The Powys Review, 26, 1991

The Powys Review NUMBER TWENTY-SIX The Powys Review Editor Belinda Humfrey Reviews Editor Paul Bennett Morgan Advisory Board Marius Buning, Department of English, Free University, Amsterdam, Netherlands Glen Cavaliero, St Catherine's College, Cambridge T. J. Diffey, School of Cultural and Community Studies, University of Sussex Peter Easingwood, Department of English, University of Dundee Michel Gresset, Department of English, Paris VII University, France Ian Hughes, Department of English, Normal College, Bangor, N. Wales Ben Jones, Department of English, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Charles Lock, Department of English, University of Toronto, Canada Ned Lukacher, Department of English, University of Illinois at Chicago, U.S.A. J. Lawrence Mitchell, Department of English, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, U.S.A. Elmar Schenkel, Department of English, University of Freiburg, W. Germany Correspondence, contributions, and books for review may be addressed to the Editor, Department of English, Saint David's University College, Lampeter, Dyfed, SA48 7ED. Copyright ©, The Editor We are grateful to Mr Francis-Powys and Laurence Pollinger Ltd., for permission to quote from the writings of John Cowper Powys and T. F. Powys, and to the late Mrs Evelyn Elwin for permission to quote from the writings of Llewelyn Powys. The Powys Review may be obtained from Booksellers for £3.75, or from Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed, for £3.75 plus 75p postage. The Powys Review is printed by J. D. Lewis & Sons Ltd., Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed. ISSN 0309-1619 Contents John Williams Reviews T. F. Powys: Absence and Exile in Innocent Birds 3 Charles Doyle Richard Aldington: A Biography J. S. Rodman PETER MILES 61 Plotting Wolf Solent 10 Gerard Casey Echoes Janina Nordius JOHN WILLIAMS 62 Behind the Pigsty: On the Duplicity of Solitude in Wolf Solent 19 Kim Taplin Tongues in Trees: Studies in Literature H. W. Fawkner and Ecology Atlanticism: John Cowper Powys MICHAEL BELL 63 and Mineralogy 29 Lionel Gossman Ernst Verbeek Between History and Literature R. C. RICHARDSON John Cowper Powys: 64 Tempting the Gods 40 Charles Hobday Edgell Rickword. A Poet at War Susan Rands GORDON WILLIAMS 65 John Cowper Powys's The Inmates, an Allegory 49 Belinda Humfrey, ed. John Cowper Powys's 'Wolf Solent": Critical Studies Carys Richards, Some Recollections GLEN CAVALIERO 66 of Phyllis Playter 59 Letter to the Editor: Timothy Hyman 60 Notices: Den otidsenlige och den aktuelle: John Cowper Powys 1872-1963: Sven Eric Tackmarks specialsamling: BH 69 Notes on Contributors 69 The Powys Review Number 26 1991 Volume VIHii John Williams T. F. Powys: Absence and Exile in Innocent Birds Absence and exile are themes which find same time an act of annihilation. Annihilation their place in most if not all of Theodore is redefined as a triumph, an idea that Powys's novels. Powys himself often should not seem so very bizarre for the emerges from his text as a person sharing in Christian pondering the way in which Christ's the sense of futility experienced by his ministry appeared to be collapsing in ruins bereaved characters. He either declares or as he deliberately allowed himself to be reveals himself to be profoundly alienated crucified. from a world dominated by greedy, selfish, When we turn from Powys's victims, the hypocritical, lecherous individuals who outsiders and exiles, to the mass of humanity, manipulate the weakness of other individ- death is there perceived as anything but uals or groups: "Must everyone here on triumphant annihilation. So attached to this earth be either ordering or obeying, stealing life are most of us, that we construct a model or giving, blessing or cursing?" (SH 13). of the afterlife which effectively guarantees Thus we have self satisfied, proud clergymen, the continuation of this life into the next. It is squires and city fathers; the ignorant, our tombs, and not just those of the ancient boorish working classes, "... a mass of Egyptians, that are full of the bric-a-brac of a screaming beasts", he calls them in Father material existence, marking our poor Adam, "a wild medley . of uncontrolled attempts to persuade ourselves that we are passions, crushed and crammed together" never really going to leave it. This is "the (FA 10); and a materialistic bourgeoisie, all stagnation of immortality" that Powys des- of whom dance to a tune they none of them cribes with such loathing in Soliloquies of a understand. Hermit (113). In Innocent Birds we have Miss The characters with whom we are invited Pettifer convinced that Jesus, 'With a little of to sympathise are the victims, the deceived, her training", would "learn to cook her the outsiders, the 'wise fools' like Mark heavenly rasher as she liked it done best, and Only (MO 23), who in his way is also an also to answer the door to her friends and to exile, " 'My home be up on these hills, when wait at table in her mansion above." (IB 95) I bain't down in horses' stable ... 'Tis down Miss Pettifer, of course, is particularly taken in village that I be made a fool of.' " (MO with the way in which Christ's role as a 31). Often the triumph of these people rests servant receives due emphasis in the Gospels. on the fact that in the end they choose, The dominating presence of death in deliberately and determinedly, to turn their Powys's novels is in fact a device which serves backs on this existence. Death in such cir- to focus a more positive meditation upon how cumstances is claimed as an attainment of a to live. For the outsider to survive in this "great joy" (JP 90) which we cannot begin world, most if not all the expectations and fully to understand. The wisdom of the ambitions which have been implanted in our outsider lies within the paradox that the minds from our earliest years, and which most complete affirmation of self is at the make life attractive, must be discarded. We need to recognise that we have created God in "This article is based on a paper delivered to the Powys our own image, the image of man, and man is Society at Cirencester 1990. My thanks to members for a lively discussion which has resulted in some of course fallen. We worship power, money, additions to the original text. JW status and work, and in so doing we have 4 T.F. Powys Absence and Exile in Innocent Birds created a language, more properly a structure could quietly hate her neighbours in the road of rhetoric, which implicitly privileges that ... and thank the good God for creating a profoundly inverted, perverted God of life. pretty place called Hell, and a pretty person Here lies the basis of Powys's humour; the called the devil" (IB 7): technique for revealing this hypocrisy is Miss Pettifer attended church, as every woman irony, and it works with particular effect in does who believes in established gentility, and the case of the labourers he describes. The whose shoes are not too down at heel. When poorest and most abject of these figures do in Miss Pettifer thought of God, she thought of fact live in what might ironically be termed a Him as a Father who showed His temper to the 'Godless' state. They have no power, money, wicked, His enemies, in very much the same or status, and not infrequently they are at the sort of way as she did herself at breakfast time, point of being worked to a standstill. All that and who would be sure to always keep His good remains—and they cling to it—is the rhetoric, things for Miss Pettifer. (94) and in their attempts to use it they remain States of absence and exile will consequently minimally, comically attached to a life which occur repeatedly in Powys's novels, and reduces them, like William Spokes in Father Innocent Birds is no exception. The novel Adam, to not much more than a piece of mud begins with an emphasis on absence. thrown against a wall (FA 48). Chapter One tells of how many of the We have to remember, of course, that the familiar inhabitants of Madder village are bereft condition of William Spokes, John now dead; Chapter Two concentrates on a Pirn in Innocent Birds, and others like them is new arrival, Mr Solly, who comes to live in communicated to us by Powys within a "Gift Cottage". But Solly's presence sophisticated literary structure of irony. For contains an absence, that of his aunt, the author, as for his reader, an escape from Deborah Crocker. The saintly Aunt the man-made, fallen God of life must there- Crocker has had a vision on Madder Hill of a fore be an intended and indeed articulate act heavenly "Presence", who promises "a gift of denial; not a process of depravation made to Madder with its love, and that the gift possible by the silence, ignorance, and indeed would be given as a solace to someone." (5) innocence of the victims the author is able to But Deborah Crocker is now dead, and Solly describe. lives in Madder charged by his aunt to The situations and characters in a Powys discover the full import of the vision and its novel function in order to perform a steady message. erosion of certainty where the quality and The landscape gradually created by the value of life is concerned. Language itself is narrative is a landscape reflecting absence. tainted, untrustworthy, loaded with assumpt- What Solly wants in Madder is not there, ions. It is of no small significance therefore, "He never went out of his door of a that communication between Powys's morning, dull or shining, without looking sympathetic characters is often a problem.

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