John Cowper Powys ( 8 October 1872 - 17 June 1963 ) - A Complex Wonderful Vision

John Cowper Powys novelist, poet and philosopher was born on 8 October 1872 at Shirley Vicarage in Derbyshire, the eldest of eleven children born to the Rev. Charles Francis Powys (1843–1923) and Mary Cowper Powys (1849–1914). A brief biography of John Cowper Powys can hardly be ‘brief’.

His father's ancestry can be traced back some six centuries to Powyses of Montgomery, and to, more recently, the first Sir Thomas Powys of Lilford (died 1719). From his mother, Mary Cowper-Johnson, he derived the more literary blood of the poets John Donne and William Cowper. He came from a family of eleven children, many of whom were also talented. His two younger brothers Llewelyn Powys (1884–1939) and Theodore Francis Powys were well-known writers, while his sister Philippa published a novel and some poetry. Another sister Marian Powys was an authority on lace and lace-making and published a book on this subject. His brother A. R. Powys, was Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and published a number of books on architectural subjects. 

Like his father and brothers, he was educated at the ancient and prestigious Sherborne School in Dorset, where he succeeded in keeping bullies at bay by aggressively playing the fool, a skill he honed by practicing on his younger brothers. After Sherborne, still in the family footsteps, he went to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University. There he associated with few, bar one or two fellow misfits; he kept a revolver in his rooms as a deterrent to excessive socializing. 

After graduating with a second-class degree in History, on 6 April 1896 he married Margaret Lyon. They had a son, Littleton Alfred, in 1902. The marriage was though unsatisfactory and Powys eventually lived a large part of each year in the USA and had relationships with various women. In 1921 he met Phyllis Playter the twenty-six year old daughter of industrialist and business man Franklin Playter. Eventually they established a permanent relationship, though he was unable to divorce his wife Margaret, who was a Catholic. However, he diligently supported Margaret and the education of their son.  Margaret Powys died in 1947, and his son Littleton Alfred in 1954.

Powys's first employment was teaching at several girls' schools at Hove, Sussex.  He then worked as an Extension lecturer throughout England, for both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Then in 1905 he began lecturing in the USA for The American Society for the Extension of University Teaching. He worked as an itinerant lecturer until the early 1930s, gaining a reputation as a charismatic speaker. However, he usually spent the Summer in England. During this time he travelled the length and breadth of the USA, as well as into Canada. He engaged in public debate with the philosopher Bertrand Russell on marriage, as well as with the philosopher and historian Will Durant; he was also a witness in the obscenity trial of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses..

He met a great variety of people: Charlie Chaplin, Emma Goldman, Paul Robeson, the dancer Isadora Duncan, Theodore Dreiser who became a close friend. But also humble folk: the black porters on the trains, the farmer next door or the poor immigrants who came to his lectures to improve their education.

His first published works were  Odes and other Poems (1896) and Poems (1899).In the summer of 1905 Powys composed "The Death of God" an epic poem modelled on the blank verse of Milton, Keats, and Tennyson that was published as Lucifer in 1956. There was then a gap in publications due to his lecturing commitments, but from 1916 onwards his essays, criticism and philosophical works appeared at regular intervals.No prodigy, Powys had published his first novel, Wood and Stone,dedicated to Thomas Hardy, at 43 in 1915, and four more had followed. All sank into the swamp of critical indifference. A collection of literary essays Visions and Revisions in 1915 and his first full length work of popular philosophy, A Complex Vision, in 1920.

 As an author, Powys was inspired by many other authors including George Eliot, Dostoyevsky and Rabelais.He first came to wide public prominence for four books published between 1929 and 1936, collectively called The Wessex Novels after their geographic setting in England’s South West. The name also alludes to Thomas Hardy, a major influence on Powys.

It was with Wolf Solent,the first of his Wessex novels, written when he was 57 and still making a part-time living from his mobile lecture show the first of his Wessex novels  that Powys achieved any real critical, and financial success. This novel was reprinted several times in both the USA and Britain and translated into German in 1930 and French in 1931. In the Preface he wrote for the 1961 Macdonald edition of the novel Powys states: "Wolf Solent is a book of Nostalgia, written in a foreign country with the pen of a traveller and the ink-blood of his home". Wolf Solent is set in Ramsgard, based on Sherborne, Dorset, where Powys attended school  as well as Blacksod, modelled on Yeovil, Somerset, and Dorchester and Weymouth, both in Dorset, all places full of memories for him. In the same year The Meaning of Culture was published and it, too, was frequently reprinted. In Defence of Sensuality, published at the end of the following year, was yet another best seller. First published in 1933, A Philosophy of Solitude was another best seller for Powys in the USA.

A Glastonbury Romance, one of Powys’s most admired novels, published in 1932, also sold well. According to Powys this novel's "heroine is the Grail", and its central concern is with the various myths, legends and history associated with Glastonbury. Not only is A Glastonbury Romance concerned with the legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Grail, a vessel containing the blood of Christ, to the town, but the further tradition that King Arthur was buried there. In addition, one of the novel's main characters, the Welshman Owen Evans, introduces the idea that the Grail has a Welsh (Celtic), pagan, pre-Christian origin. The main sources for Powys's ideas on mythology and the Grail legend are Sir John Rhys's Studies in the Arthurian Legend, R. S. Loomis's Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, and the works of Jessie L. Weston, including From Ritual to Romance. T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland is another possible influence. A central aspect of A Glastonbury Romance is the attempt by John Geard, ex-minister now the mayor of Glastonbury, to restore Glastonbury to its medieval glory as a place of religious pilgrimage. On the other hand, the Glastonbury industrialist Philip Crow, along with John and Mary Crow and Tom Barter, who are, like him, from Norfolk, view the myths and legends of the town with contempt. Philip's vision is of a future with more mines and more factories. John Crow, however, as he is penniless, takes on the task of organising a pageant for Geard. At the same time an alliance of Anarchists, Marxists, and Jacobins try to turn Glastonbury into a commune.

Another important work, Autobiography, was published in 1934, in which he describes his first 60 years. While he sets out to be totally frank about himself, and especially his sexual peculiarities and perversions, he largely excludes any substantial discussion of the women in his life. The reason for this is now much clearer because we now know that it was written while he was still married to Margaret, though he was living in a permanent relationship with Phyllis Playter.

Powys openly admits, again and again, in his autobiography, in letters and, by implication, in his fiction, that he found the notion and practice of normal penetrative sexual intercourse deeply repugnant, and could not understand how his brother Llewellyn could go in for that kind of thing. ("I have a horror of 'fucking' as it is called" was one of his many comments on this matter.) He insists that he is not a "homosexualist", though he has no objection to those who are. He liked girls of the demi-monde, and prostitutes, and slim young women in men's clothing.

His notions of sexual satisfaction centred around masturbation, voyeurism and fondling. He liked girls to sit on his knee, and he also got sexual satisfaction from reciting poetry at them. The comic aspect of this was apparent to him, and it bothered him not at all. There is a grandeur in his indifference to the norm. His appetite for food was as unusual as his appetite for sex: he became, nominally, a vegetarian, but eschewed most vegetables, surviving for years, he claimed, on a diet of eggs, bread and milk, with occasional treats of guava jelly. This gave him severe gastric trouble, and he had to endure a painful form of surgery that he labels "gasterenterostomy". In his later years, he depended for bowel function entirely on enemas, a procedure of which he highly approved, as it facilitated meditation.

We would not have known about all of this if he had not told us about it, but he recites his woes with such relish that his prose becomes charged with rapture. During a sojourn in hospital he says that he invented the trick of concentrating on variously coloured angels - "purple ones let us say ... vermeil-tinctured ones perhaps" - which he would direct towards his fellow sufferers, and "in this way, as I lay in the great White Ship of Suffering, I felt that I was not altogether wasting my time". Convalescing in his garden at home, he at last found relief in vomiting a "whole bucketful - forgive me, dear reader! - of the foulest excremental stuff possible to be conceived ... of a dusky sepia tint, a colour I had not so far hit upon for any of my tutelary angels". Reality, in his own phrase, lies "between the urinal and the stars".

It is one of his most important works and writer J. B. Priestley suggests that, even if Powys had not written a single novel, "this one book alone would have proved him to be a writer of genius." By his own admission, John Cowper Powys was mentally abnormal. His eccentricity showed itself most clearly in his relationship with the natural world: for him everything in nature pulsated with life,not only plants and animals but rivers, rocks, clouds. He found ecstasy in landscapes and a sublime significance in the smallest twig. And he believed that his sensitivity to the life force of inanimate objects gave him access to a larger cosmic meaning, one that connected humans with their environment and filled the universe with rapturous energy. In short, Powys was not your average man. There are not many geniuses in the literary canon, but one can argue fairly that Powys is among them.

The memoirs of Casanova and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were his models, and Powys rivals them in his sometimes hilarious descriptions of his own follies. These outbursts of frankness are intended to distract from his evasions, his inconsistency, and emotional intensity. But as we read further, and encounter prostitutes, fishermen, priests, ticket collectors, publishers, poets, and all the hoi polloi from a thousand railway journeys and lecture halls and bars and ocean voyages, we begin to appreciate the underlying generosity and life-democracy (to coin a Powysian term) of this book and its author. We are never manipulated toward a social or political message. Powys sees relationships as meetings of solitudes; he has no interest in social hierarchies, politics, worldliness, or ambition. He never moralizes about sex. And he has no time for religions and creeds that lack aesthetic qualities; to him, religion is art, or it is nothing.

In 1929 Powys and Phyllis  had moved from Greenwich Village in New York City to rural, upstate New York. Then in June 1934 John Cowper Powys and Phyllis Playter left America and moved to England, living first in Dorchester, 

Weymouth Sands ( 1934 ) the third of his so-called Wessex novels was a celebration of the seaside town Jack had loved as a child, but its tone is far from innocent. The novel features a sinister clown figure and Punch and Judy shows: Powys was not one to shy away from the suggestions of violence and child sex abuse that are now routinely associated with such entertainments.

He moved to Corwen, Denbighshire North Wales, in July 1935, with the help of the novelist James Hanley, who lived nearby. Corwen was historically part of Edeirnion or Edeyrnion and an ancient commote of medieval Wales, once a part of the Kingdom of Powys, Here Powys immersed himself in Welsh literature, mythology and culture, including learning to read Welsh. Here he could also satisfy his lifelong mystical delight in landscape and country walking.

The move inspired two major novels with Welsh settings, Owen Glendower [1941] and Porius (1951). They are considered to be his greatest masterpieces. It is not surprising that John Cowper Powys should, after he moved to Corwen, decide to begin a novel about legendary national hero, Welsh Prince Owen Glendower (A.D.1400–16),who, like King Arthur, will one day come again.  because it was in Corwen that Owen's rebellion against Henry IV began on 16 September 1400, when he formally assumed the ancestral title of Prince of Powys at his manor house of Glyndyfrdwy, then in the parish of Corwen.

An important aspect of Owen Glendower are historical parallels between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the late 1930s and early 1940s: "A sense of contemporataneousness is ever present in Owen Glendower. We are in a world of change like our own". The novel was conceived at a time when the Spanish Civil War was a major topic of public debate and completed on 24 December 1939, a few months after World War II had begun. 

While Porius takes place in the same  time of the mythic King Arthur,  set in October in 499 AD, it is more like a mountain landscape or an epic poem than a novel. Its characters include King Arthur, a Pelagian monk, a Roman matron, a Jewish doctor, the shape-shifting Myrddin Wyllt (otherwise known as Merlin), the bard Taliessin and a family of completely convincing aboriginal giants, who live on the slopes of Snowdon. We also meet the Three Aunties, grey-haired princess survivors of the old race. In this twilight of the gods, the cult of Mithras, the old faith of the Druids, the fading power of Rome and the rising force of Christianity do battle for a week beneath a waxing moon, while Powys's characters intermittently find time to reflect on past times, and congratulate themselves on being so modern.

In both works, but especially Porius, Powys makes use of the mythology found in the Welsh classic The Mabinogion. Porius is, for some, the crowning achievement of Powys's maturity, but others are repelled by its obscurity. It was originally severely cut for publication, but in recent years two attempts have been made to recreate Powys's original intent.

Cowper Powys is a somewhat controversial writer who evokes both massive contempt and near idolatry. His work is marked by depth of ideas, and for their massive sized and much complexity of character but with much humor. In addition to their scope Powys’ books can be difficult because of their many obscure references to Welsh culture and mythology. Other sources of difficulty for the contemporary reader are Powys’ obsession with the occult and an animist world view which, among other things, endowed inanimate objects like the sun in A Glastonbury Romance with souls and points of view.The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, 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. 

The appeal of Powys eludes some readers, while others are deeply moved. Reading a novel by John Cowper Powys requires stamina, but is well worth it because they offer great rewards. And though his challenging works have never been fashionable,  they have won a loyal following nevertheless, and what is noteworthy is that throughout his career he consistently gained the admiration of novelists as diverse as Theodore Dreiser, Henry Miller, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and James Purdy, as well as the academic critics George Painter, G. Wilson Knight, George Steiner, Harald Fawkner, and Jerome McGann.. 

Powys was also one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary letter writers: his correspondence bears comparison with that of Charles Olson in its immediacy and intellectual scope. A collection of his letters to his lifelong friend and biographer Louis Wilkinson (himself best known for his close connection with Aleister Crowley) was published during his lifetime: further volumes have been issued posthumously.

More minor in scale, the novels that followed Porius are characterized by an element of fantasy. The Inmates (1952) is set in a madhouse and explores Powys's interest in mental illness. But it is a work on which Powys failed to bestow sufficient "time and care". Glen Cavaliero, in John Cowper Powys: Novelist, describes the novels written after Porius as "the spontaneous fairy tales of Rabelaisian surrealist enchanted with life", and finds Atlantis (1954) "the richest and most sustained" of them. Atlantis is set in the Homeric world and the protagonist is Nisos the young son of Odysseus who plans to voyage west from Ithaca over the drowned Atlantis. Powys final fiction, such as Up and Out (1957) and All or Nothing (1960) "use the mode of science fiction, although science has no part in them".

He and Phyllis  later moved, a final time, in May 1955, to Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales. He corresponded with many distinguished Welshmen of letters;and his non-fictional writings about Wales and the Welsh were collected in Obstinate Cymric (1947).

A convert to anarchism, he strongly supported the anarchist side in the Spanish Revolution and corresponded with Emma  Goldman whom he referred to as his “chief Political Philosopher”

Here is a  letter to his sister (24 September 1938), published in The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Philippa Powys (1996), edited by Anthony Head :„I have been reading of late, most carefully, oh such an exciting mass of Anarchist Literature sent to me by old Emma Goldman who is my Prime Minister & chief Political Philosopher! and every week I get the anarchist paper from Avenue A New York City and also the ‘Bulletin of Information’ from the Anarchists of Barcelona. This latter pamphlet I am carefully keeping; because it is not so much concerned with the war as with their experiment in Catalonia of organizing their life on Anarchist lines and getting rid of all Dictatorship & of the ‘Sovereign State’.“

Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1784075-john-cowper-powys-i-have-been-reading-of-late-most-carefully-oh-su/

Source: https://quotepark.com/authors/john-cowper-powys/

Letter to his sister (24 September 1938), published in The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Philippa Powys (1996), edited by Anthony Head p. 106

Source: https://quotepark.com/authors/john-cowper-powys/

 Powys wrote of having forged his own worldview in reaction to capitalist society: “I would convert my malicious hatred of the commercial hurly-burly into a passionate eulogy of the saints and mystics of the past”.

He professed to having a mania “for every sort of metaphysical system”,  wrote of “the organic link that binds together the human generations”and thirsted for a current of thinking “that, in its historic continuity, links the religion of the cave-man with the religion of the philosopher”.

Powys often expressed his disdain for what he termed “the various mechanical inventions of our western world”.

He wrote: “There is no escape from machinery and modern inventions; no escape from city-vulgarity and money-power, no escape from the dictatorship of the uncultured”

 “Money and machines between them dominate the civilized world. Between them, the power of money and the power of the machine have distracted the minds of our western nations from those eternal aspects of life and nature the contemplation of which engenders all noble and subtle thoughts”. His critique of modernity went further than a dislike for the physical mechanisms of its society and embraced its cultural essence.

In common with the likes of Ruskin,William Morris,Herbert Read and Henry Miller, Powys felt a profound aesthetic loathing for the base culture of contemporary commercial society and the “crudest superficiality” which prevailed there.

 Powys was at heart a primitivist, for whom virtually every modern invention was anathema. In Wolf Solent he referred to airplanes as "spying down upon every retreat like ubiquitous vultures." He never drove a car and never used a typewriter. He thought television was pernicious. He didn't like talking on the telephone, because he didn't want his words violated by a tangle of wires.He was suspicious of science, which man has the means to use wrongly. He fought all his life against the practice of vivisection, “a wickedness” which, as he said, “contradicts and cancels the one single advantage that our race has got from what is called evolution, namely the development of our sense of right and wrong” (Powys, Autobiography, 639).

A passionate and clear-sighted ecologist, long before our times, he was deeply conscious that there is a necessary link, a mysterious and compelling harmony to respect between a blade of grass, the humblest insect, man and the cosmos, which entails that we respect life under all its forms. 

"A really lonely spirit can gradually come to feel itself just as much a plant, a tree, a sea-gull, a whale, a badger, a woodchuck, a goblin, an elf, a rhinoceros, a demigod, a moss-covered rock, a planetary demiurge, as a man or a woman. Such a spirit can gaze at the great sun, as he shines through the morning mist, and feel itself to be one magnetic Power contemplating another magnetic Power. Such a spirit can stand on the edge of the vast sea and feel within itself a turbulence and a calm that belong to an æon of time far earlier than the first appearance of man upon earth. It is only out of the depths of an absolute loneliness that a man can strip away all the problematical ideals of his race and all the idols of his human ambitions, and look dispassionately about him, saying to himself, “Here am I, an ichthyosaurus-ego, with atavistic reminiscences that go back to the vegetable-world and the rock-world, and with prophetic premonitions in me that go forward to the super-men of the future!” (Powys, In Defence of Sensuality, 100) 

For Powys the greatest achievement possible is to feel an “unearthly exultation”, an ecstatic state, provoked by a deep and willed mental concentration. In these moments of ecstasy our vision becomes the “eternal vision”. He had one rule in his life and never tired of repeating it in his books: “Enjoy, defy, forget!”

Powys, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, 1959 and 1962.In 1958, he was awarded the plaque of the Hamburg Free Academy of Arts  in recognition of his outstanding services to literature and philosophy.Then on 23 July 1962, Powys, who was 90, was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in absentia, by the University of Wales at Swansea, where he was described as "patriarch of the literature of these islands"

Throughout his life, Powys never willingly compromised: he saw several of his novels published with huge chunks of text removed and their overall impact accordingly reduced, but the manuscripts as he wrote them never offered anything less than the all-encompassing world he envisioned. This insistence on his own style contributed to the incomprehension that frequently met his work, but it also produced unparalleled literary achievements. 

The world as seen by Powys is his own. It was painfully won out of his battles with his own complex, protean personality, and its varied layers of manias, fears, frustrations, strange obsessions, his challenge to fate and to the Deity he named “the First Cause”. Powys is not a ‘literary’ author, he is not concerned with formal perfection. He was a writer by inner necessity and therefore never attached much importance to his style, which can sometimes be extravagant, he never considered himself an ‘artist’. Throughout his novels, the oblique effects of the action count more than the action itself. Great importance is given to mental states, to thoughts going on inside the minds of the characters, more than to their actions. He is intent on recording everything related to each of them, their sensations, their habits, their obsessions, even some irrelevant thought, such as we all sometimes have. The reader is never sure how the characters are going to evolve. Powys had a rare openness of mind and showed far more advanced ideas than D.H. Lawrence, to take a famous example, in matters of sexuality. He describes its shades and complexities, its ambiguities. Except for sadism which Powys hates and condemns, he included homosexuality, onanism, fetishism and incest in his novels. He wrote that “no religion that doesn’t deal with sex-longing in some kind of way is much use to us” 

 As he became older, he got into the habit of praying to many different gods, to the Earth-Spirit, to the spirits inhabiting woods, trees, rocks. Describing his rituals in Autobiography, he writes that he had “a mania for endowing every form of the Inanimate with life, and then worshipping it as some kind of a little god” (Powys, Autobiography 629). He held special worship for trees and recommends, when we feel weary, to embrace one with our arms around it, for then: “you can transfer by a touch to its earth-bound trunk all your most neurotic troubles! These troubles of yours the tree accepts, and absorbs them into its own magnetic life; so that henceforth they lose their devilish power of tormenting you” (Powys, Autobiography 650) 

In 1955 John and Phyllis moved to a tiny house in the slate-quarrying town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, high in the mountains of Snowdonia. John was living mainly on raw eggs and two bottles of milk a day. He worked on what he called a Freudian paraphrase of the Iliad and various short works that Richard Perceval Graves, the Powys brothers’ biographer, called bizarre fantasies. He grew gradually weaker, stopped writing and died quietly in the local hospital, aged 90. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered according to his wishes in the sea at Chesil Beach in Dorset. 

Though sadly neglected,and with  few of his books currently in print. he remains nevertheless one of the giants of twentieth century British Literature. long has his rich imagination stirred me, and  left a deep impression.There is a spell that weaves its magic in the pages of Powys’s words and contained within his novels, that continues to be cast to this day. Revealing a mystical sense of history and a complex but wonderful vision that combined a philosophy of defiance of the pressures of the modern world that was in tune with mother nature. that is more important than ever. 

Numerous books, by, or about Powys, can be read online at "John Cowper Powys" Internet Archive  and his memory is kept live by the Powys Society https://powys-society.org/ To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, in the following programme Matthew Sweet discusses his life and writing with Margaret Drabble, John Gray, Iain Sinclair and Kevan Mainwaring.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d286tm

Wood and Stones -  John Cowper Powys

THE silent trees above my head

The silent pathway at my feet
Shame me when here I dare to tread
Accompanied by thoughts unmeet.

"Alas!" they seem to say " have we
In speechless patience travailed long
Only at last to bring forth thee,
A creature void of speech or song ?

"Only in thee can Nature know
Herself, find utterance and a tongue
To tell her rapture and her woe,
And yet of her thou hast not sung.

Thy mind with trivial notions rife
Beholds the pomp of night and day,
The winds and clouds and seas at strife,
Uncaring, and hath naught to say."

O Man, with destiny so great,
With years so few to make it good,
Such fooling in the eyes of fate
May well give speech to stones and wood!