Powys Autobiography

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30946-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 662 Seiten

'I have tried to write my life as if I were confessing to a priest, a philosopher, and a wise old woman. I have tried to write as if I were going to be executed when it was finished. I have tried to write it as if I were both God and Devil.' One is tempted to say only John Cowper Powys could have written that, and, beyond doubt, only John Cowper Powys could have written the idiosyncratic and spellbinding work we have here. Yes, he was influenced by Yeats and Rousseau, especially the latter's Confessions, but there is no other work quite like this. It seems almost too pedestrian to say it covers the first sixty years of his life (he lived for another thirty years) and to say anything about them, as J. B. Priestley memorably put it, 'would be like turning on a tap before introducing people to Niagara Falls.' J. B. Priestley also said 'It is a book which can be read, with pleasure and profit, over and over again. It is in fact one of the greatest autobiographies in the English language. Even if Powys had never written any novels, this one book alone would have proved him to be a writer of genius.'

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) was born in Derbyshire, brought up in the West Country (the Somerset/Dorset border area was to have a lasting influence on him), went to Cambridge University and then became a teacher and lecturer mainly in the USA where he lived for about thirty years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his long life. Those are the bare bones of his life. In some senses they seem unimportant when set alongside his extraordinary writing career. Not only was output prodigious, it was like nothing else in English Literature. Indeed, George Steiner has made the bold claim that his works are 'the only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared to the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky'. And even that doesn't touch on their multifarious strangeness. John Cowper Powys wrote compulsively: letters, diaries, short stories, fantasies, poetry, literary criticism, philosophy and, above all, novels poured out of him. He also wrote a remarkable autobiography. In addition to his Autobiography his masterpieces are considered to be Wolf Solent, Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Porius. But his lesser, or less well-known, works shouldn't be overlooked, they spring from the same weird, mystical, brilliant and obsessive imagination. John Cowper Powys is a challenging author with an impressive list of admirers. In addition to George Steiner, these have included Robertson Davies, Margaret Drabble, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Miller, J. B. Priestley and Angus Wilson.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Powys, John Cowper

Leseproben

Weymouth and Dorchester

IT was not only to thoughts of things that without any malicious puritanism must really be called “wicked,” that I used, when left alone in my darkened bedroom in my eighth year, to close my eyes. I had found out a wonderful trick in connection with this shutting of eyes, which at a touch, and quite an innocent one this time, transported me into Elysium. I used to press my knuckles against my closed eyelids and in that manner stare entranced into the Void. And lo and behold! The Void presently gave birth to a lovely kaleidoscope of incredible patterns and colours! It is Keats who somewhere talks of the “spangly” gloom thus evoked; but my visions of these rainbow spirits, when to-day I take off my spectacles and try to call them up, do not come as they were wont to do.

In those days, however, they were much more than “spangly.” It was like some pre-cosmic panorama, imprinted on the aboriginal retina of chaos, of all the Iris-tints, of all the butterfly stains and tints and dyes, of the “dome of coloured glass” of the unborn world. It is not only that I’ve lost the trick of conjuring up out of squeezed eyelids a colour-orgy. I have no longer any wish to do it! Isn’t it a queer thing how the main urge of a person’s inmost being changes? I lack the least desire now to behold the dance of those Euclidian Rainbows! And yet, just as I did then, I live for sensation. It is strange! I suppose I have some sort of æsthetic conscience now which censors my sensations and insists that I should only make a cult of such among them as, as have got—how shall I put it?—a poetical and elemental value.

But it certainly becomes clearer and clearer to me as I ponder over these early years of my life that there is some secret, and a secret far more valuable than the revelation of that impersonal-personal Eternal Being which came to Proust, to be found in the feelings of a young boy as to the nature of the Universe. This queer expression, “having an ecstasy,” what does it really mean? What are the ingredients that compose them, the atmosphere out of which such ecstasies arise? The following is my own analysis of these precious moments. I think they always come, just as everything living does, out of duality, (out of the energizing of opposite poles of existence, poles of substance, poles of being, poles of electricity, if you prefer that scientific word. I think these moments of ecstasy are apt to come when, as you contemplate some particular scene or object, you suddenly recall some other deep cause of satisfaction in your life, but a cause totally independent of the one you are now regarding and not in the same plane of feeling.

For instance, I am looking at a patch of moss on a greenish marbly rock and I am aware of a deep sensual pleasure. But there suddenly comes into my mind the thought of a coal fire and of the light of candles, and of a chess-board, with the men all arranged for the game, and of old leather-bound Homeric Lexicon. Now either for a game of chess or for the looking out of Greek words the mind has to be active, whereas in drinking up the deliciousness of this dark wet green surface of stone, matted with moss, the mind is in a state of concentrated passivity. And my idea is that it is the sudden impact of the thought of pleasurable activity upon a mind concentrated upon pleasurable passivity that brings that tingling up-flow of exultation which is named “ecstasy.” Had the mind in contemplating this dark rain-dripping surface and these emerald-green spores been led away to think of the earth mould of a damp flower-bed strewn with rain-wet petals, there would almost certainly have been no increase in the sensual pleasure already being enjoyed. If however the mind had summoned up a spade or a fork left sticking in the border of this flower-bed it is very possible that an ecstasy of the same sort as that called up by the image of the chess-board or by the image of the Homeric Lexicon would have resulted.

It is in fact contrast, contrast first and last, that plays the major part in what we call ecstasy; and this appears natural enough to a person who has come to hold as I have that the First Cause Itself is of a dualistic nature.

Well! I must hurry on now to the end of our Shirley life. This was brought about by a rapidly conceived and rapidly executed move to Dorset. My father seems to have felt, after his only brother’s death, that it behoved him to reside within call of that bow-windowed house in Weymouth where our aged relative lived. So he accepted—a rather unworldly move in a young priest’s life—the subordinate position of a small-town curate, after having enjoyed for seven years the sweets of an authority that was practically despotic; for there was no squire in Shirley Village. My father became then the hard-worked curate of the Rector of St. Peter’s, the chief parish church, though there were others in the place, of the old Roman town of Dorchester.

With a characteristic gesture, just as when shopping in Ashbourne he had always bought good solid and surprisingly large objects, he now took, on some sort of a lease, an enormously large dwelling in an extensive garden, quite heedless of the fact that the house was still being built and the garden still being dug. This was Rothesay House, the birthplace of three more of his eleven children. It was, I think, one of the Mayors of Casterbridge, the excellent Mr. Gregory, who let Rothesay House to my father; and Mr. Knipe, the elderly rector, used to point out to his amazed friends this brick-and-mortar castle arising so near the South Walk for the lodging of a curate. Poor Mr. Knipe! He must have felt sometimes that it was his destiny—good, easy man—to be the clerical superior to a veritable “Giant Grumble” whose disturbing pretensions were only matched by his astounding and disconcerting simplicity!

While the Mayor of Casterbridge was building us this surprising house in Dorchester, we lodged in no very grand manner in Weymouth, in a lodging to the rear of Brunswick Terrace.

It was at this time that our aged relative in Penn House gave me an infinitesimal cedarwood cabinet of tiny black and gilt drawers and with a paradisic smell. This little object contained only five drawers and was really of dolls’ house proportions, but it became a fetish of mine and it makes me feel a little sad now to think how completely it has disappeared. There ought to be a “Fairy Sprightly” whose chief purpose in life is to guard from neglect and destruction the inanimate things into which human souls have been flung! There were pieces of my soul—and some of these pieces sold to the Devil too!—in every drawer of this little black and gold object. I kept in it a picture of the second little girl I ever seriously thought about. I am compelled in strict veracity to say “the second”; but the first only manifested herself like a figure in an artificial Pastoral-Picture while I sat with Littleton near my grandfather’s fish-pond at Northwold. We were like a couple of childish Machiavels then, talking about fish-hooks and fish-kettles and artificial flies, but touching lightly too upon the love of women.

Littleton in this, as in all else, far more efficient than I was, had already made a little girl-friend; and it was my rôle in these talks by the fish-pond to try to think up another one that would do for me! I can well remember—for it was not till some twenty years later that I linked any idea of women with my sadistic vice—the vague, vague, vague sense of something remotely desirable about long silky hair and a soft form. Nor was this “second” lady-love of mine much more than a proud little statue, upon whom to hang these vague, vague, vague sentiments which in those days were totally unconnected with “the brutish sting” of my vice. Once and once only when this “second” young girl was sitting on my knee, did I experience in connection with her anything approaching to a sensual feeling; and by this time I was an undergraduate at Cambridge.

But it was always a characteristic of mine—for I was not only a born actor, as they say, but what might be named an impassioned “metamorphosist”—to bring to bear upon these vague, vague, vague attractions an overwhelming and most literally creative imagination. Fetish worshipper as I was, magician as I conceived myself to be, indurated romanticist as I have proved first and last, it was my delight to pretend to be “in love” and then to buttress up this pretence with a concentrated mythological will-power that was really terrific and abnormal.

I suppose, if the truth were confessed, I got ten times more pleasure from sealing up this young woman’s countenance—I can see it now as it looked in that little picture—in about twenty paper wrappings, all carefully fastened with sealing-wax, than I ever got from converse with its original! No girl’s face has ever been wrapped up—whether living or dead—in so many cerements, and only on very ritualistic occasions did I so much as open this sacred drawer and contemplate the outside wrapping!

In another drawer of this cabinet I preserved certain scriptures of my own, very ambiguous, although extremely decent writings, dealing with various never-to-be-indulged caresses; caresses whose object was no woman, caresses that were far beyond the power of achievement by such a...