The Ecological Imagination of John Cowper Powys: Writing, 'Nature', and the Non-Human
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The Ecological Imagination of John Cowper Powys: Writing, 'Nature', and the Non-human Michael Stephen Wood Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English September 2017 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his/her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2017 The University of Leeds and Michael Stephen Wood The right of to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Acknowledgements Thanks are due, first and foremost, to Dr. Fiona Becket for her unswerving belief and encouragement. This thesis would not have been possible without the support of Stuart Wood, Susan Bayliss, Elaine Wood, Paul Shevlin, and Jessica Foley, all of whom have my love and gratitude. Further thanks are due to Dr. Emma Trott, Dr. Frances Hemsley, Dr. Ragini Mohite, Dr. Hannah Copley, and Dr. Georgina Binnie for their friendship and support, and to Kathy and David Foley for their patience in the final weeks of this project. Thanks to Adrienne Sharpe of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for facilitating access to Powys’s correspondence with Dorothy Richardson. I am indebted to everyone in the Leeds School of English who has ever shared a conversation with me about my work, and to those, too numerous to mention, whose teaching has helped to shape my work and thinking along the way. The community in the School has made my time here a pleasure and I am proud to have been a part of it. A final word of thanks is due to the many students whose enthusiasm and intelligence made teaching a further joy. Abstract This thesis seeks to explore and demonstrate the ecological imagination of John Cowper Powys. Dismissals of Powys as a naïve worshipper of a received, Romantic concept of nature demand to be updated by a contemporary and on-going greening of modernist studies. Powys’s fictions are marked by an attentiveness to the non-human that is developed by looking through, and beyond, localised human perspectives; the result is a poetics that seeks to ground the human, materially and experientially, in nature understood as material reality. Drawing on both the more familiar Wessex novels—Wolf Solent (1929) and A Glastonbury Romance (1932)—as well as the less discussed discursive writings and Porius (1951), this thesis will show how Powys’s fictions present complex, polyphonic, and often contradictory fictional worlds in which surprisingly modern insights and epistemologies jostle against, and indeed, cross-fertilise with, more traditional literary forms and devices. In Powys’s writing, modernistic experiments with novelistic form and content are variously inflected by a romance-inspired literary consciousness that seeks to transgress the human’s localised perspective through overt expenditures of imaginative license. Exploring how Powys’s fictions record, and respond to, a variety of forms of what Powys calls ‘Nature’—discursive, poetic, material—this thesis will show how Powys’s writing shapes, and is shaped by, an ethical sensibility towards non-human forms and forces. Particular attention will be paid, throughout, to his experimentation with scale and perspective, and to the looming and recurring figure of the Earth, through which his later fiction, particularly, seeks to ground not only human life, but a sense of human and non-human community. Table of Contents Abbreviation of John Cowper Powys’s Writings ...................................................... 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 2 I: Imagination and the Ecological Consciousness ....................................................................... 2 II: Versions of ‘Nature’ ................................................................................................................... 9 III: Romance and Literary Experiment .......................................................................................18 IV: Chapter Overview ...................................................................................................................24 Chapter One: Locating the Place of the Discursive Writings in a Powysian Ecopoetics........................................................................................................................... 29 I: Powys’s ‘life-technique’: Instructions to the Reader ............................................................39 II: Powys’s First Aesthetic Principle: The ‘Poetical’ ...............................................................47 III: Powys’s Second Aesthetic Principle: The ‘Beautiful’ .......................................................55 IV: A ‘pluralist and animist metaphysics’ ..................................................................................61 Chapter Two: Dramatising Rural Regeneration: Wolf Solent’s Modernist Romance ............................................................................................................................. 80 I: Psychological Pastoral ...............................................................................................................87 II: Modernist Romance—an ‘enchanted’ country? ...................................................................98 III: Narrating Origins ................................................................................................................ 109 IV: ‘a queer and quite special sense of romance’ ................................................................... 118 V: Wonder and the Non-human ................................................................................................ 126 Chapter Three: ‘A great modern novel consists of and ought to include just everything!’: ‘Interminable’ Creativity in A Glastonbury Romance .............. 138 I: ‘How can a spot, or region, or locality, be treated psychologically?’ ............................. 146 II ‘A Freak at a Fair’ ................................................................................................................... 157 III: ‘[M]aking the spot itself the real hero or heroine of the tale’ ........................................ 169 IV: Naturalist Romance ............................................................................................................. 182 Chapter Four: ‘Nature’, Matter, and Planetary Community in Porius ......... 196 I: ‘This ever receding landscape & mirage (reality & unreality!)’ ...................................... 201 II: Language, Power, Identity.................................................................................................... 213 III: ‘Natural freedom’; “natural” order .................................................................................... 222 IV: The Earth and Planetary Community ................................................................................ 235 Conclusion: Powysian Ecological Consciousness ............................................... 247 Appendix: Postscript from John Cowper Powys to Dorothy Richardson, Aug 23, 1944, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Dorothy Richardson Collection .......................................................................................................................... 253 1 Abbreviation of John Cowper Powys’s Writings A: Autobiography AF: After My Fashion AR: ‘Glastonbury: “Author’s Review”, 1932’ AT: Atlantis CV: The Complex Vision D: Dostoievsky DS: In Defence of Sensuality GR: A Glastonbury Romance ISO: In Spite Of LDR: The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Dorothy Richardson LL: The Letters of John Cowper Powys to his Brother Llewelyn LLW: The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson, 1934-1956 MAC: Maiden Castle MC: The Meaning of Culture OC: Obstinate Cymric OG: Owen Glendower P: Porius PS: A Philosophy of Solitude VR: Visions and Revisions WES: Weymouth Sands WS: Wolf Solent 2 Introduction I: Imagination and the Ecological Consciousness On February the fourteenth, 1930, while undertaking preparatory reading for the novel that was to become A Glastonbury Romance (1932), John Cowper Powys recorded an experience from his morning walk in his diary: I came to one tree like an oak in its bark and with snow on it where the leaves were distinctly in bud when you saw them against patches of blue in the sky. [...] As I touched this tree and looked at those buds I got for one second the feeling of continuity of human life on the earth and had that unselfish sensation (‘twas but for a second), pardi! of sharing it, sharing a stream of life on the earth (human and non-human too) so unconquered and resilient that no evil, no misery, no death could stop its course!1 Just over two months later, Powys returned to this ‘non-human’ element as he set pen to paper: ‘I have begun my Glastonbury Book. May I be inspired by all the spirits of all the hills and of all stones upon all hill-sides and upon all plains raised up above sea level’.2 If such language is immediately suggestive of what Fiona Becket has described as Powys’s ‘“green” credentials’,3 it also perhaps indicates how his discursive style—with its mythic, even mystical, turn of phrase and liberal usage of the exclamation mark—may have contributed to the way in which