What do you think?
Rate this book
Wessex #2
A Glastonbury Romance
First published in 1932, here is John Cowper Powys's masterwork, an epic novel of terrific cumulative force and lyrical intensity. In it he interweaves the ancient with the modern as he probes the mystical and spiritual ethos of the small English village of Glastonbury and the effect upon its inhabitants of a mystical tradition from the most remote past of human history - the legend of the Grail - to create a book of astonishing scope and beauty. Panoramic in design, charged with scenes of great vividness and informed by Powys's own towering genius, A Glastonbury Romance is still astounding readers.
1120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1932
About the author
John Cowper Powys
181 books153 followersPowys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar. His mother was descended from the poet William Cowper, hence his middle name. His two younger brothers, Llewelyn Powys and Theodore Francis Powys, also became well-known writers. Other brothers and sisters also became prominent in the arts.
John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.
He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.
Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.
John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.
He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.
Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 72 reviews
February 2, 2021
John Cowper Powys was one of those outstanding modernists who have boldly outstepped the bounds of literary traditions.
In A Glastonbury Romance John Cowper Powys manages to create a rich gallery of personages that are as colourful as those by Charles Dickens…
And there is an obvious influence of D.H. Lawrence but the sexual behaviour of the characters and their psyche are more grotesque…
And the certain parallels may be drawn between the characters of the novel and some heroes of the Arthurian cycle…
And the author’s attitude to religion resembles that of James George Frazer presented in his famous opus The Golden Bough…
But as a raconteur John Cowper Powys stays on his own ground, he skilfully fuses black comedy, mysticism and tragedy into the unique alloy boasting all the properties of precious metals…
Everyone in this world holds one’s own Holy Grail and to every person Holy Grail suggests and reveals one’s own exceptional meaning.
People going to be executed, people going to deathbeds, people going to bury their dead – their shadows look the same. Shadows have no hearts. Shadows are like men who have decided to follow Christ and to leave their loves and their loves’ children!
In A Glastonbury Romance John Cowper Powys manages to create a rich gallery of personages that are as colourful as those by Charles Dickens…
And there is an obvious influence of D.H. Lawrence but the sexual behaviour of the characters and their psyche are more grotesque…
And the certain parallels may be drawn between the characters of the novel and some heroes of the Arthurian cycle…
And the author’s attitude to religion resembles that of James George Frazer presented in his famous opus The Golden Bough…
There was a feeling among them all as they went off as if they had stretched out their arms to grasp a Golden Bough and had been rewarded for their pains with a handful of dust.
But as a raconteur John Cowper Powys stays on his own ground, he skilfully fuses black comedy, mysticism and tragedy into the unique alloy boasting all the properties of precious metals…
“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.”
Everyone in this world holds one’s own Holy Grail and to every person Holy Grail suggests and reveals one’s own exceptional meaning.
August 2, 2023
I finished this magnificent, more-than-half crazy 1120 pages long novel! It was one of my most amazing reading experiences. Do I recommend it? Hmmmm… no! Unless you want to be enraptured, aggravated, exhausted, thrilled, toyed with, baffled and thunderstruck, that is.
What’s it like? Just an ordinary year in the life of 35 or so inhabitants of a sleepy rural town in which a cultural war is being waged between a guy who can raise the dead & who wishes to start a new religion (the only true religion) and three other guys who establish Communist rule over the town, and another guy in the third corner who is the big bad capitalist who is confident he will outlast these idiots.
WHY GLASTONBURY?
One character says
There are only about half a dozen reservoirs of world-magic on the whole surface of the glove – Jerusalem…Rome…Mecca…Lhassa – and of these Glastonbury has the largest residue of unused power.
Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset which is now famous for the festival but before the current headliners were born, before their grandparents were born, it was famous for something else. Two something elses, both mythical. First was King Arthur, he’s buried there. Second was that Joseph of Arimathea came over from Palestine and founded the first Christian Church anywhere right there, and brought along the Holy Grail, and also shoved his walking stick in the ground which then sprouted into the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury which survived until 2010 when some vandals chopped it down, and he died there and his tomb may be seen to this day.
DID YOU CALL IN SICK TODAY?
The tone of this vast book is unique. Most of the time we are affectionately and comedically following the sometimes scandalous lives of these Glastonbury folks but out of the blue will come weird theological statements or mini-lectures about the First Cause, which is JCP’s name for God.
But here the First Cause a) has a dual nature, being both Good and Evil, b) is intimately concerned with the least most measly decision made by human beings (did you decide to call in sick today? The First Cause will note this with interest) and c) is also intimate with every living thing and I mean every one, tiny little beetles, plankton, everything. Everything is thrillingly, soulfully, electrically alive and the First Cause is right there, mostly, it seems, expressing irritation.
At one point there is a conversation between two tiny beetles.
At another point one character has a profound cataclysmic vision of the Grail, then has to visit an old man to administer an enema as he has been suffering from dreadful constipation. And we get a description of that procedure. This is not a normal book!
THE THEOLOGY
JCP is not very helpful about all this. He does not explain his vision of how the universe (it seems to be a multiverse) works. There are hints and partial revelations and crackbrained paragraphs that leave you scratching your head. Quite early on, the Sun (the one in the sky) is introduced as a sentient being who has great influence on human consciousness. At one point the Sun gets involved with the Vicar of Glastonbury’s musings about Jesus and takes a dim view:
“Let his Christ protect him!” thought (if we can call the titanic motions of super-consciousness in such a Power by the name of “thought”) this great outpourer of life heat.
On p 322 the Sun pokes his nose in again:
As he spoke Mr Dekkar took off his hat and wiped his forehead. This gave his superhuman enemy, the sun, his supreme opportunity, and he poured down his burning noon rays upon that bare grey head with redoubled concentration.
What about prayer? Glad you asked.
The magnetism of their prayer shot like a meteorite out of the earth’s planetary atmosphere… and drove it forward beyond the whole astronomical world, and beyond the darkness enclosing that world, till it reached the Primal Cause of all life.
We then get a dense paragraph about what the First Cause does with received prayers. It’s a fair question. We read:
Even though the cry of a particular creature may reach the First Cause, there is always a danger of its being intercepted by the evil will of this Janus-faced Force.
So be careful what you pray for. One character is a sadist and at one point is enjoying some scenes of cruelty in an old book. How is it that this character responds in this way?
Such abominable wickedness came straight out of the evil of the First Cause, travelled through the interlunar spaces, and entered the particular nerve in the erotic organism of Mr Evans which was predestined to respond to it.
Some of this stuff does seem unhinged, or maybe just incomprehensible. One guy is so happy he thinks he is TOO happy when he visits his girlfriend, and JCP comments :
The great suction-process of cosmogonic matter – always waiting to drain up in its huge, blind, clay belly, these rapturous overtones of its foster children – was soon at work, sucking up the spilt drops of his happiness.
Sometimes the author (not one of the characters) can’t contain himself any longer and has to lay out some truths, such as :
There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless, because the reality of being is forever changing under the primal and arbitrary will of the First cause.
The lecture continues :
The composers of fiction aim at an aesthetic verisimilitude which seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic dispositions of Nature. Only rarely are such writers so torn and rent by the Demon within them that they can add their own touch to the wave-crests of real actuality as these foam up, bringing wreckage and sea-tangle and living and dead ocean monsters and bloody spume and bottom silt into the rainbow spray!
NOT ENTIRELY UNIQUE
Yes, we can see other artists drank this koolaid too – Dylan Thomas, Stanley Spencer, William Blake, Robin Williamson, all loved to invent their own pantheistic pantheons. And lately Alan Moore in Jerusalem, which I would like to try to read (but not yet!) – that one sounds kind of similarish.
WHAT THE COMMUNIST SAYS
Under a just and scientific arrangement of society which they have achieved in Russia, our human values begin to change. People feel ashamed of having money. It becomes a disgrace, like the reputation of a thief, to have more than the essentials.
WHAT THE ATHEIST THOUGHT
If only he knew that there were a God who for one second had an ear open, what things he would pour into that gaping, hairy stupid orifice.
A SORRY STORY
JCP “hoped for the Nobel Prize & being knighted by my sovereign & receiving the acclamation of Europe & seeing the book translated into all languages”
JCP's biographer writes :
Six months after it was published (March 1932) it was obvious that the book was a financial failure. It sold only 4000 copies; while he and Phyllis were hoping to make $3000 on it they received only $750 and out of that they had to pay $500 for its typing
And then, on 22 Feb 1934, JCP was sued for libel. A Captain Hodgkinson who was a bigshot businessman in Glastonbury decided that the character Philip Crow was a libellous version of himself. After some back & forth JCP accepted an out of court settlement & had to pay £1100. So he lost a lot of money on his life’s masterpiece. Maybe he just hadn’t kept his hat on that February morning.
THIS MAY BE THE MOST FLAWED FIVE STAR NOVEL EVER
It could lose 200 pages easily & be a mere 900 page monster. There are many accounts of the 35 interwoven lives and the teaparties and the flower arranging and the swooning of this young lady over that young man and vice versa. And the book’s title looks more like a subtitle and I guess might put readers off – to call this mighty work a Romance doesn’t do it any favours.
But wow – all of that is froth – this is something else.
What’s it like? Just an ordinary year in the life of 35 or so inhabitants of a sleepy rural town in which a cultural war is being waged between a guy who can raise the dead & who wishes to start a new religion (the only true religion) and three other guys who establish Communist rule over the town, and another guy in the third corner who is the big bad capitalist who is confident he will outlast these idiots.
WHY GLASTONBURY?
One character says
There are only about half a dozen reservoirs of world-magic on the whole surface of the glove – Jerusalem…Rome…Mecca…Lhassa – and of these Glastonbury has the largest residue of unused power.
Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset which is now famous for the festival but before the current headliners were born, before their grandparents were born, it was famous for something else. Two something elses, both mythical. First was King Arthur, he’s buried there. Second was that Joseph of Arimathea came over from Palestine and founded the first Christian Church anywhere right there, and brought along the Holy Grail, and also shoved his walking stick in the ground which then sprouted into the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury which survived until 2010 when some vandals chopped it down, and he died there and his tomb may be seen to this day.
DID YOU CALL IN SICK TODAY?
The tone of this vast book is unique. Most of the time we are affectionately and comedically following the sometimes scandalous lives of these Glastonbury folks but out of the blue will come weird theological statements or mini-lectures about the First Cause, which is JCP’s name for God.
But here the First Cause a) has a dual nature, being both Good and Evil, b) is intimately concerned with the least most measly decision made by human beings (did you decide to call in sick today? The First Cause will note this with interest) and c) is also intimate with every living thing and I mean every one, tiny little beetles, plankton, everything. Everything is thrillingly, soulfully, electrically alive and the First Cause is right there, mostly, it seems, expressing irritation.
At one point there is a conversation between two tiny beetles.
At another point one character has a profound cataclysmic vision of the Grail, then has to visit an old man to administer an enema as he has been suffering from dreadful constipation. And we get a description of that procedure. This is not a normal book!
THE THEOLOGY
JCP is not very helpful about all this. He does not explain his vision of how the universe (it seems to be a multiverse) works. There are hints and partial revelations and crackbrained paragraphs that leave you scratching your head. Quite early on, the Sun (the one in the sky) is introduced as a sentient being who has great influence on human consciousness. At one point the Sun gets involved with the Vicar of Glastonbury’s musings about Jesus and takes a dim view:
“Let his Christ protect him!” thought (if we can call the titanic motions of super-consciousness in such a Power by the name of “thought”) this great outpourer of life heat.
On p 322 the Sun pokes his nose in again:
As he spoke Mr Dekkar took off his hat and wiped his forehead. This gave his superhuman enemy, the sun, his supreme opportunity, and he poured down his burning noon rays upon that bare grey head with redoubled concentration.
What about prayer? Glad you asked.
The magnetism of their prayer shot like a meteorite out of the earth’s planetary atmosphere… and drove it forward beyond the whole astronomical world, and beyond the darkness enclosing that world, till it reached the Primal Cause of all life.
We then get a dense paragraph about what the First Cause does with received prayers. It’s a fair question. We read:
Even though the cry of a particular creature may reach the First Cause, there is always a danger of its being intercepted by the evil will of this Janus-faced Force.
So be careful what you pray for. One character is a sadist and at one point is enjoying some scenes of cruelty in an old book. How is it that this character responds in this way?
Such abominable wickedness came straight out of the evil of the First Cause, travelled through the interlunar spaces, and entered the particular nerve in the erotic organism of Mr Evans which was predestined to respond to it.
Some of this stuff does seem unhinged, or maybe just incomprehensible. One guy is so happy he thinks he is TOO happy when he visits his girlfriend, and JCP comments :
The great suction-process of cosmogonic matter – always waiting to drain up in its huge, blind, clay belly, these rapturous overtones of its foster children – was soon at work, sucking up the spilt drops of his happiness.
Sometimes the author (not one of the characters) can’t contain himself any longer and has to lay out some truths, such as :
There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless, because the reality of being is forever changing under the primal and arbitrary will of the First cause.
The lecture continues :
The composers of fiction aim at an aesthetic verisimilitude which seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic dispositions of Nature. Only rarely are such writers so torn and rent by the Demon within them that they can add their own touch to the wave-crests of real actuality as these foam up, bringing wreckage and sea-tangle and living and dead ocean monsters and bloody spume and bottom silt into the rainbow spray!
NOT ENTIRELY UNIQUE
Yes, we can see other artists drank this koolaid too – Dylan Thomas, Stanley Spencer, William Blake, Robin Williamson, all loved to invent their own pantheistic pantheons. And lately Alan Moore in Jerusalem, which I would like to try to read (but not yet!) – that one sounds kind of similarish.
WHAT THE COMMUNIST SAYS
Under a just and scientific arrangement of society which they have achieved in Russia, our human values begin to change. People feel ashamed of having money. It becomes a disgrace, like the reputation of a thief, to have more than the essentials.
WHAT THE ATHEIST THOUGHT
If only he knew that there were a God who for one second had an ear open, what things he would pour into that gaping, hairy stupid orifice.
A SORRY STORY
JCP “hoped for the Nobel Prize & being knighted by my sovereign & receiving the acclamation of Europe & seeing the book translated into all languages”
JCP's biographer writes :
Six months after it was published (March 1932) it was obvious that the book was a financial failure. It sold only 4000 copies; while he and Phyllis were hoping to make $3000 on it they received only $750 and out of that they had to pay $500 for its typing
And then, on 22 Feb 1934, JCP was sued for libel. A Captain Hodgkinson who was a bigshot businessman in Glastonbury decided that the character Philip Crow was a libellous version of himself. After some back & forth JCP accepted an out of court settlement & had to pay £1100. So he lost a lot of money on his life’s masterpiece. Maybe he just hadn’t kept his hat on that February morning.
THIS MAY BE THE MOST FLAWED FIVE STAR NOVEL EVER
It could lose 200 pages easily & be a mere 900 page monster. There are many accounts of the 35 interwoven lives and the teaparties and the flower arranging and the swooning of this young lady over that young man and vice versa. And the book’s title looks more like a subtitle and I guess might put readers off – to call this mighty work a Romance doesn’t do it any favours.
But wow – all of that is froth – this is something else.
Read
December 19, 2020When I reached page 323 of this 1120 page book, it struck me that the following scene describes not only aspects of the main character's personality, but key aspects of the 450000 word book itself:
John Crow turned down Street Road. He had in his mind a little shop not far from [Geard's house]. This meant a furtive and foxy shuffle for the misanthropic John along 'the other side of the road'. It might indeed be said that the whole of John's life was a sequence of 'other sides'—'other sides' of roads, 'other sides' of thoughts, 'other sides' of ideas, religions, activities, in the whole dusty bustling panorama of life.
Like John Crow, the narrative shuffles along in a meandering way, and while misanthropic John is hiding away from everyone, including the reader, which he does for hundreds of pages at a time, the narrative investigates a lot of 'other sides' via the thoughts and activities of a great panorama of characters—and it's partly because there are so many characters that the story shuffles along so slowly. Indeed the reader might think that the plot itself is as furtive as the main character. It hides away for long periods allowing the people of Powys' Glastonbury to go about their daily lives without much incident. And not only the people, the insects of Glastonbury also go about their lives, settling on walls, walking casually across the brim of a hat, or bathing in someone's soap dish. Meanwhile nature, which could easily be the main character, shuffles along slowly as well, crawling from one Spring to the next Spring, and transforming the landscape gradually over the course of one year.
The geography of Glastonbury is very important in this novel. It is described as an island town of three hills, encircled by the river Brue and various drainage canals. At the centre of the town is the supposed tomb of King Arthur, and at the centre of the story is the Grail of Arthurian legend. The Grail of Christian legend is also present because Glastonbury cathedral houses the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. He is said to have founded Glastonbury Abbey and to have placed a chalice of Christ's blood there. Much of the story revolves around the tension between these two versions of the Grail legend. There's a further layer of legend too: the drained site of a Neolithic lake village and its temple to the goddess of fertility. With all of this in the background, is it any wonder that the novel records many of the amorous adventures of the people of Glastonbury. There is even a house called Camelot and when one of the characters is found dead in the river, the man who finds her, though no Sir Lancelot, says words that could be straight out of Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot: She has a lovely face. Ironically, the 'Lady' in Powys' novel is a tragic charwoman who fell into the river while drunk, and the house called Camelot is a brothel.
Reading the book is like living in the town, walking its streets, passing mansions and hovels, witnessing wealth and misery. And every now and then, getting a glimpse, as if through a narrow aperture between the buildings, of some unexpected beauty of the natural world. The descriptions of nature were my favourite aspect of the book. Powys is brilliant at nature writing whether he's describing the clouds in the sky or the ground beneath his characters' feet. He's especially good at descriptions of wetness. John Crow is described as having an affiliation with fen-water and fen-peat. Such marshy ground pulled his soul earthward.
Velvety moss is everywhere too, rain-soaked moss, the moss of withy-beds and water-meadows, it springs up like a dark froth from the living skin pores of the earth-mother, this primeval growth covers with its shadowy texture, every tree root and hovel roof and ancient boarding, over which the rain can sweep or the dew can fall.
I was reading some of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems while wading through this book, one of which was his hymn to wetness, 'Inversnaid'. The liquid language of the poem echoed the book very well—Powys' brown rain-pools and drenched beech boughs go perfectly with Hopkin's darksome burn full of pitch-black broth overhung by a beadbonny ash dappled with dew.
And wetness is central not only to Powys' nature writing but also to his storyline. When progress reaches Glastonbury and a new bridge threatens to replace the ancient one that Merlin might have crossed, and when a new airstrip threatens the site of the Neolithic Lake Village, wetness rises up to destroy the new and restore the old. It's as perfect an ending as the one in Hopkins' poem.
John Crow turned down Street Road. He had in his mind a little shop not far from [Geard's house]. This meant a furtive and foxy shuffle for the misanthropic John along 'the other side of the road'. It might indeed be said that the whole of John's life was a sequence of 'other sides'—'other sides' of roads, 'other sides' of thoughts, 'other sides' of ideas, religions, activities, in the whole dusty bustling panorama of life.
Like John Crow, the narrative shuffles along in a meandering way, and while misanthropic John is hiding away from everyone, including the reader, which he does for hundreds of pages at a time, the narrative investigates a lot of 'other sides' via the thoughts and activities of a great panorama of characters—and it's partly because there are so many characters that the story shuffles along so slowly. Indeed the reader might think that the plot itself is as furtive as the main character. It hides away for long periods allowing the people of Powys' Glastonbury to go about their daily lives without much incident. And not only the people, the insects of Glastonbury also go about their lives, settling on walls, walking casually across the brim of a hat, or bathing in someone's soap dish. Meanwhile nature, which could easily be the main character, shuffles along slowly as well, crawling from one Spring to the next Spring, and transforming the landscape gradually over the course of one year.
The geography of Glastonbury is very important in this novel. It is described as an island town of three hills, encircled by the river Brue and various drainage canals. At the centre of the town is the supposed tomb of King Arthur, and at the centre of the story is the Grail of Arthurian legend. The Grail of Christian legend is also present because Glastonbury cathedral houses the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. He is said to have founded Glastonbury Abbey and to have placed a chalice of Christ's blood there. Much of the story revolves around the tension between these two versions of the Grail legend. There's a further layer of legend too: the drained site of a Neolithic lake village and its temple to the goddess of fertility. With all of this in the background, is it any wonder that the novel records many of the amorous adventures of the people of Glastonbury. There is even a house called Camelot and when one of the characters is found dead in the river, the man who finds her, though no Sir Lancelot, says words that could be straight out of Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot: She has a lovely face. Ironically, the 'Lady' in Powys' novel is a tragic charwoman who fell into the river while drunk, and the house called Camelot is a brothel.
Reading the book is like living in the town, walking its streets, passing mansions and hovels, witnessing wealth and misery. And every now and then, getting a glimpse, as if through a narrow aperture between the buildings, of some unexpected beauty of the natural world. The descriptions of nature were my favourite aspect of the book. Powys is brilliant at nature writing whether he's describing the clouds in the sky or the ground beneath his characters' feet. He's especially good at descriptions of wetness. John Crow is described as having an affiliation with fen-water and fen-peat. Such marshy ground pulled his soul earthward.
Velvety moss is everywhere too, rain-soaked moss, the moss of withy-beds and water-meadows, it springs up like a dark froth from the living skin pores of the earth-mother, this primeval growth covers with its shadowy texture, every tree root and hovel roof and ancient boarding, over which the rain can sweep or the dew can fall.
I was reading some of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems while wading through this book, one of which was his hymn to wetness, 'Inversnaid'. The liquid language of the poem echoed the book very well—Powys' brown rain-pools and drenched beech boughs go perfectly with Hopkin's darksome burn full of pitch-black broth overhung by a beadbonny ash dappled with dew.
And wetness is central not only to Powys' nature writing but also to his storyline. When progress reaches Glastonbury and a new bridge threatens to replace the ancient one that Merlin might have crossed, and when a new airstrip threatens the site of the Neolithic Lake Village, wetness rises up to destroy the new and restore the old. It's as perfect an ending as the one in Hopkins' poem.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
April 5, 2017
This is where I grew up:
I lived there between the ages of 3 and 18, when I left for university.
The village, Hampstead Norreys, was listed in the Doomsday book. In the woods a few minutes from my house was the remains of a Norman motte and bailey castle.
The Ridgeway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rid...) ran not far from us, and we regularly walked on and over it. Neolithic tools and shards of Roman pottery were not unusual finds.
It would be fair, then, to say that a certain sort of traditional English relationship with the landscape and the past was part of my upbringing.
But my father was a chemical engineer, and an atheist of the most rigorous and critical nature. My mother, brought up a Christian, had religion bullied out of her (or, at least, suppressed or repressed). Any hint of belief in, or reference to, the supernatural was mocked.
It is therefore interesting, at least to me, that I have strong memories of certain moments alone in the woods, or somewhere on the Downs, where I had a powerful sense of something Other, something frightening being aware of me. I remember in particular a tangle of brambles, nettles and twigs that, for some reason, terrified me to the extent that I ran home and never forgot it.
Now perhaps it is my father’s doing that I simply think that response a legacy of thousands of years of evolution, an instinct remaining from the days when the world outside the cave was violent and dangerous. Others would think differently.
John Cowper Powys, for example, would say that the First Cause (a duality of good and evil) and its attendant spirits and forces, existing in, through and within all things, was making itself known. That there was a malevolent “consciousness” directing its attention toward me. That when, at another time (aged 12, I think) I felt the strong instinct to talk to and embrace an ancient oak, I was responding to something that was really there.
I don’t agree. And, in fact, find that sort of world-view intensely irritating. Not least because it removes an important degree of agency from us, and responsibility (as do all religions that posit a God or Force that interacts with us and the world, that influences our actions), but also because believers of such things have a tendency to go on long mystical rants about the life force, the being, in the flowers and stones at our feet. One scene in this novel (I kid you not) has a tree getting turned on because two people are making out against its trunk. The use of "Good" and "Evil" as though these concepts existed independently of us (and were not differently defined by each of us) similarly does nothing but obfuscate.
Animism makes sense to me as a belief system for our ancestors - it makes sense as a logical response to the behaviours of the natural world, when such world remains outside of what is considered "knowable". But when one can tear a tree down to its constituent atoms, there is no room for deities or dryads.
The first paragraph of this book was enough to put me off reading the novel for two years. Here it is:
”At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.”
Ugh.
For some reason I managed to keep going this time. By about 50 pages in he had a hook in me, by 100 pages I was done for.
How and why would be difficult to tell, though I do think my childhood in landscape geographically close to, and mythologically connected to, that in the novel, was part of it. As were my memories of certain experiences I could see behind all the (what I will label for convenience sake) "New Age" spiritualism. I also know Glastonbury itself very well, and remember school trips to Wookey Hole.
It was also that the writing itself was exceptional. Simply genius. The characters, the narrative, the power of certain set-pieces, was breathtaking.
And, to bring the different strands of this rambling "me-view" together, I can sympathize with the post-war mind, reaching back into myth in a desperate attempt to locate meaning. I see this as the last attempt (by JCP, Mary Butts and others) to hang on to meta-narrative, to order (even if such order is paradoxically chaotic) - there is a sadness to it which soothes the irritation for me. In a similar way I think it not coincidental that all my experiences of mysticism took place on the cusp of, or during, puberty - when I was full of all that uncertainty, confusion and fear which is an inherent part of the whole process. Perhaps I was hoping that old oak tree would hug me back, make me feel a little less lost and a little less sad.
One can also read what is being done in this novel as an attempt to overlay the structures of ancient belief systems onto modern life - both in the overt sense of the Grail Myth, the Pageant etc, as well as in that of the interior psychic life of the characters. That is what is happening in that impossible, ugly first paragraph quoted above - that is why it is so jarring - it is a though a stone-aged man were discussing emojis.
It is correct too to see the connection between the death and rebirth of the Christ-God and the countless other belief systems that are tied closely to the natural world, the dying in winter and the awakening in Spring. What this does not mean, however, is that there is some sort of "truth" uniting them all, other than that human beings are all wired basically similarly and have a similar instinctive response to events in the world around them. [I wonder why Christianity has such a short period for its God in the underworld?]It makes sense that, if you long for a re-birth of society at large after the horrors of the early years of the 20thc, you would turn to such mysticism, or to Communism (which, at least for the romantic Utopians in the novel, is simply another form of such myth). The town of Glastonbury is torn between all of these systems.
Henry Miller, on reading this novel, famously wrote to Lawrence Durrell: "my head began bursting as I read. No, I said to myself, it is impossible that any man can put all this - so much - down on paper. It is super-human."
I don't think this response comes just from the number of characters, from the size of his project, but from this conflation of millennia of belief and experience into one place and one time. This achievement is most certainly super-human.
One other point - if you don't know much of the Glastonbury mythology (the Thorn, the last Abbot, the Chalice Well, Gwyn ap Nudd etc) then I would suggest a quick skim through something like this http://www.storyline-features.co.uk/g... (or the wiki pages) as JCP assumes a certain familiarity with this stuff.
There are some good reviews of this on GR - I like this:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
in particular, probably because we seem to have had a similar response...
Whether or not this novel will work for you is impossible for me to tell, indeed it failed for me on a number of occasions before finally hitting its stride. I feel confident in labelling it a work of genius, a masterpiece of the novel form, though it is not perfect, of course. It has a unique power that stands it outside the rest of my reading. It is deep and rich and full of life. I will certainly be investigating more of his books.
I lived there between the ages of 3 and 18, when I left for university.
The village, Hampstead Norreys, was listed in the Doomsday book. In the woods a few minutes from my house was the remains of a Norman motte and bailey castle.
The Ridgeway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rid...) ran not far from us, and we regularly walked on and over it. Neolithic tools and shards of Roman pottery were not unusual finds.
It would be fair, then, to say that a certain sort of traditional English relationship with the landscape and the past was part of my upbringing.
But my father was a chemical engineer, and an atheist of the most rigorous and critical nature. My mother, brought up a Christian, had religion bullied out of her (or, at least, suppressed or repressed). Any hint of belief in, or reference to, the supernatural was mocked.
It is therefore interesting, at least to me, that I have strong memories of certain moments alone in the woods, or somewhere on the Downs, where I had a powerful sense of something Other, something frightening being aware of me. I remember in particular a tangle of brambles, nettles and twigs that, for some reason, terrified me to the extent that I ran home and never forgot it.
Now perhaps it is my father’s doing that I simply think that response a legacy of thousands of years of evolution, an instinct remaining from the days when the world outside the cave was violent and dangerous. Others would think differently.
John Cowper Powys, for example, would say that the First Cause (a duality of good and evil) and its attendant spirits and forces, existing in, through and within all things, was making itself known. That there was a malevolent “consciousness” directing its attention toward me. That when, at another time (aged 12, I think) I felt the strong instinct to talk to and embrace an ancient oak, I was responding to something that was really there.
I don’t agree. And, in fact, find that sort of world-view intensely irritating. Not least because it removes an important degree of agency from us, and responsibility (as do all religions that posit a God or Force that interacts with us and the world, that influences our actions), but also because believers of such things have a tendency to go on long mystical rants about the life force, the being, in the flowers and stones at our feet. One scene in this novel (I kid you not) has a tree getting turned on because two people are making out against its trunk. The use of "Good" and "Evil" as though these concepts existed independently of us (and were not differently defined by each of us) similarly does nothing but obfuscate.
Animism makes sense to me as a belief system for our ancestors - it makes sense as a logical response to the behaviours of the natural world, when such world remains outside of what is considered "knowable". But when one can tear a tree down to its constituent atoms, there is no room for deities or dryads.
The first paragraph of this book was enough to put me off reading the novel for two years. Here it is:
”At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.”
Ugh.
For some reason I managed to keep going this time. By about 50 pages in he had a hook in me, by 100 pages I was done for.
How and why would be difficult to tell, though I do think my childhood in landscape geographically close to, and mythologically connected to, that in the novel, was part of it. As were my memories of certain experiences I could see behind all the (what I will label for convenience sake) "New Age" spiritualism. I also know Glastonbury itself very well, and remember school trips to Wookey Hole.
It was also that the writing itself was exceptional. Simply genius. The characters, the narrative, the power of certain set-pieces, was breathtaking.
And, to bring the different strands of this rambling "me-view" together, I can sympathize with the post-war mind, reaching back into myth in a desperate attempt to locate meaning. I see this as the last attempt (by JCP, Mary Butts and others) to hang on to meta-narrative, to order (even if such order is paradoxically chaotic) - there is a sadness to it which soothes the irritation for me. In a similar way I think it not coincidental that all my experiences of mysticism took place on the cusp of, or during, puberty - when I was full of all that uncertainty, confusion and fear which is an inherent part of the whole process. Perhaps I was hoping that old oak tree would hug me back, make me feel a little less lost and a little less sad.
One can also read what is being done in this novel as an attempt to overlay the structures of ancient belief systems onto modern life - both in the overt sense of the Grail Myth, the Pageant etc, as well as in that of the interior psychic life of the characters. That is what is happening in that impossible, ugly first paragraph quoted above - that is why it is so jarring - it is a though a stone-aged man were discussing emojis.
It is correct too to see the connection between the death and rebirth of the Christ-God and the countless other belief systems that are tied closely to the natural world, the dying in winter and the awakening in Spring. What this does not mean, however, is that there is some sort of "truth" uniting them all, other than that human beings are all wired basically similarly and have a similar instinctive response to events in the world around them. [I wonder why Christianity has such a short period for its God in the underworld?]It makes sense that, if you long for a re-birth of society at large after the horrors of the early years of the 20thc, you would turn to such mysticism, or to Communism (which, at least for the romantic Utopians in the novel, is simply another form of such myth). The town of Glastonbury is torn between all of these systems.
Henry Miller, on reading this novel, famously wrote to Lawrence Durrell: "my head began bursting as I read. No, I said to myself, it is impossible that any man can put all this - so much - down on paper. It is super-human."
I don't think this response comes just from the number of characters, from the size of his project, but from this conflation of millennia of belief and experience into one place and one time. This achievement is most certainly super-human.
One other point - if you don't know much of the Glastonbury mythology (the Thorn, the last Abbot, the Chalice Well, Gwyn ap Nudd etc) then I would suggest a quick skim through something like this http://www.storyline-features.co.uk/g... (or the wiki pages) as JCP assumes a certain familiarity with this stuff.
There are some good reviews of this on GR - I like this:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
in particular, probably because we seem to have had a similar response...
Whether or not this novel will work for you is impossible for me to tell, indeed it failed for me on a number of occasions before finally hitting its stride. I feel confident in labelling it a work of genius, a masterpiece of the novel form, though it is not perfect, of course. It has a unique power that stands it outside the rest of my reading. It is deep and rich and full of life. I will certainly be investigating more of his books.
November 26, 2022
Gosh. What to say about this! Firstly, I'm staggered that it's not as popular as the likes of Thomas Hardy, George Eliot or Charles Dickens when it comes to that English classic. Well, it is described as a classic, yet not many have even heard of it. Compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in terms of scope, this gargantuan novel clocks in at 1120 pages and, taking into account this paperback version is larger than your standard sized paperback and has quite small font, it absolutely smashes the longest novel I'd previously read. With Glastonbury only being an hour away from me - although I hadn't visited the place for nearly twenty years until recently, while lots of other towns & cities are mentioned that I know so well - my Somerset roots held me closer to this book than any other by an English writer.
And what a writer! OK, so maybe his skills at storytelling aren't on the same level as others, but the writing, by god, is so astonishing at times that I don't regret paying over the odds for a pre-owned copy - I would have paid three times as much if I had to.
Politically, economically, mystically, poetically, socially, religiously, John Cowper Powys brings Glastonbury and its people to life. Published in 1932, it felt at times like a 19th century novel, both in its writing and the mannerisms of certain characters, and it took a while to figure out; with motor cars on the roads and even a private aeroplane, that it hints strongly towards late in the 1910s. No mention of The Great War, and no actual year/years are ever specified, so I'm still not sure. One thing I'm absolutely sure on though, when it comes to nature - woods, rivers, fields, wind and rain, etc... - is that I was completely awestruck by his passion for the natural world and its earthly aura. Even things like moss, toadstools, tree stumps, mud, twigs, hay, plants, pollen, even wood lice, get put under his magnifying glass - he is so fascinated by them all! Sometimes, he will philosophize about the point of view of these things for pages at a time.
When it comes to characters, and the effect Glastonbury and its history of Merlin, King Arthur, and the legend of the Holy Grail has on them, this is where he also excels. There are something like forty-five characters that crop up throughout the novel, of all different ages and classes; including the Mayor and his daughters Cordelia & Crummie, the local Vicar, a mad woman (mad Bet - barking mad is she), a farmer and poet, a Welsh antiquary, bastard children and old cronies, servants & cooks. There are love affairs galore - including that of two cousins, marriages, births & christenings, but the main thing I took from the novel was the power struggle in regards the future of Glastonbury.
There is battle going on between industrialist Philip Crow, owner of the town Dye-works and Wookey Hole Caves (along with the Glastonbury Tor, the Abbey ruins, and my city's Roman Baths, is one of Somerset's tourist attraction hot-spots), with his latest venture being mining tin and wanting to build more roads and bridges, clashing with the troublesome Bolshevik inspired Dave Spear, who wants to bring Communism to the town. Along with a disgruntled ex Crow employee, Red Robinson, and an anarchic young lawyer, they try and sink their claws into both the Mayor and the landowner The Marquis of P. to side with them; to prosper away from capitalism. These three men will all have a clash of ideas, but one thing they all agree on, is that Glastonbury's mysticism and it's legends means little to them.
This is only an aspect of the novel that I found most interesting, as there is no one big story line running throughout the narrative, just lots of small daily occurrences really. In fact, for a novel that is so big I can only think of five really memorable moments that have stuck clearly in my mind after finishing it: the reading of a will right at the beginning, a summer pageant featuring a play recreating Christ on the cross which doesn't go according to plan, an apparent miracle at the Chalice Well natural spring involving a sick cancer patient, a murder at St Michael's Tower, which sits at the top of Tor hill, and the great flood in the final chapter. There was just so much to take in though, so I was never going to remember everything; but being in it at the time - well, living in it, for nearly six weeks, would be more suited – It's like nothing else I've ever experienced before in a book.
It might not be the greatest novel I've read, but I was not for a single one of its 1120 pages bored - now that is quite something, and it beats anything I've read by those writers mentioned at the top. Yes, even Dostoevsky. Waving goodbye to Powy's Glastonbury and its residents was not an easy goodbye I can tell you.
July 2, 2021
And so begins life after A Glastonbury Romance.
This might be the best book I’ve ever read. It’s hard to tell, it’s a very different animal compared to any of my other all-time-favourites. But this book touched something in me and the magic didn’t falter for the duration of its 1120 pages.
So, to business. Who the hell is this John Cowper Powys and why isn’t he more spoken about? He is a giant hidden in the foggy fringes of British literature. We're talking a man who believed he was descended from Merlin and who lived his life in accordance with a homegrown animistic philosophy. He believed every rock, insect, clump of moss and blade of grass was endowed with spirit and even, to an extent, opinions. This philosophy is reflected in his works, and he writes with such superhuman confidence and detail about the inner lives of all things, living or otherwise, I would not be surprised to hear that the pen that wrote this book was held ‘twixt the branches of a poplar bough.
He also believed in the existence of cosmic energies that can positively or negatively affect the course of our individual lives, and these energies are very much active characters throughout the novel. In a way, JCP is like a modern Homer. The story in A Glastonbury Romance takes place on two levels: the human level (with its dramas, romances, tea parties, etc) and the superhuman level, that of the cosmic powers that govern the former. This often struck me as a modern take on the gods of The Iliad interfering with the affairs of man.
What’s extraordinary about A Glastonbury Romance is that it delivers on all levels. The characters are memorable (rural religious fanatic John Geard has bolted to the top of my personal pantheon of favourite literary characters), the many intertwining storylines are compelling, the writing is sublime… When it’s sad it’s moving, when it’s funny it’s hilarious, and when it’s raunchy you better open a window because boy do things get hot.
But what really drives the book forward is the strength of the author’s personality, which shines through every page like sunlight through a cracked vase. He tells the story through the prism of his worldview, and he doesn’t care one bit whether you share, appreciate or are offended by his ideas; like a prophet, he cannot help putting them out there. The reader simply has to accept this, marvel at the wonderful and put up with the warts.
I hesitate to say he doesn’t have a clue about structure or plot. I think the best way to describe JCP's writing is 'free'. It's appallingly above and beyond all conventional expectations of what a text is meant to be or convey. And not in the sense that it's experimental, but that it feels like the movements of his pen are determined by some alien power. Characters are unrestrained regardless of whether it hinders the plot, unexceptional images become pivotal epiphanies... This is one of those rare books where every time I picked it up, all throughout its gargantuan length, I never had a clue what to expect. There’s incest, ghosts, cosmic energies, communism vs capitalism, the sun hating a specific character… and that’s all only in the first chapter!
I think Michael Henderson described the experience of reading this book in the best way possible in his review for The Telegraph: “Reading it may be like being gripped by a madman, but when you are finally released from that grip, you will never behold the world in the same way again.”
I can’t with this review even come close to encapsulating the crazy, the magic, the wonder, the crackling fireworks of joie de vivre contained within this book. It’s one of those books that makes you thrilled to be alive.
This might be the best book I’ve ever read. It’s hard to tell, it’s a very different animal compared to any of my other all-time-favourites. But this book touched something in me and the magic didn’t falter for the duration of its 1120 pages.
So, to business. Who the hell is this John Cowper Powys and why isn’t he more spoken about? He is a giant hidden in the foggy fringes of British literature. We're talking a man who believed he was descended from Merlin and who lived his life in accordance with a homegrown animistic philosophy. He believed every rock, insect, clump of moss and blade of grass was endowed with spirit and even, to an extent, opinions. This philosophy is reflected in his works, and he writes with such superhuman confidence and detail about the inner lives of all things, living or otherwise, I would not be surprised to hear that the pen that wrote this book was held ‘twixt the branches of a poplar bough.
He also believed in the existence of cosmic energies that can positively or negatively affect the course of our individual lives, and these energies are very much active characters throughout the novel. In a way, JCP is like a modern Homer. The story in A Glastonbury Romance takes place on two levels: the human level (with its dramas, romances, tea parties, etc) and the superhuman level, that of the cosmic powers that govern the former. This often struck me as a modern take on the gods of The Iliad interfering with the affairs of man.
What’s extraordinary about A Glastonbury Romance is that it delivers on all levels. The characters are memorable (rural religious fanatic John Geard has bolted to the top of my personal pantheon of favourite literary characters), the many intertwining storylines are compelling, the writing is sublime… When it’s sad it’s moving, when it’s funny it’s hilarious, and when it’s raunchy you better open a window because boy do things get hot.
But what really drives the book forward is the strength of the author’s personality, which shines through every page like sunlight through a cracked vase. He tells the story through the prism of his worldview, and he doesn’t care one bit whether you share, appreciate or are offended by his ideas; like a prophet, he cannot help putting them out there. The reader simply has to accept this, marvel at the wonderful and put up with the warts.
I hesitate to say he doesn’t have a clue about structure or plot. I think the best way to describe JCP's writing is 'free'. It's appallingly above and beyond all conventional expectations of what a text is meant to be or convey. And not in the sense that it's experimental, but that it feels like the movements of his pen are determined by some alien power. Characters are unrestrained regardless of whether it hinders the plot, unexceptional images become pivotal epiphanies... This is one of those rare books where every time I picked it up, all throughout its gargantuan length, I never had a clue what to expect. There’s incest, ghosts, cosmic energies, communism vs capitalism, the sun hating a specific character… and that’s all only in the first chapter!
I think Michael Henderson described the experience of reading this book in the best way possible in his review for The Telegraph: “Reading it may be like being gripped by a madman, but when you are finally released from that grip, you will never behold the world in the same way again.”
I can’t with this review even come close to encapsulating the crazy, the magic, the wonder, the crackling fireworks of joie de vivre contained within this book. It’s one of those books that makes you thrilled to be alive.
January 2, 2018
Among the foremost charms of this very well-written and entertaining novel is the way it feels totally unclassifiable. Unfortunately, this also makes it unusually difficult to describe, since I can't rely on the usual shorthands of genre, period, etc. I will make a partial stab at description below, but the bottom line is: read this book, it's great.
A Glastonbury Romance was published in 1932 and is full of long, wild sentences that either plumb strange depths of human inwardness, ascend to strange heights of syncretic mysticism, or (frequently) do both at once -- and yet it is not "modernist." Whatever it is, it feels very much not anything-ist. It feels like the output, perhaps, of some genial great-uncle, beloved by a sprawling rural family, among whose many benign eccentricities is a habit of spending days at a time in an old shed scribbling away, and who turns out to be utterly brilliant, his style full of mad Nietzschean incandescence and yet perfectly recognizable as the guy who tells those hilarious tall tales at family gatherings: half god, half grandpa.
Or something. I don't know! This isn't easy. Let's try another tack. So, if you read almost any review of this book, or indeed anything written about it, you are likely to encounter a quotation of its remarkable first sentence:
Now, if you had to guess what sort of novel would follow this opener, would you say "an endearingly down-to-earth chronicle of everyday life, romantic entanglements, and local politics in a small town?" Probably wouldn't be your first guess, anyway. But that's what you'll get. Well, that, except that even while Powys is being "endearingly down-to-earth" he is also, somehow, writing in these unremitting blasts of trippy phantasmagoric spiritualism. So e.g. in a scene where two young adults nervously flirt and then suddenly reach the mutual decision to act upon their lust for one another -- in outline, a perfectly commonplace bit of human behavior, a story as old as the hills -- the exact emotional tenor of the situation is transmitted to us like this:
Yes, that is at least arguably a description of a tree getting turned on. In context this is less weird than it sounds, because in Powys-world everything has a soul, or at least might, and our world is merely one rung on a great ladder of being, with higher rungs occupied by "supernatural Naturalists" or "invisible Watchers" who observe us as we might observe fish in a fishbowl (these are first mentioned in a momentary, deadpan aside on p. 307 and come up every once in a while thereafter) -- all the way on up to Powys' godhead, the First Cause (which, by the way, has two separate parts). This spiritualistic background is simply assumed by the narrative voice -- Powys is not a leaden polemicist like Marie Corelli or her New Age descendants, and writes not to convince you of any of this, but as if it's all just obviously part of the same texture as young love, town gossip, and socially uncomfortable tea parties.
And this works. Powys' grand spiraling pantheism claims to encompass everything and feels like it really does, and yes that means you, your deepest hopes and fears, that weird embarrassing fantasy you just had, and the fungus currently living between your toes. Nothing is too small or too undignified to be important in the Powys cosmos, to be as worthy as the First Cause itself of rapturous descriptive passages with more exclamation marks than periods.
One manifestation of this, incidentally, is that Powys treats the great variety of human sexuality with a lack of judgment -- or even fanfare -- that I wouldn't have expected in a book from 1932. Although all of the "onscreen" romances (of which there are many) are heterosexual, quite a few characters are implied or simply stated to be gay or bisexual, and Powys relates this as matter-of-factly as he'd relate their hair color. (In a modern author this same pattern might seem tacky -- a way of making sure you know he accepts sexual minorities without actually letting that acceptance shape the plot in any way. With Powys, you are free to criticize the pattern, but he is clearly not trying to convince you of his progressive bona fides; he "accepts sexual minorities" because he accepts literally everything that exists and a lot that doesn't.) One character is wracked with guilt over his intense and insistent fetish for sexual sadism, and this is treated seriously as a personal struggle like any other. Another character -- a particularly fascinating one -- is torn between his affair with a married woman and a newfound religious mania which demands chaste, extreme asceticism; what would be a black-and-white moral issue in (say) Tolstoy is emphatically not in Powys. (His asceticism is, in a perverse sense, quite selfish; she truly and touchingly loves him, much more than her husband loves her. Etc.)
So: imagine, perhaps, an unlikely fusion of George Eliot and H. P. Lovecraft -- except a version of Lovecraft who exuberantly loved life, human variety, and the cosmic Beyond, rather than hating or fearing those things. And then imagine that this combination feels not incongruous but seamless and perfectly natural.
Can you imagine that? Maybe not. And while I could keep coming up with things to tell you to imagine, and then conceding that you might as well imagine a square circle or a married bachelor, you could pick up this book and not have to imagine anymore. I imagine I could have gone my whole life without ever knowing that John Cowper Powys existed, but as it happens I saw this book recommended in some blog post somewhere, I bought a used copy on a whim for all of $6.02, and it kept me entertained for the better part of a year with its 1120 pages of tiny, improbably fun-filled print.
A Glastonbury Romance was published in 1932 and is full of long, wild sentences that either plumb strange depths of human inwardness, ascend to strange heights of syncretic mysticism, or (frequently) do both at once -- and yet it is not "modernist." Whatever it is, it feels very much not anything-ist. It feels like the output, perhaps, of some genial great-uncle, beloved by a sprawling rural family, among whose many benign eccentricities is a habit of spending days at a time in an old shed scribbling away, and who turns out to be utterly brilliant, his style full of mad Nietzschean incandescence and yet perfectly recognizable as the guy who tells those hilarious tall tales at family gatherings: half god, half grandpa.
Or something. I don't know! This isn't easy. Let's try another tack. So, if you read almost any review of this book, or indeed anything written about it, you are likely to encounter a quotation of its remarkable first sentence:
At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of march, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe.
Now, if you had to guess what sort of novel would follow this opener, would you say "an endearingly down-to-earth chronicle of everyday life, romantic entanglements, and local politics in a small town?" Probably wouldn't be your first guess, anyway. But that's what you'll get. Well, that, except that even while Powys is being "endearingly down-to-earth" he is also, somehow, writing in these unremitting blasts of trippy phantasmagoric spiritualism. So e.g. in a scene where two young adults nervously flirt and then suddenly reach the mutual decision to act upon their lust for one another -- in outline, a perfectly commonplace bit of human behavior, a story as old as the hills -- the exact emotional tenor of the situation is transmitted to us like this:
The nervous excitement manifested by these two was so free from traditional sentimentality and normal passion, so dominated by a certain cold-blooded and elemental lechery, that something in the fibrous interstices of the old tree against which they leaned was aroused by it and responded to it.
Yes, that is at least arguably a description of a tree getting turned on. In context this is less weird than it sounds, because in Powys-world everything has a soul, or at least might, and our world is merely one rung on a great ladder of being, with higher rungs occupied by "supernatural Naturalists" or "invisible Watchers" who observe us as we might observe fish in a fishbowl (these are first mentioned in a momentary, deadpan aside on p. 307 and come up every once in a while thereafter) -- all the way on up to Powys' godhead, the First Cause (which, by the way, has two separate parts). This spiritualistic background is simply assumed by the narrative voice -- Powys is not a leaden polemicist like Marie Corelli or her New Age descendants, and writes not to convince you of any of this, but as if it's all just obviously part of the same texture as young love, town gossip, and socially uncomfortable tea parties.
And this works. Powys' grand spiraling pantheism claims to encompass everything and feels like it really does, and yes that means you, your deepest hopes and fears, that weird embarrassing fantasy you just had, and the fungus currently living between your toes. Nothing is too small or too undignified to be important in the Powys cosmos, to be as worthy as the First Cause itself of rapturous descriptive passages with more exclamation marks than periods.
One manifestation of this, incidentally, is that Powys treats the great variety of human sexuality with a lack of judgment -- or even fanfare -- that I wouldn't have expected in a book from 1932. Although all of the "onscreen" romances (of which there are many) are heterosexual, quite a few characters are implied or simply stated to be gay or bisexual, and Powys relates this as matter-of-factly as he'd relate their hair color. (In a modern author this same pattern might seem tacky -- a way of making sure you know he accepts sexual minorities without actually letting that acceptance shape the plot in any way. With Powys, you are free to criticize the pattern, but he is clearly not trying to convince you of his progressive bona fides; he "accepts sexual minorities" because he accepts literally everything that exists and a lot that doesn't.) One character is wracked with guilt over his intense and insistent fetish for sexual sadism, and this is treated seriously as a personal struggle like any other. Another character -- a particularly fascinating one -- is torn between his affair with a married woman and a newfound religious mania which demands chaste, extreme asceticism; what would be a black-and-white moral issue in (say) Tolstoy is emphatically not in Powys. (His asceticism is, in a perverse sense, quite selfish; she truly and touchingly loves him, much more than her husband loves her. Etc.)
So: imagine, perhaps, an unlikely fusion of George Eliot and H. P. Lovecraft -- except a version of Lovecraft who exuberantly loved life, human variety, and the cosmic Beyond, rather than hating or fearing those things. And then imagine that this combination feels not incongruous but seamless and perfectly natural.
Can you imagine that? Maybe not. And while I could keep coming up with things to tell you to imagine, and then conceding that you might as well imagine a square circle or a married bachelor, you could pick up this book and not have to imagine anymore. I imagine I could have gone my whole life without ever knowing that John Cowper Powys existed, but as it happens I saw this book recommended in some blog post somewhere, I bought a used copy on a whim for all of $6.02, and it kept me entertained for the better part of a year with its 1120 pages of tiny, improbably fun-filled print.
July 29, 2020
When you've read an incredibly long and psychologically intense book like A Glastonbury Romance (AGR) for the third time, it no longer becomes a book, it becomes part of your soul. The characters are so familiar you feel like they are close friends, you no longer observe, you participate. John Cowper Powys (JCP) has a way of peering deeply into the consciousness of his characters that you understand and know them even better than the people you know in "real" life. So, in an odd way, I find myself living through this novel in a way even richer than "real" life, and certainly, I get to meet and know people whom I never encounter (probably fortunately) in my "real life" experience. As a result, it's kind of difficult to review a reading of this book, as opposed to talk about my experience of "living" the book.
AGR is a difficult but rewarding undertaking. This is a book that you "plan" for, you don't take off the shelf and read like a normal book. First of all, the beginning is by far the most difficult to get through, and a large percentage of readers don't make it very far past JCP's "First Cause", which is unfortunate. It is also unfortunate that the First Cause "disturbance" permeates the book, although over time it gradually seems to fade away, and is not even present at the end. Other "problems" with AGR are JCP's obsession with sexuality, which can be probing but over the top at times, there's barely a "normal" relationship in the novel. Finally, the bits on capitalism, communism and even anarchism are rather weak, although they add a touch of "reality" to the work.
On the other hand, if you were to stop reading the book after its crazy beginning, you would be missing out on some of the greatest literature ever written. Some of the chapters of AGR reach heights not seen in other writers. The same sexual "bug" that runs through book also allows JCP to write chapters like "Mark's Court", the "Silver Bowl" and probably 10 other chapters like them where I was frankly left gasping at the scope of JCP's brilliance. There's nothing quite like them in literature except perhaps in Dostoyevsky, to which JCP has been compared. These chapters and scenes completely "make" the novel and sort of cleanse the badness of it. They are the reason why I love this novel and have returned to it twice after my initial reading.
I wouldn't read this book for the King Arthur and Grail elements, while these themes add color they aren't really what the book is about. There is a terrific guide to AGR by the late professor W.J. Keith which is available (you can find it through a Google search) which helps a lot with the various references to Arthurian and Welsh mythology, but it's hardly essential to reading the book. I used the guide during my second reading but didn't refer to it once this time around.
I would however encourage those who have visited Glastonbury to read the book, or those who like books that fully encapsulate a village and all of its idiosyncrasies. I've visited it twice, the first time having a religious experience and the second a psychic one, the place is quite conducive to these sorts of experiences, and in that aspect I can completely relate to the novel. There is something quite odd and spiritual about the town, even today. I'm sure the popularity of the Glastonbury music festival held nearby has something to do with that aspect of the town. Regardless, the description of the town, how it works, and all of its wonderful characters from the high to the low, from the elderly to the children, it's hard to think of a book that captures a town, its inhabitants, its feeling, so utterly and completely. You have a relationship not only with the characters in the novel but the place itself, and that in and of itself is very rare in my reading experience.
In terms of where it fits and stands in the oeuvre of JCP, it comes after Wolf Solent, which was a book about an individual - AGR is a book about a town and dozens of characters, so it's very different. It is very distinctly original to JCP, and the influences of Hardy and Bronte found in his first three novels are largely gone. JCP by the time of AGR has become quite an original novelist stylistically and thematically, and he explores his subject matter with great richness and depth. Many of his scenes of weather and nature are unsurpassed in literature and he has cleaned up the excesses of his earlier novels in this regard.
So in sum, for those considering this book I want to impress that it constitutes a major undertaking. It takes a very long time to read, and there are times where you will be bored and frustrated with the story and the peculiarities of the author. The rewards though far outweigh the pain. If I've read a book of this length 3 times there must be something about it that calls me back, above all I think it's the sense that this book is a home of sorts, as I said it's part of my "soul." I'm not sure there's any other book I've read like that (maybe the closest is The Brothers Karamazov?), so calling this a "long novel" or something that might cause one to draw comparisons with more traditional literature is kind of misleading. It draws deeply on your inner self, it is difficult to approach intellectually or objectively.
I'm not sure what else to say. I think this review gives a good sense of the novel, and I hope guides you in terms of whether you decide to tackle it and how you do so. One thing I can absolutely assure you though is that if you make it to the end, it will rank very high on your all-time reading experiences, and you will be very glad you made it through.
AGR is a difficult but rewarding undertaking. This is a book that you "plan" for, you don't take off the shelf and read like a normal book. First of all, the beginning is by far the most difficult to get through, and a large percentage of readers don't make it very far past JCP's "First Cause", which is unfortunate. It is also unfortunate that the First Cause "disturbance" permeates the book, although over time it gradually seems to fade away, and is not even present at the end. Other "problems" with AGR are JCP's obsession with sexuality, which can be probing but over the top at times, there's barely a "normal" relationship in the novel. Finally, the bits on capitalism, communism and even anarchism are rather weak, although they add a touch of "reality" to the work.
On the other hand, if you were to stop reading the book after its crazy beginning, you would be missing out on some of the greatest literature ever written. Some of the chapters of AGR reach heights not seen in other writers. The same sexual "bug" that runs through book also allows JCP to write chapters like "Mark's Court", the "Silver Bowl" and probably 10 other chapters like them where I was frankly left gasping at the scope of JCP's brilliance. There's nothing quite like them in literature except perhaps in Dostoyevsky, to which JCP has been compared. These chapters and scenes completely "make" the novel and sort of cleanse the badness of it. They are the reason why I love this novel and have returned to it twice after my initial reading.
I wouldn't read this book for the King Arthur and Grail elements, while these themes add color they aren't really what the book is about. There is a terrific guide to AGR by the late professor W.J. Keith which is available (you can find it through a Google search) which helps a lot with the various references to Arthurian and Welsh mythology, but it's hardly essential to reading the book. I used the guide during my second reading but didn't refer to it once this time around.
I would however encourage those who have visited Glastonbury to read the book, or those who like books that fully encapsulate a village and all of its idiosyncrasies. I've visited it twice, the first time having a religious experience and the second a psychic one, the place is quite conducive to these sorts of experiences, and in that aspect I can completely relate to the novel. There is something quite odd and spiritual about the town, even today. I'm sure the popularity of the Glastonbury music festival held nearby has something to do with that aspect of the town. Regardless, the description of the town, how it works, and all of its wonderful characters from the high to the low, from the elderly to the children, it's hard to think of a book that captures a town, its inhabitants, its feeling, so utterly and completely. You have a relationship not only with the characters in the novel but the place itself, and that in and of itself is very rare in my reading experience.
In terms of where it fits and stands in the oeuvre of JCP, it comes after Wolf Solent, which was a book about an individual - AGR is a book about a town and dozens of characters, so it's very different. It is very distinctly original to JCP, and the influences of Hardy and Bronte found in his first three novels are largely gone. JCP by the time of AGR has become quite an original novelist stylistically and thematically, and he explores his subject matter with great richness and depth. Many of his scenes of weather and nature are unsurpassed in literature and he has cleaned up the excesses of his earlier novels in this regard.
So in sum, for those considering this book I want to impress that it constitutes a major undertaking. It takes a very long time to read, and there are times where you will be bored and frustrated with the story and the peculiarities of the author. The rewards though far outweigh the pain. If I've read a book of this length 3 times there must be something about it that calls me back, above all I think it's the sense that this book is a home of sorts, as I said it's part of my "soul." I'm not sure there's any other book I've read like that (maybe the closest is The Brothers Karamazov?), so calling this a "long novel" or something that might cause one to draw comparisons with more traditional literature is kind of misleading. It draws deeply on your inner self, it is difficult to approach intellectually or objectively.
I'm not sure what else to say. I think this review gives a good sense of the novel, and I hope guides you in terms of whether you decide to tackle it and how you do so. One thing I can absolutely assure you though is that if you make it to the end, it will rank very high on your all-time reading experiences, and you will be very glad you made it through.
June 22, 2014
At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe.
An opening sentence only an author could love. It gets better, but it is also like this on and off for all its 1,120 pages. Somehow, though, I'd just look at the bits like that and wonder why they weren't bothering me. Powys reminds me of my impression of D. H. Lawrence's worst traits (must read more of Lawrence and see just how justified my impression is); women having emotions in their quivering breasts and the sex relation and the like, with added mumbo jumbo. I feel like Lawrence is too much interested in himself and the quivering breasts. Powys is a very interested author. Also he understands that funniness exists in the universe, and this is very important in an author -- they need not even be actually funny. This quality of Powys's voice stops the book from feeling too earnest or grotesque -- it has a sense of proportion, in its own way. it's a companiable book.
The book opens with John Crow, a rather shiftless, stubborn, lone wolf youngish man, coming home for his grandfather's funeral. He meets his childhood sweetheart/cousin, Mary, and they instantly reconnect; by and large they share a character poised between cynical coldness and cynicism. John moves to Glastonbury to be nearer to Mary, who is a lady's companion there. Both resist and resent the history and concomitant caricaturisation of Glastonbury, though both come to relent to some degree. John takes a role organising a fantastically ambitious pageant for John Geard, the man who has inherited his grandfather's fortune, an intensely mystical and earthy messianic figure. It's hard not to take John as the central figure, as he is certainly a main character and we meet him first, but this is such a community/cast of thousands novel the idea of a centre is tenuous.
Powys doesn't stint. He lays on a spread. There are romances and Mayors raising children from the dead and conflicts between romanticism and business and politics and communes and epic struggles with consciences and ghosts and murders. I find that Powys is very good at capturing experience; the ineffable, distinct atmosphere of a particular gathering of people on a particular day. Lots of things happen and lots of people have thoughts about them. God and Jesus have thoughts about things. A woodlouse, admittedly imagined by John Crow, has thoughts about a human louse. It's a book about connecting to the land and the continuous identity of the land, I suppose, and Powys makes every random scrubby bit of moss, every rotten bit of wood, every mote of dust on an apple part of that. If one could imagine a modern urban equivalent, it might glory in crisp packets. I think there's something inherently likable about the audacity and generosity of all this.
In a way the book is hard to talk about because it's too talky itself -- most books you have to tease out what they think about things. This one keeps up an overt stream of chat on life, the universe and everything. I read Wolf Solent by Powys in 2007 and loved it, though possibly less than this. After that I kept getting Maiden Castle out of the library and not reading it somehow. For the first 100 pages of this I was thinking, but this is exactly my thing, why did I not read more earlier? Once into the next hundred I thought ah, it's because Powys fits more into fifty pages than most authors do into a whole novel. Reading a whole book by Powys is like reading twelve books by the same author back to back. You're going to need strength, or you're going to need to need Powys at this particular point in your reading life. The good thing is that it's not like reading twelve books that are exactly the same back to back. Powys keeps on doing different things. I wasn't surfeited after the first hundred pages. I miss it now I'm not reading it.
An opening sentence only an author could love. It gets better, but it is also like this on and off for all its 1,120 pages. Somehow, though, I'd just look at the bits like that and wonder why they weren't bothering me. Powys reminds me of my impression of D. H. Lawrence's worst traits (must read more of Lawrence and see just how justified my impression is); women having emotions in their quivering breasts and the sex relation and the like, with added mumbo jumbo. I feel like Lawrence is too much interested in himself and the quivering breasts. Powys is a very interested author. Also he understands that funniness exists in the universe, and this is very important in an author -- they need not even be actually funny. This quality of Powys's voice stops the book from feeling too earnest or grotesque -- it has a sense of proportion, in its own way. it's a companiable book.
The book opens with John Crow, a rather shiftless, stubborn, lone wolf youngish man, coming home for his grandfather's funeral. He meets his childhood sweetheart/cousin, Mary, and they instantly reconnect; by and large they share a character poised between cynical coldness and cynicism. John moves to Glastonbury to be nearer to Mary, who is a lady's companion there. Both resist and resent the history and concomitant caricaturisation of Glastonbury, though both come to relent to some degree. John takes a role organising a fantastically ambitious pageant for John Geard, the man who has inherited his grandfather's fortune, an intensely mystical and earthy messianic figure. It's hard not to take John as the central figure, as he is certainly a main character and we meet him first, but this is such a community/cast of thousands novel the idea of a centre is tenuous.
Powys doesn't stint. He lays on a spread. There are romances and Mayors raising children from the dead and conflicts between romanticism and business and politics and communes and epic struggles with consciences and ghosts and murders. I find that Powys is very good at capturing experience; the ineffable, distinct atmosphere of a particular gathering of people on a particular day. Lots of things happen and lots of people have thoughts about them. God and Jesus have thoughts about things. A woodlouse, admittedly imagined by John Crow, has thoughts about a human louse. It's a book about connecting to the land and the continuous identity of the land, I suppose, and Powys makes every random scrubby bit of moss, every rotten bit of wood, every mote of dust on an apple part of that. If one could imagine a modern urban equivalent, it might glory in crisp packets. I think there's something inherently likable about the audacity and generosity of all this.
In a way the book is hard to talk about because it's too talky itself -- most books you have to tease out what they think about things. This one keeps up an overt stream of chat on life, the universe and everything. I read Wolf Solent by Powys in 2007 and loved it, though possibly less than this. After that I kept getting Maiden Castle out of the library and not reading it somehow. For the first 100 pages of this I was thinking, but this is exactly my thing, why did I not read more earlier? Once into the next hundred I thought ah, it's because Powys fits more into fifty pages than most authors do into a whole novel. Reading a whole book by Powys is like reading twelve books by the same author back to back. You're going to need strength, or you're going to need to need Powys at this particular point in your reading life. The good thing is that it's not like reading twelve books that are exactly the same back to back. Powys keeps on doing different things. I wasn't surfeited after the first hundred pages. I miss it now I'm not reading it.
April 13, 2010
John Cowper Powys was a brilliant and courageous writer who possessed some truly unique insights. His book is warm, tender and makes you feel you're in the company of the most dear friend. There are many passages in this book that make you want to 'store' them somewhere, that seem to be a treasure you'd never want to lose — either because of the things he says or because of the way he says them. Unfortunately, Powys wasn't a great storyteller. The book just doesn't _cohere_, it's not well-structured, there's a lot of things there that just don't add much to the whole. Even if you can compare Powys to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in regards to the scope of his vision, he's clearly a much inferior craftsman. If you want a book that pays off every bit of your patience, you'd better think twice before you pick Glastonbury Romance. But if you want something that will make you enter a world which is like nothing you've experienced, but is eerily familiar at the same time, read this book.
May 3, 2013
Incomparable. And I use that word with more attention to its actual meaning here than I normally would. Because this book and its indomitable author, John Cowper Powys, is truly without comparison. The closest I can possibly come is to suggest (and it's ONLY a suggestion, a very weak, unwieldy arrow shot at this book in an attempt to pin it down to something more identifiable and, thus, less potent) that it has the strange, heady flavor of some kind of mixture of Dickens at his best and Blake at his most mystical. There are those, undoubtedly, who will complain of it being "over the top" or "long-winded" or "boring" or something along those lines so familiar to impatient, pop culture-drunk neanderthals. And to those who make such hasty judgments, I can only express my desire of seeing them go straight to hell.
September 6, 2020
So yes, you may have noticed that A Glastonbury Romance is a big book; but once started I was drawn into its mythologies, its many sub-plots and its strange characters, I almost forgot the size of it and only wished it were longer—the same thing has happened with my reading of Dickens and Dostoyevsky. A Glastonbury Romance (AGR) was first published in the U.S. in 1932 (and 1933 in the U.K.) three years after Wolf Solent. It won't be any surprise to find that the bulk of the novel takes place in Glastonbury, Somerset but it begins in Northwold, Norfolk with the reading of Canon William Crow's will; many of the family members have assembled, such as John, Mary, Philip and Elizabeth Crow, all who feature throughout the novel; Elizabeth is the daughter of Canon Crow and is the aunt of John, Mary and Philip. John has just returned from a period in France and has no real plans for the future, whereas Philip is a successful businessman from Glastonbury. Canon Crow has a surprise in store for everyone as he's left all his estate to John Geard, who had been the Canon's valet, secretary and in the end, his friend. Although this revelation causes initial excitement and anger, most of the characters seem to resign themselves to the decision quite quickly—maybe they were half-expecting something of this sort. John decides to walk to Glastonbury and meets a Welsh Arthurian scholar, called Owen Evans, at Stonehenge; Owen happens to be Geard's daughter's fiancé.
John Geard is one of Powys's brilliant characters but it's difficult to know whether he's genuine or a charlatan. At several points in the book Geard seems to suggest that he believes he is the manifestation of Christ; he appears to be at least a mesmeric cult leader. Physically, Geard is rather odd-looking and is described thus:
One of the new characters that appears in the second-half of the novel is Finn Toller. I can never resist a good description of a character, so here's Finn:
Throughout the novel Powys introduces us to his spiritual philosophy of the First Cause; I always find mystical or spiritual text difficult to 'understand' but in Powys's hands such passages are still stimulating to read. I shall end with a couple of passages as examples.
Thus did these two, the man from Wales and the man from Norfolk, enter the silent streets of the town of Glastonbury.The rest of the book takes place within Glastonbury and its environs. Powys introduces us to multiple characters and sub-plots and tries to show us the political, philosophical, mythological, quotidian, psychological, sexual, natural life of Glastonbury (n.b. I may have missed some). The political side of Glastonbury is demonstrated by showing three main strands of political life represented by different characters or groups of characters: there is the capitalistic, industrious group represented by Philip Crow and William Zoyland; the socialists are represented by Red Robinson and Dave Spear; and the religious/mystical represented by John Geard and Mat Dekker. There are many others, some connected to these groups, some completely separate that intertwine with this narrative within the novel but there are conflicting interests for the future of Glastonbury (Britain). Crow and Zoyland are ashamed of the mystical past of Glastonbury and want to create industry, wealth and jobs; the socialists are just as ashamed of the mysticism but want to create a commune in the town; and there is Geard, who uses his newly acquired wealth to try to revive the mystical past of Glastonbury. Geard both uses and is used by the others to attempt to accomplish their aims. For instance Geard is supported by the socialist groups to become the mayor of Glastonbury as they believe he can be used to thwart Philip Crow's industrial plans. When Geard does become mayor he decides to put on a pageant (or passion play) which ends in an amazingly chaotic mess.
John Geard is one of Powys's brilliant characters but it's difficult to know whether he's genuine or a charlatan. At several points in the book Geard seems to suggest that he believes he is the manifestation of Christ; he appears to be at least a mesmeric cult leader. Physically, Geard is rather odd-looking and is described thus:
...a broad-shouldered, rather fleshy individual, without any hat, whose grizzled head under that suspended light seemed to Sam the largest human head he had ever seen. It was the head of a hydrocephalic dwarf; but in other respects its owner was not dwarfish. In other respects its owner had the normally plump, rather unpleasantly plump figure of any well-to-do-man, whose back has never been bent nor his muscles hardened by the diurnal heroism of manual labour.Geard can work a crowd, he delivers impromptu speeches to audiences, sometimes sober, sometimes drunk and sometimes under some unknown influence. He's enigmatic but shambolic. Later on in the novel he supposedly cures a cancer victim and during the opening ceremony of a Saxon Arch, he has had built, he seems to bring a recently-deceased boy back to life. Weird? Yes, meanwhile Sam Dekker, the son of the vicar of Glastonbury, has a vision where he sees the Grail in a barge on the canal. Maybe, even more strangely, Powys invests all creatures, indeed, all objects with a living spirit; but Powys has a special affection for trees; the following quote takes place whilst Owen Evans and his new wife, Cordelia, kiss in a wood next to two trees, a Scotch fir and a holly tree, which are also in love with each other.
In the summer when the wind stirs the trees, there is that rushing, swelling sound of masses of heavy foliage, a sound that drowns, in its full-blossomed, undulating, ocean-like murmur, the individual sorrows of trees. But across this leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their sub-human 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.But it's not all mysticism and animism, in fact, that takes up only a small part of the book; there are many affairs and other dalliances, sexual desires, repressions, sadism and murder. Owen Evans, for example, has sadistic sexual urges which he tries to purge, initially, by playing a crucified Christ at the pageant; later on in the novel he's obsessed with witnessing a murder; but in both cases he does not really have the stomach for it as his sadistic desires turn to revulsion when realised. Powys switches about between characters, human and non-human, good and evil, at one point we are viewing events from afar and then we fall into the character's mind. It can be disorienting but also exciting.
One of the new characters that appears in the second-half of the novel is Finn Toller. I can never resist a good description of a character, so here's Finn:
Mr. Finn Toller in his natural condition was no engaging sight. In his present state he was a revolting object. He was a sandy-haired individual with a loose, straggly, pale-coloured beard. He gave the impression of being completely devoid of both eyebrows and eyelashes, so bleached and whitish in his case were those normal appendages to the human countenance. His mouth was always open and always slobbering, but although his whole expression was furtive and dodging, his teeth were large and strong and wolfish. Mr. Toller looked, in fact, like a man weak to the verge of imbecility who had been ironically endowed with the teeth of a strong beast of prey.Finn is a nasty piece of work; he thinks that everyone is trying to inveigle him to murder people on their behalf. He's quite happy to oblige, except for women and children, so when Mad Bet does indeed urge him to murder John, whom she is besotted by, he plans an attack, which forms another sub-plot to this mesmerising novel. As with many of the local characters Finn talks, and thinks, with a Somerset accent. As a little taster of some of Powys's Somerset dialogue here are a couple of examples of Finn's:
"I never have liked these here windy nights. These here nights be turble hummy and drummy to me pore head."
"What I've got...to say, Missus, be for Mr. Robinson's ear alone. Please allow me, Missus, for all that us poor folks have got left"—he stopped and threw a very sinister leer at Red—"be what be put in our minds by they as be book-larned and glib of tongue, like this clever Mister here, who is foreman of his Worship's. Us poor dogs hasn't got anything left in the world, us hasn't, except they nice, little thoughties, they pretty thoughties, what clever ones, like Mister here, do put into we."By the way, the 'nice thoughties' are those of bludgeoning Philip Crow over the head with an iron bar. In a public speech Red Robinson had called for Philip to be 'liquidated', by which Finn takes that to mean that Robinson wants him bumped off; when he repeats Robinson's words back to him with this 'understanding' Robinson is shocked. It's gruesome but funny as well.
"A bloated capitalist, like 'im, what do hexploit us poor dawgs, ought to be lickidated." It was Mr. Toller undoubtedly who was saying that; and Red recognized his own oratorical expression, "liquidated," the meaning of which, for the word had reached him from Bristol, had always puzzled him—though this had not prevented him from using it in his orations.But AGR is not all dark, there are light passages as well, humour as well as seriousness, and realism as well as mysticism and a cataclysmic ending for good measure. The aspect I really like about his work is how the narrative weaves between all these. For example, there is a great section where Powys describes a murder and the narrative switches to that of some rooks flying above and some insects on the ground near the body, or in the earlier example where the narrative fades from Owen and Cordelia kissing to the 'thoughts' of the trees.
Throughout the novel Powys introduces us to his spiritual philosophy of the First Cause; I always find mystical or spiritual text difficult to 'understand' but in Powys's hands such passages are still stimulating to read. I shall end with a couple of passages as examples.
There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless, because the reality of Being is forever changing under the primal and arbitrary will of the First Cause. The mystery of mysteries is Personality, a living Person; and there is that in Personality which is indetermined, unaccountable, changing at every second! The Hindu philosophies that dream of the One, the Eternal, as an Ultimate behind the arbitrariness of Personal Will are deluded. They are in reality—although they talk of "Spirit"—under the bondage of the idea of the body and under the bondage of the idea of physical matter as an "ultimate."
Apart from Personality, apart from Personal Will, there is no such "ultimate" as Matter, there is no such "ultimate" as Spirit. Beyond Life and beyond Death there is Personality, dominating both Life and Death to its own arbitrary and wilful purposes.
What mortals call Sex is only a manifestation in human life, and in animal and vegetable life, of a certain spasm, a certain delicious shudder, a certain orgasm of a purely psychic nature, which belongs to the Personality of the First Cause.
January 3, 2018
this book is really large but it's not very hard to read, there's just a lot of it. some parts read kind of 19th century realist, like the character descriptions where he goes into every crevice of their facial features and their family histories, as well as the dialogue. but there are also these very cool modernist parts where he starts talking about how the sun is an enemy of a specific person, or how the vital energy that permeates all life is responding to events, in long sentences. nice book
February 1, 2021
Powys is a strange name. I barely can pronounce any writer's name but this one I'm sure I'd get wrong and it looks weird. Only read one of his books, Wolf Solent, which was as strange as the name but I liked it because the digressions were as strange as the story. GR is no different in this regard but is wider and the range of characters farther. In GR he builds toward a climatic scene and continues building to another event so that there are several figurative deaths throughout (festivals, storms, miracles, floods).
But this alone does not separate Powys as a writer. That would be the mystical narration which he doesn't just throw in as flavor deep into the story but right at the beginning to show what you, as a reader, will be dealing with. In GR this shows up as the omniscient 3rd person's idea of God which seems to be a mix of Greek, Christian and Powys where God is some source spot, somewhere, that the characters, or maybe you or I, perchance have a particularly extreme emotion or, perhaps, a random mood that flies off to this Source which, depending on Its mood, sends back either a positive or negative fate since it is made of both Good and Evil.
Most of the main characters have some unique view of Christ (Geard and Sam Dekker) or of the twisted psychopath or sociopath or whatever the hell he is's view of some Welsh pride and sorcery in the Holy Grail (Evans) or John Crow's bierotic sexual philosophy of screwing his cousin Mary while simultaneously carrying in his mind the love of his childhood friend Tom Barter. All of his characters are unique and living. I especially liked the character of Crummie who, although subdued in the time we spend with her, was the most alluring and caring and innocent with her deep love of her father (Mr. Geard), who she refused to stop sitting on his lap past the "correct time" and was the holy man's most fierce and loyal defender. It was a passing on of both familial blood and spirit which is espoused in the old "blood is thicker than water" chestnut but rarely true. What a bright and curly-headed and perfect femininely-legged creature she is. Realer than life, you know.
But this alone does not separate Powys as a writer. That would be the mystical narration which he doesn't just throw in as flavor deep into the story but right at the beginning to show what you, as a reader, will be dealing with. In GR this shows up as the omniscient 3rd person's idea of God which seems to be a mix of Greek, Christian and Powys where God is some source spot, somewhere, that the characters, or maybe you or I, perchance have a particularly extreme emotion or, perhaps, a random mood that flies off to this Source which, depending on Its mood, sends back either a positive or negative fate since it is made of both Good and Evil.
Most of the main characters have some unique view of Christ (Geard and Sam Dekker) or of the twisted psychopath or sociopath or whatever the hell he is's view of some Welsh pride and sorcery in the Holy Grail (Evans) or John Crow's bierotic sexual philosophy of screwing his cousin Mary while simultaneously carrying in his mind the love of his childhood friend Tom Barter. All of his characters are unique and living. I especially liked the character of Crummie who, although subdued in the time we spend with her, was the most alluring and caring and innocent with her deep love of her father (Mr. Geard), who she refused to stop sitting on his lap past the "correct time" and was the holy man's most fierce and loyal defender. It was a passing on of both familial blood and spirit which is espoused in the old "blood is thicker than water" chestnut but rarely true. What a bright and curly-headed and perfect femininely-legged creature she is. Realer than life, you know.
February 11, 2009
A Glastonbury Romance is an immense book. There are 47 principle characters in all and if that's not a lot, there's always all the extras whose names make it in but who quickly pass out. A Glastonbury Romance encompasses the widest girth of human experience I could imagine, as I can't wonder what John Cowper Powys has left out. Read more about this "girt" book here.
Read
October 23, 2013The first sentence is known as the Beechers Brook of British fiction and if you get major arm problems from holding its huge weight you can hollow it out and use it as a garden shed. In other words a huge novel that tries the most dedicated reader. If you persevere you'll have a unique experience. Powys is a one off, seen as a link between Hardy and Lawrence he in fact is entirely his own man. If you get this it will set you on a lifetime relationship with a great, very odd mind.
January 13, 2016
I came upon this author via reading "The Information" in which the author's mouthpiece(Richard) says that Powys is a neglected genius. I hope so 'cause this is a big 'un...
Glastonbury(Connecticut)... land of my mother's youth... no, not THAT Glastonbury. This one's Somersetshire, West Country. I'm just a little ways in and already sort of stunned by the author's semi-delirious prose. Lot's going on already: family reunion, a stunning and capricious inheritance decision, childhood sweethearts re-united, childhood haunts revisited, family bickering, local color, ghosts talking to each other(!) and all this infused with JCP's peculiar spiritual/ natural world/all-of-creation emanating backdrop. That's in the first 50 pages or so(chapter 1) only 950 to go!
- John and Mary are referred to as "returning natives".
- Back in East Anglia(The Nine Tailors)but only for a while.
- A familiar debate on Right vs Left politics.
- Scopas???... An Aetolian General or a Sculptor. Both in late ancient Greece. The sculptor came first by a couple of centuries. I think I may be missing a bunch of such references. Oh that classical education!
A walk from Norfolk almost to Stonehenge. THAT's a walk! I'm settling in for the long read. Pretty good so far. Heavy on the non-religious metaphysics. Nature-ism or Universe-ism or some such.
- hamadryad... tree nymph(among other meanings)... spell check doesn't like it!
Monday morning... slow progress lately due to busy-ness but I have 4 days off now so here we go. The cast of characters is still expanding with interest. We now have the Venus of fields - Nell and her free-thinking, crafty husband Will. Crummie and Cordy and Bloody John plus the local Reds. Fascinating... Though this seems much like a Hardy epic with beautiful descriptions of the natural and human background, the temporal setting is much more modern and that means the sexuality(including boy-boy) is fairly direct. Lots of social/relational/romantic misfitting here and all this plus spirituality, economics, sociology and politics. The full catastrophe in Glastonbury, the Sedona of England. Powys even uses the word "vortices".
Still moving towards the middle as the cast of characters expands and the issues multiply. Already our sympathy is drawn towards two characters: Cordy Geard and wild Nellie, the big man's "love-child". I love the way the author pushes the overarching spiritual themes both general and specific to "Avallonia" while grounding the story in all the individual characters, their stories and their interactions. Meanwhile... the looming fight over the future of Glastonbury reminds me of a similar fight here in Maine over the proposed(by Roxane Quimby) North Woods National Park. The mill-town(Millinocket) folks who stand to benefit most from it are mostly opposed because they're attached to their way of life and don't want to be set upon by a bunch of tourists. Interesting...
- reminds me now of Cather as well as Hardy.
- what IS up with this Evans guy anyway. I'm not "getting" it...
- "Money-the engine of life-is an engine of death when it is in the hands of individuals. Put it in the hands of the Communist State and whatever blunders are committed the whole situation is transformed! The individual has no more right to own money than he has to own earth, air, water, fire. We are all a herd of gibbering monkeys in a madhouse of inherited superstitions; and the maddest and wickedest of all these superstitions is the idea that private people have a right to be rich! NO ONE has the right to be rich. It is a crime to be rich. It is a perversion, an obscenity, a monstrosity. It is an offence against nature, against intelligence, against good taste. To be rich is to be a moral leper." WOW!!! Fightin' words round theses parts...
Slow progress as I mine Powys' astounding vocabulary for quiz questions. It's fun AND tedious. So... adults behaving badly(i.e. sex) is going on and I'm going "Tsk, tsk". Funny... The author's wordiness and tendency to digress into opinionated essays(his voice or is the narrator someone "else"?) can get a bit distracting. These are well written and interesting but it's a 1200 page book!
- there's that "handful of dust" again...
And onward... slowly... We finally have a time marker: the second decade of the 20th century which was about what I figured. The Great War has not been mentioned so we're either in the early teens or near 1920 and everyone has forgotten about it or wasn't involved. Mentions Chesil Beach... Perhaps McEwan's book was a tribute.
Back to reading after a three-day work weekend. The inhabitants of G'bury continue to walk about in the nighttime; an interesting habit.
As the story develops John becomes less and less sympathetic. A self-absorbed a-hole. Mary seems to be wasting her time with him but what are the options? I'm wondering if the author is in sympathy with M. Arnold and "Dover Beach". Emotionally if not specifically religious. Powys seems to be more of a pagan...
New characters are introduced on p. 420. Lady Rachel and her father Lord P. in particular. The writing always flows and sometimes becomes sublime, as in the digression about moss in Somersetshire. Then the astounding scene of John Geard's arrival at the big party at Mother Legge's. Crazy...
So much for the incredible Pageant and it's sideshows. Beautifully described of course. Funny, crazy, scary, dramatic and touching. I read that John Boorman once wanted to make a movie of this. How about three or four movies? Notes:
- copyright confusion possibly due to a re-write after the libel lawsuit loss. Originally published in the early 30's but my copy says 1967???? Its my understanding that it's easier to prove libel under English law than in the US. Too bad...
- Sam Dekker is a fool. A well-meaning one but still. So's his old man. Both Anglicans...
Now into book(2,3?) in this "year-in-the-life" of Glastonbury. Still not sure what year though. JCP continues with his interesting but distracting philosophical/spiritual asides. Reminds me of Victor Hugo in "Les Miserables". Too much blah-blah but there's still plenty of fascinating stuff going on. I thought there'd be some sex-talk when John and Mary finally consummate but he skips right over it. I guess that was necessary back then.
Arrived at p.700... only 400+ to go! I had to renew the book yesterday. My first time for that in ages!
And now in the home stretch, if you can call almost 300 pages to go a home stretch. Thinking that the author may have the same spiritual distain for industrial progress/environmental destruction as Tolkien. Seems to be implying that there's an essentially feminine quality to the Grail a la' Dan Brown. Notes:
- Rhiannon... taken by the wind... again. The author was fascinated by Welsh mythology.
- Mad Bet's little witchy ritual reminds of "Return of the Native".
- Chesil Beach sea holly supposed to be an aphrodisiac? Did McEwan mention that?
Things are getting heated up now as the author points toward the conclusion. LOTS of stories and characters to deal with though. Will Zoyland and Perse are showing themselves to be a couple of grown-up children. Perse and Lord P.? I don't recall any mention of THAT before. No word from the Mayor lately. I'm sure it's coming. Unfortunately I spoiled the ending a bit by unintentionally uncovering some of it. Oh well...
Almost home... Tilly steps up vis-a-vis Nelly. A great scene, as was the one between Nelly and Philip in the field. Good soap opera...
And done and done finally. My progress was slowed considerably by writing so many vocabulary trivia questions from the book. At the end we get some serious evil-doing and a catastrophe to rival the one at the end of "The Nine Tailors"... stupendous. There were so many characters that the author didn't get to all of them and their status by the end of the book. It's as if he drifted into town with John Crow and drifted out again a year later. What a year! My main complaint about the proceedings was the constant flow of the authors asides about his(evidently) own free-lance spirituality and how it "explains" the Glastonbury doings. Notes:
- To the extent that Sam Dekker embodies at least some aspects of the author's character the Jesus-Grail thing seems silly. Angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. The emotional worrying of the immature and churchy.
- The Tor Hill events a possible premonition of WWI?
- Cybele-Goddess of Nature=The Mother in 1,000 BC Greek religion?
- 4.25* rounds down to 4...
Glastonbury(Connecticut)... land of my mother's youth... no, not THAT Glastonbury. This one's Somersetshire, West Country. I'm just a little ways in and already sort of stunned by the author's semi-delirious prose. Lot's going on already: family reunion, a stunning and capricious inheritance decision, childhood sweethearts re-united, childhood haunts revisited, family bickering, local color, ghosts talking to each other(!) and all this infused with JCP's peculiar spiritual/ natural world/all-of-creation emanating backdrop. That's in the first 50 pages or so(chapter 1) only 950 to go!
- John and Mary are referred to as "returning natives".
- Back in East Anglia(The Nine Tailors)but only for a while.
- A familiar debate on Right vs Left politics.
- Scopas???... An Aetolian General or a Sculptor. Both in late ancient Greece. The sculptor came first by a couple of centuries. I think I may be missing a bunch of such references. Oh that classical education!
A walk from Norfolk almost to Stonehenge. THAT's a walk! I'm settling in for the long read. Pretty good so far. Heavy on the non-religious metaphysics. Nature-ism or Universe-ism or some such.
- hamadryad... tree nymph(among other meanings)... spell check doesn't like it!
Monday morning... slow progress lately due to busy-ness but I have 4 days off now so here we go. The cast of characters is still expanding with interest. We now have the Venus of fields - Nell and her free-thinking, crafty husband Will. Crummie and Cordy and Bloody John plus the local Reds. Fascinating... Though this seems much like a Hardy epic with beautiful descriptions of the natural and human background, the temporal setting is much more modern and that means the sexuality(including boy-boy) is fairly direct. Lots of social/relational/romantic misfitting here and all this plus spirituality, economics, sociology and politics. The full catastrophe in Glastonbury, the Sedona of England. Powys even uses the word "vortices".
Still moving towards the middle as the cast of characters expands and the issues multiply. Already our sympathy is drawn towards two characters: Cordy Geard and wild Nellie, the big man's "love-child". I love the way the author pushes the overarching spiritual themes both general and specific to "Avallonia" while grounding the story in all the individual characters, their stories and their interactions. Meanwhile... the looming fight over the future of Glastonbury reminds me of a similar fight here in Maine over the proposed(by Roxane Quimby) North Woods National Park. The mill-town(Millinocket) folks who stand to benefit most from it are mostly opposed because they're attached to their way of life and don't want to be set upon by a bunch of tourists. Interesting...
- reminds me now of Cather as well as Hardy.
- what IS up with this Evans guy anyway. I'm not "getting" it...
- "Money-the engine of life-is an engine of death when it is in the hands of individuals. Put it in the hands of the Communist State and whatever blunders are committed the whole situation is transformed! The individual has no more right to own money than he has to own earth, air, water, fire. We are all a herd of gibbering monkeys in a madhouse of inherited superstitions; and the maddest and wickedest of all these superstitions is the idea that private people have a right to be rich! NO ONE has the right to be rich. It is a crime to be rich. It is a perversion, an obscenity, a monstrosity. It is an offence against nature, against intelligence, against good taste. To be rich is to be a moral leper." WOW!!! Fightin' words round theses parts...
Slow progress as I mine Powys' astounding vocabulary for quiz questions. It's fun AND tedious. So... adults behaving badly(i.e. sex) is going on and I'm going "Tsk, tsk". Funny... The author's wordiness and tendency to digress into opinionated essays(his voice or is the narrator someone "else"?) can get a bit distracting. These are well written and interesting but it's a 1200 page book!
- there's that "handful of dust" again...
And onward... slowly... We finally have a time marker: the second decade of the 20th century which was about what I figured. The Great War has not been mentioned so we're either in the early teens or near 1920 and everyone has forgotten about it or wasn't involved. Mentions Chesil Beach... Perhaps McEwan's book was a tribute.
Back to reading after a three-day work weekend. The inhabitants of G'bury continue to walk about in the nighttime; an interesting habit.
As the story develops John becomes less and less sympathetic. A self-absorbed a-hole. Mary seems to be wasting her time with him but what are the options? I'm wondering if the author is in sympathy with M. Arnold and "Dover Beach". Emotionally if not specifically religious. Powys seems to be more of a pagan...
New characters are introduced on p. 420. Lady Rachel and her father Lord P. in particular. The writing always flows and sometimes becomes sublime, as in the digression about moss in Somersetshire. Then the astounding scene of John Geard's arrival at the big party at Mother Legge's. Crazy...
So much for the incredible Pageant and it's sideshows. Beautifully described of course. Funny, crazy, scary, dramatic and touching. I read that John Boorman once wanted to make a movie of this. How about three or four movies? Notes:
- copyright confusion possibly due to a re-write after the libel lawsuit loss. Originally published in the early 30's but my copy says 1967???? Its my understanding that it's easier to prove libel under English law than in the US. Too bad...
- Sam Dekker is a fool. A well-meaning one but still. So's his old man. Both Anglicans...
Now into book(2,3?) in this "year-in-the-life" of Glastonbury. Still not sure what year though. JCP continues with his interesting but distracting philosophical/spiritual asides. Reminds me of Victor Hugo in "Les Miserables". Too much blah-blah but there's still plenty of fascinating stuff going on. I thought there'd be some sex-talk when John and Mary finally consummate but he skips right over it. I guess that was necessary back then.
Arrived at p.700... only 400+ to go! I had to renew the book yesterday. My first time for that in ages!
And now in the home stretch, if you can call almost 300 pages to go a home stretch. Thinking that the author may have the same spiritual distain for industrial progress/environmental destruction as Tolkien. Seems to be implying that there's an essentially feminine quality to the Grail a la' Dan Brown. Notes:
- Rhiannon... taken by the wind... again. The author was fascinated by Welsh mythology.
- Mad Bet's little witchy ritual reminds of "Return of the Native".
- Chesil Beach sea holly supposed to be an aphrodisiac? Did McEwan mention that?
Things are getting heated up now as the author points toward the conclusion. LOTS of stories and characters to deal with though. Will Zoyland and Perse are showing themselves to be a couple of grown-up children. Perse and Lord P.? I don't recall any mention of THAT before. No word from the Mayor lately. I'm sure it's coming. Unfortunately I spoiled the ending a bit by unintentionally uncovering some of it. Oh well...
Almost home... Tilly steps up vis-a-vis Nelly. A great scene, as was the one between Nelly and Philip in the field. Good soap opera...
And done and done finally. My progress was slowed considerably by writing so many vocabulary trivia questions from the book. At the end we get some serious evil-doing and a catastrophe to rival the one at the end of "The Nine Tailors"... stupendous. There were so many characters that the author didn't get to all of them and their status by the end of the book. It's as if he drifted into town with John Crow and drifted out again a year later. What a year! My main complaint about the proceedings was the constant flow of the authors asides about his(evidently) own free-lance spirituality and how it "explains" the Glastonbury doings. Notes:
- To the extent that Sam Dekker embodies at least some aspects of the author's character the Jesus-Grail thing seems silly. Angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. The emotional worrying of the immature and churchy.
- The Tor Hill events a possible premonition of WWI?
- Cybele-Goddess of Nature=The Mother in 1,000 BC Greek religion?
- 4.25* rounds down to 4...
January 8, 2019
ekphrasis
(also ecphrasis)
NOUN
The use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.
I came across this term quite recently, in relation to a contemporary poet. I read one of their poems inspired by a certain painting and had a go at imagining what the painting might look like. Around the same time, I was walking through the newly re-opened Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and discovered two paintings by the Dutch artist Otto Marseus van Schrieck, examples of what the museum called 'sottobosco' - Italian for what we might call the undergrowth.
The paintings, not to mention the tactile bliss of that word, sottobosco, gave me such a delicious thrill that I immediately wondered what might be its literary equivalent. As it happened, I was about to read it.
So many of the elements of JCP's novels are present in van Schrieck's paintings. The naturalist's power of exact description, the erotic and Biblical presence of the serpent, the child's delight in those prancing butterflies, the terraqueous appreciation of fungal and amphibious life, beyond all the ambiguous menace of a lowering sky.
The overall effect is difficult to describe. Powys describes, for example, disembodied messengers of disaster - one of his typical mysticisms - as leaping 'from bog-tussock to bog-tussock', immediately plunging the transcendent into the earthy. He has Sam Dekker, 'Holy Sam,' one of two Christ-like figures, administer an enema to a piles-ridden geriatric before going out to empty the man's chamber pot. He uses the the love-prayers of two kissing-cousins lying together in boat to expound upon the duality of good and evil contained within the First Cause, and how 'human prayers that are offered up at noon are often intercepted by the Sun - for all creative powers are jealous of one another - and those that are offered up at midnight are liable to be waylaid by the Moon in her seasons or by the spirit of some thwarting planet.'
His writing can be rapturous and breathtaking. How else to describe such a sentence as this?: 'One the contrary, the very essence of life is revealed in such fleeting impressions; and in experiences such as these Eternity itself can be heard moaning and weeping, as its Cimmerian waters advance and recede around the lamplit promontories of Time.' Not to mention the page and a half which preceded this culmination. And the book is full of such passages.
On the other hand, and perhaps the reason Powys remains a cult figure, are the patches of truly abysmal dialogue and drama. If Powys can provoke wonder, awe and delight, he fails to stir the more basic responses which any half-decent novel is capable of. No doubt this is an essential part of the way he looks at the world: his characters are so strange, communicated through such obscure bits of their psychology, that their interactions lack dramatic impetus - they don't respond in 'normal' ways to one another, or if they do, Powys is not interested in focussing on it. Of course, we are all stranger and more eccentric than most novels would render us, but we still manage to engage in dialogue with one another which follows a logical through-line. There are pages upon pages of meandering and demotic conversations between the working and underclasses, all rendered phonetically with words like 'thik' and 'girt', not to mention the fun he has in docking 'h's and then adding them were they don't belong. These longeurs can last from 3 to 30 pages, and are frankly worse than the occasional lapses it is common to admonish Victorians like Dickens for.
Not to end this on a low-note. The highs are greater than those achieved by almost any other British novelist I have yet read. My copy of the book is dog-eared and underlined all the way through, as is every other Powys I own. Flaws, or what we perceive as such, are probably an inherent part of true originality, and Powys is nothing if not truly original. Better to take the eccentricity of genius, perhaps, than the second-rate consistencies of mere talent.
(also ecphrasis)
NOUN
The use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.
I came across this term quite recently, in relation to a contemporary poet. I read one of their poems inspired by a certain painting and had a go at imagining what the painting might look like. Around the same time, I was walking through the newly re-opened Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and discovered two paintings by the Dutch artist Otto Marseus van Schrieck, examples of what the museum called 'sottobosco' - Italian for what we might call the undergrowth.
The paintings, not to mention the tactile bliss of that word, sottobosco, gave me such a delicious thrill that I immediately wondered what might be its literary equivalent. As it happened, I was about to read it.
So many of the elements of JCP's novels are present in van Schrieck's paintings. The naturalist's power of exact description, the erotic and Biblical presence of the serpent, the child's delight in those prancing butterflies, the terraqueous appreciation of fungal and amphibious life, beyond all the ambiguous menace of a lowering sky.
The overall effect is difficult to describe. Powys describes, for example, disembodied messengers of disaster - one of his typical mysticisms - as leaping 'from bog-tussock to bog-tussock', immediately plunging the transcendent into the earthy. He has Sam Dekker, 'Holy Sam,' one of two Christ-like figures, administer an enema to a piles-ridden geriatric before going out to empty the man's chamber pot. He uses the the love-prayers of two kissing-cousins lying together in boat to expound upon the duality of good and evil contained within the First Cause, and how 'human prayers that are offered up at noon are often intercepted by the Sun - for all creative powers are jealous of one another - and those that are offered up at midnight are liable to be waylaid by the Moon in her seasons or by the spirit of some thwarting planet.'
His writing can be rapturous and breathtaking. How else to describe such a sentence as this?: 'One the contrary, the very essence of life is revealed in such fleeting impressions; and in experiences such as these Eternity itself can be heard moaning and weeping, as its Cimmerian waters advance and recede around the lamplit promontories of Time.' Not to mention the page and a half which preceded this culmination. And the book is full of such passages.
On the other hand, and perhaps the reason Powys remains a cult figure, are the patches of truly abysmal dialogue and drama. If Powys can provoke wonder, awe and delight, he fails to stir the more basic responses which any half-decent novel is capable of. No doubt this is an essential part of the way he looks at the world: his characters are so strange, communicated through such obscure bits of their psychology, that their interactions lack dramatic impetus - they don't respond in 'normal' ways to one another, or if they do, Powys is not interested in focussing on it. Of course, we are all stranger and more eccentric than most novels would render us, but we still manage to engage in dialogue with one another which follows a logical through-line. There are pages upon pages of meandering and demotic conversations between the working and underclasses, all rendered phonetically with words like 'thik' and 'girt', not to mention the fun he has in docking 'h's and then adding them were they don't belong. These longeurs can last from 3 to 30 pages, and are frankly worse than the occasional lapses it is common to admonish Victorians like Dickens for.
Not to end this on a low-note. The highs are greater than those achieved by almost any other British novelist I have yet read. My copy of the book is dog-eared and underlined all the way through, as is every other Powys I own. Flaws, or what we perceive as such, are probably an inherent part of true originality, and Powys is nothing if not truly original. Better to take the eccentricity of genius, perhaps, than the second-rate consistencies of mere talent.
June 10, 2019
Abandoned on page 188 of 1020 pages (I kid you not). Much excess verbiage. Many unlikeable characters. The sense that the whole thing could have been swiftly and much more effectively handled in 350 or so pages. Life is short, my friends.
July 26, 2023
The lives and affairs (romantic, political, religious) of the auspicious town of Glastonbury's inhabitants, circa 100 years ago - but so, SO much more than that summary suggests. I'm still a more than a little stunned from finishing this last night, so perhaps I'll write some more words on this at another time. For now, here's a pithy little description that may or may not pique your interest:
Imagine the kind late 19th/early 20th c. novel fit to be filmed as a BBC costume drama - y'know, the kind that's full of interpersonal dramas and secretive infidelities, with a Dickensian cast of characters - but one that is not afraid to telescope from the mundane and earthly to the cosmic, the cthonic, and the mythological. Among the cast of characters is Brobdingnagian lay-preacher, a Merlin-obsessed antiquarian who struggles to comprehend his sadistic fantasies, a codependent spinster, a madwoman imbued with a frightful psychic magnetism, and many more eccentric and unique personas.
Breviary stuff, as John Cowper Powys's idol François Rabelais would say.
Imagine the kind late 19th/early 20th c. novel fit to be filmed as a BBC costume drama - y'know, the kind that's full of interpersonal dramas and secretive infidelities, with a Dickensian cast of characters - but one that is not afraid to telescope from the mundane and earthly to the cosmic, the cthonic, and the mythological. Among the cast of characters is Brobdingnagian lay-preacher, a Merlin-obsessed antiquarian who struggles to comprehend his sadistic fantasies, a codependent spinster, a madwoman imbued with a frightful psychic magnetism, and many more eccentric and unique personas.
Breviary stuff, as John Cowper Powys's idol François Rabelais would say.
July 5, 2022
I have picked away at this magical book for over two years - it was quite the journey. It started out as my summer porch read, then became a nightstand read (which is never a good idea with Powys, you really need to focus and be awake to read him.) Then last summer was such a rainy and chilly summer, my porch reading moments were few and far between. This summer, has been fair and nigh perfect for porch reading, and I steamed through the second half of the book without missing a day. It is a thick book, it has a mystical-magic vibe, full of mythologies, and philosophy, and lush with mossy landscapes and ancient stones - Powys, as always, has a way of creating a sense of place that can be quite fragrant right down to someone stepping in dog poo. His full cast of characters are always a delight and even the good can be despicable! Oh, humans!
I had been using a sunflower seed packet for my bookmark throughout the reading, and tore off several pieces of it to mark places of interest that I will revisit when I drop in for a read. My copy is a battered old fellow, a reprint of the English first edition from July 1933 that my Fred gave to me for Christmas a few years back, I still have the label from the wrapping paper inside the front cover along with two pressed four leaf clovers and a five leaf clover! (The summer of 2020 I was finding a lot of these in our yard, we do live on Irish Hill, so...why not find such flora?)
Anyway - I'm only scratching the surface of my thoughts about this book, so please, if you decide to dive into Glastonbury, enjoy it for what it is, it is worth the investment of time to soak it up.
I had been using a sunflower seed packet for my bookmark throughout the reading, and tore off several pieces of it to mark places of interest that I will revisit when I drop in for a read. My copy is a battered old fellow, a reprint of the English first edition from July 1933 that my Fred gave to me for Christmas a few years back, I still have the label from the wrapping paper inside the front cover along with two pressed four leaf clovers and a five leaf clover! (The summer of 2020 I was finding a lot of these in our yard, we do live on Irish Hill, so...why not find such flora?)
Anyway - I'm only scratching the surface of my thoughts about this book, so please, if you decide to dive into Glastonbury, enjoy it for what it is, it is worth the investment of time to soak it up.
April 11, 2021
A monumental book (1120 pages) that took me 3 months to read and knocked me off my reading schedule. Rather than one or two main characters, it has a large caste of characters, including the town and environs of Glastonbury itself. Set in the 1930's, as England is becoming more motorized, there are industrialists and communists, as well as people who are still living a relatively traditional life close to the land. There are adherents of Christianity, believers in the Arthurian legends and Welsh mythology, and atheists. And whether they believe in the legends or not, everyone in the town is aware that Glastonbury is the site of many of those legendary events, as well as the site of a Neolithic lakeside town. The legendary and real history of Glastonbury extends into the present lives of its inhabitants in strange ways. That is partly what the novel is about.
It's not an easy read, which is why it took me so long to get through it. The sentences can be long and abstractly philosophical. I sometimes had trouble keeping track of what was happening in a paragraph because of that. But when Powys focuses on the lives of the human characters, it's magical. His characters are a large collection of men, women, and children from different walks of life, with conflicting agendas (industrialists, communists, traditional farmers, maiden aunts, philandering husbands, unfaithful wives, kissing cousins, messianic town officials, etc). Most of them are real weirdos. Many of them are part of the Crow family, which is in conflict with itself. They are all treated with loving attention by the author, so that you are drawn deeply into their lives and concerns--sometimes against your will.
I mentioned that the town of Glastonbury and its environs is also a character in the story, but there are also other non-human characters, like trees, the sun and moon, lingering consciousness from people who had died in the past, and the First Cause. Another Goodreads reviewer compared them to the gods in Greek myths, which I think is a good way to describe them. The human beings in the story are not necessarily aware of the non-human characters, but they are influential in what happens.
In summary, this is a long, weirdly wonderful book that I feel I barely understood, but I'm glad I persevered and read the whole thing. Bon courage if you decide to take it on.
It's not an easy read, which is why it took me so long to get through it. The sentences can be long and abstractly philosophical. I sometimes had trouble keeping track of what was happening in a paragraph because of that. But when Powys focuses on the lives of the human characters, it's magical. His characters are a large collection of men, women, and children from different walks of life, with conflicting agendas (industrialists, communists, traditional farmers, maiden aunts, philandering husbands, unfaithful wives, kissing cousins, messianic town officials, etc). Most of them are real weirdos. Many of them are part of the Crow family, which is in conflict with itself. They are all treated with loving attention by the author, so that you are drawn deeply into their lives and concerns--sometimes against your will.
I mentioned that the town of Glastonbury and its environs is also a character in the story, but there are also other non-human characters, like trees, the sun and moon, lingering consciousness from people who had died in the past, and the First Cause. Another Goodreads reviewer compared them to the gods in Greek myths, which I think is a good way to describe them. The human beings in the story are not necessarily aware of the non-human characters, but they are influential in what happens.
In summary, this is a long, weirdly wonderful book that I feel I barely understood, but I'm glad I persevered and read the whole thing. Bon courage if you decide to take it on.
January 26, 2017
It is a 'romance' novel as the title suggests. OK, a modernist romance novel that qualifies as literature but one nonetheless. It may be a genre of one.
I can't give the book more than 3 stars because of the 300-400 pages of flab that JCP forces the reader to consume. Does it tie together in the end? No, but that's modernism, too. I was never so emotionally involved in a character or characters to care. There are, of course, bits of this that don't work, which is unavoidable given the ambition.
I can't give the book more than 3 stars because of the 300-400 pages of flab that JCP forces the reader to consume. Does it tie together in the end? No, but that's modernism, too. I was never so emotionally involved in a character or characters to care. There are, of course, bits of this that don't work, which is unavoidable given the ambition.
July 27, 2011
So detailed every page is a novel, every page an exploration of nature. And the best opening ever, full of magic and mysticism
September 6, 2022
Ik begin verslaafd te raken aan de vrijwel onbekende Engelse schrijver John Cowper Powys (1872-1963). Want "Wolf Solent" (1929) vond ik al prachtig, maar "A Glastonbury Romance" (1932) vond ik zelfs nog een klasse genialer. Niet voor niets noemde Vestdijk het "een grandioos boek". Niet voor niets noemde George Steiner het "the only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostojevsky", wat wel heel jubelende lof is, want Dostojevski en Tolstoi waren Steiners ultieme helden. Ook naar mijn smaak is "A Glastonbury Romance" echt een absoluut meesterwerk. Ik snap direct dat het geen allemansboek is: het is 1120 bladzijden dik, het is volgepropt met geloof in magie en in het occulte en bovennatuurlijke, het put wel heel erg uit de sfeer en de motieven van de koning Arthur mythes en de Graal- legendes, en er zijn wel heel veel markante personages en grillige verhaallijnen. Ook is het proza enkele keren nogal bombastisch en soms ook vrij complex. Maar ik snap echt niet dat dit boek en deze schrijver zo onbekend zijn. Bovendien vind ik dat heel jammer. Want er moeten veel meer mensen bestaan die net zoveel uitbundig plezier aan dit boek zouden kunnen beleven als ik.
De eerste alinea van dit boek zet al meteen de toon: "At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railways station and yet beyond the deepest pool of emptiness between the uttermost stellar system one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heigthened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third- class carriage of the twelve- nineteen train from London and the divine- diabolical soul of the First Cause of all life". Een ziel van een vooralsnog naamloze man komt, zonder dat hij dat zelf weet, in aanraking met de ziel van het Numineuze en Goddelijke, en daardoor ontstaat een voor mensenogen nauwelijks te vatten vibratie. Die met nadruk niet met conventionele woorden als "magnetisch" of "spiritueel" wordt benoemd, want daar is die vibratie (die golf, die beweging)"too subliminal" en dus veel te ongrijpbaar voor. En precies door die ongrijpbaarheid is de man in kwestie zich ook nauwelijks van enige vibratie bewust. Alleen de verteller, alwetend als hij is, neemt deze onvatbare trilling waar.
Het numineuze wordt bovendien niet "God" genoemd, en niet als een voorstelbare zij het bovennatuurlijke gestalte voorgesteld, maar heet hier "The First Cause". Wat naar mijn gevoel eerder een naam is die de raadselen vergroot dan een naam die de raadselen verklaart. En dat wordt in mijn beleving nog versterkt door formuleringen als "deepest pool of emptiness", "infinitesimal ripples" en "creative silence". Sommige van mijn favoriete filosofen (zoals Heidegger, maar ook de door Powys bewonderde Nietzsche) benadrukken dat we geen enkel antwoord hebben op de vraag "waarom is er iets, en niet veeleer niets", wat betekent dat ons hele universum geen grijpbaar waarom heeft en geen kenbare oorsprong. En dat de "First Cause" van alle zijnden dus radicaal onbekend is en radicaal anders dan al het geschapene en rationeel kenbare. Ook in de romanwereld van Powys is de wereld volgens mij niet te verklaren en te begrijpen als geschapen door een kenbare God, maar is er een "First Cause" die wij niet kennen en niet bevatten, die een puur hypothetisch karakter heeft en dus niet als feit of gebeurtenis aanwijsbaar is in de tijd, die nog ondoorgrondelijker is en duisterder dan het meest duistere Zwarte Gat, en die zelfs "divine- diabolical" wordt genoemd: een ondoorgrondelijke verknoping van Goed en Kwaad, even verknoopt als de chaotische wereld waarin we leven. Of misschien zelfs alleen een tentatieve benaming van de chaos van krachten en tegenkrachten in ons en rondom ons: het irrationele en onbevattelijke begin van al het irrationele en onbevattelijke dat ons van binnenuit en buitenaf bepaalt.
Cowper Powys appelleert dus sterk aan onze ontvankelijkheid voor het occulte en het magische, iets wat fans van Tolkien of Harry Potter misschien aanspreekt en wat haters van fantasy wellicht juist afstoot. Tegelijk is het wel een andere soort magie: geen toverspreuken die de werkelijkheid beïnvloeden, geen magische wezens (elfen, heksen, tovenaars, draken, monsters) die een herkenbare gestalte krijgen, maar een ongrijpbare elektrische veelvoudigheid die steeds "too subliminal" is om echt te bevatten. Zodat Cowper Powys met al zijn aandacht voor het occulte en magische vooral appelleert aan het onbekende binnen en buiten ons: "The cause of the unseen against the seen" , of de "Challenge to What Is , from the wavering margins of What Might Be". Wellicht is "A Glastonbury Romance" daarom het beste te vergelijken met het het zo fraaie mythisch- magische universum van Mulisch, waarin de wereld ook niet logisch samenhangt maar magisch, en waarin allerlei raadselen zich voordoen en bovendien voortdurend worden uitvergroot of met nieuwe raadsels worden beantwoord. Ook Mulisch' universum is vooral zo intrigerend omdat het door onverklaarbare mythen en magie in beweging wordt gebracht, en door een verbeeldingskracht die de grenzen van het rationele expliciet poogt te overstijgen. Net als het universum (of liever: multiversum) van Powys. Maar Powys' magische universum (multiversum) is veel grilliger dan dat van Mulisch, veel intenser, veel pluriformer, beduidend minder cerebraal, veel duisterder en irrationeler. En naar mijn smaak ook nog rijker en nog meeslepender.
Plaats van handeling is de West- Engelse stad Glastonbury, ongeveer begin jaren 30 van de vorige eeuw. Die stad heeft een "personality of its own", zoals elke stad zijn eigen sfeer of aura of ziel heeft. En de ziel van Glastonbury is doordesemd van allerlei religieuze strevingen en woelingen uit zeer oude tijden: sporen van mythen en legenden, Keltische boouwwerken of ruïnes daarvan, oud- Christelijke symbolen, enzovoort. Het is een "reservoir of world magic", een voorraadschuur van symbolen en vervaagde sporen uit meerdere wonderbaarlijke religies, en soms trillen die symbolen en sporen door in het moderne leven. Bijvoorbeeld omdat "iets" sommige mensen doet denken aan de Graal- legende of de Arthur- verhalen, waarin - volgens oude geschriften althans- Glastonbury een belangrijke rol in had. Of omdat het aandachtig kijken naar oeroude stenen of gebouwen, die ooit als bezield golden, de mensen weer iets laten voelen van die oeroude bezieling of van het geloof daarin. In het mythisch- magische wereldbeeld van Cowper Powys kunnen gedachten en religieuze aanvechtingen, of uiterst subtiele trillingen van de "First Cause", zelfs ook eeuwen na dato nog tot leven komen in een object of in onbewuste impulsen van een persoon. Bovendien, in Glastonbury wordt een grootse "Pageant" georganiseerd, een groots schouwtoneel vol Christelijke en Keltische mythen dat alle oude mythische glorie van Glastonbury weer levend maakt en dat zelfs onverwachte nieuwe vormen van mystieke beleving mogelijk moet maken. Alles in Glastonbury zindert dus van magie en wonderbaarlijke mythen. Dat, en de persoonlijke ontvankelijkheid die sommige van de personages hebben, maakt vele wonderbaarlijke ervaringen mogelijk. Ervaringen die Cowper Powys met meesterlijke diepgang en kleurenrijkdom beschrijft.
Schitterend daaraan vind ik vooral de enorme diversiteit en ongrijpbaarheid van die ervaringen, de wijze waarop die ervaringen altijd weer nieuwe onbeantwoordbare vragen en twijfels oproepen, en de onvoorspelbaarheid ervan. Zo is de eerste die een bovenzinnelijk visioen heeft John Crow, een hedonistische man die juist uitermate sceptisch is over al het goddelijke en bovenzinnelijke Wat hij ziet -of in een hallucinatie meent te zien- is bovendien op zijn zachtst gezegd onverwacht: de aanblik van "a dead cat whose distended belly, almost devoid of fur, presented itself, together with two paws and a shapeless head that was one desperate grin of despair, to the mockery of the sunshine". Mede daardoor wordt John Crow geraakt door een "diabolical twinge of mental and even physical misery" een een "strange vibration of malignant revolt against the whole panorama of earth- life". En precies in die uiterst negatieve stemming ziet hij hoe het magische zwaard Excalibur - hetzelfde magische zwaard dat koning Arthur vertwijfeld zou hebben weggeworpen vlak voor zijn dood- als in een schitterend visioen verschijnt en dan verzinkt in de modder van de Brue.... John Crow is totaal flabbergasted en weet de betekenis hiervan niet te duiden. Hij ziet dit visioen zonder te begrijpen en te geloven wat hij ziet, en tot in het diepste van zijn wezen doorvoelt. Ook de lezer weet niet welke symbolische betekenis deze wonderbaarlijke passage zou kunnen of moeten hebben. Of liever, hij ervaart verschillende mogelijke betekenissen en weet niet welke te kiezen. Gaat het hier inderdaad om een reïncarnatie van Koning Arthur, of om een geheel ander verschijnsel dat alleen maar met koning Arthur en Excalibur wordt geassocieerd? Is het wegwerpen van het sublieme zwaard in de smerige en laag bij de grondse modder een bevestiging van Crows "vibration of malignant revolt" tegen de hele schepping, omdat het laat zien hoe al het grootse door modder wordt versmoord? Staat de Brue symbool voor het aardse leven dat al het hogere opslokt? Of heeft de Brue, die modderige rivier, nog heel veel andere geheimen, en is het weggeworpen zwaard een soort richtingwijzer naar het oord van die geheimen diep onder water? John Crow weet het niet, de lezer ook niet, en precies dat niet- weten is een essentiële versterking van het toch al zo wonderbaarlijke karakter van dit visioen.
En zo zit "A Glastonbury Romance" vol van wonderbaarlijkheden die hun geheimen niet ontsluiten. Wonderbaarlijkheden die bovendien veel meer zijn dan simpele en rechtlijnige hervertellingen of herbelevingen van Keltische of Christelijke mythen. In die ervaringen proef je als lezer soms wel de sporen of echo's van Graal- legendes, van het Christus- verhaal of van het Arthur- verhaal. Maar ze wijken altijd op essentiële punten van die oervoorbeelden af, waardoor ze altijd verrassend zijn en uniek, en vol van nieuwe raadselachtigheden. Bovendien is deze roman ongelofelijk pluriform en polyfoon: eerder een mythisch en magisch multiversum dan een universum. Want we volgen tientallen wonderbaarlijke personages, door het oog van een alwetende maar soms voor raadselen staande verteller, en al die personages zijn een mythische en magische wereld op zich. Zodat je via de verteller van het ene personage naar het andere surft, en daarmee van de ene magische binnenwereld en buitenwereld naar de andere. Daardoor vergaapt de lezer zich niet alleen aan een onuitputtelijke veelheid van verschillende universums, maar ook aan de talrijke contrasten en verschillen tussen die universums en de soms bizarre wijze waarop ze elkaar toch even raken. En dat terwijl elke verhaallijn en elk personage al bol staat van de raadselachtige onbewuste vibraties, die alleen de verteller kan zien of vermoeden: die verteller ziet als door een microscoop elke minuscule verandering in het onbewuste van zijn personages, en elke interactie tussen dat onbewuste en een nauwelijks waarneembare verandering (een windvlaag, een insect, de flard van een gedachte van een spook) in de buitenwereld. Soms lijkt Powys door zijn enorme gevoel voor schakeringen en details wel de Engelse en mythisch- magische versie van Proust. Dat maakt zijn multiversum ongelofelijk rijk: het is niet de schets van één magische en rijk geschakeerde wereld, maar de evocatie van heel veel zulke werelden. En daardoor staat de queeste in "A Glastonbury Romance" niet in het teken van één Heilige Graal en één Ultieme Waarheid, zoals je bij een queeste zou verwachten, maar in het teken van een ongelofelijk rijkgeschakeerde variëteit van wonderbaarlijkheden en raadselen.
Bovendien staat Powys' multiversum werkelijk bol van extatische gevoelsintensiteiten. Bijvoorbeeld door de diverse heftige ervaringen van het wonderbaarlijke of juist van totale vertwijfeling aan het geloof. Of van de heftige schok van het nieuwe en alles omver werpende die de ervaring van het wonderbaarlijke met zich meebrengt. Maar ook door de vele lange en prachtige passages over erotiek en seksualiteit, waarin op werkelijk prachtige wijze de rol bezongen wordt van de verbeeldingskracht - want de verbeelding die alles transformeert vermenigvuldigt de intensiteit van elke seksuele met factor 10- en waarin geliefden elkaar in trilling brengen, door de hen omringende natuur in extase worden gebracht, en hun eigen vibraties en energiestromen weer laten doortrillen in de natuur. Ik ken weinig boeken met zulke aanstekelijke erotische passages: aanstekelijk omdat Powys gewoon een enorm talent daarvoor heeft, maar ook omdat hij er met zijn mythisch- magische verbeelding een glans aan geeft die je bij andere schrijvers zelden ziet.
Daarnaast echter is hij ook ongelofelijk goed in het voelbaar maken van existentiële en peilloos diepe vertwijfeling. En van een diepe existentiële waanzin die minstens zo intens is als bij Dostojevski, een van Powys' grote voorbeelden. Vooral het ongelofelijke personage Owen Evans belichaamt dat: iemand die voortdurend worstelt met de ongekend heftige sadistische en moordlustige aanvechtingen in de diepten van zijn gemoed, iemand die zich uit pure innerllijke verscheurdheid en wanhopige hoop op verlossing zogenaamd als Christus laat kruisigen tijdens de grootse "Pageant" in Glastonbury, iemand die zijns ondanks helemaal wordt meegesleept door de moordlustige waanzin van de krankzinnige Mad Bet en van de bezeten Finn Toller. Door dat alles bereikt hij de absolute bodem van de wroeging, net als Raskolnikov in "Misdaad en straf". Maar anders dan Raskolnikov vindt hij geen verlossing, ook niet door wroeging en intens boete doen. Dat is in Powys' multiversum kennelijk niet toereikend. Het magisch- mythische gehalte van Powys' taal geeft tevens zelfs extra scherpte aan de vertwijfeling. Want bij Powys is er geen troostende en goedgunstige God, maar alleen een "First Cause" met een 'divine- diabolical soul". Het in Evans woekerende kwaad krijgt bovendien de mythisch- magische gestalte van een innerlijke "worm snake" die vol seksuele lust kronkelt door de moordfantasieën van Finn Toller. In zijn adembenemde passages over Owen Evans lijkt Powys kortom soms een soort Dostojevski 2.0. Dat is hij ook als hij de waanzin van Mad Bet voelbaar maakt, of de ongeremde pijnkreten van de dodelijk zieke Tittie Petherton, of in de passages over een personage dat zelfmoord wil begaan juist om het leven in zijn allerlaatste overgangsmomenten ten diepste te kunnen proeven. En eveneens in sommige passages over Sam Dekker, de Christus- zoeker die in een werkelijk schitterend beschreven visioen de Heilige Graal meent te zien. Tot zijn eigen verbijsterde ongeloof. Maar bodemloos is daarna de ontdekking hoe onmededeelbaar die ervaring is, en hoe irrelevant anderen hem vinden. En dan gaat dat Graal-visioen ook nog eens gepaard met de gewaarwording van "the final desperate cry of humanity to the crushing, torturing universe that had given it birth" en met de "hope beyond hope" dat "Something somewhere" in staat zal zijn "to smash to atoms this torturing chain of Cause and Effect". Wat in het verlengde ligt van Sam Dekkers koortsachtige, meeslepend beredeneerde maar vergeefse hoop dat Christus de totale negatie vertegenwoordigt van God en zijn Orde. Nee, zo vertwijfeld als Owen Evans is Sam Dekker zeker niet. Maar ook zijn geloofsvragen peilen het mysterie tot op de bodem, en tot op het bot. En ook hij lijkt soms een Dostojevski- personage, dat zich vol intense hartstocht onderdompelt in de raadselen van het bestaan. Raadselen die Powy's ook nog eens uitvergroot, door het mythisch- magische gehalte en de chaotische pluriformiteit van zijn multiversum. Want juist dat mythisch- magische nodigt nog sterker uit om Dostojevskiaanse speculatieve vragen te stellen over oorsprong en doel van de wereld. En juist die pluriformiteit onderstreept nog eens te meer dat er nooit één enkel antwoord kan bestaan.
Ik vind "A Glastonbury Romance" kortom een verbluffend en grandioos multiversum, door zijn enorme gevoelsintensiteiten en door de wijze waarop die gevoelsintensiteiten nog versterkt worden door Powys' fenomenale mythisch- magische verbeeldingskracht. Ook is hij werkelijk een crack in het carnavaleske schrijven: in het oproepen van werelden die magisch en verheven zijn en tegelijk vol van platheid en lage driften, in het evoceren van personages die het sublieme belichamen maar tegelijk ook het oerbelachelijke en karikaturale, of in het beschrijven van visioenen die glimpen lijken te bieden op iets Goddelijks terwijl ze tegelijk alle goddelijkheid bespotten en parodiëren. Met andere woorden: ik vind het een meesterwerk. Powys' boeken zijn nauwelijks meer te krijgen, maar via internet heb ik toch een aantal van zijn andere highlights besteld. Die ga ik binnenkort allemaal lezen. Ook "A Glastonbury Romance" lees ik over een paar jaar wellicht opnieuw. Wat een formidabel boek. Wat een fenomenale schrijver.
De eerste alinea van dit boek zet al meteen de toon: "At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railways station and yet beyond the deepest pool of emptiness between the uttermost stellar system one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heigthened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third- class carriage of the twelve- nineteen train from London and the divine- diabolical soul of the First Cause of all life". Een ziel van een vooralsnog naamloze man komt, zonder dat hij dat zelf weet, in aanraking met de ziel van het Numineuze en Goddelijke, en daardoor ontstaat een voor mensenogen nauwelijks te vatten vibratie. Die met nadruk niet met conventionele woorden als "magnetisch" of "spiritueel" wordt benoemd, want daar is die vibratie (die golf, die beweging)"too subliminal" en dus veel te ongrijpbaar voor. En precies door die ongrijpbaarheid is de man in kwestie zich ook nauwelijks van enige vibratie bewust. Alleen de verteller, alwetend als hij is, neemt deze onvatbare trilling waar.
Het numineuze wordt bovendien niet "God" genoemd, en niet als een voorstelbare zij het bovennatuurlijke gestalte voorgesteld, maar heet hier "The First Cause". Wat naar mijn gevoel eerder een naam is die de raadselen vergroot dan een naam die de raadselen verklaart. En dat wordt in mijn beleving nog versterkt door formuleringen als "deepest pool of emptiness", "infinitesimal ripples" en "creative silence". Sommige van mijn favoriete filosofen (zoals Heidegger, maar ook de door Powys bewonderde Nietzsche) benadrukken dat we geen enkel antwoord hebben op de vraag "waarom is er iets, en niet veeleer niets", wat betekent dat ons hele universum geen grijpbaar waarom heeft en geen kenbare oorsprong. En dat de "First Cause" van alle zijnden dus radicaal onbekend is en radicaal anders dan al het geschapene en rationeel kenbare. Ook in de romanwereld van Powys is de wereld volgens mij niet te verklaren en te begrijpen als geschapen door een kenbare God, maar is er een "First Cause" die wij niet kennen en niet bevatten, die een puur hypothetisch karakter heeft en dus niet als feit of gebeurtenis aanwijsbaar is in de tijd, die nog ondoorgrondelijker is en duisterder dan het meest duistere Zwarte Gat, en die zelfs "divine- diabolical" wordt genoemd: een ondoorgrondelijke verknoping van Goed en Kwaad, even verknoopt als de chaotische wereld waarin we leven. Of misschien zelfs alleen een tentatieve benaming van de chaos van krachten en tegenkrachten in ons en rondom ons: het irrationele en onbevattelijke begin van al het irrationele en onbevattelijke dat ons van binnenuit en buitenaf bepaalt.
Cowper Powys appelleert dus sterk aan onze ontvankelijkheid voor het occulte en het magische, iets wat fans van Tolkien of Harry Potter misschien aanspreekt en wat haters van fantasy wellicht juist afstoot. Tegelijk is het wel een andere soort magie: geen toverspreuken die de werkelijkheid beïnvloeden, geen magische wezens (elfen, heksen, tovenaars, draken, monsters) die een herkenbare gestalte krijgen, maar een ongrijpbare elektrische veelvoudigheid die steeds "too subliminal" is om echt te bevatten. Zodat Cowper Powys met al zijn aandacht voor het occulte en magische vooral appelleert aan het onbekende binnen en buiten ons: "The cause of the unseen against the seen" , of de "Challenge to What Is , from the wavering margins of What Might Be". Wellicht is "A Glastonbury Romance" daarom het beste te vergelijken met het het zo fraaie mythisch- magische universum van Mulisch, waarin de wereld ook niet logisch samenhangt maar magisch, en waarin allerlei raadselen zich voordoen en bovendien voortdurend worden uitvergroot of met nieuwe raadsels worden beantwoord. Ook Mulisch' universum is vooral zo intrigerend omdat het door onverklaarbare mythen en magie in beweging wordt gebracht, en door een verbeeldingskracht die de grenzen van het rationele expliciet poogt te overstijgen. Net als het universum (of liever: multiversum) van Powys. Maar Powys' magische universum (multiversum) is veel grilliger dan dat van Mulisch, veel intenser, veel pluriformer, beduidend minder cerebraal, veel duisterder en irrationeler. En naar mijn smaak ook nog rijker en nog meeslepender.
Plaats van handeling is de West- Engelse stad Glastonbury, ongeveer begin jaren 30 van de vorige eeuw. Die stad heeft een "personality of its own", zoals elke stad zijn eigen sfeer of aura of ziel heeft. En de ziel van Glastonbury is doordesemd van allerlei religieuze strevingen en woelingen uit zeer oude tijden: sporen van mythen en legenden, Keltische boouwwerken of ruïnes daarvan, oud- Christelijke symbolen, enzovoort. Het is een "reservoir of world magic", een voorraadschuur van symbolen en vervaagde sporen uit meerdere wonderbaarlijke religies, en soms trillen die symbolen en sporen door in het moderne leven. Bijvoorbeeld omdat "iets" sommige mensen doet denken aan de Graal- legende of de Arthur- verhalen, waarin - volgens oude geschriften althans- Glastonbury een belangrijke rol in had. Of omdat het aandachtig kijken naar oeroude stenen of gebouwen, die ooit als bezield golden, de mensen weer iets laten voelen van die oeroude bezieling of van het geloof daarin. In het mythisch- magische wereldbeeld van Cowper Powys kunnen gedachten en religieuze aanvechtingen, of uiterst subtiele trillingen van de "First Cause", zelfs ook eeuwen na dato nog tot leven komen in een object of in onbewuste impulsen van een persoon. Bovendien, in Glastonbury wordt een grootse "Pageant" georganiseerd, een groots schouwtoneel vol Christelijke en Keltische mythen dat alle oude mythische glorie van Glastonbury weer levend maakt en dat zelfs onverwachte nieuwe vormen van mystieke beleving mogelijk moet maken. Alles in Glastonbury zindert dus van magie en wonderbaarlijke mythen. Dat, en de persoonlijke ontvankelijkheid die sommige van de personages hebben, maakt vele wonderbaarlijke ervaringen mogelijk. Ervaringen die Cowper Powys met meesterlijke diepgang en kleurenrijkdom beschrijft.
Schitterend daaraan vind ik vooral de enorme diversiteit en ongrijpbaarheid van die ervaringen, de wijze waarop die ervaringen altijd weer nieuwe onbeantwoordbare vragen en twijfels oproepen, en de onvoorspelbaarheid ervan. Zo is de eerste die een bovenzinnelijk visioen heeft John Crow, een hedonistische man die juist uitermate sceptisch is over al het goddelijke en bovenzinnelijke Wat hij ziet -of in een hallucinatie meent te zien- is bovendien op zijn zachtst gezegd onverwacht: de aanblik van "a dead cat whose distended belly, almost devoid of fur, presented itself, together with two paws and a shapeless head that was one desperate grin of despair, to the mockery of the sunshine". Mede daardoor wordt John Crow geraakt door een "diabolical twinge of mental and even physical misery" een een "strange vibration of malignant revolt against the whole panorama of earth- life". En precies in die uiterst negatieve stemming ziet hij hoe het magische zwaard Excalibur - hetzelfde magische zwaard dat koning Arthur vertwijfeld zou hebben weggeworpen vlak voor zijn dood- als in een schitterend visioen verschijnt en dan verzinkt in de modder van de Brue.... John Crow is totaal flabbergasted en weet de betekenis hiervan niet te duiden. Hij ziet dit visioen zonder te begrijpen en te geloven wat hij ziet, en tot in het diepste van zijn wezen doorvoelt. Ook de lezer weet niet welke symbolische betekenis deze wonderbaarlijke passage zou kunnen of moeten hebben. Of liever, hij ervaart verschillende mogelijke betekenissen en weet niet welke te kiezen. Gaat het hier inderdaad om een reïncarnatie van Koning Arthur, of om een geheel ander verschijnsel dat alleen maar met koning Arthur en Excalibur wordt geassocieerd? Is het wegwerpen van het sublieme zwaard in de smerige en laag bij de grondse modder een bevestiging van Crows "vibration of malignant revolt" tegen de hele schepping, omdat het laat zien hoe al het grootse door modder wordt versmoord? Staat de Brue symbool voor het aardse leven dat al het hogere opslokt? Of heeft de Brue, die modderige rivier, nog heel veel andere geheimen, en is het weggeworpen zwaard een soort richtingwijzer naar het oord van die geheimen diep onder water? John Crow weet het niet, de lezer ook niet, en precies dat niet- weten is een essentiële versterking van het toch al zo wonderbaarlijke karakter van dit visioen.
En zo zit "A Glastonbury Romance" vol van wonderbaarlijkheden die hun geheimen niet ontsluiten. Wonderbaarlijkheden die bovendien veel meer zijn dan simpele en rechtlijnige hervertellingen of herbelevingen van Keltische of Christelijke mythen. In die ervaringen proef je als lezer soms wel de sporen of echo's van Graal- legendes, van het Christus- verhaal of van het Arthur- verhaal. Maar ze wijken altijd op essentiële punten van die oervoorbeelden af, waardoor ze altijd verrassend zijn en uniek, en vol van nieuwe raadselachtigheden. Bovendien is deze roman ongelofelijk pluriform en polyfoon: eerder een mythisch en magisch multiversum dan een universum. Want we volgen tientallen wonderbaarlijke personages, door het oog van een alwetende maar soms voor raadselen staande verteller, en al die personages zijn een mythische en magische wereld op zich. Zodat je via de verteller van het ene personage naar het andere surft, en daarmee van de ene magische binnenwereld en buitenwereld naar de andere. Daardoor vergaapt de lezer zich niet alleen aan een onuitputtelijke veelheid van verschillende universums, maar ook aan de talrijke contrasten en verschillen tussen die universums en de soms bizarre wijze waarop ze elkaar toch even raken. En dat terwijl elke verhaallijn en elk personage al bol staat van de raadselachtige onbewuste vibraties, die alleen de verteller kan zien of vermoeden: die verteller ziet als door een microscoop elke minuscule verandering in het onbewuste van zijn personages, en elke interactie tussen dat onbewuste en een nauwelijks waarneembare verandering (een windvlaag, een insect, de flard van een gedachte van een spook) in de buitenwereld. Soms lijkt Powys door zijn enorme gevoel voor schakeringen en details wel de Engelse en mythisch- magische versie van Proust. Dat maakt zijn multiversum ongelofelijk rijk: het is niet de schets van één magische en rijk geschakeerde wereld, maar de evocatie van heel veel zulke werelden. En daardoor staat de queeste in "A Glastonbury Romance" niet in het teken van één Heilige Graal en één Ultieme Waarheid, zoals je bij een queeste zou verwachten, maar in het teken van een ongelofelijk rijkgeschakeerde variëteit van wonderbaarlijkheden en raadselen.
Bovendien staat Powys' multiversum werkelijk bol van extatische gevoelsintensiteiten. Bijvoorbeeld door de diverse heftige ervaringen van het wonderbaarlijke of juist van totale vertwijfeling aan het geloof. Of van de heftige schok van het nieuwe en alles omver werpende die de ervaring van het wonderbaarlijke met zich meebrengt. Maar ook door de vele lange en prachtige passages over erotiek en seksualiteit, waarin op werkelijk prachtige wijze de rol bezongen wordt van de verbeeldingskracht - want de verbeelding die alles transformeert vermenigvuldigt de intensiteit van elke seksuele met factor 10- en waarin geliefden elkaar in trilling brengen, door de hen omringende natuur in extase worden gebracht, en hun eigen vibraties en energiestromen weer laten doortrillen in de natuur. Ik ken weinig boeken met zulke aanstekelijke erotische passages: aanstekelijk omdat Powys gewoon een enorm talent daarvoor heeft, maar ook omdat hij er met zijn mythisch- magische verbeelding een glans aan geeft die je bij andere schrijvers zelden ziet.
Daarnaast echter is hij ook ongelofelijk goed in het voelbaar maken van existentiële en peilloos diepe vertwijfeling. En van een diepe existentiële waanzin die minstens zo intens is als bij Dostojevski, een van Powys' grote voorbeelden. Vooral het ongelofelijke personage Owen Evans belichaamt dat: iemand die voortdurend worstelt met de ongekend heftige sadistische en moordlustige aanvechtingen in de diepten van zijn gemoed, iemand die zich uit pure innerllijke verscheurdheid en wanhopige hoop op verlossing zogenaamd als Christus laat kruisigen tijdens de grootse "Pageant" in Glastonbury, iemand die zijns ondanks helemaal wordt meegesleept door de moordlustige waanzin van de krankzinnige Mad Bet en van de bezeten Finn Toller. Door dat alles bereikt hij de absolute bodem van de wroeging, net als Raskolnikov in "Misdaad en straf". Maar anders dan Raskolnikov vindt hij geen verlossing, ook niet door wroeging en intens boete doen. Dat is in Powys' multiversum kennelijk niet toereikend. Het magisch- mythische gehalte van Powys' taal geeft tevens zelfs extra scherpte aan de vertwijfeling. Want bij Powys is er geen troostende en goedgunstige God, maar alleen een "First Cause" met een 'divine- diabolical soul". Het in Evans woekerende kwaad krijgt bovendien de mythisch- magische gestalte van een innerlijke "worm snake" die vol seksuele lust kronkelt door de moordfantasieën van Finn Toller. In zijn adembenemde passages over Owen Evans lijkt Powys kortom soms een soort Dostojevski 2.0. Dat is hij ook als hij de waanzin van Mad Bet voelbaar maakt, of de ongeremde pijnkreten van de dodelijk zieke Tittie Petherton, of in de passages over een personage dat zelfmoord wil begaan juist om het leven in zijn allerlaatste overgangsmomenten ten diepste te kunnen proeven. En eveneens in sommige passages over Sam Dekker, de Christus- zoeker die in een werkelijk schitterend beschreven visioen de Heilige Graal meent te zien. Tot zijn eigen verbijsterde ongeloof. Maar bodemloos is daarna de ontdekking hoe onmededeelbaar die ervaring is, en hoe irrelevant anderen hem vinden. En dan gaat dat Graal-visioen ook nog eens gepaard met de gewaarwording van "the final desperate cry of humanity to the crushing, torturing universe that had given it birth" en met de "hope beyond hope" dat "Something somewhere" in staat zal zijn "to smash to atoms this torturing chain of Cause and Effect". Wat in het verlengde ligt van Sam Dekkers koortsachtige, meeslepend beredeneerde maar vergeefse hoop dat Christus de totale negatie vertegenwoordigt van God en zijn Orde. Nee, zo vertwijfeld als Owen Evans is Sam Dekker zeker niet. Maar ook zijn geloofsvragen peilen het mysterie tot op de bodem, en tot op het bot. En ook hij lijkt soms een Dostojevski- personage, dat zich vol intense hartstocht onderdompelt in de raadselen van het bestaan. Raadselen die Powy's ook nog eens uitvergroot, door het mythisch- magische gehalte en de chaotische pluriformiteit van zijn multiversum. Want juist dat mythisch- magische nodigt nog sterker uit om Dostojevskiaanse speculatieve vragen te stellen over oorsprong en doel van de wereld. En juist die pluriformiteit onderstreept nog eens te meer dat er nooit één enkel antwoord kan bestaan.
Ik vind "A Glastonbury Romance" kortom een verbluffend en grandioos multiversum, door zijn enorme gevoelsintensiteiten en door de wijze waarop die gevoelsintensiteiten nog versterkt worden door Powys' fenomenale mythisch- magische verbeeldingskracht. Ook is hij werkelijk een crack in het carnavaleske schrijven: in het oproepen van werelden die magisch en verheven zijn en tegelijk vol van platheid en lage driften, in het evoceren van personages die het sublieme belichamen maar tegelijk ook het oerbelachelijke en karikaturale, of in het beschrijven van visioenen die glimpen lijken te bieden op iets Goddelijks terwijl ze tegelijk alle goddelijkheid bespotten en parodiëren. Met andere woorden: ik vind het een meesterwerk. Powys' boeken zijn nauwelijks meer te krijgen, maar via internet heb ik toch een aantal van zijn andere highlights besteld. Die ga ik binnenkort allemaal lezen. Ook "A Glastonbury Romance" lees ik over een paar jaar wellicht opnieuw. Wat een formidabel boek. Wat een fenomenale schrijver.
November 25, 2023
A huge book in which a number of members of a Norfolk family wind up in Glastonbury where there are culture wars between a capitalist businessman, various left-wing would-be revolutionaries, and a lay preacher and faith-healer with miraculous powers.
E M Forster, in Appendix A of Aspects of the Novel, says “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” A Glastonbury Romance is supposed to have half a million words in it; my print copy ran to 1120 pages. Writing something of that length is a considerable achievement and testimony to the endurance of the author. But AGR is not on my list of great literature.
In 2006, Margaret Drabble wrote in the Guardian that "Words poured from him, and he was famous for never rereading any of them." I think this shows. The reader (and, I suspect, the writer) is overwhelmed by the flood of words. Some readers say they loved that feeling of inundation, that they abandoned themselves to it and luxuriated in it. I just felt suffocated.
It is written in the past tense with an omniscient point of view, head-hopping through the consciousnesses of the characters, including insects.
There is a huge cast of characters, from all social levels, though most of the lower-class characters seem to be there principally to create entertainment and background colour. To call the characters Dickensian is both accurate and a back-handed compliment. Most characters are eccentric and can be described quite easily. For example, Owen Evans is obsessed with Merlin but also has sado-masochistic fantasies which he finds difficult to suppress. Philip Crow is a one-dimensional businessman intent on making money and obsessed with his cousin's wife. Many of the principal male characters (John Crow, Sam Dekker, Owen Evans, Mayor Geard) have extensive spiritual lives, although their spirituality seems to be different aspects of the same thing, making them both distinct from one another and somehow weirdly similar. The women are fundamentally concerned with attracting a male (although there are several lesbians) and keeping house. Voice is used to distinguish social classes rather than individuals. Opportunities to develop characters were routinely missed. For example, John has spent years living on his wits in Paris and is described as having a rather wolf-like nature but when he gets to Glastonbury he settles down, gets a job and gets married and his distinctive personality seems to merge in with the others. I suspect that it is not possible, even over 1120 pages, for an author to properly explore characters when there are so many of them.
I was desperately disappointed by the plot. Two of the major plot developments are the creation of a commune in Glastonbury and the murder of one of the main characters. Both of these rely on characters and spring into action only in the last third of the book, as if they are afterthoughts. Most of the book therefore seems to be preamble. There was little feeling of structure. Even Margaret Drabble says "the plot rambles".
There is an awful lot of mystical clap-trap, such as: "It is a natural fact that there Two Twilights are propitious to psychic intercourse with the First Cause while other hours are malignant and baleful." (Ch 2). This, to be fair, seems to be the catnip that generates many of the five star reviews. JCP sets the tone from the first sentence: "At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred with a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar system one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occurs when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe." (Ch 1) There's a lot of this sort of thing, both in terms of its long-windedness and it's mysticism: scarcely any of the principal characters can perform any action without a vast amount of soul-searching in terms often as obscure as this. In the end I agreed with Ned Athling when he said "I feel somehow ... as if all these Grail stories, all this mediaeval mysticism, had grown tiresome and antiquated." (Ch 17)
Several of the characters have mystical experiences. John Crow has a vision of Excalibur being flung from Pomparles Bridge. Sam Dekker has a vision of the Grail coupled with a sensation of a spear being thrust into his bowels ... which makes him either Jesus on the Cross of, more likely, the Fisher King. Other Christ-like figures include Owen Evans who apparently dies when enacting crucifixion during the Pageant but revives at the hospital and Geard who is a faith-healer, curing cancer and raising from the dead, who finally sacrifices his life for another, dying while clinging to an aeroplane which has a cross-like shape.
There is the usual 1930s assumption that racial characteristics are innate and eternal. John says: "we Crows are plain sea-faring Danes ... We haven't the goodness of the Saxon, not the power of the Norman, not the imagination of the Celt." (Ch 2) Later we are told: "Though Lord P's bastard had never sailed the sea, his Norse ancestors had, and that manner of life lay deep in his blood." (Ch 26) Enduring (in this case for more than thirty generations) racial consciousness might have been fashionable then but it nowadays sounds racist and eugenicist.
JCP has a lot of fun with regional accents, although only servants and other working-class people speak like that normally: "There do come to I, of nights, the shaky-shivers, as ye might say, when, as I lies awake in thik girt white ward, where thro' they cold windies be blowin' every draught of Heaven; and I do hear they ghosties come out of they Ruings, brother, and go whush, whush, whush over all the roofs, and I feel, for sure, that some girt change be coming over this town." (Ch 13)
There's a lot of sex, although it is sometimes difficult to be sure exactly what is going on. The phrase 'make love' didn't, in those days, refer to full sexual intercourse; when two lads sleep together that doesn't necessarily mean they are having sex, even when they have both previously been described as having a crush on another male character. Many characters are, apparently, chaste even after they appear to have had sex. Thus John and Mary 'make love' almost from the start but she is unbedded even after marriage, for a few days at least. Sam Dekker's goings on with married Nell have scandalised the neighbourhood but they don't have sex till much later. Nevertheless, sex is omnipresent and acknowledged. Nell's husband Will suggests that they live with Sam as a menage a trois. Mrs Legge rents out rooms to unmarried couples. Philip has an illegitimate child and sleeps with his married cousin Persephone (who in turn has a lesbian affair and then an affair with Will) and Tom Barter has a string of conquests among the servant class before impregnating Tossie.
Somehow the attitude to sex seems typified by Sam Dekker who enjoys his (only?) sexual experience with Nell so much that he decides not only to abandon her and the child he has fathered but also to forswear sex for the rest of his life and become a sort of saint.
Punctuating all the spiritual stuff is everyday life including mountains of bread and butter and oceans of tea. One aspect of JCP's work that I admired was the way his characters perform strange little actions, the sort of thing that we all do in our everyday lives, moments of subconsciousness, such as when the reverend, at the moment that his son leaves home, picks up a dead fish from his aquarium and "raising it to his nostrils, sniffed at it with inquisitive interest!" (Ch 28) This is a moment of surreal nonsense but it suddenly lends verisimilitude to the whole scene.
One thing I didn't admire was JCP's prolific use of exclamation marks. He obviously thinks they add tension. He also uses italics a lot to mark the key moments of a thought or speech ... which is at least useful given that they are so many unitalicised words swamping the important ones.
But what do I know? John Cowper Powys was regarded as a great author by novelists as diverse as Henry Miller, Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble. Hermann Hesse admired AGR.
E M Forster, in Appendix A of Aspects of the Novel, says “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” A Glastonbury Romance is supposed to have half a million words in it; my print copy ran to 1120 pages. Writing something of that length is a considerable achievement and testimony to the endurance of the author. But AGR is not on my list of great literature.
In 2006, Margaret Drabble wrote in the Guardian that "Words poured from him, and he was famous for never rereading any of them." I think this shows. The reader (and, I suspect, the writer) is overwhelmed by the flood of words. Some readers say they loved that feeling of inundation, that they abandoned themselves to it and luxuriated in it. I just felt suffocated.
It is written in the past tense with an omniscient point of view, head-hopping through the consciousnesses of the characters, including insects.
There is a huge cast of characters, from all social levels, though most of the lower-class characters seem to be there principally to create entertainment and background colour. To call the characters Dickensian is both accurate and a back-handed compliment. Most characters are eccentric and can be described quite easily. For example, Owen Evans is obsessed with Merlin but also has sado-masochistic fantasies which he finds difficult to suppress. Philip Crow is a one-dimensional businessman intent on making money and obsessed with his cousin's wife. Many of the principal male characters (John Crow, Sam Dekker, Owen Evans, Mayor Geard) have extensive spiritual lives, although their spirituality seems to be different aspects of the same thing, making them both distinct from one another and somehow weirdly similar. The women are fundamentally concerned with attracting a male (although there are several lesbians) and keeping house. Voice is used to distinguish social classes rather than individuals. Opportunities to develop characters were routinely missed. For example, John has spent years living on his wits in Paris and is described as having a rather wolf-like nature but when he gets to Glastonbury he settles down, gets a job and gets married and his distinctive personality seems to merge in with the others. I suspect that it is not possible, even over 1120 pages, for an author to properly explore characters when there are so many of them.
I was desperately disappointed by the plot. Two of the major plot developments are the creation of a commune in Glastonbury and the murder of one of the main characters. Both of these rely on characters and spring into action only in the last third of the book, as if they are afterthoughts. Most of the book therefore seems to be preamble. There was little feeling of structure. Even Margaret Drabble says "the plot rambles".
There is an awful lot of mystical clap-trap, such as: "It is a natural fact that there Two Twilights are propitious to psychic intercourse with the First Cause while other hours are malignant and baleful." (Ch 2). This, to be fair, seems to be the catnip that generates many of the five star reviews. JCP sets the tone from the first sentence: "At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred with a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar system one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occurs when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe." (Ch 1) There's a lot of this sort of thing, both in terms of its long-windedness and it's mysticism: scarcely any of the principal characters can perform any action without a vast amount of soul-searching in terms often as obscure as this. In the end I agreed with Ned Athling when he said "I feel somehow ... as if all these Grail stories, all this mediaeval mysticism, had grown tiresome and antiquated." (Ch 17)
Several of the characters have mystical experiences. John Crow has a vision of Excalibur being flung from Pomparles Bridge. Sam Dekker has a vision of the Grail coupled with a sensation of a spear being thrust into his bowels ... which makes him either Jesus on the Cross of, more likely, the Fisher King. Other Christ-like figures include Owen Evans who apparently dies when enacting crucifixion during the Pageant but revives at the hospital and Geard who is a faith-healer, curing cancer and raising from the dead, who finally sacrifices his life for another, dying while clinging to an aeroplane which has a cross-like shape.
There is the usual 1930s assumption that racial characteristics are innate and eternal. John says: "we Crows are plain sea-faring Danes ... We haven't the goodness of the Saxon, not the power of the Norman, not the imagination of the Celt." (Ch 2) Later we are told: "Though Lord P's bastard had never sailed the sea, his Norse ancestors had, and that manner of life lay deep in his blood." (Ch 26) Enduring (in this case for more than thirty generations) racial consciousness might have been fashionable then but it nowadays sounds racist and eugenicist.
JCP has a lot of fun with regional accents, although only servants and other working-class people speak like that normally: "There do come to I, of nights, the shaky-shivers, as ye might say, when, as I lies awake in thik girt white ward, where thro' they cold windies be blowin' every draught of Heaven; and I do hear they ghosties come out of they Ruings, brother, and go whush, whush, whush over all the roofs, and I feel, for sure, that some girt change be coming over this town." (Ch 13)
There's a lot of sex, although it is sometimes difficult to be sure exactly what is going on. The phrase 'make love' didn't, in those days, refer to full sexual intercourse; when two lads sleep together that doesn't necessarily mean they are having sex, even when they have both previously been described as having a crush on another male character. Many characters are, apparently, chaste even after they appear to have had sex. Thus John and Mary 'make love' almost from the start but she is unbedded even after marriage, for a few days at least. Sam Dekker's goings on with married Nell have scandalised the neighbourhood but they don't have sex till much later. Nevertheless, sex is omnipresent and acknowledged. Nell's husband Will suggests that they live with Sam as a menage a trois. Mrs Legge rents out rooms to unmarried couples. Philip has an illegitimate child and sleeps with his married cousin Persephone (who in turn has a lesbian affair and then an affair with Will) and Tom Barter has a string of conquests among the servant class before impregnating Tossie.
Somehow the attitude to sex seems typified by Sam Dekker who enjoys his (only?) sexual experience with Nell so much that he decides not only to abandon her and the child he has fathered but also to forswear sex for the rest of his life and become a sort of saint.
Punctuating all the spiritual stuff is everyday life including mountains of bread and butter and oceans of tea. One aspect of JCP's work that I admired was the way his characters perform strange little actions, the sort of thing that we all do in our everyday lives, moments of subconsciousness, such as when the reverend, at the moment that his son leaves home, picks up a dead fish from his aquarium and "raising it to his nostrils, sniffed at it with inquisitive interest!" (Ch 28) This is a moment of surreal nonsense but it suddenly lends verisimilitude to the whole scene.
One thing I didn't admire was JCP's prolific use of exclamation marks. He obviously thinks they add tension. He also uses italics a lot to mark the key moments of a thought or speech ... which is at least useful given that they are so many unitalicised words swamping the important ones.
But what do I know? John Cowper Powys was regarded as a great author by novelists as diverse as Henry Miller, Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble. Hermann Hesse admired AGR.
October 9, 2020
For the past 207 days or so (ever since the pandemic started on my hemisphere), every day, I've been posting on Youtube in roughly 15 minutes segments me reading out loud this wonderfully weird and sprawling book.
I'm done now, and have compiled all the readings into a playlist. If you're so inclined, you can find the collected fruits of my labors here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
Read
January 3, 2018Read more than 20 years ago, in part because it was there on my office mate’s shelf and partly because Jeff Bursey was mentioning Powys to me as, at least alphabetically, a logical choice to follow Powell. I agree with the recent review here, that it is a huge book but not a difficult one. It did not, however, inspire me to shift down the shelf from Powell!
July 15, 2021
4.5. Bonkers masterpiece, chock-full of hectic, dodgy, problematic, disturbing, atmospheric, mystico-political business. JCP frankly yet another of those 1930s male authors who could have done with a few more brisk walks and a cold shower or seven. Good fun and intense.
August 21, 2019
This is not an easy book to read, hence me giving it only 4 stars. I found I had to take in almost every sentence so’s not to miss plot twists. Also, I had to keep referring to the principal character list. However, I am very glad I’ve read it, and managed to get thro’ to the end. I am also very glad I’ve been able to read it while we’ve been on holiday, when I’ve more time to sit with it. Not a book to be undertaken lightly, but very rewarding.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 72 reviews