Wolf Solent and A Glastonbury Romance - Both the two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured First Cause

Last summer I read John Cowper Powys’s novel Wolf Solent (1929) and recently I read A Glastonbury Romance (1932), not his first novels but the first that anyone noticed.  Wolf Solent is a plump 600 pages, and Glastonbury a monstrous 1,100.  Powys was 56 when the first was published, and 59 for the second, a mature writer, a seasoned weirdo.

These novels are genuine eccentrics, in ideas and style, as odd as D. H. Lawrence or Ronald Firbank.  Powys, like Lawrence, is a direct descendant of Thomas Hardy, at least that is clear, not just writing about the same part of England but employing a Hardy-like narrator (although Powys’s narrator works with his characters rather than against them) and using explicitly fantastic devices.  In Glastonbury he pushes the fantasy quite far.  I’ll save that idea for tomorrow.

Writing about these books has been a puzzle.  I am tempted to just type out weird sentences.  Maybe I will do that after a tint plot summary.  Wolf Solent – that, surprisingly, is the name of the main character – “returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy.”  I am quoting the anonymous author of the novel’s Wikipedia entry.  That is, in fact, the plot of the novel, although it does not seem like it so much while actually reading, thank goodness.  A Glastonbury Romance earns its 1,100 pages by expanding to a large cast and many stories.  A mystic uses an inheritance to jumpstart the tourist industry of historic Glastonbury.  Many things happen to many people, murders and visions of Excalibur and the Holy Grail, all kinds of things.  Lots of sex, in Wolf Solent, too.  Powys is as earthy as Lawrence, if not as explicit, or not as explicit as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), but also abstract:

Both the two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured First Cause possess the energy of sex.  (AGR, “Tin,” 665)

This is nominally the thought of an industrialist leaving a cave where he plans to establish a tin mine.  Or it is the philosophical narrator floating along with him.  Hard to tell.

And the ecstatic quiver of that great cosmic ripple we call Sex runs through the whole universe and functions in every organism independent of external objects of desire!  (666)

That exclamation point is a Powys signature.

‘Walking if my cure,’ he thought, ‘As long as I can walk I can get my soul into shape!  It must have been an instinct of self-preservation that has always driven me to walk!’  (WS, “Ripeness Is All,” 601)

The characters use the exclamation point; the narrators love them.  Sometimes I can sense the need for emphasis, and other times I am puzzled.

Powys’s characters are great walkers, that is true.  These two novels are fine examples of the domestic picaresque.  Powys can organize close to the entire plot just by having characters walk around, dropping in on each other’s homes, varying the pattern with “party” chapters like “The Horse-Fair” (WS) and “The Pageant” (AGR) where Wolf Solent can just wander around the fair, bumping into and advancing the story of every single character in the novel in whatever arbitrary order Powys likes.  A brilliant device; use it for your novel.

Powys has the true novelist’s sense, or let’s say one of the kinds of true senses, in that he always knows where his characters are in relation to each other, in town, in a room.  If a character walks this way he will pass these houses in this order, and is likely to meet these characters.  He can over do it, as at the pageant – “At the opposite end of the sixth row from where Mrs. Legge and Blackie were seated were Old Jones and Abel Twig” (AGR, “The Pageant,” 560) – but he actually uses this kind of detail when the show begins.  He has it all in his head.  Or he made a diagram, I don’t know.

Those are some aspects of these particular Powys novels.  They are original enough that I can see how readers can develop a taste for, or be repelled by, their strong flavor.

Tomorrow I will write about Powys’s trees.