John Cowper Powys (1872–1963)

John Cowper Powys can be the most infuriating of writers, able to combine the most exquisitely atmospheric writing with moments of obscurantism that one knows is deliberate and may be unnecessary.

Nevertheless, this book shows us his genius. Ostensibly the tale of a group of Dorchester folk over a year of their lives, the personalities are ‘types’ (obviously so in the male Cast of Characters).

Yet they are also real persons, certainly the women, in the detail of their reactions to each show more other and events. Theatrical and stage managed scenes compete with scenes of the most vivid realism.

The time is indeterminate but ‘contemporary’ – repeatedly a main scene of the action is referred to as having been pulled down. The political debates could only have happened within a decade or so of the writing.

The homage to Hardy is obvious. Powys likes to make things explicit, sticking his symbolic representations in front of our eyes, yet he suggests depths of meaning that may or may not be there.

The ‘hero’ of the novel is an impotent early middle aged writer with a limited emotional range (an artistic achievement in representation by Powys) who is called, in that jarring way of Powys’, Dud Noman.

This evidently symbolic name is then attached to a character that is to be described in very realistic terms. An interplay between realism and symbolism is essential to the Powys project.

The first section is made up of a detailed, almost Proustian, account of Mr. Noman’s rising, with every detail of his room superbly described, in a way that grabs our attention from the start.

This is an attention that is sustained all the way through to his meeting at the graveyard with the first of the circle to which he will become attached.

Once you understand that the novel is about sex and, particularly, the attempt by the uncomprehending male (any Noman) to understand the varieties of female response, then things start to fall into place.

The male characters appear to have interior lives that are constructed out of ideas – the Platonist, the dim-witted Fascist, the ‘New Man’ Communist.

Even the second hero of the novel ,the simultaneously fascinating and unattractive Enoch/Uryen Quirm, who turns out to be Noman’s father, is defined by the way he exists through a mythic narrative.

Uryen's narrative loses its power when it is expressed in the written word. Hmmmm!

The sexual centres are Enoch/Uryen, whose intense sexual attraction for women is a mystery to the reader, as I believe it is supposed to be, and Wizzie, the circus girl with an illegitimate child.

Noman, in a classic tribute to Hardy, purchases Wizzie to live with him in what proves to be a sexless mistress relationship.

To describe the flow of energies between the characters – four or five women and four or five men, depending on who you think important to the dynamic – is to describe a catalogue of possible relations.

I am not going to ruin the book for you by describing that dynamic here.

What Powys has done with consummate brilliance is to confuse our perceptions about the reality of what is going on in order to concentrate our attention on specific moments.

At these moments, two persons ‘connect’ – as if in response to EM Forster’s famous appeal on this matter.

If he does not always succeed, this may be because he is trying to capture the indescribable in words as he subverts the conventions of literature (as it stood in the English 1930s).

The traditional novel appeared to give verisimilitude to relations by setting them in a ‘real’ narrative.

This merely succeeded in masking the fact that such relations have been conventionalised in order to engage the reader in the narrative.

Powys, on the other hand, describes very recognisable and specific but relatively momentary points of human connection.

He adds a degree of unreality or locks an exchange between persons into a clearly manufactured context. This makes the book extremely hard to describe.

It is not a narrative with a ‘point’ or clear conclusion (the ending, you are warned is incoherent and perfunctory) but a concatenation of set-piece incidents.

These are strung together with sufficient narrative to create an air of credibility that begins to collapse only when we think about it.
Whatever the technique, with all its unlikelihoods, it works.

The mind concentrates on the incident or the anticipation of the incident (though Powys often cleverly set us up for something that does not happen) but not the consequences. The 'why' is often unclear.

The perfunctory ending is in accordance with the book’s style. What happens next is not very interesting to the author. Indeed, what actually happens is not of enormous interest.

What is interesting is how people respond to events. It is the ‘incident’ that matters, not the cause and effect, because the ‘incident ‘contains the truth of the relationship.

As a result we come to think we know the women in the novel as persons whereas the men remain weak, not merely unknowable but not subjects we wish to know more about.

Again, there is a genius in this. Powys, a man, seems to have decided that he can only try to get to an understanding of women if he presents the men as mere catalysts.

These men passively and conventionally worship a mistress, challenge a daughter, suffer a rejection and so on.

The women in this book are very different. All are personalities, rather than just obvious ‘types’, who take their time acting but either act or choose not to act in a determined way.

They are ‘formidable women’ – most men reading the book will fall a little in love with one of them at some point.

Does Powys succeed in this mission to understand women by abstracting men? I am not sure he does entirely but it is a gallant effort and it triggers the paradox underlying the book.

The male ciphers and hysterics (three of the main male characters exhibit hysterical or emotional loss of control in a way conventionally associated with women) are one thing.

The women are another. They are pragmatic and, above all, proud and self-contained.

The way the women relate to these ciphers and hysterics turns back in on itself to tell us something about male responses. This is where the genius lies.

The male reading this book, by not identifying with these male types, can relate to the internal selves of the women in each case and feel that he is ‘understanding’ them for the first time.

It is as if Powys has sought a technique for getting inside a woman’s mind based on his observation of behaviour and then opening it up to scrutiny with an implicit cry – ‘There, see, this is how they work!’

Furthermore he tells us that the workings are reasonable and can be understood as reasonable.

There is certainly nothing in the interior workings of the women that is not reasonable or presented as anything other than a mind to be respected as having its own legitimate perspective.

Even the irrational resistance to sexuality of Jenny in relation to Claudius, that appears to be countered effectively by the unexpected and passionate intervention of her father, is explained.

Past history allows this intervention and shows a mind changing with new facts and ideas where conventional arguments failed. Whether Powys has ‘got it right’ only women can answer.

Men will think he has done enough to open a door to understanding what women are really like instead of how conventional literature has presented them, to themselves as much as to men.

Yes, this is a flawed work (those occasional obscurities and the perfunctory closure) but it is a remarkable attempt at dealing with one of the great challenges of all literature.

That challenge is how to present the minds of the other sex without falling into conventionalism.

It is a novel of psychological realism set within a deliberately jarring narrative, realistic enough to make us believe that we are presented with ‘reality'.

This reality, though, is imbued with enough implicit magical or irrational elements to shake us into engaging with the material, with life, with a fresh eye.

There are many insights to be had from this book but perhaps one of the most interesting is Wizzie’s (the circus girl’s) attitude to Old Funky.

Old Funky is the unattractive and a-moral man who taught her the skills that make her feel alive but who also raped her and is not averse to blackmail.

Conventionalism would make a woman’s feelings far from ambivalent but reality can make her compare his engagement with life a cause for a very negative comparison with the sexless ‘love’ of Noman.

It is only a fleeting moment but it is true to interior life and this brings up another technique of Powys which he carries with commanding effect.

How the mind can move rapidly through emotional change and see other persons with very different eyes at different times.

The book is set on single days, dealt with in great detail, with long gaps in the narrative between those days.

This effect also jars because relationships have advanced between the days without the reader having any idea how or why a change has taken place.

We have to work back to ‘imagine' the cause of the change. The only male whose interior life is reported in detail is Noman himself whose lack of self-knowledge is startling in retrospect.

Noman is also used by Powys to show just how ‘fickle’ the male mind is in its feelings.

At more than one point, he is attracted and unattracted to several women (as men are) in succession. Wizzie’s flow of thought shows a similar flow.

This works against convention as well, so that the overall effect is to raise up the ‘personhood’ against conventional representation in what is really an artistic experiment.

I am no expert on Powys but there is a short if unenlightening Prefatory Note to the novel (in this edition) that seems to confirm that Powys was working out his feelings about ‘formidable women'.

The women in this novel are both formidable and ordinary – above all, they are not caricatures.

The triumph of Powys is to imbue an air of eroticism around these women without any obvious sexual acts, although Powys is relatively open about sexuality compared to most of his contemporaries.

As a male, I could sense Powys’ own erotic responses to these formidable women who may be types themselves but at a far more sophisticated level than the males.

The variation of erotic response is definitely not conventional and it is certainly skilfully made, as momentary for the reader as it is for the protagonists.

From this perspective, this is a novel about transitory responses and male hysteria and a powerful step forward in male literature’s ability to come to terms with strong women.

In that sense, it is a small but important step towards the modern age, one in which conventional sexual stereotyping can be replaced with a better understanding of actual sexual difference. show less

Published in 1916 when the flower of Europe's youth was entrenched in Northern France in a world war with no end in sight. Powys's reflections on the art of literature concentrating overwhelmingly on French writers must have seemed particularly poignant to those reading during the war years.

Powys selected 16 authors from the western canon whom he believed were touched by greatness. In each essay Powys concentrates on an individual writer teasing out the qualities that set him/her above their show more contemporaries, with reference to some of their works. Powys is very much aware of his role as a critic and says:

"Criticism whether of literature or art is but a dead hand laid upon a living thing, unless it is a genuine response to the object criticised of something reciprocal in us".

It is his ability to convey his passionate responses to his selected authors that make these essays so lively and interesting. Tthey will often trigger thoughts and ideas on the precious qualities of life, which he weaves into his text in such a way that he never loses sight of the author he is criticising. With the great war in the foreground of most European peoples thoughts, it must have felt for some that civilization was coming to an end. Powys says in a final essay of summation that "the burden of humanity must not be allowed to press all joy, originality, all waywardness, all imagination out of our lives" John Cowper Powys's reading of the classics was extensive and he leaves the reader in no doubt that this has informed his views, he has no time for those critics who cannot see traditional beauty and merely acclaims the latest, newest sensation: "one begins to surmise that a person of this brand is not a rebel or a revolutionary,but quite simply a thick skin endowed with the insolence of cleverness, which is the enemy of genius and its works"

Of the sixteen selected authors ten of them are French and Powys writes about them more or less chronologically. Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire Rousseau, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Maupassant, Anatole France, Verlaine and Remy de Gourmont are all examined for their contributions to the canon. Montaigne is described as a shrewd pagan spirit, who gave palpable intellectual shape to the different spirit and temper of the classics. Pascal is admired for his ability to tear himself away from peddling and compromise and to "look the emptiness of space straight between its lidless ghastly eyes." He admires the passion of Voltaire as a living indictment of the madness of politicians and the insanity of parties and sects. Balzac is undoubtedly the greatest purely creative genius who ever dealt with the art of fiction, while Victor Hugo is the essence of pure poetic imagination. Guy de Maupassant is the greatest realist that ever lived, while Verlaine understood like no one else that the art of poetry is the art of heightening words by the magic of music. Remy de Gourmont is described as a spiritual anarchist who was the shameless advocate of pleasure as the legitimate aim of the human race.

There are only six essays left to cover the rest of the western canon and William Blake, Byron, Emily Bronte, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Oscar Wiide are selected. While Powys's writing is just as insightful and passionate on this group he is more likely to diverge from his subject and to worry about their short comings. I found his essay on Conrad particularly fascinating. He is described as a philosopher and a psychologist who writes particularly well about women. Powys launches into a critique of the opposite sex, saying that they want to posses their men body and soul.

"That they are forbidden this complete reciprocity by a profound law of nature excites their savage fury and they blindly wreak their anger upon the innocent cause of their bewildered unhappiness."

This could be Powys' view of the women in Conrad's novels, however it sounds more like something that D H Lawrence might say. Perhaps their is a bit of Powys in there too.

The final essay; suspended judgements is not an attempt to tie everything together as this would be very difficult, it is more generally a plea for the individual artists of genius not to be swept away by the unruly mob, who lack the imagination to do much else. It is not overly pessimistic as I am of the opinion that Powy's believes that great art endures. I think a true test of a book of critical essays such as this, is as to what extent the reader is persuaded to explore or explore further the authors criticised. I will certainly keep Powys's thoughts in my head as I continue my reading. show less

Autobiography of the most original kind. This is spell-binding confessional writing by a unique talent. Powys leaves other autobiographies wallowing in mires of self-justification, tuft-hunting and self-promotion.
It is Powys' inner world that he insists is central to his being. In his introduction, J.B.Priestley notes that introversion does not have many adherents who write well, but in JCP's case his is a singular genius who "brings eloquent and often subtle expression to a type that has show more known very few spokesmen".
This is a book that will always remain as one I can always pick up again and marvel at. Long live dithyrambic analysis. show less

It is a very rare occurrence, but I have abandoned the attempt to read this book. I got through the first three or four chapters, skipping more and more verbiage on each page, until I couldn't stand it any longer. Ye gods! and I thought Henry James was tough going.

I should have known, really. Many years ago, a friend gave me A Glastonbury Romance solely because it was the only book he had found that was thicker than The Lord of the Rings. The prose style was so turgid, so convoluted, so show more pretentious, that I caused much hilarity among my schoolfellows by reading out a sentence or two from the first chapter. This book is no better. Powys is verbose; relenstlessly verbose; oppressively verbose. He never uses one word where six would do; he stacks ideas and piles up subordinate clauses until the reader is desperately grasping, or gasping, for the end of the sentence. He ladles in classical reference in such a way that you feel he is giving you information about his mythological sources, but you seem to end up none the wiser, and battered by the onslaught of names and attributes. After several pages of philosophizing and rumination on the part of a range of mysteriously sentient characters such as a fly, a moth, a large wooden club, and a pillar of Odyseuss's palace, the author has both exhibited and then obscured whatever deep and cosmic idea it was that motivated his writing.

I just lost patience with it. Life is really too short to spend time on such an annoying book!

MB 31-iii-2024 show less