The Powys Review NUMBER EIGHT Angus Wilson SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE "A very distinguished novel ... It is superb entertain- ment and social criticism but it is also a poem about the life of human beings - a moving and disturbing book and a very superior piece of art.'' Anthony Burgess, Observer "Wonderfully intricate and haunting new novel. . . The complex relationships between art and reality . . . are explored with a mixture of elegance, panache and concern that is peculiarly his ... magnificent." Margaret Drabble, Listener "As much for the truth and pathos of its central relation- ships as for the brilliance of the grotesques who sur- round them, I found Setting the World on Fire the most successful Wilson novel since Late Call. I enjoyed it very much indeed.'' Michael Ratcliffe, The Times "A novel which will give much pleasure and which exemplifies the civilised standards it aims to defend." Thomas Hinde, Sunday Telegraph "A book which I admire very much . . . this is an immensely civilised novel, life enhancing, with wonder- fully satirical moments.'' David Holloway, Daily Telegraph "... an exceptionally rich work . . . the book is witty, complex and frightening, as well as beautifully written.'' Isobel Murray, Financial Times

Cover: Mary Cowper Powys with (1. to r.) Llewelyn, Marian and Philippa, c. 1886. The Powys Review

Editor Belinda Humfrey

Reviews Editor Peter Miles

Advisory Board Glen Cavaliero Ben Jones Derrick Stephens

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

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

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

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Contents

Editorial Reviews John Cowper Powys's M. Krissdottir, After My Fashion: a series John Cowper Powys and the Magical of views. (Glen Cavaliero, Quest. BEN JONES 79 Ben Jones, Cedric Hentschel, Sylvia Townsend Warner Kim Taplin, G. Wilson Twelve Poems. CLAIRE HARMAN 81 Knight, T.J. Diffey) 8 Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood, Emyr Humphreys A Critical Biography. A Perpetual Curate 22 BERNARD BERGONZI 82 John Hodgson Frank Gloversmith, ed., On Reading Porius 28 Class, Culture and Social Change. BenJones A New View of the 1930s. John Cowper Powys's PETER MILES 83 Literary Criticism: Brian Lee, Continuity and Context 39 Theory and Personality: The Significance of T. S. Eliot's Denis Lane Criticism. PATRICK PARRINDER 86 John Cowper Powys, Tom Earley, Thomas Hardy and Rebel's Progress. GILLIAN CLARKE 87 48 the Faces of Nature R. L. Caserio, Mary Barham Johnson Plot, Story and the Novel: The Powys Mother 57 From Dickens and Poe to the J. E. Roberts Modern Period. PHILIP BENTLEY 89 Two Photographs of NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 91 John Cowper Powys 65 Gamel Woolsey to Alyse Gregory: Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins 68

The Powys Review Number Eight 1980/1981 Volume II iv

Editorial

There are obviously many and various ways a courteous, middle-aged man to a girl (and of reading So Wild a Thing, Llewelyn Gamel was twenty-eight, Llewelyn forty- Powys's letters to Gamel Woolsey, June three in 1927): "How generous and charm- 1928 to November 1939 (edited as a narrat- ing you were to me, dear Gamel. I can never ive by the late Malcolm Elwin and pub- forget your grace either of mind or body ... lished by the Ark Press, 1973). One can May I really keep this little book of poems, immerse oneself in them as the love-letters, the central petal of so lovely and cherished a often passionate, often lyrical, of a literary flower." They quicken after the arrival of man who has 'fallen in love'. One can stand Gerald Brenan in East Chaldon in July back disenchantedly and find these effusions 1930, soon to propose marriage to Gamel sometimes mawkish, sometimes cloying; (who had followed Llewelyn there from and, perhaps further to this, one can see America in May 1929). Forbidden love Llewelyn both consciously and unconsc- becomes stronger when threatened: "Our iously constantly extending, even convert- love is not over. It is ... like the daffodil in ing, reality into fiction, the fiction which the corner of the house of the secret garden was eventually to be composed into his where we used to cling to one another." But novel, Love and Death (1939). Or, aided by probably it is unfair to ask such questions Malcolm Elwin's excellent narrative of and make such observations; certainly they events into which the letters are inset, one are incongruous with the concept of roman- can approach them biographically, tracing tic love which underlies Llewelyn's letters. Llewelyn's active, literary and emotional The cloying elements of the letters come life from his meeting Gamel Woolsey in largely from Llewelyn's entry into what he November 1927 to his death in December sees as Gamel's own-created, fictitious 1939. Here one sees the life in the context of world of poetic vision, "middle earth", his relationships with Powys relatives and linked with fairy and medieval romance, a friends and their comments on his relation- curious amalgam of child and adult fantasy. ship with Gamel, and, above all, in the He will observe, for example, her "neck context of his relationships with those tol- with its tiny love-mark on its sun-brown erant and surely suffering people, his wife, skin like a little round hog-weed seed that Alyse Gregory, and Gerald Brenan. In this had been placed there to decorate (her) by biographical context and prompted by an acorn fairy who had loved (her) long ago Malcolm Elwin's own daring suggestions, in the south" or declare to her, "I said [to one can make psychological speculations as J. C. Powys] you were too medieval, like a to the complex of motives and feelings of woman in The Faery Queen, like a girl in a Gamel and Llewelyn. Did Gamel really forest glade or going to her turret by the want a child of Llewelyn's such as she tapestried passage out of the hearing of the proved physically unable to bear? (She lost sounds of fantastical hate!" Such escapist two of Llewelyn's children during preg- and lover's sweet-nothings have in- nancy, one by miscarriage, in America in gredients attractive to a variety of mid- 1928, one by abortion, in England, 1929, Victorian painters; one might in more pos- but these were not the only such losses in her itive defence of them observe that they are of life.) Was Llewelyn's love largely a longing the very world which, even now, in the to have a child? (For he repeatedly refers to world of the machine, our young children by a child: see especially pages 32, 33, 36, 37, nature wish to be the true world into which 47, 48.) Was his love quickened when it they will grow up (with the difference, per- became totally forbidden and physically haps, that the ideal world of children con- frustrated? The very first letters are those of tains plenty of laughter). But these love Editorial letters may be distasteful to adults, to what- or frustration. His country images give ever degree they are enchanted by day- more "joy to the living" when they come in dreams of child and lover. More positive apparently less contrived abandonment to distaste, of a very different kind, may be felt memory. Such evocations, despite some by those readers-between-the-lines who are apparent falling off after 1932, appear guided by notions of personal responsibility, throughout the letters. They vary from a the difficult business of loving one's neigh- revivifying of love through sketches of place, bour as one's self. Here enjoyment of as of September 1930: Llewelyn's world of love may be marred by I doubt there is a single spot between White an awareness that the third person in the Nose and Ringstead where we have not met, drama unfolded by So Wild a Thing, Alyse often in the grass walk, once on the hillock Gregory, was showing this virtue in an where the little dip is, often near Mrs Link- unusual way: for apparently she was asked later's, by the stile also, and by the badgers to foster her husband's love for his mistress the first time, in the fairy glade, by the thistles and did. This mode of reading, involving where the goldfinches fed ... moral judgement, and usually best avoided, to frequent association of her with country has already been deftly touched upon, sense-experience and always with the scents together with the related question as to what of summer flowers: "The memory of you is extent the writer of the love letters had an always like a honeysuckle hedge in the first eye to posterity, by Jeremy Hooker in a week of June" (1936) (so that one soon review (The Anglo-Welsh Review, Winter perceives Gamel as what John Clare would 1974, Vol. 24, Number 53, pp. 218-220). have called his "Rural Muse"), to the final Alyse Gregory, expressing the hope that country glimpses of her mistily vanishing or the love letters exchanged by Llewelyn and coming momentarily bodily near in the very Gamel would be published, commented: last letters of October and November 1939. "There is no injury that death does not At the last, Llewelyn's concept of Gamel cancel and no folly that it does not reveal, appears to have been affected by his reaction and expressions of love give joy to the against his sense of the shadows of war and living". The joy given by So Wild a Thing is his own death, and invigorated by the pub- revealed at first glance by the beauty of its ication of his gift to Gamel, his "garland of publisher's presentation of the text itself in sunny dandelions", Love and Death: paper, type, cover and illustrations by Peter Reddick. For the book is a superb celebrat- The war will pass, but do keep alive, so I can hope ion of love in a rural setting. Llewelyn to see you again, my darling, made out of the Powys and Alyse Gregory (married in 1924) breath of the morning birds, out of the breath met Gamel Woolsey in Patchin Place, New of the midnight moon . . . the thought that I York, at the end of 1927, when Llewelyn may see you again is to me a thought rapt and was beginning six months there as visiting sweet-smelling as a primrose bed under a beech tree. critic for the New York Herald Tribune, but, Often a token, a gesture, a word at the end after only three extracts from letters of 1928, of a letter, can evoke in a moment the eye- Malcolm Elwin's selection plunges us into bright, the thyme, the quivering sunshine and Llewelyn's reconstruction of a love enjoyed the banks of Maiden Castle, the silent magic in Dorset, orchestrated by images of its of Dorset woods, and the sea valley where we flowers, fields, hedges and cottage rooms. used to walk. In those cold flint fields when Even painful events are transformed by the your tall boots were muddy, how lovely it was rural ideal: "with you even an Xray waiting to me to feel you near—as we walked looking room becomes a place where birds are sing- and stooping over those austere plough lands ing". At the height of Llewelyn's yearning where the sea winds go. for the absent Gamel, in particular through A regret in reading So Wild a Thing is that the winter of 1930-31, country images blend one cannot see enough of Gamel's response with ecstatic dreams of love's consummation to Llewelyn. Malcolm Elwin's only Editorial 7 quotation from one of her letters, of January The main body of this Review is devoted to 1931, is cool, clear and 'to the point', with the works of John Cowper Powys, with sentences like, "And I do hope Alyse is special attention to his early novel, After My better and is happier. I do grieve and worry Fashion (1919), which he apparently chose about her, and the injury I have done your not to publish, the late novel which he dec- life together." Alyse Gregory's private lared his "masterpiece", Porius (1951), and response to the Llewelyn and Gamel affair also to his literary relationship with two has been made public in that other beautiful master-influences of his creative work, book from the Ark Press, The Cry of a Gull, Hardy and Whitman. Our opening article is an edition of her Journals 1923-48 (1973). on Evan Evans, eighteenth century Welsh The editor is reviewing these books because scholar and poet, translator and editor of the the reading of them, especially So Wild a important Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Thing, is probably a necessary prelude or Antient Welsh Bards (1764). This brings us in adjunct to the reading of the selection of touch with one of the earliest modern Gamel Woolsey's letters to Alyse Gregory explorers of the Welsh literary and which we are pleased to publish at the end of mythological traditions which (though he this Review. They are presented by Kenneth rarely adhered closely to related historical Hopkins who has recently published several facts) were so exciting to John Cowper collections of Gamel Woolsey's poetry Powys and contributive to his Welsh novels, through the Warren House Press, has made especially to Porius. one published entry into her mind through his own long poem, Gamel and Rex (1979), and continues to work on her biography. John Cowper Powys's After My Fashion (Picador, 1980, £2.50): a series of views

GLEN CAVALIERO daughter he marries and accompanies to New York, is told with a subtlety that looks After My Fashion : ahead to the Wessex novels; but when "more quiet and less mad": Powys tries to integrate their story with a a contribution to the canon picture of contemporary Greenwich Village artists he comes woefully unstuck. As a Writing to his brother Llewelyn following portrait of Isadora Duncan his Elise Angel is the publication of Rodmoor, John Cowper well enough—so long as her creator is Powys speculates: content to describe the effect of her dancing; but in her human relationships her appear- I think my third novel must have Sussex for its ances seem closer to some vamp of the silent background and I think Nature must obtrude itself less—don't you?—and I think it must be screen. more quiet and less mad—eh?—and also must 'I've found him at last!' she whispered to her- be free from the influence or even the suggest- self. 'The free spirit worthy of me. It will be ion of any other writer—ha? easy enough if he loves me. But if I love him— let him beware!' And here presumably it is, emerging at long last from its confinement. The fact that One almost hears that famous, "Kiss me, Powys never tried to publish it in later years fool!" gives the lie to the suggestion that he was a However, it was a brave try, and certainly slapdash author without literary self-res- a more successful one than Llewelyn's del- pect; indeed this novel, inevitably taken up ineation of top society in Apples Be Ripe. And by his admirers with a mixture of delight even when the surface reality, and dialogue and apprehension, turns out not only to be ring false, the inner motivation and an addition but also a contribution to the reactions of the characters are rendered with canon. All Powys's readers must be grateful the customary insight. The New York to Pan/Picador for their enterprise in scenes, although the least successful portion making it available, and to Richards Sparks of the novel, constitute its most'unusual and for producing such an attractive cover. to that extent its most interesting feature. The reason for Powys's not furthering its They presumably had a negative value for fortunes may be that having tried unsuc- their author since he did not again seek to cessfully to follow his own prescription he repeat them. (The Autobiography is a different found that prescription faulty. After My matter altogether.) Fashion shows a commendable reaction from But the greater part of the book is set in the melodrama and emotional afflatus of Sussex. Here nobody is going to be disap- Rodmoor, but in attempting to write a novel pointed: all Powys's powers are brought to of ordinary human relationships, and to bear on the kind of generalised evocation of confront the American scene directly, Powys which he was such a master. The opening was going against his imaginative grain. chapter describing Richard's meeting with This novel is pulled in two directions. The Nelly in the church at Littlegate; and the tragic love story of the middle-aged poet description of Selshurst (Chichester), of the Richard Storm and the young vicar's Downs and above all of birds and flowers, After My Fashion: a series of views look forward to the finest things in Ducdame the power, of Rodmoor and Ducdame, it offers and Wolf Solent. a great deal to enjoy. Afficiandos will relish Indeed Powys was clearly to re-work a familiar mannerisms (the New York artist's good deal of After My Fashion into later model "selecting another chocolate with novels. Mrs Solent is developed from the exquisite care") and note, less happily, the formidable Mrs Shotover (is the name an customary eccentric use of words like "dras- unconscious echo of Heartbreak House?); the tic". Nelly's father and his heresies are port- heterodox old vicar John Moreton is to rayed with affectionate humour, and there is father both the Reverend Matthew Dekker another of John Cowper's poignant little and his son, and on his death bed reveals a girls. Richard himself is analysed unspar- tortoise neck like that of Sylvanus Cobbold. ingly, with a far greater detachment on the Catherine, the young bohemian who co- author's part than we find in the delineation habits chastely and so fatally with Richard, of Adrian Sorio in Rodmoor. He is also more is of the boy-girl sylph type which constantly convincing as a man of letters. This book, appears in Powys's fiction; the Priory farm one suspects, is strongly autobiographical looks ahead to the landscapes of Ducdame; (perhaps Powys felt that it was too much and the whole theme of return to ancestral so). And no more than in its successor could haunts is to be developed further in Wolf he imagine a happy fulfilment for his hero: Solent. The novel's suppression was at least once again death by water is the conclusion. put to effective use. In After My Fashion, however, there is a For all the attempted naturalism the sardonic ambiguity at the end that looks essentially symbolic nature of Powys's im- ahead to the mature work to come. The agination is continuously apparent. It naturalistic venture had by no means been reveals itself not only in the various back- all loss. grounds, such as the downland valley of Richard and Nelly's betrothal, or the-des- olate Atlantic City beach, scene of Elise and Richard's separation, but also in more un- BEN JONES obtrusive forms of notation. The mysterious After My Fashion: young man who emerges out of the blue, literary criticism and dualities only to die, is called Roger Lamb—the surname suggests a sacrifical victim; and it Detailed study of the previously unpub- is his death which proves to be the catalyst lished After My Fashion will soon be under- that breaks up the relations between the way, but first the community of Powys protagonists. (The name could also be a scholars and friends needs to acknowledge combination of Roger Fry and Henry with gratitude Pan-Picador's adventurous Lamb—there is a scornful reference to "the publication of the novel. They have made it skirts of Bloomsbury".) At the end of the available at the right time, in conjunction novel Richard dies after rescuing a sheep with the other John Cowper Powys novels from drowning in a dewpond; and its weight which they have so successfully reprinted fuses in his mind with his idea of his own and distributed, all of them in attractive poetry and\vith his sense of God. Similarly, formats. Special note should be made of the use of Dante's Vita Nuova as a paper- Richard Sparks's remarkably appropriate weight to keep Nelly's farewell note in place and provocative cover illustration for After recalls Richard's scornful awareness of that My Fashion: They have also published it in book's fulfilling a similar function in Mrs the right way, without lengthy scholarly or Shotover's over-crowded drawing room. In critical commentary. Francis Powys's the context of this closely woven narrative "Foreward" strikes the proper balance texture, the attempts to be up-to-date con- between the informative and the tantalizing. stitute even more of a wrench. We are given enough information about the But if the book lacks the unity, and indeed Elise Angel-Isadora Duncan relation to ask: 10 After My Fashion: a series of views "Can it really be she?" and "Was it really in these contradictions is Powys's deep that way?" Then we are brought back to involvement in his own criticism during this fiction, reminded that the novel has its own period. After My Fashion reveals the turmoil integrity to establish and declare. of professional reassessment. After My Fashion cannot be read as a Powys's reassessment of his poetry, "new" novel: we know too much about perhaps even his decision to give it up, is Powys's later development. It resonates shown in a conversation with Elise Angel. with the dualities, the characters (the old Storm states a position which is Powys's people, the deviant ecclesiastics, the aspiring own. Elise put him straight: "Your poetry is and disenchanted writers, and, particularly, a kind of self-indulgence" (p. 221). We the contrasting women), the patterns of suspect that Powys knew this to be so. (And, action (the return to native ground), and we wonder, did Isadora Duncan and John the evocations of sensuality which we assoc- Cowper Powys discuss such matters? Auto- iate with the later fiction. Yet, it is filled with biography offers a splendidly pertinent line: new information, with arresting insights "Isadora Duncan too 'got my number,' into human character, with startling achie- even as I most assuredly got hers!") Like vements in characterization and compos- the debate with Canyot about literary crit- ition. It adds substance to the Powys canon, icism, this exchange presents what may and it will, I believe, make us think seem to be uncertainties. Rather than un- somewhat differently about Powys's artistic certainties, however, the episodes are cons- development and achievement, and about ciously organized dialectical set-pieces from his life. which Powys could reassess and re-estab- Take, for example, what the novel shows lish his position. Throughout the novel (for about Powys's attitude towards the example, the political discussions with intellectual and artistic life. Richard Storm, Elise's Russian companion, Karmakoff*) like other Powysian heroes, is a writer we are given obvious connections to Powys's searching out his origins. Storm at the beg- intellectual and personal life. inning is still enjoying some success as a rec- The novel focuses intently on the crises of ognized literary critic, albeit in Paris, ready this period, but it has its own life as it tells to state and defend his theory and judgement. the story of a compulsive, indulgent and Compare Storm to the shabby John Crow progressively disenchanted man, trapped by returning to England after fifteen years his own action and by his time. The action, down and out in Paris, or to Wolf Solent composed with considerable care, shows recovering from his "malice-dance", or to that Powys was undertaking to establish Dud No'Man, returning to Dorchester to himself as a conscious and deliberate crafts- recover a lost identity. Storm's intellectual man. There are occasional excesses in the status is still important to him, and his views descriptive passages in the chapters set in provide a surprising contrast to Powys's Sussex, and there are, unfortunately, loose literary criticism of these years: Storm threads in the New York City chapters, but defends the new and the experimental in his overall Powys displays mature artistic skill arguments with the painter Robert Canyot in the pacing of action, the creation of at- (pp. 43-46), Powys attacks the "modern" mosphere (even in New York City), and the writers repeatedly in Visions and Revisions development of central characters. and Suspended Judgments. The argument pro- The organization of tensions, particularly vides a particularly interesting dialectic the mingling of the sensual richness and when read in the light of Powys's own views moral oppressiveness of Sussex, is at times on tradition and experiment (although carried out with brilliance. The surface Powys, like Storm, author of a Life of Ver- laine, agrees on the importance of French literature and criticism, of Remy de *Karmakoff's cultivated, pipe-smoking character is Gourmont in particular). The point to note far different from Isadora's real-life Russian husband, the poet Yesenin. After My Fashion: a series of views 11 action develops with ease and economy, but ness of vision. This in part explains the Powys does not allow the deeper tensions to uneasy extravagance of the final scenes. be forgotten. The deeper tensions are those Richard Storm is a richly complex character, of the "old accursed duality" introduced as and no mere one-dimensional fictive mask a, basic thematic statement at the end of of Powys, but he does represent indulgent Chapter One: "After all, he' thought, the and self-destructive energies which Powys more complicated pattern of our modern had to bring under control. Storm did days has not liberated us from the old not survive his quest, but the acknow- accursed duality. Will the balance, the ledgement of such failure allowed Powys to rhythm, the lovely poise of things, never be continue his search for "the balance, the obtained by luckless humanity, torn and rhythm, the lovely poise of things." divided between the two natures?" (p. 24). The design of the story is shaped from dual- ities—Storm's indulgence in sensual res- ponses to earth and flesh contrasting with his CEDRIC HENTSCHEL groping towards the "deeper vibrations After My Fashion: from the Unknown" (p. 89), the dilemma of the two opposing women, the confusions of a war novel his commitments to art, the ironies of his Though After My Fashion may lack the robust final defeat. philosophy and the broad narrative sweep of As for particular success in the work, he John Cowper Powys in his belated prime, created several remarkable characters: the the very unevenness and occasional dif- sometimes disagreeable, but prescient, and fidence of its tone mirror the doubts as well wonderfully drawn Mrs. Shotover; Mr. as the aspirations of a post-war generation Moreton, the fallen priest; Robert Canyot, groping its way towards a new social order. fascinating as a Powysian anti-self, but It thus forms an intriguing link between the nqver fully realized; Nelly Moreton whose author's two 'war books'—between the physical attraction and possessiveness polemics of The War and Culture, in which the Powys catches so well, but whose specious lot of the individual appears subordinated to morality he does not seem willing to the needs of abstract war-aims, and those explore. Elise Angel remains an enigma. more personal aspects of warfare which, a After My Fashion offers one of Powys's few quarter of a century after, were to enliven attempts to write about a city in his fiction, Mortal Strife. Yet if After My Fashion is in and it is the only time he used his American some sort a war novel, it has little to say experiences in his novels. The New York of the carnage of the trenches and shuns experiences are recast in Autobiography, but those ugly, blood-and-guts revelations there the tone is different, much more which characterize so much semi-autobio- reconciled than the novel's frustrations and graphical fiction of the 1920s. anxieties. In the opening chapters the echoes of the "With Sons and Lovers," Leavis has said, 1914-1918 conflict are insistent and "Lawrence put something behind him." monitory; they strongly recall the beginning The statement is only partially applicable to of Aaron's Rod (1922), where D. H. After My Fashion. It is a novel which Powys Lawrence sees a new menace clouding the seems to have been compelled to write, relief brought by the ending of the war: "A perhaps as an exorcism. He was not finally man felt the violence of the nightmare successful in the immensely difficult task of released into the general air." Richard shaping the dualities of his own experience Storm's war record (like his ereator's, we into a totally creative design. He had not may feel) has been "neither especially noble established his own emotional and moral nor especially mean." We iearn that before perspectives, nor solved the problem of sus- his return to England he had been doing taining throughout the narrative a cohesive- "unheroic but necessary work in a certain 12 After My Fashion: a series of views military base" in a small French town. We of war by other means is soon lent credence are also told that "though he had seen through the grotesque scene which comparatively little of its real horror, the interrupts the idyll set in Canon Ireton's war had profoundly affected him." While walled garden. A gang of louts bait and many of his French friends have died at the injure "a wretched hydrocephalic child". front, those survivors who shared his earlier Once more Storm reflects that the war "was Bohemian life, far from re-moulding their not over". The intrusion of horror into the existence, "have become more violently, intimate rapport just achieved by the lovers more dogmatically than ever, their old, in their romantic encounter is an oddly fierce, hard, fantastic, hedonistic selves." arresting episode; but it also serves to bring Not surprisingly, Richard Storm is restless the relationship between Richard and Nelly and dissatisfied; but what has unbalanced into closer focus. We witness the play of him is not the war alone but "the war and Nelly's powerful maternal instinct which, in Elise". The justaposition, scarcely flattering certain of his moods, Richard grows to to Richard's dancer-mistress, is significant, resent, even though (yet another parallel for with it Powys sets the stage for a post- with his creator!) he is ill-adapted to fend for war tragedy in which hostilities are himself in the hurly-burly of daily life. transferred from the military to the sexual The antagonism between Richard Storm plane. and Canyot spills over into areas unrelated If Storm had hoped to forget the stresses —or not seemingly related—to their rivalry of war amid the rural tranquillity of Sussex, over Nelly. The two men squabble over Lit- he is speedily disabused. He is himself "well erature as they squabble over Art, Canyot aware of the sinister ambiguities of most always defending conservative values while patriotic moods", but Robert Canyot's Storm pleads for innovation. A similar empty right sleeve is a constant reminder polarity is evident in their political opinions. that, in the long-drawn-out struggle for Entrenched in traditional attitudes, some of Nelly's favour, he is up against a doughty which now appear curiously dated, Canyot and daunting rival, the possessor of two sees Storm as a Sinn Feiner and a pro-Bol- medals for courage in the field, whose shevik who "believes in Egypt for the wealth, in contrast to Storm's relative Egyptians and India for the Indians". That poverty, enhances his masculine integrity. such dire reproaches, if not wholly Nor does Nelly herself, though her affection stemming from jealousy are at least exacer- might be thought the best of all antidotes for bated by it, is demonstrated in a down-to- her lover's malaise, allow him to forget the earth Powysian manner: standing by the past. At their first meeting Nelly's intuition window Nelly becomes engrossed in a dog- leads her to suppose that Storm had been fight in the street, as her two admirers con- thinking of the war: tinue their wrangling in the room behind her. He hadn't of course been thinking of the war Ever gravitating towards the larger dim- at all; and yet, in a very profound sense, he ension, Powys seizes on an important sub- had been. The whole thing was 'the war' and theme in his book—the anguished doubts of the peace after 'the war' again! Like the the Rev. John Moreton—to extend his an- shooting of a shuttle or like the darting of a fish alysis of conflict to the theological sphere. his mind moved up and down all the vistas of confusion and misery that filled the world. The dilemma Nelly's father faces is that, Something in this girl's gravity as she looked while affirming Christ, he cannot accept at him brought vividly to his mind many God, because he believes it is "the concept- things he had forgotten. 'The war can never ion of God round which have gathered all the really end,' he found himself muttering. tyrannies, superstitions, persecutions, cruel- ties, wars which have wounded the world." The dispiriting notion that, given man's War, Powys seems to be telling us, does not aggressive nature, peace is the continuation spring solely from human incompetence or After My Fashion; a series of views 13 ill-will, but from a spirit of malevolence conventions were breaking down. Human immanent in the universe. beings were learning to be more generous to Who shall say to what extent a cosmic one another, less tenacious of their legal principle of Evil can justify the folly of rights, more flexible,mor e reasonable. mankind and so be urged by Richard Storm in mitigation of his vacillating conduct—to Even the most cursory study of the 1920s rate it no worse—towards the two women he tells us that 'here were solid grounds for loves? Perhaps it is too simplistic a view to Storm's initiai optimism. Conventions were say that he is his own enemy. Bad luck and breaking down. Sexual emancipation, part- coincidence do play a part—too large a part, icularly of women, was entering a new we may think—in his downfall. It is cert- phase. Against such a social background, ainly not his fault that his Paris publisher Storm's vaunted philosophy of non-attach- fails and that he is thereby plunged into ment seems admirably in tune with the spirit poverty. Yet many of the injuries he suffers of the age. Perversely, instead of throwing are self-inflicted: being at war with one's self in his lot with 'Bohemian' friends of equally is presented as one more facet of man's progressive outlook, he chooses to marry an aggressive instincts. Or is Storm merely inexperienced girl whose possessiveness he gauche and inexperienced in his behaviour comes to hate because it restricts his free- and not wise enough to calculate its effects? dom. He thus himself conjures up a Why, once he has triumphed over his rival situation where he is bound either to forsake and married Nelly, need he pursue his his innermost beliefs or else to kick against liaison with Elise Angel in so ham-fisted and the marriage tie. self-destructive a manner? Robert Canyot, with his distaste for Storm further forfeits our sympathy by his 'lechery' ("I am old-fashioned, that is all") boorish treatment of the mutilated Canyot, and his quiet conviction that life swings whom he wrongheadedly stigmatizes as backwards and forwards without achieving "that insolent young coxcomb of an artist". true progress, has the poise and stability that When his relationship with Nelly begins to Storm so sadly lacks. founder, he imagines Canyot to be "an ugly In the final emotive scene where Storm one-armed sentinel at the gate of their lost dies in Canyot's arms, having suffered a paradise". We may not feel unduly shocked heart attack after his laborious efforts to that Richard steals Robert's girl, for Nelly rescue a trapped sheep, we sense that Powys herself is a willing accomplice and even is passing judgement on his two contrasted takes the initiative at crucial moments. But male characters—and perhaps on himself as need Storm be quite so churlish and cantan- well. Storm has made a bid to achieve a kerous in his dealings with Canyot? Does his heroic gesture and so to emulate the valour moodiness perhaps stem from a sense of of his adversary, but his self-sacrifice is as inferiority, or even from a presentiment that unrewarding as that of so many "better in the end he will suffer defeat at his own men" who have died in Flanders. Canyot, hands and so restore Nelly to his rival? the born survivor, victor alike in war and Richard Storm had returned to England peace, champion of the staid, old-fashioned full of good intentions, buoyed up by the virtues, returns to Nelly, the widow who belief that his self-realization as a poet would will bear Storm's child—a child that may prosper, with the coming of a more enlight- inherit the brave new world Storm has ened post-war social order: glimpsed too soon. Yet however convenient Richard's death may be within the frame- work of the story, this sudden resolution of He thought to himself, as he followed his fav- the sexual triangle wears a wrenched look ourite hazel path, that these difficult relations and might even be thought a betrayal of between men and women were really growing Powys's own liberal creed. a little more adjustable nowadays. The war had left its impress, he thought. Old rigid The reader may also feel that the war 14 After My Fashion: a series of views theme so deliberately developed in the order to provide a home for her father? earlier chapters is rather lost sight of to- Should she, in any case, marry him in the wards the conclusion, as the human drama cause of his art? Her father, the Reverend gathers pace. Yet even at the very end we Henry Moreton, pays the price of his "dis- are reminded of certain wider realities. As covery" that the idea of God is the focus of Richard lies dying, his mind filled with the world's cruelty by a painful struggle and feverish speculations, he suddenly remem- giving up his living. He continues to cele- bers Karmakoff, the Russian he had met in brate a heretical Mass enacting the sacrifice New York, "and he imagined himself of Christ, in whom he still believes as the putting the question to him as to whether focus of the pity and sympathy in the world. they would have slaughter houses in an ideal Dying, "He loved everyone; only he state!'' We know from so much of the later couldn't speak to tell them so. Annihilation fiction, and especially from Morwyn, that had something to do with love, then? It 'slaughter house' is a key-word denoting a must have." A character whom we have key-concept in the Powysian miiltiverse. scarcely met, but who is called Roger Lamb, Transcending its immediate application, it fails to survive a kill-or-cure operation. One suggests not only man's exploitation of the by one characters are made unwilling sac- animal kingdom but the cruel oppression of rifices to the changing desires (psycholog- his own species; and with its ultimate ically speaking, the needs) of their partners. Manichaean overtones it hints at a philoso- In a somewhat cursory political digression phical and theological dilemma of cosmic Ivan Karmakoff represents the view that the proportions. In After My Fashion, as in all his individual should be sacrificed for the gen- novels, Powys was also commenting on his eral good. Should the Powys-hero, Richard personal mythology; and if the slaughter Storm, sacrifice his sexual freedom to make houses that enter into Storm's last conscious his wife happy? Too late, he decides to do thoughts recall the bloodshed of the it—though not until he needs the comfort of trenches, they also symbolize an eternal her love—and, rejected, he fatally strains his conflict. It could be maintained that despite heart while, literally, rescuing a lost sheep. its lack of military incident and although the We have followed too much the devices and desires actions of its protagonists convey a blurred of our own hearts? message, After My Fashion is an attempt at a That we seem unable to co-exist without war novel on the grand scale. either hurting each, other cruelly or under- going utter self-negation is the burden of Powys's lament. Against this he sets pity and sympathy, rather than the more KIM TAPLIN ambiguous love. One by one the characters After My Fashion*: are bereaved or deserted or sad or ill and someone is there to turn to, often someone self-sacrifice who has showed callousness elsewhere. Love In 1919, when this novel was written, the is another thing: love can manifest itself in a notion of sacrifice must have had as much mother striking her subnormal child or, in meaning as at any time in history. The the verdict of the artist Canyot on Nelly's nature of love and its relation to self-sac- rejection of Richard, "She killed him because rifice, and the entelechy of this England so she loved him". Readers of Powys will recog- many died for, are the book's central con- nise the beginnings of his later insistence on cerns . the importance of kindness and his rejection of love as impossible. But here, in the person Should Nelly Moreton marry Robert of Canyot, who lost his arm in the war and Canyot, a man she has ceased to love, in whose love for Nelly transcends possess- iveness, we are offered a glimpse of a *This review previously appeared in The Literary higher and more saintly love than Powys Review No. 20, July 1980. After My Fashion: a series of views 15 usually allows. And, significantly, Canyot is many incidents and motifs to be plundered able to produce painting that is important in for Wolf Solent. a way that the poetry of the Powys-hero is The indestructible pain which like an under- not. ground stream of po>jon flowsroun d the roots Storm's ecstatic, deep-rooted love of place of all the ros.es in the world had burst its —the first two-thirds of the novel is set in the barriers once more. The war was not over. Sussex downs—is bodied forth for us- in a Storm early on records "a deep desire to thick, beautiful tapestry whereon are em- justify the accident of his own escape by broidered the lovingly identified wild some really adequate contribution to the flowers and birds, the footpaths, the little bitter-sweet cup of the world's hard-wrung teashops, the old walled gardens, the wisdom''. Like so much of Powys's writing Church of England, the tiny nuances of this is confessional. He forces himself to character and social behaviour that are think aloud. Those who wince at such ex- specifically English. These things assuage an plicitness, those who allow their dislike of exile's thirst. The novel was written in embarrassment to prevent their asking America, where Powys spent nearly thirty whence it springs, will never love Powys or years: within the book, Storm has just re- recognise his wisdom. He attempts to be a turned from Paris. As the hero drinks cup spiritual Poor Tom, he 'attempts naked after cup of tea—even seasoned Powysians truth: and compared with him we are most will be amused at how many—he also drinks of us, in Lear's word, "sophisticated". This England. Those whose love of rural England book is no such "adequate contribution" as connects with a sense of exile from Eden will Powys speaks of. What book could be, as it drink eagerly here too. But Powys does not were, a recompense for even one soldier's shirk the question, Is this escapism? Are death? Yet how many authors could say, these places, as Rupert Brooke saw them, hand on heart, that adding to the sum of human refuges yet evasions, "Deep meadows yet, wisdom was the motive behind their activ- for to forget/The lies, and truths and pain"? ities, and how many would have rested Is there some sense in which we ought to content with a single publisher's rejection— share in the urban, the international, the all that After My Fashion apparently received? modern, the turbulent, the uprooted, em- bodied then in the New World? There are also things Powys can't stomach about the English upper class, and he makes his hero exclaim at one point, "It is to escape from women like that . . . that people emigrate. G. WILSON KNIGHT Oh England, England, you certainly allow After My Fashion: death many troublesome persons many strange privileges!'' The novel then moves—for the If the title of this newly discovered story, first and last time in his fiction—to America. written between Rodmoor and Ducdame, is to be understood autobiographically it is It is Canyot who finds a need to go, in misleading,, since its fashion is not what we order to broaden his vision, although he has expect of Powys. We miss so many of his succeeded in catching" "the happiness of peculiarities and it is far more of a normal England" in his work. Elise Angel, Storm's story, true to the play of forces that normally mistress and said to be based on Isadora constrict us, as in the importance to its Duncan, tells him that writing about the people of financial considerations: so often : happiness of England is not enough. Cruelty in fiction of high quality such constrictions and otherness have to be taken account of. are by-passed. Indeed even into the walled garden they in- With sex, especially, we come sharply up truded, as they have always done—here, in against normality: an engagement involving the screams of the bullied child, one of the a properly consummated marriage is 16 After My Fashion: a series of views central, and others without marriage are important treatment of this appalling enig- important. Usually a Powys hero is un-at- ma in, all his writing. What he needs to do is home with normal sexuality. Elsewhere to balance our natural scepticism against there are, necessarily, marriages, but our equally natural instinct, implanted from nowhere else is normal sexuality isolated untcfld generations, that death is not all. The and so acu'tely analysed. It leads up to perfect balance needed is struck by passionate and often highly dramatic ant- Shakespeare's Timon: agonisms born of love and jealousy. The story surveys a range from physical passion My long sickness to ideal love. Normal sex-emotion may also Of health and living now begins to mend And nothing brings me all things. be contrasted with art; with poetry, or (Timon of Athens, v. i. 191) painting, or dance. These speak to the 'soul'. The hero's ill-fated hope to create a In Powys's second novel, Rodmoor, this work of great, spiritualised, poetry may be balance is assured. I have hitherto taken its conveniently related to Powys's own future reading of death to be the finest ever ach.- life-work of spiritualised fiction, nearer iiSved by Powys, as the hero, believing in a poetry than novels, that followed. "nothing" which is also a strange luminance, dies, like Timon, by the sea's infinitude; All these psychological undulations are with a final positive struck by his last cry to sensitively deployed. The events progress the seraphic Baptise, recalling Thomas with dramatic inevitability and a convincing Mann's Death in Venice. logic. It is, indeed, strange to have this most 'readable' book, which demands so much Here John Moreton's dying is carefully less of the reader than is usual with Powys. described (X. 144-7). For him words have We find, however, a fair amount of nature become meaningless, only "annihilation" description, here of Sussex country, which is makes sense: certainly in his "fashion", together with the That was the secret then: John Moreton was occasional use of some natural or animal being annihilated. He wished this being anni- analogy.to point a quality, rather in the hilated would never stop. It was the happiest manner of Llewelyn Powys. When we move sensation he had ever known. He loved every- to New York, description is cogent, both in one; only he couldn't speak to tell them so. revulsion at its metallic materialism but also Annihilation had something to do with love, in recognition of it as an advance post in the then? It must have. And it was beautiful bey- human adventure. The response is balan- ond expression. But what was the connection ced; balance and commonsense are between annihiliation and the immortality of pervading qualities. the soul? He wished he could remember what the immortality of the soul meant. It was a I have been thinking of human relation- musical sentence. It must have meant some- ships and perceptions, the book's main thing once to him when his brain was clouded. concern. Where religion and metaphysics But his brain was clear now and it meant are involved we are on more obvious Powys nothing at all! ground. The cleric, John Moreton, has lost his faith in God but believes firmly in the He is floating in "blue space", soon to get crucified Christ as an "eternal protest" darker. He is "going to sleep upon velvet- against the sufferings of a cruel world. His black butterfly wings". He hears his feelings will be recognised by anyone who Mother, who was dead, weeping. "He has read The Complex Vision or A Glastonbury shouted 'Mother!' in an ecstasy of Romance. indescribable peace", and was gone. On the difficult question of death and As in Rodmoor, there is the final call to a human survival, to which Powys returns loved one, but the emphasis falls not on again and again throughout, right up to his being dead but as in Timon's words, on the final stories, our present work is not only Gradual dying, the transition; like "going to adequate but contains, perhaps the most sleep", a sensation which Powys rated After My Fashion: a series of views 17 highly (A Glastonbury Romance, XXIV; 1933 cropped turf, have disappeared from the ed. 788, 1955 ed. 755; Letters to myself, still South Downs, and some downland has been unpublished, 6 November, 1957). In this put to the plough. The wild flowers are less description of dying positive and negative profuse than in After My Fashion and the are blended, as in the Buddhist 'Nirvana'. coastal plain more built upon. Indeed the We may compare the paradoxical occasional tower block on the shoreline at appearance of Jesus at the conclusion to Littlehampton and Bognor Regis (surely the Powys's late story, Two and Two. Fogmore of this book and where John This I take to be, with Rodmoor, Powys's Cowper once convalesced) will be more two most balanced treatments of death. likely to attract the attention from the Unless we call in spiritualistic evidence, downs, not the "windmills, gates and solit- which Powys's world-view does not survey ary trees, presenting that peculiar suggest- and is here best considered as irrelevant, ion of an unbounded expanse behind them nothing can well be added to them; and his which dwellers by that particular portion of later thoughts accordingly lack pungency. the English Channel come to know so well". Other suggestions touching on spirit-life But Powys's fecund plain between the occur on pp. 73, 152, 236, 260 and (hinted) South Downs and the sea is not pure invent- 287; and on the transition from sleep to ion. It is corroborated, for example, by waking on p. 47; for 'transition' has signif- George Sturt. In his essay "Down into icance either way.* The high metaphysical Sussex" (1913) he describes the life of the triumph here achieved is in no sense an in- labouring men who migrated annually from trusion, but flowers naturally from the Surrey to help with the harvest "in the strenuous sexual and spiritual engagements manor" (the area around Chichester) and handled throughout. there conveys the impression of a landscape which is recognizably the same which *I have studied the concept in an essay on Wole Richard Storm, gentleman, crosses and re- Soyinka, "The Transitional Enigma", to appear in a crosses in After My Fashion. volume of essays on him at the Oxford University The imaginary places located in the Press, New York. I have also written on it in "Beyond Poetry", for a talk given to the Anthroposophical Sussex of the novel are Selshurst, Little- Group, Cambridge, on 4June 1980. gate, Toat Great Pond and West Horthing. For Powys's love of all "marginal" impressions see These are imagined to lie north east of Jeremy Hooker, John Cowper Powys (Cardiff, 1973), Chichester (the Selshurst of the novel) in the 26-33. direction of Arundel where there are the "great seignorial parks" such as Goodwood and Arundel Castle. Of this last, "you feel", Powys says in his Autobiography, "that T.J. DIFFEY Sussex can boast her 'melancholy seignorial After My Fashion: a view from woods' as well as any chateau on the Sussex Loire." There is no point in trying to identify A substantial portion of After My Fashion is West Horthing with any actual place in set in Sussex in that part of the county where Sussex since we are told nothing about it Powys spent his "2nd thirty years with except that it is evidently on the downs and Burpham, Arundel, Sussex as a back- that Mrs Shotover lives there at Furze ground". These were also the years when he Lodge, appropriately for this region, at the lectured in America; that experience is end of a drive of old beeches. Its geograph- drawn upon for the New York scenes of the ical location is not entirely satisfactory: on book. page 57 it is "poised high above the great There have been changes in the Sussex seignorial park, at the point where the more landscape since John Cowper described it. luxuriant foliage of the lower slopes merges The sheep, and consequently the finely into the sheep-browsed turf of the bare 18 After My Fashion: a series of views upper Downs" while on page 67 widespread Powys's statement in the Autobiography park-like slopes are said to rise up from it. was that his novels were propaganda— Similarly Littlegate: it is never said that the "effective as I can make it"—for his phil- hamlet stands close to, if not immediately osophy of life. Here as in the other early under, the downs, but this impression is books the philosophy is in the making: not certainly given. Yet Nellie, "in intervals of until we come to Wolf Solent (1929) does it her dressing", is accustomed to taking leis- begin to crystallise. There are many clever urely peeps "at the familiar face of the writers who can tell us unkindly what we distant Downs''. are: wisdom is rarer and sweeter than that If the siting of the places is makeshift, —as Sophia in Tom Jones is rarer and their naming is not. Evidently John sweeter than the women of Restoration Cowper's talent in naming fictional charact- Drama—it offers us some consolation, ers, which his circle admired, could extend attempts some reconciliation. Powys's habit to places. Selshurst, Littlegate and West of analysing himself in his books is very far Horthing belong in that part of Sussex from self-admiring. He is hard on himself. where in reality are to be found Selsey, Little- Am I utterly self-centred? Am I capable of hampton, Eastergate and Worthing. (There love? he is continually asking. If these are is even a West Worthing on the railway line not questions that concern us we shall find Powys frequently used.) nothing in Powys. The title is never ex- Selsey once had a cathedral, now obliter- plained, but I think we can gloss it as the ated by the sea. In 1075 the Normans trans- author-hero's human appeal to his fellow- ferred the Saxon bishopric inland to Chich- humans to recognise the unspoken boast and ester, Powys's Selshurst. The 'hurst' in the plea of each, "I too have loved—after my name is a familiar particle in Sussex place fashion". names. Both cities possess cathedrals with Certain facts about the old village at cloisters and prominent spires no great Eastergate, which is between Chichester and distance from their railway stations. Both Littlehampton prompt the conjecture—it is are graced with "great red-brick Georgian no more—that Eastergate may have given houses" and both may claim that it was more than a bit of its name to Littlegate. "here that Keats must have composed his The resemblances between Selshurst and fragmentary 'Eve of St Mark'". Both are Chichester, on the other hand, are not linked to the sea by canal. Powys describes conjectural but obvious. the hospital to which Mrs Canyot is taken These, however, are not literary con- after her fatal accident as a "quiet, un- siderations. The book is patchy and sketchy professional-looking building". If this is the and contains inconsistencies. Certainly Royal West Sussex, it is, according to Ian Powys would have revised it before pub- Nairn, "Georgian, but ignoble" (Nairn lication. It deserves publication now for its and Pevsner, Sussex). scattered insights into human nature, its Selshurst, however, has literary an- rich evocation of rural England, and for the tecedents as well as topographical. It surely enormous interest it will have for those who owes something to Casterbridge, South already know Powys's work. It is not the Wessex, as well as much to Chichester, book of his to begin on. Mercifully, it con- West Sussex. Both fictional places are tains almost nothing of his undeniable but permeated by their surrounding coun- tiresome interest in the occult and the mor- tryside. In Selshurst "the very streets were bid. It does contain many of the preoccup- full of the fragrances of the fields" while ations with moral and humane questions Casterbridge "was a place deposited in the that should, where they find mature expres- block upon a cornfield". I find another sion in Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance and faint echo of Hardy, of Mrs Yeobright's Weymouth Sands, place him squarely among journey across Egdon Heath to see the major novelists. Eustacia, in Powys's account of John After My Fashion: a series of views 19 Moreton's hot and fatiguing journey over belongs "My epic poem, 'The Death of the downs, shortly before his death, to see God,' . . . modelled on the blank verse of Betty Shotover at Furze Lodge. Milton, Keats and Tennyson." The hair After My Fashion is not, however, Har- on Moreton's forehead grows "as one sees dyan. Francis Powys is right to stress this in it in portraits of the philosopher Schop- his Foreword. enhauer" while in the Autobiography it is the The novel is well endowed with Sussex wrinkled forehead of the Southwick poet detail. The smaller Sussex churches, for which "resembled that of Schopenhauer". example, are aptly characterized in the Dodd's Beauties of Shakespeare, which does duty description of Littlegate church, whose as a letter-weight in Mrs Shotover's drawing tower is compared to "an extinguisher room is, in the Autobiography, the source of upon an extinguished candle". Room too is the quotation which Powys incants behind found—in the telling of Richard Storm's Hove station thus bringing on an ecstasy. death—for an interesting note on Sussex The phrase "after my fashion", or variants, dew-ponds. And the downs are beautifully crops up more than once in the Sussex caught in this: "The immense undulating chapters. upland, along the crest of which they were In the Autobiography Powys recalls his first now moving, was like some huge wave of journey into Sussex: "It was not my coun- the sea struck into immobility". Sometimes try . . . but there was something about the the Sussex location is overdone. It was un- place that was profoundly English". Now necessary to make fifty years of Sussex this is exactly the role of Sussex in After My rains and frosts fall on the headstone of Fashion. Its business is to be profoundly Richard's grandparents; ordinary frost and English, but not ultimately Storm's coun- rain will do. try. It must carry the weight of contrasts Three chapters of Powys's Autobiography between, on the one hand, nature and love (6, Southwick; 7, Court House; 8, Bur- in the English countryside, and on the pham), which was written more than a other, art and love; first, somewhat shadow- decade after this novel, also, it is well ily in Paris, and secondly, much more known, have Sussex for their background. palpably, in New York. It would be There are points of comparison to be made mistaken to suppose that judgement is between these Sussex chapters and After My finally exercised in favour of Sussex. Fashion, though in this connection the The English afternoons in Sussex come Court House chapter is the least in- close to, if they do not topple over into, the teresting. Here I must register a sentimentality of the calendar makers. disagreement with the Foreword since I About this R. G. Collingwood once wrote: myself can find nothing in the novel of the A considerable literature exists devoted to Lewes neighbourhood of East Sussex sentimental topography: books about the though certainly there is much that is charm of Sussex, the magic of Oxford, pic- reminiscent of Burpham in West Sussex. It turesque Tyrol, or the glamour of old Spain. would be pedantic to notice the ad- Are these intended merely to recall the ministrative division between East and emotions of returned travellers and to make West except that Powys is himself inclined others feel as if they had travelled, or are they to observe it in the Autobiography. Moreover, meant as an invocation—I had almost said, there is some geographical difference and to call fools into a circle? (The Principles of Art, what is depicted in After My Fashion belongs 1938, p. 88) distinctly to the western part of Sussex. Well, Powys, as is confirmed by "Duc- Here are some of the comparisons bet- dame", the title of his next novel, is in- ween After My Fashion and the Autobiography. terested in the business of calling fools into John Moreton in Littlegate is hostile to God a circle, though his attitude to them seeks to for reasons shared by John Cowper in Bur- predate that of contemporary scientific pham. To this period, Powys tells us, rationalism. The question here, however, is 20 After My Fashion: a series of views whether the Sussex of After My Fashion fits figure much more often than they do in our any of Collingwood's categories: recollec- appraisal of what is real. The ordinary, tion, evocation, invocation. Instances of all everyday, public world is not, for Powys, are to be found except that what is invoked "all there is" nor indeed a significant part is less the topographer's Sussex than a of "what there is". Wayfaring in this sense Sussex put to spiritual purposes. In New defines Richard Storm as it does many a York Storm looks back to the time in subsequent Powysian character. Their Sussex when "he was taking his pleasure in quests are their realities, which are not the green pastures and beside still waters". If social English world, the imperatives of this does not convince, it is not that Sussex "Granny" Shotover. is not the necessary background of an in- Hostile readers may think that in the tellectual and spiritual conflict but that the light of the established greater works I am style in which it is done sometimes ap- reading too much into this novel. How, for parently falls into cliche. instance, is bad writing particularly in the Llewelyn Powys's later novel Apples Be Sussex chapters, to be explained? Sussex is Ripe obviously resembles John Cowper's in done in the language of Victorian poetry, that both brothers at the end somewhat in the language (not, I think, of Keats but) melodramatically kill off their protagonists of Tennyson and Swinburne. Something of in the same part of Sussex. But the resem- the enervating afternoon of "The Lotos- blance is more extensive. Predominantly in Eaters" hangs over it. The immemorial Llewelyn's novel, briefly in John Cowper's, elms grow again around Selshurst; Sussex the restrictive character of English social is replete with maidens, damsels and the life is attacked. So the Englishness of other poeticisms that comprise an outworn Sussex is not all idyll and vision. Mrs literary idiom. Here indeed is "the idiocy Shotover is condemned for living by false of rural life" but lived by people with no values, by what matters to polite society. It connection with the land. Sussex was turns out that she is not alone in being con- ripening nicely for the arrival of Cold Com- demned for her English values. In Atlantic fort Farm on its literary map. City Elise Angel rounds on Richard: But as often with John Cowper, a "crafty fox" (his description), matters are not this I hate all you English. Your feelings are clot- simple. For one thing the poeticisms, ted tip with clods of earth—gross, thick, heavy clods of earth! Not one of you can be largely confined to Sussex, are expressive of" clear and free and honest. You worship what Storm's own condition. The Tennysonian is, just because it is. It's worse than periods give way in New York to a tauter, materialism, it is absolute deadness! And more vigorous style appropriate to the new what's more you're not content until artistic growth of Greenwich village. Here everyone's as dead as you are. Dead words, is a foretaste of the precision that is charac- dead sentiment, dead hearts! You've no real teristically scattered through the later courage in you . . . without courage novels, notwithstanding their longwind- everything becomes initials written on sand! edness. In the scene for example on the When Hardy visited Montacute he wrote New York waterfront where Richard and in the archives in the Robbers' Castle: Karmakoff discuss politics, Marx's theory "Thomas Hardy, a Wayfarer'". Wayfaring of revolution is gathered up and amply is dominant in Powys's own life-illusion delivered in the space of a single sentence. and is certainly a theme in After My Fashion. And this: "the massive reticence of The wayfaring idea runs the risk of ana- London" succinctly captures the character chronism but in John Cowper's hands is of that city. more a philosophical idea, a means of The New York chapters partly function focusing on those elements . outside the as a critique of the Sussex ones, for among boundaries of social routine—memories, other things After My Fashion is about art associations, imagination—which should and its creation. The Sussex scene is not After My Fashion: a series of views 21 nature done for its own sake as the out- reminded of the happiest moments of his moded literary language may wrongly life.' suggest. The natural landscape is not 'And what are they, if I may ask?' . . . enough. Richard had come to see its in- 'It's no use trying to explain to an American sidious side, how it had lent itself "to the things of that kind," he said. 'The happiest moments of a person's life in England are process of spiritual deterioration" even associated with old country memories, with before his departure for New York. The just those lanes and gardens and fields that New York chapters are good partly because you find so dull. If you don't care for things in them and in himself John Cowper is like that, of course my poems are nothing to fighting the strong connection that has held you!' between the English countryside and 'But my dear Richard,' cried Elise, 'surely English letters. The conflict is brought into the whole purpose of art is to make such im- the open when Elise attacks Richard: pressions universal, so that everybody feels them? If you're content to write about ponds 'I've been reading those poems of yours,' she and ditches for the benefit of English said . . . 'and I cannot say that I think people—well! you may please yourself of they're worthy of you. They are so course, but I cannot allow you to call such a overloaded with sensations that one doesn't thing art. It is the merest personal sensation get any emotion at all from them.' . .'. - of one individual!' ... 'What do you mean by sensations?' said 'Isn't art always a personal sensation?' he Richard . . . 'The whole purpose of what protested. 'Not a bit of it!' cried the dancer. I've been writing is to get into it the very 'Art's an emotion not a sensation. It's an essence of the English country—and that's a emotion that expresses the only really im- "sensation" isn't it?' personal thing in the world.' 'It may be to an Englishman, my dear,' Powys knows about the impersonality of she replied. 'It isn't to me. All this in- poetry, about the then-revolutionary doc- discriminate piling up of flowers and trees and grasses, all this business about lanes and trines of Pound and Eliot which have fields, seems to me just heavy and dull. It played a major part in making the manner seems to get into the way of something.' in which he sometimes writes about Sussex 'That's because you're an American,' he seem outmoded. But the conflict is in the threw at her indignantly. 'Any English per- novel. Powys is big enough to encompass son reading what I've written would be contraries. Emyr Humphreys

A Perpetual Curate

The manufacture and proliferation of myth plating mortality on a full stomach in a mel- must always be a major creative activity ancholy churchyard. among peoples with high expectations When he returned from the Grand Tour reduced by historic forces into what econ- it was an agreeable surprise to discover that omic historians like to refer to as 'a margin- there would be no reason at all for him to al condition'. Not the least creative among conceal the existence of, for example, a such activities is a preoccupation with pedi- Welsh grandparent. The lordly flights of the gree. Here in fact myth and history mingle. imagination indulged in by Tudor gene- Thus when the Wars of the Roses had virt- alogists had percolated nicely down the ually exterminated the flower of Anglo- social scale to give an extra nudge to the cult Norman chivalry, the genealogies of the of the picturesque. In this sense the druids Tudors and their social climbing followers were very well-connected and as fine a arrived to fill a notable gap. It was after all subject for the amateur of poetry and paint- more distinguished to be descended from ing as anything in classical antiquity. They Brutus than from a brutal barbarian like were also more mysterious, tinged with tant- William the Conqueror, even if the line of alising mythologies and therefore more descent involved some strange deviations romantic. Thus came about a revived among the mountains of Wales. interest in the land of Wales and in the Welsh language. What could be more pict- When the Welsh aristocracy penetrated uresque, and indeed more picaresque, than the reconstituted Tudor English networks the survival, in this comparatively accessible of power, they brought with them a corner of the world's newest empire, of a generalised sense of ancestor worship which, peasant people largely ignorant of English, with the passage of time, easily lent itself on using an ancient tongue that some insisted the one hand to institutionalised snobbery, was as venerable as Hebrew and as old as and on the other to the vague romanticism the druid's circles. and antiquarian interests of a prosperous England of the eighteenth century, There is no better example' of this devel- burgeoning forth into the first British opment than the relationship between the Empire based on mercantile capitalism. young Sir Watkin Williams Wynn II and When a fortunate young man on the Grand the unhappy curate Evan Evans. The Tour was taken up with the cultivation of his founder of the Williams Wynn dynasty had sensibilities among the ruins and the been an Anglesey cleric with an interest in grandeur of the classical past, he could not the law. His son had risen to be Speaker of have been unaware that it was ruthless the House of Commons and had married land enclosures and the profits of the into the network of old families in North slave trade that were paying the expenses: he Wales. Sir Watkin Williams Wynn I, had just chose not to think about it. The iron been a Jacobite and his home had been the laws of economics were not an attractive centre of the secret Circle of the White part of history. They had little excitement to Rose. But his son showed more interest in offer compared to painting ivy-covered the arts than in politics, and he delighted in castles in arcadian landscapes or contem- his friendship with Sir Joshua Reynolds, A Perpetual Curate 23 George Frederick Handel, and David ion describes him in a tavern in Caernarfon, Garrick. He wished to be known as a where they had a row. generous patron of the arts, and to prove his interest in the native tradition he became the He was very ragged . . He called a volley of opprobrious names and epithets upon me, second President of that influential London- that would have been a valuable acquisition to Welsh organisation, the Honourable Society Billingsgate College ... I noted three of the Cymmrodorion. remarkable features about Ieuan—his pride, his bad manners, and the big scar under his Evan Evans was a farmer's son from 2 Cardiganshire. It is not unlikely that his chin. pedigree, as pedigrees went, would have It seems that in a moment of desperation been every bit as good as Sir Watkin's. He Ieuan had tried to cut his own throat. The was educated at Ystrad Meurig school, a symbolism of the action was not altogether distinguished institution in 18th century lost on his contemporaries. The throat was Wales, and Merton College, Oxford. Before the point of entry for the drink and the going to Oxford he came under the influence proper exit for the Awen. Even before he of the redoubtable Lewis Morris (the went to Oxford he had been lauded as a boy greatest of the Morris brothers, who genius by such shrewd and authoritative inspired his brother Richard in London to critics as Edward Richard and Lewis found the Cymmrodorion). Evan Evans Morris. To be a good poet'and a great found the confidence to take up the practice scholar would appear to be a worthy enough of traditional poetic art, to devoting his life ambition, but he soon realised that there was to scholarship and the collecting and nothing in the structure of the society to copying of ancient manuscripts. He entered which he belonged that could help a young holy orders in 1754 and was licensed to his man to sustain such an ambition. He needed first curacy at Manafon in Montgomery- the security of patronage, a secure niche in shire. In less than a year he moved to a some venerable college, a properly ordered curacy in Kent and the peripatetic nature of outlet of publication: but none of these his life-style began its unsteady progress. He facilities existed in any consistent form in served as a curate in at least eighteen the Welsh context. In his life as we see it different parishes and spent brief intervals in 1 reflected in his letters, the force that drove both the army and the navy. His obsession him throughout his wanderings was a pro- was the discovery and the copying of any found belief in the rich resources of the ancient manuscripts that might have some- Welsh language and the existence of hidden thing to do with the history and the liter- riches, sleeping, like Arthur and his war- ature of the Welsh. His weakness was for riors in their cave, in the library cupboards strong drink; not uncharacteristic of his pro- of those old families who had begun to fession or his time. Dr Johnson described neglect their native inheritance. The gentry him as a "drunken Welsh curate" and it for their part were inclined to treat him as a would be easy enough to declare that like so joke or an irritation. many Celtic poets of his kind he was obliged to take to the bottle as a supplementary invocation of the Awen, the Muse in charge Dear friend ... of the library at Gloddaith I of the spirit of inspiration. But the origin of can give you little account because the knight the habit is far more likely to lie in the was set upon shooting woodcock with his friends that morning . . . but I made the best condition of a disinherited culture than in of my brief moment when I got inside, and he any racial or individual weakness. was good enough to lend me five of the best volumes . . . This was all I found curious upon Drink made the curate aggressive. His so short an examination.3 bardic name was Ieuan Brydydd Hir (Ieuan the Tall Poet), as well as Ieuan Fardd. A The great pursuit had its moments of glory. fellow poet and member of the Cymmrodor- One such is captured by Lewis Morris in a 24 A Perpetual Curate I letter to Edward Richard sent on August 5th observe the unnatural behaviour of the j 1758. It was meant to read like a despatch modern Welsh clergy and gentlemen of the I from the front. principality of Wales. They have neither zeal ! for religion nor the interest of their country at Who do you think I have at my elbow ... as heart. They glory in wearing the badge of happy as ever Alexander thought himself after their vassalage, by adopting the language of a conquest? No less a man than Ieuan Fardd, their conquerors, which is a mark of the most who hath discovered some old MSS lately that despicable meanness of spirit and of a mind no body of this age or the last ever as much as lost to all that is noble and generous; and our dreamed of. And this discovery is to him and clergy contrary to their oaths, perform divine me as great as that of America by Columbus. service in a language, that one half of the con- We have found an epic Poem in the British gregation doth not understand; and thus they called Gododin, equal at least to the Iliad, rob those of the means of grace that pay them AEneid or Paradise Lost. Tudfwlch and their tythes. This is no better than mere Marchelw are heroes fiercer than Achilles and popery.s Satan.4 Evans had a strong case. For a century and a It was one thing to discover manuscripts: half no bishop who understood the Welsh quite another to edit them and see to their language was appointed to any of the Welsh publication. Evans proved himself a rem- sees; and the tendency of such career clerics arkable scholar but there never seemed to be was to licence their English dependents to a convenient printing press within his reach, livings that were inhabited -by monoglot and the tedious method of publishing by Welsh people. Even by the standards of the subscription took up too much of his time. Pax Anglicana this exploitation of benefices He had-none of the skills of an entrepreneur would do nothing to teach the common and many of the local poets and dilettanti people 'their duty' and thus the established with whom he sought to collaborate let him church could be accused of failing in its duty down. From 1771 to 1778 when the parishes to the state quite apart from any consider- where he served were all in North Wales, he ation of the welfare of the language or the was able to rely on the patronage of Sir spiritual wellbeing of the people. Watkin Williams Wynn II. He was given reasonable access to the excellent library at But as they take upon them the care of souls, Wynnstay and was able also to visit whose language they do not understand, I Hengwrt and Peniarth: and Sir Watkin think it is only for filthy lucre's sake and they provided him with regular sums of money. seem to be to be only tools of a government, He knew that Evans was highly thought of that sets religion aside; at least makes it by the famous poet Thomas Gray and by the subservient to its destructive and ungodly influential antiquarian Bishop Percy. To policy. Such I reckon the depriving of any look after a scholar who was considered to people or nation of the candlestick of God's word and of pastors who understand to preach hold so many secrets of the nature of ancient it in their own language. poetry was a feather in the cap of a man who wished to be recognised as an outstanding His words are a curious echo of the protests patron of the arts. Evans was now able to of the Puritan John Penry published by his publish a volume of sermons in Welsh which secret printing press at the end of the six- he considered to be urgently needed: an teenth century. Penry was hanged for his English poem dedicated to Sir Watkin on pains and Ieuan Brydydd Hir's fierce "The Love of our Country", by which he attacks against the bishops and their mal- meant Wales; to prepare important practices did him very little good. In spite of manuscript material for publication, and to the obvious quality of his mind, his excellent sharpen his attacks on his 'betes noires', the intentions and the justice of the cause he was 'Esgyb-Eingl', the Anglo-Welsh bishops. so determined to champion, Evans's devotion to drink and to the Welsh language I cannot without the utmost indignation were insuperable obstacles to preferment. A Perpetual Curate 25 His career offers a shadowed contrast to in his decorous English garb was able to use those of the two English literary figures with a mixture of Pindaric enthusiasm and the whom he was in correspondence. Shy and mythic prophetic gift of Taliesin, and gain retiring as he was, Thomas Gray was driven unqualified approval because his metrical to hide from the brilliant light of his own version of British history renewed the reputation. Thomas Percy was a grocer's political scenario whereby the Tudors and son who became a bishop more on the their successors were still to be acclaimed as strength of his literary reputation than the the appropriate heirs of the British tradition. rather tenuous claim that he made to be the Gray was fulfilling the appointed task of a last of the great line of the Percys. The tone national poet in translating the historic of his letters to Evan Evans are a good deal hymn of triumph into contemporary idiom more genial than Shakespeare's Percy's and making a source of aesthetic and abrupt way of addressing Owen Glendower: spiritual strength available—to yet another but the balance of power across the vanished generation of empire-builders. His view of frontier remained curiously unaltered. Evan The Bard like his view of History was a Evans's striking lack of success in contrast distant prospect from the comforting with the other two is not to be attributed shadow of Eton College. merely to his individual weakness; it also reflects the comparative state of two cultures Weave the warp and weave the woof at that moment in time. Evans was trudging The winding-sheet of Edward's race . . . around Wales in an attempt to salvage the Gray's imagination has arrived on Mount mouldering fragments of an ancient Helicon to witness the daughters of Memory tradition for the sake of the dwindling working at the loom of history. But the lim- posterity of that tradition. Gray and Percy itations of his vision make it possible to sub- were showing a cool and cultivated interest stitute the loom for the printing press of a in antiquities in order to be able to adapt public-relations operation, in which history them to the needs of a culture conscious of has been neatly stood on its head. There is a the massive political and economic power glittering invocation of the figure of the behind it. An interest in antiquities was just virgin Queen that is followed by the cele- one weapon by which the culture of the brated line: English could be exalted to a position of prominence among the powerful and "Hear from the grave, great Taliesin,hear!" 'polite' nations. When Thomas Gray wrote "The Bard" he could easily have used the But it is doubtful whether even that shape- gaunt figure of Evan Evans as his model. shifting genius would have understood the transformation which had taken place; and On a rock, whose haughty brow even if he understood, would have in any Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood way approved. Arthur had been spruced up Robed in the sable garb of woe and sent to Eton and he, Taliesin, offered With haggard eyes the Poet stood. the post of Poet Laureate which Gray himself had shyly declined. Nevertheless for Ieuan's enemy was not the ruthless King the English world of the eighteenth century Edward but his spiritual successors, the and much later this remained a serviceable Esgyb-Eingl, who were in his view doing transformation. Some kind of literary rough just as much damage. In Ieuan's experience justice had been seen to be done and honour the great struggle was still in progress, and was sufficiently satisfied all round to keep even the climax of Gray's Pindaric Ode the natives happy. As late as the 1860s, where The Bard, having completed his Matthew Arnold could hike around prophecy, hurls himself over the edge of a Llandudno with his brother Tom, waving cliff, was in some sense a reflection of the his arms and roaring out at intervals, anguished curate's attempted suicide. Gray's poem was a great success. The Bard "Hear from the grave, great Taliesin, hear!" 26 A Perpetual Curate as he enjoyed the first intimations of yet The modesty and restraint of Gray's another serviceable theory called "Celtic muse was in strong contrast to the flam- Magic". boyant excesses of Ossianic poetry and it Gray and Bishop Percy encouraged Evans was this Augustan English tradition that to publish in 1974 Some Specimens of the appealed to the conservative spirit of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards. The Welsh, and particularly the men of scholar- book was designed to satisfy the growing ship and talent who belonged to the Morris curiosity among English antiquarians and circle. Ieuan's best known poem, his englyn- men of letters about Welsh literature. The ion to the ruins of Ifor's court, would prob- impression it made was limited because a ably not have been written but for his ad- shrewd Scottish forger, James Macpherson miration for Gray. But the power of the was already in the field. As usual Evan poem derives from his understanding of the Evans's publication had been delayed for, brooding passion of the great Welsh elegies several years by his peripatetic habits and of the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The printing difficulties. Macpherson's Frag- fact of a defeat, with the pain unassuaged by ments of Ancient Poetry had set the poet the passage of time, gives a cutting edge Ossian off on his astonishing journey into beyond romantic melancholy. Brambles the mysterious hinterland of the European cover the ruins of splendour, the halls of creative imagination. The influence of song are the haunts of the owl, and the qual- Ossian the poet became second only to that ities of generous noblemen and a whole way of Arthur the king. His origin was a similar of life are less than stones in the sand. potent compound of original Celtic fact and When Ieuan visited the ruin of the court judicious fabrication. In entrepreneurial of Ifor Hael (which is now probably under terms, Macpherson like Geoffrey of Mon- the M4 outside Newport, Gwent) he was mouth, was smart enough to see that a great accompanied by one of the strangest figures market existed for romantic fantasy of Celtic in the history of modern Wales. His young origin and he set out deliberately to supply guide was a stone-mason called Edward it. Williams, the Bard of Glamorgan who The Welsh were never taken in and, re- became famous in Wales under his bardic assured by Evans's solid scholarship, they name, Iolo Morganwg. Although the date is refused to accept Macpherson's work as uncertain, it was an occasion of some sig- genuine translation. Macpherson counter- nificance. Iolo himself was deeply moved by attacked with the instinct of a skilled the sight of the ruin. For him it had an publicist. He went straight for the cultural added significance. This was the court jugular vein and poured contempt on the where the great poet of the fourteenth Welsh poetic tradition. It was not worthy of century Dafydd ap Gwilym had been made notice. Meanwhile Ossian continued welcome and in his more inspired moments literally to ride the crest of a wave. In a few Iolo had already begun to believe that he years the young Goethe made his tormented himself was the eighteenth century equiv- hero in "Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers" alent of the great Dafydd and that it was recite the translation he had made of therefore his duty to supplement the known Ossian's "Songs of Selma". It is true that works of that genius with effusions of his Goethe's admiration for Ossian wore off and own. Inside the world of Wales, Iolo's that he was to observe in later life, "I made forgeries had an even more profound in- my hero quote Ossian when he was mad, fluence than the outpourings of Mac- but Homer when he was in his right mind". pherson-Ossian in romantic Europe. But it was his interest and Herder's that They were an oddly assorted couple, vastly extended that influence of Ossian in Ieuan and Iolo. The force that drew them European culture that brought the young together was Taliesinic; a devotion to the Mendelssohn as far as the Hebrides in the faltering Welsh poetic tradition bordering 1840s. on the demonic in the case of Ieuan and in A Perpetual Curate 27 the case of Iolo, well beyond it. They were needs the authority of the older man to re- both initiates, the more conscious of some inforce his own position. They are both mysterious and even prophetic form of South Walians and Iolo is well aware that a poetic consecration because they were the life time of disappointments has given Ieuan two living men most deeply versed in the a deep seated suspicion of the North Wales ancient language and the myths and legends literary establishment, of the Cymmrodor- and history of what was rapidly becoming a ion, and an irrational hatred of English lost world. It was a great burden to bear and, Bishops. These are weaknesses that he if we are to believe Iolo, the learned curate would be very ready to exploit for his own was very ready to share it with him. In a purposes, but he is equally well aware that letter to Owain Myfyr, a well-do-do London Ieuan Fardd is not a man to be manip- Welshman who was assistant secretary to ulated, and that these transient passions the Society of Cymmrodorion at the time would pale into nothing alongside his schol- and later to become its guiding force, Iolo arly devotion to the truth. The drunken wrote, curate who had stubbornly refused to accept the Ossianic forgeries, would never have Ieuan the priest and the poet is now minister allowed a similar activity to flourish inside at Maesaleg, but he will not find there a single Ifor Hael. The poet has become a very sober the field of Welsh antiquities that he had and religious man, but his worldly state is very spent a lifetime cultivating. Iolo had good low. I believe he must be the poorest man in reason to keep a sharp and respectful eye on his profession in the whole island. It would be the movements and welfare of the older no great expense for the Cymmrodorion to man. As long as the Revd. Mr. Evans was present him with eight or ten pounds, which alive, he was obliged to keep a tight rein on kindness would be of great benefit and a 6 his impetuous imagination. It was not until service to him at this point in time. Ieuan was safely dead and buried that Iolo In tracing their dealings with each other, the could retire to his bardic lodge to manu- reader has the impression that Iolo is facture the mythological sustinance of nine- handling Ieuan with a pair of tongs. He teenth century Wales.

Notes

'He was only four days in the army. "This is to at 60 and fathered six children. Collaborator and certify that the bearer, Evan Evans, was enlisted in patron of Iolo Morganwg]. the 34th Regiment of Foot, but being disordered in "'Additional Letters of the Morrises of Anglesey", his mind, and finding him to be the Rev. Mr. Evans, Y Cymmrodor, Vol. XLIX, Part Two, pp. 521-522: is hereby discharged . . .OGLE, Captain, 34th Regt. Evan Evans to Richard Morris. of Foot, London, April 6th, 1768." 4Ibid., Vol XLIX, Part One, p. 348: Lewis Morris (Panton MS. 74, quoted Saunders Lewis, A School of to Edward Richard. WelshAugustans (1924), Bath, 1969, p. 145.) 5The Grievances of the Church in Wales (N.L.W. 2Robin Ddu o Fon [Robert Hughes, 1744-1785, 2009) quoted in Llythyrau Ieuan Fardd at Ddafydd schoolmaster and barrister's clerk] in a letter to Jones, from Aneirin Lewis, Lien Cymru, July 1951. Owain Myfyr [Owen Jones, 1741-1814, wealthy 6Iolo Morganwg, G. J. Williams, University of Wales London skinner and patron of Welsh letters. Married Press, Cardiff, 1956, p. 372 (letter in Welsh). John Hodgson

On Reading Porius

Opinion among Powys scholars—if not immediate a state as possible. The habit of readers—is moving towards a belief that writing "in situ" could be pushed to no Porius is the greatest of John Cowper's further extreme, and no doubt encouraged novels. Morine Krissdottir in her book, John the minute density of the novel's attempts to Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest, gives fixate fugitive impressions of air, moisture, convincing reasons why this should be so, vegetation and light. and her judgement is confirmed by readers The writing of the novel was begun out of visiting Colgate University Library in in- doors, in ritualistic fashion. In this letter of creasing numbers, in search of the complete 1951, ritual is typically tempered by mock- unpublished text of the novel. It is an ritual . opinion which Powys himself certainly snared. When we read that "Personally I But just as I was turning to descend being think it beats that Glendower book of mine content to be hearing curlews and cuckoos in the hollow", or that "It suits me better than mist I was seized by a psychic compulsion which anything except perhaps 'Morwyn'",2 this said: "Go to the sheepfold (at the final turn enthusiasm may be ascribed to Powys's S.W. towards Liberty Hall) where at a stone well-known zest for the work in hand at any standing-desk for the larger stones of its walls are smooth and flat—" where the first one moment. Yet it is true that he spent over sentence—the first page of Porius was written seven years on Porius, which is over twice as in 1942 Jan 18 nearly ten years ago! Well at the long as on its nearest competitor {Wolf Druid Stone a "Compulsion" made me, tho' Solent), and over four times as long as on A tired, ascend the Purgatorial Mount till I Glastonbury Romance. Porius seems intended reached the Stone Desk of Jack the Talker the as a crowning achievement. Preacher the Verbose One the Arch-Welsh- Humbug. And when I got home cocksure certain Something of the conditions under which I wd. find Porius what did I find? Nothing at the book was written can be gathered from all but an "ad" from Swan & Edgar Aunt Powys's letters. Kate's favourite shop!!! But at Noon the Book s I took my final page, i.e. (. . .) p. 2811 in my came: A Perfect Page-Proof!'!!7 long sprawl up to the Gaer here & snugly ensconced against the north-east wind = that While the results of these years of labour deepest stone-craters in the wall or stone- are gaining critical respect everywhere, I do chambers & waited for some sort of Inspir- not think that Porius has yet won the love ation in situ for my last paragraph & I really and enthusiasm of readers in the way the did get it! ... but I make no conjecture as to 3 major Wessex novels have. There is the whence it came! murmured complaint that Porius may be In another letter, Powys writes of "a sort great, but it is certainly unreadable. Many of mossy rocky precipice with a cave I admit to not finishing it at first attempt, wanted to experiment with (I mean in\) in myself among them. In 1975 George Steiner view of my Romance of Corwen in 499 wrote, "Porius is a novel one attempts, A.D."4 To "experiment" in a cave suggests retreats from, returns to with a deepening 6 more than a novelist's customary collection sense of magic and authority." of background data, and hints at a diary- Morine Krissdottir's book provides a like record of experience and sensation in as splendid substantiation of this "sense of On Reading Porius 29 magic and authority." Porius is expounded then under his eye!" In this case, it is a as an alchemical opus "written as a secret straw of wheat. In the chapter "Culture and doctrine with a "secret" embedded in it that Nature", in The Meaning of Culture, Powys Powys made sure would remain hidden to elaborates a belief th^.t the souls of things are all but the few willing to follow him on his apprehended from their appearances. "... magic hunt."7 No more can the complexities the soul of Nature dwells upon her material of the novel be dismissed as the results of surface rather than in any 'spiritual' confused narrative powers in old age. depths." "It will be noted that this magic of But the book now seems more daunting the universe always emanates from the 9 than ever, reserved for initiates of elaborate surface and always returns to the surface." occult disciplines, and I think there is a Hence there is a certain appropriateness in danger that Porius may be hived off into a Powys's curious combination in Porius of critical hiding-place (or "esplumeoir") of alchemical magic with the imitation of the its own. surface of life which prose fiction provides. It appears to me obvious that, if Powys The 'surface' of Porius is very curious intended Porius as an alchemical opus, he indeed. Angus Wilson10 suspects that the also wished it to be accessible in plainer kind of novel where "stones and vegetables terms as well. Writing about A Glastonbury begin to speak", to which Porius points, is Romance in the American magazine, Modern not possible. The reader who has success- Thinker, he was anxious to reassure readers fully hacked his individual path through the that his book could be enjoyed without forests of Edeyrnion is likely to find Porius specialist knowledge: something of an impossible object—but the experience will have been too vital to permit It has interested me also to re-create the pro- the cool judgement of 'failure'. found symbolism of the Grail mythology and to discover it re-enacting itself in various The undergrowth is certainly very dense significant groupings of animate and inanim- —and we have this in the very first chapter. ate existence in these modern days. All this, It is not the only hard beginning in Powys: though it will clearly reveal itself to anyone the opening of A Glastonbury Romance is also with a penchant for mythology, does not in any hard, where we meet all those people at way interfere with the philosophy of the book Canon Crow's funeral, only to have them or become an encumbrance to any reader's disappear for a hundred pages. But Porius is enjoyment and understanding of the conflict 8 very tough. There are the different races— in it between its two main forces. the Romans, the Brythonic Celts, the forest- That Porius may be read on a plain as well people, the Gwyddyl, the Ffichti, the as a magical level not only accords with Gwyddyl-Ffichti, the Cewri, the survivors of everything we know of the kind of relation- lost Atlantis and the Coranians. There are ship with his public that Powys desired, but the individual people as they pass through also, of course, with alchemical teaching, Porius's head with their great-grand- where the philosopher's stone is something mothers' marriages and dead foster- at the same time hidden and obvious, as it is mothers. These people too are met in every in Taliessin's poem: aspect of human behaviour, from the public spheres of politics and war, to their religions The centre of all things, yet all on the surface, and philosophies, to the privacies of love The secret of Nature, yet Nature goes and the remotest retreats of introspection. blabbing it Matters are not helped by the wonderful With all of her voices from earth, fire, air, pervasive 'atmosphere' of the book, with its water! (418) mist and autumnal drag. It is quite easy for After reciting his poems, Taliessin has the this opiate mist to lull the reader's attention; habit "of entering into an intimate relation getting lost in Edeyrnion is a pleasure in its own right, but I am not sure it is a legitimate with some small inanimate object that one. happened by the purest chance to be just 30 On Reading Porius The difficulty is one of dramatic focus. warriors in about as many lines, there is no What is the central action? There is none, busy, competent kindling of suspense and and this is because Porius is the multiversal expectation. Instead Rhun's dog licks a novel, and this affects our reading in discon- dead mare's nose, certing ways. Most novels may be imagined as plays about whose nostrils and eye-sockets crawled enacted on an old-fashioned box-stage, with several black ants, while a tiny brown insect a proscenium arch. The focus is on the whose identity, had Porius tried to verify a matter of such sub-human interest in that dim human actors, and the scenery, more or less light, would have struck him as belonging impressionistically represented, recedes rather to the race of beetles than to that of away in a diminishing perspective. Trees flies, kept approaching the slippery surface and buildings, the stage tells us, are less crossed by the dog's devoted tongue and then important than people. And as for gods, if again precipitately retreating. (558) they exist, they are invisible spirits, who operate in the minds or souls of the characters. So much for war. And in presenting a In Porius, there is no sense of perspective. "multiversal" view of reality, it is the Gods and people and insects and bits of normally central political and military area fungus are all there, and if—for we are of the historical novel which Powys crowds people—-we try to apply ordinary human out most. The political action of Porius, such perspective to it all, we find there is no gen- as it is, seems most faulty. The ostensible erally accepted dramatic distance. We framework of the novel is the Saxon swoop from one kind of focus to another. invasion of Edeyrnion, and the response of This is a consequence of the multiverse, the princedom to Arthur's attempt to unite where everything is a personality, and has Britain against these invaders. Yet, because the same value. there is so much else going on, we are only intermittently aware of the pressures of war We know that Powys read Spengler's upon daily life, while the vagueness of Decline of the West, and that a lot of Speng- Powys's military dispositions means that we lerian ideas went into A Glastonbury Romance. can never be sure how near the Saxons are Spengler says of the consciousness of prim- at any time, or in what force. itive man: More seriously, the invasion appears The unlimited multitude of antique gods— largely irrelevant to the development of the every tree, every spring, every house, nay morality of innocent anarchy in the book, every part of a house is a god—means that and to compromise this theme. Is the Saxon every tangible thing is an independent existence, invasion an unmixed evil? One of Porius's and therefore that none is functionally sub- ordinate to any other.11 ambitions is to join the Arthurian forces to clear Britain of the Saxon, though it is not Hence the strange impartiality of minute clear whether the liberation of Myrddin observation in Powys. We are used to this to Wyllt makes this unnecessary. Of those few some extent in earlier,novels—but in Porius Saxon crimes we see, the corpses of Cadawg it is carried to such an extreme that it is and Auntie Tonwen are certainly shocking, often hard to decide whether, on any one but not more so than the cannibalism of the page, we are most interested in myth or Giants, whose 'evil' is embraced as a politics or bits of twig. necessary opposite in Porius's philosophy, Witness the difficulties of a reader who and whose race is held in high mythological first thinks of Porius as a gusty historical esteem. The Saxon we meet, Thorson and novel, full of explicit action. Of course there Gunhorst, are genial, simple-minded are always impulses in Powys to good, warriors. As Arthur says, "if only we could thrilling drama a la Walter Scott, but now disarm and cajole these common soldiers of when he comes to a scene of dramatic these queer Saeson, and kill off their curst action, as when Porius kills twenty Saxon chieftains, we'd have as good and as law- On Reading Porius 31 abiding a set of colonists among us as any" churchyard.12 Rhys's Lectures on Welsh (366). Philosophy and The Welsh People are ransacked Socially, the most admired race are the for a vision of pre-Aryan Welshness, with forest people, with their placid matriarchy. hints of migrations from Iberia and North Their political leaders are the three Mod- Africa. rybedd, and Auntie Yssylt's pathetic Enclosed within the novel, Powys's loving attempt to ally her house with the Saxon, creation of a vanished domestic life and out of fear of the growing empire of Arthur, culture certainly is convincing; the reader wins a certain sympathy. may instinctively feel that the fifth century Does Arthur win any sympathy at all? was not quite so civilized as Powys paints it, The "clever, worldly, and subtle" Artiiur- but there are no real historical grounds for ians are treated with scorn, and why should argument. Porius nourish hopes of joining the likes of Nonetheless, Powys's "multiverse" also the effete, over-civilized Galahalt and Mab- invades the social world of the novel, and its sant ab Kaw. It is clear that Powys uses the whole way of looking at humanity. Arthurian court principally for non-political After his encounter with the giants. purposes, and the court is most memorable Porius experiences a curious ecstasy: as "an enchanted circus of horses and pretty ladies", the home of the seductive Nineue This ecstasy included every ecstasy he had and Gwendydd, and a successor to the many ever had. (. . .) It was a feeling, he decided other enchanted theatres and circuses in later, that embraced the whole world as if it Powys. But how does Myrddin Wyllt square were something under water: something that his anarchism with his post as emperor's included not only staring eyes and pieces of counsellor? "The Golden Age can never bone, but ourselves also, as if we lived under come again till governments and rulers and water and saw ourselves, and everybody else, as weeds, stones, reeds, minnows, newts, kings and emperors and priests and druids water-beetles, mud! (TS. p. 1009). andgods and devils learn to un-make them- selves as I did, and leave men and women to How often the world is like this in Porius; themselves!" (276). Because this anarchism Powys's angle on things is at times wholly runs throughout the book, the reader cannot non-human. Porius especially is conscious give very much more attention to political of a sub-human point of view: ". . . his affairs than does Porius himself when he mind seemed more and more able to regard inherits the princedom, beyond mourning everything that was happening with the sort the extinction of those splendid Three of clouded interest from below,. such as Aunties. Perhaps Powys, in this political vegetable life would feel for animal life, and tangle, is demonstrating the instability of animal life for human life." (384) He looks political loyalties, but it seems more likely at Myrddin Wyllt's eyes with "an interest that the political narrative only provides rather of a boy in a green beetle than of a dramatic skirmishes at certain points, and Christian in the windows of an immortal that Powys is not wholeheartedly committed soul." (63) to its implications. Since one of the most important features But Powys is wholeheartedly committed of Porius is a certain blurring of the distinc- to the creation of an historical and social tions between human and non-human, it is world. While he delighted in the "beautiful, worth emphasizing the many successes of a heavenly blank"12 which fifth century characterization of a more orthodox kind. British history offered him, he clings in There are dramatic confrontations and obsessive fashion to those tiny shards of the lyrical interludes which show Powys a long past which do exist, building his novel upon way from the nervous peculiarities of many those two little stones with their opaque ins- of his characters. The beautiful, domestic criptions, the famous PORIUS stone and scene in the cave between those very aged the CAVOSENIARGII stone in Llanfor lovers, Cadawg and Auntie Tonwen, shows 32 On Reading Porius him 'elemental' in the simplicities of bombs or bolts or spears can pass without human behaviour as well as in his love of affecting me.13 the material world. This scene may have This passage recalls Wolf Solent hugging been especially valued by Powys —for .in his little hard crystal of personality within, cutting the book he left it in, although it and the good-evil dualism of his novel. In contributes nothing to the forward move- Porius, a stubble mist is a kind of agent of ment of the novel nor the alchemical psychic change, and we find that Powys has plan. There is the delightful, straight- exploded his chief character into fragments. forward romance of Gwythyr and Nesta, or This will perhaps be clearer if Wolf Solent the more thwart confrontation between and Porius are compared a little further. Rhun and Morfydd, where Rhun makes Wolf Solent is a very hero-centred novel, advances to Morfydd because he does not in which Wolf indeed doubts the reality love her, and Morfydd resists these ad- of what goes on outside himself. Powys vances because she does love him. The slow presents his psychological development pace of the book allows Powys room to with very clear symbols. The Waterloo- analyze this incident at leisure, with splen- Steps face, the man with the white cat, did psychological understanding, without Wolf's father's skull, King Aethelwolf seeming undramatic. are compared, matched, and opposed It is important to emphasize such sim- to each other. The argument of the plicities, for their presence helps the reader book is conducted in very articulate interior to believe in the more evasive characters of monologue. Of course, the success of the the book. Powys is careful to have Porius novel is in its shaping of very fugitive himself accompanied by Rhun, who psychological material to a convincing pat- provides a stabilizing influence throughout tern, but by the time he came to write the novel, rather as Littleton did in John Porius, I believe Powys found his Wolf Solent Cowper's Autobiography and life. For it is method far too earnest, self-exalted, and true that much of the characterization is evangelical. Porius rejects the whole idea of very elusive indeed, in Porius himself, and "life-illusion": in those characters who combine human and supernatural attributes—Myrddin "What I've got to do is kill this life-illusion Wyllt, Nineue, and Medrawd. of mine so that it can't start growing again! There is a change in the conception of But what exactly is it that I've got to kill? That's the question. (. . .) It's a sort of dif- human personality in Porius corresponding fused cdnceit of yourself; that's what it is; a to Powys's changed conception of himself. sort of feeling that to be what you are and to In "My Philosophy as Influenced by feel as you feel makes you a person in some Living in Wales" he writes: peculiar way superior to the people you meet. In my earlier days when reality was either In reality of course it only makes you different. devilish or divine, either attractive or And since, as Brother John told me, ac- repulsive, and before the appearance of the cording to Pelagius there's experimentation in psychic nebulae that now keep tantalising me values going on all the time a person who wants with hints and glimpses of elements that in- to be wise must analyze and criticize even clude and transcend both these simple while he obeys, the values he's received from categories, I used to visualize my 'animula the past." (TS pp. 1243-4). vagula' as a(n) irreduceable, un-splittable Porius's capacities for analysis and atom, in other words, as a miniature but im- pregnable fortress, into which I could escape criticism are certainly well-developed, and at will. Now, on the contrary, just as if I per- so is his habit of obedience. Although, as ceived some dangerous threat to this atomic Morine Krissdottir has said, Powys has \me, I have myself exploded myself into so created his first true hero figure, he is a many fragments, that they are no longer hero of most unusual complexion—one who fragments, but have become aerial waves of combines heroic action with an incorrigible mist through which the enemy's bullets or passivity, a floating on the surface of events. On Reading Porius 33 He marries, or rather is married, the else in his work. Powys's "in situ" writing, princedom falls to him—and as for his his daily log of sensation, may have helped conquests in love and battle, these take him here. Porius is a man whose place almost in trance. The same is true of psychology is relatively fixed, but his tem- his final liberation of Myrddin Wyllt. per and his candidature for the role of Porius hardly understands what he is liberator of Cronos are tested, and we see doing, and his career in the novel is less a how his habits of mind, in particular his result of his efforts than a fulfilment of un- 'cavoseniargizing', rise to the occasion. conscious destiny, or tynged; "almost all his We have 'cavoseniargizing' as the key to pleasure in existence consisted of two Porius's distinctive character. Porius him- parallel activities—his active enjoyment of self attempts constantly to think of his habit the simplest sensations of living, and his ac- in robust fashion: tive enjoyment of the subtlest analysis of^ He had a subtle philosophical motive in life. For adventure, as adventure, he cared making much of this ridiculous word, and in nothing." (TS p. 977) thinking of his secret pleasure in this absurd The pleasures of a reader of Porius are way, for by so doing he drained it of all similar. Powys mocks the great actions of religious mysticism and purged it of all the normal historical novel, rather as, in A spiritual illusions. (403) Glastonbury Romance, he created a wholly un- It is vital to Porius and to Powys himself serious cosmology. that 'cavoseniargizing' should be presented But even in Porius's "analysis of life" as a non-religious activity, but there is what Powys again frustrates the simpler ex- must almost count as a mystical dimension pectations readers bring into his book. Just here, whose importance is obscured in the as readers who think they have an exciting published novel. For it is 'cavoseniargizing' Arthurian chronicle in front of them will be which binds Porius to Nineue, and it is bogged down in the minutiae of the Porius's intimacy with Nineue—and at the multiverse, so readers who expect the clear same time his ability to resist her total pull— and exciting mental drama of Wolf Solent which enables him to free Myrddin Wyllt. will be disappointed. Porius undergoes no Cavoseniargizing is a communion with the radical transformation from slavery to elements described in erotic language: freedom or ignorance to enlightenment. There is a sense in which the whole world in Could a man with the blood of the giants in Porius undergoes such a transition, but the him embrace air, water, and fire as though they were a cloud, and embrace them progress of Porius himself is as serpentine without ravishing or devouring any beautiful as 'The Path of Pelagius' which wanders goddess, as he was accustomed to do with through the Edeyrnion forests, and Porius the elements in what he called his at the end of the book is not very different 'cavoseniargizing'? (146) from Porius at the beginning. But this is hardly personally erotic at all, Oh, it was a mistake always to be making and is much closer to that very muted these rational efforts after order and unifor- eroticism of Wordsworth: mity when the wisdom of every creature lay . . . the first virgin passion of a soul in reconciling itself as well as it could to that Communing with the glorious universe.14 mysterious mingling of Nature's purposes with accident and chance which is the only But it is Wordsworth written in lower world we know. case letters, without the reverence for any monistic "universe". "Tread amorously That is page 106, but it could be 706. It the earth", advises the language of the is important to remember that the action of Cewri, but we are a long way from that the novel is contained within one week, physical embrace of grass and water in within which Powys comes nearer to a Whitman's prose piece, "A Sun- "stream of consciousness" than anywhere Bath—Nakedness". 34 On Reading Poriw Nineue is essential here. She is a very feminine principle. Nineue is, of course, a elusive character, not because of any un- 'sylph'—but 'sylphs', here as in earlier certainty on Powys's part, but because her Powys, are less actual women than proj- elusiveness is important. In Arthur's tent, ections of the kind of imaginative possession Porius holds Nineue to prevent her from which used to be ascribed to a 'muse'. The falling. The incident balances Porius's feminine principle is present in the earlier embrace of Myrddin Wyllt, where he imagination, and in nature. It belongs to a had experienced a sense of the prophet's mythological region, and we find Powys in '' multiple identity ": his letters of the 1940s very interested in Whitman's "Square Deific", particularly, But with Nineue it was as if he were pressing impressed by "Whitman's audacity in against himself something boneless,' ribless, making the Holy Ghost Feminine."11 In his' formless; something that was a yielding image of femininity in the abstract, the introduction to the Autobiography, J. B.| resilient, lithe, magnetic, slippery Platonic Priestley quotes Jung's Psychological Types}, Idea of all the evasive allurements in the claiming Powys as an example of "Thej world that are the objects of impersonal Introverted Sensation Type": desire . . . Actually he moves in a mythological world, There was nothing of Nineue that was not where men, animals, railways, houses, rivers deliciously capable of being absorbed. And in and mountains appear partly as benevolent the absorption of Nineue even for those brief deities and partly as malevolent demons.18 seconds there was a sensation of the unfathomable and the infinite. (93) It is clear that the mythological invaded and complicated John Cowper's life, just as Here is obviously a being of comparable the collision—hardly the merging—of the supernatural significance to Cronos in his mythological and the naturalistic is perhaps Myrddin Wyllt incarnation. Powys, in his the most distinctive feature of the novels. note on the characters of the book In the final chorus of Faust, "the eternal published in the excellent Porius number of feminine leads us on"; in other words, it is the Powys Newsletter, specifically dissociates never attained. It might be very dangerous her from "any fixed academic place in any actually to catch up with it. One might be fixed academic mythology" (15). But she is put under a stone, like Merlin, or over- clearly a powerful embodiment of the whelmed by the undisciplined contents of feminine principle. the imagination, as nearly happened to There is a constant opposition between Powys in his harrowing years at Southwick, masculine and feminine in Porius, worth where he experienced in their destructive presenting not as an 'interpretation' of the aspect the very powers out of which he was book, but as offering the reader some point later to create his novels. of reference in the seething anarchy of the I think this is the meaning of the strange 'multiverse'. It is an opposition familiar game of tag which Porius and Nineue play from earlier Powys. At the end of Glaston- on the top of Snowdon. Talking to Rhun bury, the Great Mother, Cybele, is revealed on the mountain slopes, Porius says of the as the inspiration of all the hopes and '' mystery of women'': dreams which have gone before. (As Powys wrote to his publisher, "Don't you think it "I think their "mystery" forces them to try was a good inspiration to end the Glaston- and possess us, to surround us with them- bury Book—in a tone like the very end of selves, to draw us into themselves, to make the Second Part of Faust".16) us part of themselves,—in a word to swallow us. But—and here comes the extraordinary Discussion of the feminine principle in contradiction—in their deepest selves they Powys has been bedevilled by the want us to escape being swallowed! Therefore strangeness of the relations between Powys- the thing we've got to do is never to cease heroes and their women, which have running away, never to cease escaping being relatively little to do with this central swallowed!" (TS p. 1561) On Reading Porius 35 The tolerance with which Nineue treats Porius debates the values of different Porius after he has escaped her is described religions at a time of cultural transition as "a supernatural planetary indulgence (here resembling Marius the Epicurean). totally beyond anything humanly maternal, Where Christianity has no special claim to but not impossible to associate with the pre-eminence, the ideas of St. Paul look boundless earth, mother of the Titans, nor much odder than any 'cavoseniargizing': impossible to associate with her who betrayed Uranus to crooked-counselling "He feels that Jesus Christ has got into his Cronos, and then again Cronos to the hurler soul and is there instead of himself. Yes, Drom feels that it isn't Drom who does the ofthunderbolts."(TSp. 1577) good things he does but Jesus in him." (TS Whatever the status of Nineue, it is ap- p. 1094) parent that the final arbiter is Gaia, mother earth. We remember that Myrddin Wyllt The finality of Biblical revelation, as had to gain the permission of the earth, his preached by the Corwen priest, seems mother, before inaugurating the events equally strange: leading to a second Golden Age. "The Lord has spoken, and the Lord has Glen Cavaliero has noted that the women stopped speaking. And that's how it ts\" (TS in Porius are of stronger mettle than the p. 1178) men. Porius is dominated by his masterful mother and capable wife. His father Einion Resolving "everything back into nature" is ineffective, and devoted to the goddess of is the overwhelming impression of autumn the matriarchal forest people, Ceridwen. in Edeyrnion. These sound like comfortable There are the three Modrybedd with their words, but they are nothing of the sort. We natural dignity. One 'masculine principle' are thrown back on that restive, fevered to set against the dominant 'feminine prin- multiverse. The glorious 'atmosphere' of ciple' is Rhun ap Gwrnach's Mithraism, Porius with its luxurious, downward October which collapses under the pressure of his pull, has been everywhere admired. passion for Gwendydd, his attempted But this earth-mysticism is very different ravishment of Morfydd, and his happier from that of Lawrence at the opening of The fate with Sibylla. This invasion of the Rainbow. In Lawrence, the farmers' contact feminine upon philosophical detachment is with the land is an assurance of stability. treated with compassionate humour, as Man becomes simpler, his moral values with Richard Gaul in Weymouth Sands. more straightforward, the 'cerebralism' of For the rest, we have the male thunder- modern urban culture has no chance to bolt-hurler, and the male Trinity. Porius develop. (The differences between Lawrence hopes to oppose the fanaticism of Minnawc and Powys are nowhere sharper than in Gorsant with the feminine principle: the different meanings they give to 'cerebralism'.) In Porius nature challenges And he seemed to see clearly now that to with her deviousness and instability. fight this priest with anything resembling the man's own undying frenzy of love-hate "Nature is the mother of all extremes", would be impossible, and that the only hope, writes Powys in Dostoievsky, "She loves to bring forth monsters, abortions and as had already crossed his mind, would be to 19 use the feminine element in the heart of freaks". So, the closer to nature man religion itself; an element that in the end draws, the more complex his response to would resolve everything back into nature. the world becomes, the more provisional (TSp. 1212) his moral judgements. Hence the strange rankness of landscape, initially sinister and That the rebellion against religious 'evil'. Powys particularly dwells on orthodoxy in Porius is made from an alter- traditionally parthenogenetic fungi, which native position of security is evident from Nicander described in the 3rd century B.C. the humour of this rebellion; there is none of as "the evil ferment of the earth". "The the shrill anti-clericalism of Owen Glendower. 36 On Reading Porius central heat of the globe forms them by underworld, where one illusion melted into) rarefying the mud of the earth".20 Powys, another illusion and, where all definite! aware of these inauspicious connotations, shapes and all definite thoughts shifted and} associates fungi with the earth's mysterious shimmered and waxed and waned in aj generative forces; the 'atmosphere' of phantasmagoric mist". (143) This greenish-) Porius is not just scene-painting, but an black underworld is familiar to all Powys j enactment of the whole philosophical readers as the Nineue-haunted Annwn. I motion of the book, towards the liberation What is all in favour of this huge bookj of' authority from below'. with its unarresting title as being con- "We know only too well," writes Powys sidered Powys's greatest is its sustained in Rabelais, "how the sancity of religion and seriousness. For the first time in Powys the sanctity of the family have come to be seriousness of purpose is matched byj closely associated with authority from above, seriousness of performance. I do not detect) while authority from below has been perverted any of the famous charlatanism at all. j to mean authority from the Devil instead of There is no authorial clowning, none of the j authority from the sound and good instincts miracles which are not miracles, the ] of the masses of common men and "Never or Always" of A Glastonbury Romance, j women".21 Of course, . the greatness of Glastonbury is i The opposition of 'above' and 'below' in in its very instability; its incongruities point j Powys goes far back. Wolf Solent prayed in to central dilemmas in modern religious ex- vain to the stars on the slopes of Ramsgard, perience. But I think it is clear that Powys but found assurance in the field of gold did not conceive of this kind of showman's behind the pigsty. In Glastonbury, prayers to novel as his final ambition. the powers above were highly dangerous, In the Autobiography he records a strange and Geard emerged from Wookey Hole to ecstasy upon looking at a stone wall behind transform the town. In Morwyn wisdom the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, j came from the depths. Porius confirms this The ecstasy had to do with his vocation as a sequence, where the fungoid fertility of the writer. earth, of nature, becomes a source of good- i ness. This fertility is associated with the It is impossible for me to describe it! And yet earth-wisdom of Myrddin Wyllt, and the I never see the least patch of lichen, or moss, Pelagian wisdom of Brother John. Brother or grass, in the veinings of an ancient rock John's cell seems to sink into the earth, in but something of the same feeling returns. one of Powys's most extravagantly lyrical Not, however, quite the same; for that im- passages: pression, that vision of "Living Bread", that mysterious meeting-point of animate with The stones of Brother John's cell descended inanimate, had to do with some secret un- straight and deep into that same black mud derlying world or rich magic and strange and when Porius reached them (. . .) and romance. In fact I actually regarded it as a touched them with his cold knuckles, it was a prophetic idea of the sort of stories that I rough, blind expanse of stone he touched, myself might come to write; stories that where miniature armies of moss and tiny ferns should have as their background the in- and little round-leaved trailing plants and describable peace and gentleness of the sub- stance we name grass in contact with the sub- squadrons of grey lichen seemed in league 22 with the swamp and the forest in their slow stance we name stone. tireless vegetative determination to go on in- No charlatanism here. No Powys novel vading this solitary outpost of human fulfils this early hope of peace so well as civilisation until they had swallowed it up. (143) Porius. And how closely Brother John's cell reminds us of this stone wall. This is early in the story, and Porius is What is against Porius is the apparent distinctly fearful that he "should be carried privacy of its message. If the questions of down into some faintly lit greenish-black Glastonbury are appropriate to our age, is On Reading Porius 37 this also true of the answers of Porius? Does "Eternus, Edernus, Edeyrn" murmurs Powys's Corwen Golden Age have much to Porius on the Gaer watch-tower. At the offer the world at large? end, Porius steps outside temporal Gerard Casey has put this question in its limitation, climbing ''across great yawning most necessary and blunt form, in asking gulfs of time" to enact a drama of mythic whether Porius really has much to do with a meaning. world which includes "Auschwitz, It might be argued that, if the post-war age is Dresden, Hiroshima and the Gulag Ar- the one with least access to a Pelagian chipelago".23 It is barely credible that philosophy, there is no other age which so Powys, perhaps in 1945 itself, should write urgently needs it. Powys's belief in in Rabelais: Pelagian natural goodness, in a 'multiver- sal' reality, and his faith in the power of the A far-off Utopia to some still; but not to all. feminine principle—these may be the ex- Things may look the same to the superficial perience of inner truths, platitudes, or lies. eye; but different they are. Not so far below They are among those grandiose sim- the surface the invisible mole of human destiny is heaving up the soil beneath our plicities which are only so far true as they feet. proceed from a necessity of inspiration and achieve honest representation. Powys's The world's great age begins anew: novels deal less with good and evil in action The golden years return.24 than they explore the potentialities for good and evil in the imagination and cast of Of course, in presenting mythical mind of the individual. If a writer, in the material in a history-less past, Powys is middle of the twentieth century, can attempting a novel about eternal aspects of honestly sustain a belief that "bon espoir y the world. The Grail of Glastonbury was "a gist au fond", his work has a more than or- little nucleus of Eternity, dropped somehow dinary claim for attention. The reader who from the outer spaces upon one particular 25 has coped with the bizarre multiplicity of spot". The whole of Porius is in a sense Porius is at least offered the chance of find- such a descent of the timeless into time. ing Powys's belief just possibly true. The beginning of the book moves from the timeless down to Corwen, A.D. 499:

A Note on the Text prepared by Joseph Slater and published in The Quotations with pages indicated in parentheses are Powys Newsletter, No. 4, of Colgate University Press. from Macdonald's 1951 edition of Porius. Those marked "TS p." are from the typescript of Porius in the Library of Colgate University. The pagination of Notes the fragments of the Porius typescript in Mr. Bissell's collection, and in photocopy in the Library of Chur- 'Letters to C. Benson Roberts, Village Press, 1975, p. chill College, Cambridge, is identical to that in the 92. Colgate typescript. It seems clear that Powys correc- 'Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson, ted, in ink, two copies of the complete typescript Macdonald, 1958, p. 142. simultaneously. Mr. Bissell's pages represent those 'Letters 1937-1954, ed. Iorwerth C. Peate, Univer- complete pages not used by Macdonald in the sity of Wales Press, 1974, pp. 79-80. preparation of their published edition. This means, 'Ibid., p. 59. for example, that where Powys cuts a section from 5Letter to Marian Powys, 6 May 1951, MS in the TS p. 165 (line 2) to TS p. 169 (line 26), the pages possession of Mr. Peter Powys Grey. in Mr. Bissell's and Churchill College's collection 'George Steiner, "The Problem of Powys", The will be TS pp. 166, 167, and 169. The cisatlantic Times Literary Supplement, 16 May 1975, p. 541. reader who wishes to approach a complete Porius may 7Morine Krissdottir, John Cowper Powys and the therefore do so, though he will lack connecting Magical Quest, Macdonald, 1980, p. 130. ' passages of under a page, by reading the published "'The Creation of Romance", Modern Thinker, I, text supplemented by the British TS, and with the No. 1, March 1932, p. 76. assistance of the gloss "Porius Restauratus", ''The Meaning of Culture, Cape, 1930, p. 203. 38 On Reading Porius '"Angus Wilson, "John Cowper Powys as a "Quoted in John Ramsbottom, Mushrooms and Novelist", The Powys Review, No. 1, Spring 1977, p. Toadstools, Collins, 1953, p. 13. 14. "Rabelais, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1948, "Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Allen p. 362. and Unwin, 1932, I, p. 403. "Autobiography, pp. 199-200. "Joseph Slater, "The Stones of Porius", The Powys "Gerard Casey, "Three Christian Brothers", The Newsletter, No. 3, 1972-73. Powys Review, No. 4, Winter/Spring 1978-79, p. 19. "Obstinate Cymric, Carmarthen, 1947, pp. 170-1. "Rabelais, p. 397. "Wordsworth, "The Excursion", Book 1, 11. "A Glaslonbury Romance (1933), Macdonald, 1955, 285-6. p. 458. "The Powys Newsletter, No. 4, 1974-75, p. 21. "Letter to Melrich Rosenberg, 18 November I wish to thank Mr. Peter Powys Grey for per- 1931, MS Colgate. mission to quote from John Cowper's letter to "Letters to Clifford Tolchard, Village Press, 1975, p. Marian Powys, Professor R. L. Blackmore for his 20. great help in opening to me the Powys collection in "Autobiography, (1934), Macdonald, 1967, p. xiii. Colgate University Library, and the staff of the "Dostoievsky, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1946, Library of Churchill College, Cambridge for their p. 97. kind assistance. Ben Jones John Cowper Powys's Literary Criticism Continuity and Context

Does John Cowper Powys's commentary If there is continuity hoped for at the on literature provide an informed and in- deepest levels of experience, might we not formative, a restorative, revelation of con- expect it in literary criticism? Indeed, tinuity, and does his commentary have a discrimination cleanses the processes of context in twentieth-century critical receptivity, making continuity possible. traditions? In The Meaning of Culture he Hence, for Powys, criticism is an essential describes the processes for achieving con- act in the fulfilling of imaginative power. tinuity: "The particular weight of gathered But is it actually there—this continuity—in impressions ... is constantly being made Powys's criticism? more formidable in the face of the brutality If Powys did not attain "status" as a and the rawness of things by this exercise of literary critic, it was not because he was out our will. Our receptivity flows with an of touch or antithetical in all ways to the ever-increasing momentum along the chan- main stream of criticism. Pound, Eliot, the nel that the will has obstinately dug to 1 American New Critics offer uneasy com- receive it". He uses the word "will" in the pany for Powys. Yet we can remind our- "sense of a will to select and a will to 1 selves that there were areas of similar con- reject". Let me rephrase it: the will to cern: 1) the importance of continuity and discriminate, to select and reject, cleanses tradition, as shared in a common view of and directs the processes of sensual recep- the uses of the past; 2) the seriousness of tivity (our "receptivity" of "gathered im- literature, in the tradition of Arnold; 3) in pressions"). This act of cleansing and the case of Eliot and Pound, a spirit of in- directing makes more formidable the "par- ternationalism, including a concern for a ticular continuity of our deepest life ..." renewed vitality for the idea of Europe; 4) Blake comes to mind here, for whom the opposition to technological and in- "receptivity" is an active process, as, for dustrial "progress"; 5) the recognition and example, in the Printing House in Hell sec- engagement of mythic process in con- tion of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. temporary human experience. The least Here we find an encompassing purpose: likely candidates for common brotherhood the energy of will directed towards the for- with Powys seem to be the New Critics, mation, the sustenance, of continuity. The with their particular attention to detail and literary imagination is not alone in precision in the reading process. Their revealing this continuity, but it is clear methods of critical procedure are counter to enough that literature is to be taken Powys's, yet-their view of an agrarian, non- primarily as a revelation of our "deepest industrial society—where the value of the life". In The Pleasures of Literature, Powys individual life, in harmony with the says: "In books dwell all the demons and processes of the earth, formed and ar- 2 ticulated by the imagination, would be all the angels of the human mind". 3 Literature is revelation, and power also: sustained—is shared by Powys. It is an "A word is a magic incantation by which area for continued exploration within the self exercises power—first over itself Powys studies, particularly for those in- and then over other selves and then, for all terested in his connections to the United we know, over the powers of nature" (1). States. 40 John Cowper Powys's Literary Criticism: We cannot here develop at length Eliot's criticism. Powys tells us that he Powys's relation to the theory, methods knew The Waste Land by heart8 (a comment and achievements of Eliot and Pound, reminiscent of Wordsworth saying that he although much could be learned about had "committed much" of Dryden and Powys's achievement by particular com- Pope to memory),9 and though it is cer- parison with them. Peter Easingwood has tainly the case that he would be uneasy with already established the usefulness of placing some aspects of Eliot's imaginative Powys's literary art in a contemporary con- engagement, he nevertheless was at odds text.4 It was his reference to Donald with Eliot on serious grounds. There were Davie's Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor that theological differences, differences on the suggested a connection between Powys and nature of the person and revelation of Pound, although in a different context.5 In Jesus, on concepts of evil, and on the role spite of essential technical differences, they of the Church, particularly on the question share a sense of language as both an im- of "orthodoxy". But even on the question mediate and historical revelation of a con- of orthodoxy we should take note of tinuous human experience, taking form in Powys's reference to the Christian saints, diverse languages, words and signs, and near the end of Psychoanalysis and Morality. delivering to the contemporary reader an He is attacking the modern concept of the awareness of the continuity of the European culture-hero, much as Eliot does in After ideal. If their modes of art differ, they both Strange Gods: "What a relief to turn from sense their own achievements to be com- these character-artists to the infinite and mentaries on and restatements of magical tenderness of the Christian saints previously articulated revelations. Powys and their profound recognition of the eter- would perhaps have disparagingly called nal value of every human soul, 'weak' or Pound an "artist", but even the poet of the otherwise!"10 Their similarities are those Cantos, sculptor that he is, can be called shared as part of an ethos: an indebtedness "one of the great sprawlers of literature", to the new anthropology of Frazer and as Angus Wilson, I assume with affection, Jessie Weston, the sharing of views about called Powys.6 There are other connections: the recurrence of primitive or mythic events the interest in European medieval in history—something shared with Pound literature, and in Dante; in the delineation and Yeats, and received in part, as Donald of "culture"; in the solitary life, indeed Davie points out, . from Pater.11 The exile; in Whitman (see Pound's "I make a primary text from Eliot is the familiar pact with you, Walt Whitman"); in a per- essay, "Tradition and the Individual sistency to use language—be it English, Talent". There are two passages which I Greek, Chinese, or Welsh—as a primary wish to note particularly:, first, Eliot's effort for human survival. The differences statement on the altering of the past by the show up particularly in the matter of the art present, and secondly, his controversial of poetry and in the manner of discussion: statement on the role of personality in the Powys, we know, is not known for terseness creative process. and economy of statement. That they were, or would have been, incompatible seems Eliot explains how, in his view, a new (a likely.7 It is possible that Powys had Pound "really.new") work of art enters into the in mind when talking about "Fanatics of tradition: ' the modern school ..." (see below, p. 41). The existing order is complete before the new Yet the list of shared commitments work arrives; for order to persist after the remains, chiefly the commitment to see supervention of novelty, the whole existing or- literature as a continuing process of der must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and statement and restatement, vision and, so the relations, proportions, values of each perhaps, revision. work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and We also find similarities when we turn to the new. Whoever has approved this idea of John Cowper Powys's Literary Criticism: 41 order, of the form of European, of English this point, even after sixty years, may still literature will not find it preposterous that the raise a stir. Discussing the relation between past should be altered by the present as much tradition and personality, he says that as as the present is directed by the past. And the the poet develops the necessary "con- poet who is aware of this will be aware of 12 sciousness of the past" he experiences "a great difficulties and responsibilities. continual surrender of himself as he is at Powys is one of those who has "approved the moment to something which is more this idea of order, of the form of European, valuable. The progress of an artist is a con- of English literature . . ." His specific tinual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction 14 references to this organic unity of literary of personality". This is, some may say, tradition occur in The Pleasures of Literature totally opposed to Powys's "personal" view in which he attacks the "Fanatics of the of the artist. I do not need to argue for modern school" who, he says, "love to Powys's emphasis on personality; he states point out that it is use and wont and it both early and late. But Eliot, more reverent piety and liturgical repetition that generous in his explanations than is gives half their glamour to the old writers . sometimes allowed for, goes on to make the . \" Against these "fanatics" (amongst case that the "extinction of personality" is whom he may possibly, and paradoxically, necessary if the poet is to express his include Eliot) Powys cites "Croce's ad- "medium". He says that "the poet has, mirable doctrine that every creation needs not a 'personality' to express, but a par- its completion by the minds of generations ticular medium, which is only a medium before it can be really mature . . ." (16). and not a personality, in which impressions Croce's view of tradition is referred to and experiences combine in peculiar and again in the essay on Cervantes: "How unexpected ways. Impressions and ex- profound was the inspiration of the Italian periences which are important for the man philosopher, Croce, when he said that a may take no place in the poetry, and those great work of art is not completed until which become important in the poetry may humanity itself for many generations has play quite a negligible part in the man, the 15 set its seal upon it!" (479).13 Powys iden- personality." It is true, he does not say tifies here specifically with Croce. More that the poet is a medium: rather that the generally, in his procedure of selection and poet expresses not personality but "a commentary, he demonstrates his affiliation medium ... in which impressions and ex- with an organic and integrated in- periences combine in peculiar and unex- terpretation of history. He shares with Eliot pected ways." If not an invocation of the an awareness of the complexity of in- occult, Eliot's reference nevertheless takes tellectual and imaginative continuity. As its place alongside Powys's more emphatic we learn from Powys's essay on Dostoiev- insistence that the poet is a medium and sky, it is the fate of Europe, of human con- that the poet's self is something other than sciousness, that is being settled in works of his personality. The poet's self is like the literature, and he shares with Eliot the view magician's, as we have seen, exerting that the continuity of life has been revealed power, first, "over itself (italics mine). in history and constantly reshaped in the Discussing psychoanalysis, Powys says that currency of passing time. This is Eliot's "We are the creatures of strange sense of tradition, and it is Powys's. It is unutterable impulses, super-human and stated in the prefaces to his critical sub-human, personal and impersonal. volumes, in his modes of selection, com- Every conscious soul stands hesitating and mentary and comparison, but it is, as with faltering on the verge of terrific half- Eliot, most forcefully articulated in his realized powers, . among which the imaginative writing. imagination moves as an actual creator." Our thoughts are "penetrated by perpetual The second connection has to do with the response to mysterious forces that reach poet's personality". Eliot's comments on 42 John Cowper Powys's Literary Criticism: backward through an infinite past, and for- of political and religious experience. But ward to an obscure future."16 In the 1949 the placing of these three exiles—two Am- Introduction to Tristram Shandy, Powys calls ericans in England, and one Englishman the novel the "most extravagantly personal of in America—detecting common areas all stories ever written," and adds that of interest and shared imaginative com- "there are few writers whose manner and mitments, serves a purpose in defining tone are quite as personal as Sterne's."" where Powys stands in twentieth-century He has already spoken of Sterne's literature, and this place will be established "Dionysian self-expression" and his only when his relation to such works as "orgiastic cerebralism" (11). Sterne Eliot's Selected Essays, for example, or Tht becomes part of legend, and in this sense Sacred Wood, or After Strange Gods, oi loses what Eliot talks about as "per- Pound's Cantos, has been clarified. Powys sonality". We may say that he becomes will not always come off well when such "impersonal". Finally, in the essay on comparisons are made, yet much can bt Homer in The Pleasures of Literature, Powys gained from seeing his work in this context. says: "There is something strangely sym- In the 1915 "Preface" to Visions anc bolic in the fact that both Homer and Revisions, Powys set out some guidelines Shakespeare, the greatest poets among men They are, fundamentally, anti-critical up to this hour, should have.lost their iden- "What we want is not the formulating o tities as persons" (70). So, whether the new Critical Standards, and the dragging narrator be Prufrock, or Tiresias in The in of the great masters before our las Waste Land, or the sensitized narrator of miserable Theory of Art. What we want i; Dostoievsky's tales, the omniscient voice an honest, downright and quite personal ar who relates the resurgence of ancient ticulation, as to how these great things ir powers in modern Glastonbury, or in the literature really hit us when they find us foj Welsh mountains of 499 A.D., or the the moment natural and off oui Aether trying once more to tell the story of guard—when they find us as men anc Achilles, whether any of these, Eliot and women, and not as ethical gramaphones' Powys share a common purpose: the poet— (sic).19 His object is to divest himself o the imaginative writer—is the trans- "opinions", and to give himself up "ir lator, the carrier, the possessor of special pure, passionate humility . . absolutely anc gifts, whose responsibility is tradition and completely, to the various visions and tem continuity, the "sense of the timeless as peraments of these great dead artists" (10) well as the temporal and of the timeless and In Suspended Judgments (1916) he continue; of the temporal together."18 In Powys's this emphasis on the "entirely personal anc commentaries much is made of the man, idiosyncratic" excursions into the aesthetic ' the personality, but rarely do we encounter world.20 "The chief role of intellect ir biographical, indeed "personal" facts of criticism," we are told, "is to protect ui much importance or reliability. The man from the intellect; to protect us from those he talks about is a "persona", an invented, tiresome and unprofitable 'principles of art fictional, or legendary figure whose identity which in everything that gives us thrillim as a person has been lost. pleasure are found to be magnificently con tradicted!" (9). There is a certain nobilit) When we look at the relation Powys bore in such sentiments. The tone is not alway: to Pound and Eliot we can make much of sustained in their application. Th< the differences, but finally, if we wish to "Preface" to Visions and Revisions start; carry out our responsibilities, they are of with a lively brashness, an attack oi limited use. We can list obvious and prac- academics ("their squalid philandering: tical differences, starting with prose style, with their neighbours' wives," he says), ai and modes of rhetorical procedure, in- idiosyncratic rejection of "constructive' cluding kinds of audience, varying criticism, a few hard words on "moderi pressures of financial survival, contrarities John Cowper Powys's Literary Criticism: 43 writers", an uneasy discussion of "the demands of the respective audiences. We grand style" with several examples of assume the origins of the published essays where it can and cannot be applied, and a to be the syllabuses of his lectures in final apostrophe to Beauty. His own England and the United States for statement of unity in the collection is this: various educational organizations.21 Vest- iges of performances remain in the printed If there is any unity in these essays, it will be essays. The problem is not that these cannot found in a blurred and stammered attempt to be read together, but that for the practical indicate how far it may be possible, in spite of the limitation of our ordinary nature, to problem of constructing a coherent response, live in the light of the "grand style". I do not the reader may be struck with a sense of mean that we—the far-off worshippers of having too much at one time. But, we are these great ones—can live as they thought and reminded again that these essays were part felt. But I mean that we can live in the at- of the University Extension programme, direc- mosphere, the temper, the mood, the attitude ted to an audience of a particular kind: towards things, which "the grand style" they eager and informed, but intellectually use evokes and sustains. (17) passive, looking for immediate intellectual The problem is that in this discussion of excitement, not for controversy, theory or "grand style", which is indeed "blurred scholarship. One is awed by the extent of and stammered", Powys slips from treating the material and the directness of Powys's it as a literary style to a personal life style. articulation of response, but some things "Grand style" as a critical term becomes of are missing: a sense of concentration, an little use when so applied, and even if engagement with particular problems in a Powys is himself satisfied with a loose and given writer (he does, in his generosity, general usage, when we come to his essays, generally defend the authors, at times the term rarely fits the writers he chooses to missing significant points), a closeness to discuss. It were "Peevish and querulous" the text (in the manner of Eliot, Lea vis and (the phrase is Powys's) to press the point, a whole epoch of criticism), and, finally, a but one disturbing element of his discussion consistency of scholarly perspective and is his use of the term with reference to diligence. One wishes for a more definite modern writers: "It [the grand style] is stand on "modern writers" whom he —one must recognise that—the thing, slights so often without identifying, but that and the only thing, that, in the long run, may be a problem inherent in his appeals. It is because of the absence of professional status at the time, in his need it that one can read so few modern writers to perform for an audience. He was, after twice. They have flexibility, originality, all, selling "great books", and, perhaps, cleverness, insight—but they lack distinc- himself. tion—they fatally lack distinction" (13). Powys shared with some of his con- This early reference to modern writers is temporaries—including those whom we especially dissatisfying because of Powys's have discussed—an elitist position in mat- refusal to name them. Once, however, ters of culture and the imagination, and Powys gets beyond his preface, he forgets this, too, must be noted. At the end of most of what he has said. He moralizes, Suspended Judgments, he says: "We have to preaches, speaks from the pedestal, cajoles, face the fact—bitter and melancholy though professes and pleads in a way not so remote it may be—that in our great bourgeois- from what even then could be called dominated democracies the majority of academic. people would like to trample out the flame The rhetorical problems encountered in of genius altogether; trample it out as transforming a performed lecture to a something inimical to their peace" (434). published essay will always be a problem He then refers to the "instinctive hatred for Powys's criticism. He has not satisfac- with which the mob of men regard what is torily resolved the disparity between the exceptional and rare" (434). He has 44 John Cowper Powys's Literary Criticism: already said, in the introductory essay, that through Powys's career, but we may find it I "it is the typical modern person, of normal useful to trace his perspective and response culture and playful expansiveness, who is if we choose a single author. Powys may be the mortal enemy of the art of "pluralistic", but the same names keep turn- discrimination" (5). The passages place ing up in his commentaries. He had his him with Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Yeats, own "great tradition", and in this tradition and some others too, in their rejection, for a Whitman's name is one of the more ob- variety of reasons, of the drift of con- vious. Derek Langridge records a syllabus temporary democracy. Powys's appeal, at for a lecture on Whitman for the Oxford this stage of his writing, to books and to University Extension programme (1905- perception based on intellectualized sen- 06)," and Whitman is cited in 100 Best suality, offers a resolution different from Books (1916). Visions and Revisions has the Pound's fascism, Yeats's aristocracy, first e.xtended published commentary. Lawrence's blood-primitivism, and Eliot's There is a longer discussion in The Pleasures orthodoxy—a different resolution, but a of Literature, and he takes a prominent place sharing of views about the survival of art in the apocalyptic concluding chapters of and tradition in a hostile society. Rabelais. Continuity exists in individual ex- The essay in Visions and Revisions gives us perience, and, Powys argues, the develop- a sense of Powys's early critical procedure. ment of an identity depends on the It starts with an emphatic statement—two discovery of such continuity. The artist not short sentences—that he is going to discuss only discovers but articulates this con- Whitman's poetry. Then, a page on what tinuity. Here the term relates to literary else he could discuss, at the end of which he tradition. Tradition, rightly discerned, is reminds us that he is going to discuss Whit- the collective revelation of the inner life as man's poetry. This is side-tracked, however, it has been discovered and articulated by when he mentions Whitman's optimism, artists of the past. Criticism, then, becomes and he spends a page taking shots at the op- the task of identifying those artists who timistic Robert Browning, referred to as have most potently discovered and ar- "Mrs. Browning's energetic husband". ticulated the inner life. These uses of the Then a brief and single shot at Chesterton terms continuity and tradition are, I have at the end of which we are forcefully remind- suggested, shared by Powys's contemp- ed: "But it is not of Walt Whitman's op- oraries. There exists, then, a context— timism that I want to speak; it is of his shared attitudes and objectives—for poetry." We settle-in at last; but, with the Powys's early critical perspective. I have mention of Whitman's "free verse" he tried to identify this continuity without carries out an attack on "modern poets". undermining his own unique gifts, his He tells us that "all young modern poets passion for books as psychic revelations of write alike," and "they are alike", etc. We an essential and deeper self, his boldness in are now halfway into an essay emphatically exploring areas sometimes restricted, devoted to the discussion of Whitman's specifically the area of sexuality {Suspended "poetry", and still waiting. The fifth page Judgments, "Rousseau"), his appeal for new begins with a determined intent to discuss directions in criticism, and, of course, his the poetry. He mentions Whitman's "mag- own streak of game-playing, as when, near ical unity of rhythm", which Powys the end of Suspended Judgments, having written correctly discerns to be a primary source with enthusiasm on some sixteen authors, he for Whitman's evocative power. He men- says that he is "drawn instinctively only to two tions Whitman's music: "Those long, among them all—to William Blake and Paul plangent, wailing lines", and the in- Verlaine" (428). dividual effects "in the great orchestral symphony he conducts". We have had, It is not possible now to trace the com- then, two sentences on the "poetry". He plete course of changing perspectives John Cowper Powys's Literary Criticism: 45 gathers some examples which, however, do more elaborate in its references. The not carry on the discussion of this "mag- longest single section, taking up more than ical unity of rhythm". They are, rather one-third of the essay (444-458), is an ex- a listing of Whitman's evocation of tended attempt to explicate the cosmos in sensations, and the list is given to us Whitmanesque terms, using Whitman's op- imitatively in a typically Whitmanesque timism as an indicator that Being is not one catalogue. It is a set piece obviously to be but many. Bui Powys is, as sometimes hap- performed. As the essay ends, when we pens, diverted from Whitman, this time in- could have expected a discussion of poetry, to a critique of modern science. He is less we have a potentially spell-binding than convincing in his discussion of modern rhetorical evocation of love and hope. In an physics, although we may credit him with essay devoted emphatically to the attempting to go "extra-territorial". He discussion of Whitman's poetry—not other attacks "specialization", but gets trapped in things—we have been given only a part of a its language. Better to have talked about paragraph for that discussion. The mistake Whitman. When he returns to Whitman's in his method is that Powys gives us to sup- pagan mysticism he returns to what he can pose at the beginning that poetry can be do best, constructing continuities with other discussed separately from other things, writers, building a design and a context. from optimism, sensation, love, hope. The Whitman is the "true pluralistic anarchist" reminders that he will discuss the poetry (475), mystical and assertive, the medium take on a somewhat, and perhaps in- for the deeper life. His optimism, in tentional, comic twist. If we want a term Powys's view, is not that of America, or for his method, we can say that it may be democracy, or the "Average Man", but an centrifugal, but the centre does not always assertion that imaginative reconstruction of hold. The single memorable commentary, a desolated, materialized, fallen creation is other than the put-down of Browning, is yet possible, that "there is no position, not the catalogue of Whitman's ability to evoke even the, position of being a god, that is "the magical ugliness of certain aspects of closed to our transmigratory progress" Nature" (286; 213), that same "magical (464). ugliness" which Powys was himself to What mars his discussion particularly is evoke so powerfully in his fiction. the lack of concentration. The attack on The essay on Whitman in Visions and modern science, if faulty in its control of Revisions is indicative of the procedures the language, is partly redeemed by its followed in the early essays—the search, pointed enthusiasm. But more serious carried out rhetorically, for for a controlling problems develop when Powys tries to play sensation in an author, a sensation which the scholar: I cite a fairly long section that evokes the "continuity of our deepest life". begins on page 466. Having discussed In some of the early essays such a sensation Whitman's pagan mysticism, he goes into a is found, but the effort expended can hardly scattered commentary on Whitman's af- be called economical. When points are well- finities with Arnold, shifting in the same made they seem to have come about ac- paragraph to the theme of supersexual ec- cidentally. They are often betrayed by stasy, moving, appropriately, to the theme peripheral excursions. of ecstatic death. Without warning he states In The Pleasures of Literature, Powys offers his contempt for psychology and pathology, a more extensive view of Whitman's work, defends Whitman's use of French words, and he is more intent on the analysis of comments on Whitman's audience, and Whitman's ideas than he was in the earlier jumps to the problem of evil. He returns to essay. The method is still centrifugal, but what he calls "the sex question", tactfully this time there is a centre: he will speak acknowledges both Whitman's homosex- about Whitman's Optimism. The per- uality and his "cosmogonic celebration formance is more moderate in tone, but of women". At the point where we are ready 46 John Cowper Powys's Literary Criticism: for illumination, for a revelation of the core Me, wherever my life is to be lived, O to be of Whitman's imaginative energies, Powys self-balanced for contingencies! decides to discuss Whitman's originality in O to confront night, storms, hunger, rid- "moulding words". Here, especially, he icule, accident, rebuffs, as the trees and needs an editor.23 The conclusion of the animals do. (373) essay moves towards apocalyptic statement, a rhetorical design which, for Powys, has What we trace in these three different become typical and to which he returns in statements on Whitman is the development the books on Dostoievsky and Rabelais. of a perspective on the poet, from an object Whitman is one of those who keep creation to be used, self-indulgently in the first alive amidst the processes of human decay. essay, into a symbolic affiliate, not unlike This is the image of Whitman that recurs what Milton becomes in Blake's prophecy. in the concluding chapters of Rabelais.2* I Here is Powys's comment in The Pleasures of have been sceptical of Powys's association Literature on such symbolic figures: "There of Whitman and Rabelais. Whitman's con- are two kinds of symbolic figures . . . The nections to the earth do not fit Rabelais's. inferior kind are symbolic in a gaudy, spec- Whitman is tenuous, grasping, longing to tacular, worldly sense, like Beckford or touch flesh and earth. Always, he craves Byron or Oscar Wilde, while the superior companionship. His sexuality is based in kind, like Blake and Nietzsche and Whit- longing for affiliation, in sensual fantasies man himself, have the power of actually of secretive mingling, always in the presence feeling themselves to be great occult of death. The sexuality of Whitman is Apparitions in the history of our race" (464). close to something Powys tries to articulate We discover also in the progress of these in Maiden Castle—unconsummated desire as comments what discriminating reading a source of primal energy. Wizzie comes to mean to Powys: an act, as it Ravelston is, appropriately, one of those draws out the continuities of imaginative strange Whitmanesque lovers—carnival- realization, which renews the world. rider, something bought and sold, an object Powys's criticism has a place in the con- of desire, something to be touched but not text of the major critical traditions of his possessed, to become a memory of desire, a time. The connections were sometimes ten- mythic traveller to a new world, a lost com- uous, but he was not so eccentric as even he panion. These aspects of Whitman do not might have liked to think. He was, in- lead to Rabelais, even the Rabelais which tellectually, much closer to the shaping forces Powys created. Yet, Powys has a point. of the twentieth-century imagination than he There is a connection. Whitman is a sign, a was to his own immediate colleagues, to presence, an Apparition, linking Rabelais Louis Wilkinson and Llewelyn Powys, for to modern consciousness, fending off the example, who were, intellectually, in a dif- apologists for orthodoxy, for the One Law, 25 ferent class. He did not belong to any for a single-centred world. Whitman, like group of modernists, but he was not anti- Blake's Los, facing the same enemies, kept modernist. He was against systems (I was the Divine Vision in time of trouble. He is surprised, but not disappointed, to find so a presence that Powys found reassuring. He little of Jungian theory in his criticism). Yet quotes, with reasonable accuracy, from he, energetically and imperfectly, created Whitman's poem "Me Imperturbe," asser- his own system, and he professed his own ting what he later in Rabelais calls Whit- exclusive and "great" tradition. As a man's "sense of unconquerable anarchistic reader, he was concerned with specific freedom" (394). The passage illustrates issues and controversies, some, but not all, Powys's visionary response to Whitman, of them out of his territory: Christian and we recognize in it the aspirations of the apologetics, scientific speculation, social Powysian hero: unrest, right conduct. He was at times tact- less and embarrassing in his performance. John Cowper Powys's Literary Criticism: 47 He was not, in intellectual matters, without exists, in conduct, in intellectual war. For discipline and form. His Age of Aquarius, him, as for those critics whose work has of which "new era" he appoints Whitman some importance, criticism—the art of a Messiah (Rabelais, p. 374), had little to do discrimination—is an engagement in the with horoscopes, but with a revelation of discovery and articulation of the "con- human history created and discovered in tinuities of our deepest life". Its function is acts of the imagination, in the world as it to ensure, and enhance, human survival.

Notes

1 The Meaning of Culture, New York, 1929, p. 14. "Translation of Croce's works into English was 2 The Pleasures of Literature, London, 1938, p. 2. well underway by the early 1920s (I am assuming 'See I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian that Powys read Croce in translation). Powys may Tradition, New York, 1930: it has been reprinted by have known Croce through his article "Literary Harper and Row, 1962, with a useful preface by Criticism as Philosophy", in Contemporary Review, 118 Louis D. Rubin, Jr. The book's twelve essays per- (October 1920), trans. D. Ainslie, in which Croce sistently attack "Progress", the eradication of discusses the "perpetual development of history" (p. traditional culture, industrialism and its "unrelent- 535). Powys seems also to have known of Croce's ing war on nature" (p. 7). The movement is still philosophy through his friend—his "Hegelian- controversial, witness the discussion of it in John Crocean-Philadelphian 'calamus-root' crony"— Fekete's The Critical Twilight, London, 1978, and in James Henderson, discussed in "The War" chapter the response to Fekete's book, for example, those in of A utobiography. PN Review: David Levy's review in Number 8 and "Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 17. Harold L. Weatherby's rejoinder in Number 11. "Ibid., pp. 19-20. 4Peter Easingwood, "John Cowper Powys and the ^''Psychoanalysis and Morality, p. 45. Pleasures of Literature", Powys Review, No. 4, Win- "Introduction to Tristram Shandy, Macdonald, ter/Spring 1978/79, pp. 29-34. The reference to London, 1949, pp. 11-12. Eliot's After Strange Gods, New York, 1934, is uE\iol, Selected Essays, p. 14. provocative. The lectures which comprise the book "Visions and Revisions, New York, G. Arnold Shaw, were delivered at the University of Virginia. I'll Take and London, 1915, p. 10. These editions have My Stand (Note 3, above) is given prominence in the identical pagination, and include the "Preface" first lecture (p. 15). Eliot's description of his journey which demonstrates Powys's critical procedures at an through the "beautiful desolate country of Vermont" early stage. Page citation to the Macdonald edition, (p. 17) has Powysian intonations. London, 1955. This edition replaces the 1915 5Easingwood, p. 34. "Preface" with a retrospective "Introduction" which 'Quoted in Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis concludes with an invocation of the spirit of Whitman. Wilkinson, London and Hamilton, N.Y., 1958, p. 10. 20 Suspended Judgments, New York, 1916, p. 14. Page 'Charles Lock, at the 1979 Powys Society Con- citations to this edition will appear in the text. ference, provided useful information about the J1See Derek Langridge, John Cowper Powys, A relation between Powys and Pound. Pound is men- Record of Achievement, London, 1966, pp. 19-54. tioned only briefly in Autobiography. Powys wrote a "Langridge, p. 50 (Syllabus No. 846). He cites sonnet defending Pound, presumably during Pound's also "The actual Walt Whitman", in the New York post World War II troubles, the manuscript of which Evening Post, Book Review (Poetry Number), 19 June is in the library at SUNY (Buffalo). 1920. 'Obstinate Cymric, Carmarthen, 1947, p. 121. 23A judicious selection of Powys's literary criticism Powys adds that he regarded The Waste Land as "the and commentary could be a valuable aid to Powys greatest poem of my generation." studies; the editor would need to be both sensitive 'William Wordsworth, Prose Works, ed. A. B. and somewhat ruthless. Grosart, 3 vols., London, 1876, III, 460. 24Rabelais, London, 1948. Page citations will ap- 10'Psychoanalysis and Morality (San Francisco, 1923), pear in the text. London, 1975, p. 47. "The apologists for orthodoxy, of one kind or "Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, Lon- another, include C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, don, 1965, p. 123. D. B. Wyndham Lewis, Nicholas Berdyaev, even 12T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual William Carlos Williams. One of the more engaging Talent", Selected Essays, London, 1932, p. 15; first elements in Rabelais is the on-and-off skirmish Powys published, 1917. carries on with these defenders of a closed universe. Denis Lane John Cowper Powys, Thomas Hardy, and the Faces of Nature

Readers of his personal and The term elementalism, implying as it autobiographical writings will be familiar does a purely primal mode of ap- with the extent to which John Cowper prehension, gives only a partial indication Powys developed early in life a deep love as to the scope and depth of Powys's and fascination for the realm of nature and philosophy of nature and its implications how, as an indefatigable, not to say for his novels for, appropriately, his in- ritualistic, walker, he pursued a life-long terpretation of nature is as complex as meditation upon the meaning and value of nature herself. His elementalism, for in- the natural world. Strengthened by a stance, contains conflicting attitudes toward cosmic-sense akin to that of Goethe and nature, in which he recognizes her multiple Emerson, this abiding interest in nature characteristics and her propensity for gave rise to the philosophy that Powys oppositions; it provides also a distinctive called planetary elementalism, a creed that cosmology moulded upon either a First was to put its highest faith in human Cause or chance; and, finally, it confers the possibilities and that culminated as "a artistic means, the special techniques, that working substitute for religion"1 Pan- are, I believe, among the chief conditioning theistic in tone, pagan and atavistic in factors in the unique signature of Powys's form, Powys's religion was in fact a par- imaginative art. These latter are at their ticular kind of quietism but one which took most patent in Wolf Solent, the first of the not God, but nature (both in its external major novels, where Powys announces the and universal senses) as the principal object methods he will use more powerfully and of contemplation. with a greater range of suggestiveness in later works: a protagonist who, like his In his major novels, narratives that dwell author, is highly sensitive to the ways of primarily upon interpersonal and anthro- nature, a broad pattern of metaphorical pogenic relationships, Powys sucess- language that focuses upon the natural fully transmutes this philosophy into world (and that reaches its apotheosis in a fiction, for its presence reaches into all field of buttercups), and the symbolic use of departments of his thought and all the season and setting to record, in this case, themes of his novels. At their most reduc- the protagonist's arduous journey toward tive level, these themes are indeed no less psychic stability. than various paradigms of Powys's cardinal elementalist precept: the right of every in- Throughout his development as a nov- dividual to a life of happiness and self- elist, Powys's dynamic and deepening fulfilment—an end that he tells us in his vision of man's place in the external world essays he sees inseparably linked to a direct is conveyed primarily through the medium mental absorbtion with nature. Thus, of natural description, a term which, where his novels deal with the concept of although perhaps inadequate, I use gener- self-realization, they lead inevitably and ically to connote his many different spatial, simultaneously to a consideration of the sensuous, and psychic evocations of the restorative value of contacts with the natural world. Virtually any passage of natural world, and in particular to the ap- nature description in Powys tells us im- preciation of the earth as a place of ultimate mediately that it is mediated through a stability. highly observant, highly schooled eye, the John Cowper Powys, Thomas Hardy and the Faces of Nature 49 eye, in fact, of a born naturalist. The techniques and tones emerge inconsistently minuteness of observation, the perceptive in his novels of the early eighteen seventies commentary Powys makes upon the (Desperate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree, phenomena he finds in nature, equals and Far from the Madding Crowd), but the anything we might find in Hardy, the structure and features of his novelistic previously acknowledged master of land- method are clear even then. All these scape description, and the writer to novels project a positive view of nature, of whom, in his use of nature, Powys is cer- her beauty and fruitfulness, while at the tainly the literary heir.2 If, as I have same time recognizing her destructive suggested, Powys's novels assert the power, her passivity, and her separation premise that nature is the point d'appui for from human activity. Initially, these an analysis of life, then this was surely a separate images of nature stand unrecon- lesson he gained from Hardy, as his now ciled, but in three later novels —The Return oft-quoted testimonial appears to confirm: of the Native, The Woodlanders, and Tess of the "And from T. Hardy I learnt, long long D'Urbervilles—Hardy gradually created a ago, to see all human feelings, gestures, coherent vision of nature, a vision of actions & everything else!—my own and vitality within destruction. This view—the everybody's—against the Inanimate Back- one, rightly or wrongly, for which Hardy is ground of Nature ".3 perhaps best known—is a more deter- The connections between Powys and ministic view than that of the earlier novels Hardy are in fact subtle and extensive. and it is through this that the quality of Powys, who saw Hardy "at intervals "lineal absoluteness" to which Powys during a period of more than thirty refers, comes to the fore. The Unfulfilled years".,4 first wrote of his admiration for Intention controls nature, character and Hardy in the early critical work Visions and plot in The Woodlanders, while the heath's Revisions, a copy of which Hardy told message of endurance through gradual Powys he always kept at his bedside. Twenty evolution broods over The Return of the years later, writing in The Pleasures of Native (and decrees that any human in- Literature, Powys's admiration had become dulgence of strong desires brings down deeper and more acute. In one of his finest swift tragedy). In a more complex way, chapters of criticism Powys discussed Hardy's Tess's history implies that natures's many power 01 landscape description, his moods and faces form a pattern with genius for reproducing the "tactile values" of human experience. the scenes depicted, and his ability to con- It is often the case with Powys's literary vey the "palpable essence" of those "half- criticism that his interpretation of another abstract, half-concrete entities" of dawn author tells us much of what he sought in and twilight (PL 613). "He saw most his own writing and his words on Hardy things", continues Powys, "under what are no exception. It perhaps goes without might be called their lineal absoluteness, the saying that Powys is closest to Hardy in his imprint they make ere the universal flux three early novels, Wood and Stone, Rodmoor carries them away upon the 'camera ob- and Ducdame, works that stand, like Hardy's scura' of the timeless" (PL 614). early novels, as evidence of his maturing, With that mode of penetration so rather than mature, art. Compare, among peculiar to him, Powys is touching here many similarities, the closeness in struc- upon the way in which, like his own, many tural function that exists between Leo's of Hardy's novels are formed or influenced Hill in Wood and Stone and Norcombe Hill by the mood of nature they project or in Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, sustain, and upon that remarkable strain of where even the detached and panoramic distancing—spatial as . well as tem- quality of the description is strikingly poral—that Hardy had developed with such similar. Later, this same device of using keen assurance. Hardy's characteristic natural settings for the purposes of 50 John Cowper Powys, Thomas Hardy and the Faces of Nature narrative structure appears with greater Powys, as narrator, shares easy company sophistication as in Wolf Solent, for instance, with the unmistakably Hardyan "Invisible or in A Glastonbury Romance, where, as the Watchers"), can be said to diminish in binding element in a vast, labyrinthine later novels. It is the characters themselves, chronicle, Powys utilizes the mystical and the interior eyes of the novel, who, in spiritual ethos of Glastonbury, whose im- keeping with Powys's belief in the primacy pact, like that of Hardy's more diffuse of individual consciousness, are the prin- Egdon, he tests upon his characters. By this cipal commentators or observers. Corres- stage in Powys's career, however, full and pondingly, Powys can find only a limited substantial differences are apparent bet- place in his major novels for the prefatory ween the two writers. The chief difference descriptive settings so typical of Hardy— may be summarized as being between one those scenes that set the initial tone and who sees from above (Hardy), and one who heighten the reader's imagination. For sees from within (Powys). In general, Har- Hardy, such descriptions had enormous dy's idea of cosmic indifference precludes value in the creation of the moral scheme of the sort of empathetic sentience that Powys a given novel. Much of The Return of the so frequently attributes to natural forces; Native is, of course, shaped in this fashion: indeed, it could be said that Hardy's morally, Egdon is the plane on which man humans move in a world ultimately set works out his destiny, and in its ambiguous apart from the processes of nature—no relations to him, it further complicates his matter how forcefully those processes are moral dilemma. If Powys learned this recorded or felt—whereas those of Powys, technique, then its full mastery came late in at least among central figures, are caught at his development. Not until Owen Glendower the very heart of nature's activity. Thus, do we encounter such an ordering principle Hardy's sense of the transience of human applied with any rigour, where, through a hopes set against the sombre power of the variety of locales, all extensively evoked, natural world runs counter to the sort of Powys consistently marks out the moral mood that Powys generally evokes, the em- tone of the different stages of the narrative. phasis of which is upon continuity rather More often, as I have suggested, descrip- than transience, upon cognition rather than tive passages in Powys are integrated with inscrutability. the developing action or, even more typically, form part of a state of emerging Pivotal to Hardy's method in this respect consciousness. One thinks, for example, of is his use of the narrator; he sees from Dud No-man's reception of the mystic, im- above because that is precisely where he memorial "Sunday smell" of Dorchester, positions his narrator. Hardy's narrator or Rhisiart's response as he beholds for the moves in and out of scenes; abstracts, ob- first time the castle of Dinas Bran. In this jectifies, visualizes or imagines at different latter episode the relation between the ob- points. Or he may become a spokesman for server and the scene is organic so that the modern man, fully aware of the dimensions natural details themselves operate as of time and place implicit in the scene (as, psychological counters, presenting Rhis- for example, in the threshing scene in Tess). iart's state of mind concretely rather The locus classicus of this approach is than through abstractions, a favourite found in Desperate Remedies, for it is there, in device for Powys. In addition, when seen in the central episode of the fire, that the the context of the novels from which they narrative reveals the general narrator of are drawn, these examples illustrate how Hardy's major novels: namely, a figure Powys habitually aims for a blend of per- devoid of personality or features, but spectives, creating limited but highly in- profoundly influential on the fictional tone. dividualized points of view, more personal In Powys, by contrast, the role of the om- and vital than that of an omniscient niscient narrator, for all its strategic em- narrator. ployment in A Glastonbury Romance (where John Cowper Powys, Thomas Hardy and the Faces of Nature 51 This, and the use of a highly reticulated woodland scene that the objective narrator imagery, are what control the Powys novel. is recording. Similarly (though in more Such is particularly the case with Weymouth limited fashion), in Far from the Madding Sands which, in the absence of any Crowd, Bathsheba's awakening in a swamp overiding dramatic framework, moves for- full of decaying fungi, aptly symbolizes the ward in streams of consciousness overlaid poisoned thing her marriage has become by, or set against, the cumulative meta- in her mind. In adopting this device, phors of the book: the sea, the sands, the however, Powys went further than Hardy; rocks, and the settlements of the Dorset he effected a transition between description coastline; in effect, Weymouth Sands is a and meditation, and an interpenetration of novel of the margins, its sands the margins consciousness and landscape, of con- of consciousness, where the psychic residua sciousness and object, that goes deeper, I of its characters are confronted and laid believe, than anything to be found in bare. Similarly, the archetypal "night jour- Hardy. Hardy deploys the reactions and ney" of Porius, Powys's fullest descent into relations between mind and landscape in the primitive and unconscious sources of such a way as to throw light upon the per- being, might be described as resting almost sonal and psychological life of his charac- entirely upon the complex deployment and ters, but while this is also true of Powys, he interplay of natural and primal images. differs from Hardy in that he is particularly Such a density of imagistic structure, Har- inclined to direct this power upon visionary dy,-it appears, for all his forceful skill in the exaltations and erotic ecstasies, or to use of imagery, could not or did not wish to dissolve almost entirely the borderline bet- sustain. Thus, although the austerity of ween human consciousness and the sub- Egdon heath, embodied in elemental images stantial world. Thus where Hardy may of night, storm, and wind, conveys the view a scene intellectually, with external theme that human aims and actions are control and detachment, under the focus, doomed, its depiction appears more that is, of "lineal absoluteness", (no better segmentally, more widely spread, than illustrated perhaps than in the initial would be the case in Powys. description of "Haggard Egdon"), Powys will view his fibrously—through as it were, Yet at the same time this very aspect of the focus of matter, in a manner that is Powys's work has its beginnings in Hardy. devoid of any spatial or mediating dimen- Powys was aware, of course, of the new sion. This, I think, is the great in- level to which Hardy had raised landscape tensification brought by Powys to Hardy's description in the English novel, and of the fusion of mind and landscape and its suc- importance it assumed in his works as a cess is everywhere exemplified in the means of expanding the reader's under- novels: there is Wolf Solent's immersion in standing of character and theme. Hardy's the leaves and grass of the Somerset vale as originality involved relating landscape he sinks back into the womb of his "real and the organic life upon it to the interior mother", there is Sam Dekker's vision of life of his characters, a method which at its the Grail on the banks of the Brue when best reaches profound and deeply affective matter is . confirmed as an inlet of levels. In his description of Graces's flight spirituality, and there is Catherine's tragic from Fitzpiers—to take an example from yielding in the Forests of Tywynn. The Woodlanders—Hardy creates a landscape that mirrors Grace's complex and subtle Had Hardy lived to read it, he may well suffering as one who was "to be numbered have appreciated the example cited from among the distressed" (Ch. XL). Her af- Wolf Solent, for in fact he wrote a scene that finity with her surroundings is reflected in was not unlike it, the scene of Tess's com- the pull of adjectival forms, such as "spec- munion with the spirit of the June garden tral", "weak", and "expiring", words in chapter XIX of her story. While one that are ostensibly applied to the darkening, should not divorce the separate purposes of 52 John Cowper Powys, Thomas Hardy and the Faces of Nature these descriptions from the novels in which that lies within. Because the scene takes they appear, they nevertheless present place in darkness and silence, the sense of salient differences—arising from their ob- touch prevails, and this, combined with the vious parallels—that point in turn to the effects of mind, produces a condition of sort of novelistic courage Powys displays in rarified consciousness. Gradually, as the his treatment of the identification of mind luxuriance of this world invades Wolf's and landscape. Both passages have certain spirit, its vegetative details—the leaves, the features in common—a heightened at- moss, the ferns (images that again bear mosphere, a suspension of reality, and a paradisal overtones)—lose their identity for catalogue of specific sensory effects com- Wolf as material entities to emerge, slowly bined with harmony of imagery and and with absolute precision, as the psychic thought—but in the spiritual trance that she components of his "real mother", the experiences, Tess moves into emotional in- eternal and primordial Great Mother, to tensity rather than toward the passivity that whose presence and influence he readily is Wolfs ultimate desire. In his novel, submits. Hardy manipulates the ingredients of his Tn this episode, then, Powys captures description to convey a moment of tran- Wolf in what is essentially a state of bio- sendence whereat Tess becomes a tran- psychical seizure; Wolfs responses are sparent medium for the impressions that directed more by archetypal images entrance her, but importantly he closes the ("primal dew", "womb", "real mother") passage with his own, or his narrator's, than by concepts, more by instincts ("fallen symphonic fusion of the scene, an "im- back", "swallowed up", "sank down") posed" summary of the garden's sensory than by voluntary decisions of the ego. In harmony and unquestioned power. That is other words, Wolf experiences the landscape to say, if Tess herself achieves tran- mythologically (in contradistinction to Tess's scendence, the objects and conditions primarily spiritual experience), in symbols through which she achieves this state that are the spontaneous expression of the remain actual and real, and, as equally, the ' unconscious as much as the conscious. It is presence of the narrator—for all his this emphasis upon the original importance drawing back in the passage's sequel—is no of instinct, this heightening of the less close and dominant. The description is submerged or numinous aspects of man's mediated, then, through the exercise of a psychology, that speaks to us in images certain controlled intellection on Hardy's fashioned sometimes consciously and part, a tendency that Powys, who might be sometimes unconsciously, that is the most called an instinctualist in this aspect of his distinctive feature of Powys's treatment of writing, vigorously resists. When we turn mind and landscape, and that is, by to the account of Wolf's regression (I refer extension, one of the most remarkable to the last six paragraphs of the chapter, characteristics of his novels as a whole. "The School Treat"), we see how Powys gives special force to the otherworldliness of Perhaps the sharpest difference between the experience, to its instinctual character. Powys and Hardy, however, exists not so The introductory sentence prepares the way much in their techniques as in their philo- with images that carry miscellaneous sophical interpretations of nature. Like paradisal and mythic overtones—"umbrag- Hardy, Powys combined an appreciation of eous", "phallus", "mystical hill". Thus in both the positive and negative aspects of time Wolf enters, through a phantasmal nature, but in contrast to Hardy, who saw in "hidden doorway", a world beyond the natural environment a body of deter- ordinary human experience, a world set ministic "law" dictating the inevitability of apart, where seemingly only the initiate may human conflict and thwarting human enter ("no men, no beasts, no birds"), to ambition, Powys appears more committed penetrate to the "secret heart of silence" to accepting these ambivalences and even to celebrating them. Where Hardy holds these John Cowper Powys, Thomas Hardy and the Faces of Nature 53 ironies in the scheme of things in creative dividual creativity and the striving for self- tension—for man, though he considers these fulfillment. Significantly, it is nature, and natural signs, cannot always act man joining with nature—gaining hope, spontaneously in accord with them—Powys faith, and courage— that are the essential confronts them, or investigates them head- matter of the novel; these are the aspects of on, yet steering clear of any suggestion of Porius that live most in the imagination and the absolutism or dark Immanence that we that possess tLe most independent life. find in Hardy. For Powys, nature often While, then, in both writers we witness a resists formulation; qualities, rather than tempering of the human soul in con- rules of nature, shape his philosophy. frontation with a hard, intractable nature, It is interesting to note, therefore, that it would be accurate to say that in Powys Powys abandons the First Cause—which this confrontation is nearly always previously had served him as a per- ameliorated by an affirmative spirit. sonification of paradox in nature (ap- Wilfulness, by which we mean the con- proximating, though roughly, to Hardy's structive use of the imagination, is praised notion of the Immanent Will)—as an ex- in Powys; in Hardy it is seen as the plicit novelistic device in the works that ultimate folly. Thus against Hardy's deter- follow A Glastonbury Romance. No matter minism, his so-called "pessimism", we how much he was struck in his early years have the brighter light of Powys's op- as a novelist with the plausibility of a timism. Yet if Powys is optimistic, he is cosmology of the First Cause, Powys even- restrainedly and realistically so; again, tually found it impossible to conceive that Porius more than any other novel illustrates the contending principles of this cause are this. A reasonable, rather than a glowing, entirely equal, that there does not in fact optimism, is how we might best charac- exist "a feather's weight, a gossamer's fall" terize the moral legacy of Powys's elemen- in favour of the good.5 Although he shares talism. (as also does Hardy) that late-Victorian A corollary to this philosophic difference Zeitgeist that postulates "good" rather than is found in the extent to which each writer God, he shuns the idea that good can even- was prepared to use landscape description tually triumph over evil—a fallacy that is for the purposes of social commentary. In one of his favourite targets—rather he many of his novels Hardy sets up a patent suggests that in the cosmos as he describes contrast between urban and rural values, or it, man's best hope lies in his making the raises the spectre of increasing industrial- most of that "faint quiver of the balances" ization, particularly as it affects time- toward the good and in building upon the honoured rural practices. In The Mayor resultant potentialities for human happi- of Casterbridge Hardy stresses the continuity ness. This, I believe, is the primary in- between Casterbridge and its agricultural tent of Porius which, along with other surroundings, but a tragic conflict bet- critics, I would regard as the summit of ween modern mechanisms and country Powys's achievement, and I do so precisely traditions is also strongly apparent (and for the reason that it is the novel in which indeed foreshadows the collapse of commun- he most fully attains harmony between this ity customs and ties portrayed fully in positivist theme and the medium through Jude the Obscure). Although Powys was which that theme is expressed. Porius is no not averse to such strictures—as his essays less than a mythic rendering of its author's eloquently testify—in his novels he adopts elementalist creed, a novel that is charac-" only tentatively this stretching of landscape terized by an intense concentration upon all to cope with moral or social preoccu- the orders of the natural world, a quivering pations. With him, this opposition, while sense of the earth, a repeated evocation of admittedly implied is both muted and primal images, a twilight atmosphere of restrained. Little is said, for example, change and stoical courage, praise of in- about Glastonbury's tin-mines even though 54 John Cowper Powys, Thomas Hardy and the Faces of Nature their owner, Philip Crow, represents mystic power that permits him to face the Powys's closest and severest portrait of the satanic miseries of the asylum, whereas industrial mind. For Hardy the social world Clym, viewing the "horizontality" of and the natural world are intricately en- Egdon, gains only the insight of a "bare twined, the latter commenting upon and equality" with nature and an overwhelming evaluating the former, but for Powys sense of his personal insignificance. Again, nature is generally a substitute for the Powys's increasing emphasis on the relat- social context, or at best the social context ionship between myth and nature—ex- is merely an adjunct to the natural. Hence pressed so variously in the figures of Enoch in Porius, while it is true that no real ur- Quirm, Owen Glendower, and Myrddin ban/rural contrast is possible, it is also true Wyllt—does not seem to be a typically that nature subsumes the social context Hardyan concern, though for Powys it altogether. Not simply a ruralist, as was gradually assumed a paramount import- Hardy, Powys is quintessentially a primor- ance. The first complete synthesis of these dial writer, expressing in his novels the two aspects of Powys's thought, the mystic elementalist aim so clearly enunciated in and the mythic, occurs perhaps in Maiden the Autobiography: "I feel the deepest thing Castle. Certainly there Powys breaks new in life", he wrote, "is the soul's individual ground, both in mood and compass, as he struggle to reach an exultant peace in begins to give full rein to his mythopoeic relation to more cosmic forces than any genius. The face of nature remains central social system, just or unjust, can cope with to the novel's movement, however, for in or compass".6 Such, of course, may also Enoch Quirm and Dud No-man Powys have been Hardy's aim, but novelistically portrays, first negatively and then positive- he went about it in a strikingly dissimilar ly, two separate reactions to nature and to fashion to Powys who, eschewing Hardy's the cosmic forces that are hypostatized in trenchant critiques of social values, directs nature. In effect we are given two types of his energies more exclusively toward the mysticism—one vital, the other perverse— depiction of elemental relationships and the latter of which will be rejected, for in the primal modes of life, thought, and feeling end it is the organicist response that is ascen- that answer to man's deepest psychological dant and the earth, rather than a presump- and religious instincts. Quite simply, tion of godhead, that is confirmed as the true though a visionary himself, Hardy is ham- fount of human continuity and wisdom. pered by a severity of philosophic belief Then there is the question of what might from indulging in the broader visionary be called, in a general sense, deity in nature. range that is so fundamental to Powys's Powys's "nature", unlike Hardy's—which approach and to his eventual success as a rests at bottom upon the starkly dehuman- novelist. ized workings of the ImmanCnt Will, is It follows, therefore, that Powys's con- irremediably anthropomorphic and, as an templation of nature results in what is ultim- organic entity, is literally populated with ately a view of the universe quite different deities. Natural phenomena alone are from that entertained by Hardy and, as godlings for Powys; so often the reader is equally, it leads to a consideration of areas made aware of the divinities of dawn and altogether outside the bounds of Hardy's twilight, and the primal sanities of wind and novels. Powys's works, for example, are rain, night and mist, sea and earth. In A empowered by the sort of mystical Glastonbury Romance we see the moon as a intimations that would appear to be quite guiding beacon for womankind, or in Owen alien to the purely agnostic tenor of Hardy's Glendower as a cult of the deity of the dead. thought.7 His Sylvanus Cobbold and Briefly, in Owen Glendower again, the sun is Hardy's Clym Yeobright stand at opposite proposed as the chief divinity in nature, poles in their experience of nature; from though in the same novel, and in both A Tup's Fold Sylvanus derives a life-renewing Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle we John Cowper Powys, Thomas Hardy and the Faces of Nature 55 recognize also the dark territory of the Powys's descriptions, and they are so underworld. But of all the elemental deities because they are both the visible and it is the earth that most consistently and inferential signs of the Mother's presence. most deeply commands Powys's imagin- Behind his every descriptive passage there is ation, and it is here, it seems to be, that always the sense of mystery and awe, the we are concerned with the very core of overwhelming sense of the archetypal numina the elementalist cultus of John Cowper of vegetation, rocks, elements, and seasonal Powys. It is perhaps critically passe to say change. that in his novels Powys worships the earth, It is possible to see, then, how Powys's but I believe he does so—just as he worship- particularly intense form of primitivism, his ped the earth in daily life—and I believe also elementalism, directly generates many of that we cannot overlook this fact. For me, the distinctive and steady features of his this consuming devotion reveals not only novels: the natural.animism (which, inter- Powys's belief in the intimate interrelation estingly, is found embryonically in Hardy as that subsists between man and his world, pathetic fallacy), the patterns of primal but, far more importantly, how Powys views imagery and the symbolic frameworks that the earth as a psychological entity whose define mood, the subtle atmospheres that fateful power is still alive in the psychic capture what Powys calls certain "psycho- depths of present-day man. He seems to sensuous feelings that come to us from suggest that the health and creativity of earth, sky, sea and air", and the cosmic every human being depend largely on scale that confers on the. Powys novel its whether his consciousness can live at peace characteristic feeling of immensity and that with this atavistic and pre-rational stratum allows, correlatively, its constant modul- in the unconscious. The alternative, asserts ation from the mythic to the common- Powys, is to be consumed in strife with it. place, from the cosmic to the microscopic. In addition, it becomes clear that because Powys's major novels, which might just- the earth, as the creative aspect of the Earth ifiably be called novels of nature, represent a Mother, rules over all the orders of life, distinct and significant achievement. Their vegetative, animal, and human alike, it concerns are as wide as they are profound. embodies for Powys the highest and most Shaped in large part by an elementalist essential mysteries of life. And this, I think, creed, and working as much through provides the key to that power of Powys's exempla as through doctrine, they attempt natural descriptions whose effect no to find or portray an actual, valid, and pre- sensitive reader can gainsay: in short, they eminently practical interpretation of the carry not simply fictive, but sacral over- universe. Nature, I would argue, is a tones. Not only does he combine an unusually primary source of the supreme power of earthen sensuousness with a truly scient- these novels, as it is also of those of Hardy. ific accuracy of observation, but to these he Indeed, in his Dostoievsky Powys wrote that joins a sort of holy rhapsody, so that his Nature is, "after all, the Supreme Novelist writing becomes, in effect, a sort of holy . . . the greatest of all novelists," to which he text. The transformation of the earth, the added, with characteristic humility, that changes it undergoes under varying con- those who write of her are merely the "sens- ditions of weather, season, and light; the itive plate for the 'over-novel' of Nature growth, and conversely, the dissolution, it herself".8 sustains—these are the customary focus of 56 John Cowper Powys, Thomas Hardy and the Faces of Nature

% Notes The Art of Growing OW(1944), Village Press, 1974, p. 213. XA Philosophy ofSolititude (1933), Village Press, 1974, 'Autobiography (1934), Macdonald, 1967, p, 626. pp. 165, 167. 'It seems to me there are times when Hardy appears 2For other connections between the two writers see to contradict his conscious agnosticism. In some of the David A. Cook's useful essay "Powys, Hardy, and depictions of Egdon and of the Vale in Tess, a sort of Wessex", The Powys Newsletter, 5, 1977-78, pp. 19-23. proto-mysticism emerges, though the foundation of 3Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson, objective detail militates against outright mysticism. Macdonald, 1958, p. 338. The distinction, of course, is that Powys pursues such 'The Pleasures of Literature, Cassell, 1938, p. 612 dimensions in nature deliberately and methodically. (cited in the text as PL). "Dostoievsky (1974), Village Press, 1974, pp. 102-4.

Two Johnson houses in Norwich Cathedral Close (numbers 19 and 9). It was here on a visit to his mother's sisters, including his "adored" Aunt Dora, at number 9, in 1905 that John Cowper Powys composed the bulk of his poem, Lucifer (1956, Village Press 1974: see his Preface, pp. 9-10). Mary Barham Johnson

The Powys Mother

I have never forgiven John Cowper Powys for making no mention of his Mother in his Autobiography. Admittedly, children in those days were more aware of their nurse in the nursery, than of their parents; but when John looked back over his early life, he must have realised how much he owed to his mother, especially from her wide reading and love of poetry. When I challenged him, he replied that she was too sacred to be made public in a book. Mary Cowper Johnson was the fourth daughter of the Rev. William Cowper John- son, Rector of Yaxham in Norfolk. I never knew her, but I knew the rest of the family very well. Catharine—always known as Kate— having been given by her god-father some schooling in Brussels, became the governess of her younger sisters, but otherwise seems to have been something of a wanderer, until when over 40, she became the second wife of her cousin Mowbray Donne, whom she had known and loved since childhood. There- after her home in London became a port of William Cowper Johnson (1813-1893) call for all her nephews and nieces and their children. She was a lively and loveable Powys to send Marian to Norwich High person. Her husband called her "Saint School. She lived with her Aunts in the Catharine". Cathedral Close, but after little more than a William Cowper the only son—always year was recalled to teach her younger called Cowper—was a very dear uncle to sisters. Dora was John's favourite Aunt. me, for he married my father's sister Emily Writing to my mother in 1947, he claimed Barham Johnson, and succeeded his father that all his life his affection belonged to Aunt as Rector of Yaxham. They had six sons. Dora. Theodora, known as Dora, was a strong, forceful personality. When I was about to go I doubt if any Aunt has ever had a greater or more lasting affection from her nephews and to Oxford, she told me how she wished she nieces as Aunt Dora had ... I fancy the truth could have had my opportunities. I think is that between our rather earthy egoisms and she was slightly jealous of Kate's superior Aunt Dora's rather earthy egoism there was a education. I used to think what a good natural link and reciprocity combined with a headmistress she would have made, or even certain simplicity and childish enjoyment and zest an M.P. It was she who persuaded Mr for life that we and Aunt Dora shared. 58 Family Tree. The Powys Mother The next sister, Gertrude, died of T.B. same education as men. "Poor needles and when she was twelve. This left Mary rather pins and such like things should be thrown isolated, as she was five years younger than to the bottom of the sea." Her cousin Etta Dora, and five years older than Annie. was "quite wild with disgust''. When she was grown-up, Annie and Etta She sums up her impressions thus: were still "the children". Annie married the The lectures were interesting, but from the Rev. Cecil Blyth, who had been one of her rapid way one rushed from one to the other . . father's pupils. She remained in Norfolk, I think one came home feeling confused and and her children joined the number of Aunt ignorant. But it was something to see these Dora's much-loved nephews and nieces. men who are so mighty. With the exception of Etta was somewhat overshadowed by Dora, one or two, there looked to be a great absence but after Dora's death blossomed out as a of brightness and cheerfulness in their faces most loveable person. . . . One could not help thinking about Solo- In 1868, when Cowper had just come mon's opinion of one kind of knowledge without the other and greater. If you come down from Cambridge, he went with a pupil across the Georgian women, Beware and take for a year's tour of India, China and Russia. care. The great Mr Palgrave says they are of Each week he received a packet of letters all women the most beautiful! from his home. His parents never ceased to exhort him to prayer and Bible reading, and Mary was at this time 19, and Cowper 24. the building of a good Christian character, Cowper's letters were greeted with but some of his father's letters are also de- delight, and were read aloud to the whole lightfully amusing. Dora, and occasionally family. Kate, sent news of their activities, but the best letters are from Mary. Her first letter We have all been brushing up our Geography this morning, peering for the places you are gives an amusing account of a meeting of the going to. Annie, after our quiet reading this British Association at Norwich, and a fete morning, burst out with "I envy Cowper so, I. at the stately home of a Parliamentary can- can hardly sit on my chair!" Mother thinks didate, who used the occasion to collect daily and hourly about you. It is amusing to votes by putting on a free show—a giant and see her look for the places you are at or going dwarf, food and drinks, and fireworks— to in the map. It is with half disgust at their and riding up and down the grounds existing at all, and yet half affection and love viewing his guests. Mary went to some of because you are there. the lectures. Cowper had been cultivating ferns in a little conservatory, and had left them to There was something very amusing in seeing the young ladies and old, old ladies rushing Mary's care. She took this charge very frantically, with little green tickets in hand, seriously, and was distressed at being unable into the lecture room, staying there two to keep them in such good condition as he • minutes listening to deep or rather high sub- had done. jects about the moon, stars, and all the con- I get so disheartened in the fernery. The rank stellations; then the poor ladies whisper to- growing ones do very well-—it is the little • gether, "rather too high for me", they say, tender ones that seem to be crying for you, whereupon they make a bolt through the and blaming me because the horrid invisible crowds, rush into another hall, and find them- Sows and Slugs will get to them and eat them. selves in the depths of the earth listening to the The more I see after flowers and ferns, the most recent discoveries of Mammoth teeth or more I love them . . . You dear Cowper, you 'Saurian' skeletons! Norwich indeed looked dont know how I long to grumble and talk beside itself in its great thirst for wisdom. with you, but it seems a shame to send such Her next letter states that "the Norwich small grumblings to India; only the end of it is 'wisdom week' is over." She describes a that we miss you more and more. lecture from "a lady (or woman)", who was Cowper sent some ferns from India, but advocating that women should have the on arrival most of them seemed to be dead. Family Tree. The Powys Mother 59 Mary was much laughed at by her sisters To-night Halle is to be there for the first time and cousins for cherishing pots of brown this season. Valentia, Kate, Mary, Mowbray sticks, but she was determined not to give up & Edith and myself are going to join forces hope. "I think you must not expect them to there, and I am going to take Arthur Reeve grow, but I do earnestly hope they will. I and his fellow pupil, so we shall be a very jolly love them like children." party. Mary was susceptible to colds and After Mary's return home, Aunt Cecie coughs, and the family were concerned lest wrote, she should be a victim to the dreaded T.B. Her cousin Alice Barham Johnson at Wel- You can fancy what a pleasure it is to me to borne was dying of it, which made Mary's hea;r good accounts of dear Mary. She was parents relive the anguish they had suffered such a dear sweet companion, so clever and at the death of their Gertrude five years ago. good and affectionate. But I had to scold her Her father would also remember his distress well before I left her at Yaxham, as she was inclined to rebel against the botheration of at the death of his sister Catharine in that being made to think about herself, and take very house, and of his sister Mary a year care of herself. I believe she submits now to later. He was also concerned for his own rubbings and feedings and resting and health. He therefore went to visit his brother drinking, and whatever her Mother and Katie Harry Vaughan Johnson in London, and wish. You will be charmed with her painting. consulted a Doctor there. It was then arran- It is really wonderfully clever. ged that Mary should go to say there, and be under this Doctor. Her Uncle Harry offered Her father wrote about her painting and to pay for her to have painting lessons, and drawing. her Aunt Cecie took her to lectures. Aunt Cecie wrote of this to Cowper. Mary seems very pleased with her drawing lessons, but as usual is full of modest fears lest We are diligently trying to improve our minds she should disappoint—the man in the moon at the Royal Institution. It is such a pleasure (if he brings his lantern too near to look at to take Mary, because she enters into it all so them). heartily, and enjoys the lectures immensely. Miss Mackenzie, the Welbourne governess, Kate was also staying in London with the wrote, Donnes—W. B. Donne and his daughters Blanche and Valentia. Their brother Mary is quite delightful. We all compare her Mowbray had recently married Edith to a mountain spring—it is so refreshing to Salmon, and was living nearby. Kate's idea fall in with her. Her conversation flows on so prettily with quaint little sparkles of fun every of a holiday in London was not so serious. now and again. Mary is attending lectures at the Royal Institution, and going to have painting Just opposite the gate to Yaxham Rectory lessons. I feel *I am only going for the is a house which had been built for the John- amusements, and she for instruction. I enjoy son grandmother, but was now occupied by my amusements greatly. Mrs Millett, who was Mrs Cowper John- son's cousin, and Mrs Barham Johnson's . Hamilton Barham Johnson was also in sister. She had three daughters, Georgie, London, training as an engineer. He wrote Nellie and Etta, who became great friends to Cowper, telling him what fun he was with the Rectory family. They took up having with his cousins. archery, played croquet, battledore and I have been going every Monday night to the shuttlecock or cup and ball, danced, played Monday popular Concerts, generally with the piano and sang, read and discussed the Valentia and some of her friends. You hear same books, collected and painted wild lovely music, all for one shilling. Just now flowers, went to the Norwich Musical Festi- Piatti, Joachim, Rees, Blagrove are the swells. val, and holiday'd together at Lowestoft and 60 Family Tree. The Powys Mother Cromer. The Johnson girls made frequent course I said 'Very well', rather delighting in visits to their grandmother and Aunt Bessie the charming confusion of names. Patteson at Cringleford, and to the Henry For the church was the very 'high' All Patteson cousins at Thorpe. When their Saints', Margaret St! She continued, cousin Harry Patteson came to Yaxham, there were hilarious charades, especially if I suppose I am thought able to take care of Hamilton Barham Johnson was also there. myself now, [she was 27] but Mother is in a But except for their father's pupils, who fright lest I should go to a Pantomime, and were usually boys of 15 or 16, there seems to begged me not. I can tell you I never had such have been a great lack of young men in the a desire to go to a Play as I have now, but I neighbourhood. suppose I ought not. The Mother would think I was quite contaminated. One of these pupils had been Charles Powys, a grandson of Mr Littleton Powys Perhaps it was in revolt against her who had been Rector of Titchmarsh and a mother's possessiveness that Mary never near neighbour of Mary's grandfather, John put restraints on any of her eleven children. Johnson, when he was Curate of Burton Except for inculcating loyalty to their father, Latimer near Kettering. When William she allowed them complete freedom, and Cowper Johnson was at school at Sherborne even stimulated their individualities. he had got to know this Mr Powys's son, But her son Littleton says that it was from who was Rector of Stalbridge. Before going her mother that she inherited the import- to Cambridge, William had been with a ance she attached to love; and John stated tutor at Thrapston, and had ridden over to that he had a real affection for her. see old Mr Powys whom he had known The father was sometimes irked by his when he was a small boy. His College wife's somewhat domineering ways, and friend, John Patteson, had his first Curacy had bouts of nervousness. In one of her at Stalbridge, and William had married letters to Cowper she says, John's sister Marianne Patteson. So it is not Your Father is rather ailing again this surprising that young Charlie Powys had Autumn, his throat is not very comfortable. I come to him as a pupil. feel sure it is the damp weather, but he gets William had been a Wrangler, and was nervous about it, and fears he shall lose his well qualified to coach young men in Maths voice. I do try to cheer him, but you know and Theology. His cousin W. B. Donne how difficult it is to do so when he gets down described him as having good brains and about himself. being clever with his pencil or a gun. "He is My mother was fond of him, and was a a good burly fellow, well-visaged, though frequent visitor when a young woman. something like a negro in his contour.'' Marianne was well fitted to be a parson's He took me for long walks into the country, wife. She played the organ, trained a choir, and was a most enchanting companion. From him and his family I learnt to know and love taught the village girls to sew, and wild flowers. When we came in from our supported her husband in all his under- walks I felt he had thrown off a load. Some- takings. She was an affectionate mother times the urge for a jaunt came upon him, and to seven children, but was somewhat stolid then he would drive me for day trips into the and unimaginative, perhaps due to a Dutch country. Sometimes he went off alone for a strain in her inheritance. week. On other occasions he sat moody and Her daughter Kate gives us a peep at her silent, and laughter ceased when he entered in one of her letters. She wrote from London the drawing-room, and no-one disturbed him, where she was staying with the Donnes. unless it was his daughter Annie, who some- times said something that tickled him, and I must tell you one of Mother's parting in- then a most brilliant smile came over his face, junctions to me. In a touching voice, 'Dear, and he was himself again. don't let Valentia take you often to that church of St Margaret's, Welbeck St.' Of William Cowper Johnson and John Barham Family Tree. The Powys Mother 61 Johnson were very lucky financially in their Donne of Letheringset, who died in 1684, is marriages, for Marianne Patteson's father, carved a wolf saliant, which is the same coat and Anna Morse's father were partners in a of arms as that on John Donne's first book flourishing brewery, and their wives, who of poems. This William could have known were sisters, were daughters of a Rotterdam the poet John Donn;, Dean of St Paul's. diamond merchant. Mr Morse was very William Donne's grandson, who was generous in helping to build Welborne Cowper's uncle, used the same coat of arms. Rectory. The young Johnsons must have It is likely that Cowper was told of the rel- had considerable charm to have been able to ationship when he visited his uncle in win consent from these rich men for their Norfolk when he was a boy. daughters to marry 'poor Parsons'. For when their father died he had been heavily 'Johnny' was so proud of his relationship in debt, and their mother had had a struggle to Cowper that he engaged Lemuel Abbott to pay for their education. to come and paint a portrait of him. He John Johnson had always been extrava- devised a double frame for it, which opened gant, and had overspent on building like a cupboard door to reveal a pedigree Yaxham Rectory with six rooms for pupils, drawn up on parchment by the College of besides accommodation for his family of Arms, tracing the Donnes through a five. His wife, Maria Livius, was a grand- number of females to Thomas Mowbray, daughter of Joseph Foster Barham, who Duke of Norfolk, son of John of Gaunt. owned plantations in Jamaica. He had a For the last five years of his life Cowper large house in Bedford which he left to his was cared for in Norfolk by John Johnson. daughter when she married George Livius, 'Johnny' named his eldest son William who had retired from the East India Com- Cowper after him. The second son was pany, owing to his disapproval of the named after his mother's grandfather behaviour of Warren Hastings. The family Barham, and the third son after her grand- were Moravians by religion. When mother Dorothy Vaughan. Hayley's Life of Cowper was published, they read it with great interest, for Mr Barham The great picture of Cowper dominated lad met and admired Cowper. So when the dining-room at Yaxham for three gen- Cowper's 'Johnny of Norfolk' was intro- erations. When young Charlie Powys came duced as a suitor for the eldest Miss Livius, as a pupil, he would have been interested in he was readily accepted, though he was 38 the pedigree, and the probable connection and she only 17. As there was no parsonage with the Welsh family. at either of his parishes, he had to find a curacy with a house, which he did at Sarrat In 1869 Charlie, now a curate in Dorset, near Watford, moving later to Burton went to Cambridge to take his M.A. and Larimer. Not till 1821 was he able to afford took the opportunity to spend a week at to build a Rectory at Yaxham. Yaxham. Dora wrote to her brother, You will be amused to hear that Mr Powys is As a young man he had sought out his coming to-morrow. I am sure he will be mother's cousin William Cowper, who had frightened at the quantity of ladies he will find just become famous by the publication of here. "The Task" and "John Gilpin". Cowper However, he had lost his shyness, and the wrote a sonnet to him beginning, "Kinsman mother reported to Cowper, beloved and as a son by me" and ending with an injunction to follow the example of • We all liked him. He seemed pleased to be "our forefather Donne". In spite of much with us, and quite to enjoy the family party after being so much alone in lodgings. research, the actual relationship to the poet- Dean has never been traced. The strongest He played battledore and shuttlecock with proof is heraldic, for on the tomb of William the girls, and twelve year-old Etta wrote, 62 Family Tree. The Powys Mother "He kept making furious dashes at it in such a peculiar way." He preached a "simple, earnest Gospel sermon" on Whit Sunday morning, which gave the parents great pleasure. His manner was solemn and devout and reminded Marianne of her brother John. Charles told her that the Stalbridge people had said the same, when he preached there.

He preached a "simple, earnest Gospel sermon" on Whit Sunday morning, which gave the parents great pleasure. His manner was solemn and devout and reminded Marianne of her brother John. Charles told her that the Stalbridge people had said the same, when he preached there. Though Mary wrote to her brother on the same day, she did not mention him.

Two years later she and Charles Powys were married. One wonders whether she Mary Cowper Powys with (1. to r.) Llewelyn, Marian had any say in the matter. With five un- and Philippa, c. 1886. married daughters, and a great lack of elig- ible men in the neighbourhood, the parents probably welcomed his offer, and Mary herself, seeing her sisters Dora and Kate still unmarried at the ages of 25 and 30, may have thought herself lucky. She would I think have been determined to make a success of whatever her fate should be. But when she faced the birth of her first child, she was full of foreboding and did not expect to survive. This fear never left her, and she dreaded each birth, though when the babies arrived she loved them all dearly. Though she had no time to keep up her painting, she never lost her love of reading. Books arrived regul- arly from Mudie's Library. She read aloud to her husband and children, and kept an evening hour for her own reading. Her children must have been led to appreciate literature when she read to each separately, or listened to them reading to her. Her all-embracing love held the large family together in life-long bonds, though she recognised and encouraged the individ- uality of each one. The sense of security in Charles Francis Powys and Mary Cowper Powys with which they grew up, with their steadfast, their daughter-in-law Dorothy (wife of A. R. Powys) honest, reliable father, and their loving, and grand-daughter, Isobel, 1910. sensitive, idealistic mother, made them an Family Tree. The Powys Mother 63 unusually close-knit family, but at the same wife Emily Barham Johnson. This was I time self-centred and slow to mature, so that think the first time they had all been most of them found the problems of adult together since Mary's marriage. A photo- life difficult. But their zest for life's graph was taken t<" celebrate the event. experiences forced them to expression in Though she was only 64, she looks older creative forms. Mary did not live to enjoy than her elder sisters, and was probably the fruits of their labours. aware that she had not long to live. She died In 1913, the year before her death, she in 1914 and her brother Cowper in 1916. and her husband came to Norwich to visit Annie survived the War, though her naval her sisters, Kate, Dora and Etta. Here she son Reggie was lost at sea. She died in 1921 was visited by her sister Annie and her hus- leaving a daughter and two sons. Kate and band, and by her brother Cowper and his Dora both died in 1924, and Etta in 1934.

Norwich, 1913: C. F. Powys, Annie Blyth, Reggie Blyth, Cecil Blyth, Etta Johnson, Emily and Cowper Johnson, Mary Cowper Powys, Dora Johnson, Kate (Mrs M. Donne). William DONNE ofLetheringset d. 1684

Roger DONNE == Catherine Clench

Henry Anne Roger William Patteson DONNE DONNE DONNE = Martha Dorothy = Joseph = John = Harriet = Mary Fromanteel Vaughan Foster Cowper Rival Sayer Barham William John COWPER | Patteson William Mary = George John Catherine Anne Castres William Tom = Eliz. Tasker Barham Livius JOHNSON = DONNE DONNE DONNE DONNE DONNE Staniforth of Rotterdam — Thos = Anne = Hana Bodham Vertue Barnwell

QsZi 50 JohnS. Elizabeth Hannah - : George Maria John Catharine Anne= Edward Patteson ; = Tasker Tasker Morse Livius JOHNSON Johnson Vertue DONNE z = C. Hewitt DONNE

Henry John Bessie Marianne = William Henry Cathn. William Patteson Cowper 1 Vaughan Hewitt = Bodham JOHNSON Fanny Morse Anna John JOHNSON I DONNE Mrs Millett Morse = Barham = Cecilia —- JOHNSON Campbell H n I- I. I I II Annie Etta Nellie Etta Hamilto1 n Emil Iy Barha I m Alice Robert Charles Bla I 1. Harry Katie Marian Kate William Dora George Henry Margaret Edina Mowbray .nche Valentia DONN= MowbraE y Cowpe= Emilry Gertrude Barham Hubert = KateCJ. % Barham = Cath Bodham Bertram CO JOHNSON Mary DONNE = C.F. POWYS Cath. Bodham O Mary Barham Johnson DONNE aXT (writer of article) = H.B.JOHNSON John E. Roberts

Two Photographs of John Gowper Powys

In 1950, when John Cowper Powys had been living in Corwen, North Wales, for fifteen years, I was looking in the window of the Llangollen photographer, Mr. J. Percy Clarke, now deceased, when I saw those photographs he had taken of George Bernard Shaw in the riverside gardens of the Hand Hotel and the one reproduced here of J.C.P. When, in August 1950, I sent the photograph to J.C.P. he made an interesting comment on photographic portraits.

I do thank you for letting me know you bought and liked too that photo of me taken by Mr. Clarke in Llangollen. I like it fairly well myself but I really think and I daresay Mr. Roberts that you'll agree with me that the only entirely satisfactory photos are caricat- ures and rarely O so rarely, a good—a specially good—snapshot! My interest in John Cowper Powys really began when he moved to Corwen after his travels abroad and more so when his Owen Glendower was first published in England in 1941 and when his Essays 1935-47 under the title of Obstinate Cymric were published by The Druid Press. John Cowper Powys "I am fortunate here in Corwen to live in the very heart of the Owen Glendower changed: as Powys says in Owen Glendower country . . . Glendower wanted to base his (Ch. XI) even the "Banquet Hall of Dinas rule on the masses of the people, he wanted Bran had fallen, by the year of grace to give Wales universities of her own ..." fourteen hundred, into so ruinous a state wrote Powys in Obstinate Cymric. that it was very seldom used." The atmosphere of the days of Glyn Dwr was all there at Corwen—and all around— Of my visit to 7 Cae Coed, Corwen, Sycharth, the Pillar of Eliseg within a Powys writes, stone's throw of Valle Crucis Abbey so close I think of you coming up that "little path of to Castell Dinas Bran, whose ruins now stones'' [which is how I had written] past the little tower up, jagged and desolate, above the iron gates into the back yard of Numbers 5 and 6 romantic town of Llangollen in the Vale of and 7 and 8 of Cae Coed—yes, I go thro',almost the Cross and the River Dee. It had hardly daily, that wood; and (over a barbed-wire 66 Two Photographs of John Cowper Powys fence and a wall) clear up the first ridge you know when I am happily settled there." of our portion of the Berwyn Range where on He was somewhat impatient of the delay by the top there stands that queer deserted little the builder. house visible for miles over the valley called When we arrived we found the cottage* at locally Liberty Hall and built by some the foot of a mountain of slate. The door was magnate of the great house of Cecil who hired opened by a giant of a man (both physically it from Rug where our local squire lives and which clearly comes from "Grug" a Mound and mentally) yet how princely he seemed. for (as I expect you know) it was there that His greeting was memorable, as he Gruffudd ap Cynan the father of Owen beckoned us to follow him upstairs where he Gwynedd and the grandfather of a discoverer rested and worked. of America was for 10 years a captive not in After a warm and friendly welcome he Rug but in Chester of the Normans. But I am eventually rested on a couch, as seen in the doing worse than carrying coals to Newcastle I photograph. On the left of where we sat we am dropping a load of them on the head of one noticed well-stocked bookshelves, and on his I shrewdly opine who could teach me more table the bottle of milk, for his diet in later than I know of these environs. years was mostly milk and eggs. On our right was a typical low Welsh cottage My wife Barbara (who died in 1978) and window to which he turned his gaze every so I visited John Cowper Powys in the summer of 1958 at 1 Waterloo, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd. It was in January 1955 that he *I refer only briefly to the sanctuary of that cottage interior because it has been so well described by had written to me saying "If I get into that Angus Wilson, Glen Cavaliero, Jacquetta Hawkes and little cottage, mostly a staircase—before the others in Belinda Humfrey's Recollections of the Powys middle of February—if then—but I will let Brothers, 1980.

John Cowper Powys Two Photographs of John Cowper Powys 67 often. We were reminded of Rodin's That day Powys told us much of courage "Thinker" for as he looked down one . . . One wondered what he must have been seemed to sense his imaginings taking like in his heyday when for many years he shape, before he gave us his considered toured America (1905 to 1934) lecturing. judgments. He spoke to us of many topics—from the I well remember the sound of running mystery of life to that of death. One seemed water as if it were raining outside, but privileged to listen. I well remember how he unlike present day traffic on our main roads, discoursed on the theme of the paradox of it was a soothing sound. He explained that it St. Paul on which he has also expounded in was the cascading of water down the The Pleasures of Literature to the effect that St. mountain of slate which ran as a stream at Paul was the psychologist of the Revelation the back of his cottage and my mind went and that the two writers to whom the New back to the poem—Nanty Mynydd groyw loyw, Testament owes what is most precious and The Mountain Stream, by the Welsh poet, memorable in its pages were St. Luke and John Ceiriog Hughes (1832-1887) who lived St. Paul. at Llanarmon-Duffryn-Ceiriog near my hometown, Llangollen. Gamel Woolsey to Alyse Gregory, Some Letters 1930-1957 edited by Kenneth Hopkins

Gamel Woolsey's letters to Alyse Gregory, which lonely. After dusk he can not bear me out of his I have been able to copy by the kindness of Miss sight. If I go out on the balcony and am out of the Rosemary Manning, cover roughly the period room for five minutes Gerald will follow me. It is 1930-1960, with considerable gaps here and not love though he loves me very much, but a there, occasioned probably by some letters feeling of necessity. It would be very cruel to getting lost; and for the later years very few leave him even if I wanted to do so. And I do not. letters seem to have survived, although one may We are happy together. I truly think that the best suppose that the correspondence continued until chance of our all being happy is in the way I have Gamel's death in 1964. Gamel never dated her chosen. letters, and frequently omitted the address from I truly think when we have met we will all feel which she wrote. Accordingly, they can only be better. Our present separation puts us all under a dated from postmarks (in the few cases where special strain. Gerald will not be unhappy as envelopes have been preserved), from dates long as he knows I really love him. And I do. inserted on some by Alyse Gregory on receipt, Lulu when he is no longer separated from me and from internal evidence where an event (like will feel very differently I think. the publication of a book) is mentioned—and Your nobility and generosity always then only approximately in most cases. This is profoundly move me. I know your love for Lulu teasing for an editor, but not of great conse- is without limits. But, Alyse, it is impossible for quence to the reader, whose main interest, quite you to make me believe that it would be for properly, is in what Gamel has to say. Lulu's good or happiness to leave you, and to go Gamel's punctuation is eccentric, as John away with me. I know it is not true. My Cowper Powys's was. She makes much use of the profoundest instincts tell me so. dash for a full stop, and often goes on with a And I do believe we can be happy in this way. lower-case letter; sometimes she has a capital Two things in your letter I did not understand. etter after "a comma. She uses "—', or '—" in My blaming Lulu [for] going away. I have never the same quotation. Sometimes she underlines a blamed him for going away as he did. I think book title, sometimes she puts it between it made everything harder, but with his quotation marks, sometimes she does neither. I temperament it was necessary. have preferred to keep her punctuation, although And the reference to Gertrude. She never tried I have corrected her occasional spelling mistakes. to influence me. She was most scrupulous not to. K.H. She wanted all our happiness of course, but she did not try to move me in any direction. I must stop. It is so late and I am so stupid. I [? August 1930] must stop. Dearest Alyse, I love you.

My dearest Alyse, Gamel I hope this will reach you before you sail. I am not sure. I must answer what I have always answered. I will not go away with Lulu. I will not leave Gerald. I love Lulu. But I also love Gerald. In the seven months we have lived together I have come to really love him and really be attached to In August 1930 A.G. and LI.P. sailed for New him. It is not that I love him more. It is that it is York and were in America (including the voyage different. Gerald is very dependent on me as to the West Indies) until 31 March 1931. Lulu is on you. All his grown up life he has been Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins 69 [? 1930] Half Moon Cottage, Aldbourne, My dearest Alyse, Marlborough, I think of you so much today and with such Wilts. appreciative charming memories of you that I [1938-9] must write to you. I do hope you are well, and happier. I do so want you to be. Dearest Alyse, I wish I could have been at Rex Hunter's I disagree wi«h both opinions about Byron & when you went there to tea. I expect my ghost, a Lady Byron, for I don't believe that anyone was thin tired, rather dusty, ghost still haunts those ever in love with anyone they had lived with for rooms. And stirred the dust slightly as it watched more than a year or two. Being in love is a you from some corner peering out from behind a strange state—of dream, of illusion, which no pile of books. How long ago and how far away! one could possibly retain while living with its I sit opposite Gerald beside a fire in a dark object over many years. Human relations are not afternoon in Norfolk, and all the time I see you like that. People become much more profoundly in a blue dress in the upper room at the White attached more tender & devoted sometimes, but Nose. And it is summer, then it changes and the they do not stay in love. It isn't possible or so rain is lashing the window, and it is winter. Or rarely so as to be unknown & unheard of. I think we are going flint hunting, or you have just come it is remarkable that we can stay even deeply to tea at Ringstead. For we did have many happy attached to people we live with, for human hours, didn't we? beings are disillusioning at close quarters. Or We are going to Yorkshire I think in a few perhaps that is the wrong way of putting it. days and perhaps as far as Westmoreland to see Perhaps I should say that human beings are not Wordsworth's cottage and that country. But only adapted to living happily & graciously together. for a week probably and then returning here, Close relations put a strain upon our illusions until December. Gerald wants to take me to see that they will not bear—But at the same time his family, in a half-engaged capacity. It will be they sometimes forge a profound feeling of love, rather awful, I expect. You know his father is a pity, common humanity which can become the retired army officer with a terrible temper. strongest thing in life. Fortunately his mother's mother came from Louisiana and my being a Southerner will please "Without feet on the fender her. But they can't approve of my not even being Love is but slender' divorced as yet. They haven't heard of me yet. is certainly a wise proverb. If I could only see you there would be so much We have always known that Lulu's most I would tell you. Dear, dear Alyse, I do love you. profound, most tender and most permanent I do wish you so very well. feelings were for you. But do not let us let these things trouble us any more. Gamel I have seen two pages of Lulu's novel he sent me—something about Dittany—the flower & a You must not think of me as unhappy. If you and girl. You know what Lulu is—tomorrow it will Lulu are happy, I am happy too. I am very fond be a white owl and the month of May. Lulu is in of Gerald. And he is very devoted and very kind. love with life and the visible world—those are his And takes almost as good care of me as you do real paramours— of Lulu. If that is possible! Life has long seemed to me a. very sad affair— An adventure in which stoicism will prove our most valuable quality—However there are days & hours—Lets walk to Davos by ourselves again, and talk the hours by. This letter is signed "Elsa" which is crossed out We leave next week & go to Aldbourne. and "Gamel" substituted. It seems to have been sent to New York by the reference to Gamel's With my love always husband Rex Hunter, and may thus be dated Your later than the previous letter. For a note on Rex Gamel Hunter see p. 73 below. 70 Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins Bell Court, This letter is addressed from Aldbourne, but the Aldbourne, last sentence probably means Gamel expected to Marlborough. be there before Alyse would have time to answer. The reference to "Lulu's novel" concerns, of [Early December 1939] course, Love and Death.

Dearest Alyse, What can I say to you when Lulu is lying dead—it seems to take the light out of the skies— but it is so infinitely worse for you that I can [Summer 1938] hardly think of it or imagine it. And this desperate last illness on top of everything that Dearest Alyse, had gone before—Oh I don't know how you I am just writing a line—at last for I have been endured it. so harrassed with six people in the house to cook Dear Alyse I know it is too early to think of for and talk to. such things, but Gerald & I would be very happy I was sad about your letter—& I wanted to if you would live in our little cottage. It has three write before. But I don't think things are so little rooms & you could live as independently as simple as that really. I don't think there is only you liked. And we would be so happy to have you one true love. People are loved in different ways. near us. And a passionate heart has love for more than You and Lulu were my home in this world— one—perhaps for many. I think Genji was very wherever you were. Don't let us ever lose each wise as well as very charming about that. Do you other—let us always be together whenever we remember Murasoki says he had the capacity of can. I love you always with my deepest never forgetting his old loves and of returning to love—and your personality always moves & them at intervals all his life with a return of the delights me— freshness of his early feelings. If it would be any help or any comfort to you Lulu's book was a trouble to me too, for I did for me to come to Clavadel—I beg you to tele- not want him to write anything about his assoc- graph me & I will try. I do not know if it would iation with me however indirect. Though I be possible. These things are difficult now I know realize that only certain feelings of one's own & —But I would try very hard—Oh I wish I could certain facts (which do not matter) are made use hear how you are—something about you. You of in any work of art which is to some extent a mean so much to me. Dear dear Alyse I always Roman a clef. It is sure to be transformed and only loved you so much and always shall—your indirectly inspired by any real feelings or real devoted events—But there—I should not wish to prevent the creation of any work of art, especially one by Gamel Lulu. He says that you wrote a perfect intro- Gamel Woolsey duction to his book, He has twice spoken of it—how wonderfully good it is. When will your book be out?—that I can look Oh the letter I wrote you from Wales has just forward to seeing with entire pleasure. I hope to been returned to me—this war seems so to divide come,at the end of September or in early Oct- us— ober—and I long to see you, dear Alyse. I send always my very great love

Gamel Llewelyn Powys died at Clavadel on December 2, 1939.

Alyse Gregory's book of essays, Wheels on Gravel was published in 1938; and is dedicated to Gamel Woolsey. Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins 71

Bell Court, [Aldbourne. 1941-42] Aldbourne, Malborough, My dearest Alyse, Wilts. I think of you & d'n't write. I don't know [December 1939] why. Today I'll think of you & write too. Gerald got home only last night from a fort- night's work ia London as a special A R P Dearest Alyse, Warden. He foetid it both interesting & boring. Your letter has just come. It is a lovely letter, And always say;, it is all so much less bad than we worthy of you and I can say no more to praise it. think—though there are horrid moments when You were so'much a part of Lulu's life and buildings do get hit & people do get killed. Lulu of yours that I hope in a way you will I spent a night there a fortnight ago just before always keep him with you. I am so glad'you were Gerald went up to stay. And I am ashamed to say with him in life and in death always—for your enjoyed it extremely. I can't help it. There's a love was the stay of his life—as necessary to him kind of excitement in the air when bombs begin as sun and warmth. He lived in it and was happy to fall & there's a slight danger (but not much), in it. which I can't resist. I think that thing in us which Poor Lisaley I do feel sad to think of her. So loves a little danger is one of our most unfort- single hearted & left alone again after her few unate qualities because it leads ordinary people happy months. to half enjoy wars—and keeps them from hating Gerald & I have set our hearts on your coming war & feeling the disgust for it they should. to us, to our little cottage. I hope you will like this Gerald had said I wouldn't mind London at all idea. Unfortunately we have six people in the after Spain—and I didn't. But there were cert- house now—but they will leave in March, I ainly things that surprised me. One was the way think. It is a very tiny little cottage, with a little the bombs shrieked like banshees as they went sitting room downstairs & two tiny bedrooms past sometimes. Then we were sitting in a room above. It is rough and old, but when it has a good that opened on a garden & once or twice when a fire in the old grate it is warm & bright. You bomb fell fairly close the blast blew the curtains should be as private as you wish. in as if a gale had struck the house. It was start- And we would truly love to have you so close ling. Then I'd thought the barrage would be a to us. As Gerald says, "It isn't only that I love sort of continuous roar during a raid, as Gerald Alyse, but that I think her such an absolutely describes it on the western Front. It was so loud charming companion.'' there, he says, that they had to write out orders, And you know some of the happiest times I've no one could hear them. ever spent have been with you. Don't let us ever Instead, there's a pop here, a bang there and a lose each other. This is such a sad world & 'Time sort of sea-lion roar somewhere else & occasion- & Chance' happens to all of us. Let us keep what ally a deafening crash as a gun opens up just we can out of these wrecks & disasters. behind you. It's curious but not impressive. And Dear Alyse, I wish I could come to you—I I noticed that my sister-in-law slept calmly wish you could tell me more—write me what you through it & the children never stirred. The plan. animals who were upset at first now pay no I love you deeply & constantly attention. your devoted, I should add that I got a fair impression of it all, as the night I spent there was described by the Gamel papers as 'a night of heavy & continuous raids with bombs on eighty London districts,' and by Blair as one of the noisiest nights they ever had. There was hardly a moment from 7.30 until I "Lisaley" was Lisaly Gujer, whom Llewelyn went to sleep about 1.30 when you couldn't hear had known since his first visit to Davoz Platz, the drone of German bombers & the noise of the 1909-1910; she shared with Alyse the nursing of barrage. Llewelyn in his last illness. The calmness of everyone is amazing. There's something really fantastic about the old ladies buying wools and asking the shop assistants if they are sure these vests won't shrink in an 72 Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins atmosphere of wailing sirens & crashing bombs. It is difficult to return to any kind of intellect- The most startling war experience I've heard ual life after such an orgy— of was Arthur Waley's. He was called on as a The wedding had a certain charm. As I was stretcher bearer when the YMCA in Tottenham about to enter the church Beryl de Zoete Court Road was hit & there were over two appeared beside the door as if she lived in it, two hundred casualties from flying glass. He said dressed in a strange cloak & a huge bow. Photo- that it was like the Ballad of True Thomas where graphers were snapping photographs & turning he "waded through red blude abane the knee." films. The service was long, with a full nuptial He said the blood actually splashed over his shoes mass. As we emerged afterwards & the photo- as he walked through it. He said he felt no repul- graphers began to snap & turn again, a violent sion but a sort of wonder at being there. dark grey rain had begun to fall & it was all black The blood struck Gerald too. He said that even umbrellas. when injuries were slight everyone was covered But the reception was quite gay, in a big studio with blood. It trickled through the floors & ran which my brother-in-law's house happens to down the stairs. Its the glass. have. There it was bright in spite of the dark But what a letter— downpour and there was champagne & a • I was interested to hear that you were reading wedding cake and the usual wedding festivities. Tolstoy & wish we could talk about him. Or But none of our old friends were there except rather that you could talk to me. For I'm not sure Arthur Waley and Beryl. that I want to read about Tolstoy & his wife. It Still I think such weddings are a mistake. The seems such a painful subject—I have such a bride and groom get tired and irritable, with all passion for Tolstoy as a novelist, but somehow the fuss and bother of the preparations. The the idea of his life always depresses me. I think bride looks her worst in those cold whites which Le Rouge et le Noir is wonderful — but I don't only suit a few fair virginal-looking girls. They really care a great deal about La Chartreuse de finally get away from it all late and tired and in Parme, though it is charming. the worst mood for beginning life together. It has rained so here. I loved your description We were forced into giving the kind of of Mrs Lucas. But you seem really to be in the wedding we didn't like or approve of (& certainly War. My love to Gertrude & to Katie, too. couldn't afford) by Miranda's wanting the kind With my great love always, of wedding her French in-laws would like. As Gerald said it was a fine example of pot luck as Gamel practised by the Pacific coast Indians when they burn furs and other valuables just to show that they can! It also illustrated the theory of "Blair" was Gamel's brother-in-law, in whose conspicuous waste—But I don't think really that house she was staying. that is the way to regard festivities. For it is always something gained to be gay if only for an hour or two—Only we'd rather have given the money to Miranda to furnish her new flat. And I [Aldbourne. did feel so sorry for her and Xavier, the wedding "2 Sept 1950" A.G.] over, hanging about waiting for her French passport, tired and dull like children after a My darling Alyse, party—but of course they will recover and enjoy It was lovely to have a letter from you. The themselves in France. great confusion is over, but it has left us tired I thought of my marriage to Rex Hunter restless, depleted and good for nothing. because it was so different. We took the elevated Gerald, amazingly, is already working hard to the City Hall and were married with two again. But not on anything that requires imagin- loafers as witnesses—And then we walked all the ation. He is doing the bibliography for his book way back to Patchin Place laughing and talking on Spanish Literature. I just feel tired and let all the way. We were not marrying the right down with no imagination, intelligence, or people of course—But we were very gay. There energy. I did nothing but cook & shop & talk for were no guests & no wedding presents to bother five weeks. The meals people have to have! Meal us. We only went home & cooked supper. And I after meal—is it really necessary to eat so much still think that unless you can be married in a & so often? village among people you have known all your Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins 73 life that is the only way to be married—if you a newspaper in Honolulu, the Advertiser, and must marry at all. shortly after that he was in the United States, What you told me about Rex made me very where he worked at different times in those early sad. I had never heard anything about it and did years on newspapers at Salt Lake City, Denver, not know he had gone back to New Zealand. and Kansas City: he was moving steadily east, ' Creep home and take your place there'— we see, and his next stop was Chicago, where he He could be such a good companion, so amus- was with the Daily News at a time when Ben ing & gay, such fun to be with on a ferry boat— Hecht, one of the most celebrated journalists of in a snow storm on Fifth Avenue—over a late his time, and Carl Sandberg the poet were both breakfast in Patchin Place surrounded by Sunday employed by the News. Sandburg was the Labour newspapers, with the pigeons the pigeon scarer Editor, whatever that was. I think it is likely that drove up wheeling outside the windows—Those it was in Chicago that Hunter first met John warm starlit nights and chilly dawns when we Cowper Powys, who spent a great deal of time were young. there in the years around 1920, when he was And I have a feeling of regret & guilt for I once associated with Maurice Browne and the Little promised to take him for better and for worse— Theatre. It was in 1919 that a Chicago publisher Your dream was so like dreams of mine— put out four one-act plays by Hunter under the "Too late—always too late"—the dreams in title Stuff o' Dreams, and it may be that one or which I search for someone I never find—some- more of these were staged; but until I know more times it is you—sometimes Ned, my mother, my and have seen the book this is one more point not father—'The day is gone' to be pursued at present. It was Hunter's All my love first book, which suggests that his interest in writing for the theatre was strong at that time, Gamel and perhaps that it ceased to be so later, for we hear of no more plays. But Hunter was sometimes engaged as an actor, and went to the theatre at least once in his life, as we shall Miranda was Gerald Brenan's natural daughter, presently discover. born before he had met Gamel Woolsey. She had brought the child up. The years up till around 1922 when he settled The Day is Gone is the title of A.G.'s Autobio- in New York are fully covered in Hunter's auto- graphy—a quotation from Keats. biography, Odyssey of an Antipodean, but that remains unpublished and I have not seen it. We know that he left Chicago for New York perhaps Rex Hunter about 1922, and there we may leave him for the This seems an appropriate place to say a few moment and turn our attention to Gamel. words about Rex Hunter, by way of a footnote to Gamel Woolsey also arrived in New York his relationship with Gamel Woolsey. about 1922. She recounts the circumstances in Maurice Reginald Hunter was born at South- her novel, One Way of Love (which also is unpub- brook, New Zealand, on 5 Jan 1889, the son of lished) and there describes her first meeting with Thomas and Bella Hunter. His father is des- Rex Hunter, whom she calls Alan; and from the cribed as a storekeeper, and as Southbrook was a moment he appears in the story it concerns small place he probably kept something like a nothing but their relationship—courtship, mar- village general store. Rex Hunter describes his riage, separation. birthplace as Oxford, which was the nearest They were married in New York in 1923, and town; but his birth certificate gives the birth- not long afterwards set out for England, which place as Southbrook. Hunter especially wished to visit as "the old I have learned nothing of his education, but it country". Gamel, as it happened, had been there seems likely that he was not at a university; a before, when her mother took her to Europe for magazine article at the time of his return to New several months after her father died; but that was Zealand in 1949 speaks of his early years at ten years earlier, when Gamel was a little girl. Oxford, and there is no university at Oxford, They travelled on a joint passport issued on Nov- New Zealand. Probably he was in local ember 28, 1923—it is a British Passport—in journalism as a young man, for the next date we which she appears as Elizabeth Gammell have is 1915, when he left home to see the world, Hunter, nee Woolsey, with the original spelling as he put it. A year later we find him working on of her name as Gammell (which was her 74 Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins mother's maiden name.) Gamel's part in this The typescript of Hunter's autobiography passport is crossed through as if cancelled under finishes at about the time of his marriage, and it a date stamp January 1st, 1925. By then she and was his intention to write a second volume. This Rex were separated, and if she went abroad she is not among his papers and it is not known yet would have a passport of her own. whether or not it was written, or partly written; Some part at least of the visit to England was but if it was, and it can be found, there will passed very happily, but when the Hunters certainly be valuable information about his returned to .New York they soon drifted apart marriage. At the end of the existing typescript and ceased to live together; I notice that I have there is a synopsis of what is to follow, which not mentioned that soon after their marriage includes these sentences: Gamel was obliged by her delicate health—it was "My marriage to Elsa Gamel Woolsey, ex- only a year or two after her serious illness and a quisite poetess ... we see Eugene O'Neill's year in a sanitorium—to have an abortion; and play "Strange Interlude" xas guests of Judge perhaps this was among the causes of the failure John M. Woolsey . . . Elsa and I visit her nat- of the marriage. The whole sad story—and it is a ive South . . . Life as a guest on a Southern -sad one—is told in One Way of Love. After Gamel Plantation . . . voyage of Elsa and myself to went to England around 1930 she and her England.. ." husband never met again, nor it seems did they All this is mouth-watering stuff for those of us correspond; and when Rex Hunter died in 1960 who are interested in Gamel. Gamel did not hear of it, nor did she ever hear of So far as the existing typescript goes, it too it before her own death four years later. may well contain material of general interest. If I summarise the remainder of Hunter's life I Hunter knew not only Sandberg, as formerly shall be relating mainly facts that were never mentioned, but Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee known to Gamel. It is possible that Gamel may Masters (a great friend of John Cowper Powys's) have seen one or two of his books, although she and e.e. cummings; and I have no doubt this does not mention them in her letters to autobiography will be found to contain passages Alyse—and Alyse was her main and almost her concerning John Cowper. only confidant. Hunter was a good journalist and a successful one; he was a specialist leader writer at different times for two very important newspapers, the Boston Evening Transcript and the New York Sun, and this alone is an indication of his professional standing. He published three books of poems, Syracuse And Tomorrow Comes (1924), The Saga of Sinclair [1951] (1927) and Call Out of Darkness (1946). He pub- lished one novel, Porlock (1940), which carries a Dearest Alyse preface by John Cowper Powys. Gamel Wool- I wish I had begged you to write to me here, sey appears in it briefly under the name Eliz- but I did not realize in time that Gerald was abeth. This novel gives a lively picture of the having letters sent here. Our plans are always so society based in and around Patchin Place and uncertain. Greenwich Village in the early 'twenties and We have been travelling right round the coast justifies at least some ofJoh n Cowper's praise. of Sicily, visiting places with Greek remains. Hunter was in England again around 1928 We went a few days ago to an immense ruined and wrote among others for John o' London's. He Greek city called Selinus. Temples are lying on then went to the Continent and finally returned the ground where an earthquake had thrown to New York a year or so later, when it seems he them, with a few columns still standing, their tall remained until 1949, when he returned to New altars, roads, a huge place of tombs, hidden now Zealand. There he worked for the Timaru Herald, under sand & spare dry grasses. And the sea at Timaru, half way between Christchurch and sands are slowly remorselessly drifting over the Dunedin; and in February 1960 he died at ruins. We bought some worn copper coins from a Dunedin. His manuscripts and papers were aft- fisherman sitting on the shore—They find them erwards deposited at the National Library in on the shore after storms. Wellington, where I intend to inspect them as The place was beautiful, bare, lonely & sad, soon as I can find somebody to pay my fare. and somehow consoling. For Selinus had a sad Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins 75 history (like most Greek cities). But it is all over Palinuro now. And the clean sand is covering it up & the Calabria. fresh sea wind blows over the grey ruins and the ["12.4.51" A.G.] generations of sea parsley from which it takes its name. And it is more beautiful now than it ever My dearest Alyse, was before. It seems such a long time since I heard from We had always read that Syracuse was extreme- you. Joan enclosed a note with the letters she sent ly ugly and only to be visited because of its his- to Sicily saying you were coming to Aldbourne so torical associations, but Gerald & I love it. It's so I hope you are there now & the sun is shining and surrounded by the sea, and the bare limestone you can sit in the garden—But how dreadful the plateau where the Greek theatre is, & where weather has been. And I couldn't say it had been some of the Greek cave tombs are actually in- really very warm in Sicily or Italy except in habited (if this were Spain every one of them Tabrmina when the sirocco was blowing. would be) is austerely beautiful. Here we are staying at a most beautiful village There are very strange deep limestone by the sea among olive groves, to rest after our quarries there now turned into gardens & orange travels. It takes its name from Palinurus, the groves. They are sad places, I think in spite of pilot of Odysseus who was supposed to have been their strange, rather fairy tale beauty, for it was drowned & buried there. in them that the Athenian captives languished We walk among the olives & take row boats to out their lives working the quarries & dying of the caves—I would swim if I had a bathing the work and the heat, after the victory of Syr- suit—and did not have a cold. acuse over the Athenian expedition. 'Man is a Yesterday we went in a boat to visit a cave wolf to men.' where there are bones of animals and men in the But I liked very much to sit in a seat at the earth & stones. The guide book for some reason Greek theatre & remember that Aeschylus prob- says that they are thought, to be bones from probably saw his own plays performed there, & Octavian's ships. We spoke of that to the fisher- that Plato certainly sat here often during the men who rowed us there—but he did not like to period when he was trying to reform Dionysius. think of drowned sailors—he said they had been Joan enclosed a letter with the post she sent. thrown there from the castle above—But other She writes such nice letters. She said that you sailors said they were bones of people who were were coming, & I liked to think that you would drowned in The Flood. be there—only I wish I could be too. I had heard of the Antidiluvians before when She seems to like Hope—I am so glad. She we visited a Greek temple at Himera. A man told must be company for him. Poffett will never me that it had been built by the men who lived at want me to come back. He is a lucky cat. Himera 'before the Deluge'. I don't wonder that I must stop. I am writing in such a noisy cafe they think so, for the tremendous grey ruins of that my letter is very wandering, I expect. the Greek temples seem to belong to a world My love impossibly remote from theirs. Much of Calabria is very poor—much as Gamel Spain was before the Civil War. In many towns we saw the streets full of workless men—it is the great problem of Italy. It is extraordinary how people can travel without noticing the Life of a "Joan" is Joan Lamburn who was Louis Wil- country. So many people have told us we must be kinson's fourth wife; she died in 1953. "Hope" sure to visit Palermo for its wonderful churches is John Hope-Johnstone, Gerald Brenan's old with their glittering gold mosaics. But no one friend, who was living in the Brenan's house at ever mentioned that it has the most appalling Aldbourne while Joan was staying there. slums, with two hundred thousand people living in them—half the population of the city. And people don't-dwell on those screaming motor horns & roaring motor cycles & motor scooters either. I've never seen such frantic or such noisy traffic. The noise in the bigger Italian cities (except Rome) is almost unbearable. How modern inventions have spoiled the world—the 76 Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins motor car, the radio (few of those, thank good- a book of criticism which is at all original or ness in Italy—you seldom hear one.) imaginative. We go on to Naples in a few days, beginning I was sad to have missed Joan and really do our homeward journey—It would be lovely if not know why I could not find her. I was saying you were at Bell Court when we came back—I to Ronnie recently that I believed that the people have not heard from you for so long. I hope I we should meet went by on the other side of the I may have a letter in Naples— street, turned the corner just ahead of us, took, With much love the other road . . . But I don't know why I am wandering off into these digressions. Gamel Do you think that Joan would care for this cottage again—as you say you would not— probably not as she has so many cats and her own cottage now. We might be in Spain for seven or eight months if we can manage about money. But I have such a dread of the whole process of ["Aldbourne30Sept 1951"A.G.] selling the house—I mean on account of the ser- vants who will feel it so much—that I dread My dearest Alyse, going to Spain now.' It almost seems vain to write to you now that you have gone: Dear Alyse, I do hope you are happy, are 'Ten leagues beyond Man's life—' interested, are well. Surely the letter will fall in the sea, the words With much love fade from the paper. I can't really believe in Gamel anyone's returning to America. But I thought of you often while you were on the wide misty ocean. How strange those great William Holmes McGuffey (1800-1873) was a floating Palace Hotels must be. And how little I college professor who published six Eclectic Read- should like them. ers over the years 1836-1857 which sold a total of Oh I do hope you are happy in America. That more than 122,000,000 copies. The fifth, the Ec- all is well. I hope it will influence you to write. I lectic Spelling Book, was written by his brother liked very much your idea of writing on the Alexander Hamilton McGuffey in 1846. I don't authors of McGuffy's Readers. It seemed to me a know if A. G. wrote anything on the subject, but really good subject, one that would reveal all there have been at least three books on the Mc- sorts of things about the past—'the weather in Guffey s. the streets'. "Ronnie"—Ronald Duncan. It would be the kind of book I would like, I know. Did you manage to read Porius? I have been reading .'Other Voices, Other Rooms' by Truman Capote, a very young Southern writer, & think it ["Malaga 29 April 52" A.G.] so good. I think I told you about meeting him at Taormina. I had read his short stories My dearest Alyse, recently—but I think I talked to you about them. Oh how sad your letter made me. Though I so Perhaps you will meet him if he has gone'to seldom saw Gertrude I felt that I had lost almost America. my oldest and kindest friend. And I thought so Please tell me if you hear anything about much of how you would miss having her next Robert Lowell. I am very interested in his door. And Oh, what will Katie do?—I can not poetry. But it seems to be developing strangely, imagine her without Gertrude there to look after becoming more crabbed and more tortuously her1—Could she live there alone? And I can not religious. imagine her being anywhere else. But I suppose Gerald's Spanish Literature came out yesterday, everything somehow is arranged, whoever dies. and we await the reviews with some apprehen- Life comes to some terms with what is left. The sion, as they say that only dons will be able to centre prop of the Powys family is fallen indeed, review it because of the erudition required; and as you say. She held them together and was the , really they are the last people who should review centre to which they came back. Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins 77 I am so glad that you did get back in time to be The garden is full of frezias again. How lovely with her and to help them all. these returns of the flowers & the seasons are. But though it is so sad—what a wonderful way There's a 18th century Mexican poem called to die—only ill for a short time, keeping up till Primavera y sus Noticias which I think is such a the last, only thinking of others. It made me charming title. I wish I nad thought of it. think of Emily Bronte's death, though she died in We have exchanged Cyril Connolly for Ray- such a different spirit. Ah, such a good death. mond Mortimer, who has been very sweet It is strange that the last few days I had been tempered, kind. & charming. He is staying with thinking so much of Gertrude. I found a number Ralph & Frances Partridge & has just been here. of her old letters to me out here and in But they are all leaving tomorrow. Lulworth—there are two old chests full of old No, I've never seen the Wm Wetmore Story— letters & manuscripts & papers of all sorts— we only read reviews of it. Thank you so much As you say—We know what life is. always for the Manchester Guardian. How good I haven't the heart to write a real letter. This is it is. I'm so glad Florida came—& Sylvia & Val- only to take you my love. entine too. So much love Gamel My love and sympathy to Katie—I will write— Gamel And to Theodore too—

The best book on William Wetmore Story is Gertrude Powys died at Weymouth after a short by Henry James, and both Alyse and Gamel illness in April 1952. would have know this book, from their keen interest in James. His book was published in 1903 and Gamel can hardly have read reviews of it; the book mentioned must have been a new work, but I have not yet traced it. [March 1957?] Final sentence: Florida Scott-Maxwell, an American friend of Alyse; and Sylvia Town- send Warner and Valentine Ackland. My darling Alyse, I am so glad you are happier. I believe good hope does lie at the bottom—but I couldn't say why—Do you remember Walt Whitman's strange saying: "Death is different from what men think, and luckier." What did he mean? But ["p.m. 10Sept57"A.G.] life seems to me as mysterious as death. I finally did hear from Alex Brooks, from Bar- My darling Alyse, celona—did I tell you? He wrote me such a nice It seems a long time since I have heard from letter—But they wanted a flat or a pension— you, but perhaps it is not. It seems long to me not a hotel—and asked for names—and this filled because I want to hear. me with worry because a flat is of course impos- It is a wonderful moonlight night. Frogs are sible for a week or even a fortnight; and I simply croaking. An owl is calling with a queer cat- don't know any pensions that are at all attractive. like sound. The Daina de Noche is in bloom & And Marjorie who might is away. Then I have no breathing out its intensely sweet odour. The confidence in myself on these occasions. I feel whole night is full of it, it fills up like a cup with sure that anything I recommend will turn out this scent. badly—Some people think that they are real & Ah I wish you were here—there is no one to talk everything else is a dream. Gerald is one of to. We see far too many people at the moment. those. But I feel on the contrary that everything But no one ever comes (or ever will come again) else is all too real but / am not—/ am something to whom I can talk. All is chatter—Ronnie was from a dream, & have no power to act on this here with the Harewoods & I was happy to be hard, heavy world. I expend great energy (or so with him but he talks to me—not I to him. Still it seems) on trying to push people into place, but that's a great deal. nothing happens & in the end I give up—that's Someone has twice been here (I think I wrote really the explanation of my life! you) called the Princess Callimachy, a Ruman- 78 Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins ian. We were excited when she wanted to come Oh dear, this pen is going the way of all pens— because we were told that she had known Proust. leaking, refusing to write. I always feel I might But she says she knew him very slightly, met him have been a writer if it hadn't been for pens. And once or twice at parties, which was a disappoint- my handwriting gets worse & wilder & uglier ment. She is about 65, has been very rich & is everyday. now poor, wants to work, but finds no one wants I got a letter from Bertrand Russell a few days to employ a woman of her age—I don't know if I ago, & his writing is just the same. I wish I could exactly liked her but I felt sympathetic to her. I see him again, but I don't suppose I ever will. thought she was courageous in a hard world. I must stop. How good you are to send The Until quite recently she had some money, but Manchester Guardian, my favourite paper. now I gather everything has been confiscated & Lawyers! Law is wrong: that is what is wrong she has practically nothing to live on. She lives in with lawyers— a small cottage in Kent, or rather in part of it. She is quick and intelligent & has seen mucho Much love mundo as the Spaniards say. But it's hard being a Gamel refugee & leaves its mark—like smallpox, as someone said about nobility in one of Gorky's books. Reviews .

John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest, or circled about, one question which, in a MORINE KRISSDOTTIR. myriad of forms, obsessed him all his life: is there an invisible, superhuman world behind Macdonald, 1980, £8.95. the visible world, (p. 41)

The approach taken by Morine Krissdottir in This first chapter is a useful one, but useful in this book is, within limits, a useful and a limited way. It does not convincingly establish necessary one: useful, because it provides in- how the variety of magical traditions cited formation that enriches the reader's perception; became a part of Powys's imaginative ex- necessary, because some elements of Powys's perience, and without stronger citations, the overall achievement will remain inaccessible un- references remain speculative. The references til his extensive reading and his imaginative re- are so many (Francis M. Cornford and the creation of previous texts are carefully explored. Cambridge Anthropologists, Empedocles, The view that Powys wrote from something Chuang Tzu, Henri Frankfort, Norman O. called "personal experience", without a com- Brown, J. J. Bachofen, Mircea Eliade, Malin- prehensive and constantly active intellectual owski, Anagarika Govinda, Eric Neumann, base, that his symbolic and magical lore is amongst others) that a consistency of develop- accidental, is simply inadequate for the study of ment, or a consistent perception of Powys's dev- his work. That we shall some day have a fully elopment, seems highly improbable. She est- annotated Glastonbury Romance does not in every ablishes an extraordinary range of possibilities way seem a happy prospect, yet until we have which it will be valuable, and even, for some, such explication, Powys studies will remain exciting to sort out and verify. It is her propos- parochial. In this sense, I believe Krissdottir's ition that all of Powys's career can be explained work to be preliminary rather than final, and in such terms, that it is a single continuing quest, exploratory rather than definitive. with each work representing a stage along the . The magical elements in Powys's fiction, way, which is most troublesome. It raises quest- Krissdottir argues, are based on questions that ions about the function of literature, of the novel he posed about the nature of reality. Does it in particular, and about the intricacies of human exist as something other than "impenetrable experience. Discussing the passage concerning pieces of matter suspended in a void",1 and if it the moment of mystical enlightenment from does exist as a unity are we able to perceive it? Govinda's Foundation of Tibetan Mysticism, she From these questions follows the quest for the states: "Unfortunately, Powys could never con- Age of Gold, the goal of all serious magicians, vince himself completely that such a union of the the conviction that we live in a unified creation antitheses was possible" (p. 30). Some readers which we can perceive and of which we can par- will insist on "Fortunately" rather than "Un- take. The quest is the subject of ancient fortunately". Powys was a novelist, not a mystic. The novel form depends on antitheses, and it mythology, of the Grail legends, the alchemical 2 tradition, Taoism, and several other magical- affirms dissonance. Krissdottir's approach to philosophical traditions. The first chapter, "The the idea of the novel is questionable. We see this 'Mythology'", sets out the complicated web of in her explanation of Powys's decision to write mythic, religious, and magical associations—too novels. She quotes a passage from Visions and diffuse to be called lines of thought—which she Revisions in which Powys describes the myster- believes to have existed in Powys's mind ious journey, the "divine submersion", under- throughout the long period of his creativity. She taken by El Greco's "visionaries". She explains his achievement as a single continuing comments: "magic hunt": This was a mystery his philosophy could not apprehend; and since he was 'so made that But it seems to me that this myth of the my imagination inevitably converts every magic hunt can serve as a symbol of the con- mental process which is at all important to voluted questing of John Cowper Powys. His me into a ritualistic symbol', he began philosophy, personality, and art centred on, writing novels. Like the shaman who literally 80 Reviews recites himself into an ecstatic voyage to gold, the rain-god Mukalog, and the notorious cosmic regions, Powys used his novels to pig-sty (p. 77) cannot be supported by events as transport him on his Grail Hunt. (p. 40) they take place in the novel. Any schematic reading of Powys would have to account, above The argument is not persuasive. Given, such all else, for a convincing and authoritative ap- motivation, he might have undertaken a num- plicability to Wolf Solent in all its complexity of ber of activities different from writing novels. design and creation. This Krissdottir does not Although ritual and symbol are present in his offer. work, he had engagements other than ritualistic symbol-making in mind. It is, perhaps, because If Wolf Solent remains elusive, Krissdottir finds writing great novels is more significant than much to grasp in A Glastonbury Romance and hunting the Grail that the sense of the passage Porius. In both of these texts—as in Weymouth should be reversed: Powys used the Grail Hunt, Sands and Owen Glendower—Powys offers ex- with other mythopoeic sources, to enliven, at tensive and tempting symbolic references. times to direct, his commitment to the high Krissdottir cites a passage from Kenneth imaginative vocation of becoming a serious Hopkins's The Powys Brothers in which Powys is novelist. reported to have said of A Glastonbury Romance that there "is a vague sort of parallel" to what Once she turns to specific works, Krissdottir Joyce did with the Odyssey (p. 84). She uses the establishes a pattern of commentary, moving passage to justify her approach, but Powys's not by analysis, but by application: here, she comment on the "vague sort of parallel" is suggests, is a theory of magic, or of mythology, surely a warning against the kind of pedantic or a modern commentary on magic or exegesis appropriate to Joyce. Details which mythology, and there is where it fits Powys. The Krissdottir provides in the way of reference—for advantages are those of annotation; the disad- example, Sam's role as a Grail Knight, Geard's vantages are those of non-discriminating in- "fishing for Cybele" (p. 97), the pervasiveness terpretation and imposed exposition. For exam- of water imagery—enrich the symbolic per- ple, in the second and the third chapters—on ception of the work. The application is, Autobiography and the early novels, and Wolf however, too scant (Owen Evans is hardly Solent, respectively—useful allusions are drawn discussed) to provide a comprehensive reading from magical lore that clearly enrich our of the novel. reading. Particularly important are the discussions of the androgyne as "bisexual Krissdottir follows her syncretic approach in 'primal being'" (pp. 55-56), the brother-friend her discussion of the fittingly syncretic Porius. It or "twin" relationship (pp. 60-62), and the is in this discussion that the advantages of stages of the heroic journey through separation, annotation are most evident. The exposition of initiation and return (p. 66). These and other process as it relates to Porius's advance through explanations provide pertinent referential data the stages of his refinement is provocative and and enforce the allusive character of Powys's fic- valuable ( pp. 133ff.). For many readers, the tion. The regrets arise from the failure to have a discussion will make Porius more accessible; for full account of any single work, and the regrets others even less accessible than at present. That are particularly strong in the case of Wolf Solent. the uncut Porius is a masterpiece remains to be Krissdottir focusses, indeed sheds light on Wolf's seen, but for those devoted to the novel refusal of Christie, but having established a line Krissdottir has offered a world of wonders. In- of explication she turns to other things, leaving truders into this world must be wary, however, much to be explained. She notes that what and exercise restraint. Take, for example, the "stops Wolf is a vision he has in Christie's reading of Porius and Morfydd's union: bedroom" (p. 71), but she fails to mention that the vision is "the lamentable countenance of the Immediately after her initiation, Morfydd man on the Waterloo steps!". She identifies the and Porius meet and mate a second time. vision as the water-imagery, the "greenish- This union, unlike their first one, is a joyous coloured vapour", described several paragraphs and fulfilling one. Strictly speaking this later in the scene. This obviously suits her pur- second coming-together of the cousins is un- pose, but it fails as a reliable interpretation of necessary so far as the story goes. It does show the novel. She rightly emphasizes the how closely Powys, who was not known for illumination in the field of buttercups, but her his celebration of normal sexual love, was reading of the relationships between this field of following the alchemical stages, (p. 152) Reviews 81

This passage seriously misrepresents Porius: the Twelve Poems, statement on the "celebration of normal sexual SYLVIA TOWNSElND WARNER. love" demonstrates the almost whimsical ease by which a text—indeed a central concern—can Chatto and Windus, 1980, £3.50. be misrepresented in order to fit the needs of speculative theory. Twelve Poems comprises some of Miss Warner's Criticism and scholarship on John Cowper last and finest work and its publication this year, Powys will likely continue to be divided into, with a brief reminiscence by Peter Pears as first, those who see the novels in traditional preface, constitutes a posthumous tribute to the terms, based on the conflict of character, the con- poet, novelist and story-writer whose writing life tinuity of action and theme, the particularities spanned six decades. It is ironical .that in her of language, in the articulation of the lifetime Miss Warner never published a book so recognizable struggles of individual persons in short as this and yet, the five previous collections society, and, secondly, those who see the novels being out of print, her reputation as a poet primarily in "magical" terms, based in the must for the time being rest on the merits of this revelation of schematic and hidden lore. John book alone. Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest contributes It is a slim volume in the style of Chatto and important insights and information to this Windus's elegant productions of the 20s and second group. Its successes are with those areas 30s, so slim indeed that one might reasonably of Powys's achievement that are based on his in- fear for its health; but within the meagre four- terests in mythology and magic, with the "con- teen pages of Twelve Poems can be found a stant undercurrent of secret reference" (quoted, remarkably robust selection of work, displaying from Hopkins, on p. 84) to the Grail and other much of the lyric gift evident in her early books, legends. But Krissdottir's study is not finally freed at last from the somewhat mannered voice convincing in its attempts to establish this which intruded into many of those verses. The element of Powys as central, either to his artistic voice in these more recent poems is subdued achievement or to his life. The book does, and, often, chilling. however, force commentators of the first group to respond forcefully to those elements in his Who valets me at nightfall, undresses me work which she has illuminated. of another day, Powys's imaginative energy is based in his Puts it tidily and finally away, scepticism: it is the energy of doubt, com- And lets in darkness plemented by a compulsion to accept the world To befriend my eyes like an illusory caress? on available terms. Some of this compulsion is ("Azrael") revealed in his willingness to search out and even use, as fitting, the lore of the magician in a Miss Warner's expertise at handling ballad variety of its manifestations. Morine Krissdottir form is also evident in this volume. It was ever has made some of these manifestations more ac- her forte—the best example is "Nelly Trim" cessible. But the great magic of Powys is his (from The Espalier, 1925), taken from an East own astonishing achievement in Wolf Solent, A Chaldon legend—and in Twelve Poems she gives Glastonbury Romance, Autobiography, Weymouth us the bleak "Ballad Story" and a delicate poem Sands, and, in its partly disclosed way, Porius. owing much to the traditions of folk-song, "Earl These are works that cast their own spells. Cassilis's Lady". This is a fine example of the tact with which Miss Warner chooses her BEN JONES language; the Earl has only to ask his wife, charmed out at night onto the snowy heath, Notes Was it the music called you down the stair, 'Morine Krissdottir, John Cowper Powys and the Or the hot ginger they gave you then? Magical Quest (London, Macdonald, 1980), p. 14. Was it for pleasure that you followed them All subsequent references will be cited in the text. Putting off your slippers at the door 2Georg Lukacs used the term "affirmation of a dissonance" in his discussion of the inner-form of the To dance barefoot and blood-foot in novel in The* Theory of the Novel, translated by Anna the snow? Bostock (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1971), and there is no need for her to mention the word p. 72. The Theory oj the Novel first appeared in 1916. "gypsies" at all. 82 Reviews Not surprisingly, themes which appeared so I have left my dais to learn a new policy often in the past, death and the passage of time, Through watching of your feet, and as the acquire an extra edge in these late poems. Indian Poems of personal loss, such as "In April" and Lays all his listening body along the earth "Graveyard in Norfolk", are full of a grief con- I lie in wait for the reverberation trolled by respect for grief and her ironic wit is Of things to come and dangers threatening. supplanted by an irony which allows room for hope, although hope is not there. CLAIRE HARMAN The strangest poem in the collection is "A Journey By Night", a surreal vision of the. burial of the Cross—a sort of latter-day Dream of Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography, the Rood: BRIAN FINNEY. It lay there, naked,on the bier. It was black With tears, blood, matryrdoms, with Faber, 1979, £8.50. jewels decked, And rubbed smooth with wearing on a Christopher Isherwood worked as a writer in child's neck. England for a little over ten years; for more than forty years, since 1939, he has lived in In spite of the distractions of its weird plot America. Even so, it is easy to think of Isher- (verging on the absurd when "Shouting like a wood as a writer of the 30s whose American ex- bridegroom it bounded / On its one foot towards perience has been no more than an extended a pit dug in the sand"), the poem has many postscript to his work of that decade. This technical strengths, the tercet allowing Miss tendency is encouraged by the long gap in Isher- Warner plenty of scope for ingenious slant- wood's career as a novelist; Prater Violet, rhymes : published in 1946, belonged to the 30s by subject- It was at this hour that God matter, if not by date. Then Isherwood walked discouraged published no more fiction until The World in the Seeing his olive-grove with a new knowledge Evening came out in 1954. Mr Finney While man hid from his visage. acknowledges the problems posed by the discon- tinuities in Isherwood's career and does his best "Gloriana Dying", the best poem of Miss to give a balanced account of the whole life and Warner's later years, was in many respects a work. It is never easy to write the biography of departure. In this, the most consistently well- a living writer, but Mr Finney acknowledges his imagined poem, she uses the dramatic subject's full co-operation. He also mentions in monologue form and brings to bear on her his introduction the problem that he, as a blank verse the resources of a well-trained ear, heterosexual, faced in discussing a writer who is persuasive tongue and sharp historical sense. committedly, even vehemently, homosexual. Mr Her vivid characterization of the Queen is com- Finney makes the commonsense point that pletely convincing. Here the best elements of Isherwood undoubtedly writes for the her poetry and prose combine and when read heterosexual majority and there is no reason why aloud, as it has been by Miss Warner herself on a member of that majority should not assess his radio, the effect is memorable. life and work. In the event Mr Finney deals No, no! Leave me alone, woman! I will not with the matter with admirable tact and Be put into a bed. Do you suppose honesty. The larger difficulty for the writer of a That I who've ridden through all critical biography is in defining just who or what his subject is; for many years Isherwood has weathers, danced woven a course between fiction in the narrow Under a treasury's weight of jewels, sat sense, memoir and biography, and has thrown Myself to stone through sermons and out many personae in the process. The boy born addresses, to a family of Cheshire gentry in 1903 was Shall come to harm by sleeping on a floor? known at school as C. W. Bradshaw-Isherwood; Not that I sleep. A bed were good enough thereafter he appeared in a variety of guises as If that were in my mind. But I am here "Christopher Isherwood", "William Brad- For a deep study and contemplation, shaw", "Herr Issyvoo" and "Christopher". In And as Persephone, and the red vixen, his writing Isherwood was raising questions Go underground to sharpen their wits, Reviews 83 about the relation between author and narrator Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View and persona long before they became a matter of the 1930s, for arguments in literary theory. Editor, FRANK GLOVERSMITH. Mr Finney does his best to keep his subject in focus but he is not to be blamed if Isherwood Harvester, 1980, £20.00. remains hard to pin down. English readers are still likely to be most interested in the first part The 30s are always with us. As in interwar of Isherwood's career; partly because of the con- Britain the wire and trenches of the Somme tinuing current preoccupation with the 1930s, lurked powerful and monitory in the collective and partly because Isherwood's Cheshire or consciousness, so in postwar Britain, from the London or Berlin seem denser and richer in 1945 election through the Welfare State to Mac- literary terms than his California. In fact, pre- millan's pleasure at our never having had it so Hitler Berlin has become and is likely to remain good and on to current anguishes at the role of an Isherwood invention. Mr Finney writes well unemployment as an economic regulator, bleak about the literary history of the 30s, and clears images of the distressed areas of Lancashire and up some disputed issues; in particular he shows South Wales, of the hunger marches and the that Auden and Isherwood were verifiably in- operation of the means test have functioned in fluenced by Brecht in The Dog Beneath the Skin modern memory as elements of a distinctive and the other verse-plays in which they myth, a pocket holocaust to be remembered and collaborated. After the travels and crises and shunned lest it return as the future. But—even collisions with history of the 30s, Isherwood's if with some salutary consequences in larger forty-odd years in America have been fairly social and cultural terms—the 30s have perhaps uneventful and there is less for Mr Finney to been over-rapidly mythologized; perhaps we write about. As a critic, he is careful and turn too easily and exclusively to Orwell's judicious in discussing Isherwood's texts, Wigan, Greenwood's Salford, Gibbon's Dun- though he does not altogether resist the temp- cairn, and Aude'n's landscapes of unease con- tation of putting in too much plot-summary of frontations for our images. Priestley's English Isherwood's novels of the 50s and 60s, though Journey displayed a map that gave other this difficulty is inescapable in writing a critical locations, and more recently historians such as biography of a novelist. He makes very good Stevenson and Cook have emphasized different sense of Isherwood's early and late versions of patterns to those of the distressed areas which, fictionalized autobiography, Lions and Shadows for all their lack of drama and human suffering, and Christopher and His Kind, in the first of which constitute other, real, experiences of the 1930s. homosexuality was a teasing absence, while in Introducing this volume, Asa Briggs indicates the second it was a central concern. One the route to reassessment when he remarks that biographical puzzle that Mr Finney does not British history has been—and still is—the clear up relates to Isherwood's long and history of sub-cultures: "one single image of a seemingly happy relationship with Hollywood as lost decade" will never serve adequately. For an a scriptwriter. Other important writers, end more substantial than simply that of American and English, have revolted angrily or academic precision it is important to get the 30s satirically against the well-paid servitude of the right, to acknowledge where the myth falls dream-factory, and made literature out of their short, is stylized, or is only too accurate in the revolt, but Isherwood seem to have been quite picture of the decade that it presents: the at home in Hollywood. One would like to know multiple perspectives Briggs finds marshalled more about this side of Isherwood's character, here, of "social history, the sociology of art and but to go into it might demand a greater liberty literature, political and ideological debate, of interpretation than is normally possible when cultural theory and socio-cultural practice" dealing with a living subject, however co- promise an appropriate response to the im- operative. In so far as this elusive figure can be peratives of the period in the diversity of its ex- placed, though, Mr Finney has succeeded, and perience and testaments. Most of these essays his book can be recommended. indeed open doors: a few, however, seem keen to slam them shut (with not a few fingers in the way)—and it is the editor's essays, rather than BERNARD BERGONZI those of his contributors, which fall into the latter category. Frank Gloversmith's opening essay, 84 Reviews "Defining Culture", examines concepts of something of a whipping-boy (and certainly un- culture within the period, embracing John justly so bearing in mind the far more actively Cowper Powys's The Meaning of Culture, Clive illiberal company he keeps in this essay), Bell's Bell's Civilization, R. H. Tawney's Equality, arabesque dreams of the life of a privileged T. S. Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society minority in a slave-society and Eliot's cir- and—quite legitimately—the later Notes Towards cuitous, heavy-handed endorsements of an ac- the Definition of Culture. This assiduous analysis centuated version of the status-quo are no less of the socio-political assumptions—but more forcibly attacked than Powys's "egoism". The particularly the inconsistencies and con- enemy is identified as any argument that tends fusions—lying behind these writers' thoughts on to valorize the achievement by a minority of culture soon resolves into a highly sympathetic heightened states of consciousness and life-style endorsement of Tawney and a relentless assault at the expense of the rest of society. But with upon Powys, Bell and Eliot. Gloversmith is con- what justice Powys finds himself first to the cerned with laying bare what he sees as the block on these charges is more problematic than authoritarian, the elitist, the anti-social, the the casual reader of these few pages is likely to illiberal, the inhumane, the irresponsible—and imagine. The determination to set up a Powys- the downright selfish—in defences of culture Bell-Eliot junta glosses over the very real dif- which involved the acceptance of social injustice ference that exists between the active mischief of or oppression in their assumptions or projec- Bell ("democracy and civilization are in- tions. That said, admirers of John Cowper compatible") and Eliot ("culture and Powys and of The Meaning of Culture in par- equalitarianism . . . conflict"), and Powys's ticular, would be well advised to watch their promotion of an ideal of culture capable of blood-pressure, for Gloversmith's hostility to being pursued "under any gonfalon". This Powys's "holiday task" (as John Cowper frustrating lack of delicacy afflicts the whole ap- described the project to Theodore) is un- proach: the works are discussed as self- compromising. On the other hand, the hostility contained contributions to a prescribed concept is somewhat predictable once one has attuned of cultural theory, rather than as historically the mind's ear to the procrustean language and conditioned documents of rather less deter- values of the essay (and in effect 'has been minate—and certainly not identical—genre. As predicted, for example by T. J. Diffey in "John a consequence the executions are perhaps more Cowper Powys and Philosophy", PR, I, ii, 27- pointless than painful. There are too many 39). From the observation of "removedness", books of fifty years ago, Lawrence's The Plumed of the "intransitive" and the "contemplative" Serpent or Etruscan Places, or much of Wyndham in Powys's ideal of personal culture (terms Lewis for example, which if treated as if written which given the calculus of value operative must for tomorrow's sociology seminar or next year's be understood in a pejorative sense), Glover- election, might just as easily be dispatched—and smith moves quickly to a detection of the if they did present themselves as such, one "philosophically pretentious" and the "mean- would be happy to help Gloversmith sharpen the spirited", finding in Powys's stance "a bleak axe. But they don't, and so the assault has little and priggish advocacy of privatism" in a work bearing on the value of reading these works which approximates to "irate, grandiloquent —particularly in the very context out of which moral melodrama". To extract the most severe Gloversmith writes. As head after head tumbles strictures: down into the basket, the thought must occur to the impartial observer that there are more con- structive ways of dealing with the con- The claims to philosophical detachment, demned—both guilty and innocent. (Tawney's rational argument, and scholarly critique are Equality is another matter. If we are indeed into just not tenable. The thinness of texture, the the realm of live political polemic, then more paucity of arguments, and the illiberality of strength to Gloversmith in promoting the feelings betray unexamined nihilism (behind reading of that humane, compassionate, and its 'mysticism') and a cynicism about human still highly engaged book—even if it is far less relationships (behind its defence of the than Powys's, Bell's or Eliot's works a direct ex- 'cultured self). ploration of a version of culture, but rather an exposition of the need for the kind of social The best construction one can put upon this is justice on which a common culture might that it is disproportionate; the worst, that it is flourish.) hysterical. However, if Powys is made Reviews 85 Jeremy Hooker has recently pointed out in expressed to Dreiser for "a real equity in our these columns two attractive directions for organised society", of his praise for the Russian Powys criticism: the fostering of the habit of Revolution, and his condemnation of the reality discussing the Powyses alongside well of Stalin, along with the dictatorships of Hitler established writers in appropriate contexts, and and Mussolini, of his attraction towards Com- the need for an "intelligent study of social in- munism and of his prediction in 1914 that the fluences and tensions in Powys lives and letters" future of the world would depend less on wars on the premiss that it is "to their having come than on certain "vast economic changes", and from a particular social world, with attitudes "a war between international capital and in- and beliefs with which each had his painful ternational labour". And what of his praise for creative struggle, that their writings owe much the Anarchists of Catalonia who had created of their significance". As is clear from Glover- "the first really self-respecting and completely smith's essay, the realization of that first direc- free life for the working people of the world"? tion may be attended with rough knocks, but How true—and simultaneously how ludicrous in that possibility only underlines the need for the its selectivity—is this picture of John Cowper second. Here there is no attempt to relate The Powys: but Gloversmith needs a Roland to his Meaning of Culture either to Powys's oeuvre at Oliver. There is no dispute that John Cowper large, or to the man, his social milieu, or more Powys's social conscience was more capacious particularly his response to that milieu. There is than his ability or desire to formulate social and simply no mention of any other work by Powys, political thought as such—but a version of him nor indeed of any of the available biographical lacking any sense of that compassion and material. (Gloversmith claims the virtue of generosity, of his radical instincts, is being orientated towards the text—but that does inadequate: without some gesture towards the not inhibit judgements on the writers as in- complexity of the man one- is left with a dividuals.) Here Powys remains simply a five- caricature of vicious, deceitful and mystificating letter word, a collocation of signs responsible (6r author behind The Meaning of Culture and to culpable) for something called The Meaning of foster that impression is to risk practising the Culture. But the reader of these pages who knows ungenerosity which Gloversmith so admirably little of Powys will not suspect the journey from detests. It is, after all, in The Meaning of Culture the milieu Angus Wilson has sketched to the that Powys celebrates the "class-destroying, in- condition of Timothy Hyman's "Holy fool"—a tellect-defying passion for equality"; and it is journey in which many ties are sustained and there also that he speaks of the school of "treat many eroded. He will not suspect the thirty 'em rough" who put it into our heads to "go years' lecturing in America, the trains and rampaging around the world like so many hotels, the practical commitment of the resident irascible policemen, rapping with our bludgeons alien to sharing ideas and experiences with his all the nervous human craniums who see and proletarian audiences, the Jewish, Catholic and feel what we cannot see and feel". Communist minorities, the mid-west townships. In another place it might have been fitting (Inevitably those thirty years will elicit a frown to give priority to the similar treatment of as representing a mere "filtering down" of the Orwell in a later essay. "Reactionary", bourgeois classics—but it was a very different "disingenuous", "graceless", "hypocritical", kind of engagement to Bell's wispy half-hopes "ungenerous", a writer of "moral melodrama" about the diffusion of civilization: indeed, it was (again), concerned to give "fundamental an enterprise with as much akin to Tawney's reassurance" in The Road to Wigan Pier, this is a W.E.A. work as to the spirit of Eliot's journals.) queerly partial picture of Orwell—and, it seems, Nor will he suspect Powys's horror at even the is at root a response to Orwell's implying the residual odour of slavery in New Orleans (Bell, "inefficacy of any systematic critique based on one assumes, would have snuffed it up), his at- analysis of social systems": the sin against the titude to Black Americans, to the unemployed, Holy Ghost. By contrast, Auden's ambiguities his disgust at those who fostered the "Negro escape surprisingly lightly: indeed, his early Problem". There will be no suspicion of the work is praised for "poetic gains that com- defence of Eugene Debs, of his reflections on pensate for the blur and incidental vagueness". Sacco and Vanzetti, on police brutality, on the Better apostatize than antagonize. "anti-social brigandage and exploitation" of Wall Street. There is no hint of Powys's desire Elsewhere, Valentine Cunningham's spark- ling essay on "1930s Writers and Taking 86 Reviews Sides" has humour and insight. The ten- occupation running through the most disparate dentiousness of that symbol of 30s commitment, facets of the period. There are more per- Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, is deftly ex- spectives to be explored, but for literary students pounded, as is the real eclecticism of Graham hooked on a few big names and historians Greene's Night and Day in its publication of the doubtful about the role of literature, film and Leftist, the Rightist and the Indifferentist art as evidence, this is a book which opens up without apparent angst. Llewelyn Powys ap- the 30s. pears in one of Cunningham's sub-divisions of the supporters of Republic Spain: "people who, PETER MILES even if they were not exactly strangers to readers of Left Review or to the whereabouts of the New Statesman offices (or at least to the Theory and Personality: The Significance of people who themselves starred in those circles) T. S. Eliot's Criticism, did help give the Popular Front idea some BRIAN LEE. credence". The Athlone Press, 1979, £9.95. The latter movement provides John Coom- bes's topic, that "nauseous spectacle of bishops, The two poles of literary-critical writing are, Communists, cocoa-magnates, publishers, perhaps, those of manifesto and commentary. duchesses and Labour MPs marching arm in Creative artists excel at the former. Scholars, arm to the tune of Rule Britannia" as Orwell saw epigoni, and poets (like Coleridge) whose work is it before himself opting for his country right or done tend towards the latter, more expansive left. Keeping the role of British Popular Front- mode. T. S. Eliot's most influential essays ism in appropriate proportion, Coombes does exemplify the declarative power, the revolut- help illuminate the attractive accessibility of ionary purpose and oracular brevity of a Communism (however illegitimate in the eyes manifesto. They also have its drawbacks. Eliot of the orthodox) to individuals of the mid-1930s fudges key terms, and seems more concerned to whose sympathies might otherwise not have dominate the reader than to meet him in moved so far to the left. By way of complement, argument. His aggressive air of holding certain Alun Howkins explores the creation of an alter- sweeping truths to be self-evident may hide the native culture between 1930 and 1935 by the fact that these truths sometimes have little in Communist Party, centring on the Daily common except his own strong interest in Worker, but extending to theatre, sport and bringing them together. social entertainments: quietly positive, the essay The virtues and defects of Brian Lee's book persuades one of the existence of a substantial are all the other way round. He advocates a close environment to which Edward Upward's reading of Eliot's key essays in preference to the writing now provides the most accessible literary sort of exposition which irons out inconsistencies link. Stuart Laing raises interesting connections and tabulates key ideas. (Mr Lee's horror of between the techniques of John Sommerfield's tabulation is so strong that, though his prefatory novel May Day and the Mass Observation chapter is entitled "Eliot's Four 'Theories'"— movement in their respective endeavours to the inverted commas are characteristic—one is represent collectivity of experience, while Mar- never quite sure which four he means.) In the tin Ceadel (in something a little too much of a event, Theory and Personality is based on the close survey) reviews reflections of the future war in reading of only one essay, "Tradition and the popular literature between 1918 and 1939. Individual Talent", using it as text for a David Mellor refreshingly opens a door onto the prolonged rumination on Eliot's achievement cultural politics of British art in the 1930s, and its significance today. though surprisingly manages to do it without As a textual commentator, Mr Lee is illumin- mentioning Wyndham Lewis either as artist or ating and yet remarkably unsystematic. His as the author of The Revenge for Love, while Jane suggestion that we should read criticism "with Lewis writes informatively and often distur- the same general attention that we give to a bingly about the position of women in an ex- poem" is suspect since he acknowledges no cellent study. The volume closes with John obligation to attend to the whole of Eliot's essay. Lowerson's "Battles for the Countryside"—an Many of its salient points he simply ignores. essay which once again asserts the possibility of Instead, he concentrates on those passages which a new perspective revealing a gleam of pre- contribute to the theme of artistic impersonality Reviews 87 (or, as he would call it, personality/imperson- him. To take the passage as involving some sort ality). Eliot's criticism, on this view, is pre-emin- of sociological observation is simply to fall into ently the expression of Eliot the poet; its one of Old Possum's traps. I have no doubt that pedagogic aspects (those which pointed to the Mr Lee would have objected just as strongly if he foundation of more than one critical school) are had been faced with an "ordinary man" who largely taken as read. was listening to the noise of the football rattle and What did it mean to be Eliot, to write those reading the News of the World. The critical essays (and those poems)—and how do his pre- commentator needs to summon all his self- occupations and disabilities relate to ours? Mr discipline if he i". to avoid that kind of mistake. Lee has no doubts that "Eliot's predicament is our predicament", and the following is charact- PATRICK PARRINDER eristic of his viewpoint and style: Eliot, throughout his life in criticism and poetry was trying to create the wholeness Rebel's Progress, of poems at a time when the relationship was TOM EARLEY. reversed, when poetic-intuitive life was sub- Gwasg Gomer, 1979, £2.25. ordinated to the measure of science (and science in a state of optimism) and its How very difficult it is tov avoid the cliche in "objective" reducing and separating method. Wales! Details of landscape (pit winding-gear, mountains), of language and dialogue, the Eliot himself shows, in some of his most famous names of places and people and their work and pronouncements, a twentyish fixation with leisure, all now carry the stain of sentimentality scientific vocabulary; Mr Lee is suitably sharp on and the risk of cliche. History and literature this. Moreover, he is suffering from the very have named and over-named them all. During a personality-disorders and divisions that his recent season of old films about Wales shown on criticism diagnoses so memorably. His poetry is television the audience, despite itself, must often made out of those divisions, which happen to be have winced at decent truths like the scarfed symptomatic of modern civilization in general— women waiting at the pithead for news, the an observation which is both a cause and a conse- unemployed hanging about steep terraced quence of Eliot's greatness. Yet Eliot's is a streets, the pitboots clattering, the choirs, the flawed achievement, and flawed in ways to chapels, the sheep. Yet some of the films were which, since his death, we have become increas- excellent, speaking as they did for their day, ingly sensitive. Mr Lee strongly implies that the before the word-glut of Dylan Thomas, before modern world does offer examples of we had a surfeit of our own imagery. "wholeness" and "balance" which help us to see But art makes the world new. Those Welsh the limitations of Eliot's split personality. His writers of the 1980s who avoid our cliches are, reference-points are Lawrence and Leavis, on the whole, living and working here now, and—less predictably—Rilke and Simone Weil. have their own view, real and present, and a The book ends with a fine dialectical flourish, freshly informed style. The versions of Wales which deserves to be cited by future comment- possessed by R. S. Thomas, Roland Mathias or ators on Eliot: "True personality and true im- John Ormond are described by powerfully in- personality are the same thing". Theory and dividual voices. Those like Leslie Norris and Personality is an absorbing and exacting piece of Dannie Abse with addresses in both Wales and work, which fails, in the end, to reconcile one to England have retained, at a little distance, ac- the author's unbuttoned and wilfully curately observed views. John Tripp and Harri idiosyncratic mode of procedure..Among various Webb mock and use the cliches to suit their pur- instances where his personal prejudices seem to poses, John Tripp never sentimental, Harri obtrude, the one that sticks in the mind is his cav- Webb often so. illing over the passage in "The Metaphysical The hardest task is that of the exiled Welsh- Poets" in which Eliot refers to an "ordinary man who writes of Wales, surely not only from man" who "reads Spinoza". Eliot seems to me reasons of nostalgia but because the root of all to be hinting that that "ordinary man" may be poetic vitality feeds deeply on the sub-soil of the same individual as the "poet" from whose childhood and adolescence. For Tom Earley, operations (following the dictates of his imper- exiled a long, long time in London, the dilemma sonality theory) he feels obliged to dissociate is acute. His talent for observation and musical 88 Reviews ear are clearly in evidence. He is good on with green and bony hands weather, and nervous fingers drumming. ("Sumachs in Bloomsbury") As drowsy child with chalk Fills in with concentrated care It is in the Bloomsbury poems that Tom The blackboard-landscape lines Earley's voice is confident, and here he ex- already drawn periments with rhythms and rhyme-schemes, ("Snow at Night") with sonnets, villanelles and rounds, his range wide and his ear true. Today has been a blue and silver day, If at the last this handsomely produced book Of all the days the kind I like the best. of 62 poems fails to carry me wholeheartedly Such days are fashioned out of wind and rain. with it then it is due not to an inadequacy of ("Blue and Silver") Tom Earley's talent or to imperfections of the poet's eye or ear but to a failure of his nerve and Or when his young daughter's raft was blown a failure to resolve the dilemma of writing at out to sea in a sudden Mediterranean squall, great geographical and chronological distance her fury from the heart of the subject which is the heart Stung me like the wind whipping the foam, of him as a poet. It is, he knows himself, some Her anger memorable as the mistral. (not all) of the Welsh poems which fail: ("Contretemps at Aygulf") I search for precious words in praise of Wales He is excellent on pigeons, describing a crippled With imagery and idiom mine alone pigeon thus: But find that every finished poem fails. ("Rejection Slip") His feet have been eaten away by disease Leaving thin disfigured stumps which make Even in good poems like "The Blacksmith" the Standing difficult and landing a shock of pain fault (in the geographical sense) jars, the nerve ("Pigeons") fails, and it ends lamely and Even dreams can be occupational hazards, Rigoletto limping distractedly or Across the stage singing his disjointed aria spring onions which chilled ("Pigeons") the throat (jibbons we called them) or real wood-pigeons, a cut above the rock- ("For What We Have Received") doves and stock-doves, where jibbons are explained, translated, rather They live a country life, consuming new than used with confidence as the only, the right, Hawthorn leaves and fresh flowers of elm. the first language giving the local and therefore universal power that is found in, for example, The sequence ends with the sentence the wood- the footnote-free poetry of Seamus Heaney. pigeon speaks: Tom Earley leaves the reader intrigued by the The nest, to our delight problem of displacement. The dilemma of exile And wonder, has inside has been resolved before and most recently and A paschal egg plain white successfully, it seems to me, by Jeremy Hooker For Easter-tide. in his beautiful Englishman's Road where he has Take two cows, taffy, take two used exile and its attendant restlessness to fill a Coo roo coo, roo coo, coo roo. loved but foreign Welsh landscape with the ("Pigeons") light and shadow of his own ghosts. Rebel's Progress convinces me that there is life About Bloomsbury, where he lives, he writes enough in Tom Earley yet for him to consider well. From his flat he observes the weather, the taking a Welshman's road. seasons, the pigeons and trees of Bloomsbury Square, the Chinese sumach trees outside his GILLIAN CLARKE window, At night we hear them coming to touch our window panes Reviews 89

Plot, Story and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe human experience. For the modernist, the am- to the Modern Period, biguity endemic to human experience adds to ROBERT L. CASERIO. life's richness, whereas if only one true per- spective remains then all human thought must Princeton University Press, 1979, $15.00. be subservient to that or at least must be viewed in relation to that ultimate meaning. Caserio's book is a study of the novel, in terms Caserio argues that modernism tends towards of its use of plot and story, from Dickens to abstraction and therefore sterility because it Beckett. He is concerned with the different uses lacks faith in moral and intellectual made of plot and story by novelists and argues achievement. Yet his view of modernism is that if writers and readers reject these principles rather narrow and this narrowness of view is of organization, then this is accompanied by a related to Caserio's method of analysis. loss of faith in the meaning and moral value of Believing that plot and story rescue life from action. He sees modernism in terms of such a chaos and indeterminacy of meaning, he judges rejection in that it represents a distrust about the effectiveness of modern works by their what can be made intelligible, purposeful or capacity to fulfil this pattern or at least to con- moral, and therefore constitutes a rejection of form to it. It is as if he has formulated his ideal life. For Caserio the novel represents pattern of plot development and that novelists meaningful action and not quietism and pur- are then evaluated in accordance with their ac- poselessness. His claim is that the problem that ceptance of that pattern. Without plot and story affects fiction is also a problem in life: it is for- there can be no access to truth and if plot and mal in terms of plot and story, and moral and story are rejected so too is access to truth, moral intellectual in terms of life. His study is largely and intellectual. But if Caserio's system is rejec- an analysis of this rejection of faith. ted as unusable, writers Cannot possibly be con- Beginning with Dickens, story is seen as a sidered failures because they do not conform to means by which life is made intelligible in that it it. is able to discriminate moral values. To be com- It is almost as if Caserio would have us return mitted to plot and story is to be committed to to a world in which access to moral insight can continuity and definite meaning as opposed to be achieved: he does not claim to have keys to sterility arising out of abstract theorizing. For the kingdom of truth but suggests that plot, as Caserio, story is not merely a sequence of events he defines it, can allow us a view of that but a means of gaining access to meaning kingdom. What he is not able to show is that through an examination of the relations between that kingdom actually exists outside of a fiction phenomena. At the same time plot should be which he is concerned with creating. Whether not only intellectual but emotional and moral, we would be better morally if we embrace and it must also be grounded in action and thus Caserio's view cannot be proved for his is a become dymanic. If fiction deals with the vision of faith. To the modernist the whole con- misguided perspective of characters, then it can ception of faith has been laid open to doubt and use peripety or reversal as a transforming therefore to embrace a conception of truth as a element whereby significant differences can be means of revitalizing life would simply be a con- construed and access gained to true meaning. In cession to illusion. It is not simply a matter of this sense plot represents a theorizing and the modernist playing with forms as abstracted generalization which "simultaneously presents play but of trying to come to terms with and life's manifold, dispersed phenomena and transcend the very forms which have made a analyses and establishes as true life's in- pretence of representing meaning. To use telligibility and coherence" (p. 28). In contrast, Caserio's terms, the final realization comes modernism tends towards abstracted thought in about as a result of peripety in that we gain in- which only fictional relations are relevant. sight through a reversal which shatters It could be argued that a faith in peripety previously held opinions. A faith in story may makes a virtue of necessity, in that it enables us make life easier to deal with but that does not to maintain that human experience and un- make it any less artificial. derstanding are not necessarily true, but that by Caserio also suggests that modern fiction reversal we gain insight into truth by im- works against itself in that although the form plication. This would suggest a faith in an may suggest meaninglessness, as in Joyce and ultimate meaning which is simply obscured by Woolf, yet the possibility of meaningfulness is 90 Reviews ever present. Modernism strives against the sense his claim is at variance with what the book natural tendency of language towards meaning actually presents. Caserio hankers after order so that for Lawrence the desire to subvert and the accessibility of truth through character meaning is in constant conflict with narrative and event in fiction, but he does not meaningfulness. This is the modernist dilemma acknowledge that we can have access to for the tools we use have traditionally tended meaning through the workings of prose fiction toward structure and meaning and so, as with itself. This may start from the position of rejec- the Beckettian protagonist, although we may tion and negativity in that it refuses to use plot desire silence the only way we can voice that and story and even makes fun of them, but that silence is through language—for that is the does not mean that there are not positive human condition. elements within such workings. It is of this that Although Caserio claims not to have written a criticism should be aware and to which criticism polemic in favour of plot and story, and that he should address itself. has sympathy with the anti-narrative tradition, we are always aware that he favours plot and PHILIP BENTLEY story as against modernist strategies. In that NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

PHILIP BENTLEY lectures in General Studies at KENNETH HOPKINS after a career in journalism Bridgnorth College of Further Education. He has has been a Professor of English at various researched in the field of narrative technique by way universities in the U.S.A. during the last twenty of studies of Flann O'Brien, and of Muriel Spark, years. He has published about fifty books including B. S, Johnson, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and critical studies, mainly on poetry, especially satire, Robert Coover. His publications include articles on and also The Powys Brothers (Dent, 1967). His Collected poverty, housing and charity. Poems 1935-1965 and Collected Poems 1966-1977 gather the contents of 22 separate collections. BERNARD BERGONZI is a Professor of English in the Department of English and Comparative Liter- EMYR HUMPHREYS, poet and novelist, has pub- ature at the University of Warwick. His books include lished some sixteen novels since 1946, winning The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester U.P., 1961), various awards: the Somerset Maughan, 1953, the Heroes' Twilight (Constable, 1965), The Situation of the Hawthornden, 1959, the Welsh Arts Council, 1972 Novel (Macmillan 1970; rev. ed. 1979), T. S. Eliot and 1979. His latest novels are National Winner (1971), (Macmillan, 1972), The Turn of a Century (Macmillan, Flesh and Blood (1974), Landscapes (1976), The Best of 1973), Gerard Manley Hopkins (Macmillan, 1977) and Friends (1976) and The Anchor Tree (1979). He has just Reading the Thirties (Macmillan, 1978). completed a book on the development of Welsh identity ("an Historical Companion to people inter- GLEN CAVALIERO, a member of the Faculty of ested in my novels") to be published by the Black English at the University of Cambridge, is the author Raven Press, possibly entitled A View of a Hidden of John Cowper Powys, Novelist (O.U.P., 1973), The Kingdom. Rural Tradition in the English Novel, 1900-1939 (Macmillan, 1977) and A Reading of E. M. Forster , MARY BARHAM JOHNSON, daughter of Henry (Macmillan, 1979). Barham Johnson and Catherine Bodham Donne (both of the family of "The Powys Mother": see the Johnson-Donne Pedigree), born in 1895, won a Harp GILLIAN CLARKE, poet, is the Editor of The Scholarship to the Royal College of Music, 1910- Anglo-Welsh Review. Collections of her poetry include 1913, qualified for an English Honours degree at Snow on the Mountain (Christopher Davies, 1971) and Oxford, 1917, and after various teaching posts, was The Sundial (Gomer Press, 1978). finally a lecturer in English and Music, Norwich College of Education. She is engaged in a study of the T. J. DIFFEY is a Reader in Philosophy at the Uni- poet William Cowper and his family. versity of Sussex. He is the Editor of The British Journal of Aesthetics and since 1967 he has published articles on BEN JONES is a Professor of English at Carleton aesthetics regularly in the British Journal, the Journal of University in Ottawa, Canada. He has edited, with Aesthetics and Art Criticism and Ratio. James Downey, a collection of essays on Thomas Gray, Fearful Joy (McGill—Queen's U.P., 1974). CLAIRE HARMAN is Co-ordinating Editor of PN Review. She is at present editing the Collected Poems of G. WILSON KNIGHT, Professor Emeritus of Leeds Sylvia Townsend Warner for Carcanet Press. University, was previously Chancellor's Professor of English, Trinity College, University of Toronto CEDRIC HENTSCHEL lectured in the universities (1931-1941) and Professor of English Literature, of London, Innsbruck, Breslau and Uppsala before Leeds University (1946-1962). His publications joining the overseas service of the British Council. His include works of autobiography, biography, poems writings in the field of Comparative Literature and a play; his many critical works include The Wheel include "John Cowper Powys and the Gretchen- of Fire, The Imperial Theme, The Christian Renaissance, Cult", Studia Neophilologica, 1941, Alexander von The Starlit Dome, The Golden Labyrinth, The Saturnian Humboldt's Synthesis of Literature and Science (Inter Quest, Shakespearean Production, Shakespeare and Religion, Nationesr, 1969), The Byronic Teuton (Methuen, 1940; Byron and Shakespeare, Vergil and Shakespeare, Shakes- Norwood Editions, 1978). His contribution to Byron's peare's Dramatic Challenge. Political and Cultural Influence in nineteenth-century Europe (ed. P. G. Trueblood), will be published in 1981 by DENIS LANE is a Professor of Englirh at John Jay Macmillan and Humanities Press. College, The City University of New York. He is Literary Editor for the current affairs monthly USA JOHN HODGSON lectures for the British Council Today, and he has articles forthcoming on Maiden at the University of Pristina, Yugoslavia. In 1980 he Castle (C.U.N.Y. English Forum, 1980) and on Porius was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Newcastle (Papers on Language and Literature, S. Illinois fora thesis on John Cowper Powys. University, 1981). PETER MILES lectures in English literature at Saint Critical Guide (Longman, 1979) and Science Fiction: Its David's University College, Lampeter. He is Reviews Criticism and Teaching (1980). Editor of The Powys Review, a frequent reviewer for The Library, and has published articles on eighteenth JOHN E. ROBERTS, at first a solicitor in Llan- and twentieth century fiction. gollen, worked in journalism for the steel industry from 1927 to 1973 and was Editor of The Refractories PATRICK PARRINDER is a Reader in English at Journal. the University of Reading. His books include H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1972), Authors KIM TAPLIN is the author of The English Path and Authority (Routledge, 1977), Science Fiction: A (Boydell Press, 1979). r

My Lamp Still Burns Robert Morgan My Lamp Still Burns is the recollections of the author's early life as a coal miner in a low seam pit in the Cynon Valley, South Wales. The work, dangerous, exhausting and almost brutal, was carried out in a seam only two feet thick, and in semi-darkness. Boys dragged the 'steel box' to and from the tram in this narrow space for six shifts a week. No longer do colliers dress coal, notch timber, build tumble- ups, bore holes with ratchet-machines, and drag coal in steel boxes. Such handwork is now history. Morgan has recalled such work in all its clandestine detail. He also describes several of his mining con- temporaries and other childhood events above ground in his mining village. Case-bound, 141 pp. Glyn Simon: His Life and Opinions Owain w. Jones The impact of the late Archbishop Glyn Simon on the life of the Church in Wales has been considerable. As Warden of the Church Hostel, Bangor, and of St Michael's College, Llandaff, he was con- cerned with the training of candidates for ordination. As Dean of Llandaff he began the re-building of the war-damaged cathedral. As Bishop and Archbishop he had a vital role in the counsels of the Church. The author has set the life of Archbishop Simon against this back- ground. He has also given due place to his opinions, for he was a com- pelling speaker, from the pulpit or the platform, on radio and on tele- vision. He was also a controversial figure who had firm convictions on a wide variety of subjects; and he never hesitated to speak out as the occasion required. Case-bound, 144 pp. Profiles Glyn Jones and John Rowlands A few million people visit Wales every year from all over the world and this book is an attempt to answer their literary questions and to inform them about what has been written in our country in Welsh and English during this century. It is the work of two men, John Rowlands, who writes about Welshmen whose work has been done in Welsh, and Glyn Jones, whose concern is with Welshmen writing in English. They treat the two literatures in a series of essays, or "Profiles", dealing with the lives and achievements of outstanding poets, novelists and playwrights. There are essays on Dylan Thomas, David Jones, Richard Hughes, D. J. Williams, Saunders Lewis, Euros Bowen and more than fifty other writers. The book also has an introduction about Welsh literary history, maps, a further chapter on younger writers and a glossary explaining Welsh words and Gomer institutions. Although intended primarily for visitors much of the material in Press this important book is bound to be news to many of our fellow countrymen on both sides of the language divide. In fact all who care for literature will find much of interest in this serious, but not solemn, Llandysul, Dyfed collection. Case-bound, 416 pp. £9.95 Telephone (055932)2371/2 Recollections of the Powys Brothers

LLEWELYN, THEODORE AND JOHN COWPER Edited and with an Introduction by Belinda Humfrey

Contributors include: Alyse Gregory, Louis Wilkinson, Kenneth Hopkins, Ethe! Mannin, Francis Powys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, David Garnett, Mark Holloway, Jack Clemo, Gerard Casey. Oliver Marlow Wilkinson, Henry Miller, James Hanley, G. Wilson Knight, Jacquetta Hawkes and Angus Wilson.

'Recollections of the Powys Brothers does make them live again and show their strange affinities ... For those who are ignorant of them it serves as a vital introduction, and for those who wish to be disturbed by them again, it is a Kim's Game of recognition and surprise.'—Andrew Sinclair, The Times 'In some ways this book is more informative than a straightforward biography. It tells us more about the quirks and oddities and obsessions of the three brothers than an ordinary biographer . . . could hope to emulate.'—John Pickford, BBC World Service '. . . Leaves us with reverberating images of three exceptional men.'—Anthony Bailey, Sunday Times 'In gathering together and editing these recollections and adding an invaluable, informative introduction, Belinda Humfrey has done the reading public a service. The book will remind those who know the Powys brothers' work to read again and to read deeper. . .'—Elizabeth Harvey, Birmingham Post 'Belinda Humfrey's volume comes as a "must" for all Powys fans. She furnishes a detailed introduction to their life and work, followed by a most valuable series of recollections from some thirty contributors . . .'—Alan Shadwick, Church Times

288 pages 18 plates Family tree of the Powys family Bibliography £9.95 PETER OWEN LTD., 73 KENWAY ROAD, LONDON SW5 ORE

TWO LIMITED FIRST EDITIONS

ALYSE GREGORY: The Cry of a Gull, Journals 1923—1948, edited by Michael Adam, with a tribute by Evelyn Hardy, and illustrations by Alan Richards: £6.30 + 50p postage. CHYDYOK LLEWELYN POWYS: So Wild a Thing, Letters to Gomel Woolsey edited as a —the home of Llewelyn Powys, narrative by Malcolm Elwin, with illustrations by Peter Reddick: 1931-36. To be let for periods of £6.30 + 50p postage. up to one year. Please contact:

Send two 14p stamps for profusely Janet Machen, illustrated brochure of these, and other Marsh Farm House, books by D. H. Lawrence & others. Margaret Marsh, Shaftesbury, THE ARK PRESS: Mousehole, Cornwall. Dorset.

THE POWYS SOCIETY

(President: Angus Wilson)

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

The Membership subscription is £7.50 a year.

Further details may be obtained from

T. D. Stephens, Martyn Branford, Hon. Secretary, The Powys Society, Hon. Treasurer, The Powys Society, 8, Clarendon Street, 38, Quarella Road, Cambridge, CB11JU. Bridgend, Mid-Glamorgan, CF31 UN.

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

(Overseas members are requested to ask their Banks to forward £7.50 to the account of The Powys Society, National Westminster Bank, Bridgend, Mid-Glamorgan, S. Wales, account number 54603129. Alternatively, payment may be made by International Money Order.)

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Gomer Press