Faber & Faber

Related to: The Early Novels of John Cowper Powys

Powys’s last novels remind me of Goethe’s comment to Eckermann: 

If the entelechy is of a powerful sort, as is the case with all whose nature is akin to genius, then, in its vital penetration of the body, it will not only strengthen and ennoble the corporeal structure, but also, through its spiritual dominance, continually seek to assert its right to an eternal youth. That is why we may see in highly gifted individuals ever renewed periods of unusual productivity, even into old age ...

It is 1950 and John Cowper Powys is 78. After a long struggle with physical illness, poverty and mental terrors, his magnificent novel, Porius, has been finished and finally accepted by a publisher. He was very grateful to Eric Harvey, the director of Macdonald, who published not only Porius, but all the rest of the books he wrote until his death. Harvey’s generosity took them out of the slough of total poverty, but at the same time his permissiveness allowed Powys to write without any editorial restraint whatsoever.

The critic, Glen Cavaliero, calls the novels of his last years 'the spontaneous fairytales of a Rabelaisian surrealist re-enchanted with his life'. Powys made the occasional joking remark while writing Porius about entering his second childhood, but somehow, by concentrating his whole mind on the novel, by living it, he held himself, his erudition, and his memory intact. With the three novels that followed, The Inmates (1952); Atlantis (1954); The Brazen Head (1956), that control was thrown joyously to the winds.

The Inmates

The plot of The Inmates is simple. John Hush, a young man with a minor sexual fetish for cutting off strange girls’ curls, begs his guardian to have him committed to an insane asylum. There he meets and falls in love with Tenna, who has murdered her father. By the end of the novel, all the inmates are rescued by John's guardian who whisks them off in a helicopter. However, the simplicity reveals more clearly than ever before the diastole-systole rhythm of Powys’s mind.

The mad world of the unconscious has enclosed Hush finally in the serpentine folds of the river and the high wall that surrounds the asylum. But although he has begged for this protection from an outside world of reality, as soon as he is in, he wants to get out. He escapes, but he does not go back to 'the outside world that’s liable to hurt us'. He and Tenna join a circus and live happily ever after in the anonymity of its tents.

By setting the novel in an institution for the insane, Powys could allow his obsessions, his fiercely repressed sadism, his desire for freedom and his desire for containment, all simply to come out - in the guise of madness. And he transformed the energy called up by the raging fantasies into a prose illuminated by electrifying imagery. The sadistic guard, Gewlie, is disintegrated by the mental/magical powers of Esty, a Lama from Tibet. Another guard, the good Cuddle, shoots the psychiatrist in the head because he is a 'maimer of dogs'.

A long section of The Inmates circles around John Hush’s maniacal obsession with Nancy Yew’s possessive love for her half-wit son - 'it makes anyone murderous'. 

He couldn’t expel from his consciousness that possessive, in-drawing, in-sucking, maternal eye of the mother of Seth ... that eye wherein this much-praised 'love' could be observed, in the serpentine coils of its devouring insatiability, swallowing its offspring’s freedom to live a life of its own and exciting itself to swallow the more voluptuously as its own pity for the helpless thing’s struggles draws forth more maternal saliva to smooth the path of its re-enwombing.

Hush makes sure that the idiot boy flees with the rest of the inmates in the bizarre helicopter escape. Seth’s mother tries to follow, but 'the unlucky woman fell backwards from the deck of the plane, struck a twisted, sharp-edged six-foot iron stanchion fixed among the reeds ... The hurt to the cattle-woman’s spine would alone have been fatal, even if her skull had not also been hit'.

In the preface to the novel, Powys affirmed that 'the genius of great artists has always been in their unearthly and startling imaginations allied to madness'. Powys had no idea of what actually happens in a lunatic asylum, but he was intimate with the mad images of the mind, and many will argue that he was a great artist.

Atlantis

When Powys was still living in America, he began the custom of reading daily a few pages of the Odyssey in Greek. He used the Loeb edition, sneaking an occasional peek at the English on the opposite page. It soon became more than an exercise; in 1932 he noted in his diary that he used 'Homer as my Breviary'. A quarter of a century later, when he was considering writing a 'Romance of Homeric Times' no failing memory was needed. The story was lodged in his very blood and bones. By the end of August, 1952 he had written his 'First Chapter of Odysseus', 'but a visit from his publisher in September changed the focus. Eric Harvey suggested that he should follow the idea in Tennyson’s poem with 'Odysseus setting off again and sailing West'.

The novel is only nominally about the Tennysonian Ulysses’s last journey. It is mainly concerned with a revolution. The Olympian Establishment that represents the Power of Order is threatened with an insurrection of the old gods - the giant, animal, woman (for 'the older times were matriarchal') gods. The cosmos is exploding back into chaos, back into a time and space of undifferentiated wholeness.

Powys’s secret title for this book was 'Pandemonium' and it is an anarchical world he creates with great verve and humour where all creatures - gods, goddesses, monsters, humans, insects and inanimate objects - have personality. Not only the large cast of human characters, but also a stone pillar, a wooden club, an olive-shoot, a moth and a fly, are allowed their say.

There are some wonderful scenes, the visit to the drowned city, the attack of the furies upon Atropos, the ride across Ithaca on the winged horse, but underlying it all is a more serious message for our own tumultuous times. In his old age Powys was writing novels that articulated a message he had proclaimed as far back as his Autobiography, published in 1934. In it he declared: 'I feel that it is essential that someone should lift up his voice in these days, when the head of Science is as swollen with arrogance as the head of Nero, and timidly and faintly, but still obstinately, suggest that the magical view of life has as much right to "rise again" as the Lord Himself'. By the magical view of life, Powys meant not simply a reaction against science and the machine, but an attempt to re-establish a lost relationship with nature, a reversion to the awareness of a primitive bond between all living things.

The Brazen Head

The Brazen Head, an altogether darker work, is ostensibly a history of the thirteenth-century Roger Bacon and his invention of the metallic head which is able to speak oracles. But in essence it is a conflict between two powerful men whose different inventions and differing life views are held to account.

Although he has been confined by the ecclesiastical authorities for his impious researches, Roger Bacon is a sound Trinitarian and believes in a 'rational soul'. Peter Peregrinus, on the other hand, is an alchemist who has discovered a lodestone from which he can draw immense power. Peregrinus sees himself as a sexual Antichrist, 'destined by the creative power of Nature herself to destroy' the 'crazy belief' in the Trinity.

Having written an alchemical opus in Porius, Powys now explores further the implications of the alchemical theory of magnetism. Nature, matter, houses a self-creative energy - energeia akinesis - and Peregrinus’ magnet has in it all the immense power of this prima materia. Roger Bacon, the embryo scientist, also believes in 'the presence of an almighty force behind the whole panorama of experience'. But he is afraid of the 'remote and ultimate power', because he suspects that this power reduces his life and the lives of all entities to 'the level of lonely, desperate, lost souls, clinging to each other in a boundless, godless, cavernous nothingness'.

For perhaps the first time, Powys is examining the motivation behind the scientific view of life and, although not approving, accepting and understanding the desire to defend oneself from that non-human night which mocks man’s heroism and man’s desire to create. This intuition is, as always, shaped most hauntingly in the form of a symbol. A company of men going through the darkness of the thirteenth-century Dorset forest suddenly hear 'a wild husky voice singing a ditty' which clearly was 'a howl of defiance to everything they had all been accustomed from infancy to venerate. ... It seemed to be appealing desperately to earth, air, and water, not to allow the sun-rays that were so life-giving to all, to fool them by their warmth'.

Where leaf do fall - there let leaf rest -
Where no Grail be there be no quest -
Be'ee good, be'ee bad, be'ee damned, be'ee blest -
Be'ee North, be'ee South, be'ee East, be'ee West
The whole of existence is naught but a jest -

The response of the company to this ditty of negation is not only the arrogant response that the scientist might make, but the necessary response of the human being: 'Every single one of them pretended that he had heard nothing'.

Despite their grotesqueries, the last novels are strangely compelling. They are what Yeats has called the 'last poems' of a soul who now speaks 'what’s blown into the mind'. Some readers will find them nonsensical, others will find them full of sense. All have a dark beauty akin to genius.

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