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The Powys Review NUMBERS TWENTY-NINE & THIRTY The Powys Review Editor Belinda Humfrey Reviews Editor Simon Barker 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 P°ter 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, Texas A & M University, U.S.A. Elmar Schenkel, Department of English, University of Leipzig, W. Germany Correspondence, contributions, and books for review may be addressed to the Editor, Department of English, University of Wales, 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 £6.50, or from Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed, for £6.50 plus £1.50 postage. The Powys Review is printed by J. D. Lewis & Sons Ltd., Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed. ISSN 0309-1619 Contents Geoffrey Gunther John Cowper Powys's Most Puzzling Novel 3 Peter G. Christensen The Role of Fate in History: Owen Glendower as Epic Historical Novel 8 Oliver and Christopher Wilkinson A Forging by Fire: John Cowper Powys and Frances Gregg 14 H. W. Fawkner The Mineralogical Microplatonism of John Cowper Powys 22 John W. Dowding John Cowper Powys's 'Six Precious Words' 27 Judith Stinton Chaldon Herring: A Place Apart 32 L. R. Leavis T. F. Powys in Perspective: The Significance of Father Adam [1919] and The Market Bell [ 1924] 42 Victor Golightly Gwyn Thomas's'Duality' 50 Robert Mighall Arcadian Perspectives: Llewelyn Powys and George Orwell 57 Rowena Griffiths A Rose for the Mistress Rowena 66 Herbert Williams JCP on TV 69 Notes on Contributors 70 The Powys Review Numbers 29 and 30 Volume VIII i & ii Geoffrey Gunther John Cowper Powys's Most Puzzling Novel I enjoy reading The Inmates, and not merely any grand illusion. John Hush's words to a because of a regressive pleasure in its menacing attendant offer a typical example: enchanted world of wish fulfilment. Its generosity of spirit and disarming candour 'Not personal questions of course,' he went inspire me to offer a supplementary view to on, 'though I can't believe the poor fellow's that of Susan Rands in a recent issue of The name is really Pantamount. I expect that's a Powys Review. Interesting as is her account nickname, eh, like Totti Cream-bo; one of those school nicknames—for, after all, Glint of the story as a psychological allegory, I am Hall is a kind of school, isn't it?—a school by no means convinced that "the puzzles from which we poor inmates that you chaps and inconsistencies of The Inmates can be are treating for our various manias are understood when viewed in the light of this 1 hoping—I'm sure I am'—and the crafty John model." straightened his shoulders and threw a wistful In his Prefatory Note to The Inmates and nostalgic glance towards the window— John Cowper tells us that he is attempting 'to soon return cured into the ordinary world! "to defend the crazy ideas of mad people... It would be more polite, I expect, don't you as against the conventional ideas of sane fancy so, Mister officer, if I were to address 2 him by his real name? Some name, I expect, people". He claims that in the former is a like Brown or Smith—though, of course, it crazy wisdom and goes on somewhat might be, for we never know in these confused cryptically to link this with William James's days, Romanoff or Hapsburg. In fact I might theory of a "multiverse rather than a chance it, mightn't I, and call him Mr. universe". Jones?' (197) This article argues that if these aims are properly understood, the novel reveals itself Here, beautifully captured, is John's slightly as a profound and highly successful work. feverish and anxious intention to do the Some such defence is needed where a work right thing, to play society's game. We feel has been described by its author, perhaps an imprisoned energy perhaps ready to light heartedly, as a pot boiler and by one of break though in a hysterical crescendo but Powys's best critics as his "most prosaic kept like almost everything in the book to a and most baffling novel".3 strictly anti-climactic mode. A childish and It is true that the novel refuses to yield to often ludicrous cunning is used to propitiate any conventional notions of good sense and the 'sane', to hide from them what is good form. Powys, by this stage, is turning happening behind the nursery doors of the his back on the coherence and cumulative inner world. power of great art. Even if the novel is The inmates suffer from the merciless compared with the work of its acknowledged glance of dispassionate curiosity. They use predecessors, Rabelais, Aristophanes, Heine all their ingenuity to avoid it. As in all and Poe, we will find it disappointingly Powys's books the irreducibility of individual lacking the very bravado which Powys so consciousness is being championed. And admired in these authors. There is a touch here, perhaps for the first time, his own of madness about the whole novel but it is fiction has finally no claim to any higher an endearing almost cosy vagary rather than ontological status than the fancies of his 4 John Cowper Powys's Most Puzzling Novel eccentrics and madmen. Were he to put such solution, no significant victory. The so- characters into an organized, controlled called waking world is a dreamlike world, and finished fiction it would be to implicitly where reality is always a curious amalgam reduce their vagaries to the level of, at best, between data and construct. There is no one charming nervous instabilities and fantasies. vantage point from which this amalgam can No organic richness of closure of the text be observed or enjoyed. There is a trans- can be allowed to imprison them within the cendence, but by this stage of Powys's walls of a triumphant wholeness. The book's writing, it is not something realizable but openness, fragmentation, and deprecatory rather a reminder of our precious and humour reflects the validity of their escape inalienable ignorance. The mysterious from all binding harmonies and any single Tibetan lama who finally liquidates the vision. The lessons of art, like the lessons of sadistic Gewlie, is a deus ex machina, made society, are to be unlearnt. The fiction, as deliberately grotesque and opaque. The well as the inmates, must reveal to us our incident is just as silly, arbitrary and finally own power to evade the inner and outer unserious as it would be in any dream. judges of normality, the tyrannies of The human mystery, the supreme reality, rational censorship. is the mutuality of relationship between the The restricting asylum stands for the dreamers, a mutuality denied by the scientism ordered traditional cosmology, enclosed by of Dr Echetus, and precluded in sado- its wall and almost completely by the world masochistic relationships such as the one stream. It is the universe of an anthropo- between Rumpibus and Tottie Creambo centrism reflected in the notions of richness that so distresses John Hush's girlfriend of personality and of art so rejected by the Tenna Sheer. To be really insane is to ignore book. the reality of mutuality, as John realizes. 'I'd tell them we should reduce our lives to 'How terrible', he thought, 'if I were really two dimensions, and cut out this damned and truly insane and she were only a fancy of personality once for all: Be in your bodies, I'd my madness?' (52) tell them—be in your bodies to the limit, and then when your bodies don't satisfy you, be in Whilst the inmates have lost the immunity the spirit'!' (114) from suffering that deluded autonomy confers, they are free in the sense that each These words of John's are echoed by all the is committed to a reciprocal relationship other inmates in their rejection of "the with the strangeness of the universe. They cruelty of old custom" (121). Old custom escape from the restrictions of authoritarian based on myths of the defeating of disorder personality and the empirical control of the has reached its grotesque epitome in Dr senses, into a world of elemental, playful Echetus's sanity. This merciless maimer and mythical energy. Language itself takes of animals and men, is brought to this on a spontaneous and free character, inhumanity not by any sadistic impulse but nonsense rhymes and childish play reflecting because he can react to the universe only as a real world of chance associations and a detached rational onlooker and searcher mysterious connections rather than any for completeness of knowledge. And to construct of a unified order presided over understand the novel's greatness is to see its by a law enforcing divinity. commitment to a constant forcing of the Minor epiphanies4 do occur, some with a reader's participation beyond the merely grace recalling the Wessex novels, but they voyeuristic and judgemental.

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