Reading John Cowper Powys

For some time now I've been orbiting the idea of doing a PhD in English, with the intention of exploring the work of John Cowper Powys. Powys is one of my favourite authors and someone I find myself drawn back to over and over again by some sort of strange magnetism. Much of his work focuses on how to find beauty and meaning in a world so obviously alive and teeming with significance which is, however, beyond true understanding. He advocates taking a personal approach to meaning-making, or the creation of one's own personal religion, something he refers to as a “life-illusion” (also referred to as a “mythology” in Wolf Solent). To talk about religion is to enter an area fraught with delicacies and complications, but what I like about Powys is the relaxedness of his approach to the subject. Personally, I do not subscribe to or identify with any established religion, but I do find a sense of greater fulfilment in approaching the world poetically – making connections between various parts of my experience and imbuing them with a deeper sense of meaning than they might otherwise have. It is this creativity, self-expressiveness, and freedom from dogma that I find to be most truthful and necessary from Powys.

He is certainly a great author, I would say, but he isn't a great writer in the way so many of those in the canon are. Saying he has a tendency towards verbosity would be an understatement. I'm currently working through his Autobiography (albeit incrementally, this is my favourite way to read Powys, in small amounts over long periods of time), and time after time my efforts at finding adequate quotations are thwarted by the sheer frequency of his digressions, his inability make any concrete statements and his seeming resistance to contextualisation. Reading his writing is like a stream of consciousness, it has a peculiarly verbal quality that heaps clause upon clause with only the effect of making impressions. I say “like a stream of consciousness” because it isn't really comparable to how his more well-known modernist contemporaries use that mode. It is un-poetic in its prolixity, but also has that wrought quality more familiar from Victorian literature. He has a propensity for “metaphysical claptrap,” (see Jed Esty's A Shrinking Island) but also an “unwillingness to systematise” ('A modern outside modernism: J. C. Powys' by Larson Powell). His uniqueness as a writer makes him difficult to categorise, and his perceived shortcomings means many simply do not bother engaging with him. For modern readers this problem is only exacerbated by the unavailability of his work.

However, I would argue it is this uniqueness along with these “shortcomings” that make him an author undoubtedly worth reading, because uniqueness is a central theme of his work and integral to the texts. Firstly, he writes without pretension. His pronouncements can be, at times, esoteric and grand, but they're made with an underlying sense of bathos - a sort of naïve, vital embrace that has within it a defusing humour. He is aware of his own foolishness but simultaneously elevates the fool to a position of significance.

He maintains a sense of innocence, a kind of reversion to primordial vitality, that connects with the reader on a very fundamental level. He writes about feelings and the sensations of being alive that is less evangelical than it is simply joyous. Pages of inconsequential, prosaic incidence can suddenly give way to passages of profound clarity and serenity. This is achieved in a way that feels completely analogous to the shifting temporalities of life itself, its ineffable, amorphous flow between the mundane and magical.

And for all his apparent naivety, as implied earlier, he is surprisingly self-aware. This facet of his work might not be immediately obvious to new readers. But whereas other writers might hide their naivety, their hypocrisies and shortcomings beneath a layer of rhetorical and stylistic bravado, what is so refreshing about Powys is that he doesn't try to manipulate you. Certainly, he can seem dogmatic in accordance with his own peculiarities and neuroses, but he has no interest in making you believe what he believes. His simultaneous inability to make concrete statements, furthermore, reflects the failures of language to completely capture the complexities and multiplicities of life. This is not to say he ends up saying nothing, rather, he will gesture at something philosophical and revise it/develop it several pages later. His tendency to digress and divert narrative are akin to rambles, they establish a sense of spatiality in the text that allow the reader to properly apprehend and reflect on his subject matter. As I stated earlier, this can be sometimes be infuriating when looking for neat encapsulations of his thought, but ultimately it has radical implications.

His maximal-yet-honest approach to writing is a way of opening up a dialogue with the reader, encouraging but not demanding a similar level of introspection from them. The confessional quality of his work and the perversities and ugliness they excavate can turn off people who are looking for a more impressive style of literary acrobatics to marvel at. But his skill lies exactly in the subversion of this active-passive/author-reader/master-slave relationship we expect from literature, from artistic exceptionalism. There is a kind of psychic mutual-aid at work here, respecting the uniqueness and autonomy of the Other. To read any one of his novels, one is struck by how the heroism of his protagonists is continually deferred as they become submerged in a strange world where every other character is also something of a hero on their own quest too.

He stresses the necessity of taking an anti-authoritarian approach to life – and this attitude filters through to the very fundamentals of his writing style. Such a privileging of uniqueness however, brings up its own problems. There is always the risk of solipsism, neglecting collectivity in favour of individuality. Powys identified strongly throughout his career as an anarchist, and the communities he presents in his fictions are certainly more Stirnerite unions of egoists than they are socialist collectives. The characters of A Glastonbury Romance represent more a pre-modern folk than a working class. Whilst in America he met Emma Goldman and kept up a correspondence with her, and the fruits of this friendship are certainly apparent in the social-anarchist leanings of his later works. But, throughout his oeuvre the core principles of this anarchism are apparent in his very approach to the medium of literature.