Wolf Solent (1929)

Wolf Solent was published in 1929, when Powys was 57 and still making a part-time living from his mobile lecture show. An unsparingly analytical, intensely poetic character-study of the kind that became his specialty, it was his debut as a mature novelist. Here are all the elements of standard Powysian psychodrama: a conflict between brothers; the hypnotic eroticism of girls; depraved elders; and the remains of innocence. Wolf Solent is no nostalgic pastoral. Powys, who eulogized the beauties of Nature, never balked at revealing its horrors. His work is full of implications of violence. To him it was a mistake not to see what he, in a somewhat Zen manner, called “the necessity of opposition”: Good and Evil; Male and Female; Life and Death; Appearance and Reality. All these, he says,
"have to be joined together, have to be forced into one another, have to be proved dependent upon each other, while all solid entities have to dissolve, if they are to outlast their momentary appearance, into atmosphere."

The novel, on the surface, is a fairly straightforward story of a native son’s return, along the lines of Hardy’s Return of the Native. Wolf, the eponymous hero, an extremely sensitive soul, returns to his hometown on England’s South Coast after suffering a mental breakdown in London. But instead of recovering his innocence at home, he loses it completely. He is coming to a presumably serene writing assignment for the local squire, to escape the intensity of the city, to understand his past, and to somehow vindicate his tightly wound mother. Nothing goes to plan. He becomes entangled in various affairs, romantic and professional, and uncovers horrible truths about some old friends and neighbors. A battle between his father’s joie de vivre and his mother’s nervousness rages in his head. He becomes sympathetic to his father’s mistress, becomes attracted to his half-sister. The job he’s come for is not at all what he’s expected. In fact, nothing in this town provides relief from intensity.
In the end he returns, disillusioned, to the anonymity of London. You can’t go home again sums up the novel in a nutshell; but a nutshell is far too small for Powys. It is what throbs beneath the surface of this novel, from the hero who is alive to every blade of grass and housefly to the world around him. There are many contemplative walks through the English countryside where he plays out every reading of his life in order to make some sense of it. His reverence and concern for the natural world is laudable and, admittedly, hard-going in places. Powys hated most things modern – such as, say, technology and capitalism – so he lingers where others might move along. This is in the heart of the story and all of Powys’s novels.

The critic George Steiner once claimed that Powys was the only twentieth-century English writer on a par with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Margaret Drabble, the distinguished English novelist, believes, “we need to pay attention to this man.” The fantasy world of his novels, she says, is “densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien’s, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.” ( )

This book operates on two distinct levels. The first level is a Lawrentian story of adultery and cuckoldry in a small English country town. Wolf Solent arrives in the town where he was born, after an absence of many years, to take up the post of secretary to the local squire. He falls in love with and marries Gerda, the daughter of the local stonemason. At the same time, he develops an ineluctable passion for the daughter of the local bookseller, Christie. His young wife is carrying on an affair with her childhood sweetheart, while Christie is fighting off the incestuous advances of her own father. Meanwhile, the squire is feuding with the vicar, and both are feuding with the local poet. There is lots of social observation, village fetes, afternoon tea, walks down leafy lanes, and a wealth of eccentric and eccentrically named characters. The novel is focalised through the eponymous protagonist, a highly educated, morbidly sensitive young man, the possessor of a 'mythology', and the story is largely about how he loses this personal mythology and becomes socialised in the world, a Dostoevskyan tale of how a young ego grows up and comes to terms with the disillusionment consequent on greater maturity and experience.

The second level, however, is really about something much deeper...

Read the full review on The Lectern ( )

Best book ever written. ( )

In this novel by John Cowper Powys (1872-1963), Wolf Solent is a 35 year old Englishman, living with his mother in London and leading an obscure life as a History instructor at a small school. At the beginning of the novel he is on a train back to his childhood home of Dorsetshire, at the invitation of a local Squire who need assistance in compiling a scandalous history of the vicinity.

Solent is, to say the least, a hyper-sensitive individual. He wants to get away to the country, away from aeroplanes and the nuisances of modern life. Since childhood, he has lived a mostly interior life occupied with his own peculiar "mythology", but he wants an authentic, sensual existence. His life is overwhelmingly an interior affair, and much of the book is taken up with the turbulent thoughts in Solent's head as he wanders the Dorset countryside, burying his face in the local flora and inserting himself into the lives of the locals.

Wolf's father, who died some 25 years previously, was the local rogue, dying in the neighborhood workhouse with "Christ! I've enjoyed my life!" as his last words. William Solent had an open extramarital affair with Selena Gault, the ugliest woman in town, and fathered at least one illegitimate child, now a woman to whom Wolf forms a strangely affectionate attraction. He also has a strangely affectionate attraction to her betrothed, but that's another thread in the fabric of this story. Wof appears determined to follow his father's footsteps, releasing himself from the suppressed life he has lived with his mother. On the train, he fantasizes about seducing the local girls,"white as a peeled willow wand", among the elder-bushes.

He wastes no time falling for Gerda Torp, the young beauty who is the daughter of the local headstone carver. His erotic sensibilities are influenced by the unseen existence of a photo of Gerda suggestively straddling a headstone in her father's yard, and by her uncanny ability to imitate the whistles of the blackbird and plover. No sooner has he bedded her in a pile of bracken in an old cow-barn, with a promise of marriage, than he meets his true soul mate in the form of the introvert Christie Malakite, who lives a circumscribed existence immersed in works of literature and philosophy, above her father's dirty book shop. Oh fate!

Wolf's obsession with Christie and the imminent collapse of his personal mythology as his life becomes intertwined with those around him forms the bulk of this massive book. In the hands of Thomas Hardy, this would have been a pretty straightforward affair, but Powys has a lot of words in him and is not afraid to use them. The novel is dense with descriptions of Wolf's interminable walks and the vegetation that he encounters. Life in its vegetative ripeness and its inevitable decay permeates the book. And under the fertile ground is the death's head of his father, grinning sardonically at the foolish indecisiveness of his son, a Yorick mocking Hamlet. The arrival of Wolf's mother, not one to let the apronstrings become overstretched, complicates matters: Wolf is as much Oedipus as Hamlet.

The supporting characters are a queer lot: Squire Urquhart, a nasty old man whom Wolf tends to see as evil incarnate; the tippling homosexual parson, Tilly-Valley; Jason Otter, the sensitive poet who seems to know Wolf's motivations better than he does himself; Christie's incestuous father; Urquhart's valet, whom Wolf imagines naked in his dirtiness; and Bob Weevil, whom Wolf suspects of cuckolding him. There is also Redfern, the deceased former secretary of Urquhart, in a shallow grave in the cemetery and over whom most of the male characters share some unshakeable obsession.

Powys imagined his book as illustrative of the necessity of opposites and an examination of "the whole mysterious essence of human life upon earth, the mystery of consciousness." My edition is one of the older Penguin Modern Classics, not the more recent volume with A.N. Wilson's introduction, so I don't have the benefit of Wilson's insights. I get the whole "necessity of opposites" thing, as well as the underlying vegetation/sexuality (dark, moist, hidden) thing. I suppose I enjoyed it, but really, this book is like "Twin Peaks", only with a lot of tea and no dancing midgets.

Wolf Solent was the first of Powys' novels, and generally regarded as his best. He is not easy to slog through, and God knows I've tried. Among his other works are A Glastonbury Romance (which I hope to read before I die, but not too soon), a massive Autobiography, and a self-help book called The Philosophy of Solitude. I enjoy dipping into the latter two volumes from time to time but I can really only take him in small doses. He was truly an idiosyncratic writer and, despite a life lived mostly in the United States, a true English eccentric.

I bought the book because I liked the cover painting. I read it and then devoured most of this great man's work. Fortunately there is a lot of it, and - even more fortunately - most of it is fine and sensitive stuff. Powys was a pantheistic eco warrior before there were such things, and consequently his work is prescient and even more timely for a modern audience. ( )