel — and that it is a first novel is pertinent — tends to the same fault that mars Powys' last fantasies — the discussion of disembodied ideas at the expense of dramatic action. To this paradoxical example of the essential unity of Powys works we shall return
(see Chapter Nine). But in this instance, the faults of the novel noted, it is rather its strengths, the uniquely Powysian merits of Wood and Stone, that claim attention.
Although the novel at times develops a forced and arti• ficial note when it describes the landscape in terms of "myth• ology ," what might be called the "pure" landscape descriptions and the passages depicting the immediate reactions of a charac• ter to the landscape are much better done. Powys succeeds when he lets the landscape speak for the idea rather than the 81
idea for the landscape. At such times Powys' affinities to
Jeffries and Hardy are evident. Nevilton Mount and Leo's Hill can be seen and sensed in themselves and hence, as we shall see below, in their symbolic importance ln terms of wood and stone. Powys' knowledge of the countryside and his power of evocation of it extend to the smaller details as well as the large concepts. The return of the rooks to Nevilton and their wild circling flight develops into a symbol of James Anderson's madness (458-9 )„ Other characters are described in terms of the landscape around them.
The old creature was as thin as a lathe; and his cavernous, colourless eyes and drooping jaw looked, ln that indistinct light, as vague.and shadowy as though they belonged to some phantasmal mirage of mist and rain drifted in from the sleeping fields. (655)
Vennie Seldom, who seems often to expound her creator's own ideas, has an experience on Lodmoor which is indicative of Powys' intention throughout this, and other novels. At a time of strain and excitement she finds it difficult to dis• entangle her thoughts from her outward impressions.
The splash of a water-rat became an episode in her suspended revelation. The bubbles rising from the movements of an eel in the mud got mixed with the image of Mrs. Wotnot picking laurel-leaves. The flight of a sea-gull above their heads was a projection of Dangelis' escape from the spells of his false mistress. (708) 82
The parallels here are a little too numerous for verisimilitude,
but the passage Is a significant one — expecially when related
to the aforementioned episode where James' thoughts are compared with the rooks. The fixing of a human character or emotion by
symbolizing it in some piece of natural description is a tech•
nique Powys derived from both Emily Bronte and Hardy, and did
not use unconsciously.
Wood and Stone is unified not only by its richly evoked
setting but by a temporal pattern of seasonal progression,
tracing the events of one summer from June to late August.
Almost every chapter opens with a "set piece" of nature des•
cription chronicling the changes in nature, the new varieties
of plants in ditch and hedgerow, the peculiar qualities of air
and light on a particular day. This pattern may sometimes be
felt to be obtrusive, an effect of over-deliberate scene paint•
ing, no matter good the actual painting. The descriptive pas•
sages do more, however, than set the scene. They are never
merely background to the actions they are part of it, and liter•
ally colour it and take colour from it. Hence Powys' —
Vennie*s — insistence upon the interaction of scene and event
which vitalizes the descriptions.
Throughout the novel weather, like topography, is seen
to influence human behaviour. Particularly "at these peculiar
seasons when Nature seems to pause and draw in her breath, men
and women find it hard to use or assert their normal powers of
resistance" (537). Peculiar qualities in the external atmos•
phere, especially approaching thunderstorms, precede sinister 83
episodes in the romance (for example, 255. 370. 371). The sun shines throughout the main part of the novel — a sun which is associated with the blond, "well-constituted" Gladys and her counterpart Luke. However, in the last chapter, set in October and functioning as an epilogue, the sun children have been tamed by marriage and it rains heavily at last.
Much of the characteristic texture of Wood and Stone comes from its nature description. Most conversations between the characters are carefully set in the context of their natural surroundingsi we know where the characters are, what flowers are blooming there, what sounds and scents the characters are aware of as they converse (for example, 51. 58. 62, 70).
Similarly, their movements about the village are patiently plotted. Care has been taken from the first chapter to estab• lish a clear sense of the topography of Nevilton and its surroundings, and landmarks such as Nevilton Park and Wild Pine
Ridge attain significance through repeated mention. Like the other early novels, Wood and Stone was written in America and shows the loving absorption ln the Wessex landscape and natural detail that was the curious result of Powys' exile. Perhaps more curious, a tribute to his special power and individual• ity as a novelist, is his marriage of rich symbolic signifi• cance with scrupulous attention to this natural detail.
This is well seen in the introductory depiction of the two hills — so geographic, even economic, in their precision, and yet so large and visionary in their metaphoric/allegoric significance. The symbolic structure of Wood and Stone 84
centres around the opposition between the two hills of Nevilton, and between the natural elements of earth, water, stone and wood. In the opening chapter, entitled "Leo's Hill" and devoted to an exposition of the effects that hill has upon the local inhabitants, the concept of a spiritual struggle between the two hills is set forth. This struggle is a manifestation of the professed theme of the novel, the question "is the hidden and basic law of things, not Power but Sacrifice, not Pride but
Love?" (vii). Although it.is to Leo's Hill rather than to the "Christian" hill that "the lives and destinies of the people of Nevilton have come to gravitate" (1), the novel ends with the forces of Love and Sacrifice at least partially victorious.
The whole concept expounded in this chapter of there being a "spiritual influence" (1) exerted by the hills is curiously similar to the central idea of La Colline Insplree of Maurice Barres, published two years earlier.
II est des lieux qui tirent l^ame de ' sa lethargie, des lieux enveloppes, balgnes de mystere, £lus de toute eternite pour Stre le siege de 1'Amotion religieuse. . . . D'ou vient la puissance de ces lieux? La doivent-ils au souvenir de quelque grand fait historique, a la beautfe" d'un site exceptionnel, a l'emotlon des foules qui du fond des ages y vinrent s'emouvoir? Leur vertu est plus mystirleuse. Elle prec€da leur gloire et
saurait y survivre. 2 (La Colline Insplree, 5, 6)
Barres stresses the elevating, inspiring atmosphere of his
"lieux ou souffle l'esprit" (7), whereas the places described in Wood and Stone are almost all sinister and debilitating 85
in their effect on the characters. Even Nevilton Mount, symbol of Christian sacrifice, traps Clavering in its veget• ation and mocks him with the Carpe Diem motto of the folly built on its summit. But whatever the differences in the na• ture of their influences, their spiritual power is indicated and similar questions are asked as to the sources of this power. While Barres believes that this power is inherent in the hill itself, independent of its human history, Powys tends to ascribe the spiritual qualities of the hills to events and associations of their past (2, 133). The "inspired hill" of
Barres' novel has two summits, respectively consecrated to
Rosmertha/Virgin Mary and to Wotan, later the castle of
Vaudemont conceived as the "masculine" protector of the "female" shrine. Again, there is a similarity to the religious and military qualities ascribed to the two hills of Wood and Stone.
Probably too much should not be made of the parallels between these novels, since no direct influence can be demonstrated.
H.P. Collins suspects that Wood and Stone was written consi• derably earlier than 1915 (43). and in any case the discovery of supernatural powers within a landscape is implicit in the
Gothic novels as well as in Hardy's description of Egdon Heath.
But the fact that the repository of these powers in both novels should be a hill is interesting, as is the construction of both novels ln that they, like The Return of the Native, open with extended descriptions of the countryside and specu• lations upon the relationship between its nature and that of its human inhabitants. Certainly, Powys was at this time aware 86
of contemporary French literature, and the possibility of a direct influence need not be discounted.
Although Powys disclaimed any intention of imitating Hardy, certain aspects of the landscape description in Wood and Stone
Inevitably recall the earlier novelist. One of these is the notion that a particular landscape concentrates itself and reveals most of its essential quality at some particular time of day.
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn i then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. ... The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis — the final overthrow. (The Return of the Native. 2,3)
Every natural locality has its hour of special self-assertion; its hour, when the peculiar qualities and characteristics which belong to it emphasize themselves, and attain a sort of temporary apogee or culmination. It is then that such localities— be they forests or moors, hill-sides or valleys — seem to gather themselves together and bring themselves into focus, waiting expectantly, it might almost seem, for some answering dramatic crisis in human affairs which should find in them an inevitable background. (Wood and Stone. 184) 87
Furthermore, the pessimism and ironic asceticism of Hardy's declared preference for the dark Heath (3) seem to have been adopted by Powys in his attitude to the Nevilton landscape.
Leo's Hill, Wild Pine Ridge, Auber Lake, the Methodist church• yard, and even the very mud of the lanes are sinister and ill- intentioned. Most of the characters are hostile to their en• vironment; like Eustacia Vye, they feel trapped by it and seek escape — significantly enough — through Weymouth. But al• though Powys seemed to enjoy adapting Hardy's pessimism as a romantic pose, in Powys the attitude does remain only a pose.
This can be noticed in the fact that his landscapes have a grotesque, Gothic malignity which contrasts oddly with the stark and bleak landscapes at which Hardy excels. The descrip• tions of Egdon and Flintcomb Ash Farm convey a sense of the weariness and futility of life. Human destiny and landscape both are shaped into bleak outlines by Hardy's pessimism.
Powys' landscapes, on the other hand, always abound ln rich earth life; this life can be seen expressing itself in the clotted fertility and demonic energies of the landscape of
Wood and Stone.
The other literary influence most apparent in Wood and
Stone is that of the Gothic novel. Scenes like the one at
Auber Lake where the night-walkers are terrified by the screams of a demented girl owe much to Mrs. Radcliffe and her followers.
As in many Gothic novels, much of the frisson comes from the terror of a young woman compelled to venture into dark, wooded, sinister and unfamiliar surroundings. Dangelis objects to the 88
macabre names of the area (Eadger's Bottom, Dead Man's Lane, etc., 259; the name of Auber Lake is evidently derived from
Poe's "Ulalume"). Even more Gothic, however is the obsession of the author and some of his characters with churchyards.
Clavering falls asleep on a bier (182-3) and James Andersen falls asleep leaning against a gravestone in the same church• yard (50?); both episodes recall the night spent by Sergeant
Troy in Wetherbury churchyard. Luke Andersen jumps Hamlet• like into a newly-dug grave (515). He and his brother "had a philosophical mania for these sepulchral places," (400) and visit them on several occasions during the novel.
Thus within the space of forty-eight hours the brothers Andersen had been together in no less than three sepulchral enclosures. One might have supposed that the same destiny that made of their father a kind of modern Old Mortality — less pious, it is true, than his prototype, but not less addicted to invasions of the unprotesting dead — had made it inevitable that the most critical moments of his sons' lives should be passed in the presence of these mute witnesses. (505)
Vennie takes Mr. Clavering to one for a crucial conversation,
Clavering spies on an Interview between Luke and Gladys in another; it is at James Andersen's funeral that Gladys is rejected by Luke and discovered to Vennie. Lacrima and James hold a morbid conversation in a place where unbaptized chil• dren used to be burled (202).
The omnipresent churchyard is not the only reminder of death in the Nevilton landscape. Powys makes frequent 89
mortuary references In his metaphors and nature description! beech trunks are "like silent pillars in the crypt of a mauso• leum" (326), a crowd on a hill is "like some great stream of voracious maggots, in the body of a dead animal" (37D.
Macabre fancies are richly indulged.
. . . mortality seems more palpably, more oppressively emphasized among the graves of Nevilton than in other repositories of the dead. . . . to be buried in Nevilton clay has a positive element in its dreadfulness. It is not so much to be buried, as to be sucked in, drawn down, devoured, absorbed. . . . (The tombstones) weigh down upon the poor relics consigned to their care, in a hideous partnership with the clay that Is working its will upon them. (6,7)
The Nevilton landscape is associated throughout with religion, fertility, dampness and death, and is frequently
contrasted with the landscape of Italy.
"In our country we grow com between the fruit trees," said Lacrima. "Yes, com —" returned Andersen, "com and wine and oil'. Those are the natural, the beautiful, products of earth. Things that are fed upon sun and air — not upon the bones of the dead! All these Nevilton places, however, luxuriant, seem to me to smell of death." (203)
This morbid, almost hysterical, Insistence upon the rank,
sinister qualities of the vegetation and soil does eventually
give the air of being consciously indulged ln — of being a
literary pose. As an expression of James Andersen's mania It
is valid, but one tends to suspect Powys of working up such 90
a mania in himself as well for the literary effect. Louis
Wilkinson marks in Powys a strong dash of the great poseur and actor, and Powys in his Autobiography shows his own self- awareness of this trait. As a lecturer, he no doubt benefitted from this gift for imitation and exaggeration, but as a novel• ist he was sometimes betrayed by it.
Spiritual conflict between the two hills of Nevilton is not the only symbolic opposition in Wood, and Stone. As the title suggests, Powys conceives an opposition as well between different forms of matter — between clay, wood, water, Leonian stone and marble. The title probably is derived from a Victor• ian hymn which sees these two substances, as Edmund Gosse put it, as "peculiarly liable to be bowed down to by the heathen in their blindness."-'
What though the spicy breezes Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle, Though every prospect pleases And only man is vile, In vain with lavish kindness The gifts of God are strown, The heathen ln his blindness Bows down to wood and stone. Bishop Reginal Heber (Hymns Ancient & Modern #522)
As Christian orthodoxy plays a fairly important role in the novel, the hold which the stone of Leo's Hill has over the people of Nevilton may be seen as a sort of idolatry, reaching
its apogee in the values and morals of the Homers. Gladys is referred to frequently as "pagan" (24l, ?21), and also is especially identified with Leonian stone. 91
The sun-warmed slabs of Leonian stone, upon which she had so often basked in voluptuous contentment seemed dumbly to encourage and stimulate her in this heathen design. How entirely they were the accomplices of all that was dominant in her destiny -- these yellow blocks of stone that had so enriched her house!, They answered to her own blond beauty, to her own sluggish remorselessness.
(103)
Her father too has a sense of identification with the stone which is, as he is, representative of cruelty and power.
He always seemed to renew the forces of his being' when he visited this grass-covered repository of his wealth and influence. Leo's Hill suited his temper, and he felt as though he suited the temper of Leo's Hill. Between the man who exploited the stone, and the great reservoir of the stone he exploited, there seemed an illimitable affinity. (372-3)
A similar affinity for Leonian stone is expressed, with
much less self-satisfaction, by the unhappy carver James
Andersen. Having worked the stone all his life, he feels him•
self about to "turn to stone" (440, 443). Mr. Taxater attempts
to dispel his morbid mood ln a passage which is thematically
central to the novel.
"Remember, this is no longer the Stone Age. The power of stone was broken once for all, when certain women of Palestine found that stone, which we've all heard of, lifted out of its place'. Since then it is to wood -- the wood out of which His cross was made — not to stone, that we must look." (440) 92
Andersen remembers the admonition, and applies it prophetically to his rival, Quincunx.
"He is an ash-root, a tough ash-root," he muttered, "And that's the reason he has been chosen. There's nothing in the world but the roots of trees that can undermine the power of Stone*. The trees can do it. The trees will do it. What did that Catholic say? He said it was Wood against Stone. That's the reason I can't help her. I have worked too long at Stone. I am too near Stone. That's the reason Quincunx has been chosen. She and I are under the power of Stone, and we can't resist it, any more than the earth can! But ash-tree roots can undermine anything. (463)
Thus wood, organic matter with its Christian connotations as the vehicle of Sacrifice, becomes the half-successful adversary of the pagan, pitiless power of stone. Nevilton Mount is wooded, whereas Leo's Hill is bare. The symbolism is not consistent throughout the novel, however, as in the opening chapter we are told that "the rank vegetation" of Nevilton churchyard
"assists the treachery" of the clay and stones absorbing man back Into the earth (7). Lacrima and James agree that the
Nevilton orchards "were made to keep out the sun and the whole• some air," and that "shrubbery is the last limit of depression and desolation" (203).
Other possible opponents of Leonian sandstone are marble and the sea. Mr. Taxater, finding the Seldoms' "orchard based on rock ... an admirable symbol of what this place represents," professes that marble, the building material of the Latin races,
"is the appropriate medium of civilization's retort to instinct 93
and savagery," and could resist the "corrupting natural forces"
which pervade the Nevilton landscape (209). In Wej^mouth
Leonian stone gives place to "noble Portland Stone" (530), which
is "so much nearer to marble than to clay" that Quincixnx be•
lieves that in it "lurked some occult talisman ready to save
him from everything connected with Leo's Hill" (699). Portland
stone is in direct contact with the sea, which is seen as the
ultimate reality and victor over the forces of both wood and
stone. Swimming naked in the open sea Luke experiences a
"large emancipation" (589), and feels that "in the solid earth's
eternal antagonist, was a power capable of destroying every
sinister spell" (590). Vennie, too, thinks in Weymouth of how
"long after the last block of Leonian stone had been removed
from Its place . . . this same tide would fling itself upon
this same beach ..." (712, 713).
Another way of studying the landscape of Wood and Stone
is to note how various are the responses to it by different
characters in the romance. The chief advocates of what seems
to be the author's own point of view on the hills are James
Andersen and Vennie. Although the stonecarver expresses his dark opinions about the evil force in Leo's Hill while in a deranged state (440, 472, 481, 570), they coincide with those
of the lucid Vennie (435-6, 568, 720). Vennie, James and
Lacrima are encouraged by the ambiguous Taxater to unite ln
their hostility to the "corrupting natural forces" of the
Nevilton landscape and to form a "freemasonry of the children 94
of marble against the children of clay" (209). While Vennie and James feel their greatest opposition to the stone of Leo's
Hill, Lacrima is particularly hostile to the vegetation and soil of Nevilton with its "sluggish fertility" which is so alien to her Latin spirit (92, also 189, 295 and 421).
Other characters do not feel this alienation and hostility to the landscape, either because they delude themselves as to its nature or because their own natures are in harmony with it. In the latter group are the representatives of Power —
Gladys and her father, who can Identify themselves with the stone, and Farmer Goring. "If Mr. Romer represented the occult power of the sandstone hill, his brother-in-law was the very epitome and culmination of the valley's inert clay" (93-4).
Luke Andersen, also, while he is not cruel, admires and pos• sesses Power, and does not feel alienated from his environment.
Like Gladys he is blond and therefore identified both with the sun and with the golden sandstone.
Mr. Wone and Mrs. Seldom share a sentimental evangelical illusion about nature which offends the more perceptive characters.
Fate could not, surely altogether betray her prayers, in a place so brooded over by "the wings of the dove." In the exquisite hush of the afternoon the birds' rich voices seemed to take an almost liturgical tone —- as though they were the ministers of a great natural temple. To make a solemn request of a dear friend under such conditions was almost as though one were exacting a sacred vow under the very shadow of the altar. So at least Valentia felt, as she uttered 95
her serious petition; though it may well be that Mr. Taxater, skilled in the mental discipline of Saint Ignatius, knew better how to keep the distracting influences of mere "Nature," in their proper secondary place. (53-9)
Taxater promptly betrays the lady's confidence, demonstrating the Inadequacy of her optimism. Taxater is the recipient of similar opinions, clothed ln cant from the obnoxious Wone.
I love this beautiful scenery, these luscious fields, these admirable woods. ... I love the vegetables in the gardens. And I love to think . . . of these good gifts of the Heavenly Father as being the expression of His divine bounty. Yes, if anywhere ln our revered country atheism and immorality are condemned by nature herself, it is in Nevilton. The fields of Nevilton are like the fields of Canaan, they are full of the goodness of the Lord! (341)
Wone is rebuked by Vennie on the two occasions he expresses similar views to her (3^6-8, 478), and the events of the elec• tion belie his optimism as well.
Clavering, on the other hand, is well aware of the heathen and sinister powers of Nature. In an extraordinary passage his internal conflict with temptation is expressed by his reck• less ascent through the brambles and clutching foliage of
Nevilton Mount; "the bind-weed, which entwined itself round, many of the slenderer tree-stems, became a symbol of the power that assailed him" (143). Powys distinguishes men to whom
"the influences of what we call Nature are in harmony with all that is good in them," from others, including Clavering, for °>6
whom Mature was magical, not mystical, and permeated "by a subtle diffusion of something evil there ..." (143). The dualism implicit in the book becomes explicit in Chapter VIII, the account of the battle between nature and Clavering*s soul.
The religious aspirations of characters such as Clavering and
Vennie are resisted by the forces of nature, "the power of all these entangled growing things" felt by the priest "as a sin• ister heathen influence pulling him earthward" (143).
No one view of nature emerges triumphant in Wood and Stone, although the weight of reiteration supports the morbid fancies of Lacrima and James. Certainly the naive confidence of
Mrs. Seldom and Wone is dispelled, but by the end of the novel the forces of Sacrifice have thwarted at least some of the designs of the advocates of Power. Perhaps the ambiguous response of the inscrutable Mr. Taxater, who on one occasion expresses hostility to the "corrupting natural forces" of the
Nevilton landscape (209) but on others is sympathetic to these natural, pagan powers (71-6, ?21), comes closest to coping effectively with his surroundings. He controls his emotional response to Nature, and Is not mastered by it, but yet retains an admiration for natural beauty (59, 73, 77, ?21). He is, of course, sustained by his orthodoxy and so does not resign hope as readily as do the irreligious James and the lapsed Lacrima.
A last point of view on the landscape of Wood and Stone is that provided by Dangelis, a curiously Henry Jamesian figure for Powys to have created, and one through whom some of Powys' own methods are given a rationale. An American, and therefore 97
something of an outsider, Dangells is more cosmopolitan than the Nevilton locals and has greater self-awareness than any- other character except Luke. In the Henry James tradition, however, his open nature is educated by the perfidy in love of which the citizens of the older nation prove capable. As an
American and as a painter, Dangells* response to the Nevilton landscape is very different from that of the characters who have lived there longer and are less able to escape from it.
The sinister qualities of this landscape do strike him upon oc• casion (especially in Chapter XII, "Auber Lake"). But on the whole his attitude is one of aesthetic appreciation (127-130,
132-3, 213, 711). He is on the side of neither Power nor
Sacrifice in the spiritual warfare Powys conceives as being waged in Nevilton.
He brought into the place a certain large and elemental indifference. To the child of the winds and storms of the Great Lakes as, so one might think, to the high fixed stars themselves, this local strife of opposed mythologies must needs appear a matter of but trifling importance. (122)
Frequently during the course of the romance Powys contemplates the struggles and tragedies of Nevilton from the superior and indifferent perspective of the stars (182, 193, 518, 597-8).
Dangells, whose name suggests this Hardyesque perspective, functions at the end as a deus ex machlna.
As an artist, Dangells and his meditations provide an interesting insight into how Powys saw his own treatment of 98
landscape. His artistic purposes are similar to what Powys seems to have attempted in his fiction.
What in his soul he vaguely Imaged as his task, was an attempt to eliminate all mystic and symbolic attitudes from his works, and to catch, in their place, if the inspiration came to him, something of the lavish prodigality, superbly material, and yet possessed of ineffable vistas, of the large careless evocations of nature herself. His imaginative purpose, as it defined Itself more and more clearly in his mind, during his solitary return through the evening light, seemed to imply an attempted reproduction of those aspect of the human drama, ln such a place as this, which carried upon their surface the air of things that could not happen otherwise, and over-brimmed and over-flowed all traditional distinctions. (132)
While Powys hardly eliminated "all symbolic and mystic atti• tudes" from his work, the "lavish prodigality" of nature and a sense of "ineffable vistas" are among his own finest qualities as a novelist. There is an anticipation of Wolf Solent in
Dangelis' determination to find poetry in "the great black heaps of cow-dung which alternated here with the golden lumps of drowsy buttercups" (133). This note of generous acceptance characterizes the novels of Powys' maturity, but is rarely heard amid the Gothic forebodings of Wood and Stone. Vennie
Seldom remarks "I am afraid right and wrong are more strangely mixed in this world than all that, Mr. Wone" (478), but this recognition is not fully absorbed into the novels until Wolf
Solent. Wood and Stone is in its basic conception dualistic, and Dangelis' tolerance is not its prevailing vision. 99
In a later meditation on his artistic alms, Dangells conceives of a picture which would take a well-known myth and
"clothe the shadowy poetic outline of the classical story with fragments and morsels of actual experience as one by one his
Imaginative intellect absorbed them" (213). He chose those legendary episodes "which seemed most capable of lending them• selves to a half-realistic, half-fantastic transmutation, of the people and places around him" (212-13). Wood and Stone, based as it is upon Montacute and containing, particularly in the relationship of the Andersen brothers, elements of auto• biography, does thus "transmute" Powys' memories of the people and places around him in an earlier period. Unlike the painter, he seems to have worked best with remembered rather than immediately present scenes, to have created out of "emotion 6 recollected in tranquility." The transmutation is of the phys• ical environment of his childhood, and of personalities such as Llewelyn, John William Williams (Taxater) and the Montacute crone Nancy Cooper ("Witch Bessie"). As yet, there is no
"classical story" underlying the plot of Wood and Stone.
Classical and mythological references remain fragmentary and decorative rather than integral. The passage is, however, prophetic, for it very closely defines the achievement of
A Glastonbury Romance. 100
Chapter Four: Footnotes
•••L For example, E.M. Forster's short stories such as "The Story of a Panic," "The Celestial Omnibus" and "Other Kingdom", or Kenneth Grahame's essays in Pagan Papers (London: Bodley Head, 1898).
2 Maurice Barres, La Colline Insplree (1912; rpt. Le Livre de Poche, no date given).
3 His One Hundred Best Books (New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1916) includes fairly recent works by Anatole France, Hemy de Gourmont and Paul Bourget. I have been unable to trace any reference to Barres.
^ Thomas Hardy. The Return of the Native (I878; rpt. New York: Norton, 1969).
5 Edmund Gose, Father and Son (190?; rpt. London: Penguin, 1970), p. 38.
^ See also Kenneth Hopkins, The Powys Brothers (London: Phonenix House, 1967), PP. 60-61. 101
Chapter Five: A Glastonbury Romance
A great change is evident in Powys' basic attitude towards nature between the writing of his first and his fourth novels.
Although one group of characters in the later book, the
Norfolk-raised Crows, does feel a hostility to the Somerset landscape reminiscent of the attitude frequently taken in Wood and Stone, the earth is no longer viewed as a prison or a grave.
A large part of the novel takes place in early spring; the emphasis is on earth life as fresh and delicate, not heavy and cloying. It is from his sensual nature and strong physical delight in the earth that the central figure of A Glastonbury
Romance, the prophet, healer and mystic John Geard, draws his power. Geard's dying thoughts are of "the green spring grass of the park at Montacute." A native of Montacute, the Nevilton of Wood and Stone, he feels none of the revulsion to the soil of his home that the characters of the earlier novel felt.
While in A Glastonbury Romance there are relatively few set pieces of landscape description such as those with which each chapter of Wood and Stone began, the treatment of land• scape in the later novel is more varied and rich. Perhaps the most significant of these changes is that ln the later novel, as in all Powys' major novels, the landscape is seen almost always through the eyes of a particular character rather than described directly by an omniscient narrator. Thus the emo• tional and moral connotations which invariably are present in landscape descriptions have reference to the particular vision 102
and state of mind of the individual who observes them: the narrator no longer attempts to Impose his own impressions of the character of a given setting or day as absolute. This is quite in accord with the philosophy of the novel as a whole in its denial of absolutes and its stress on the validity of many different points of view. In his 1955 Preface to the novel Powys writes that "Its message is that no one Receptacle of Life and no one Fountain of Life poured into that Receptacle can contain or explain what the world offers us,"'*' and in the novel Itself he asserts that "there is no ultimate mystery!"
(693, see below, pp. 50-5D. Thus Nature enters A Glastonbury
Romance as it penetrates the stream of consciousness of a particular character (for example, 54-5, 264-5, 283-4) rather than being described from an omniscient point of view. Char• acters, too, may be visualized through nature imagery: "Sam's hulking form swayed like a gnarled thorn bush in a high wind"
(214), "her eyes lingered for a moment, clinging to Sam's, like a goldfinch to a thistle-head" (390). But these compari• sons are not made into allegorical equations as they were in
Wood and Stone, where Quincunx was ash wood, Romer was Leonian stone and Goring was Nevilton clay.
A Glastonbury Romance is the first of Powys' novels to be set in more than one localityj although Rodmoor opens ln
London, the city is only slightly evoked. Like John Crow, the reader is brought to Glastonbury by way of Norfolk and
Salisbury Plain, places which contrast greatly with the lush and sheltered Somerset town. This use of contrast heightens 103
the individual qualities of the Glastonbury landscape.
Northwold and Stonehenge both appear as bleak, harsh and real•
istic challenges to the hazy glamour and illusion of picturesque
Glastonbury. The contrast is of biographical significance as well: in his Autobiography Powys makes much of the distinctions
he sensed between the places he visited as a child, including
his grandfather's home at Northwold, and he writes ln his pref•
ace to A Glastonbury Romance that
from the sands and the waters, from the reeds and the waters, of the East Coast, we may pass as ray own Norfolk-born mother passed, to the mysterious stones of Stonehenge and the not less mysterious Vale of Avalon. (xili)
The first two chapters of A Glastonbury Romance are set
in Northwold, and some of the protagonists return there at the
end of the year which the novel describes. There are simijar-
it ies between Norfolk and Glastonbury ln that the landscape
of both is marked by water ditches or rhynes; but whereas the
atmosphere of the eastern town is clear and bracing,. Glastonbury
is characteristically veiled in haze or mist. Powys seems to
enjoy, when writing of a place so charged with sentiment as
Glastonbury has been, first making a hostile approach to it
through the scepticism of the Viking-descended Crows. The
flat, open land of Northwold suits the Crows' temperament as
the hills and mists of Glastonbury do not. Racial distinctions
are accorded in this novel the same significance that topo•
graphical distinctions are. 104
Stonehenge, which, for different reasons, appeals to both
John and Mr. Evans, remains an ultimate mystery challenging both the cynicism of the Danes and the religiosity associated with Glastonbury. Because its stones, according to Mr. Evans, came originally from South Wales and it was the chief temple of the Druids (86), Stonehenge is associated with the pagan
Celtic mysteries and "secrets of life" which are also so important in Powys* conception of Glastonbury. But in the third chapter of the novel Stonehenge is seen through the eyes of the sceptical John Crow, in whom "some ancient vein of old
Danish profanity" (85) is aroused by its over-powering presence.
Reacting against Mr. Evans* pedantic reverence for the place,
John is nevertheless greatly impressed by it, and feels drunken with the magnetism emanating from it (84). He, however, sees
Stonehenge as "very English," rather than full of Celtic mys• teries, and wishes to worship the stones simply because they are such magnificent stones — not, as Mr. Evans does, because they hide some secret of life.
John's visit to Stonehenge is one of the most impressive scenes ln A Glastonbury Romance, notwithstanding the humorous undercurrent of conflict between the shameless John and the indignant Mr. Evans, and it may serve as an example of Powys' variety of approaches to landscape. Several incidents in it are developed during the course of the novel into important themes. For example, the subject of suffering is central to the novel, and the "Stonehenge" chapter begins by identifying
John's exhaustion and pain with the colour of the sky and 105
Salisbury Plain. John's weariness produces a kind of synthesia whereby his sensations of pain become associated with what he sees, with the landscape before him. The theme of suffering is thus Introduced to the novel, and at once identified with
John's journey to Glastonbury; travelling "towards the West
Country was like walking towards some mysterious celestial
Fount wherin pain was transmuted into an unknown element" (99).
Salisbury Plain is a strong contrast to the Norfolk land• scape of the preceding chapters. Like Norfolk it is flat and open, but it is bare and lacks the water ditches of both
Norfolk and Glastonbury. The road across it is "bleak and un• frequented" (75)» thus the encounter with Mr. Evans takes on an eerie significance. Stonehenge is the portal through which
John enters the West Country, the land of magic and illusion.
John's sensation that the place is "very English" perhaps implies its power over all the different racial strains --
Celtic, Danish and Saxon -- which comprise the nation.
Stonehenge has power and life for both Mr. Evans and John,
"the man from Wales and the man from Norfolk" (96), although each interprets this power differently. Stonehenge, like the towers of Glastonbury, is one of the shrines of Cybele, monu• ments of man's belief in spiritual forces greater than himself.
"The powers of reason may number the Stones of Stonehenge and guess at the origin of the Grail of Glastonbury; but they can• not explain the mystery of the one, nor ask the required magic question of the other" (1174). The stones are seen at twilight, when "the very indistinctness of the dying daylight served 106
also to enhance the lmpressiveness of the place" (89). John's sense of its immensity and living quality is stressed; the individual stones are given their own characters, but in John's final sight of it it seems a whole, a single stone. As will happen later, at the opening of the Saxon. Arch, present charac• ters appear as ghosts from the past; John seems like "the ghost of a neolithic slave" (89) staring at the gods of his masters. Past and present fuse in a "Cimmerian greyness" (89) which anticipates the mingling of ages and worlds to be found in Glastonbury.
Other aspects of the landscape description in this third chapter Include the focusing upon small details of nature as they obtrude into the mind of the protagonist, and the incan• tation of the names of villages along the route to Glastonbury as John and Mr. Evans pass them. This latter episode.is characteristic of Powys' fascination with the individual qual• ity of small places, and his awareness of their social and historical connotations. The former lends humanity and real• ism to the often rather fantastic behaviour and speculations of his characters. Overwhelmed at his first sight of Stonehenge,
John notices a few buds on a thorn branch. He remarks that it is not dead yet, and Mr. Evans misunderstands him. The inci• dent is both poignant and appropriate, for Mr. Evans applies
John's remark to the stone circle and expounds upon what they both feel about its power. As a miraculous sign given to
Joseph of Arimathea, and a symbol of spirtual life in death, the thorn tree has great historic and symbolic significance 10?
in-the Glastonbury legend, and its appearance here is the first of many ln the novel. The associations it acquires here with new life and with spiritual powers are carried throughout the novel.
Earlier in the chapter, John is given a feeling of "almost sacred reassurance" by the sight of a newt in a dew pond" (77).
The dew pond is also part of a recurrent symbolism ln the
Romance, here a series of pools containing animal life such as
Harrod's mill-pond and the mill pool of Lydford where the great chub lived. Powys' description of the newt in this pond slowly sinking down into the blue-grey depths of the water closely resembles the ritualistic rising and submerging of the great fish into the blueish-grey water of Harrod's mill-pond des• cribed some fifty pages earlier. On both occasions John Is given a kind of ecstasy by the sight of this descent into the
"mysterious luminosity" of the water (22). Before the capture of the chub, Geard also submerges himself into a pool of water
(here the reddish water of Chalice Well) to enact his miracle of healing; in death he again sinks slowly into the waters which embody for him the means of attaining spiritual union with the Absolute. The water, its blue-grey colour, and the descent of the water animal into the depths are all important images in terms of the novel as a whole, as will be shown later. They are associated with ecstasy, transfiguration and communication with the other world. Thus even an apparently insignificant incident such as this one of the newt in the dew pond can be seen to be intricately incorporated into the major 108
purposes of this novel.
Glastonbury is the first town to be described in detail, under its true name, in Powys' novels. The movements of char• acters about its streets — Silver, George, High,Chilkwell — are carefully plotted; various buildings such as the Abbot's
Tribunal, the George and Pilgrims' Inn, Abbey House, St. John's
Church, the Tithe Barn and Chalice House appear today much as
Powys describes them. Most of the scenes in the novel are located precisely in or around the actual town. This accuracy is the more interesting when it is recalled that Powys wrote the novel while living in New York State. He writes to his brother Littleton, "I am going to settle doivn and write my new long romance with Glastonbury as a background -- so any pamph• lets you may pick up about Glastonbury or Wells or those parts 2 do'ee let me have them!" In this recreation within a work of fiction of an actual and closely described setting one can find the influence of Scott and Dickens, whom Powys admired for their ability to confer a romantic aura upon a realistic description of a contemporary place (see Autobiography, 60-61 and Visions and Revisions, 96, 99).
But Glastonbury is a small town, and the fields and meadows which surround it are as important a part of the environment of the novel as are the streets and buildings. Just west of the present town lies the hummocky site of the prehistoric
Lake Village where Abel Twig lives, where the Chub of Lydford is caught, and where the final confrontation between Geard and Philip takes place. Queen's Sedgemoor and Nell's cottage 109
by Whltelake River lie to the east of Glastonbury; Wookey Hole, centre of Philip's aspirations, lies to the north. Particular groupings of characters tend to be associated with each area, but Mr. Geard moves about them all.
At the centre of the town, as of the novel, stand the
Abbey Ruins, picturesque focus of the Christian legends of the place but also the source of mysterious, apocalyptic rumours.
The other dominant feature of the landscape and a central image in the novel is the Glastonbury Tor, surmounted by its tower. It appears here as a more vital place than the ruins, for on it occur two climactic events, the Pageant and the murder of Tom Barter. Powys identifies it with the conflict between forces of good and evil, and between Pagan and Christian forces
(96). He describes it as the Home of Gwyn ap Nud, Celtic god of the underworld (264), but its tower is dedicated to St.
Michael, the archangel who wars against the enemies of God, and who "appears in more places than one in Celtic lands as 3 the supplanter of the dark powers." It is on the Tor that
Mr. Evans first makes an unsuccessful attempt to purge himself of his vice by undergoing crucifixion, in the Pageant; it is on the Tor that he is at last purged by his revulsion at wit• nessing Tom's death. The deaths and near deaths which occur on the Tor recall the martyrdom of Abbot Whiting there (264); past and present are drawn together by their common location
ln this landscape charged with history and mystical symbolism.
Glastonbury is often held to be the "Insula AvalIonia" or Island of Apples where King Arthur was taken to be healed 110
of his wounds after his last battle. Thus the water meadows and the apple orchards around Glastonbury are emphasized in
Powys* descriptions. Rhys in a chapter of his Studies develops a theory that Glastonbury when it was still an island might have been believed by the ancient Celts to be the realm of the dead which was either an island beyond the sea or a fairy castle on a mound like the Glastonbury Tor (chapter XIV, particularly
329-30). The haze or watery vapour which characterizes the atmosphere of Glastonbury in Powys' descriptions blurs the outlines of the landscape and gives it that atmosphere of unreality which is appropriate to a Celtic otherworld.
Before them to the westward stretched the green water meadows, among which, a mile or so out of town, could be detected the wide Lake Village Fen and even the little shanty of Abel Twig; while to the southwest, beyond the fens, rose the blue-grey ridge of the low Polden hills. All these were softly suffused by the cloud-latticed vapour-filmed sun; a sun which, though riding at high noon, lacked the potency to dominate what it bathed with that glamorous and watery light. (263)
The treatment of landscape in A Glastonbury Romance is of course profoundly affected by the mythological parallels which Powys is concerned to make. Indeed, it is largely subordinated to them, as it never was in the earlier novels.
In considering some subjects, such as the Tor and the images of water, it Is impossible to separate the landscape image from the mythological connotations. Powys himself discusses the relationship between the two in his 1955 Preface to the novel, and asserts that the book attempts to describe how Ill
"a special myth, a unique tradition" has not only "stained, dyed, impregnated the atmosphere of this particular spot but has associated itself with every detail of its local history"
(xi, xii).
The Grail Legend, with the Celtic legends in which scholars have sought its sources, provides the mythological skeleton for this novel. That the novel is thus.controlled and given form by the legend is arguably a major cause of its greatness.
There is an immense variety of material in what Powys guessed must be "the longest English novel"-' but the complex threads of plots and characters are worked together into an artistic whole by the reference of elements from all parts of the novel to the mythological dimension. The intricate and profound handling of the parallels between modem characters and situa• tions and their counterparts in mythology can well bear compar• ison with the Homeric parallels in Joyce's Ulysses. Indeed,
G. Wilson Knight asserts that "his use of myth and legend, indigenously rooted in his story's British locale, is more convincing than Lawrence's Quetzalcoatl,or Joyce's use of the
Cdyssey . . . . "^ By placing his novel within the Arthurian literary tradition, Powys for once works with symbols and myths which are comprehensible without reference to his personal biography.
The great Pageant on Midsummer's Day, towards which the first part of the novel builds, might seem the logical centre of the mythological structure of the novel, since it is intended to present the legendary history of Glastonbury. The Pageant 112
turns out to be, however, one of those curious non-events in which Powys delights. Unlike the much-anticipated wedding in
Weymouth Sands, the Pageant does take place, but it is hardly described at all. More attention is paid to peripheral events
—: the reactions of various members of the audience, and a con• frontation between protestors and the police. Like Mr. Geard,
Powys chooses to absent himself from the actual performance.
This is cut short by the collapse of Mr. Evans during the
Crucifixion scene, and thus the latter part of the Pageant is never performed.
Some of the roles taken in the Pageant seem particularly appropriate, notably the choice of Crummie as the rejected lady of Shalott and Mr. Evans as the tormented Christ. Other correspondences are merely vignettes, such as the shamefaced retreat of the boot-black St. Peter and the despair of Judas enacted by the "crazy and good-for-nothing" Mr. Booty "who used to read Grimm's fairy tales on the cricket field when his side was in" (623). While they have no great significance, these correspondences enrich the novel like the tiny background figures in one of the Flemish genre paintings to which Powys seems in this chapter to be inviting us to compare his own work (618, 623).
This aspect of the Pageant illustrates, however, a principal means by which Powys establishes the mythic dimension of his novel: that is, through making certain of his own char• acters and episodes correspond with characters and episodes in Welsh, Arthurian and Grail mythology. Thus a great many of 113
the characters in A Glastonbury Romance are placed in some sort of relationship to a mythological figure or figures. For some, like John Crow and Sam Dekker, this relationship consists in their having an experience drawn directly from myth: John sees King Arthur's Sword, and Sam has a vision of the Holy
Grail. These experiences are highly significant events in their lives, and identify them within the Arthurian pattern of the book, but Sam and John are not themselves counterparts of any specific legendary figures. They experience mythic events, but are not themselves seen in terms of myth. John sees
Arthur's sword but is not Arthur or his symbolic representative.
Other characters, however, are directly compared with mytho• logical personages — Merlin, Nineue, Charon or Dis -- by the author, by other characters, or by their own actions.
Philip Crow is identified throughout the novel as a dark god, the devil or the ruler of the underworld. As the owner of both the cavern called Wookey Hole and an airplane, he exults in his power over Nature and desires to conquer the landscape with factories, mines and roads (225). He is one of the two rival kings of Avalon (1162); he seeks to rule through exercis• ing the power of reason and science (226, 1165) whereas his counterpart, Geard, draws his power from the non-rational (3^0).
Philip descends into his kingdom, the underworld of Wookey
Hole which is full of obscene and phallic shapes (236), to ravish his cousin Persephone. His power over her is complete while they are ln the caves, but when they return to the sur• face and the daylight his Influence wanes. Mr. Geard, also 114
descends into Wookey Hole, and while he sleeps there, overcome by a mental struggle against uncongenial forces of reason and contrivance, his rival Philip takes advantage of his absence to deal against him what Powys terms The Dolorous Blow (350-2).
Powys implies here a reference to the Solar Hero theories of his Arthurian authority, Sir John Rhys, which find the god of 7 the underworld triumphant during the absence of sunlight.
Philip in Wookey sees himself as "a solitary magician, whose secret kingdom hidden in the bowels of the earth and guarded by invisible demons, was impenetrable to invasion as the pri• vate thoughts in his own mind were impenetrable" (236). As he rows Persephone across the "Stygian flood" of the under• ground river in Wookey, she addresses him as Charon, but his role in terms of classical myth is rather that of Dis.
In terms of Christian mythology Philip appears as the devil, both in his underground machinations and in his ability to fly. "'That's Philip Crow,' she thought to herself, trav• elling like the devil through the black rain! He's off to
Wookey Hole'" (210). Mad Bet also identifies Philip in his airplane with the devil (633). Much of Philip's power is based on the discovery in Wookey of tin or diabolus metallorum -- the devil of metals. "Are you a devil?" cries Persephone in
Wookey Hole, and the echo answers her affirmatively (237).
Persephone herself is a more ambiguous figure. Apart from her underground ravishment, her role seems unrelated to that of her classical namesake. She embodies the restlessness and dissatisfaction of the sophisticated, emancipated woman, 115
like Huxley's Myra Viveash or Lucy Tantamount; her love affairs are sterile and short-lived (324). In the Pageant she movingly enacts the grieving Madonna, and appears like "her own name• sake, the great Goddess of the Dead" (623), but she acts from a perverse and neurotic inspiration incongruous to traditional piety (635-7). A truer identification of the girl comes when she dreams herself a dryad (790-1), or is termed a maenad (636), for she resembles Philippa Renshaw of Rodmoor in her bisexual, boyish qualities, her embracing of trees, and her inability to be satisfied with normal human love.
Persephone is addressed as Gawain's mistress, Lorie de la Roche Florie, by the admiring Angela, who herself is iden• tified with Blodeuwedd, the flower-maiden of Math ap Mathonwy in the Mablnoglon. The latter identification seems purely decorative, rather than thematically significant, but the girl's romantic interest in the Welsh and Arthurian legends is an ironically-treated version of Mr. Evans' and Powys' own obsessions. Angela herself, white-cheeked and cold to men, is a figure of sterility, and her enthusiasm for the legends bores and alienates her beloved Perse. It is a type of the pretty, pseudo-romantic, superstitious fancy which so irritates the cynical realist John Crow, as it lacks the harsh, grim quality with which he associates true Romance (20).
Many other minor characters in A Glastonbury Romance have their proportions enlarged by a comparison with archetypal or legendary figures. Eudoxia, the smooth-skinned paramour of Will Zoyland, is compared to "the damosel Linet, of the 116
Castle Perilous" (864). Penny Pitches is an "arch-sorceress," with her great stove which is "like a world in itself" (385) and her cauldron. Cauldrons have an important role in Celtic mythology; their food-giving and life-restoring properties have encouraged their being taken for a prototype and source g of the Grail. Penny's cauldron is one of the grail manifes• tations in this novel, along with Mother Legge's silver bowl and the gold christening cup. In describing Penny's cauldron
Powys makes a curious, seemingly pedantic and irrelevant, reference to the theories of Rhys. Penny and Wetherwax des• cribe the soup cooked in the cauldron as "gorlas," which Powys explains may be a corruption of the Celtic word gorlasser, "a dark-blue, livid colour . . . used to describe a mysterious
•corpse-god' or 'Rex Semi-mortuus• in the old Cymric mythology"
(203). There is no apparent connection between the corpse-god and Penny's soup, but this reference to gorlas may be sugges• tive of the pagan mythic traditions which live on among the common people of Glastonbury, side by side with the sophisti• cated legends popular among the gentry such as Miss Drew and
Angela.
The contrast between the Christianized surface of
Glastonbury life and its pagan substrata is evident in the scene of the choir supper, where they are harmonized by the tolerance of Mat Dekker. Wetherwax, whose satyr-like qualities are elsewhere noted (390), appears at this feast as a colossal gnome, goblin or ogre (385); his sub-human appearance and interest ln lechery recall Images of the pagan fertility cults 117
which preceded Christianity. Yet his presence in the
Glastonbury vicarage is not incongruous, because it is the peculiarity of the place to draw together many forms of religious worship (for example, 291). In his Preface to a later edition of A Glastonbury Romance Powys remarks that
what really allured me about the Holy Grail were the unholy elements in both its history and its mystery: in other words the unquestionable fact that it was much older than Christianity Itself. Christianity Instinctively clutched at it as an ideal receptacle for the blood of the Redeemer: but it has other levels of reception in its sacrosanct grillage, and it remains a dedicated symbolic centre for all those primordial cosmic •fetishes*. ... (Preface to 1955 edition, xiii)
Another of the peasant characters, Young Tewsy, is seen in terms successively of classical, Celtic and Christian legends. The doorkeeper at the bawdy house of Mother Legge, he is called "a sort of Psychopompus, or inverted Charon of
Limbo" (413). On the day of Mr. Geard's miracle at Chalice
Hill, however, Tewsy catches the celebrated fish, the Chub of
Lydford. His employer, Mother Legge, craves possession of the fish and recalls an ancient Glastonbury saying, 1 i When Chub of Lydford do speak like human On grass where Joseph has broken bread, Be it man or be it woman, In the Isle of Glaston they'll raise the Dead. (763) The capture of the fish is related both to the miraculous heal• ing of Mother Legge's niece, Tittle Petherton, that day, and the subsequent raising to life of the dead child by Mr. Geard. 118
The fish is a symbol of fertility, healing and the resurrected
Christ; the doggerel seems to relate it also to the Grail legend and hence to the maimed Fisher King. Young Tewsy is an unlikely representative of the Fisher King. Eut Mr. Evans finds it apt that he was the one to catch this fish, perhaps because of his connection with fertility as gatekeeper for the bawdy house or perhaps because his simplicity makes him a kind of holy fool. The event inspires Evans to a prophetic rapture on the search of the mystic Fisher Kings for "that which exists in the moment of timeless time" when the Cauldron and the
Spear, Grail and Sword became one (772). Sam Dekker, present at the capture of the great fish, does indeed later experience a vision such as Evans describes, when he is pierced with pain as by a sword and sees the Grail (982).
Tewsy eventually leaves Mother Legge's establishment to become gatekeeper at that of Mr. Geard at Chalice Well. "From
Camelot to Chalice HI111" reflects Lord P. sardonically. "Well
. . . that's how this world wags'." (9^2). The transition is not, however, an incongruous one in Powys' Glastonbury, where eros and religion are closely linked. The satyr-like
Mr. Wetherwax working for the vicar and Tewsy's passing from
Mother Legge's to the sacred well are instances of a thematic relationship between the two which runs throughout the novel.
A climax of this relationship is reached when Cordelia uses her erotic powers to divert Mr. Evans from the pursuit of his own damnation. Glastonbury itself is conducive to both erotic and religious forces. 119
... the presence of the Grail in that spot has the effect of digging deep channels for the amorous life of those who touch its soil. • • • The Grail of Glastonbury — and this is why Mr. Geard was entirely justified in making it the centre of his new religious cult — just because of its timeless association with the First Cause had the peculiarity of exciting human souls to concentrate their eroticism upon one single ideal object, as Sam for instance has done in becoming a mediaeval lover of his tortured God-Man; while it excited others, among whom was John Crow, to concentrate upon one real human being. (818)
Mystical belief and sensuality are combined in the person of
John Geard.
The official representative of sensuality ln the novel, and also the closest female counterpart to Mr. Geard, is the procuress, Mother Legge. Her authority is great (^93-5, 878-9), and she Is on familiar terms with Geard, Philip Crow and even the Marquis of P. Her house of ill repute is named Camelot, which recalls the disillusioned promiscuity which characterizes that city in Tennyson's "Last Tournament;" but the name comes from that of its former owners, the Camel family (506), who also owned the great silver bowl which is another one of the
Grail images in this novel. The villages of West and Queen
Camel are near Cadbury Camp, which has long been identified as a possible site of Arthur's Camelot; they lie between
Glastonbury and Montacute.
The silver Camel bowl is evidently reputed to have mag• ical powers — probably connected with fertility -- which are known to Mother Legge, Mr. Evans and Jennie Morgan (513). 120
The bowl Is a powerful symbolic presence ln the novel, but its meaning is only hinted at and never clearly revealed. It is the centre of the annual party at Mother Legge's on Easter
Monday, a party associated with the pre-Christian fertility rites subsumed into the traditions of Easter. Mr. Evans
declared that this Easter Monday party was the last surviving relic of some ancient Druidic custom of Religious Prostitution; that there was even something of the kind in the Arthurian days. . . (494)
A dionysiac element is implied also ln the unusual mingling of social classes, which is elsewhere as well associated with
Mother Legge's presence (493, 495, 879, 942). The entry of the silver bowl causes a change of mood in the party (512), and Mr. Evans makes a frantic effort to ensure that Cordelia should be the first to drink from it. When Nell, instead, drinks first, Jenny Morgan, whose name and Welsh origin associ• ate her.with Morgan Le Fay whom Mr. Evans had invoked in connection with the party (494), explains that there is "won• drous witchcraft" in the bowl (513). Later the "maddening power" of Nell's beauty and "fatal passivity" is identified with this drink from the Camel Bowl (961). Nell's child flourishes, but Cordelia's is stillborn.
Like Penny Pitches, Mother Legge is called a sorceress, and presides over her bowl as Penny Pitches reigns at the
Vicarage kitchen party on Maundy Thursday. But while Penny's cauldron is the Celtic cauldron of plenty, feasting all the guests and never becoming empty, Mother Legge is ungenerous 121
with food (495). She excels instead in the quantity and qual•
ity of the drink dispensed from her celebrated bowl, which
lays a glamour over the scene of the party.
. . . the whole scene swam and shimmered before him in an incredible luxury of significance. People and objects as John now looked at them seemed transferred from the confused dynamic scramble of life into something just beneath life; something that was there all the time, but that needed a few glasses of Brldgewater Punch to enable it to steal silently forth and show itself as the eternal essence. (506)
This insight into "something just beneath life" is what
Mr. Evans seeks through his research into Welsh myth (?72,
843, 1105); the punch provides an easier, though temporary, Q means of attaining it.
Mother Legge is a kind of incarnation of the feminine principle, an important figure in a town which is itself said to be dominated by a "Feminine Emanation" (1046). At her
party, she utilizes her fire "as a second or super-female"
(505) to aid her in ruling over her guests. She is a huge woman, whose presence and occupation enable her to transcend
social barriers. Her occupation, that of Procuress, is seen by John Crow as a motherly one in that it provides men with an escape from their sense of cosmic isolation. He finds Mother
Legge "a kind of mystical Mother -- like one of the Mothers in
Faust" (512), who provides security and protects her guests
from their fear of the unknown. (The moon, on the other hand,
is seen as "the tutelary mistress of all sterile passions, of all wild revolts against 'the Mothers,' that have led the virgins of 122
prophecy to shatter this world's laws" (285). The moon is associated in this passage with powers of imagination and mysticism; she is horned, like the Cybele of the closing pas• sages of the novel. There is no direct opposition between
Mother Legge and Mr. Geard, or other representatives of the spiritual aspects of life; Powys implies that all exist and all are necessary.) When the rainstorm breaks and she draws her curtains, she is seen as a great mother comforting a crowd of frightened children, protecting them from the "Something more meanacing than ordinary rain," from "some monstrous invasion
, . . from some unearthly 'questing Beast'" of darkness and chaos (511-12, 523).
What does enter the party at this point is Mr. Geard, coming to the aid of the tormented Tittle Petherton. His powers are frightening in that they seem to break the laws of nature, but he bursts out of the darkness and rain not to threaten but to save. With his arrival, the Camel Bowl is given a. Christian significance as well. Geard assumes Tittle's pain himself, as Christ took upon himself the sufferings of humanity in His Passion. In his anguish Geard begins the cry of Christ in Golgotha, "Let this cup --" (524), at the same time dashing the silver bowl to the ground. Mother Legge's bowl thus becomes the symbolic cup of suffering drunk by the
Saviour in Passion Week, and hence the Grail Itself. Into the silver bowl, then, Powys has drawn Celtic, pagan and Cnristian symbolism, the symbolism which Rhys and Loomls find in the
Grail tradition. 123
Mr. Geard is the central figure in the mythological structure of A Glastonbury Romance, as he is the central fig• ure of the novel as a whole. He is identified throughout the novel with ancient gods of the underworld or another dimen• sion — Cronos (3^2), Pwyll Pen Annwn, Bran (1120) and Gwyn ap
Nud! (596, 599). Elsewhere he is seen as Tireslas in the Under• world (925). The Marquis, referring to Geard, inadvertently finds himself uttering the name "Caer Sldi," which refers to the Celtic otherworld. It is from this other dimension that
Geard draws his power, and to it he eventually commits himself in his death by water.
Animal imagery occurs frequently in Powys* descriptions of Geardj^his sensuality is of a natural, animal kind just as his mysticism is entirely instinctive and unselfconscious. He appears as "some neolithic beast-god, paramour perhaps of the
Witch of Wookey!" (92?). Three times, as well, he is identified with the Questing Beast of the Arthurian legends. In the extra• ordinary scene at Mother Legge*s party, where it is felt that some threatening, unnatural power is trying to break into the fire-lit security of the room, this power is named as "some unearthly 'questing Beast'" (523). The party is then disrupted by the arrival of Geard, who accomplishes an unnatural but beneficient healing of a sick woman. Again, when rescuing the
Marquis from an enraged mob, Geard is likened to the Questing
Beast, as panting noises, "different from mere human breathings, rose from his tormented lungs" (600). The third occasion upon which he is likened to the Questing Beast is also a miraculous 124
rescue, the final healing of Tittie Petherton at Chalice Well.
Beast-like cries are made by Geard in his empathy with the sufferer, as on other occasions he is the medium for the cries of Christ and Merlin (524, 461; see also 1157-8).
It is with the figure of Merlin that Mr. Geard is primar• ily associated. He refuses to allow the representation of
Merlin in his Pageant, for what John understands to be the reason that
while for the world at large Christ was by far the more sacred, here, in Glastonbury, where he disappeared from view, Merlin must always be the 'numen' or the 'Tremendum Mysterium' that can be second to none. (594)
Geard parallels his own career with that of Merlin. As a
Christian Geard considers himself a "miracle-worker" wheras
Merlin was a "magic monger"; Merlin vanished with "his heathen
Grail," but Geard will show the world that the real Grail still exists in Glastonbury (471). Geard's sympathetic powers, which enable him to work his miracles, give the identification of him with Merlin a dimension lacking in the other mythological cor• respondences of the novelt because Geard is aware of and in touch with the supernatural, it is possible for him to have direct experience of the personality of Merlin himself. In the magnificent Chapter Fifteen, "Mark's Court," Geard senses in himself the torment of the imprisoned Merlin and, as he cured
Tittie Petherton, he manages to utter a prayer for Merlin which apparently brings about some sort of relief and release (463).
Geard as Merlin requires a Nineue, and he is matched with 125
two — lady Rachel and his daughter Crummie. In "Mark's Court" it is Rachel who responds to Geard's involuntary cry of "Nineue!
Nineue'." Caught up in the psychic tension of Geard's night in the haunted room, she seems to undergo something of the same sublimation of herself into the mythic role which Geard exper• iences. Her words have a double meaning: "I heard you call
. . . and I had to come," she whispered (464). Earlier her hysterical laughter had caused the name of Nineue to pass into
Geard's mind, just as it causes her father involuntarily to speak the name of Caer Sidi, the otherworld in which Merlin, like Gwair, was imprisoned (453, 454). At the end of his struggle in Merlin's chamber Geard finds that "the two Beings, the old Magician's paramour, and this sweet young creature . . . had at last merged in each other " (470).
In a dream of Geard, Rachel and Crummie are mingled to• gether with the image of Nineue (791). Crummie is elsewhere described as Nineue (1016), and has an intuition that her father craves "another me, someone like me, only of course much more exciting, down there in Hades" (1025). Geard's fascination with death Is represented in this image of Nineue, who lures him out of this world. As he drowns he has a vision of embracing this "incarnate Sweetness that was his daughter and yet not his daughter" (1171).11 This sweetness had earlier been identified with Rachel and the night in Merlin's chamber.
His dying vision of the Grail enables Geard to embrace Nineue in the belief that he is embracing "the very Life of Life"
(1171). But whether or not his self-immolation does result in 126
the attainment of more life, the Esplumeoir of Mr. Evans' mystical broodings, Powys perhaps wisely leaves unresolved.
The other major character of A Glastonbury Romance identi• fied with Merlin is the antiquarian, Mr. Evans, who is writing a book on the great magician. Tormented by a sadistic obses• sion, Evans searches for a release from his manias in the gnomic and prophetic fragments of ancient Welsh poetry. Like
Powys himself, he finds in these fragments clues to eternal mysteries, insights into "this basic Secret of Life, that our
Bards expressed in poems like The Harrying of Annwn ..."
(844-45). Particularly he is fascinated by the word Esplumeoir, which refers to the disappearance of Merlin, the final state
of Being into which he passed (1048). Glastonbury is to him
Yr Echwyd, the twilight land on the borders of the Celtic
otherworld (771) and the site of Merlin's passing, and Evans apparently hopes to find there that "knot of the opposites"
(772) or fragment of the Absolute sought there by the mystical
Fisher Kings (1105). Striving to express eternal mysteries,
Mr. Evans is always obscure, and frequently incoherent (771-72,
843, 845); his scholarly Welsh mysticism is counteracted by
the earthy cynicism of John Crow (for example, 82-87).
Evans is fascinated by one violent episode in Merlin's
life, when the magician tore a stag's antler from its head to
use as a weapon. The memory of this scene acts as a stimulant
to Evans' vice (104l). Just before he succumbs to his sadistic mania and determines to be an accessory to murder, he turns
over In his mind another passage from his life of Merlin about 12?
the Dolorous Blow (1048). This mythic event, the wounding of the Fisher King which results in the barrenness of his king• dom, is symbolized for Mr. Evans by the projected murder of
John Crow with an iron bar (10?1). As he describes Merlin weighed down by knowledge of the Dolorous Blow, Mr. Evans feels himself burdened with too much knowledge of evil.
His partial salvation eventually comes about, not through the discovery of any ancient Celtic secret, but as the result of his wife's courageous gesture. Cordelia and Mad Bet are both seen by Mr. Evans as the Grail Messenger, the female figure which corresponds for him to the Nineue of Mr. Geard.
Both- are ugly women; Bet is identified by Evans with the satis• faction of his sadistic cravings (522, 831, 1071) while
Cordelia represents normal erotic love (831, 836). The triumph of this latter force, together with the revulsion occasioned by the sight of the Blow itself, emasculates Evans and ages him
(1104-5). in a fine piece of irony, he becomes himself the
Fisher King incapacitated by the Dolorous Blow.
The Arthurian parallels of A Glastonbury Romance are to be found in the thematic structure of the novel, In the organi• zation of certain episodes, as well as in the creation of character. A good example of how Powys uses an Arthurian subject to point a thematic relationship between various events and characters of his own is to be found in an early chapter
(chapter 12), "The Dolorous Blow." The title and subject have little to do, however, with the later use of the "Dolorous
Blow" parallel in the account of Mr. Evans' temptation. In 128
chapter 12 the subject is the wasteland myth, which is set in
contrast to the subject of the preceding chapter entitled
"Consummation." The chapter concerns itself with sterility on
several different levels — physical, sociological, moral,
aesthetic and mystical. Its references to T.S. Eliot's poem
(published ten years previously) and to the anthropologists,
particularly Frazer, seem conscious and deliberate (for example,
351).
Chapter Eleven, "Consummation," describes with insight
and feeling the consummation of a deep, normal erotic love;
ln contrast, the twelfth chapter begins with the "morning-
after" disgust felt by the boyish Percy towards her lover.
It's these nights that are so awful. Oh, why are men made as they are? . , .Is this shrinking, this loathing, something that every girl feels? (322)
The morning is chilly; the girl feels a physical shrinking
and tightening of her flesh which is the opposite of the sen•
sations of Nell in her passionate response to the embrace of
Sam described at the end of the preceding chapter. Percy
avoids Philip, and a barrier arises between them. "Her pose
was withdrawn, chaste, reserved, remote, her face cold and
pale ..." (325). Philip reflects that she will never bear
him a child, that she is "not the maternal type" (324).
In the next episode Sam Dekker, who has just begotten a
child, is set by his father on the path of renunciation and
asceticism. He walks with his father over a piece of land which "ln the heat of his frenzies and his fancies, Mr. Evans 129
had got so far as to persuade himself . . . was the actual
site of that Terre Gastee, of the medieval romances ..."
(326). In his Autobiography, Powys describes the obsession with sex, isolated from the rest of human feeling, as "a land
of fever, whose purlieus and borders are the ghastliest of all
'Terres Gastees'" (32). The Dekkers are out to reprove a boy
for waylaying and taunting passing females on this piece of waste common. The unchivalrous behaviour of the boy comically
parallels that of Balin, dealer of the Dolorous Blow in Book II
of Malory's Tale of King Arthur. But the Dekkers themselves,
Powys notes with irony, are indulging ln a basically similar
type of sex-abuse (327), which revolves around the father's
efforts to make Sam renounce the "fleshly sin" which he himself
Is so greatly tempted by (330). Renunciation of the natural
sexual instinct and a resultant unnatural obsession with sex
is thus the theme of both these first episodes in the chapter.
The third episode, the discussion between John Crow and the
poet Athling, touches on the theme of sterility from the
aesthetic point of view; John is repulsed by Athling's senten•
tious critical theories although he likes the poetry itself.
It is in the culminating episode of the chapter — the
descent of Geard into Wookey Hole and his consequent absence
from the Tribunal meeting — that the wasteland theme is fully
developed. Its import here is spiritual and mystical. Geard's
struggle Is against rationality, and in this subterranean
domain of his scientific foe Geard's own powers leave him.
"No sign of life was there, no grassblade, no insect, no bird. 130
He was alone with the metallic elements out of which all organic entities are formed." (3i!+0) Philip triumphs in Geard's absence, and Powys finds the event a profoundly consequential one: "... Bloody Johnny and his ambiguous Grail received a
Dolorous Blow from which it appeared possible that neither of them might recover " (351). The non-event of Geard's speech represents a possibility, a potentiality of spiritual communi• cation and union, which is thwarted. Glastonbury is stirred to respond to Geard's communication, and is left unsatisfied (351).
Powys' use here of sexual imagery, his references to the
"strange spring thunder . . . that brought neither rain nor lightning", the Golden Bough, and the "handful of dust" (351, 12 see "The Waste Land"l. 30) all directly evoke Eliot's poem
"The Waste Land" which also treats the themes of physical and spiritual sterility in contemporary England, and uses the
Arthurian images as interpreted by the anthropologists. Like
Eliot's poem, Powys' chapter opens with several vignettes illustrative of contemporary sterility. Persephone Spear re• sembles Eliot's hyacinth girl, and the other women of the poem
("all the women are one woman", Eliot's note tc 1. 218) in their common Inability to find sexual and. spiritual fulfilment.
Eliot's poem begins with April, the "cruelest month," in which the stirrings of generation are resisted and thwarted by man, for example in the dialogue on abortion. Eliot's opening lines
(1-7) are recalled ln Powys' "The generative nerve of Her body had descended into Her womb, but all to no purpose!" (351). 131
Elsewhere in the novel Powys names the towers of Glastonbury, comparing them with those of Rome and Jerusalem, much as Eliot evoked the towers of the great cities in a passage dealing, like Powys', with spiritual quest and natural catastrophe.
A central image in Eliot's poem is rain, or the lack of it, and the thunder which precedes it (11. 32?, 399). During
Hr. Geard's fateful sleep, which Powys compares with that of
Cronos in the ancient British Isles of the Dead (3^2), porten• tous cloud racks gather from the hills of Wales (always in
Powys associated with spiritual powers and mysteries), and thunder is heard. The absence of water in Eliot's poem indi• cates spiritual sterility, and the failure of these clouds and thunder to bring rain has the same symbolic function.
These heavy, jagged clouds, this first of April night, were like the evil clouds spoken of in the Scriptures, for they were 'clouds without water.'
They dominate the day (351), as the absence of rain is stressed in "The Waste Land"5 the crowd's anxious expectancy of Geard in the Tribunal is paralleled by its anxious expectancy of a rainstorm (3^6-47). The rain, like Geard, does not appear, and the possibility of some significant spiritual awakening in
Glastonbury is lost.
In a later chapter, "The Silver Bowl", Beard's appearance is again heralded by rain; on this occasion he does arrive, and performs a miracle of healing. Both episodes associate the rain and Geard with an undefinable spiritual mystery:
". . . something deep had been stirred up, ready to respond 132
to Geard of Glastonbury's communication, and . . . this Some• thing had been suppressed. . ." (351).
The noise of the rain seemed now to be steadily increasing in that room of glittering lights and black curtains. Nor was it only Nell Zoyland who felt aware of it as something coming upon them all from outside — from far outside — coming over the wide-drenched moors, over the hissing muddy ditches, over the sobbing reeds, over the salt- marshes; coming from somewhere unearthly, somewhere beyond the natural'. (517)
This identification of the coming of rain with spiritual forces beyond Nature — in Christian terms, Grace — is a central image in Powys' novel as it is in Eliot's poem.
Cordelia's experience on Chalice Hill, where she finds the power to love and cope with Mr. Evans, is climaxed by a heavy rainstorm (209-10, see also 523).
The great tree was telling the hillside that there was rain upon the wind; but it was telling Cordelia something else'. Then all was absolutely still; and in that stillness, a stillness like the terrible stillness of uttermost strain in travail, there came the first cry of birth, the fall of a single drop of rain .... Her feeling at that moment was that some deep psychic chain had been broken in her inmost being .... She waited for a minute or two with upturned head and closed eyes, letting the water stream upon her face. (210)
Water in Powys' novels has always tended to be a force of purgation and renewal. Luke Anderson and Rook Ashover sought escape and self-realization by immersing themselves in the sea. As with them and Eliot's Phonecian sailor, Geard's quest for the Absolute leads him to undergo death by water. 133
In the apparently deliberate correspondences to Eliot's Grail poem, Powys does no violence to the underlying symbolic structure of the Romance, because this structure can be traced throughout his work. Nor does the Wasteland Imagery of A
Glastonbury Romance derive exclusively, or even primarily, from Eliot, since Powys was familiar with the Arthurian mater• ials and with secondary scholarship, such as the work of Rhys, which Eliot does not draw from. But the allusions to Eliot, like those to Rhys, Frazer, Dante, Malory and the Mabinogion, add another layer to the past-conscious and richly allusive texture of this novel.
King Arthur's Sword is a second major mythological sub•
ject integrated into the structure of A Glastonbury Romance;
Powys associates it with pain and the problem of evil. In
Chapter Thirteen, "King Arthur's Sword," he approaches the subject of suffering through several different episodes just as ln the preceding chapter he used encounters between a number of different characters to elaborate the concept of the wasteland. In the opening episode Mr. Evans, against his own will, tries to indicate to Cordelia the nature and extent of the evil which he senses within himself, and asks if "there are forms of evil so horrible that nothing can wash them out?"
(36l), Because he struggles so grimly against it, Evans' vice causes him extreme mental anguish even though it never results in the infliction of physical suffering upon others.
The second episode of the chapter humorously records prophecies of evil made by the old Bartholomew Jones, who hears 134
"moaning and groanings in they Ruings."
Something be coming upon our town .... "Pis coming; and all these changes of Mayors, and proclaimings of Fairs, be the outward signs, as Catechism do say, of some Holy Terror. (366)
However quaintly uttered, old Jones' forebodings of evil are an important preparation for what is to come later in the novel.
Later the setting for Jones' prophecies is the scene of a violent children's quarrel, witnessed by John Crow who takes
"a wicked pleasure" in it (376). The venom of which the chil• dren prove capable is another variation on the theme of evil which runs throughout this chapter as it does, more diffusely, through the whole novel. What is unique about Powys' handling of this theme Is his ability to see evil in juxtaposition with the comic and the trivial. Although it is concerned throughout with suffering and the Infliction of suffering,
this is often a humorous chapter. Mr. Evans desperate confes•
sion is real and convincing, but we remain aware with Cordelia
of the man's comic and endearing awkwardness. The attention
to physical detail, to how the scene looks, to how Mr. Evans
backs up into a bureau while expressing his conviction of his damnation, conveys a great sense of humanity and reality.
Similarly, the children's quarrel reduces to comic perspec• tive the cruelties and obsessions of their elders -- Jenny's degradation, Robinson's hatred of Philip, the illegitimacy
of Nelly. 135
•They call I bastie, Bastie. They did run after I in dinner-hour yesterday, till I bit Amy Brown's wrist so she bled awful had.' 'They mustn't tease you, Nelly, and you musn't bite people's hands,' murmured John helplessly, thinking to himself that if, when Bloody Johnny got on his nerves, he could bite him, 'so that he bled awful bad,' it would be an immense clearing of the air. (379)
Leaning over Pomparles Bridge, John Crow sees the grinning skull of a dead cat in the mud and is provoked to a fury of protest against "whatever Power it was that was responsible for the creation of such sensitive nerves in such a torturing world" (37D, His rage awakens some force which Powys con•
ceives of as lingering on this spot where King Arthur threw away his sword Excalibur.
It is doubtless these violent storms of intense feeling in great magnetic human personalities that are responsible for many of the supernatural occurrences vouched for by history and so crudely questioned by scoffing historians. (370)
In the extremity of his anger, John sees an object resembling a sword shearing the air and falling in the mud below him.
He is irrationally convinced that what he has seen is Arthur's sword, and feels that "something had touched him from beyond the limits of the known" (373). Despite his sceptical nature,
John's gesture of imaginative sympathy with the suffering of the cat, made ln that particularly emotion-charged place, brings about for him a visionary experience. Arthur's casting away of his sword and John's vision of it both fall into the 136
pattern of significant events which Powys sees as recurring in a spiral, linking present and past, myth and modern reality
(351). The vision is the central episode of a chapter concerned with evil, suffering, and man's protest against them.
The association of the image of the sword with the theme of empathy with suffering occurs elsewhere ln the novel as well, notably in Sam Dekker's vision of the Grail in Chapter
Twenty-Eight. Living as an ascetic, labouring among the hos• tile poor and befriending outcasts, Sam becomes preoccupied with the pain and purposeless suffering of men. When he does see the Grail his vision is "accompanied by a crashing pain," as of "a sharp, long-shaped thing piercing his guts" (981).
It is likened to a spear, piercing the bowels (982), and there• fore suggests the Spear of Longinus with which the guardian of the Grail was dealt the Dolorous Blow. This spear image was earlier used in Geard's miraculous cure of Tittle Petherton:
"his arrows of thought now became a spear — the Bleeding
Lance of the oldest legends of Carbonek -- and with an actual tremor of his upraised, naked arms he felt himself to be plunging this formidable weapon into that worst enemy of all women I" (739). The spear and sword are often identified with 13 each other in anthropological studies of the Grail legend.
G. Wilson Knight, and Powys himself ln his Preface to the 1955 edition of A Glastonbury Romance, point out the connection between the anal piercing which Sam feels and his vision of the Grail. 137
Only those who have caught the secret which Rabelais more than anyone else reveals to us, the secret of the conjunction of the particular and extreme grossness of our excremental func• tions in connection with our sexual functions are on the right track to encompass this receding horizon where the beyond-thought loses Itself in the beyond-words.^
As long weapons for inflicting pain, the sword seen by
John and the spear felt by Sam are related also to the iron bar imagined and finally witnessed by Mr. Evans. Evan's obses• sion with this weapon, his craving to watch it crush someone's skull, is the obverse of John's and Sam's sympathy for the victims of suffering. As able as they are to imagine the full extent of the pain inflicted, Evans finds perverse erotic plea• sure in envisioning it. The different responses of the three men to the weapon as an image of pain admirably illustrates the range of Powys*. creation. The three men have previously been grouped together, and the contrasts between their differ• ent attitudes to experience studied, during their conversation on the Tor (263-65). Evans, the reluctant sadist, is excited by the weapon as bearer of pain; although he desires something outside nature to break through and redeem him (362), he is denied a visionary experience and is redeemed instead by the natural love of his wife. Potentially a sentimental situation,
Evans' redemption becomes morexreallstically pathetic as Powys ironically shows that when the man is purged of his vice he loses with it most of his vitality.
The weapon becomes a source of ecstasy for Sam Dekker as well, but in a very different way. Unlike Mr. Geard, or even 138
the superstitious John Crow, Sam Dekker is no natural, mystic:
"there was more mysticism ln John Crow's little finger — for all his sceptical perversity — than in Sam's whole body"
(977). But Sam's quest for sanctity, his empathy with and efforts to relieve suffering, prepare him for a vision of the
Grail accompanied by a vicarious sensation of being pierced by the sword of Longinus. Through embracing the pain of other people, as he and Mr. Geard do, they are enabled to become healers, and achieve an underlying spiritual peace.
John Crow's vision of King Arthur's sword is attributed to both his pity for the cat and his Arthurian researches
(371). His response to it, however, is unlike Sam's joyful credulity, gratitude and unwittingly comical efforts to share his experience with other people. John seeks rational explan• ations for it (373), and searches the mud for tangible evidence.
He confides his experience only to Mary and Mr. Evans. Ulti• mately, however, he may be said to reject its very essence, refusing to allow what he has seen to disturb his own sceptic• ism and his hostility to the transcendental powers of
Glastonbury.
. . . John's thoughts kept hovering around that startling episode of the milk-white sword with the dark handle. 'I don't care what they do; I don't care what signs and omens they fling down; I don't care how much I infuriate them .... I'm going to blow this whole unhealthy business sky-high.' (380)
He reflects with pleasure that "that damned Sword was really 139
made of tint" (383) This perseverance in his sceptical con• tempt impoverishes John. He and Mary leave Glastonbury carry• ing "the corpse of their stillborn never-returning opportunity of touching the Eternal in the enchanted soil where the Eternal once sank down into time" (1113).
Linking landscape and mythology, this phrase, "the enchan• ted soil where the Eternal once sank down Into time," is the key to Powys' conception of Glastonbury, the Grail, and hence to the central subject of the Novel. As romance, it engages its characters in a quest for what is variously described as the "opportunity of touching the Eternal" (1113), a "fragment of the Absolute" (?8l, 789, 1170), "the basic Secret of Life"
(843-44) and a "by-product of some vast planetary reservoir of an unknown force" (1047). A symbol for all of these, uniting pagan and Christian (789). the Grail represents man's achieve• ment of union with the other, the numinous, the au dela. Powys sees Glastonbury as the centre of both the Christian Grail cult and the pre-Christian cults from which it stemmed (843), and considers It as one of those peculiarly inspiring localities, like Nevilton Mount in Wood and Stone, where a concentration of religious emotion has for centuries been focussed. "Gener• ations of mankind, aeons of past races, have . . . made
Glastonbury miraculous" (291, see also 764). Mr. Evans hopes to see Glastonbury restored to what he conceives as its ancient status as an Urbs Beata where the pilgrim may be spiritually purged (837). Geard's desire is similar: Glastonbury is to be the centre of a completely new life (456) where men other than 140
himself might discern as he does "a borderland of the miraculous round everthing that existed (1171). In the closing passages of the novel Glastonbury is seen as one of the resting places of the goddess Cybele, a stronghold of the imaginative, the
irrational, the spiritual, the "madness of Faith" set against the powers of reason, science and materialism (1173-?4).
Glastonbury is associated with water, twilight, death and the female. The association with water is partly geographical: the town was once under water, the site of a Lake Village as we are frequently reminded, and is surrounded by water meadows.
An atmosphere of bluish vapour characteristically surrounds it
(108, 694, 1141, see also 263, 1045 and Saturnism Quest, 35-36).
Water, the source of life (1158), becomes for Geard a means of seeking the spiritual — in his cult of the Chalice Well and eventually in his self-chosen death by drowning. Powys presents a technical, psychological explanation for Geard's suicide, attributing it to a desire to return to water as the "great maternal womb of all organic earth-life" (1158). But the
spiritual dimension of the death is more significant than its
Freudian one: Geard has sought to "get into closer contact with his invisible Master than was possible in this 'muddy vesture' of earth-life:" (1159).
The great Flood which drowns Geard and his town is an apocalyptic image, difficult to interpret because of its wealth of possible meanings. G. Wilson Knight relates it
to both the sub-world and the super-world of our various human delineations, and to the 141
great beyond, eternity as against time; and to the cleansing of an agonised world. It is a fearful invasion ... of life as we know it by a power non-human and sinister . . . . ^
Although the towers of Cybele, symbols of man's quest for spiritual enlightenment, stand out against the flood, the waters themselves seem also to be an embodiment of those mys• terious powers which have challenged human complacency and science throughout the novel, and finally are embraced by
Geard. One of the great Images of the book is Geard in his coracle, borne away by the river current within the greater flood. The current bears him to the corpse of the airplane where he will rescue the semi-paralyzed Philip and commit him• self to the water.
The identification of water with death, and spiritual life- in death, is evident in Geard's drowning, ln the other deaths caused by the flood, in the resuscitation of the dead child at
Chalice Well and In the two Wookey Hole scenes where Geard and
Philip cross the underground river to commune with powers which -I s respectively negate and confirm their own natures. Glastonbury
Is the traditional location of Avalon, the mysterious land where the dying Arthur was taken to be healed of his wounds and to await his return. According to Mr. Evans, it is also
"the Gwlad-yr-Hav, the Elysian Death-Fields of the Cymric tribes," and "yr Echwyd, the land of Annwn, the land of twilight and death, where the shores are of Mortuorum Mare, the Sea of the Departed" (771, 789, see also 1052). The blue haze around
Glastonbury, like the twilight, blurs the distinctions between 142
Christian and pagan, Celt and Saxon, past and present, living and dead. At the opening of the Saxon Arch, John Crow envisions a crowd of ghosts from Glastonbury's past, separated from him by a "Cimmerian mist" (921, 923). Glastonbury is a place of transition and touching, and is peculiarly conducive to spiri• tual insight; it is this quality of the town which Geard and
Mr. Evans seek to exploit and which the Crows struggle against
(for example 456, 764, 837 and 350, 697, 759, 760, 778-8).
Glastonbury Is seen as a person, a living woman. Morgan
Nelly, Mad Bet and the Dekkers agree that the true way to see
Glastonbury is not as an economic, social or political entity but as a personality, which resists these limiting classifi• cations (561, 1045). Paul Trent, who as a native of Scilly is considered to have special perception (839, 1045), realizes in a moment that the political and commercial efforts within
Glastonbury are missing the point of life and of the nature of their town.
A feeling stole over him as if all the way down its long history Glastonbury, the Feminine Person, like Mary at the feet of the Master, had been waiting for the fuss to cease, for the voices to subside, for the dust to sink down .... Could It be possible that the secret of ecstatic human happiness only arrived, when all outward machinery of life was suspended, all practical activity held in abeyance? (1046)
The women of Glastonbury are sympathetic to the Grail legend, and to the spiritual forces of the town, whereas the men of the novel tend to be hostile to it (778). Mary Crow's change 143
of attitude towards Glastonbury after her marriage is described in sea imagery (779), linking the female associations of
Glastonbury with the sea as they are linked in the passages about Geard's death also (1158). The feminine is conceived as that "which forever is waiting, watching, listening, dreaming, ln a trance of mindless passivity for something that never quite comes" (1046): like the water, twilight and death images, the feminine qualities of Glastonbury indicate receptivity to the spiritual and the non-rational.
This conception of Glastonbury as a living person (723) is also central to Powys treatment of history in the novel.
In references to the pre-Celtic aboriginals (788), the Lake
Village, the Romans, the Saxons, the Arthurian traditions, the
Monmouth rebellion and Judge Jeffreys (for example 367, 1044)
Powys evokes all of what the place has been in actual history and in the imaginations of men. Glastonbury thus seen as a whole, past and present, reduces much of the activity of her modem Industrial and political leaders to triviality. When his daughter reminds Philip of the Lake Village, he is uncom• fortable.
Yes, it was certainly a queer thing that this grass should have been covered with a brackish expanse of water in those old days 5 but It was not a thing he cared to think about. In some subtle way it seemed to make his present activities less important, (758-59)
Mr. Evans finds the machinations of the "philosophical trium• virate" absurd. 144
. . . when a person touches . . . this basic Secret of Life, that our Bards expressed in poems like The Harrying of Annwn, these external arrangements of Society — capitalism or communism — seem unimportant. (845)
Powys' allusions to Glastonbury's past relate what is happen• ing ln the novel to the wide sweep of human history, and they also serve as a touchstone of the ultimate significance of human concerns.
History gives perspective; it confirms, also, the peculiar nature of Glastonbury as a centre of religious emotion and spiritual discovery. Mr. Geard's miracles on Chalice Hill are explained at one point as being due to his extraordinary animal magnetism enabling him "to tap a reservoir of miraculous power"
(738). Powys imagines a "psycho-chemical force" gathered about the well which
had been the scene of such a continuous series of mystic rites, going back to the neolithic men of the Lake Village, If not to the still more mysterious race that preceded them, that there had come to hang about it a thick aura of magical vibrations. (737-38)
Earlier statements about Pomparles Bridge (369-70) and Lake
Village Field (764) also put forth this theory that a concen• tration of strong human feelings in one place can give the atmosphere of that place power to affect the thoughts and feel• ings of other humans who come there. The topography of
Glastonbury, religious centre for different civilizations, contains unique reservoirs of such power. 145
Everyone who came to this spot seemed to draw something from it, attracted by a magnetism too powerful for anyone to resist, but as different people approached it they changed its chemistry, though not its essence, by their own identity, so that upon none of them it had the same psychic effect. (112)
Just as Glastonbury's past lends other dimensions and perspectives to the modern events recorded ln the Homance, these modern events themselves become part of the cycle of human experience, and can be seen as containing all that exper• ience within themselves. That is to say, it is possible to find the timeless in one moment of the present, and this is what Powys in some of his scenes achieves.
. . .for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter's afternoon, ln a secluded chapel History is now and England. CLittle Gldding," V)
Powys seems to be trying to create this sense of the timeless moment, or of time frozen in an ecstatic perception, through his many references to painting. In some instances a particu• lar grouping of characters is intensely visualized, seen as an allegory of something constant in human experience. Mr. Evans,
Sam and John Crow, seated ln a row on the hilltop together,
"represented — in Remorse, in Renunciation, in Roguery — everything that separates our race from nature" (264). As
Mr. Geard watches the three Zoylands, they fall for him "into a symbolic group of human countenances," and become "to him an allegorical picture, rich with Rembrandt-like chiaroscuro, of 146
the three ages of the journeying human psyche" (440). Many comparisons are made between scenes of the novel and paintings
— most frequently Dutch or Flemish portraits and landscapes (353, 378, 431, 440, 462, 578, 618, 620, 623, 746, 1161).
For two lovers a chance framing by an open doorway "turned the scene they now looked on into a curious 'work of art', isolat• ing it from the rest of Nature, and giving it a symbolic signi• ficance" (554-55).
Like Eliot's Four Quartets, A Glastonbury Romance is concerned with the timeless moments of spiritual vision within the changes of the seasonal cycle, and the relationship between time and place. The action of the novel takes place within one year and ten days, the part about Glastonbury exactly one yearJ the novel begins on March fifth, John Crow's walk takes him eight days after he leaves Northwold on the seventh, and the flood occurs on the fifteenth of March in the next year.
The book thus moves ln a cycle from one spring solstice to the next. The changes encompassed within that time — the births, love-making, marriages, sickness, healing and deaths — are part of the larger cycle of nature 5 the social and political changes in the town, too, are part of a pattern which Powys sees from an historical and sometimes a prophetic perspective
(for example, 506).
Glastonbury itself, like Powys* novel about it, is a microcosm wherein can be seen an image of the larger world, the eternal human situation, and faint reflections of what may be the forces and gods of a spiritual world outside the limits 14?
of our comprehension.
It was as if £Geard in Death} had ceased to belong to our world of looking-glass pantomine wherein we are driven to worship we know not what, and had slipped down among the gods and taken his place among those who cast their own mysterious reflections in the Glastonbury of our bewilderment. (1171)
The pun, unusual for Powys, points his theme i Glastonbury is a glass or mirror wherein we see shapes and shadows of a reality which always evades our understanding. Its landscape and its myths are shrines of Cybele, the goddess who upholds the cause "of the unseen against the seen, of the weak against the strong, of that which is not, and yet is against that which is, and yet is not " (1174). This mystery and uncertainty are at the heart of A Glastonbury Romance, because they are funda• mental to Powys' conception of the universe. As we have read earlier, Powys writes of his Romance that "Its message is that no one Receptacle of Life and no one Fountain of Life poured into that Receptacle can contain or explain what the 17 world offers us." '
Thus the central image of the Glastonbury legends, the
Grail, remains ambiguous and of no clear significance in the novel. Mary and Sam see it, but the former tells no one of her experience and the latter is unable to interest anyone in his. Mr. Geard also sees the Grail, in its mysterious fifth form, but it is a dying vision which can not be communicated.
Evidently, then, the Arthurian materials provide no key or code 148
to unlock the meaning of the novel. "There is no ultimate mystery!" Powys asserted. "The Mystery of Mysteries is Person• ality, a living person, and there is that in personality, which is undetermined, unaccountable, changing at every second!" (693)
It is the personality of Glastonbury as a whole* comprised of its landscape, its legends, its historical past and its chang• ing present, which lies at the heart of the novel and of Powys' achievement. The Arthurian references, linked as they almost always are with the local topography, serve as the focus for certain chapters and themes. But the Romance is not based upon systematic mythological correspondences In the manner of
Joyce's Ulysses, nor does It set itself within a definite religious tradition as does Charles William's use of the Grail material in War ln Heaven. The mythological allusions are carefully worked into the composition of Powys' novel, and add resonance to many of its characters and episodes, but ultimately impose no clear meaning or interpretation upon it. 149
Chapter Five» Footnotes
1 John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance (Londont Macdonald, 1955), xiil.
2 Essays, ed. B. Humfrey, Appendix I (b), p. 325.
3 Rhys, Studies. p. 339
^ See Rhys, Studies, p. 334 or Loomis, Celtic Myth, p. 191.
^ Letter to Littleton Powys, Feb. 6, 1932, quoted in Essays, ed. B. Humfrey, Appendix I (b), p. 331.
^ G. Wilson Knight, "Lawrence, Joyce and Powys, "Essays ln Criticism, 11 #4 (Oct. 1961), p. 4l4.
7 Rhys, Studies, pp. 14, 17, 231, 233. Geard should not, however, be equated with the Solar Hero since he too is often seen as a dark god.
8 See Rhys, Studies, Chapter XIII and Loomis, Celtic Myth, Book 3, "The Cult of the Grail," especially p. 139.
9 Rhys finds the origin of the Grail in the sacred vessel found ln many mythologies ln which is brewed a drink which intoxicates, inspires and exhilarates those who drink it. (Studies, p. 327, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 286-8?, 296-99, 356-60).
10 pp. 287, 292, 340, 34l, 424, 441, 458, 467, 473, 524, II69, see also G. Wilson Knight, Satumlan Quest, p. 38.
11 See Loomis, Celtic Myth, p. 191 on the healing of Arthur in Avallonia by his daughter.
12 T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," Collected Poems 1909- 1962 (London 1 Faber, I963). Future references will be to this edition.
13 For example, Jessie Weston, op. cit., Chapter VI, "The Symbols."
Preface to 1955 Macdonald edition, xv. See also G. Wilson Knight, "Lawrence, Joyce and Powys," op. cit., 403-417. 150
G. Wilson Knight, Saturnian Quest, p. 4l.
16 See Rhys, Studies, Chapter XV.
Preface to 1955 Macdonald edition, xiii, see also Timothy Hyman, "Powys' World Book," a paper read to the Powys Society, London, 1970. 151
Chapter Six
"A Monstrous Grotesquenesst" Maiden Castle
During the summers of 193^ to 1937 there were archeolog- ical excavations held at the neolithic earthwork of Mai-Dun, or Maiden Castle, two miles southwest of Dorchester. Hardy had written a short story about a clandestine excavation there in the last century,^ and the modem digs provided Powys with a focus for his seventh novel. In this "Dorchester romance" the local landscape, its Roman history, and the cultlc vestiges of primitive civilization unearthed at Maiden Castle work to• gether to polarize and disturb the thoughts of some of its contemporary inhabitants. Powys* use of myth ln this novel is both simpler and more obscure than it was in A Glastonbury
Romance, since Maiden Castle is not structured around a famil• iar body of legends such as the Grail myth but instead refers exclusively to modem scholarly interpretations of the old
Welsh fragments which so ineffectually preoccupied Mr. Evans in the earlier novel. The pattern of mythology to which Maiden
Castle refers Is thus much smaller than it was ln A Glastonbury
Romance; the novel as a whole is of a smaller dimension, and its concerns are basically personal rather than apocalyptic.
The mythological obsessions of Uryen are treated ironically, and the credibility of the mythological dimension of the novel is constantly under doubt. It will indeed be argued that Powys uses the chief characters of Maiden Castle to dramatize and mock the peculiarities of his own behaviour and his private 152
maniasj the self-dramatizing and self-critical exaggerations of the Autobiography, written just before this novel, are here translated into fiction.
In its treatment of landscape, however, Maiden Castle bears considerable resemblance to A Glastonbury Romance and
Weymouth Sands, the novels which immediately preceded it.
They are the three Powys novels which are centred upon indivi• dual towns, and constantly evoke their characteristic atmosphere, their topography, their monuments and the events of their history. As in Glastonbury and Weymouth, the near presence of water In Dorchester is emphasized. Because water for Powys is associated with the afterlife and another dimension, these
"watery" towns have a peculiarly Cimmerian quality; they link this visible world with another, spiritual or ghostly one.
The struggles of the characters for spiritual enlightenment are abetted by their environment. Dorchester
seemed to have a magical power over Dud's imag• ination. He began tapping levels in his conscious• ness that he had not known he possessed. The moment that he sat down at that table ln front of those old roofs the spirit of the past seemed to obsess him. (112)
Uryen finds Maiden Castle a reservoir of the same sort of spiritual power that Mr. Geard believed was stored in
Glastonbury (1?^, 233. 329).
One aspect of Powys' use of nature which is especially striking in this novel, although not unique to it, is the curious but forceful similes wherein people are seen in terms 153
of plants or landscape. These Images may be comical or quaintt
. . . he closed his sentence with a desperate and yet awkward rush, like the final and squawking plunge of the coal-man's ducks into the water. (195)
Dud thrusts "his fists so violently into the depths of his trouser pockets that the trunk of his body came to resemble a knotted tree with a protruding bole bulging out on either side." (201) Others mix humour with Gothic horror!
. . . the satisfaction of his mental desire seemed to him then like a delirious worm feeding upon the vegetation-roots of the world, a worm rising up from that black water — that was the primal gulf of space — to feed forever upon celestial duok-weed! (211)
Perhaps the most moving of these comparisons is that of the distraught Nancy's face to a landscape which has been under flood-waterj the simile recalls the pathos of some of the flood scenes at the end of A Glastonbury Romance (for example
1145-46).
Slowly, and as if by some power beyond her will, her soft features returned to their normal expression! each wry curve, each wretched twist smoothing themselves out, not so much as shadows in water after their dispersal by a flung stone, as shapes in a flooded landscape when the waters have subsided. But such shapes, returned though they are to light and air, carry upon them an Indescrib• able film, the ashen-grey deposit of their long submersion. (274) 154
Comical or pathetic, these natural similes strengthen the relationship implied throughout the novel between man and his physical surroundings. People, animals, plants, buildings — the animate and the inanimate features of the landscape -- share in the same kind of under-life, the same kind of ultimate reality; this sharing gives them a visionary unity similar to that found in the paintings of Samuel Palmer. It is this feeling towards landscape which after Wizzie's departure makes
Dud mingle his memories of her body with the features of the landscape around him (486). The process is carried further in
Porlus, where Merlin at times takes the apparent form of a beast, a tree or a rock, and in the late novels among whose active characters are a moth, a club, an apple and a fountain
(Atlantis, The Mountains of the Moon, All or Nothing). In
Maiden Castle, which remains within the realistic mode of fiction, this sense of the underlying unity of all matter is conveyed largely through the similes and images of nature.
It never occurred to her to suspect that the sweet exciting glow about Uryen's interest in her was like the dallying of a rock-plant with the caresses of the wooing sun — dalliance that was Impossible save for its root in the stone out of which it grew. (352)
There Is even less pure description of nature in Maiden
Castle than there was in A Glastonbury Romance, which is per• haps what leads G. Wilson Knight and Malcolm Elwln to feel that 2 ln this novel "we are little aware of Dorchester as a town."
(Saturnlan Quest p. 51, see also Elwin's Prefatory Note to the 155
1966 Macdonald edition of Maiden Castle). On the contrary, the town is vividly and frequently depicted, but always through the medium of the consciousness of one of its characters.
We see Dorchester in the last three chapters through the perceptive but unsentimental eyes of Wizzie, who responds as warmly to her own sensations about Dorchester and Its past
(343-44, 393) as she is cold to Dud's enthusiasm. But Dud is the chief centre of consciousness in the novel 1 he is a fine observer, sensitive to nature and historically aware.
"'Dorchester's one of the most interesting towns in England,' he said to himself. 'It'll be a wicked thing if I don't do justice to it ln Mary Planning'" (199-200). Whatever Dud's success, Powys does do justice to Dorchester as it is observed by Dud and Wizzie. The novel is firmly located in the real town 1 the very streets and buildings may be identified.
The Icen Way is made as memorable to the reader as any thoroughfare in Glastonbury or Weymouth 1 we are told repeat• edly about Dud's attraction to its historic name, Wizzie's impatience with his notions about "Itching Street," and the disputes between them as to whether or not they shall go along it (289, 298, 343-44). The Weymouth road is presented in even greater detail; it is the setting for much of the action of Chapters One and Eight, and Dud returns along it at the close of the novel. Brewery, railway station, fair-field,
Maumbury Rings, and cemetery are remarked each time characters pass them on this road, and the last three places are from the outset associated with major themes of the novel — Wizzie's 156
abduction, the suffering of Mary Channlng, and death. South
Street and the chestnuts of South Walks, the Cenotaph and its railings where Nance collapsed, Glyde Path Lane, High East
Street, St. Peter's Church, the Hardy and Barnes statues,
Friary Lane, Hangman's Cottage and many other streets and monuments are mentioned often during the course of the book, and many acquire symbolic associations with particular char• acters or events.
The principal landscape Images in Maiden Castle are the cemetery, the river, the scummy pond and Mai-dun itself 5 they are all related to the main themes of the novel. Dud's reason for moving to Dorchester, and the goal of the first of his many walks, is the cemetery on the Weymouth Road. Here he seeks the graves of his mother and wife, and hopes to solve
"the ultimate meaning of death itself " (20). Of course Dud never succeeds, but the themes of death, the afterlife, and the sinister father who may be intending to supplant Dud in the remaining grave-plot are recalled at many points through• out the novel. Dud makes his first visit to the cemetery on
All Soul's Day. There he meets Nance, and he returns there with her one year later after she has been the means of bring• ing him together with his father and with Wizzie.
Death, and the borders between this world and the spiri• tual world, is the predominant theme of Maiden Castle. As in A Glastonbury Romance, water is the means and/or symbol of transition between these worlds. Thus Dorchester, the Camp on the Waters (197), contains many images of death and transition. 157
These are mostly identified with the River Frome, along which the characters of the novel frequently walk and which separ• ates Glymes from the town. On the first morning Dud catches sight of the Frome from his room, remembering that Hardy com• pared it in its clearness to "a tributary of the celestial
Water of Life" (24), and thereupon decides to visit his dead relatives ln the cemetery. Later, as he walks by the eerie river path which passes the Hangman's Cottage and is over• shadowed by the prison, he feels surrounded by water, and imagines a subtle confederacy between the river, the rain and the descending darkness (70). When Dud passes the same place on another night "the rush of the water through the weir sounded in the still night like the rush of the waters of death" (184). A pathway in the rain is seen as "a phantasmal river for ghosts to gather at, a river where a crowd of limbo- weary spirits might wave beseeching arms" (402). The refer• ence is to Odysseus in the underworld but also to the hymn which Dud later chants nervously, having heard it ln the
Dorchester streetsi
Shall - we - gather - at - the Riv- ver, the Beautiful, the Beautiful Ri - ver, shall we gather at the Ri - ver, that flows by the throne of God? (438-39)
Dorchester, a rainy town, witnesses the "mystic encounter of water with water" (71) in those "moments ln the place when the waters 'under the firmament' rose to meet the waters 'above the firmament* and Deep called to Deep" (403). The very sleep 158
of its inhabitants is compared to a "great underworld sea" which is "the everlasting other side of the turmoil of life" and "a state of being that resembled death ..." (475, see also 88-89). As well as the rain, the river, the water meadows and the drainage ditches, Dorchester has a great underground river which supplies its drinking water (71). In a passage of his Studies in the Arthurian Legend to which Powys makes
Dud refer elsewhere (252), Sir John Rhys describes the Celtic concept of the Eel River, the mighty river which separates this 3 world from the Court of Death or Otherworld. Whereas the transition between the worlds was presented in A Glastonbury
Romance through the image of the great flood, in Maiden Castle it is the rivers — above and below ground — which are the
Images of this transition. "What a place for running water this is!" murmurs Dud, and Thuella responds, "There's always water! Never an end to the water!" (71).
Dorchester is Indeed "under the water-sign" (73) and to
Dud, whose coming there has "coincided with the lifting of a great sluice-dam ln his emotional fate" (73), it is lucky to live in such a place when the world is moving into the zodiacal sign of Aquarius (197-98). His meetings with the sweetly mysterious figure of Droit the Drowner he regards as equally propitious. Whatever their associations with death, the water images of this novel are less fearsome and overwhelming than the flood which drowned Glastonbury. There are no miraculous wells or unnatural catastrophes; rather, the flowing waters symbolize the natural passage of life into death and the 159
unknown. In a mood of chastened acceptance, the novel wit• nesses the transitory nature of human life and human happiness.
Watching the rain through a sick-room window Wizzie sees the
"universe £as it} was to the eye of Heraclitus . . . spectral epitomes of the flowing away of all things." She feels as if a boy's face seen through the rain "were drifting on the same fatal tide that was bearing her own life into the unknown," and hopes that she will not die on such a night (402-03).
Although it too is a water image, and resembles the Lenty
Pond which exerted a morbid, deathward attraction upon Wolf
Solent, the scummy pond of Maiden Castle is associated with eros rather than with death. In a passage which recalls
Donne's "Ecstasie," Dud and Thuella enjoy a "magnetic inter• change" of erotic delight which is increased rather than diminished by the absence of physical expression. These cere• bral lovers perch on the steep bank above the pond, clinging to hedge-roots to prevent themselves from slipping in. The pond is deep, its surface covered with green slime, and the precarious position of the man and woman above it parallels the precarious perversity of their avoidance of the "deep- waters" of normal love.
Powys enjoys playing with the symbolic and literary properties of his image of the slimy pond,
into whose dark water it is certain that John Bunyan would have precipitated them both, and out of whose green slime it is equally certain that Dante would have called forth a cartload of horned devils, of scratching, 160
biting, scaly devils, of foul, stinking, obscene devils, to switch them off to hell. (212)
Out of the slimy pond Powys would himself have called forth, in his early novels, some sinister eidola and ominous emana• tions, and at least one mad and sardonic hero would have pre• cipitated himself into it. But now the Gothicism of these early novels has been tempered by humour, and a more original apprehension of the mishaps which befall men. Powys carefully prepares for Dud's meeting with Thuella in a series of ironical recognitions of his mingled attraction and hostility to her.
No sooner has he vowed that the "vile larva" will "never catch
D. No-man" (202) than he receives her letter and rushes off in a desperate hurry not to miss her. The erotic tension of their dalliance beside the pond is heightened both by the awkward• ness of their physical position and by preliminary difficulties
— Thuella forgets her hat and Dud, fetching it, is embarrassed by three loquacious old men and an inquisitive terrier.
"How grotesque,' he thought, in the detached portion of his mind, 'are the situations we get into! I must remember this in the story of my Mary. People in books are luckier than in life. Every life, if the truth were known, contains episodes of a monstrous grotesqueness.' (211)
A comparison between this scummy pond episode and the episode at Auber Lake in Wood and Stone reveals the "booklshness" of the early novels, which rely upon Gothic extremes, in contrast to the mellowness and human understanding achieved by the later 161
novels. Auber Lake is unrelievedly the abode of blackness, madness and terror; Lacrlma appeals to the Virgin against its
evil influence. Lenty Pond, too, witnesses unnatural events, and Wolf nearly succumbs to its appeal to suicide. Dud indulges
in a fantasy about a worm in the slime and black water, but
the pond exerts no pull to self-destruction. Like the ash tree, which he imagines deriving pleasure from the contact of its
roots and branches with the water and air, Dud enjoys his pecu•
liar encounter with Thuella and his fantasies about the pond.
The potentially horrible image is accepted and enjoyed, rather
than feared. Thus the scummy pond episode is a good example of
Powys' maturity, in its fine blending of human emotion with a
particular landscape, ln its placing of its characters' situ•
ation within the context of past literatures, and in the self-
critical awareness which enables it to undercut melodrama with
realistic humour.
The greatest of the landscape Images in the novel is, of
course, Maiden Castle itself. Only two of the novel's nine
episodes actually take place at the earthwork, and it is not
described until Dud goes there with Uryen half-way through the
book. Nevertheless, the presence of the place is felt through•
out the novel, as the result of Uryen's absorption in it and
the impression he conveys of its mysterious powers. The ghost-
wind from Maiden Castle rattles the chimneys at Glymes, and
the ghost-smell which lingers there passes into the Antelope
dining-room (227).
Dud and his father approach Maiden Castle as pilgrims: 162
the road to it is described as a "long, straight, pilgrim's road" (230) and they come to "a gate across the way, with instructions on it, worthy of Pilgrim's Progress, about not wandering from the path ..." (235). The image is appropriate, since the earthwork, with its temple and cultic statuary, is the centre and shrine of Uryen's personal religion. A myster• ious power and living quality are emphasized in the descrip• tions of Maiden Castle, and conveyed in Thuella*s painting of it (329).
In his description of Dud's reaction to Maiden Castle
Powys apparently borrows an image from Hardy's story, "A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork." Hardy's narrator sees the earth• work as an "enormous many-limbed organism of antediluvian time . . . lying lifeless ..." (1?4). To Dud the road to
It goes as straight as if
this mystical city of Dunim, had been an antediluvian monster — a monster compared with whom Leviathan himself were but a field-mouse — whose long straight dragon's tongue lay supine as a strip of seaweed so that the Beings it Intended to swallow might advance at ease along it, undeterred by any distraction from advancing to their doom. (230)
He sees the earthwork in other monstrous Images as well, as the shell of the Kraken, or the "vast planetary Tortoise, upon whose curved back . . . rested the pillar of creation," or "the mysterious nest of some gigantic jurasslc-age bird- dragon . . . even now hatching its portentous egg." (230)
The metaphors all emphasize the size of Maiden Castle, and an 163
antiquity so great that it seems timeless. They all suggest,
too, a quality of expectancy! we are waiting for the egg to
hatch, the Kraken to find its mate, and the dragon to swallow
its prey. This quality of expectancy is important in Uryen's
conception of Maiden Castle, for he believes that at certain times the place itself comes to life (1?4, 201, 329). Powys i
may have derived the hint for this theory, as well, from
Hardy's story. Hardy's narrator, approaching the place in
the dark, finds that "the castle looms out off [slcj tne shade
by degrees, like a thing waking up and asking what I want
there." But the notion of a part of the landscape having a
life of its own is found often enough ln both Hardy and Powys
— in the description of Egdon Heath at the of The Return of
the Native, for example, and in John and Mr. Evans' recogni•
tion that Stonehenge was "not quite dead" (A Glastonbury Romance,
82). As Maiden Castle is the centre of Uryen's fantasies
about himself, based upon his recognition of living, mystical
powers stored within the earthwork, it thus links the mytho•
logical preoccupations of the novel with the Dorset landscape
which gives the novel so much of its texture and character.
While the major landscape Images of Maiden Castle may
well be studied in terms of their individual connotations,
the novel is less concerned with any one of them than with
the portrayal of the town of Dorchester as a whole. Dud, the
writer of historical romances, is acutely aware both of the
historical past witnessed by the streets and buildings of
Dorchester and of the sights, sounds and smells which combine 164
to make the atmosphere of the modern town. As was Indicated
earlier, Dorchester is made vividly present in every chapter
of this novel. An unusual effort has been made to indicate
its aural atmosphere, and to show how the soundscape retains
some noises which link modem Dorchester with the past just
as the old names and buildings do. This is the subject of
some of the novel's opening passages.
Milk-carts made their pleasant clatter; while the sound of the hoofs of the horses that drew these reassuring equipages, echoing between the walis, seemed to gather the centuries together with a familiar continuity of unbroken tradition that was not disturbed when an occasional bus or car came down the street. (15)
Later when Dud is described at his writing desk, looking at
the old roofs of Dorchester, he becomes obsessed by the spirit
of the past. The sound of church bells, and the various kinds
of street traffic, affect him similarly, and the sound of
human feet on the pavement impresses him with the poignancy
of human history (112-14). On two occasions the sounds of the
clock chiming In the Com Exchange tower (15) and the bells of
Fordington Church (113), respectively, suggest to Dud the
"intimations of hope against hope" which through the centuries
have enabled men to bear their personal tragedies.
Through this evocation of sound, the essence of Dorchester
is very largely conveyed. The newspaper vendor's cry of
"Ech -of." and the Shakespearean cries of the local "funny man" evoke the street life of a Dorchester evening (269-?0). 165
On a midsummer Sunday afternoon the town is brought to life in terms of its sounds — the Salvation Army band, the laugh of an old gentleman, the tramp of soldiers from the barracks, and the bells of St. Peter's (341-43). The sounds of the town on a weekday at tea-time are similarly detailed (409). The night sounds Dud hears from his bedroom are as carefully described as the morning ones were.
How well he had come to know the familiar noises of the night that entered that Friary-Lane bedroom! Intermittent they might be, but there was seldom an entirely new one. The stamping of a strange horse in the Kings' Arms stable, the cry of a wandering sea-bird come higher up the Frome than its wont, the hum of a voyaging airplane driven closer to the roofs of Dorchester than was their wont — such were the exceptions; but every night he could hear the long-drawn-out whistle of some heavy luggage-train as it emerged from the Poundbury tunnel, every night he could hear certain particular human steps . . . that passed down Friary Lane between two and three in the early morning; and finally there were the harsh-sweet rook-cries at dawn, and the chattering of the sparrows above the Kings' Arms tap-room. (188)
With the street sounds, Powys blends the sounds of nature, and particularly the cries of birds. "The nesting rooks in the high elms of Acland House garden were making a fine cawing, and into this level of rustic clamour the town-noises ascended like voluble dust blending with aerial orchestration" (199).
Progress is represented by the sound of the airplane, which gives so much pleasure to the optimistic Claudius but to which
Dud decides he prefers the sound of the ducks. The airplane lacks for him the magical childhood associations which the 166
train whistle evokes (188, 236). The final sound in the book is that of the airplane, but again Dud rejects it, affirming that "The future's not everything" (495). Dud is often found sympathizing with natural sounds, ln opposition to other char• acters who find their theorizing interrupted by them. He notes that "These people with fixed ideas can't bear it when reality barks or quacks at them" (251).^ The unfortunate Uryen is not only barked at while he is attempting to expound his mystical theories; he must compete at Maiden Castle with the outbursts of a lark, which emphasizes for Dud "what seemed to him the shocking grotesqueness of his father's talk" (247). The natural song of the larks makes nonsense out of Uryen's own attempts at spiritual flight, and he "cast an almost savage glance towards the sky as if the sun were deliberately pelting him with lark-music ..." (251). Wizzle, too, is irritated by the sound of the larks (377)» only Dud enjoys them, because he hears their song as the essence of life rather than as a distraction from it.
Much more than Glastonbury, Weymouth or any of Powys' other towns, Dorchester is imagined ln this novel through its history. There are innumerable references to the past of
Dorchester, to the history of various buildings, and to the way in which the atmosphere of antiquity and continuity stimu• lates the imagination of the novelist Dud. His creative work flourishes in the "aura of this old Roman-British town, with its layers upon layers of human memories, semi-historic and prehistoric. ..." (112). Presumably Dorchester had a 16?
somewhat similar influence upon Powys himself, who for once was actually living in the town while he wrote about it, and indeed shortly thereafter began to write historical novels. Certainly it is ln the past of Dorchester that Uryen finds his inspiration, and although Dud is equally attracted to the observation of nature and human nature ln the present, his work grows out of his sense of the past.
Impressions from the past come to Dud ln a particular wayi they appear as "reality caught under a purged light falling on the less transient gestures of our race" (196). It is this quality of "winnowed reality" which attracts him in Dorchester's vestiges of the past (see 390). He is interested less in great events than in ordinary human experience, in monuments less than in cottages and little bridges (26-27, 113). Watching the circus near Maumbury Rings he muses on "the queer contin• uity of things" (29), that circuses should still be held where the Romans held them, but with their bloodthirsty qualities now so drastically diminished. The historical event with which
Dud is particularly concerned in Dorchester is the execution of Mary Channing in the eighteenth century, but his interest and observation are by no means confined to that century.
Different historical periods and different attitudes to history are, however, represented in the novel. The Cast of
Characters listed at the beginning of the book makes it appar• ent at the outset that many- of these characters exist in terms of their opinions and attitudes, like the people in a book by Thomas Love Peacock rather than plausible inhabitants of 168
a southern English town. Claudius idealizes Dorchester's
Roman past, and believes in communism, science and progress.
Teucer Wye is a platonlst and admires the Ideals of ancient
Greece. His son Dumbell, on the other hand, is a humourous caricature of a single-minded amateur scientist with no under• standing of the rest of life. A shrewder man, though just as ignorant of cultural and intellectual values, Mr. Cumber the newspaper magnate seeks to exploit the past; he is interested not in finding the truth but ln obtaining popular articles for his newspapers.
Although so many of these characters are created in terms of particular attitudes to history and human experience, they do not remain merely mouthpieces for their own points of view.
Teucer Wye and Claudius are both shown in situations where they find it necessary to bend their philosophical principles to accommodate human needs. Despite their fantastic and symbolic names, Dud No-Man and Uryen are much more complex characters than the others; but they too hold certain extreme positions which conflict with each other's and with those of the other men. Dud, the historical novelist and Uryen, the fanatic who makes his studies of myth and anthropology into a private religion with himself as its saviour-god, are two more examples of ways of approaching history. What is perhaps most significant about this range of opinions, however, is that
Powys' characters govern their personal lives according to their beliefs. Claudius takes to manual labour, Teucer Wye preaches Plato to the holiday-makers at the excavation-site, 169
Dud literally sees his environment almost entirely ln terms of its historical connotations, and Uryen makes his Celtic researches the basis of his whole "life-illusion."
The episode where the major characters of Maiden Castle climb up the earthwork to view three images discovered in recent excavations there shows the interaction of the various approaches to history and human experience which Powys' char• acters exemplify. The images are apparently representations of Caridwen, the Welsh earth or mother goddess, a headless male which may be the dark divinity, and a beast figure, which even the unsympathetic Wizzie finds similar to Dud's bed-post carving (373)• The women pronounce ho opinions about these statues, but are emotionally disturbed by them. Claudius and
Teucer Wye dispute over whether the statues are Roman or Greek in origin. Dumbell uses Claudius' praise of Roman civilization to proclaim his Fascist recognition of our need for a modern
Caesar. Teucer Wye, the Platonlst, explains that "these precious discoveries must not bind us to earth" (37^) as they are merely "symbols of the soul, and of the soul's journey from one level of spiritual beauty to another" and there is nothing divine in matter Itself (367). Only Uryen remains silent in the presence of the images, his "massive lineaments
. . . transformed by the Object on that rude wooden stand"
(370). He sees the statues as not only a subject for intel• lectual debate, but as a confirmation of his own beliefs about his Identity and the meaning of life.
While the male characters of Maiden Castle represent 170
various philosophical approaches to life and the past, the women have a timeless quality. They are entirely taken up with their present lives and make no self-conscious effort to place themselves within their own conceptions of the historical process. Wizzle is irritated by Dud's delight ln the past and by his often clumsy attempts to make himself and Wizzle a part of it. He likes to walk down the Icen Way and discourse about it; he refers to himself as the Bronze Age captor of the Stone
Age Wizzle; he wishes to have a bonfire to celebrate Midsummer
Eve in the old heathen way. All this pretence, which is at the heart of Dud's life-illusion, exasperates Wizzle, as she can not and will not understand It.
'They're all the same, these men! They can't take things as they are. They have to link them up with what other men have done and said and fussed about in the olden days. I'm getting sick of it.* And with the weight of the burning sun on her head there came over her a fierce revulsion against all these thick, crushing, heavy burdens of cruel antiquity. (368)
Dud is ln many ways a caricature Of Powys himself, and he shares his creator's philosophical fluidity, scepticism, love of old, familiar things and nature, and distrust of "pro• gress." Other characters confide their theories to him, for he does not often openly contradict them, but neither Is he convinced by any of them. He is openly hostile to his father's theories, finding them bizarre and the physical presence of his father is repugnant. The philosophy to which he clings Is a determination to hold to his own soul, his "Identity, in the 171
midst of the flowing away, an identity that rested on what all the while was behind this universal flux," and a conviction that reality lies within us, not outside us (485).
Although he rejects Claudius* ideas, Dud finds them troubling. Claudius believes in science and progress, although he is quite unlike the power-loving materialists of earlier novels -- Mr. Homer, Philip Crow and Dog Cattistock. Described as "a well-to-do ascetic philanthropist with a passionate devotion to Communism" (13), he demonstrates his faith by him• self becoming a manual laboureri this sacrifice, and his resultant illness, give him pathos and dignity, and make him much more than a mouthpiece for an historical attitude. His
Communism is rooted in a materialism abhorrent to Powys* own understanding of life, but it is redeemed by its compassion for the poor. Claudius sees the past as serving the rationalistic, economic purposes of the present. Maiden Castle is to be ex•
cavated, for there are "large gaps ... in the history of
Evolution that must be filled .... The more you know about what was, the faster you can create what will be." (125-26)
Claudius' attitude to Maiden Castle appears inadequate when
set against the visionary approach of Uryen or even the imag•
inative sympathy of Dud. He praises the scientific spirit of modem archaeology, "getting rid of all the old romantic non•
sense and studying the way our ancestors obtained their food-
supply and their water-supply ..." (164); he is mistakenly
convinced that the image and temple found on Maiden Castle are those of the respectable Roman goddess of wisdom. 172
Uryen*s retort to Claudius is perhaps the most convincing speech he makes in the novel. While Claudius is attracted to the Roman history of Dorchester, in its practical and rational approach to life, Uryen concerns himself with the religion of the yet earlier civilizations which built Mai-Dun. He believes in dark powers whose worship involves eros, sacrifice and suf• fering, and which he asserts still manifest themselves both in prophets like himself and in such ancient worshipping places as Mai-Dun. "They have life in them that can be revived"
(167). The power within him, he claims, is "the old magic of the mind" (252); his attitude to the excavations is that "the truth of life's in the imagination, not in ashes and urns"
(250). He feels a destiny laid upon himself "to reach the life behind life," and came to this knowledge of his true nature through "fumbling about in the roots of the past . . ." (249).
No cataclysmic event ever occurs to prove Uryen right, but the strength and individuality of his nature inspire awe in the other characters. His own loss of conviction in his
life-illusion, which comes about as the result of publishing his theories, does not render the theories themselves imptent before the materialism of Claudius, the idealism of Teucer
Wye or the scepticism of Dud. One feels that Uryen, a greater man than they, has attempted greater things and failed.
Uryen is the central figure to whom the mythological references of Maiden Castle are related. Like Geard and
Mr. Evans of A Glastonbury Romance, he is engaged in "a wild search for the life behind life" (496), and this search he 173
conducts by relating himself to certain fragments of old Welsh mythology as he and Sir John Rhys interpret them. Mythological allusions throughout the novel are often applied to characters other than Uryen, but ultimately they are tied together and given meaning in his obsessions. Whatever meaning they are given, however, is even less coherent and explicable than that of the Arthurian references in A Glastonbury Romance. Basic• ally they refer to Uryen*s hiraeth, his sense of another and greater reality and his longing to break through into it.
Because of the antiquity of the Welsh materials, and their half- caught allusions to an otherworld whose threshold is often crossed in the legends, they appeal to Uryen, and Powys as well, as containing some secret of life, some clue as to what may be the mysterious rites of passage into that otherworld.
The mythological images of Maiden Castle are relatively few, in comparison with those of A Glastonbury Romance t the major ones are the corpse-god, Dor-Marth — the heraldic beast or familiar, fire, the cauldron or bowl, and the statuary found at Maiden Castle, including the Taurus Trigarnus. As well, there are peripheral references to characters other than
Uryen in terms of mythology. Thuella is seen throughout as a
lamia, a creature which has no direct parallel in Welsh myth• ology, but which well indicates the peculiar attraction of the girl and her sometimes venomous nature (63, 64, 143, 202,
205).^ Her thin, lithe figure is "an unhealthy distortion, a deformity, a sickness of nature" (214). She is also called
Circe, for her ability to charm people against their better 174
Judgements (67). Yet like Keats' Lamia, Thuella's treacherous beauty has pathos and can command much sympathy. Jenny, her sister, is seen as another animal, a horse; Dud nicknames her the "Horse-head" because of her facial features, and compares her with an image of the great Phrygian Mother (97). Although
Powys does not mention this, the Celtic goddess Epona is a horse goddess.'' Jennie admires Wizzle initially for her horse• manship, and encourages her not to give up her riding.
Wizzie herself is called "a natural daughter ... of the earth-goddess Caridwen" (364), and her passion for Uryen is compared to "the sacred stream that rose from the life- giving Cauldron of Caridwen" (447). Both references seem, however, to show how Uryen sees everything in terms of myth• ology, rather than indicating anything about Wizzie other than her earthy vitality; in this novel there is no female equiva• lent to Caridwen in the sense that Uryen and "Dor-Marth" cor• respond to the headless man and the beast statues found at
Maiden Castle. More meaningful, in an ironic or sardonic way, are the comparisons of Dud to the Cerne Giant (26, 29, 250,
268). Dud carries a stick which resembles the club of the great figure carved in prehistoric times out of the chalk downs north of Dorchester. But the Giant is perpetually in a state of phallic excitement which the impotent Dud never achieves.
The dominant impression which Dud receives of Uryen at their first meeting is of "a half-vitalized corpse, a being that 'but usurped' his life, a seml-mortuus, an entity only 175
'half there'" (55). He is a large man, but is flabby and pallid. He emits "a sweetish-sickly odour" which resembles
"the smell of a corpse" (56). Later Dud wonders if "the man's death-thoughts . . . produce an actual smell of death?" (253).
When he denounces Wizzie and Thuella, admitting the loss of his life-illusion, the features of his face lose their shape and become decomposed like the face of a corpse (469). Seek• ing to break through the barrier between this world and the otherworld, Uryen appropriates to himself a quality of death- in-life. His lack of external vitality is perhaps a measure of the depth of his interior life. Dud decides upon their second meeting that Uryen is god-like as well as corpse-like, that he is in fact a rex semlmortuus or corpse-god such as he had read about "ln some work on the religion of the ancient
Celts"8 (166).
In Welsh history and legend, Urien of Rheged was a great
Brythonic leader, praised ln the Book of Taliesin and the Red o Book of Hergest. In a number of ways the description of
Uryen In Maiden Castle corresponds to the account of Urien and his congeners, interpreted as euhemerized versions of the
Celtic god of the underworld, given by Sir John Rhys in Studies ln the Arthurian Legend. This is a work to which both Dud and
Uryen himself make reference (115-16, 166, 252-54, 467), and from which Uryen evidently derived the notion that he was him• self the dark divinity, lord of Yr Echwydd. Rhys draws a parallel between the head of Urien described in the englynlon of Llywarch Hen from the Red Book of Hergest. and the head of 176
Bran ln the Mablnogion, both of which heads were severed from their bodies. Dud is struck when he first meets Uryen by "the majestic proportions of his head;" his features are "nothing less than tremendous," and the head reminds Dud "of some gigan• tic bust he had seen once ..." (55) • Dud imagines the bust to have been Greek or Roman, but Rhys comments on the many monumental representations of the head of the sable divinity made familiar to us by Gaulish archaeology,10 and it would seem more likely that the statue which Dud remembers was Celtic. Certainly, the emphasis laid by Powys on Uryen's great head, as distinct from his slovenly body, seems intended to suggest this attribute of the dark divinity discussed by Rhys (369-71). Another of the mythic Urien's attributes was a "black crow or raven on his breast"."''1 As the Welsh word for "crow is bran, Rhys postulates the identification of Urien with the god Bran who might have been so named because of a similar attribute. One of Enoch Quirm's bizarre notions is that "certain just distinguishable birth-marks or scaly disfigure• ments" (25^) on his own chest are the mark of the crow, "the seal of Uryen" (255, see also 258). On the breast of the male statue found at Maiden Castle he sees similar markings, which Claudius thinks are armour but which Uryen takes as confirma• tion that the statue is a representation of the power of which he himself is an Incarnation (381).
Urien and his congenor Uthr Ben are described by Rhys as being of swarthy complexion. Powys' Uryen is also dark-skinned (55, 56). As in Rhys' mythology the dark divinity is the foe 177
of the sun hero (259), so Uryen is hostile to the sun. He casts savage glances at it (251) and declares, "I've been the
Power that's older than all this damned sunshine, the Power that's older than all these new gods, the Power that's deepest of all, for it's got Death in it as well as life" (252).
The mythic Urien is lord of ir Echwydd, land of twilight and illusion. When he is killed, his castles fall to the ground 12 and his realm is exposed as the abode of desolation. Powys may well have had the collapse of Yr Echwydd, as Rhys relates it, in mind when he makes Glymes become uninhabitable immed• iately after Uryen's death (487). Indeed, shortly thereafter all traces of the dwellings on that spot vanish, like the van• ishing of the seven cantrevs of Dyved in the Mabinogi of
Manawydan, whom Rhys also terms another dark divinity ruling 13 a realm under enchantment (53).
Uryen's obsessions are of course related to his Welsh background, and to his interest in Welsh literature. Struck by Nancy's assertion that half of the books in Uryen's study are in Welsh (154), Dud presses for further Information about the Welsh origins of the man to whom he already senses that he is related, thus finding himself "a double-dyed Welshman."
Wales is identified ln this novel, as it was in A Glastonbury
Roman ce, with supernatural knowledge and powers, with a mys• terious otherworld, and with the afterlife. Most of the mythological images in the novel are related in some way to
Wales. Maiden Castle was erected by the Britons who fled to
Wales from the Saxonst the images found there are Celtic, not 178
Roman as Claudius mistakenly supposes (390). Uryen lives across a river; this may perhaps be equated with the waters crossed by the Welsh god Bran which Rhys sees as dividing this world and the abode of the dead.1'1 Most significant of the mythological images, however, is that of Dor-Marth and its companion, the heraldic beast heads which decorate the posts of the ancient bed which Dud inherited from his Welsh mother.
He learns that these beast heads were carved also on the orna• mental gates of his ancestral estate in Wales, which is how they are pictured on the ottoman coyer which his mother worked.
Their image recurs again In the beast statue unearthed in the excavations at Maiden Castle described ln Chapter Eight. As an ancient Celtic cult object, the beast heads thus show a continuity of belief through several thousand years from the carving of the Mai-Dun image to Cornelia Smith's needlework version of it.
Both Uryen and Dud endow Dor-Marth with a personal iden• tity and attribute to it some sort of psychic force» Uryen after his collapse displays a passionate attachment to it
(448-49, ^95)» and Dud imagines it a devil, taking on his own worst qualities and preying on Mona's corpse. Wizzie loathes it (187, 448-49, 463). Uryen links the bedpost heads to the cult of the ambiguous Welsh saint or god Derfel, whose worship became confused with that of his beast or familiar (431-32).
Derfel and his horse as sinister objects of an erotic cult reappear in Owen Glendower. The heraldic head itself becomes a familiar for Uryen. "'It — He — I — always had some 179
creature that was the body of our longing, of our hlraeth. of our desire to break through and to pass —•" (449).
When Uryen gives Dud the second head he grants Dud the knowledge of his paternity, and fulfils a notion Dud had earlier had that his father might be "some great Welsh noble• man, who claimed to be descended from Sir Pellemore" (129, see 241-42). For Dud the beast heads also represent some sort of contact with the inanimate world, but he rejects Uryen's idea that they can be the means of breaking through to some further dimension of reality.
And the thought came to him, as he contemplated their obscene beast-faces, that all this talk of Enoch's about the prophets and their non-human •familiars' applied in his own case to what he got out of the Inanimate. 'Yes,' he thought, 'that's what you are, you two, you're all the Inanimates on earth in which man's love-longing loses Itself, and in which it finds Itself. There's not a stick or stone ln this place into which some lonely spirit hasn't poured the tragedy of his unsatisfied desire. He thought this 'groaning and travailing' of the longing in us could break through the barrier. But there is no barrier! We couldn't think of a barrier if there weren't something in us already outside it! (493)
At the beginning of the novel Dud speculates about the identity of the bedpost head (17). It embodies for him both good and evil, but most of all a "Faustian 'desire' to penetrate and enjoy — even in forbidden directions — the huge mystery of the Cosmos" (18). As the novel goes on, and Dud becomes more and more Involved ln the real world (249, 26l), the bedpost head takes on a more sinister aspect as it is identified with 180
"the brooding imagination of his childhood" (17)$ his curious
relationship with his •Mona-wraith' (18, 103), and his pre• vious solitary life. He describes it frequently as a monster
or demon, and sees it at one point as a sin-eater to himself
(116-17).
The beast head provides Powys with another occasion for
an obscure allusion to the theories of Sir John Rhys. Rhys
finds a link between the Questing Beast pursued by Pellenore
in Malory, the hunting hound of Gwyn ap Nud, and a hound named Dormarth described ln the twelfth century Black Bood of
Carmarthen. He further finds an etymological source for "Dor•
marth" in old Welsh words for "door" and "death". Thus the 15 name may mean "Door of Death" or "Hunter of Dead Souls."
When he first visits his family's graves in the Dorchester
cemetery Dud sees the beast head as a door of death. ... between him and that fragment of level grass there hovered the familiar bed-post with its heraldic head, and leaning against this object there wavered dimly, as if about to vanish forever through the wide gates of Hades, the form of his unravished maid. (3D
Nancy tells Dud that we should visit the graves of our dead
in order to set them free (36), and Dud's visit to Mona's
grave does seem to have this effect. Her wraith ceases to
visit him and he becomes involved instead with the living.
Presumably her spirit did indeed pass through the gates into
Hades.
The gates of Hades in the quotation may be identified 181
with the gateposts embroidered by the Welshwoman on the ottoman- cover, and the park-gates of the estate where she and Uryen lived as children. If they are the "door of death," the estate which lies beyond them must be that otherworld, that
Annwn, Hades or Yr Echwydd of which Uryen believes he is lord.
His belief is thus given much justification if indeed he and
Cornelia were, as he claims, descendents of the lords of that estate (241). If the Hound of Hades, the Questing Beast and
Dud's bedpost heads are the same, then Uryen who owns the bed• posts is Lord of Hades and also Malory's Pellenore who must follow the beast which is his Quest, the "search for the life behind life" (496).
As Derfel and his horse were confounded into one, so
Uryen himself becomes the beast through which he seeks vicar• iously to break into the otherworld (495). At the outset Dud imagines him as a beast (58, see also 208). After his outburst to Wizzie and Thuella, as he crosses the ambiguous threshold between the two houses of Glymes Uryen drops to all fours, terrifying Wizzie. "Her fancy conjured up a sinister connec• tion between the way he had hugged that evil thing [the beast head] and the way he had come down that passage" (474). She is unable to rid her mind of the image of the "huge beastlike figure on all fours advancing with such unnatural speed down that dim passage" (473-74), and imagines it pursuing her for• ever down endless corridors.
Dud too indulges ln a fantasy that Uryen is "the living incarnation of his mother's 'Questing Beast'" (145). While 182
listening for the man to knock at the door on the threshold between the two Glymes houses, Dud finds the word "Dor-Marth" rushing into his brain, much as the Marquis of P. in A
Glastonbury Romance had found himself spontaneously uttering the name "Caer Sldi." Later he can not help muttering "Dor-
Marth" as he follows Uryen across the same "unlively threshold"
(145-46). These associations of the Glymes door with the door of death or threshold of Hades support the suggestion that
Glymes resembles Yr Echwydd in falling into dissolution at the death of its dark lord (see above, 27-28).
Uryen's death, seen through Dud's eyes, brings about for the tormented mystic the attainment of that for which he had apparently spent the last part of his life searching. Iron• ically, it is in the course of nature, not through any spiritual endeavour, that he passes indeed into the twilight realm, and for once his son is with him in a mood of sympathy and receptivity. "The mysterious *yr Echwydd,' of which the man was always talking, had no need now to be beseiged by violence*,
It was here, it was around them both, it was them both, and all their accumulated experience with it" (483). What Uryen actually achieves in death remains, like the achievement of
Geard, ambiguousi Powys does not purport, in the context of a realistic novel, to decide the fate of a character's soul after death. Thus Uryen's expression is one which Dud cannot interpret. It would seem that the reality to which Uryen finally does break through is one which transcends the neces• sity for identifications and illusions. "I am . . . what I am. 183
So it's all right, It doesn't matter" (484).
The male figure found at Maiden Castle, as was suggested previously, confirms for Uryen his belief in the early Celtic divinities, and his sense of identity with them. When pressed by the Cumbers for an explanation of the headless figure,
Uryen cries desperately "He's the Devil'," (391). And so he
Is, Inasmuch as the Celtic lord of the Underworld corresponds to the Devil of Christian mythology. Dud sees himself and his father symbolized in another statue found previously at the earthwork — that of the Tauros Trigarnus, a bull with two human torsos impaled on its horns and a third on its tail.
Uryen describes it as one of the "visions of life that suggest our being Impaled on the horns and tail of darkness" (167), and Dud imagines then that he hears his ancient bed creaking.
The bull emblematizes for Dud his undesired connection with
Uryen. In the scene at Maiden Castle where Dud is forced against his will to recognize Uryen as his father, he rebels against this realization of likeness and attributes to the Powers of Mai-Dun a malevolent wish to fuse the two men together.
"Was that what was meant by that horrible 'votive offering' of the men impaled on the bull?" (249, see also 257). The
Celtic dark divinity of whom Uryen believes himself to be a reincarnation is identified by Rhys with the bull.1^
These images, derived from Rhys and Celtic myth, of the river, the prehistoric fort with its cultic mysteries, the corpse god and the Door of Death are all related to the central obsession of the novel with death, the afterlife, and the 184
borders between this world and another, spiritual or Cimmerian world, Uryen's effort to penetrate the mysteries of the other- world takes other forms as well, notably his herbalism, and his attempts to use the attraction of Thuella to Wizzle, cul• minating in their wild rush through the embers of the Midsummer bonfire. Uryen is a skilled herbalist, and is able to relieve his wife's heart condition. At Thuella's "cloud-party" on
Candlemas Evening, he prepares a brew with elderberry wine which seems to cast an enchantment over the party similar to that cast by Mother Legge's Brldgewater Punch in A Glastonbury
Romance. Uryen appears as a sorcerer, bending over his magic bowl, with Thuella as some sort of witch or attendant spirit.
The wine affects everyone at the party (l66)s it is "more deeply coloured as well as more heavily scented than any wine he had ever tasted ..." (161). The mixing of the wine is accompanied by the rising of a strange wind, predicted by
Uryen and referred to by the Glymes people as their "ghost wind." It makes an uncanny sound; Dud hears it "with the kind of shock that our animal nature receives when it touches the Unknown" (158). Reputed to have followed Uryen from
Shaftesbury, as the wind evidently follows him home from Mai-
Dun, this strange noise of the "ghost wind" is another of the peculiar attributes of Uryen which can be explained rationally but which Powys gathers to form a mysterious aura about his troubled prophet.
There are many images of fire In Maiden Castle. Among the Indoor fires are those in Dud's room which are to him 185
"the landscape of his heart's desire" (23), the fires in the rooms of Claudius and Uryen when they are ill, and the fire in Jenny's stove into which Teucer Wye heroically casts his
Plato in an effort to persuade Jenny that human love is of greater value than abstract principles (415-16). Dud and Uryen light a lantern ln the barn where Uryen symbolically restores to Dud the beast head of his patrimony: Dud's clumsiness causes
Uryen to cry out against the possibility of fire (170-71).
Candlemas, the day on which this encounter takes place, is a festival associated with firelight. The culminating fire image of the book is the bonfire built by Dud at Maiden Castle on
Midsummer's Eve. Everyone present responds to the fire: the men theorize over its symbolism, and the women react in a more emotional way. Even the rationalist Claudius is struck by the "weird struggle between sun and fire" (380) as Mai-Dun lifts up as it must have done over four thousand years before in the time of the Images "the work of the fire-substance produced by man, towards the far-off living body of the great• est fire-mystery we know" (383). Uryen passes through the fire with the two girls, an act reminiscent of the Celtic rituals of Beltane and Samhain when passage through fires sig• nified transition to the otherworld.
Disturbed by the strange sight of the flames in sunlight, the bonfire watchers find themselves magnetically united in a surge of hostility against Dud. Powys supposes that had they been contemporaries of the makers of the images found in 186
Maiden Castle, they would have flung Dud into his own flames
(38?). He becomes for a few minutes the scapegoat of the group; the attack on him is a muted modern version of the human sacrifices formerly held at Mai-Dun, just as the circus had been seen by Dud as a tamer version of the old Roman ones.
This picture of Dud as discomfitted victim and scapegoat is a central one to the interpretation of Maiden Castle. The use of myth in the novel, and the meaning of the novel as a whole, must be understood in terms of the satiric self- projection which is its motive force. Like Dud, Powys had recently come to live ln Dorchester, a town with many family associations, and was attempting to write a novel which drew upon the historical background of the place. Dud's clumsiness, his devotion to his sensations, his manias for the past and for certain familiar objects, his hatred of cruelty and vivi• section, his walking-sticks, his botanical enthusiasms and his avoidance of the normal human forms of self-defence are all qualities unsparingly analysed by Powys himself in his Auto• biography. In the figure of Dud these qualities are pushed further, to the point of caricature; his name from the outset
Implies a satirical approach. In his more hapless moments, and especially when we see him from Wizzie's point of view,
Dud No-Man resembles a J.C. Powys portrait by Louis Wilkinson
— particularly the Jack Welsh of The Buffoon. Although he loves fires, Dud is "the worst maker of fires in Dorset. He had no notion of the natural laws that regulate this Promethean activity and after ten years of blundering he still made the 187
same mistakes" (23). This is typical of the tone taken by the novel to Dud; the author treats him with sympathy and humour, but as something of a fool. His attitudes and illu• sions are constantly being undercut. His dignity is never spared; we see into his efforts to rationalize, to deceive himself, to idealize his motives (20, 173). He appears as childish, even babyish (386,439). His girl leaves him, his novel is rejected, third-rate blackmailers take all his money.
If the foibles of Dud are shown little mercy, Uryen is made not only very eccentric but physically repulsive. As the mythological allusions of the novel centre around him, it is
Important to decide how far he, too, is a satiric self-projec• tion of the author. Like Powys, he is fascinated by the mythological theories of Sir John Rhys, and he pores as Powys did over obscure Welsh texts. He bears less physical resem• blance to Powys than his son does, but his obeisances at Maiden
Castle recall those Powys describes himself performing on his morning walks (Autobiography. 587). Certainly his obsession with Welsh myth, and his identification of himself with what he reads, are extreme versions of Powys' own tendencies.
But Uryen's spiritual efforts evidently come to nothing.
He is unable to gain even the respect of his son for them, and the two girls who do admire him make no attempt to understand his ideas. He is treated with universal Incomprehension or disbelief. He eventually doubts himself, and so collapses along with his life-illusion. Those around him agree that it was writing for the newspapers, the declaration to the world 188
of his private and deeply-felt ideas, which caused him to doubt them himself and feel himself betrayed.
Like Uryen, Powys in Maiden Castle exposes himself and his life-illusions in print. But ln order to protect himself from the type of reaction Uryen experienced, he becomes his own satirist and critic. Dud's eccentricities and selfish• ness are openly derided by the other characters. Uryen's
Welsh and mythological obsessions are in turn scorned by Duds i they are exaggerated and grotesque, beyond any dramatic pos• ture which Powys himself ever assumed. The scene at Maiden
Castle in Chapter Five shows the father declaiming his deepest beliefs and life illusions to a son who rejects and mocks them.
The scene has no real parallel in the relationship of Powys with his own father* rather, it seems to be a confrontation between two different aspects of Powys' own nature. The future author of Obstinate Cymric and demonstrative worshipper of stones is observed with the cool and sceptical eye of the other side of his personality. Maiden Castle is a novel rooted in self-mockery and doubt. Characterization ln the book, particularly the mythological associations of Uryen, can only be understood through a recognition that Powys has here been calling out all of his own fantasies, including his dalliance with Platonism and Communism, and exposing their follies himself.
Nevertheless, although Dud and Uryen are mocked, there is throughout the book an undertone of serious respect for their individuality. Even the delusions of Uryen have some 189
tangible evidence to support them; both he and Dud attract the other characters, and hold them by the force of their original ideas and personalities. At this middle period of his life, when he returns to England after three decades in America,
Powys seems to doubt and criticize himself in many ways.
Maiden Castle can be seen, with the Autobiography which appeared two years before, as a defensive acknowledgement of those qualities ln himself which critics were most likely to ridi• cule. But he retains the conviction of his childhood, the feeling that he is a magician "with a living power over matter and over nature" (Autobiography, 11), and the knowledge that
"the truth of life's in the imagination, not in ashes and urns I" (Maiden Castle, 250). It is not surprising that the hero of the next novel to be studied, Owen Glendower, is a magician himself. The key to the ambiguous problem of Uryen's claims is to be found in one of the passages of the Autobiog• raphy in which Powys describes his belief in his magical powers. "What I feel now, and with what seems to me my very deepest intellect, is that any imaginative illusion by which a person half lives any mythology in which a person half believes is truer, 'in the only sense in which truth matters,' than the most authenticated scientific facts" (6l). 190
Chapter Six* Footnotes
1 Thomas Hardy, "A -Tryst ln an Ancient Earthwork," A Changed Man (Londont Macmillan, 1913).
2 G. Wilson Knight, Saturnlan Quest, p. 51; Elwin, Prefatory Note to Maiden "Castle (Londont Macdonald, 1966).
3 Rhys, Studies. p. 157, see also p. 56.
^ Hardy, "A Tryst," p. 175.
5 There are three disruptive terriers in Maiden Castle» the bitch terrier who detects Thuella*s presence at the scummy pond, the Scotch terrier who disturbs Uryen's revelations at Maiden Castle, and the Irish terrier who barks at the Maiden Castle statues.
^ Powys was a great admirer of Keats and wrote a book (unpublished) on him; the lamia and the Cronos figures which recur in Powys* novels may show the influence of Keats.
•7 See Proinsias MacCana, Celtic Mythology (Londoni Hamlyn, 1970), pp. 55, 83.
8 The work presumably was Rhys, Studies. p. 257.
9 Thomas Parry, A History of Welsh Literature, trans. Idris Bell (Oxfordt Clarendon Press, 1955), PP. 1-3, 15, 16.
10 Rhys, Studies, p. 256.
11 Ibid., p. 256.
^2 Rhys, Studies, 259, see also the account from the Prologue to Chretien's Conte du Graal about the disappearance of the court of the Rich Fisher and the wasteland which replaced it, which Rhys suggests may contain "an undertone of mourning over the decadence of the cult of the chthonlc divinities," Studies. 247.
x3 See Rhys, Studies, pp. 291, 295.
1^ Ibid., pp. 249-50, see also pp. 56, 157.
^ Ibid., pp. 15^-58, see Maiden Castle, pp. 114-16.
I6 Ibid., p. 243. 191
Chapter Seven
"The Past is the Eternal"i Owen Glendower
Although published only four years after the very personal and introverted Maiden Castle. Owen Glendower is probably the least subjective of Powys' novels. The two male protagonists of Owen Glendower are placed again in what amounts to a father- son relationship, as they were in Maiden Castle, and to some extent they may be considered as representing the polarities of mysticism and rationalism. But there is virtually nc para• llel between the relationship of Rhisiart to Owen and that of
Powys with his own father. Neither Rhisiart nor Owen is a self-portrait of Powys: Rhisiart's self-confidence, political ambitions and Norman legalism distinguish him from the typical
"Powys-hero" -- the wavering and neurotic Adrian Sorio, Rook
Ashover, Wolf Solent, John Crow, Magnus Muir and Dud NoMan — and the occult interests of Uryen bear more similarity to those of Powys than the crystal ball gazing and other necromantic practices of Owen do. Distant in time and space from the world of Powys' boyhood, Owen Glendower contains fewer autobiograph• ical elements than any of the preceding novels. It is thus better able to stand as an independent work, requiring less prior acquaintance with its author's personality and theories.
One reason for the comparatively objective character of
Owen Glendower is, of course, its historical setting. The increasing concern with the historical and legendary past which Powys demonstrated in Maiden Castle determines the 192
historical character of most of his subsequent fiction. The distancing of his characters from the modern world, and the necessity of imagining them in such a different frame of refer• ence, evidently assists Powys to abstract himself from them.
Famlliary themes and psychological traits are carried over from Powys' Wessex novels — sadism, vivisection, the cult of sensations but the political, diplomatic, nationalist and even religious ambitions of the characters are quite a new sort of area for Powys to exert his powers of psychological penetration upon; these new subjects and themes are imposed by the choice of historical material.
A further influence towards objectivity in Owen Glendower is its geographical setting. All of Powys' novels up until now, with the exception of Rodmoor, describe the Dorset and
South Somerset landscapes of their author's boyhood. Even
Rodmoor is concerned with an area familiar to Powys as a child. Thus memory and recollected emotion play a large part in the recreation of these landscapes. When Powys went to live in Wales, in 193^, he moved to an area which in terms of his actual experience was completely unfamiliari the landscapes bore little resemblance to those of Wessex, and the people were of another racial character altogether. Like Rhisiart,
Powys had since his youth made Wales the centre of his aspira• tions, fantasies, and his private myth of who he was. But only ln this very cerebral sense could Wales be considered his home. The process of adjustment to living in Wales, of recon• ciling the ideal with the actual, must often have been 193
difficult; there is undoubtedly an autobiographical element
in Powys' account of Rhisiart's difficulties in adapting to the land of his fathers. But certainly the change from a
landscape filled with personal memories to one charged instead by ideas derived from reading and imagination encouraged
Powys in his detachment and objectivity towards his new sub•
ject matter.
This detachment, so different from the introverted and personal character of Maiden Castle, is one noticeable qual•
ity of the new novel effected by its Welsh and historical
setting. Another is the variety it achieves — in personal•
ities, opinions, colours, settings. Only A Glastonbury
Romance is richer in the variety of its characters, and in
Owen Glendower their physical appearance is more vividly
evoked through colourful visual descriptions, particularly
of eyes and hair. Most important, for the first time in
Powys the novel is not centered in one particular location.
Instead, its scenes take place in yet other, slightly des•
cribed, areas of England and Wales. The reason for this
change of scene is at least partly historical. Powys was
concerned to describe Owen's rebellion, and to show changes
in the characters of his principal figures over some years;
thus to enforce a unity of place upon the material of his novel would have been an exceedingly artificial and restrictive device. The wide time span, like the varied landscapes of the novel, marks a change from the technique of Powys' previous novels. 194
VJhile no one setting in Owen Glendower has quite the sustained atmospheric power which is conveyed by the landscapes of A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Porius, the varied landscapes of Owen Glendower are in keeping with the kind of historical overview of the period and situation which Powys is trying to present. By moving from place to place about Wales and the borders
Powys conveys a sense of what did constitute Wales in the fifteenth century, just as the curious personages about
Owen's court convey a sense of the variety of Welsh social and psychological types. Variety is in a sense part of
Powy's objectivity here: no one atmosphere is allowed to dominate.
The variety of landscapes in Owen Glendower results in a somewhat different sort of use of landscape symbolism. In the preceding novels, with their single settings, individual elements of the landscape took on symbolic properties. In
Wood and Stone the two hills represented Power and Sacrifice, and the thorny wood was a tangible symbol of Clavering's temptation and confusion. A more complex use of the tech• nique developed the legendary connotations of different sites around Glastonbury and their modern parallels. In Owen
Glendower, however, it is not individual elements of a land• scape but the landscape as a whole which takes on a specific symbolism. The settings of Dlnas Bran and Myndd-y-Gaer repre• sent contrasting aspects of human experience, as do the
I 195
Forests of Tywyn and Harlech. The effect of imbuing an entire landscape with a particular symbolic value is unlike that obtained by attaching symbolism to various elements within a single landscape. Powys attempted a combination of the two techniques ln A Glastonbury Romance, as he entered hazy, mystic Glastonbury by way of the less compromising Northwold and Stonehenge, and then developed the mythic associations of various sites within Glastonbury itself. But whereas the two preliminary settings of A Glastonbury Romance are intro• duced for purposes of preparation and contrast only, the various settings of Owen Glendower are more equally weighted against each other. Different places represent different attitudes to life, or different strains within the national character.
Since Owen Glendower is concerned with Wales conceived as a united and independent entity, this new treatment of landscape seems particularly appropriate* various physical aspects of the country, from north to south and east to west, can be presented in terms of their auras, their histories and their particular myths. In this chapter the mythological allusions will be studied chiefly in the context of the partic• ular landscape setting ln which they occur, since its legendary associations are an intrinsic part of the atmosphere of each place, while at the same time the great Welsh myths are a common heritage of all parts of the country and link them to• gether. Powys tries to make his account of Owen a symbol for all of Wales, like the Pendragon chant which draws together 196
the different elements of the nation as it calls upon "a past so high and remote that all modern divisions and dissensions were lost in the unity of its ancestral grandeur" (?05).
The first, and perhaps the major, landscape symbol in
Owen Glendower is the half-ruined castle of Dinas Bran. The castle has a striking and romantic location on the summit of one of those cone-shaped hills which particularly seized Powys' imagination. Dinas Bran was a hill fort before it was a castle, and guarded the upper waters of the sacred river
Dyfrdwy.1 It is in the heart of the ancient princedom of
Powys, from whose rulers Owen Glendower was descended. Powys draws upon several legends in his presentation of Dinas Bran.
The castle takes its name from the Celtic god Bran, who figures often among the mythological allusions in this novel. The name also means in Welsh "the crow". Dinas Bran is the site of the romantic legend of the Princess Myfanwy, whose lover was murdered by her jealous husband. In the novel the lover's skeleton is purportedly still chained at the foot of the Ladies'
Tower. Finally, the castle has a private significance for
Rhisiart in that one of his own ancestors had betrayed it to the English.
It is a symbol of Rhisiart's aspirations that Dinas Bran appears in the novel. While the Bran legends do not mean as much to him as they do to Owen, Rhisiart's adolescent fantasies centre around his relationship to the castle. He sees himself as defending and rescuing the Princess Myfanwy, and as redeem• ing his family's honour which was stained by the treachery of 197
his ancestor. When Rhlslart comes to Wales, Dinas Bran is the central symbol of his life-illusion, the "mystic terminus of every vista of his imagination" (9). As the novel opens, his attitude to the castle is that of a very young man -- romantic, idealistic, rather conceited, and vague about his actual pur• poses. The testing, maturing and mellowing of Rhisiart is illustrated through his changing relationship to the castle.
The towers of Dinas Bran preside over the testing of
Rhisiart on several different occasions, including his attempts to rescue Huw, Tegolln and Simon and to resist the lures of
Lowri and the Tower ladies. When he finally enters the castle, he does so not as a conqueror but as a hostage; a closer acquaintance with the castle and.its denizens makes Rhisiart realize his limitations as a military hero. Nonetheless, a genuine courage and self-discipline are proved in the drawing of his sword to defend Huw, his refusal to abnegate his masculine will to the wishes of the Tower ladies, and his escape from the castle with Owen. These episodes, and his experiences with
Lowri, indicate the traits which are to develop in the mature
Rhisiart.
Although raised outside Wales, Rhisiart has a profound sense of being a Welshman, and his feeling for Wales is at first centred upon the image of Dinas Bran which he has cher• ished since childhood. At the opening of the novel considerable tension is generated by his apprehension that the reality of
Dinas Bran may prove less satisfying than the ideal image on which his imagination had been nourished. That it does not 198
may be in part due to the obvious limitations of that imagin• ation, and also in part the fortunate accident of season and light which casts a glamour over the hill fortress. In a moment of awed recognition, Rhisiart finds that Dinas Bran was
"not less, it was more, than the picture he had in his mind"
(12). This first sight of the castle enables him to fuse for a moment the ideal with the actual. The tension between the seen and the unseen, the material and the spiritual, is to become a major theme of Owen Glendower, developed more drama• tically in the struggles of Owen himself. But for the moment of Rhisiart's vision the tension is resolved, and the possi• bility of such a resolution, however momentary, illuminates the spiritual struggles of the rest of the novel. The castle becomes an archetype "of all the refuges and all the sanctu• aries of the spirit, untouched by time" (12).
When Rhisiart goes to live as a hostage in Dinas Bran, his ideal castle separates itself once more from the reality.
The imaginary one lifted itself clean out of this draughty mad-house of broken stones . . . and limned itself on those flying cloud-wracks of the mind's horizon that no madness could touch and no burning blacken. (261)
Dinas Bran is the home of Lowri, a Circean and serpentine woman (60, 64, 68, 249) who causes Rhisiart to identify the fires of Dinas Bran with the burning of lust (254-259). The interior of the castle appears to him as a labyrinth, a "vast,
Intricate world of masonry" (258), where many choices are 199
offered him and snares laid for him. Although by an exertion of his will Rhisiart is able to maintain his liberty from
Luned and the circle of Ffraid ferch Gloyw, he escapes Lowri only by luck. Before he enters the castle he has a vision of
Owen, blending into the figure of Bran the Blessed, who offers him "an alternate destiny" to that of the followers of Derfel
— Iolo Goch, Crach and Rhys Gethin (257). But Rhisiart finds
Bran-worship, as practised in the Ladies' Tower, too cloying; neither is he attracted by the extremities of the Derfel cult.
"He recalled how clear and simple his purpose had been when he dug his crusader's sword into the turf at his first sight of
Dinas Bran. 'Something's gone wrong with me,' he said to him• self. 'These women have confused my mind'" (299).
Rhisiart at one point has a vision of Dinas Bran as iso• lated from the rest of the world, and "not as solidly material as other places" (275). Like Glastonbury, it appears as one of those sites of continued disturbance of the human spirit, a place in which matter is malleable by the mind (275). Its towers appear at the close of Owen Glendower like the towers of Cybele at the end of A Glastonbury Romance, "magical and majestic" (931), to the Rhisiart who now knows "with Welsh knowledge that the things which are seen are unessential com• pared with the things that are unseen" (934).
Before Rhisiart meets Owen Glendower, he wonders if this prince might be "the man of destiny who would people with free warriors — like fiery shapes from a vasty deep — the towering battlements of the old castle of their race" (10). 200
When the meeting does come about, Owen "took his place, easily, naturally and with a fatal inevitableness, on the ramparts of
Dinas Bran and gathered into himself their mystic enchantment
(122). Rhisiart's feeling for Dinas Bran, as the object of his personal loyalty and symbol of Wales, is transferred to the person of Owen. Later, Rhisiart's love for Catherine is referred to as "his new Dinas Bran" (501). Thus although Dinas
Bran does periodically re-enter the narrative as a symbol of a spiritual ideal, after the first few chapters its symbolic force is taken over by the living figures of Owen and his daughter. In this way, Rhisiart resembles Dud, who is attracted to an idealized place and then is drawn almost against his will into the lives of its Inhabitants.
Glyndyfrdwy, the stronghold where Rhisiart first finds
Glendower and his family, is built around an ancient mound.
The mound may be seen as a smaller version of the conical hill which is such an important feature of the Powysian landscape.
Powys describes these "gorsedd" mounds, relics of a very early
Celtic or pre-Celtic culture, as "centres in Wales, as doubt• less in ancient Greece, of mystical entombings for the dead and of magic enchantments for the living" (112). They appear in Welsh mythology as places of transition between this world and the otherworld; such, for example, is Gorsedd Arberth where
Rhiannon appears to Pwyll in the first tale of the Mabinogion.
In this novel other such mounds are mentioned at Llangollen,
Sycharth, Mathrafal, Tywyn, Narberth and Mynydd-y-Gaer. It is the mound at Glyndyfrdwy which is the most important here, 201
however, because through it Rhisiart receives early intimations of the occult forces upon which Glendower can draw, and exper• iences something of the primitive sensation of supernatural awe which is part of his heritage as a Welshman (see 131-32,
934). The mound seems to be connected with Derfel, a pagan fertility god: mysterious moaning sounds issue from it, which are taken by spme to be Derfel calling for a new bride (210).
Owen was once compelled to act the part of Derfel inside the mound (397)i and while listening for the moans Meredith con• fesses that his father is believed by his family to have com• mitted himself to Derfel (205). At the end of the novel Owen explains that the mound at Glyndyfrdwy covered one of the
"indestructible and indiscoverable" hiding places of the ancient race which preceded Cunedda and the Brythons in Wales
(882-83). Owen makes the underground dwellings of these early peoples into a metaphor for the spiritual sinking of the Welsh race Into its past and the depths of its own soul: this theme is developed more fully ln the context of Mathrafal and Mynydd- y-Gaer.
The Forests of Tywyn provide for Rhisiart, as Dinas Bran did, a kind of testing ground. Like Dinas Bran, the forests are labyrinthine and Rhisiart fears to lose his way, to take the wrong turning (599). The danger of Tywyn comes not from the lusts of a Lowri or the seductive influence of a Ladies'
Tower but from the fatal passivity and hopelessness which its vegetation seems to exude. Famous for its funguses, with their mortuary odour, and for a perpetually autumnal atmosphere, 202
the Forests of Tywyn are "well adapted to suck the life out of young hearts" (601). The elusive and stunted Elllw ferch Rhys is "their natural and congenital offspring" (601). Among these forests Rhisiart loses his usual Norman capacity for decisive action, and with it loses the girl he loves. The forests are in South Wales, which is seen, as Glastonbury was, to be a place of twilight and illusion; their atmosphere is congenial to Owen but alien to Rhisiart, who prefers the heroic, chival- ric traditions of the North to the mystic glamour of the South
(563-64). Powys describes these forests as the particular home of the ancient forest people, who fled to their shadows from the conquering Brythons. What Owen conceives to be the life secret of the ancient peoples, and what he himself incor• porates into his own final vision of Wales' destiny, is the essential spirit of Tywyn — escape and endurance (563-64, 589).
The atmosphere of Harlech, where Owen's court moves after
Catherine's marriage, is quite different. In the chapters set at Harlech the focus shifts from Rhisiart's love affairs to
Owen's military fortunes and his concept of how Wales' destiny may be fulfilled. Instead of the damp, mouldering atmosphere of the forests, the emphasis here Is on sunlight, moonlight and sea air. Jutting out as it does on a promontory of land over the sea, Harlech appears "like a towering sea-city" (6?1), such as the one the otherworld often appears to be in Celtic legends. Like Dinas Bran, its Immensity and isolation make it into a world of its own (618). It too is maze-like (618, 671), but the individual who chiefly is tested and tempted in the 203
labyrinth Is Owen rather than Rhisiart. We are shown Owen's anxiety over his French alliance, his decision to humiliate and banish Rhisiart, his passion for Tegolin, and his eventual renunciation of both the Maid and his chances of ultimate vic• tory. The peculiar temptation offered by Harlech is that of magic. Iago declares that "This castle's been his ruin!
There's something about this castle that's enervated him and turned him from war to magic" (?48). It Is at Harlech that
Owen heeds the ambiguous prophecies of Hopkin ap Thomas which lead to his military downfall.
Although not named after the god, Harlech has perhaps even more legendary associations with Bran than Dinas Bran has, and certainly in this novel the figure of the great giant is evoked most often at Harlech. In the Mablnoglon It is at
Harlech that Bran receives the embassy of Matholwch, and to
Harlech his followers return bearing his head. There are a number of deliberate echoes of the second branch of the
Mablnoglon, the legend of "Branwen ferch Llyr", in the chapters about Harlech. Owen and his companions watch the approach of two ships from the same place where Bran and his court watched the approach of the Irish fleet. Like Bran wading across to
Ireland with his musicians on his back, the giant Broch o'
Meifod wades into the sea to rescue the chimpanzee, and Powys* characters are not slow to notice the resemblance (632-33), 781).
Harlech is "soaked in sea-water legends" (643), not only of
Bran but of Manawydan fab Llyr (64-5), and the Birds of Rhlannon.
These birds, which sang in Harlech to the Company of the 204
Blessed Head of Bran, In Owen Glendower are said to fall silent forever when the castle is overcome by the English (8?6).
Harlech is described as "the most ancient as well as the most romantic stronghold in the land" (6l8), but Powys seems to find the primal heart of Wales, and of his novel, in
Mathrafal. The ancient seat of the princes of Powys and one 2 of the three royal residences of Wales, Mathrafal is believed by Powys' Glendower to have been as well the centre of a very early civilization. This civilization was in Powys' view a golden age, a peaceful kingdom where justice prevailed and worship was bloodless (415, 5^3» 917). Mathrafal is of "an antiquity that staggered comprehension;" its early inhabitants
"must have known secrets beyond the understanding of our fathers" (413). It is for these secrets that Owen searches the ancient bardic and prophetic books. Although Morg ferch
Lug, herself a descendant of the ancient race, condemns Owen as a pure-blooded Brython, Owen eventually demonstrates that he has the blood of the older people also in his veins (889,
917).
A central episode in the novel is Owen's journey to
Mathrafal and his visionary experience there. He undertakes this journey Immediately after his coronation, when he has symbolically shattered his crystal balli both of these acts are highly significant ln Powys* conception of Glendower.
Henceforward his spiritual exploration will be into the past; his first act as a prince is to prevent himself from attempting to control the future, and then to make a pilgrimage to the 205
symbolic ruins of the ancient kingdom. Mathrafal is the princi• pal symbol in Owen Glendower of that great, lost civilization which Owen believes holds the secret of Wales' true destiny.
He deliberately chooses to sink — downwards and backwards -- into the past, into introspection and a self-sufficient passi• vity, rather than to pursue his occult attempts to know and to Influence the future. The future he associates with poli• tical and temporal, rather than spiritual, power. At the moment of revelation in Mathrafal Owen cries "The Past is the Eternal'."
(415) In a sense his subsequent actions may be seen as an effort to make himself part of the past, to establish his spiritual and symbolic significance for eternity, rather than to grasp at success in the immediate future. For this kind of ambition, the grass-grown but still monumental ruins of
Mathrafal are an appropriate symbol, and they are the image with which Powys chooses to close his romance (938).
The last of the series of ruined fortresses in Owen
Glendower is Mynydd-y-Gaer, a prehistoric hill-fortress across the Dyfrdwy from Corwen. Owen explains to his grandson that beneath the Gaer is a network of underground passages which, with similar passages at Glyndyfrdwy and Mathrafal, composed the secret hiding places of the ancient peoples. They form, quite literally, an underworld equivalent of Annwn in the Welsh
legends, and of this underworld Owen does indeed become Lord
(891, 93^). The prehistoric, underground labyrinth is as appropriate a symbol for Owen's understanding of life as that other hill fortress on the Dyfrdwy, Dinas Bran, was for the 206
romantic idealism and erotic complexities of Rhisiart's nature.
The secret passages of Mynydd-y-Gaer correspond to the deep parts of the soul into which Owen would penetrate. At
Mynydd-y-Gaer, as at Mathrafal, Owen seeks out the sacred place of the most ancient inhabitants of Wales, and on its altar stone makes his symbolic gesture of casting off all forms of power but the spiritual. Spiritual triumph in the midst of political defeat is Glendower's vision of his own destiny, and that of his nation. This is the secret revealed to him by the study of the origin of his people.
. . . why shouldn't the whole race of Welshmen increase its power by sinking inwards, rather than by winning external victories? . . . What I'm doing now . . . is what all Welshmen can do who've got the least drop of . . . the ancient people's blood in their veins, sink, that's to say, into the 'Secret Passage' of our race.
In choosing to end his life in Mynydd-y-Gaer Owen makes com• plete his assertion of affinity with the ancient people, and with what he believes to be their secrets of life.
It is Interesting to observe that while the sense of place is very Important in Owen Glendower, the places them• selves are relatively little described. Rich as a whole in visual description, this novel makes relatively few attempts to. give a detailed visual impression of the various landscapes ln which it is set. Their atmosphere is conveyed chiefly through their historical and mythological connotations, and through their psychological effects on Powys' characters.
This is in contrast to the rich landscape descriptions of the 20?
earlier novels.
i' Roland Mathias in an essay on Owen Glendower declares that
"the landscape of Wales and its myth-impregnation . . .did not afford J.C.P. the degree of sustenance which he had read- 3
ily obtained from the chalklands of his childhood." He
holds that the Welsh landscape did not really impress itself
on Powys' imagination, and that his descriptions of the places
of the novel are in consequence scanty and commonplace. They
lack the atmospheric power of the landscape descriptions in
the Dorset novels and lack any unique appreciative vision of
Wales.
It is true that the descriptions of Dinas Bran, Mathrafal,
the Forests of Tywyn and the rest involve a great deal of
theorizing upon their racial and spiritual significance, and
that there is little visual recreation of these places. The
few extended pieces of actual landscape description in the
novel — for example the view from Dinas Bran (324) and the
sunrise before Bryn Glas (546-49) — are not concerned with
the major landscape images in the novel. These major images
are the castles and prehistoric fortresses, and the distinc•
tions between the landscapes in which they are set are
Implied rather than lengthily described. One possible expla•
nation for this relative paucity of landscape description is,
of course, that Powys was now living in the midst of the scenes
he was describing, and thus perhaps felt less need or less
ability to call them up out of his imagination and put them
on paper.
Nonetheless, the individual character of the Welsh 208
landscape does impress itself upon and affect the course of the novel. Mathlas notes how "the rough masculine nature of the
Welsh terrain," unlike the female undulations of Wessex, resisted invasion and helped to keep the Welsh isolated and separate. This is very close to the point made by Powys'
Glendower.
The very geography of the land and its climatic peculiarities, the very nature of its mountains and rivers, the very falling and lifting of the mists that waver above them, all lend themselves, to a degree unknown in any other earthly region, to what might be called the mythology of escape. This is the secret of the land. (889)
The artistic, Celtic soul of Elphin is repelled by the flat, monotonous scenery of England: "I have to have some real
scenery, romantic, exciting, distinguished, like our mountains and moors, before I can Invent my heraldic symbols and compose my cynghaneddlon" (808). At several points in the novel it is observed that Owen's chance of military success rests in his using the peculiarly wild character of the Welsh terrain by ambushing and confusing the invading armies. Although, for
the reasons discussed earlier, no single locality dominates
Owen Glendower as the Wessex novels were dominated, Powys does
convey a sense of the individuality of Welsh landscapes and
places, and does use them with symbolic power and for clear
thematic purposes.
The image of the labyrinth is particularly successful, as it links the various castles, forests and underground
fortresses, and relates them as well to the central theme of 209
escape, of defeat transformed into spiritual victory. Owen explains that he intends to mix his soul with the landscape, and thus teach"the whole race of Welshmen to increase its power by sinking inwards, rather than by winning external victories" (914). This interpretation of the Welsh landscape is an individual, and perhaps an Idiosyncratic one, but it pervades all the different landscapes and localities of the novel and integrates them into Powys' own concept of the spiri• tual destiny of Wales.
Like the landscape, the legends of Wales are seen by Powys as containing within themselves the same elusive essence of the Welsh character (889). Landscape and myth are nowhere more closely united by Powys than in this novel, set in such legend-soaked places as Dinas Bran, Harlech and the Forests of
Tywyn. But the greater variety of landscapes with which mytho• logical episodes may be identified, and the frequent obscurity of the allusions, makes the mythological structure of Owen
Glendower less clear and coherent than that of A Glastonbury
Romance. As was the case ln the earlier novel, the mythological references ln Owen Glendower are suggestive and decoratively enriching, but they do not provide any master key for inter• preting the book.
Most of the mythological allusions in Owen Glendower are to Welsh legends, which is of course appropriate in a work so concerned with the idea of Wales and the national character.
There are a few references to classical mythology, such as usually accompany the Celtic allusions in earlier novels, but 210
it is pointed out that not many Welshmen of the early fifteenth
century had much opportunity to become acquainted with the
classics and even the Oxford-educated would know only fragments of Homer (201). Therefore, since almost all the mythological allusions in this novel are made through the medium of one or other of the characters, references to the classics are avoided.
The majority of the Welsh allusions are to figures from the
Mablnoglon i there are approximately fifty of these allusions, but they do not seem to work together in any thematic way other than those already suggested. Many of the allusions occur in
the thoughts of Rhisiart, whose imaginative life is based upon
the stories told him in childhood by a Welsh nurse. Powys thus
stresses the folk aspect of these tales, and their oral
transmission.
Bran the Blessed is the figure most often referred toi he
Is associated with forces of peace, mercy and sacrifice, and
represents the "good" side of the Welsh character. Opposed
to Bran the Blessed is the obscure and sinister presence of
Derfel Gadarn, worshipped by the frenzied Crach and the blood•
thirsty Rhys Gethin (257). Owen is conceived as being obliged
to choose between the two gods or saints (257, 291, 300).
Apparently he chooses Bran, since he has Derfel's prophet murdered and relies on Broch o* Melfod who is several times
compared to Bran (4?2, 632-33, 78I), but this decision is never made explicit.
Abbot Oust explains that Derfel is a pagan fertility god whom Christianity had wisely canonized as a saint. In the 211
novel his worship remains, however, thoroughly pagan in form: it is given as the motivation for the defloration of virgins and the unspeakable practices of Lowri and her cohorts after
Bryn Glas. The cult of Derfel figured in Maiden Castle as a type of sterile love by means of which the mystic might break through into another dimension of reality (Maiden Castle, 432,
449). However, the Derfelites of Owen Glendower are not pre• occupied with spiritual longings. The bestial aspect of their worship is emphasized: they frequently confound the god with his horse. There is a powerful, obscene image of Derfel's prophet Orach, like "the image of a beast-god in prehistoric art," calling upon Gwyn ap Nud before battle (533-34). The
Derfel theme ln Owen Glendower indicates a dark, ugly strain
In the primitive Wales which is otherwise idealized as a bloodless, much-enduring civilization.
There are also a number of Arthurian references in Owen
Glendower, but these function chiefly as isolated images rather than to provide a pattern of significant correspondences as they did ln A Glastonbury Romance. They are associated par• ticularly with the picturesque aspects of war, and suggest how the romances influenced concepts of chivalry. The comparison with Arthur does, however, enrich Powys' conception of Glendower and it indicates how Glendower within his own lifetime attains the mythic status held by Arthur (809, 810, 814, 871, 912).
With some justification, Roland Mathias criticizes Powys' use of the Welsh legends as being inconsistent and incoherent.
He suggests, for example, that the several promising references 212
to Pryderi and the enchanted wasteland might have been developed into a controlling metaphor for the whole novel.
However, it should now be evident that such tidy symbolism is not Powys'way of handling his mythological material. Such a metaphor may predominate ln one chapter, as in the Dolorous
Elow chapter of A Glastonbury Romance, but no novel after
Wood and Stone is controlled by a clear symbolic equation.
Such an equation would give clarity to the novel, but is Incom•
patible with Powys' conception of the world as a multlverse without any "ultimate meaning" (see above Chapter V, pp. 148)
There is, however, an important consistency in the mytho•
logical allusions of Owen Glendower, and that lies in fact
that they are almost all made by the characters themselves.
Powys is in this novel very concerned with the ideas of time and history, and with how the present and future are shaped by
the past. This is an essential element in his portrait of
Owen, a man who is quite consciously turning himself into a
legend and a symbol for his people. Throughout the novel he and Rhisiart, and occasionally other characters as well, see
themselves and their present situations as copies of arche•
types in the Welsh legends. When he is repulsed at the gate
of Glyndyfrdwy by a churlish porter, Rhisiart Is consoled by
the remembrance of Kilhwch being treated In the same manner
upon his arrival at Arthur's court (11?). The mythological
parallel is turned to a revelation of the romanticizing and
self-dramatizing strains in Rhisiart's nature. Owen's fatal•
ism and his obsession with the prophecies of his race are 213
illustrated by his fears that his French alliance goes against the insular security guaranteed by the burial of Bran's head ln London (809). Owen Glendower is distinguished from other modern novels which use mythological equations by this effort to make the characters themselves the source of the awareness of the equations. Leopold Bloom does not think of himself as
Ulysses, but the self-conscious Owen deliberately fashions himself after Arthur and Pwyll Pen Annwn.
This tendency of Powys' characters to view the present and future through the medium of legends from the past is one form of their, perhaps anachronistic, sense of their own posi• tion in the flux of history. There are a great many antici• pations of the future, and of how their present will appear to the future; these anticipations are often ironically set up, as for example Rhisiart's scornful amusement at Brut's evan• gelical conviction that all Wales would one day read its Bible
(342, see also 3^. 368, 391. 627, 738, 915). A curious perspec• tive is achieved by the awareness of Powys' characters that they will themselves be the subjects of the misinterpretations of future histories. "'Are all events ln the great world like this,' the boy thought, 'so different from what the historians say?'" (40).
Powys seeks to grasp in this novel not the historical facts, whatever these may be, but "the Immortal essence which
— in the timeless — lay behind everything that happened in time, and was the truth of it, and the reality of it, and, if. you were only a bard great enough to catch it, existed in 214
both the future and the past at the same moment!" (660).
Powys would probably not claim to be such a bard himself, but
the references to Shakespeare's version of the Glendower revolt
illustrate his conception of an Imaginative apprehension of a timeless truth, and it seems that Owen Glendower is also an attempt to grasp such a truth. Although Hotspur is dead and
Shakespeare not to be born for almost two centuries, Rhisiart
has a vision at the signing of the Tripartite Indenture of how
this scene will be recreated in Henry the Fourth, Part One;
the vision makes the scene before him appear to him unreal, in
"remote perspective, as if it had all happened before and would
happen again" (663). The imaginative reality in Shakespeare's
play magically enables it to transcend time, and to become
more real than the historical reality.
Through these references to Shakespeare, and more particu•
larly through his allusions to mythology, Powys implies a
hidden or inner reality existing in some fourth dimension which
is itself a truth superior to historical truth.^ Owen's sacri•
fice of himself, in the role laid upon him by Iolo Goch and
others, brings about his transformation into a mythic figure:
hence the ritual surrounding his appearance and actions (391-92,
592). In A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle the greater
reality or fourth dimension was represented by Annwn, the Celtic
otherworld. Owen is compared to Pwyll, Lord of Annwn (757, 891,
925, 934), and ln his underground dwelling at the Gaer attains
transcendent spiritual powers. He possesses the ability to
fling his soul "into a different region" (140), to "escape 215
into Annwn, into . . . the world outside the world" (916-17).
Like another of the divine heroes of the Mablnoglon, Bran the
Blessed, Owen then makes himself a bridge by means of which the people of his race may also cross over into the world across the sea. The old description of Bran serves well as a motto for the sacrificial role of Owen as Powys conceives hims "A vo pen bit pont, . . . He who is the head, he will be the bridge"
(258). Thus the historical figure of Owen and the mythological figures from Wales' more distant past are merged through Powys' own metaphysical apprehension of experience. Chapter Seven: Footnotes
1 J.E. Lloyd, A History of Wales, trans. H. Idrls Bell (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955), P. 244.
2 Ibid., p. 249.
3 Roland Mathias, "The Sacrificial Princei A Study of Owen Glendower," Essays, ed. Humfrey, p. 243.
^ Ibid., p. 244.
•5 See John Brebner, "Owen Glendoweri The Pursuit of the Fourth Dimension," Anglo-Welsh Review, Vol. 18, no. 42 (Feb. 1970), 207-16. 217
Chapter Eight
"This huge, composite earth-creature"i Porlus
Although Porlus is, like Owen Glendower, an historical novel, it differs from its predecessor in the treatment of both history and the novel form. In the ten years which elapsed between the publication of Owen Glendower and Porlus,
Powys had moved a long way towards that complete break with the traditional novel form which characterizes the fantasies written in his eighties. Some of the inconsequences and loose ends of Porlus may be attributable to the drastic excisions which Powys* publishers obliged him to make in the original manuscript. However, although contrary to his usual practice
Powys did revise this novel, one must conclude from the pres• ence of the same traits in his subsequent fiction that most of the stylistic and structural peculiarities of Porlus were intentional.
In this novel Tallessln propounds the all-accepting, antl-monlstic world view which makes Porlus, even more than the preceding novels, depart from the dramatic and purposive structure of the traditional noveli he proclaims
The *I feel* without question, the *I am* without purpose, The 'It is' that leads nowhere, the life with no climax, The 'Enough* that leads forward to no consummation, The answer to all things, that yet answers nothing. (417-18)
A novel whose many climaxes amount to no climax, and which denies.the possibility of any ultimate purpose, answer or 218
consummation, refuses to fulfil those expectations which the
plots of historical novels have traditionally satisfied.
Furthermore, Porius ignores the distinctions usually made
between history, legend and myth» historical and fabulous
characters mingle freely. No more is provision made for a
rational explanation of the supernatural events which occur:
miraculous healings by Geard, the ghost wind of Uryen and even
the astral projections in Owen Glendower could be accommodated within the framework of the realistic novel, but the final
events of Porius — Merlin's transformation of the owl into
a girl who flies away, and the transportation of Porius from
Snowdon to Harlech —are pure magic. In his last years, Powys
turned from the strictures and disciplines of the novel form
to the freer if less substantial world of fantasy, where his
whimsies and philosophies could be expressed without check. The
propagandist fantasy Morwyn was written even before Owen
Glendower, and Porius balances precariously between the two
modes.
Porius is, even in terms of the other novels of Powys,
both a remarkably rich and a remarkably frustrating book.
The wealth of its landscape and atmospheric descriptions con•
trasts with the paucity of these in Owen Glendower; and the
mythological allusions are more numerous than ever. But these
allusions are often more lacking than ever in any clear sig• nificance, and the unfulfilled promises which Roland Mathias
complains ofln Owen Glendower are even more noticeable here.
As he juggles with the great metaphysical questions of Time, 219
Space and Free Will, Powys often hardly troubles to clothe his speculations in the personality of the character who is purportedly uttering them. Dramatic events and profound themes are announced with great excitement, then vanish and do not reappear. Like the characters, the reader of Porlus is often in danger of getting lost in its primeval forests, or sinking forever into its swamps.
Nonetheless, effort expended on following the patterns of imagery in Porlus, and observing the interaction between the mythological references and PoWys' metaphysical concerns,
is admirably rewarded. Perhaps because of its very density and occasional Incoherence, the book is extraordinarily suc•
cessful in evoking the dark and primitive landscape of
Arthurian Britain. The landscape plays a major part in Porlus, but it is depicted with a powerful restraint. Colour symbolism
is used to great effect. The sky is described more often than the earth, and the landscape as a whole is much wilder than any Powys had previously dealt with. Mythological parallels are perhaps even more richly used than they were in A
Glastonbury Romance, and the actual appearance of figures such as Taliessln and Merlin, who had long been in the background of Powys' works, gives this novel an additional dimension.
While no attempt is being made to give an ultimate interpre• tation of Powys' metaphysics, a study of the role of land•
scape and the nature of the mythological allusions in the text does provide a useful way into this profound and complex work. 220
While much in Porius points to the kind of fantasy-novel
that occupied Powys in his last years, Porius does resemble
the early novels in its concern with a single locality and with a detailed study of the sensations of a few characters within a brief time-span. The complex elongations and concen•
trations of time with which Owen Glendower experiments are
replaced in Porius by an intense focus upon a single week,
and the mounted campaigns of Owen Glendower are replaced by
short and laborious expeditions on foot through the forests
around what is now the town of Corwen. Thus, since the nature
images and symbolic sites in Porius are confined to a small
area, they are handled more as they were in Maiden Castle,
A Glastonbury Romance and Wood and Stone. Different features within a single landscape are studied in detail, each taking
on an individual symbolism. Powys has a greater interest in
conveying natural details -- the particular way the sun is
obscured by mist, the look of a certain moss on a stone, the
activities of an insect — than he has in the photographic
recreation of landscape panoramas. There was an insubstantial-
ity about some of the settings of Owen Glendower, as the
result of insufficient description; the setting, for example,
of Chapters XIII and XIV at Owen's fortress in Snowdon, never
quite becomes real to the reader. This is not the case in
Porius, where a small piece of the countryside may once again, as ln the early novels, be created gradually, in detail, and with great conviction.
By the time he wrote Porius, Powys had come to know the 221
Corwen area very well, and the places in the novel such as the
Gaer, the river and its ford, and the Fountain of St. Julian were visited on his daily walks. The detailed knowledge of
the area which he thus obtained restores to this Welsh novel
some of the richness of local atmosphere which characterizes his Wessex novels. He describes qualities of the landscape and of atmospheric phenomena which are peculiar to this part
of North Wales (5, 29, 137, 265). Not only Is the Corwen area
itself described in great detail; it is also set, within the
larger context of its geographical and geological position in
North Wales, overlooking the fertile valley of the Dyfrdwy
(Dee) which flows east to the English plains, and surrounded
by the Berwyns and the great mountain ranges of Eryri (Snowdon) and Cader Idris.
... an echo carried those two syllables . . . over the lake, over the dead Brother's cell, over the Cave of Mithras, over the deserted camp, over the rock-ridges towards the Cader, over the shrine of Tysilio Sand, over the church of Collen Sant [•.now Llangollen] , till they died away beyond the deserted unlit hall of Pengwern [Shrewsbury], among the ruined heights and the grassy howwos, haunted by owls and badgers and wolves and foxes, of Porius Manlius's vanished Uriconlum. (585)
This kind of overview of the landscape resembles the
passages in which the historical present of the novel is set
in the context of past and future civilizations, and suggests
for the novel a perspective and significance beyond those
events with which it is immediately concerned. Such a land•
scape perspective is used also at the end of Owen Glendower. 222
where the two ancient ravens observe Meredith walking over the Berwyns away from his father's pyre, and continue their own symbolic flight to Mathrafal.
Porlus opens with a view of the landscape from that very
Mynydd-y-Gaer where Owen died. The landscape perspective establishes at the outset the historical perspective of the novel as well, as Porlus muses on historical aspects of the scene before him. We learn that the Ederynion Valley below was "still covered by the aboriginal forest" (1) but had quite recently received its name from a son of the Brythonic con• queror, Cunedda. The market village across the river from the Gaer has recently been renamed Corwen (15). a Christian name replacing the former "Ford of Mithras," and its first
church is|being constructed. Christian, Mithraic and Roman alterations to the landscape lie beside still very meaningful monuments of the older past, such as the Path of the Dead and
the prehistoric earth-work called y Grug. The landscape of
Porlus is a major means through which the historical dimension
is conveyed.
Here they both stared at the river; and for his part Porlus couldn't help noticing how the massive paving stones of the ancient highway between Uriconlum and Mona were as little worn by the three hundred years of the rule of Rome as the water of the goddess- river was affected by the purgings and baptisms of the two hundred years of the rule of Christ. (37)
Landscape becomes the means, in the first chapter of
Porlus, whereby not only the historical but also the racial,
political, religious and personal themes of the novel are 223
suggested. The image of the Prince, leaning over the battle• ments of his hill-fortress and looking out on the land below, holds the novel together during those first sixteen pages which are so amazingly filled with disparate pieces of back• ground information. As Porius notices certain landmarks and atmospheric conditions, they suggest to him personalities and subjects on which he then muses. The valley Itself suggests the Romano-Brythonic conquest which gave it its name; the
Mound and the Path of the Dead provoke thoughts of the conflict between the Gwyddyl-fflchti and the forest people. St. Julian's
Fountain is associated with Brother John and Pelagianism.
The swamp reminds Porius of Morvran's murder by Christian fana• tics, and the subsequent disappearance of the corpse. The theme of the Cewri is introduced, with sinister and super• natural overtones, by the emphasis upon the unearthly quality of the midst which comes from their home in the Cader and the mystery of the corpse-snatching from the swamp where the mourners found "those huge marks ln the new-fallen snow that the forest people swore were gigantic footprints!" (9).
So much is accomplished by Powys' handling of landscape in this first chapter that some closer analysis of it is profitable. The chapter is entitled "The Watch-Tower," and opens with a description of Porius standing upon "the low square tower above the Southern Gate of Mynnydd-y-Gaer" (1) and looking down upon the densely forested river valley below.
Porius remains upon this tower during most of the chapter, his only movement being from the southern to the north-western 224
parapet. The change in his position, and in his view of the landscape, has a significant psychological effect upon him.
Looking south, he was led to think of the two women who dom• inate his life and of the causes of the conflict between them which now pulls him apart; looking north, however, he is reminded of quite another aspect of his life.
Arrived at this north-western parapet, Porius sur• veyed the stretch of country now before him with an air that made him seem a different man. What in fact he now contemplated was a landscape associated in his mind with nothing but adventure and friend• ship. With this view before him he could forget all women and all gods. (12)
The north has masculine associations, while the south has feminine ones. Looking north-west, Porius is swept in imagin• ation to the mysterious mountain-ranges of Eryrl; he looks as well towards the lake-fountain of St. Julian, the home of his friend and teacher Brother John. Thus the view suggests adven• ture and uncomplicated masculine companionship.
To the south, however, Porius sees the dwellings of his various relatives, around the township of Corwen, and is obliged to think of the quarrels which divide them. Ty Cerrig
(the Stone House) which is the home of his betrothed, Ogof-y-
Gawr (the Giant's Cave) which is the home of the three prin• cesses who are his great aunts, the Cave of Mithras where his foster-brother worships and the Church of St, Julian all lie in the direction of his gaze, on the opposite bank of the river. The buildings represent the various racial and reli• gious factions competing for Porius' support. The river 225
Dyfrdwy, which also is in his line of vision, is itself both a woman and a goddess 5 it is the "mother of rivers," still worshipped by many of the natives including Porius' great-
aunt Tonwen. The river and its fertile, cultivated valley
represent the female, maternal spirit which is the counterpart
of the masculine nature of the mountains to the north.
Rising from the river Is a mist, which "unaffected by the
wind or sun assumes, weak creature as it is, the dominant and
mastering control of a whole unreturning day" (5). This
ability of the faint mist to dominate despite its weakness is
later to be developed as the great characteristic of the
forest people who live beside the river (219, 659, see Chapter
VII, 16, 17, 20). The mist lends a strange colour to the
stubble-fields, and indeed this straw or stubble-coloured mist
becomes one of the novel's principal images, associated with
Cader Idris, with the Cewriand with Merlin and all that he
represents. At this point, however, the mist and stubble-
colour reminds Porius of his betrothed, Morfydd, whose skin
sometimes assumes this tint. To him, "the sight of this
stubble-field colour burdening the mist called up in him all
those old familiar feelings with which ... he was wont to
quiet her emotion" (10) and hence Porlus draws from the sight
"an inflow of strength" enabling him "to get a certain hum•
orous pleasure from the confused and conflicting currents of
fate" (11). The mist in this chapter is imagined as creating
and carrying the colour of the stubble-fields (4, 6, 9, 10);
later in the novel the mist assumes the straw-colour itself, 226
and Powys develops the connotations of death which it has here in the references to the "dead stubble-field shadow" beneath
Morfydd's skin and the "ivory-coloured essence of ghostly corn" which is "the life-sap of a dying goddess" (10).
The mist has yet another effect» it sets apart, and co gives symbolic significance to, the particular dwellings which exert major influences on Porius. Such images of isolation, which turn a town or hill-fortress into a microcosm, recur throughout Powys' novels. Those novels which deal with a single town or village do indeed treat it as a self-contained image of the greater world. At the end of A Glastonbury
Romance the town becomes quite literally the Insula Avallonia of the legends, as the flood waters detach it from the surround• ing countryside. In Owen Glendower both Dinas Bran and Harlech are imagined as little worlds unto themselves (see above,
Chapter VII,199, 202). The pattern is repeated in Porius' vision of Corwen in the mist.
As Porius bent now over the rampart of his watch- tower, it seemed to him that the ghostly colour from those far-off stubble-fields, which the grey shoulders of the mist had been carrying all that October afternoon, had been unloaded above those dwellings he knew so well, above the palace of the Princesses, above the Church of Christ, above the house of his betrothed, and hung suspended there, isolating from all the rest of the world those dwellings that in their harmonies and their discords, in their manias and mysteries, made up the fatal ghost-bread of his life! (9)
All this is seen through the eyes of the Prince» the ranging view of the physical world about the tower is his, 227
and he, quite literally, brings it into focus. As his eyes scan the valley, Powys makes us aware, not only of the external landscape and the symbolic associations different elements possess but how that landscape penetrates into and then passes out of the mind of the beholder: how, while there, it displaces or is displaced by images called up out of his imagination.
Porius has been looking at the river-valley and the forest but disturbing thoughts, partly evoked by the sight of the landscape, cause his imagination to summon up other sights which then blot out entirely his awareness of the external world. As his awareness of these imaginary vistas fades, however, his consciousness gradually returns to the landscape at which he has apparently been looking all the time. The passages in which this experience is described are an excel• lent example of Powys' continuing Interest in the details of the operation of human consciousness: this fascination with how the mind shapes and perceives experience is the basis not only of Wolf Solent and the Autobiography, but even of so late a work as Porlus.
Then all of a sudden, as happens with human consciousness when important decisions are being made, there occurred a vanishing away of the open space in the forest at which — with his small greenish-yellow eyes screwed up — he had been gazing so long, and in its place rose the banquet- hall of the Gaer and the image of his foster brother .... But Porius found it easier to call up the image of the emperor's Henog than to dismiss it when called up; and with that curious second consciousness that was always flapping its fantastic and reckless wings inside his muscular frame, while it watched with detached amusement his thoughts and sensations, 228
he noted now how the autumnal forest before him, with its varying shades, where lay the Swamp of the Gwyddyl-Ffichti and the Path of the Dead, which had disappeared as he conjured up the scene between Rhun and the Henog, now began coming backt only coming back piecemeal and in arbitrary fragments, so that it was through an umbrageous mist of vege• tation, out of which every now and then some particular oasis of familiar shape and colour would outline itself for a moment only to re-dissolve, that he pondered on the grey visage, the long pointed nose, and the black gown of the historian. (13-14)
There may be more than a coincidental resemblance in this first chapter of Porius to Yeat's poem "The Tower." Like the novel, "The Tower" takes as its starting point the figure of a man — here the poet — looking out over the battlements of a watch-tower. He calls up from the landscape below him remembered or imagined figures who enact the conflicts which make up the history of the place. Although the images called up by Porius do not group themselves into dramatic stories as do Yeats* Mrs. French, the "peasant girl commended by a song," and Hanrahan, they represent the same sense of layers of human history, racial minglings and half-forgotten personal tragedies which Yeats also seeks to evoke from a particular landscape.
I pace upon the battlements and stare Cn the foundations of a house, or where Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth; And send imagination forth Under the day's declining beam, and call Images and memories From ruin or from ancient trees, ^ For I would ask a question of them all.
Both the poet and the novelist use the image of a watchtower looking out over a landscape in which they have made their 229
homes to aid them in their imaginative probing of their coun• try's past and its meaning for the present. Yeats and Powys both have a central belief in the creative powers of the human imagination, which Informs their attitudes towards mythology and to some extent towards landscape as well. In the later Yeats, as ln Powys, historical and mythological properties of a landscape predominate over the pictorial; the
landscape Images are elemental, sparely evoked, and invested with a tremendous symbolism. It is interesting that when
Porius contemplates liberating himself from the personal and political entanglements of his position as a public figure In a strife-ridden Celtic land, he conceives of this liberation
in the Yeatsian image of a journey to Byzantium (for example,
63, 64). The parallel to the way Byzantium serves Yeats as an image of escape and artistic integrity Is perhaps not
coincidental. Powys was of course familiar with the work of 2 Yeats, although he evidently preferred the early poetry. There Is another Yeatsian parallel in this first chapter
of Porlus. Porlus meditates on the Pelagian idea which is to
become one of the novel's great themes; "Neither Life nor
Death nor Love nor Hate nor Angels nor Devils nor Mind nor
Matter nor Present nor Past — no, nor even the Blessed Trinity
Itself — has any power to meddle with the individual human will . . ." (16)-. The idea suggests a later passage in "The
Tower" where Yeats, after rejecting the authorities of Plato and Plotlnus, cries
Death and Life were not Till man made up the whole, 230
Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul, Aye, sun and moon and star, all, And further add to that That, being dead, we rise, Dream ar-d so create ~ Trans lunar Paradise.-'
The Pelagian idea, as Powys Interprets it, of the freedom of the human will and power of the human imagination to create their own destiny is a strengthening and liberating influence upon Porius throughout the novel. In the spirit of the poet of "The Tower" he thinks
The Mithras Bull might bellow and bleed till it broke the adamantine chains of every tradition in the world! The important thing was the human imagination that defied Itt the human Imagination that defied not only the Bull and the Slayer of the Bull, but the Crucified and the slayer of the Crucified, yea! and all the God-Bearers and all the God-Slayers from the beginning of the world unto this hour! The human imagination must never be robbed of its power to tell Itself other stories, and thus to create.a different future. (43-44)
Throughout Porius potent landscape Images abound. These may be grouped roughly into water images, earth images — the forest caves and mountain ranges, and atmospheric or sky images, the GwyddylSwamp, is a sinister locality associated throughout not only with the hostility of the Gwyddyl-Ffictl tribes to forest people and Brythons alike, but also with the murder of Morvran. The Fountain of St. Julian, actually a small lake, is the site of Brother John's wattle hut and a former home of Pelagius. Into the waters of the fountain the
Druid plunges the phallic African spear in the ancient ceremony 231
of the Fisher-King. Another feminine water image, the River
Dyfrdwy, unifies all the landscape images of the novel as it runs across north Wales from west of Lake Tegid (Bala) through
Edeyrnion to the English borders. When Merlin calms the strife between Arthur's soldiers and the forest people by uniting them in the term "Cymry", Powys describes the word echoing up the length of the river to the aboriginal heart of Wales: the river, like the word Cymry, encompasses and binds together the Welsh people.
... it was caught up ln a thundering shout from thousands of ecstatic throats —Cymry! Cymry! Cymry! Cymry! — and went echoing away over Saint Julian's water towards the up-tide current of the Divine River, the current that ran unchanged through the centre of Tegid's Lake, echoing far away on the further side of that lake, echoing up the gorges and tarns and precipices of the Cader itself, whence and whither these monstrous shapes of the true aboriginals of Ynys Prydein had, as so many now believed, actually come and gone. (490)
The river is sacred to the forest people, and their
Princess Tonwen is described ln the act of worshipping it
(32?-28). It is conceived of as feminine and maternal: it is the great River-Mother (42) or Blessed Mother (319). Porius visualizes the spirit of the river as an alder stump which bears a grotesque resemblance to the flanks of a gigantic woman, and the river whose source is near Cader Idris is thus identified with Porius' craving for his female counterpart, the aboriginal giantess (42). The great primeval forest which covers the valley of the Dyfrdwy is also a maternal image. To the natives of Edeyrnion the forest Is a place of "maternal 232
shelter" with its "huge protective trees" (19). At the opening of the novel it is set ln contrast to the watchtower of Myndd- y-Gaer, and functions as an emblem of the complicated life of action and decisions into which Porius must shortly descend.
From the tower, where he is temporarily in a condition of statis and can contemplate wide horizons below him, the Prince must go down into "the darkening forest" and follow its labyrinthine paths into a world of confusion, cross-purposes and conflict.
When he does eventually descend with Bhun into the forest, the two men must force their way through tangled undergrowth
(20), and they change their direction many times before Porius eventually reaches his original goal (143).
The forests have also a magical and evasive aspect (105)» the forest-people survive by the techniques of secrecy and escape, which are peculiarly adapted to the nature of the forests in which they live (11?, 155, 219, 659). They can merge completely into the trees, and surround their enemies unseen (121, 219). The character of the forests and forest- people is developed from the description given by Powys in
Owen Glendower of the Forests of Tywyn. And as Owen, discov• ering "the ancient people's blood" in his veins, learned to
"sink back into the secret passages of his race" (Owen
Glendower, 914-15), so the forest-people in Porius are repre• sented as masters of the art of conquering through evasion and submission, abjuring all force. They are always defeated, but always unconquerable (11?). Their art of adaptation is opposed to the warlike arts of the Brythons and Romans, whose 233
strength is in their fortresses and military campaigns. But it is suggested that "the future of us all, from Ludd's Town to the Ford of Mithras, is really in the hands of our forest- people .... They can't be defeated, for they just sink back into themselves" (219). The life-in-death cry of the forest people
might have been called a battle cry, save that it was lifted up in the strength of a magic that declared itself able to destroy all powers that ruled by force .... None heard it without being forced to feel that while the planet lasted the sound of this cry could never be altogether hushed. (659-60)
This opposition set up between the woods of the forest-people and the stone fortresses of their ostensible conquerors is a consistent development of Powys* treatment of the symbols of wood and stone in his first novel. In Wood and Stone the power and cruelty of the Homers were Identified with the stone of
Leo's Hill, while the passive, evasive and submissive char• acters were associated with wood. The wood of the Cross and the roots of trees are the forces which break the power of stone, and Quincunx, the "tough ash-root," eventually outwits the stone-quarry owners (Wood and Stone. 463, see above,
Chapter IV, 15-18).
Beyond the surrounding forests rise the mountains. Two distant mountain ranges are given symbolic roles in Porlus: both lie in the west, on the far horizon for the dwellers of
Edeyrnion. To Porlus these inaccessible ranges represent romance and a fulfillment of his nature distinct from the 234
normal tenor of his life around Mynydd-y-Gaer. In each of the
two climaxes of his life described in the novel he journeys to
these mountains and there proves his strength in a superhuman
feat. In his accomplishment of these journeys and tasks Porius
bears more resemblance to the traditional mythic hero than is
usual for the heroes of Powys' novels. The mountain journeys
and marvellous accomplishments indicate how mythic events and
fantasy increasingly supplant realism in Powys' fiction.
Cader Idrls, lying far to the south-west of Edeyrnlon,
is reputed by the forest-people to be the home of aboriginal
giants (9, 13, 14, 15, 18). As such, the mountains are a
source of superstitious terror to the forest-people; however,
Rhun and Porius, who have some giants' blood in their ancestry,
are less fearful (19). Porius, indeed, like his uncle Brochvael
and Morfydd, is strangely attracted to the idea of the giants
and their home. Their appearance at St. Julian's Fountain
during the Feast of the Sowing is heralded by a chill "of a
unique and unnatural kind" and "the rapid arrival upon the
scene from the direction of Cader Idris of a wet, cold, clammy,
straw-coloured mist" (485). The mist and the giants both
become identified with the Cader during the course of the
novel, in a powerfully-handled building up of associations.
Eventually Porius sees the Cewri and follows them up into the
foothills of their home in Cader Idrls. There Porius consum•
mates the union with the giantess which he has craved all his
life, and finds a completion and a "magnetic reciprocity" which he could never experience with an ordinary woman. But 235
the Cader also becomes the death-place of these last survivors
of the giant race. In one of the most vivid landscape images of the novel, the eyes of the drowned Cewri stare up at Porius through their tangled hair and blood in a fathomless pool of
green water. The image returns frequently to Porius, and becomes his "voyage into another world, his visit to Caer Sidi" (538).
The mountains of Eryri have a less definite range of associations in the novel than does Cader Idris. When Porius turns northward towards them at the opening of the novel, they
suggest to him mystery and adventure (12). They are the high•
est peaks in Wales, and it is on the highest of them, Y Wyddfa
(the Tomb), that Merlin submits to his entombment by Nineue.
Apparently Merlin, as "the latest incarnation of the god of
the Golden Age," has been resurrected from Y Wyddfa before
(276, 521). The peak is one of the four great gates into
Annwn, the world of the dead, and the stone from which Porius
rescues Merlin covers a chasm leading Into a bottomless abyss
(677-79). The isolation of the summit of this great peak,
where Powys himself had once climbed (Autobiography, 174),
is used to express the isolation of the individual conscious• ness in the immensity of time and space. On this mountain,
Porlus passes outside the normal apprehension of time and
space* as he climbs the peak he has the sensation of "crossing with each step he took great gaping gulfs and jagged chasms
of time . . as if it were something he had had to accomplish
aeons of time ago ..." (673K The imagery of the mountains, 236
with their hare rocks, chasms, clouds, solitude, silence and icy mists is used by Powys to evoke the timeless, metaphysical issues which their novel struggles to express.
In direct contrast to the mountain heights are the sub• terranean places. There are a remarkable number of caves, or underground dwellings in Porius; they indicate the proximity of the characters to the earth, and to the primitive way of life. Only the Brythons, Romans and Christians live ln houses, huts or tents. All the representatives of the older races and religions live and/or worship in caves. The basic force of the cave image is in the sense of enclosure, of being folded around by the earth. Like the river and the forest, the cave is thus a great maternal image. Merlin calls upon Mother
Earth to give him her counsel and assistance (282-87, 298-99,
306), and the Welsh earth-goddess, Ceridwen, is worshipped in the Cave of the Avanc. Porius refers to his habit of mental detachment as "cavoseniargizing," which suggests the image of a cave.
The giants reputedly lived in mountain caves, and a cave in Craig Hen, the Old Rock, serves them as a hiding place.
The palace of the Modrybedd, hereditary rulers of the forest- people, is in Ogof-y-Gawr or the Giant's Cave. The ancient
Cadawg, son of the fabulous British king Gorthevyr the Blessed, lives in a cave named after a prehistoric monster, the Avanc, which had taken refuge there "in the days of the first human intruders" (314). This image of the Avanc, which occurs several times in the novel (140, 163, ^56), is used to 237
describe the appearance of the last of the Druids, a man who also lives underground and is rarely seen by even his followers
(248), Rhun performs the mysteries of his ancient rite in the Cave of Mithras, Although it has been reconsecrated to
Christian worship, the cave-chapel of Mynydd-y-Gaer was orig• inally a shrine to the legendary giant king Rhitta Gawr, and still contains his relics. From its ancient function, "this rock-cavern had gathered into Itself, fold upon tremendous fold, the hierarchic mantle of the sacred terrors of aeons of time" (603).
The cults and rites which are associated with all these caves have one thing in commoni they are on the verge of extinction. The last of the Cewri are Incarcerated in an underwater fissure in the rock: the last Druid and the last of the Modrybedd die ln Ogof-y-Gawr, leaving no successors to continue the traditions of their worship, Cadawg also dies without issue, like the.Avanc who inhabited the cave before him, Rhun's Mithreaum is undisturbed, but we know that Mithra- worship in Britain did not long survive the departure of the
Roman legions.
Only one cave, or fissure ln the earth, becomes a symbol of rebirth rather than extinction. This is the tomb of Merlin/
Cronos, on the summit of Snowdon. "There are many gods," concludes Porius at the end of the novel, "and I have served a great one" (682). The measure of Merlin's greatness is shown by his ability, unique among the pagan deities of the novel, to rise again from his cave-tomb and conquer death. 238
The concept of a god imprisoned in the earth, awaiting resur• rection and promising new life or a second Age of Gold with it, is common to classical myth, Christianity and the vege• tation cults as well. The close Christian parallel Is perhaps curious, in view of Powys* intense hostility to both orthodox 4 and evangelical Christianity in this novel. Merlin, unlike
Christ, does not rise from his tomb unaided; Porius rolls away the stone, and revives Cronos with another blow from the thunderbolt of Zeus. The traditional mythological concept of the revived deity is blended here with a Welsh legend about a great sleeper buried under the peak of Snowdon. In this impressive close of his novel, Powys thus brings together a fundamental mythological pattern, a specific local legend and the connotations of a unique landscape and unifies them into an image of great power.
In the figure of Merlin Powys also ties together all the earth images, and some of the water Images, of his novel.
Merlin's eyes are cavernous (274), and he is buried In and resurrected from an enclosed fissure ln the rock of a mountain- top. He is supremely at home in the forest, and exerts a magical attraction upon its creatures. At times of crisis, he crouches close to the earth (299, 481) — recalling the earlier magician figures of Geard and Uryen who also drew their strength from intimate physical contact with the earth. But the great scene where Merlin in a trance muses upon his
Saturnlan destiny takes place on the River Dyfrdwy. Merlin appeals to the Earth Mother through the medium of the river 239
goddess (281). Thus the elements of earth and water are identified with each other.
Green is the colour of earth-life, and also sometimes of water, while black is associated with death. Merlin, who is lord of nature and eventually triumphs over death, is repeat• edly described as having green-black eyes (270, 274, 279, 281).
In the natural world this green-black colour is fearful. The
Gwyddyl Swamp, which sends up a corpse-like odour, is a "world of greenish-black dissolution" (219). Porius fears, as he sinks in the mud around the green rushes and black pools of
St. Julian's Fountain, that he will "be carried down into some faintly-lit greenish-black underworld" (143). The forest is "a tangled mass of black-green Cimmerian twilight" (633).
This green-black colour is thus associated with fungus and vegetable decay (220), with the swampy mingling of water and earth, and with death and the underworld. Decay, death and the mysterious world which lies beyond death are feared by humans although, or perhaps because, they are part of the inevitable cycle of nature. Porius, thinking of the "blood- clotted greenness" of the death-pool of the Cewri, is filled with a sense of "the terror and the horror of the truth of
Nature" (583). But Nature and death as well are eventually overcome by Merlin, he of the cavernous green-black eyes who promises to the "innumerable weak and terrified" creatures of the earth a second Age of Gold (681).
The subtle power of colour to enrich images of earth and water carries over into images of sky. The sky is quite as 240
important an element of the landscape of Porius as the earth is. The two dominant sky images are moon and mist. Charac• teristic light and atmosphere in this part of Edeyrnion are said to depend particularly upon the mist drawn up from the river (5, 265). This mist gathers associations and import as the novel develops. It is associated above all with the Cewri of Cader Idris. The stubble-colour which Porius first sees in the direction of the Cader as a phenomenon distinct from the mist later becomes an intrinsic part of the mist which shrouds the figures of the Cewri (426, 444, 485-86, 497, 517).
Its unnatural chill and corpse-like odour differentiate the straw-coloured mist from the "natural" mist (109). At the beginning of the chapter XV, "Myrddin Wyllt", Powys disting• uishes between different types of mist, and describes their interaction with sunlight and moonlight. The mist most char• acteristic of the Corwen area has a quality of enchantment, and acts as a "magical transformer" of the landscape (265,
267). It is the mist, blown into fantastic shapes by the wind, which give Morfydd a revelation about her own nature as a woman (618-19). In the final consummation of their love ln the novel Porius feels Morfydd's body as "a deep rich gathered-up cloud of undulating mist, a cloud of sea-mist and land-mist, a cloud of earth-vapour and sea-foam" which he is piercing as "a quivering shaft of palpable light" (638).
The scene of Merlin's rescue by Porlus on Snowdon takes place in a grey, icy mist, pierced at one point by a shaft of sun• light which illuminates the death-mound of Merlin/Cronos 24l
(672-73). At the conclusion of the novel, Porius is surrounded by a heavy sea-mist at Harlech (682).
Although sunlight penetrating through mist is an impor• tant image in the novel, the moon is an even more powerful image. The appearance of the moon is usually sinister, por• tentous of the battles, deaths and supernatural occurrences which take place. In the early chapters, the moon is seen as
"shapeless" (119, 128, 137) and "weird and ominous" ln this shapelessness (345). On the day before the fatal Feast of the Sowing the moon rises red, which the Jewish doctor inter• prets as portending blood. (3?4-76). Later in the same evening the moon appears to Porius as "unsympathetic" and
"coldly remote" (403). The associations of the moon with evil and death culminate in a passage where Powys' old fantastic
Gothicism seems to reassert itself. Morfydd finds Rhun weep• ing in the "primeval shrine" of the Gaer chapel.
Although the moon Itself was invisible it was impos• sible not to feel the unearthly influence of moonlight. There was indeed a weird atmosphere ln the place that was almost like the atmosphere that hangs about a corpse. A ghost herself, the invisible moon seemed to have sucked our the whole inward life, the pith, the sap, the blood-juice, of this heart of the old Gaer fortress. In some odd way the Gaer Itself seemed to have been detached by a magnetic pull of moon- suction from the rest of the earth, as if the moon were anxious to draw it into herself so that it might soothe the icy ache of one of her hollow breasts of extinct craters. And if the moon were thus sucking the blood from the Gaer, she seemed to be doing the same thing to a couple of faint barely perceptible stars that were just visible to Morfydd through the arrow-slit window. These stars appeared to be receding and receding under the compulsion of some secret purpose of their own into an infinity of moon-sucked, life-drained, corpse-grey space. 242
The last appearance of the moon in the novel, however, is as the medium of enchantment. On the night of his entomb• ment by Nineue, Merlin performs a miracle. The landscape is bathed in an "indescribable" light which is neither daylight nor darkness, because although the moon Is invisible its light mysteriously disperses the darkness.
Indeed it was just because the body of the moon was hidden that this effect of enchantment became so prominent. It was as if an occult entity, to which common speech gave the name of 'moonlight,' was now being softly diffused from all the pores of the old earth's patient skin. And not only from the earth's skin did it pour forth. From exposed roots, from bare branches, from naked rocks, from precipitous gorges, from silvery stretches of river-water, from mountain summits and ferny slopes, there rose, in a sacred silence all its own, this magic element, an emanation which, once having emerged, floated away among the zodiacal signs, to dim by its native luminosity the glittering pin-pricks of galaxies of stars too remote for thought. (652)
In this atmosphere, where the element of air is "filled with the mystery of moonlight" (653)? Merlin recreates Blodeuwedd, a creature of "moon-daisy eyes" (657) and "moonlit beauty"
(656) who is formed to respond to and to realize "the desper• ate Imaginations of youthful longings and hopeless lusts" (657).
The mythological subjects of Porlus are manifold. Although
it is set in the Arthurian period of British history —
October, 499 — the novel is curiously little concerned with
the Arthurian subjects which so exercise Powys' imagination
in A Glastonbury Romance. Strangely enough, it is classical mythology with Celtic overtones which dominates, even over the apparently more appropriate Celtic and Arthurian themes. 243
Norse myths also enter the narrative at a few points, but their contribution is less significant. The combination of
Classical, Celtic, Arthurian and Norse mythologies is not, however, a coincidental or haphazard one. Powys is concerned in Porius to give a sense of the racial mixtures and political struggles which were taking place at this crucial period ln
British history. It has already been seen how he used land• scape to represent different elements in the racial and political struggle; mythology, too, serves this purpose of recreating the atmosphere of an age in which Iberian, Brython,
Gwyddyl, Pict and Roman, Druidlsm, Mlthraism, Pelagianlsm,
Christian orthodoxy, Nordic pagan worship and even a classic• ally-influenced scepticism all vied for supremacy. As its introduction explains, the novel seeks to show a world like our own, from which "the old gods are departing" (xi). The prophetic vision of Porius, that all forms of belief are rela• tive and transitory, is achieved very largely through the rich and various accumulation of allusions to the many dif• ferent mythological and religious beliefs of the characters of the novel.
Though Norse myths play a relatively slight part, it is not an unimportant one, for they are linked to the Saxon invaders whose Inherited myths and religion were Nordic. The
Saxon band attacking Arthur is frightened off by the sudden and unearthly appearance of the grey-haired Tonwen astride the grey horse: in their surprise, the Norsemen take her to be one of the Valkyrie, and assume that Wotan has turned against them 244
(348). Later when the powerful Porius tears up a tree to use as a club against Gunhorst, the Saxon has "a strange, almost mystical feeling that he, with some kind of superior weapon, had been for thousands of years contending against this man whose strength was in his arms, and who like the giants of
Jotunheim could fight with his bare hands" (577). These allusions to Norse myth have the same quality which was char• acteristic of the mythological allusions of Owen Glendower; that is, they occur within the consciousness of an Individual character, and are revelatory of his particular way of seeing himself in terms of the archetypes of his race (see above,
Chapter VII, 23-24). The allusions have the additional effect of increasing the dimensions of the characters of the novel.
Tonwen and Porlus, so perceived by the Saxons, become larger than life: the archetypal quality conferred on them increases their resonance. It increases also our sense of the world of the novel as a primal world, on the border between the mythic and the historic. The world of Porlus is one ln which histor• ical personages like the elder Porlus, serai-historical personages like Arthur and Taliessin, and characters of pure myth such as Merlin and the Cewri can mingle with each other, and thus it seems appropriate that even the wholly "human" characters should take on a supernatural dimension in the eyes of other characters.
The classical allusions of the novel, too, are frequently matched to the perceptions of the character through whom they are made. This Is particularly the case with Brochvael, the scholar who has travelled much in the classical world, and 245
can conceive of no greater pleasure than to sit down with a new manuscript of Aristophanes (439). Through Brochvael, and his classically-educated daughter Morfydd, many comparisons are made between Greek and Roman literature and the contem• porary situation in Wales (151, 165, 243, 251, 594, 611, 621,
623, 633, 637). At one point ln the narrative Brochvael even encounters a girl named Sibylla who conducts him as the Sybil did Aeneas into a subterranean world (227, 237, 239, see 163).
The classical allusions occur with reference to other charac• ters as well. Merlin is compared to Hermes conducting a pair of souls to Hell (412), and Neb appears like a statue of that same god (54?). Gunta is compared to Iris (553) and Taliessin to Tiresias (410). The vine decorations in Porius' marriage tent suggest "Thessaly rather than Edeyrnion" and frequent reference is made to the theory of the Greek origin of the
Brythonic tribes (112, 165, 251). Even Cadawg the Disinher• ited quotes Horace, and compares the urn of Horace's poem to the sacred Celtic cauldrons of wisdom and rebirth (320-21).
Powys' treatment of Merlin emphasizes the metaphysical aspects of Cronos, the classical deity with whom Powys has chosen to identify Merlin, rather than his role as Arthur's counsellor.
The Cronos theme, and the teme of metamorphosis are both central to the novel, as will be seen later, and both are essentially derived from classical myth.
Paradoxically, the classical world seems much closer in
Porius than does the Arthurian world of the medieval romances.
Porius plans a journey to Byzantium; Dion Dionides, the Greek 246
sea-captain, brings a manuscript of Aristophanes; Brochvael and
Morfydd spend much time reading the classical authors and see their lives at least partially ln terms of that reading.
Classical mythology in the world of Porius is at least as
Important as the indigenous legends in shaping the imagination of almost every one of the novel's major characters. The classical myths provide them with images, with sources of comparison, and with suggestions of a larger dimension to their particular concerns.
The importance of this classical cultural influence in fifth century Britain is made credible through Powys' empha• sis upon the Immense impression left by the Roman occupation
— an impression not yet effaced by the waves of barbarian invasions. In this sense, the Dark Ages have not quite begun in Edeyrnion, hence the ruling Celtic families quote Homer and Virgil and educate their offspring in the classics. And as was previously suggested, the classical allusions and similes are usually made by or with reference to characters who are themselves familiar with the classics. Here Porius makes an interesting contrast to Owen Glendower for the earlier novel, although dealing with a supposedly much more cultured and civilized Wales, contains few classical allusions and makes a point of indicating the lack of knowledge of the
classics among even the most educated Welshmen.
The prevalence of classical allusions in Porlus also no doubt has something to do with Powys' increasing absorption in the ancient worldi in the eight years after the publication 247
of Porius Powys wrote two books using the Homeric mythology
— Atlantis and Homer and the Aether, and read Homer daily.^
The classical dimension in Porius is an interesting and orig• inal enrichment of Powys* conception of the Arthurian world.
The Arthurian world always fascinated Powyst it is, at least, unexpected that, when he came to write a novel ln which the people of that world might appear in their own persons rather than as suggestive shadows, he should give them sur• prisingly little substance. Nineue, Merlin, Arthur, Mordred and Galahad all appear but, with the exception of Merlin, none of them is very much developed and all take subordinate roles to the Invented characters. In this sense Powys is consis• tent with the treatment of myth in his earlier novels, such as A Glastonbury Romance; the psychology of the invented characters is all important, and the mythological references are used suggestively to add certain depths and dimensions to this psychological study rather than being worked into an elaborate and consistent pattern of their own. Thus even when given the opportunity for a direct and extended descrip• tion of the relationship of Merlin with Nineue, Powys chooses to keep that strange affair in the shadows and to expand instead upon the relationships of Porius, Rhun and Morfydd. Arthur is a much less vivid figure than Prince Einlon, and the humorous undercutting of the traditionally idealized Galahad remains only a vignette.
Perhaps Powys was wise in not attempting a full-scale version of the Arthurian figures in Porius. They have always 248
functioned in his novels as suggestive rather than clearly- developed symbols, and they undoubtedly derive much of their potency from his leaving their meaning implicit. Because the principal Arthurian figures have such rich literary associ• ations it is difficult for a modern writer to portray them directly without reducing their dimensions, making them flat and tawdry. T.H. White succeeds by being deliberately out• rageous and whimsical; generally, the most effective modern treatments of the Arthurian materials appear not ln prose but ln the complex and allusive poetry of Eliot, Charles Williams and David Jones.
A cancelled chapter of Porlus which is still extant in the typescript of the novel (in the possession of Mr. E.E.
Blssell of Ashorne, Warwickshire) develops the figure of
Galahad somewhat, and encourages speculation that the novel
ln its uncut form might have given more significant develop• ment of other Arthurian figures as well. In the published version Galahad appears as a "red-headed young fool" (424) who, when injured in battle keeps up "a loud, self-pitying monologue interspersed with groans and lamentations" (474).
Like the other young Arthurian knights camped at St. Julian's
Fountain, he is a soft-skinned dandy and a coward who meets a crisis by bursting into tears (477-80). In the cancelled chapter, however, Powys puts a different interpretation upon the nature of the prince. Hearing Tallessln recite some lines of poetry about the imprisonment of the mysterious Gwalr in
Caer Sidi, the Henog has an inspiration that Galahad himself 249
is none other than the mysterious Gwair, "a soul so haunted by the memory of one fatal incarnation that all subsequent ones become nothing but recurrent stages in one long desperate struggle to forget" (1394 of typescript). Like Uryen, Galahad is thus something of a lost soul, seeking to "break through" to another dimension and to expunge an inhuman weight of suffering which he for some reason has been called upon to bear. On the threshold of Uryen's house Dud found himself involuntarily uttering the words of Caer Sidi, as did the
Marquis on the threshold of Merlin's chamber in Mark's Court.
The concepts of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls are bound up for Powys in the image of the otherworld prison of Caer Sidi. As the figure of Galahad remains a minor one ln the novel, it would seem to be his subsequent position ln the
Arthurian legends which suggests this connection with Caer
Sidi rather than any extraordinary qualities in the man him• self such as were possessed by Geard and Uryen. Thus although it is intriguing, the connection of Galahad with Gwair remains so undeveloped as to be almost meaningless, and the excision of the reference was probably not a great loss to the novel.
However, these passages describing the Henog's notion that Galahad is a reincarnation of Gwair, do contain an inter• esting illustration of Powys' attitude towards myth. After . putting forward his theory about Galahad, the Henog then sug• gests that his friend the French poet Cretinloy might allot to the unhappy prince a special part to play in the Christian mysteries. Such a belief might ennoble and redeem the prince, 250
and grant him peace of mind. Thus, it is implied, the figure of Galahad, the Grail Questor, came into being. Elsewhere the Henog explains that many fables "in reality are far more
. . . revealing of Nature's secrets than many verified facts and unquestionable events" (423-24). Although the Henog sup• ports the cause of History over those of Poetry and Prophecy
(537), his conception of historical truth is a very broad one and leaves generous room for the imaginative truth con• veyed through legend. The figure of Galahad which the Henog wishes to create ultimately has a greater reality, because of its proximity to the archetype of the questing hero, than does the actual unpromising youth upon whom this imaginative creation is built. Powys had Introduced this approach to historical versus imaginative truth in the account of the signing of the Tripartite Indenture in Owen Glendower (see above Chapter
VII, 25-26). Merlin, similarly, in his reverie ln Chapter XV questions whether he actually remembers his life as Cronos or whether it is just that Homer, "that old Aeolian Henog, imagined it so strongly about him that it had forced him to imagine it about himself" (284). The Henog's quarrels with
Merlin and with Taliessln are ultimately Insignificant since he, like them, is concerned with an Imaginative recreation of experience which does not differ greatly from their poetry and prophecy.
The roots of the Arthurian legend are, it seems now fairly well agreed among scholars, to be found in Celtic mythology; this was the view held by Sir John Rhys, and also 251
by Powys in his fictional treatments of the legends. In Porius
as in the preceding novels there is no clear demarcation made
between the Arthurian and the more primitive Celtic worlds.
Such characters as Merlin and Taliessln belong to both. The
"Hanes Taliessin," version of the Mablnoglon along with early
Arthurian tales such as "The Lady of the Fountain," "Peredur" and "Geraint," describes Taliessin as the servant and bard of
Owain ap Urien, but does not associate this latter personage with Arthur's court. Powys follows Tennyson, and Charles
Williams, in placing Taliessin among the retinue of Arthur, although the eccentric, casual and primitive relationship of
Powys' Taliessin to his official position is very unlike the
formal role of the bard in Idylls of the King. Similarly,
the figure pf Gwendydd, Merlin's sister, is taken from an early
Welsh poem in the Red Book of Hergest which purports to be a
dialogue between Merlin and Gwendydd. The suggestion for her
character here is taken up by Powys, and his Gwendydd becomes
one of the most memorable minor characters of the novel.
Most of the references in Porius to early Welsh myths,
particularly to the figures of the Mablnoglon, are casual
allusions, not fully developed symbolically. Passing mention
made of the sea-god Dylan (507), Arlanrod (291), the mist
conjured up by Caswallawn (148), the pigs of Annwn (106, 505)
and the Coranians (2, 12, 15 and others) show an easy famil•
iarity with Welsh mythology which is appropriate to the loca•
tion and period of the novel, and enriches its texture. Some
of the references are more significant, however, and Increase 252
in resonance as the novel proceeds. Such are the references to Pryderi, the "good" god of the south who was killed by the evil magic of the northern god Gwydlon. Powys puts forward a curious theory that the forest people of northern Wales
had acquired crazy and painful and repulsive manias, and had been burdened by insane obligations, because of these old gods of theirs. In place of being a proud memory or a storehouse of fabulous beauty their ancient religion had become for them a dark horrible sensitive bruise lying at the bottom of their soul . . . (389)
The southerners, however, have no such "inbred inhibition" to make them reluctant to think of their gods, for these gods are kinder than "the older, darker, less human deities of the magical north" (390). The distinction between north and south is an interesting one. Certainly, the rulers of southern
Wales in the four branches of the Mablnoglon do appear to be kinder and more just rulers than the crafty Gwydlon and the other potentates of the north. In Porlus Arthur, Merlin and their followers apparently come from the south, and are
identified with a more benign rule than the anarchic warring
of the racial factions in the north would permit. However, the distinction is not developed. It is also curious that
in Porlus the north is "magical," when in Owen Glendower the north was chlvalric and military while the south represented magic and illusion (see above Chapter VII, 202),
The beneficent southern gods Pwyll and his son Pryderi are associated as well with death and the underworld (56, 253
257. 497, 505, 526, 669) * Pwyll's title is Pen Annwn. They are thus to be identified, with Merlin, who like them is a beneficent god from the south defeated, like Pryderi, by magic and trickery ln the north and buried under a mound. Merlin
Is described as "a far more powerful deity than any son of
Pwy11-Pen-Annwn (669), but like Pwyll he too is "Pen Annwn,
Head of Hades" (490). The massive dark head of Merlin which makes Brochvael think of the phrase "Pen Annwn" recalls also the great head of Uryen Quirm. With Uryen, Merlin ln Porius
Is compared as well to Bran the Blessed, another god from the
Mablnoglon associated with the underworld.
The allusions made in Porius to Celtic mythology group themselves, as indeed the classical allusions do as well, around the concept of the otherworld and afterlife, and hence they are mostly associated with the chief representative of that otherworld ln the novel —Myrddin Wyllt or Merlin.
Merlin is the culmination of the prophet figures of all Powys' novels from A Glastonbury Romance onward. Like Uryen Quirm and, to some extent, John Geard, Merlin believes himself to be the reincarnation of some great tormented Being who seeks to release the world from its suffering and to bring It to a knowledge of greater dimensions of life than those which we now know.
Merlin is twice compared to the "corpse god," who figured so largely in Maiden Castle, and he is associated with death and the fungus smell of decay (55, 115» 489, see also Chapter
XV). The theme of death is very important in Porius, but 254
whereas the death-fascination of Mewrawd and Teleri stems from
their hatred of life (570, 615, 621), and that of Cadawg from
resignation (322-23), Merlin defeats or uses death to bring about new life. Although the idea is fundamentally Christian,
Powys rejects the Christian associations of resurrection, yet
employs it nonetheless as the culminating image of his novel.
The "spiritual kiss" of the Jesus-man Drom is repulsive to
Porius, because it denies the possibility of evil or death;
it is contrasted to "the kiss of a corpse-god or deus raortuus whose embrace sucked the life-blood from the tragedy of life"
(599). Against the changeless harmony and unity of the after•
life implied in Drom's kiss of peace, Powys opposes the concept
of the otherworld as it appears in classical and Celtic myth•
ology, capable of variety, suffering and change as is life.
The condition of the entombed Merlin remains mysterious, and
his attitude towards his entombment ambiguous (see 271-72).
Transitions from life to death and from death to life are part
of the many metamorphoses of the novel and culminate in the
resurrection of Merlin who is a great master in both life
and death, this world and the otherworld.
Merlin, Geard, Uryen and, in some ways Owen Glendower, are all endeavouring to bring about the return of a Golden
Age and they all, like the god Bran, conceive of themselves
as the sacrificial bridge between the divided ages. Merlin's
head appears "as if it were the decapitated head of Bendigeit- vran, the head of the never-dying yet eternally dead being, whose destined nature it was to be the ghastly but imperishable 255
medium between the burled past and the new-born future" (^90,
see Owen Glendower, 258).
In order that Individual liberty shall be maintained, it
is necessary for the gods to die. Merlin in the Cave of
Mithras attempts to destroy his own image as Cronos. "The
Golden Age can never come again till governments and rulers and kings and emperors and priests and druids and gods and
devils learn to un-make themselves as I did, and leave men
and women to themselves" (276). In Maiden Castle Uryen
ennunclates a similar theory of dying and resurrected gods of whom he himself Is an incarnation.
I tell you we, I and others like me, are the gods of Mai-Dun — the same yesterday, today and forever. There's no one God, lad. Lay that up in your heart. Things are as they are because there are so many of us; and as fast as some create, others destroy; and a good thing too, as the Son of Chaos cries out in Faust I •Certain masks of life ought to be destroyed, to make room for others; to make room sometimes for those that have lain beneath them for ten thousand years. (Maiden Castle. 250)
Enoch Quirm recognizes in himself the power which animated
the dark god Uryen; Merlin is a reincarnation not so much
of any Welsh god, although he is associated with Pwyll,
Pryderi and Bran, but of the Titan Cronos. Both Merlin and
Uryen are struggling against the reigning "masks of life" in
order to restore what they believe to be greater powers which
have "lain beneath them for ten thousand years."
In the scene of Merlin's rescue Porius feels that "he was re-living an experience he had had long ago when the world 256
was young" (681). By hurling the thunderbolt at the recumbent
Merlin, he is undoing the primal parricidal act of Zeus. As
Merlin heaves himself up from his grave, the eagles of Jupiter
scream away. They are the "Birds of Absolute Power," who
represent the "world of blind authority . . . ruled by one
Caesar, or one God ..." against which Powys has always
exalted the "chance-ridden chaos of souls, none of them with•
out some fellow-feeling, some kindliness ..." (681) of
the pluralistic universe he associates with the reign of Cronos;
his rebellious son Jupiter is the god of the worshippers of
a single authority, a monistic universe. Not one god, but
the many gods and many worlds all "created and destroyed by
the mind" (Maiden Castle, 250) is the vision of Uryen Quirm;
this vision prevails again in Porlus. Its hero comes to
accept Pelagius' doctrine of the absolute liberty and power
of the human imagination (l4l) and determines to serve, of
the many gods, a great one (682).
This great god, which Powys has made of Merlin, is evi•
dently conceived in terms of a metaphysical argument rather
than being a simple attempt to elaborate upon the traditional
figure of Vortigern's soothsayer and Arthur's counsellor.
Certain aspects of Powys' Merlin are taken from Arthurian
tradition, but his role in the Arthurian camp is not stressed.
The harmony between Merlin and the animals is such a tradition,
but it is even more an attribute of Cronos as Saturn, lord
of the Golden Age. Powys stresses that in his fellow-feeling
for the lower forms of life Merlin powerfully desires to bring 257
back this age of peace for the benefit of the "innumerable weak and terrified and unbeautiful and unconsidered and un• protected creatures" of the earth (681). Such an ambition is more suited to the dimensions of the classical god than those of Arthur's magician. Morfydd wonders if Merlin is "only a magician and not a god" (656), but Porius eventually is assured that it is a great god whom he has served (682). In
Powys' concept of Cronos the essential elements are the idea of the Golden Age, and the idea of Cronos as dispossessed by
Zeus and dwelling in an otherworld, awaiting his possible return. Cronos' act against his own father is not made signi• ficant. This is very much the Cronos of "Hyperion 1" Powys writes elsewhere that "I am, in Homer and Heslod and Keats, a 6 great devotee of Saturn or Kronos."
The mythic figure of Cronos or Time is more obviously suited to carry the weight of Powys' metaphysic than is the traditional Merlin: it is interesting to see why Powys should have chosen to associate the two. The suggestion probably came to him from Sir John Rhys who propounds a theory that 7
Merlin is to Vortlgern what Zeus was to Cronos. Given the predisposition towards Merlin evident in A Glastonbury Romance and a predisposition against Zeus as an autocrat, it is not surprising that Powys chose to alter the relationship and to make Merlin himself into Cronos. The figure of Cronos was perhaps additionally intriguing to Powys because of his appearance in the "Hyperion" of Keats, one of Powys' favour• ite poets. There are parallel traditions, remarked by Rhys, 258
about the fates of Merlin and Cronos. Merlin is variously supposed to have been entombed in a tree or cave, or under a great stone, and/or held captive under an enchantment.
Similarly, Cronos was said to be imprisoned under the earth, or held in sleep in the far Western Isles. Plutarch's refer• ence to Cronos sleeping in the isles of Britain appeared in
A Glastonbury Romance, where it was related to the sleep of
Geard in Wookey Hole (342). Given the tradition of Cronos
imprisoned or asleep ln the Western Isles, and a local tradi• tion of a great sleeper buried in a tomb on the peak of Snowdon,
it is not surprising that Powys should identify these figures with Merlin, who came to a similar fate in the same country.
The identification is, however, both powerful and original.
Nonetheless, Powys' depiction of Merlin is not entirely
convincing or satisfying. It has moments of great power, par•
ticularly in the scene where Porius and Rhun first encounter
Merlin by the river in the twilight, and they hear animals
gathering around them and sense "some strange and unusual
excitement" transmitted equally to the human, animal and vegetable worlds" (51-53). The physical presence of Merlin
is also powerfully conveyed. His strength is ingeniously and paradoxically associated with actual collapse, as when he
leans upon Porius (53-61) or crouches to the earth at great
crises (299-306, 475 ff.). But the significance of the figure
of Merlin is largely dissipated by his involvement in the entangled metaphysics of the novel. The second scene of Merlin
in the ferry-boat, where he reflects volubly upon his nature 259
as a reincarnated Cronos, has far less power than the first where he is virtually silent and allows the electric atmosphere and the strange behaviour of the animals to testify to his nature. Powys lacks skill in depicting conversation, and when Merlin drops into a conversational tone the effect destroys
the atmosphere Powys elsewhere creates for him. In Maiden
Castle the contrast between Uryen's mystical oratory and the mundane Interruptions of it was used to excellent satirical
effect, and in A Glastonbury Romance the undercutting of
Geard's prophetic tone by a more prosaic one was so controlled as to enrich rather than destroy his credibility. But whereas
Geard and Uryen are contemporary characters whose claims to
super-humanity are left undecided, Powys demands in Porius
that Merlin be accepted as what he claims to be. The conversa-.
tlons with Neb are incompatible with the image of the resur•
rected deity whirling about beside the bedd-pedryael on top
of Snowdon, or with Cronos pleading with Rhaea for a return
of the Golden Age. Powys' Merlin becomes unconvincing when he
is made to bear too great a weight of metaphysical and mytho•
logical, theory, as in chapters XV and XXIX which are, unfortunately, intended as the climaxes of the novel. At these points the person of Merlin, with his green-black eyes, and his great beard hidden in his cloak, vanishes into the abstractions of a harangue on Time, Space and the tyranny of heaven.
The multiple roles of Merlin in Porius are one instance of what is a basic pattern in the novel -- the pattern of 260
transformation. This pattern is suggested by the repeated
images of Brochvael reading Ovid's Metamorphoses (151, 156,
219, 243, 427). Once again, it is found to be the human
imagination which creates the world and can by its own power bring about its transformation. Erochvael in the Druid's
cave remarks an extraordinary difference between what he had
been given to expect and what he does find.
Neither his mother, the Princess Indeg, nor any of the Modrybedd, had ever given him, nor had perhaps ever possessed, so as to be able to give him, a definite image of what the devout imagination of a thousand years had created. But from it, whatever or wherever it was, radiated the undying influence that had preserved the forest-people's mysterious race-consciousness alive. And now here he was, in this grotesquely unhealthy and absurdly childish hole ln the ground with the water oozing from the cracks of the mossy stones, with a lecherous clown trying to seduce a witch-waif from the Swamp of the Gwyddyl, and with a little bald-headed man, his bowed head over against a couple of chess-players, feeding a smoky fire from a heap of chips! What could a fellow-student of Sidonius of Arverae make of a situation where a creation of popular rumour and old-wive's tales could undergo a meta• morphosis beyond the imagination of any Ovid? (243)
As the human imagination creates and transforms the world
of Porius, many metamorphoses are brought about. Merlin him•
self is a shape-shifter who appears variously as a savage
herdsman, a magician or a prince (89); when Porius holds him,
he has "the feeling he was holding a multitude rather than a
single individual" and has a vision of
the recession backward of the bones under his grasp into those animal-worlds and vegetation-worlds from which they had, it seemed, only yesterday, emerged. And by degrees the figure he was holding grew 261
less self-contained, less buttressed-lh upon himself, and the man's very identity seemed slipping back into the elements. The human frame he held became an organism whose conscious recession into Its primordial beginnings extended far beyond the prophet's temporary existence. It was as if what he held, and what he could so easily have crushed, became a multiple iden• tity composed of many separate lives, the lives of beasts and birds and reptiles, and plants and trees and even rocks and stones! This multiple entity was weak and helpless ln his grasp; and yet it was so much vaster, so much older, so much more enduring than himself that it awed him even while he dominated it. (58-59)
This Protean Merlin, this "huge, composite earth-creature"
(59), brings about one miraculous transformation in the novel.
In the mabinogi of Math there is given the myth of a woman made of flowers and named Blodeuwedd (Flower-face) who is subsequently punished for her infidelity by being turned into an owl. Her punishment is no doubt one of the cruel deeds of the gods of the north which are elsewhere deplored. At the fumeral of Prince Einion, himself famous for his infidelities and also for his Interest in native myths, the fanatical
Christian priest proclaims that "every living creature" and
"every thought, fancy, hope, imagination, desire, purpose, interest in every individual soul" must be "completely bound and chained to Christ" (6^7). In response, Merlin says nothing but draws to himself a great owl which has been passing in disturbed flight over the scene. The priest denounces the creature as "Whore from the beginning of the world!" (654), but Merlin takes it under his cloak, whence it emerges as a beautiful girl or bird-maiden who will be the dream-lover of lonely sleepers. This "new transformation" (657) of 262
Blodeuwedd is seen as a vindication of femininity and eros against the harsh puritanlsm of the local Christian movement (656).
This transformation of Blodeuwedd is the apotheosis of a number of images in the novel whereby human characters are likened to birds. Porius and his thoughts are compared to ravens (3, 4, 5), and Morfydd and her thoughts to caged wild birds (218, 449); Tonwen is a "wild sea-gull" (312) and
Euronwy a mother-bird (655). These bird images are one Instance of the sense of proximity between the human world and the animal and vegetative worlds which prevails in Porlus even more than in the other novels of Powys. Looking into the eyes of
Blodeuwedd, Morfydd feels herself implored by "all the under- layers of earth-life" (657), which Merlin seeks to liberate.
The other great image of transformation is that of life- in-death and death-in-llfe. Many deaths occur during those eight days with which the novel is concerned, and because the novel's world is harsh and violent, death is frequently seen as a liberation (for example, by Cadawg, Medrawt, Teleri and
Brother John). The ghastly figure of the living dead, the
Saxon soldier who reappears to Arthur, seeks release and when he is granted death experiences "unbelievable gratitude and contentment" (365). In this scene there is briefly introduced a suggestion that Arthur has "been dead himself many times" or is used "to being a king among the dead" (364). This implica• tion is never developed, however, and the role of Pen Annwn and resurrected god is left for Merlin. 263
The mythological richness of Porius cannot be fully displayed in the limited space of one chapter. More extended study could be made, for Instance, of Powys' treatment of
Taliessin, Arthur and Medrawt; further parallels could be drawn between classical and Celtic myths; the relationship of the Mithraic and Druidic images to the mythological images could be explored. The major functions of myth in Porius would seem, however, to be what it has been in the novels previously studied: that is, to enrich the novel by suggestions of further dimensions, of parallels and influences and resem• blances, but not to control the shape of the novel through conformity to a recognized pattern. The central mythic sub• ject in Porius is the struggle of Merlin against the auto• cratic religions, his submission to entombment, and his resurrection. But although Merlin provides the novel with some splendid descriptive and dramatic passages, particularly in his first appearance at the river and in his transformation of Blodeuwedd, and with what purports to be a metaphysic at its conclusion, he in no way dominates or gives shape to the book as a whole. Porius' encounter with the giants, Morfydd'.s struggle to find and accept her role, Brochvael's battle with his own inefficacy assume quite as much importance as whether or not Merlin will successfully defend "four" against the proponents of "three," and thus manage to bring back another
Age of Gold.
There is certain disproportion here which, while it can be defended.by Taliessin's insistence that everything is 264
important and that life has no climax nor does it lead any• where, leaves in too much Inconsequence these necessarily major events even while investing with wonderful richness and significance the smaller details. The great mythic event of the novel, Porius' rescue of Merlin in the mist on top of Snowdon, remains abstract and unconvincing. Powys' real powers are seen instead in an earlier rescue of Merlin, which is typical of those details of the novel which give it its extraordinary texture and value.
The emperor's counsellor was in plain truth strugg• ling at that moment under a destiny almost too heavy to endure. ... •Death, death, death, death,' he said to himself; and again the face of the eldest daughter of backward- flowing Ocean, as he had seen it through the ribs of that grey ruin of an ash-tree, returned upon him with a sense of inescapable doom. Suddenly he became aware of a curious sensation upon the knuckles of one of his hands as they rested on the punting-pole. It was half a tickling and half a scraping sensation, and it was accompanied by quite definite scratching on the back of his wrist. Without a movement of any kind, and guarding with exquisite care the very drawing of his breath, he slowly lifted by an infinitesimal degree one of his heavy eyelids. And there, curled up upon the back of his hand, its hind feet steadying its cold, wet, plump body, was a bright-eyed water-rat, assiduously and with absorbed and intense concentration licking his knuckle. An incredible feeling of warmth rushed through him. Starting from the determined motion of that small tongue, it suffused itself through the whole of his body. It revived his brain. It comforted his heart. It steadied his nerves. 'So you water-rat,' he thought, 'you alone of all my creatures have dared to disobey me I For this disobedience may your children and your children's children, even unto the third and fourth generation, have luck upon luck upon luck in finding their food and safety beyond safety from all their enemies I' As cautiously as he had lifted it, he let his eyelid fall again so that thick darkness covered him. But the darkness that covered him now, though it accepted 265
death, and included death, and in a sense was it were death, seemed to be so permeated by the sensation of satisfaction under the licking of that tiny tongue and under the precise balancing of that cold wet plump body, that it sufficed as an answer . . . from all the doomed creatures of earth to the eldest daughter of backward-flowing Oceanus. (285-86) 266
Chapter Eight: Footnotes
1 W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 219. 2 John Cowper Powys: Letters to Glyn Hughes, ed. Bernard Jones (Stevenage, Herts.: Ore Publications, 1971), p. 14.
3 W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems, p. 223.
It is curious that Powys, who is elsewhere sympathetic to his evangelical Christians such as Sam Dekker and Walter Brut, should here make both the fanatical priest and the insidious "Jesus-man" Drom such unattractive figures.
^ Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson, 1935- 1956, ed. Louis Wilkinson (London: Macdonald, 1958), p. 346.
6 Ibid., p. 319.
Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, p. 152. 26?
Chapter Nine
Conclusion
The intimate relationship between landscape and myth in
Powys' novels, the way in which the topography and the tradi• tions which form the background of the human drama are gathered together and concentrated into a "symbolic unity," has been traced through five representative novels. Many of the same techniques and attitudes towards the handling of landscape and myth appear in several or all of the novels, although
certain changes and developments are also noticeable. The emphasis upon the atmospheric quality of the landscape and its.
influence upon man, the weighting of particular spots with symbolic importance, the rich sense of the variety within animate and inanimate nature and of the layers of the human past to be found in any locality, and the use of mythological allusion to extend the dimensions of a character, are perma• nent characteristics of Powys' fiction. The frequency and
complexity with which they are used may vary, but the methods are consistent and recognizable.
On the other hand, it is not surprising to find that
some aspects of Powys' treatment of landscape and myth do alter considerably during the forty-five years between the publication of his first and last novels. One noticeable tendency in Powys' fiction is for what are essentially figures of speech in the early and major novels to become actual people and places ln the later ones. The gates to Annwn, and the 268
underworld itself, are metaphors for a dimension of spiritual experience in A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle, but in
Morwyn and Porius they become places to be visited by the characters of the book. Thus there is a development from the realistic, regional landscape tradition of Hardy and his fol• lowers, in which the symbolic significance of landscape was always controlled by the appearance of fidelity to an actual scene, to the surreal landscape of fantasy and science fiction in which Hades, the Sun or the Back of the North Wind may be visited as readily as Weymouth or Corwen were.1
The characters of Powys' novels undergo a similar transi• tion from realism to fantasy. In one instance, a feature of the landscape Itself literally comes to lifei in Wolf Solent and The Brazen Head the Cerne Giant is a landmark, albeit that the surrounding area is influenced by the phallic potency of this chalk figure. But in All or Nothing the Giant leaves his hill and becomes an active character. In this last fan• tasy also, the concept of Space is personified into a monster with an enormous mouth, while a dream is an active personality named Lorra. Similarly, the mythological dimensions of the characters expand from the early to the late novels, until eventually the dramatis personae literally are the mythic figures which in earlier books they only suggested. The people of a novel like Wood and Stone are, though more cosmo• politan and 'humourous' than those of Hardy, credible villagers more or less realistically conceived. In A Glastonbury Romance and other novels of the middle period, identification of the 269
characters with mythological personages is implied, but never made explicit. In Porlus and the last works the transition is complete, for the mythological personages themselves become characters in the novel. For example, there is just a sugges• tion in A Glastonbury Romance of a parallel between Geard and
Cronos, and also a hint of Geard's relationship to Merlin and
Arthur; in Maiden Castle Uryen believes and asserts that he is a reincarnation of the god Bran (who is himself a version of Cronos, according to Rhys, Powys and Uryen); finally, in
Porius chief characters are Merlin/Cronos and Arthur in proprlae personae.
The enchanter Merlin and his fatal Nineue, the tragic and heroic Arthur, and the great god Cronos asleep under the earth
-- such mythological figures impressed themselves on Powys' mind very early, and are worked in various forms into much of his fiction. Mountain-top perspectives, underground caves and conical hills are some of the similarly powerful landscape images which his imagination recreated again and again. Like
Wordsworth's, Powys* imagination seems to have been shaped in childhood by certain powerful impressions which haunt him and recur in his work throughout his life. He finds, as Wordsworth did, much more in the natural landscape of his childhood experience than a prosaic, material reality.
. . . huge and mighty Forms that do not live Like living men moved slowly through my mind By day and were the trouble of my dreams. (Prelude. I, 425-27) 270
And like Wordsworth, Powys draws largely upon the memory of impressions of nature received in childhood and youth to recreate the landscapes of his boyhood in his mature work, under an intense, almost transfiguring, light.
To get back that laurel-axe from that garden spinney at Shirley would now be to get back the full magic power of that timeless fetish-worship by the strength of which the quaintest, most ordinary object — a tree-stump, a pile of stones, a pool by the roadside, and and ancient chimney-stack —. can become an Ark of the Covenant, evocative of the music of the spheres'. (Autobiography, 3)
. . . what ever it is it endows the sands of the sea and the grasses of the field with an enchanted light, and it reveals this world as a place where lobworms and newts have souls, and where the Inanimate has a disturbing porousness and transparency. (Autobiography, 56)
Powys' "timeless fetish-worship," his sensation that the landscape has a kind of life and spiritual significance, under• lies all his fiction, whether the mode be fantastic or real• istic. Forces within the landscape of Mood and Stone have as much influence upon the action of the book as does the animate
Cerne Giant in All or Nothing. Powys' apprehension of the personality of landscape expresses itself in various ways — in direct or metaphorical forms of animism, in theories about racial and regional influences, in his concern with the indi• vidual and unique atmospheric qualities of particular localities, as well as in more straightforward landscape description.
This sense conveyed by Powys' landscapes, of being in some way animate and an active force in the lives of his 271
characters, is very closely related to his fascination with mythology. It is at least partially the associations of their human past which give the landscapes their "almost personal" 2 quality. In writing of the attitude of primitive cultures towards natural features, Joseph Campbell notes how mythology affects the way man sees landscape. "For a culture still nurtured in mythology the landscape, as well as every phase of human existence, is made alive with symbolical suggestion."-^
While Powys' "fetishism" is not primitive but deliberate and self-conscious, it is nonetheless a very genuine element of his experience; in the Autobiography he stresses the importance of the child's capacity to discover ln apparently Insignifi• cant inanimate objects "that element in life that might be called 'inscrutable ecstacy'" (Autobiography, 5).
In Powys' best work, the mythology which animates his landscapes is indigenous to the locality, and therefore the union of landscape and myth is both most natural and most powerful. This is pre-eminently the case in A Glastonbury
Romance, where character, topography and legend are fused into a complex and satisfying work of art. While this fusion is less complete ln the other novels, the dimensions suggested by the mythological allusions, and the sense of being rooted in a deeply-appreciated locality which the landscape background conveys, undeniably work together to create the rich and unique character of Powys' fiction.
Many poets, novelists and critics have described John
Cowper Powys as one of the major novelists of the twentieth 2?2
century: Angus Wilson asserts "there is little doubt that he will stand with James, Lawrence and Joyce in the eyes of future literary critics." While such a claim for his stature is based largely upon Powys' remarkable psychological insights, the unique strength of his art can be seen in the way that the landscape participates in the psychological and meta• physical conflicts of the novels. In this respect Powys stands with Lawrence and Hardy, although his methods are quite different from theirs. The sentience of Powys' land• scapes is more than a poetic exaggeration; it is a force even more potent in his novels than in those of Hardy and Lawrence.
Powys' intensely subjective landscapes are characteristically seen through a haze or mist which obscures their outlines and which represents the mist of personal associations and emo• tional reactions in which objects are always shrouded for
Powys' characters.
The resemblances to Joyce are most evident in A Glaston• bury Romance, a novel which embraces the variety of human experience as Ulysses does, through relating contemporary events in terms of a major myth of our culture. Like the mature Joyce, Powys has a rich humour, a wide-ranging curi• osity about human psychology, and a great tolerance for the manias and weakness of his characters. But whereas ir.
Ulysses there is a close equation between the episodes of the Odyssey and those of the novel, in Powys the mythic dimension is rooted not in episodic parallels but in the intrinsic relationship between the legends and the local 273
landscape. Suggestions of supernatural communication between figures from the Arthurian past and Powys' contemporary char• acters (notably in the episodes where John Crow sees King
Arthur's Sword and Geard struggles with the spirit of Merlin) further distinguish Powys' handling of myth from Joyce's, and link it instead with the occultism of Charles Williams in a novel like Many Dimensions. Powys' material is more diffuse than Williams; and is not held together by any fundamental adherence to orthodox doctrine. But the mingling of contem• porary, deceased and legendary characters in a landscape charged with subjectivity and symbolism is skillfully achieved by both novelists.
In all these novels of Powys, landscape and myth interact with each other to increase the resonance of what is happen• ing in the lives and minds of the characters. Their landscapes are essentially landscapes of the mind; the mythic figures which pass through them are archetypes of spiritual experience.
The significance of these novels is rarely, if ever, of the topical, social sort which makes them readily accessible to the contemporary reader. Powys* novels extend beyond a concern with human nature to a kind of cosmic vision, a vision which rejoices both in the microcosm of the details of nature and in the macrocosm of the imaginative patterns of mythology. 27^
Chapter Nine : Footnotes
Powys referred to Up and Out as "a sort of Mythical skit on the Space-adventure Tales of today's fashion." (letters to Louis Wilkinson, pp. 348-49).
2 See the quotation from Suspended Judgements, above, p.
3 Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand faces (1949; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1956), p. 43.
Angus Wilson, "'Mythology' in John Cowper Powys' Novels Review of English Literature IV Nal (January 1963), 9. 2?5
A Selected Bibliography
Notei Derek Langridge in John Cowper Powys: a Record of Achieve• ment , with the additions included as Appendix II in Essays on John Cowper Powys, ed. B. Humfrey, has compiled an almost complete bibliography of the published works of J.C. Powys, reviews and critical studies on him. As this comprehensive bibliography is easily accessible, only the works which have been particularly relevant in the preparation of this thesis are cited below, includ• ing a few items not mentioned by Langridge. In addition, this bibliography lists some of the more useful sources and references for the study of Powys' use of myth and landscape.
Alcock, Leslie. Arthur's Britain: History and Archaeology A D 367-634. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1971.
Arnold, Matthew. On the Study of Celtic Literature. 186?; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1903.
Ashe, Geoffrey, et al. The Quest for Arthur's Britain. London: Praeger, 1968.
. King Arthur's Avalon: the Story of Glastonbury. London: Collins, 1957.
Barres, Maurice. La Colllne Inspiree. 1912; rpt. Le Livre de Poche, no date or place given.
Bentley, Phyllis. The English Regional Novel. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941.
Berry, Francis. "J.C. Powys and Romance." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 179 - 188.
Brebner, John. "The Anarchy of the Imagination." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 263 - 284.
_. "Owen Glendower: The Pursuit of the Fourth Dimension." Anglo-Welsh Review 18 no. 42 (Winter 1970), 207 - 216.
Erengle, Richard L. Arthur, King of Britain: History, Romance, Chronicle and Criticism. New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1964.
Bridgewater, Patrick. Nietzsche in Anglosaxony: A Study of Nietzsche's Impact on English and American Literature. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972. 2?6
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. 1949; rpt. New Yorkt Meridian, 1956.
Cavaliero, Glen. "John Cowper Powys: Landscape and Personality in the Early Novels." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 85 - 102.
. "On the Frontier: John Cowper Powys." Theology, Sept. 1961, pp. 368 - 372. . "Wolf Solent." Paper read before the Powys Society, London, May 25, 1968.
Chambers, E.K. Arthur of Britain. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1927.
Clark, Kenneth. Landscape Into Art. London: Murray, 1950.
Collins, H.P. John Cowper Powys: Old Earth Man. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1966.
. "The Largest Powys." Anglo-Welsh Review, 21 no. 48 (Winter, 1972) 180 - 18?.
. "The Sands Do Not Run Out." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 205 - 218.
Coombes, Harry. T.F. Powys. London: Barrie and Rockliff, I960.
Cumont, Franz. The Mysteries of Mlthra. Trans, from the 2nd rev. French ed. by Thomas J. McCormack. 2nd Ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1910.
Darby, H.C. "The Regional Geography of Thomas Hardy's Wessex." Geographical Review, 38 (1948), 426 - 443. de Wet, Oloff. "Nomen Laude Dlgnum." Maga (Blackwood's Magazine), July, 1968.
Drew, Elizabeth A. The Modern Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926*^
Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909 - 1962. London: Faber, I963.
Elwin, Malcolm. "John Cowper Powys and His Publishers." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 285 - 294
. The Life of Llewelyn Powys. London: John Lane, 1946. 277
Fernandez, Diane. "Whiteness." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 103 - 114. Fogel, Stanley Howard. Theme as Structure In Three Novels of John Cowper Powys. Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1970.
Garlick, Raymond. "Editorial Note on John Cowper Powys.* Dock Leaves, 7 (1956), 1.
. Towys in Gwynedd : the last years." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiffs University of Press, 1972, pp. 299 - 310.
Going, M.E.M. J.C. Powys1 Novelist. Unpublished Ph D Disser• tation, University of Michigan, 1953.
Gosse, Edmund. Father and Son. 1907? rpt. London: Penguin, 1970.
Govan, P.E. "The Powys Family." Sewanee Review, 46 (January 1938), 74 - 90.
Greenwald, Michael. "Powys' Complex Vision." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 57-84.
Gruffydd, W.J. Folklore and Myth in the Mablnoglon. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1958. :
Guest, Charlotte, trans, and ed. The Mablnoglon. London: Dent, 1902.
Hanley, James. "The Man In the Corner." Dock Leaves, 7 (1956), 2-7.
Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. I8785 rpt. New York: Norton, I969.
. "A Tryst ln an Ancient Earthwork." A Changed Man and Other Stories. London: Macmillan, 1913. Hentschel, Cedric. "John Cowper Powys and the 'Gretchen- cult.'" Studla Neophlloglca, 14 -(1941), 91 - 104.
Hewitt, Christian Blanchard. The Novels of John Cowper Powys. Unpublished Ph D Dissertation. Boston University, I96I.
Hooker, Jeremy. "Welsh Ambassador." Planet, 12 (June/July 1972), 64 - 69. 278
. "'A Touch of Caricature': The Autobiography of John Cowper Powys." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, PP. ^7 - 56. Hopkins, Kenneth. The Powys Brothers: a Biographical Appreci• ation . London: Phoenix House, 1967.
Hopkins, R. Thurston. Thomas Hardy's Dorset. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1922.
Humfrey, Belinda. Ed. and Introduction. Essays on John Cowper Powys. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 17 - 46.
Hyman, Timothy. "The Modus Vivendi of John Cowper Powys." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 123 - 148.
. "Powys' 'World Book.'" Paper read to the Powys Society, London, June 6, 1970.
Jeff ares, A.N. ^Editorial.0* Review of English Literature, 4 (Jan., I963), 7-8.
Jones, Bernard. "Style and the Man." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. Bi Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 149 - 178.
Jones, Gwyn and Jones, Thomas, trans, and ed. The Mablnogion. London: Everyman's Library, 1949.
Jung, Carl G., ed. Man and His Symbols. New York: Doubleday, 1964.
Jung, Emma and von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Grail Legend. Trans. Andrea Dykes. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971.
Knight, G. Wilson. "Lawrence, Joyce and Powys." Essays in Criticism, 11, iv (Oct. 1961), 403 - 4l?.
. Neglected Powers: Essays on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.
. "Owen Glendower." Review of English Literature, 4 (Jan. 1963), 41 - 52.
. "Powys on Death." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, .1972, pp. 189 - 204. •
. The Saturalan Quest: A Chart of the Prose Works of John Cowper Powys. London: Methuen, 1965. 279
Langridge, Derek. John Cowper Powys: A Record of Achievement. Londoni The Library Association, 1966.
Leclaire, Lucien. Le roman r£gionallste dans les Ils Britan- nloues 1800 - 1950. Paris: Soci<§t<§ d' Edition 'Les Belles Lettres,' 1954. Lloyd, J.C. A History of Wales. Trans. H. Idris Bell. Oxford: Clarendon, 1955.
Loomis, R.S. Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1927.
. Wales and the Arthurian Legend. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1956. MacCana, Proinsias. Celtic Mythology. London: Hamlyn, 1970.
MacCulloch, J.A. The Regllglon of the Ancient Celts. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1911.
Malory, Thomas. Works. Ed..Eugene Vlnaver. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
Mathias, Roland. "Gwlad - yr - haf." Dock Leaves. ? (1956) 20 - 29. "
. The Sacrificial Prince: A Study of Owen Glendower." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed, B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 233 - 262.
Mayne, Ellen "The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys." Thirteenth Foundation Lecture, New Atlantis Foundation, Richmond, Surrey, 1968.
Miller, Henry. The Books ln My Life. London: Peter Owen, 1952.
. "The Immortal 3ard." Review of English Literature, 4 (Jan. 1963), 21 - 24. Miles, Gwyneth. "John Cowper Powys: Landscape, Romance and the Regional Novel," Paper read to the Powys Society, London, October 23, 1972.
. "The Pattern of Homecoming." Essays on John Cowper Powys. Ed. B. Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, pp. 209 - 232.
Nutt, Alfred. Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail. London: Publications of the Folk-Lore Society. XXIII, 1888. 230
Parry, Thomas. A History of Welsh Literature. Trans, and with an appendix on the twentieth century by H. Idris Bell. Oxford» Clarendon Press, 1955.
Powell, T.G.W. The Celts. Londoni Thames & Hudson, 1958.
Powys, John Cowper. All or Nothing. London: Macdonald, I960.
. Atlantis. London: Macdonald, 1954.
. Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934.
. The Brazen Head. London: Macdonald, 1956.
. Ducdame. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1925.
. A Glastonbury Romance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 193^
. A Glastonbury Romance. New edition, with a preface by the author. London: Macdonald, 1955. . "The Hamadryad and the Demon." Reprinted in The Powys Newsletter II, 1971. Hamilton, N.Y., Colgate University Press.
. Homer and the Aether. London: Madconald, 1959.
. The Inmates. London: Macdonald, 1952.
. Jobber Skald. London * The Bodley Head, 1934. Published in America as Weymouth Sands, with original place names, and republished in England as Weymouth Sands, London: Macdonald, 1963.
. John Cowper Powys: A Selection From His Poems. Ed. Kenneth Hopkins. London: Macdonald, 1964. ~
. Letters from John Cowper Powys to Glyn Hughes. Ed. Bernard Jones. Stevenage, Herts.: Ore Publications, 1971.
. Letters from John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson 1935 - 1956. Ed. Louis Wilkinson. London: Macdonald,
. Lucifer. London: Macdonald, 1956.
. Maiden Castle. 1936; rpt. London: Macdonald, I966.
. The Meaning of Culture. New York: Norton, 1929.
. Morwyn; Or The Vengeance of God. London: Cassell, 1937. 281
. Obstinate Cymric: Essays 1935 - 47. Carmarthen: Druid
Press, 1947. '•
. One Hundred Best Books. New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1916.
. Owen Glendower: An Historical Novel. 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940. . The Owl. The Duck, And — Miss Rowel Miss Rowe'. Chicago: William Targ, 1930. . The Pleasures of Literature. London: Cassell, 1938.
. Porlus: A Romance of the Dark Ages. London: Macdonald, 1951. A typescript containing many passages cancelled from the published version of Porlus is in the collection of Mr. E.E. Bissell, of Ashorne, Warwickshire, and was consulted during the preparation of this thesis.
. Rabelais: His Life. The Story Told by Him, Selections Therefrom Here Newly Translated, And An Interpretation of His Genius and His Religion. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1948.
. The Religion of a Sceptic. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925.
. Rodmoor: A Romance. New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1916.
. Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations. New York: G. Arnold Shaw, 1916. . Syllabus of a course of six lectures on Shelley and Keats. 1906 - 19~0T. Ocford: Horace Hart, no date given. . Syllabus of a Short Course of Six Lectures on the Study of Poetry Introductory to the Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: University Press, 1900.
. Up and Out. London: Macdonald, 1957.
. Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions. 1915s rpt. London: Macdonald, 1955.
. Weymouth Sands: A Novel. 1934; rpt. London: Macdonald, 1963.
. Wolf Solent: A Novel. 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929.
. Wood and Stone: A Romance. New York: G. Arnold Shaw,
191—
Powys, Littleton. The Joy of It. London: Chapman and Hall, 1937. 282
. "The Powys Family". Welsh Review (Spring, 1948) 3-19.
. Still the Joy of It. London: Macdonald, 1956.
Powys, Llewelyn. The Letters of Llewelyn Powys. Sel. and ed. Louis Wilkinson. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1943.
Priestley, J.B. "The Happy Introvert." Review of English Literature. 4 (Jan. I963), 25 - 32.
Pritchett, V.S. "The Mysteries of John Cowper Powys." New- Statesman , April 2, 1965.
Rees, Alwyn and Bees, Brinley. Celtic Heritage: Ancient Trad• ition in Ireland and Wales. London: Thames and Hudson, 1961.
Rees, William. An Historical Atlas of Wales from Early to Modern Time's^ 3rd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1967.
Reid, Margaret J.C. The Arthurian Legend: a comparison of treatment ln modern and medieval literature. A study In the literary value of myth and legend. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1938.
Rhys, John. Celtic Britain. London: S.P.C.K., 1908.
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. Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom. The Hibbert Lectures, 1886. London: Williams and Norgate, 1888.
_. Studies In the Arthurian Legend. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891. '
Robillard, Douglas. "Landscape with Figures: The Early Fiction of John Cowper Powys." Studies in the Literary Imagination 1, ii (1968) 51 - 58.
Rolleston, T.W. Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race. London: Harrap, 1912.
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Skene, William F., trans and ed. The Four Ancient Books of Wales. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 196*8. 283
Smith, Morine Baldwinson. The Magician Figure in the Novels of John Cowper Powys. M.A. Thesis, Carleton University,
Squire, Charles. The Mythology of Ancient Britain and Ireland. Londoni Archibald Constable, 1906.
Starr, Nathan Comfort. King Arthur Today. Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1954.
Stevenson, Lionel. The History of the English Novel. General ed. E.A. Baker. Vol. XI, New Yorki Barnes and Noble, 1968.
Sullivan, Harry Richards. The Elemental World of John Cowper Powys. Unpublished Ph D Dissertation, University of Georgia, 1959.
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1