Coming in with John Cowper Powys
this is all about performance and performing and finding the right room to read
I am just putting my toes into this substack world.
I’m here at the suggestion of a fellow musician/performer.
The text below was what I collected or collated when I was asked to do something at a Melbourne writers festival. I was wanting to be a reader or an orator. It was in the pre covid year of 2018.
I did three events at the festival which was curated that year by Marieke Hardy who took it as a challenge to open it all up to people not necessarily from the world of publishing and literature. She copped some grief but she did a great job and thought a lot about the venues and the accessibility of the whole enterprise. So, Kudos to her.
For my part, I like arts things to lean toward seriousness and high minded thoughts. My heart sinks when I see any touches of circus or burlesque type activity (excepting - of course-if I should by chance happen be at a circus or in a strip club).
I also think writers should be as awkward and quiet as they like to be and shouldn't be expected to be entertainers or click in easily with panel type quipping situations.
That’s my bag. Keep it sober. Keep it weird. Let the writers be writers.
This text was mostly collated from either wikipedia or from readers/customers reviews at a couple of online book sites. It was meant to be a guide for my “talk”.
(I have been thinking of doing some events where I stray totally outside of my musical zone and read and talk. I want to call these events Dave Graney Speaking. If I did one I would be doing so in the knowledge that I would be following in John Cowper Powys’s footsteps as he worked as a lecturer, reading from The Classics for a couple of decades).
The first two events at the Writers Festival in 2018 were to do with "words and music", writers and musicians. I had my book WORKSHY out and thats why I was there. To front up for the work. One of the events was at the Mission To Seafarers and another at ACMI. They were both enjoyable and nobody died. One was billed, strangely, as a "singalong". That was never going to happen, though I sang a song called HEROIC BLUES when asked to do something in that area. (I’m no good in these sorts of panel things. I went on the very early episodes of the tv shows Rokwiz and Spicks and Specks and was never invited back. I was and still am not really much of a team player and didn’t laugh at any jokes. Sorry, showbiz!)
There was another event which had me as a songwriter talking to some scientists about “love”. Something to do with the song Why Do Fools Fall In Love and also chemistry. It had more to it but I was not the guy to be talking about “love songs” as that’s never been my strength or line of song. Then I realized I was supposed to host the event which meant exhibiting some sort of commitment to the idea so I asked for someone else to do that. I saw my best role as just to be a voice lurking off to the side. Shirking. Bludging. Showing up. I’m a character type player. Actually, I almost died that day. In showbiz death terms.
The third event I did was at Mission To Seafarers and it was my response to being asked to "read or perform something from a writer I liked". I suggested I read from the works of John Cowper Powys as I had always loved his books. They are very intoxicating.
This was billed as "Dave Graneys Poetry Jam". I went along with it. It was easy to introduce myself and say that I was going to read some prose from an author I loved. Not poetry. I got to the venue quite early as I was in town to do another event and it didn’t make sense to travel in and out of town. I spent a few hours in the green room, reading my Powys books in a corner as a group of twenty somethings battled for rights to speak and argued and flirted at a table on the other side of the room. Various genders and ethnicity from various states. Gender was a big theme in their discussions, dominated by a bearded young person in hippie Robinson Crusoe pants, topknot and beard who told everybody repeatedly about their identification and struggles as a trans writer in Brisbane. There was also a moment between a young woman from Brooklyn establishing some transient status with a young Canadian woman who was volunteering at the venue. Territorial and professional drama. You know I love that sort of stuff.
Then comedian Will Anderson came in and got ready for his talk with retired footballer Robert Murphy. I sat in the room downstairs and listened to them. Eventually it was my turn to read.
I like to start these sorts of things just talking in the moment rather than reading anything. I asked the people present not to laugh or snigger at anything they might think "weird" or "perverse" as thats a lot of what Powys is about. He celebrated all his kinks.
These are the notes I read from ....
“Powys's work is full of paradoxes and surprises. He was extremely prolific, yet a late starter; his manner was heroic, yet bathetic. He was a writer of tragic grandeur and of everyday comedy, of sexual perversion, and of bread and butter and cups of tea. (More bread and butter is consumed and more tea drunk in the novels of John Cowper Powys than in the whole of the rest of English literature.) He wrote poems, and essays, and gargantuan epic fictions, and manuals of self-help, and innumerable letters. Words poured from him, and he was famous for never rereading any of them. It is left to us, the readers, to lose ourselves in his creation, and to try to emerge from it and to make some sense of it. It is no wonder that mainstream literary critics have avoided him, and that a handful of scholars and addicts have clustered round his oeuvre. He is so far outside the canon that he defies the concept of a canon.” Margaret Drabble
“His six major novels - Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), Maiden Castle (1936), Owen Glendower (1940) and Porius (1951) - are formidably long, and not always in print
The most accessible of his important publications is probably his Autobiography (1934)
Born in 1872 in Derbyshire, where his father was then vicar at Shirley, near Dovedale.
From Cambridge he embarked on a curious freelance career as an itinerant lecturer on English literature, supported in part by a small allowance from his father. Under the auspices of the Dickensian agency of Gabbitas-Thring, he began speaking in girls' schools and colleges in the south of England, much taken with the slender beauty of the flurry of "sylphs" he encountered, but soon, thanks to the Oxford Extension Society, he was covering the length and breadth of the country. He was entertained in private houses, where he learned much about class and society: "There was one weekly or fortnightly round ... that caused me to leave Newcastle on Tyne before six in the morning when I used to see the sun rise over the bleak Northumberland hills, lecture in Lewes, after I had seen the sun set over the South Downs, and get to my home in West Sussex that same night."
Deeply unhappy and restless, he went to the United States in 1905 and, apart from the occasional visit to England, stayed there until 1934, working as a travelling lecturer.
The vanished world of the American lecture circuit, in which Powys was Ancient Mariner and Don Quixote, Moses with his tables and the old man of the sea, made strenuous demands on those who panned its gold for their livelihood. “Once on this accursed tour my stomach was so upset that I dreamt of nothing else but going to look for places where I could shit in peace.”
His godson was to say of him, memorably, that he was "more plant than animal; more mineral than either. He was dust and rock and feather and fin talking with a man's tongue" (Seven Friends, Louis (Marlow) Wilkinson, 1992).
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.
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.
Reality, in his own phrase, lies "between the urinal and the stars".
After My Fashion, written in 1919, was based in part on his unlikely friendship with the American dancer Isadora Duncan: This did not find a publisher until Picador brought it out in 1980. Once it was rejected, he did not bother to pursue its fate, but let it go
Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages, a work that beggars description. He thought it his best. 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. There is comedy, Miltonic sublimity, chaos and confusion in equal measure.
Powys has been described as "one of the great puzzles of 20th century literature." His critics dismiss him as a crackpot mystagogue. His admirers, and they are many, find it more difficult to describe what captures their imagination. It is a fascinating aspect of his genius that he attracts readers with widely diverse interests, and they treasure his novels for different reasons - for his comic scenes, for his erotic fantasies, for his entrancing images, for his penetrating psychological perception, for his philosophy of life.
Powys avoided literary company; he would no sooner have taken part in a writer's conference than in a gathering of morticians. A triumphant solitary, he also avoided nonliterary company.
Yet he did belong to at least one literary group -- his family. Of his ten siblings, six ended up writing books.
"The deepest emotion I have is my malice against the well-constituted as compared with the ill-constituted," he declared in his Autobiography, adding, "Dwarfs, morons, idiots, imbeciles, hunchbacks, degenerates, perverts, paranoiacs, neurasthenics, every type of individual upon whom the world looked down, I loved ... admired ... and imitated."
He was forty-three when he published a collaborative memoir with his brother Llewelyn titled Confessions of Two Brothers (1916).
At age fifty-eight he began to earn his living, or what passed for a living, as a writer.
A diet of raw eggs, milk, olive oil, and bread crusts did little to assuage it. His bowels were so out of whack that he had to have an enema every third day.
Powys didn't bang his head so much as tap it against the mailbox, a ritual he believed would ensure the safe delivery of a letter. He would also utter lengthy incantations while bathing, and walk exactly the same route every day, bowing to exactly the same trees and stones. One of these stones he named "the god of Phudd." Another he named Perdita. Perdita, he wrote, was "the only daughter I shall ever have"; he once felt obliged to kiss his geologic offspring nine times because his dog had peed on it (her?).
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.
Powys's literary output in old age was so voluminous that upon learning he had died in his ninety-first year, in 1963, one is almost inclined to say "Yes, but did he stop writing?"
Quotes from the books of John Cowper Powys.
“I tell you, any lie as long as a multitude of souls believes it and presses that belief to the cracking point, creates new life, while the slavery of what is called truth drags us down to death and to the dead! Lies, magic, illusion – these are names we give to the ripples on the water of our experience when the Spirit of Life blows upon it.”
“though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical, and wicked spirits! in books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind. it is for this reason that a a bookshop -- especially a second-hand bookshop / antiquarian - is an arsenal of explosives, an armory of revolutions, an opium den of reaction.
and just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have always been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority. in a second-hand bookshop are the horns of the altar where all the outlawed thoughts of humanity can take refuge! here, like desperate bandits, hide all the reckless progeny of our wild, dark, self-lacerating hearts. a bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.
of all the 'houses of ill fame' which a tyrant, a bureaucrat, a propagandist, a moralist, a champion of law and order, an advocate of keeping people ignorant for their own good, hurries past with averted eyes or threatens with this minions, a bookshop is the most flagrant.
~ autobiography”
― John Cowper Powys
“It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in his faded overcoat. Objects of this kind played a queer part in his secret life-illusion. His stick was like a plough-handle, a ship's runner, a gun, a spade, a sword, a spear. His threadbare overcoat was like a medieval jerkin, like a monk's habit, like a classic toga! It gave him a primeval delight merely to move one foot in front of the other, merely to prod the ground with his stick, merely to feel the flapping of his coat about his knees, when this mood predominated. It always associated itself with his consciousness of the historic continuity---so incredibly charged with marvels of dreamy fancy---of human beings moving to and fro across the earth. It associated itself, too, with his deep, obstinate quarrel with modern inventions, with modern machinery....”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent
“The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark passage; a hit in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat. Everything that has been forbidden, by discretion, by caution, by self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.
All that one has felt, but has not dared to think; all that one has thought, but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us.
There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot, will not, say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not want said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace? What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such revelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We require embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, even down there, where it has to be driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker's beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by the Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what will serve their purpose! This applies as much to the Realists, with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the Idealists, with their traditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above all, to the interpreters of Sex, who, in their conventional grossness, as well as in their conventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand!”
― John Cowper Powys, Visions and Revisions; A Book of Literary Devotions
“...we have a right to narrow down our universe ever further and further; until like the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey it is made up of certain simple endurances, enjoyments, mental and physical struggles, surrounded by the washing of the sea, the blowing of the wind, the swaying of the wheat, the falling of the rain, the voyaging of the clouds, and the motions of the sun and moon and dawn and twilight.”
― John Cowper Powys
Wolf, speaking to his father's skull in the ground beneath him, argues "There is no reality but what the mind fashions out of itself. There is nothing but a mirror opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round crystal, and a sky in water opposite water in a sky"
The response is:
“‘Ho! Ho! You worm of my folly,’ laughed the hollow skull. ‘I am alive still, though I am dead; and you are dead, though you’re alive. For life is beyond your mirrors and your waters. It’s at the bottom of your pond; it’s in the body of your sun; it’s in the dust of your star spaces; it’s in the eyes of weasels and the noses of rats and the pricks of nettles and the tongues of vipers and the spawn of frogs and the slime of snails. Life is in me still, you worm of my folly, and girls’ flesh is sweet for ever; and honey is sticky and tears are salt, and yellow-hammers’ eggs have mischievous crooked scrawls!"
And later
"My 'I am I' is no hard, small crystal inside me, but a cloudy, a vapour, a mist, a smoke hovering round my skull, hovering around my spine, my arms, my legs. That's what I am, a vegetable animal wrapped in a mental cloud, and with the will-power to project this cloud into the consciousness of others."
As I finished a troupe of burlesque dancers filed into the room and started to high kick and whoop and holler and generally shove their besequined bodies about the room (with their partners waiting nearby with their normal clothes in a carrybag). I thought it was strangely apt as John Cowper Powys is often referring to his “vice” in his books. This was to do with his predilection for visiting burlesque or girly shows, where he would be STUNG once again!
Just to add that I have loved every JCP book I have ever entered into. PORIUS is set in the Dark Ages and the hero is journeying across Britain which is being fought for by the Celts, the Saxons and remnants of the Roman empire. Merlin is involved and like all his books , it is like a spell is cast upon the reader. All I remember from this dark, 900 page tome is the wandering Porius constantly remembering to pick up his flask of water. No matter what the cicumstances.
A Glastonbury Romance is like being lost in a grand symphony. It slowly swells and reaches a terrific crescendo and leaves you haunted by it for months. Nothing else can match it. His last book, Three Fantasies was written when he was 93 and is unbelievably strange.