the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives - John Cowper Powys's trees - wuther-qoutle-glug

Wolf Solent has pressed his beautiful young wife against an ash tree, presumably as a prelude to sex, but he begins rubbing the bark:

‘Human brains! Human knots of confusion!’ he thought.  ‘Why can’t we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?’ (Wolf Solent, “’This Is Reality,’” 356)

I have learned that it is just when writers, many writers, write the strangest things that they really mean it.  John Cowper Powys has, like any good novelist, has a strong sense of irony, but he also has a fantastic, visionary mode that pushes past it.  As with his trees.

To step back for a moment.  The first page of A Glastonbury Romance introduces three characters.  They are:

The First Cause, which passes “a wave, a motion, a vibration” into the soul of

A “particular human being,” John Crow (name on the next page), a “microscopic biped” who is leaving the third-class carriage of a train, returning to his home town just like the protagonist of Wolf Solent.  He is not especially affected by

The sun, which is experiencing “enormous fire-thoughts.”

On the next page, another character is added, “the soul of the earth.”

John Crow turns out to be not the protagonist of A Glastonbury Romance but one of many, which is how Powys gets to 1,100 pages.  But the other characters or sentient metaphors or whatever they are recur occasionally.  Powys is, among other things, a fantasy writer, even aside from his use of the King Arthur and Holy Grail stories.  His landscape, his cosmos, is full of sentience, of which he occasionally gives me a glimpse.  For example, the old trees that are in love with each other:

As a matter of fact, although neither of these human lovers were aware of this, between the Scotch fir and that ancient holly there had existed for a hundred years a strange attraction.  Night by night, since the days when the author of Faust lay dying in Weimar and those two embryo trees had been in danger of being eaten by grubs, they had loved each other…  But across the leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their subhuman voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women. (AGR, “Conspiracy,” 786, ellipses mine)

My single favorite passage in Glastonbury is also about the language of trees:

The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds.  What to these lovers [lovers again!], for instance, would the singular syllables “wuther-quotle-glug” have signified?  (“The River,” 89)

John Crow, one of the lovers, has just uttered a phrase – “It is extraordinary that we should ever have met!” – that “struck the attention of the solitary ash tree… with what in trees corresponds to human irony” because this is the fifth time in a hundred and thirty years that the tree has heard the exact same phrase.  Powys gives me the details – an “old horse,” a “mad clergyman,” an “old maiden lady” to her long-dead lover.  “An eccentric fisherman had uttered them addressing an exceptionally large chub which he had caught and killed.”

All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish: wuther-quotle-glug.

That chub, or its descendant, appears again about 700 pages later as a prophetic talking fish.  I believe the last talking fish to appear on Wuthering Expectations was the trout in John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981).  The talking chub is in the most Crowleyish chapter, “’Nature Seems Dead,’” about the night the of the powerful west wind, “one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury.”  Crowley has put a magical, history-changing west wind into a number of his books.

I thought about writing about a marvelous antique shop Powys describes early in A Glastonbury Romance, but I will instead finish with one line of the description, a description of his own novels.

But it was a treasure-trove for the type of imagination that loves to brood, a little sardonically and unfastidiously perhaps, upon the wayward whims and caprices of the human spirit.  (“King Arthur’s Sword,” 345)

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.

Books Read in June 2024 - "Why can't we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?"

Three weeks in Portugal meant less and different reading.

FICTION

Wolf Solent (1929), John Cowper Powys – among the most eccentric novels I have ever read, up there with his contemporaries D. H. Lawrence and Ronald Firbank!  I feel I should write about it; I feel I should read The Glastonbury Romance (1932) first!  See where he is going with this.  The exclamation points in puzzling places are one of Powys’s eccentricities.  The quotation in the title can be found on p. 356 of the 1961 edition.

Winter’s Tales (1942), Isak Dinesen – for all seasons.

Loving (1945), Henry Green – just perfect.

Brat Farrar (1949), Josephine Tey

Grendel (1971), John Gardner

High Stakes (1975), Dick Francis

I had both the Tey and Francis in Portugal with me as my light reading which was a minor mistake.  I knew that the Francis novel was obviously (see left) a horsey book, obviously, but I did not know that Brat Farrar was also a horsey book (see below – I guess I did not look too carefully at the cover), and two in a row pushed a bit past my threshold of interest.  But there I was.  

I enjoyed that neither book was in a hurry to turn into a mystery or thriller.  It was not until at least halfway through Brat Farrar when I saw that the book would indeed qualify as a mystery.  A third of the way into the Francis it was unclear if it had any story at all (it does).  None of this is meant as a complaint, since I enjoyed both books’ voice and characters and even horses and am frankly often happiest when the genre formulas are set aside for a while.

POETRY

A Treatise on Poetry (1957), Czeslaw Milosz – a survey of Polish poetry in poetry form.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Portuguese was mostly menus and worksheets.  French was neglected.

Douze petits écrits (1926), Francis Ponge – like a preface to Ponge’s next book, the 1942 masterpiece Le parti pris des choses.

Trente-trois sonnets composés au secret (1944), Jean Cassou – composed in his head, a half-sonnet per day, in a Vichy prison where he was being held for Resistance activities.  Kept in his head, too, since he had no means to write anything down until his release.  Beyond criticism, really, although I found a non-sonnet, a translation of a Hugo von Hoffmansthal poem, especially beautiful.  All published in 1944 under the name Jean Noir.  Poetry as heroism.