Faber & Faber

Related to: The Late Novels of John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys was a well-known and highly esteemed novelist in the 1930s. Since then, although he has been honoured by such famous writers as Iris Murdoch, Henry Miller, Bernard Cornwell, George Steiner, he has never regained the popularity he once had. This is strange because despite the challenges posed by his intricate novels, he is a writer whose passions - not least his intense love for the earth - strongly resonate today. His heroes are remarkably modern, if highly idiosyncratic, living in an intense inner world of their imagination. His fictional universe is as fantastical as that of his near-contemporary, Tolkien. On the other hand, his characters and situations can be as domestic and as wryly humorous as anything in Jane Austen. Perhaps it is this amalgam of the comic, the magical and the psychological that is the challenge.

Who was this larger-than-life writer? He was born in 1872 and lived until 1963. The eldest of eleven children born to the Reverend Charles Francis Powys and to Mary Cowper Powys, John Cowper was brought up within the ordered tradition of a Victorian English, upper-middle-class society. He went to Sherborne and to Corpus Christi and after Cambridge he began teaching, married, and had one son. Then, in 1904, he abruptly left custom and family in England to begin a rootless existence as freelance lecturer and writer in America.

He was a charismatic, unconventional lecturer, attracting immense crowds; he once remarked gleefully that he was a one-man circus. The circus master was his erratic agent Arnold Shaw who, in October 1914 suddenly announced that he had decided to become a publisher. Lacking any authors, Powys stepped into the breech, speedily producing a war pamphlet which sold well. A successful book of essays followed which encouraged them both to try something more adventurous.

In November, 1915 Wood and Stone was published. Shaw was an inspired publicist, taking out large newspaper advertisements, putting a catchy blurb on the dust cover and the novel sold 8000 copies almost immediately. Rodmoor, Powys’s second novel, was written equally quickly and Shaw (who would have made a great online publisher) had it printed and on the streets a month after it was finished. Rodmoor too had an astonishing success and John wrote exultantly, 'we’ve sold  extraordinary numbers of the book - as many as ever old Hardy sold of Tess'.

Certain characters, themes, landscapes and preoccupations developed in these early novels which would recur in increasingly complex patterns in the later romances. One of his strengths from the beginning was to use people and places he knew intimately to give authentic detail to sometimes unlikely plots. In Wood and Stone, the action takes place in an undisguised Montacute, the village in which he grew up. Powys also used family and friends as his main characters. The Powys siblings were extremely close, and remained so all their lives - 'almost incestuous', was how John Cowper described the intricate relationships. Not surprisingly, his brothers and sisters invariably appear in his novels: there is Llewelyn as the fair-haired, fair-minded 'life-enamoured youth'; Theodore as the introverted pariah-figure; an unbalanced sister whom Powys feared had inherited the family 'taint'. His mother, whose death in 1914 may well have triggered this frantic novel-writing, is portrayed in Rodmoor as a depressed, haunted woman who is a combination of masochism and 'unusual and almost terrifying power'. There is almost always too a boyish girl modelled after his first love, Frances Gregg, as well as a wifely figure, a mistress, and an androgynous figure who represents his son. And of course there is always a hero, or non-hero, obviously Powys himself, who is portrayed as a nervously incompetent, hyper-sensitive middle-aged man.

In Ducdame, Powys rehearses once again his relationship with his brothers and with his mother, the unfinished business of his marriage, the role of the mistress, the themes of nature as woman, death as liberator. Rook Ashover ‘this master of manias and inhibitions’ lives with his widowed mother and his mistress, Netta Page, in the ancestral home in Dorset. His life-loving younger brother Lexie, dying of tuberculosis, lives nearby. Rook’s mother has invited his cousin, Lady Ann Wentworth Gore, to stay with them. Eventually Rook marries Ann and Netta disappears. The story ends with the drowning of Rook and the birth of his son.

Powys would not be the inspired writer he became had he simply continued to write stories about friends and relatives or as a form of self-therapy. He quickly learned to weave his personal experiences seamlessly into his philosophical preoccupations, and to use his study of mythology to give a reverberative significance to the writing. In Ducdame, the metaphysical battle between creative and destructive forces Powys grounds in the larger psychological conflict of wills between man and woman. Rook Ashover is struggling against the will of his mother, who is determined that the ancient family line will continue. The hero has resisted by living with a mistress who is barren and he feels 'a blind repulsion' at the idea of being married to Lady Ann: as if this 'female creature'  were 'some sinister living growth, fungus-like and  carnivorous, that devoured his flesh and drank his blood'. From the beginning, Powys used nature imagery to reflect and reinforce the motivation and thoughts of his characters: 

It was perhaps because of the millions and millions of dead leaves that were dissolving back into the flesh of their great drowsy mother that, with this air from the woods and meadows, there came a perceptible savour of the very sweat of death itself.

Between Rodmoor and Ducdame he wrote a novel which, for a number of reasons, was not published until long after his death, although it was written in 1920. After My Fashion was in all respects totally different from anything he wrote before or would write again. In the summer of 1919 he lived briefly with his best friend’s wife, Frances Gregg, a woman he continued to love all his life. It was a disastrous interlude, so immediately and overwhelmingly painful that, arguably for the first time, Powys confronted himself without the defences of philosophical or mythological constructs. 

After living for 20 years in France, the hero, Richard Storm has left to escape his love affair with a dancer, Elise Angel. Richard has a fair reputation as a critic, but he wants to be a poet. He thinks that if he 'digs himself' into English soil he will be able to write a new kind of poetry of the earth. Richard travels to Sussex and there he meets Nelly Moreton. Despite the fact that she is betrothed to Robert Canyot, an artist and a war hero, Nelly and Richard marry. Richard is conscious that he married Nelly 'as a living symbol of what he was aiming at in his work', but gradually Nelly 'becomes more of an obsession to him in a physical sense and very much less of an inspiration to him in a spiritual sense'. He gets himself in a philosophical and logical pickle when he starts on the idea that his 'erotic obsession' saps 'the life-blood of his soul'.
 
A few months after his marriage, Richard receives a letter from his lover, Elise, who has accepted an engagement at a New York theatre. At the same time Canyot has been invited to have several large exhibitions in New York. He begs Storm to bring Nelly to NY because 'without seeing her I can’t do my work' - a cri du coeur that fits in nicely with Richard’s desire to see Elise again. They moved into a flat in Greenwich Village, and Powys’s descriptions of life in the Village are marvellous, culled directly from his own existence in New York. Canyot looks after Nelly in a brotherly fashion and introduces her to the bohemian crowd. Richard is serene about this, giving his defeated rival 'every facility to make the best of the rind, so to speak, while he enjoyed the fruit'. However, soon after they arrive in New York, Nelly discovers she is pregnant and Richard is appalled because 'he wanted his name to be perpetuated not by children but by poetry. Poetry was the attempt of the spirit of mankind to rise above nature and extricate itself'.
 
Richard resumes his affair with Elise and can’t understand why Nelly is upset by this: 'He reasoned with himself that this fierce claim of hers for absolute loyalty was a wild demand of insane possessiveness that no human soul had a right to make upon another'. Nelly finds his attitude as incomprehensible as he finds hers: 'Sometimes I doubt whether you’ve ever grown up'.

He gets no comfort from Elise either when they go off for a few days to Atlantic City. Elise tells him, 'You were always afraid of committing yourself ... You’re scared of losing something of your precious personality ... That’s just what you always do. You use masks and screens and blinds for everything'. She continues, 'Haven’t you even got the courage to face the fact that you are utterly and profoundly selfish?' Powys often insisted that he was 'auto-sadist', getting emotional satisfaction out of inviting humiliation as well as out of flaying himself. Storm is a beautifully drawn portrait of a man who has learned the meaning of sado-masochism; its effect on self and on others: 'Externally he kept his temper to avoid looking a fool; internally he revenged himself out of all proportion to the affront. And he never really forgave'.
 
Elise then goes on to give him a few home truths about his poetry. 'Your poetry is a kind of self-indulgence. It is the expression of a good deal in you that is merely personal. It is too self-satisfied, too unruffled. It’s as if you had never really wrestled with life!' This stirs him to the 'very depths of his self-love', but he soon comforts himself by thinking, 'She is only a woman. Her art is instinctive, not intellectual'. Elise counters by telling him that his poetry is 'a fraud, a fake, a piece of rank charlatanism'.

There are many wonderful scenes like this, which must have been lifted almost directly from the many turbulent discussions John and Frances had. Powys, like Storm, considered he was above all a poet, but during the time with Frances in California he finally had to face the fact that if he was going to be anything more than a third-rate rhymester, he would have to find another medium. The reasons for the failure of his relationship with Frances is also worked through in this novel with honesty and a certain self-mockery, which is what makes it so much better than anything he has ever done. 'Was he actually wanting in some normal human attribute; and did everything that occurred to him approach his consciousness through some vaporous veil like a thick sea mist? Where was his place in the world then, he who was neither a normal human being nor a creative genius?'

Powys sent After My Fashion to Dodd Mead, but did not try another publisher when they rejected it. Possibly the novel represented a moment of self-revelation and he found it rather too difficult to confront. In any case, three months after he had finished it, he met Phyllis Playter. Thereafter, his women characters, as complex and beautifully drawn as they were, never flayed the Powys-hero as Elise/Frances had done. Nor did he ever write another story set in America, although he lived there for a further fourteen years. In his future novels, Powys turned once again to the landscapes of childhood. Nonetheless, some years later, when the novelist Dorothy Richardson asked him again why he had not written more about New York, he sketched that part of the city he knew in such a way that one regrets the unwritten novel. He described 'the peculiar Sunday morning silence with a vast hole in space', the milk-cart horses, the buoys in the harbour, the sirens of the great liners, the 'cracked one-bell jangling that you hear tell the Angelus sometimes with a faint little sound that you can almost watch making its hurried thin way between the tall buildings like a nervous little old dwarf-nun'. Then in a throw-away remark in which lies one of the keys to the peculiar power of the novels he was to write in the next ten years, he went on: 'No one knows the nuances of America better than I do - none as well! But do you think I’ll write about it? Sideways I always must - for I must see England like a daydream, a brown study, an onanistic (forgive me) ecstasy'.

Morine Krissdottir's book - Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys - is available now, published by Duckworth.