PART TWO: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

 

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JOHN COWPER POWYS

 

Of all twentieth-century authors, John Cowper Powys was surely the most prolific.  From a traditional fictional standpoint he was also probably the most gifted, though doubtfully the most profound.  He was like an inexhaustible well of creativity from whom book after compendious book flowed with a spiritual generosity more reminiscent of the Middle Ages than of our own, somewhat more academic and scientific time.  He was no miser where literary production was concerned, and neither could he be described as lazy, he who must have got through more words than any other three major authors combined!  Indeed, so quickly and fluently must he have written, that one might well describe his technique as spontaneous, and define him as a bourgeois/proletarian author after the mixed-class fashion of, say, D.H. Lawrence. 

     But if spontaneity is a hallmark of much proletarian writing, the subject-matter of Powys' novels and philosophical works must mark him out as a bourgeois author, and not one of the most enlightened bourgeois authors either!  For although he was never a Christian, in the strictly devotional sense of that word, he was a long way from being a transcendentalist - indeed, such a long way as to be essentially neo-pagan and somewhat Rousseauesque in character.

     Yes, there was a rather old-fashioned and even reactionary streak about Powys, which led him to identify with Rousseau and nature-worshippers generally.  He espoused the doctrine of 'Elementalism', or controlled nature-worship, in pursuance of a dual, positive/negative attitude towards the hypothetical First Cause of all Creation, which others might equate with God the Father or Jehovah, depending on their religious persuasion.  This First Cause, which Powys wisely preferred not to anthropomorphize, was allegedly the fount from which all pain and pleasure, sadness and happiness flowed, and should be regarded, in his estimation, with an appropriately dualistic attitude of defiance alternating with gratitude, as the occasion warranted.  Such was the base of Powys' religious faith, and he remained its faithful adherent to the last.  Thus he remained orientated towards the galactic-world-order in deference to the diabolic creative and sustaining force behind all life, which more perceptive intellectuals would equate with solar or stellar energy without, however, deigning to anthropomorphize it, like a Christian.

     Whether Powys found his twenty-year stint in America, mostly in New York and other large cities, particularly distressing or not, I have never discovered.  But his return to Britain, following the termination of his career as a free-lance lecturer, led to a preference for rural over urban life and took him to North Wales, where he wrote many of the novels and philosophical works for which he is now better known.  It was not so much that he became a nature-worshipper in old age (for he had been a devotee of nature-in-the-raw from childhood), as that his attitude towards nature - which was generally spelt with a capital 'N' with him - hardened and became set in the 'Elementalist' mould which was to influence the remaining years of his life, causing him to reaffirm and strengthen his religious position.  Isolated from modern civilization in his Welsh retreat, Powys emphasized the importance, as he saw it, of closeness to nature in the interests of mental health, his writings becoming ever more neo-pagan in their insistence on natural living.  Of all twentieth-century authors, he was arguably the most religiously anachronistic, not just the most prolific.  For 'Elementalism' is fundamentally nothing more than pantheism and animism freed, through Protestant optimism, from demonic associations and turned into a Rousseauesque cult of the natural, a kind of earth hedonism with its own sexless brand of Puritanism, depending on the degree of sincerity or seriousness the devotee brings to his relationship with rural phenomena.  Wordsworth would not have felt particularly out of his depth in the pages of a typical Powys tome, such as The Art of Happiness or In Defence of Sensuality, both of which testify to a heathen joy in natural living.

     As a philosopher Powys was never more than popular, given by natural inclination to practical philosophy, with its hints to the common man as to the wisest conduct of life in the natural environment.  His work thus ranks fairly humbly in the hierarchy of philosophical writings.  For applied philosophy inevitably falls short of the academic brand, its emphasis being utilitarian rather than intellectual, something to live by rather than to think by.  Had Powys been a better man his work would doubtless stand higher in the hierarchy of philosophical writings.  But his closeness to nature ensured that he remained one of the Devil's most fervent disciples - a thoroughly heathen type of spiritual bourgeois!

     Of all his works, the ones I've been least able to abide are the novels, partly because of their inordinate length in a majority of cases, but partly, too, because of the way in which they are written and the level of thought they generally contain.  I have already referred to the obvious fluency of technique, which in itself need not arouse any critical hostility, as a quasi-proletarian dimension in Powys' novels.  But their inordinate length, which must be tied-up with a spontaneous approach, is quite the reverse of a proletarian dimension, being, if anything, closer to medieval aristocratic materialism.  Only a bourgeois of extreme reactionary cast would write novels in excess of seven-hundred pages.  For the bulk that results from such a length guarantees a degree of voluminous materialism, in the published book, far in excess of anything commensurate with proletarian criteria of spiritual progress.  Only a bourgeois of Powys' mentality could have equated spiritual greatness with extreme length of a novel.  For, in reality, evolutionary progress demands that as the spirit expands, so the material aspect of writing contracts, resulting in shorter books of superior spiritual insight.  Powys' novels lacked both slenderness and superior spiritual insight, and are therefore of a relatively inferior quality from any strictly transcendental standpoint.

     Given that the level of thought in the average Powys novel, like A Glastonbury Romance, is pretty low, fit only for humanistic or pre-humanistic (pseudo-pagan) mentalities, the style in which they are written can be no less distressing, especially when involving the overly parochial or colloquial idioms of a Penny Pitches or a Tossie Stickles or even a Mr Weatherwax!  Here Powys reveals himself to be worse than culturally reactionary; simply realistically old-fashioned in one of the most embarrassingly sentimental, patronizingly ninnyish sort of provincial ways.  The photograph of him on the cover of The Art of Happiness with a pair of carpet slippers on his feet, a long-eared, soppy-looking pet dog on his lap, and a scruffy old jacket thrown over his shoulders ... just about typifies the provincial mentality of the author of such illustrious fictions as Penny and Tossie!

     I do not want, however, to end this first biographical sketch on a wholly negative note; for if Powys' novels have never made an agreeable impression on me, I have at least retained some respect for The Meaning of Culture, which - not excepting the biographical and polemical brilliance of Suspended Judgements - is arguably his most accomplished philosophical work.  Not that I can agree with everything or indeed much of what is said in it.  But the style in which it was written still impresses me after so many years, and I occasionally dip into it to savour English prose at or near its very best.  He wrote this book in the United States during the late 1920s, and wrote it, moreover, for an educated and cultured public, who could be depended upon to have read all or most of the authors whose works are therein discussed.  The 'back-to-nature' attitude is of course fairly conspicuous, even at that comparatively early date.  But there are other ingredients, mostly of a literary, aesthetic, and philosophical order, which show that Powys wasn't entirely the neo-pagan barbarian he so often appears to be.  Perhaps New York had a salutary influence on his inner life which North Wales didn't?