The Life-Illusion

  The act of reading the work of John Cowper Powys presents us with a topic almost as interesting as the work itself. The critic George Steiner, in an address to the Powys society, commented on the difficulties presented in such a task, listing reasons ranging from the unavailability of the texts, to their sheer size, to their perversities and idiosyncrasies which split critics like marmite: “there is inwoven with the most accessible of [his] novels certain obsessions and convictions of an extremely special sort, which, depending on one's point of view, are sublime or merely cranky” (Steiner, 1977). Charles Lock finds an interpretive reading of A Glastonbury Romance (1932) to be ultimately futile, "there is too much going on, too many voices, stories, versions, words disparate and centrifugal, eluding any single reach or range, utterly resistant to the grasp of coherence" (Lock, 2019: 54).  This is the author who, effectively, “commits suicide” (see McGann) on the first p...

(Tintern Abbey, 2017) When these wild ecstasies shall be matured  Into a sober pleasure;  when thy mind   Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,  Thy memory be as a dwelling-place   For all sweet sounds and harmonies... (from 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey...'  lines 138- 142 (1798) by William Wordsworth) When Wordsworth describes the “beauteous forms” from along the banks of the River Wye revisiting him “'mid the din / Of towns and cities...” and causing “sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart...” we find exactly where his Romanticism is to us outdated. Climate change has demolished any notion of there being a boundary between Nature and Society. In Wordsworth's poem, Nature manifests itself in the “wild secluded scene,” impressing “[t]houghts of a more deep seclusion...” whereas now we are only truly discovering the extent to which we are enmeshed with nature. Nature increasingly encroaches upon soci...

I recently finished reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934). It's a novel notorious for its pornographic detail and casual misogyny, yet underneath (and, to an extent, undergirding) this is a vital and engaging work, an easy and confident prose style that ripples with electricity. I think Miller will play a large role in my project, it is he who helped steer surrealism in a more anarchistic direction through his correspondence with Herbert Read. In his youth, Miller had also witnessed first-hand one of John Cowper Powys's highly-charged, idiosyncratic lectures in the US; a performance he came away “elated and fascinated” by, and must have surely inspired his writing style in some way. This connection is interesting, because much of my thinking recently has been centred around Powys's lectures. From descriptions of them, they appear to be both very personal but also shamanic, often expounding his own personal interpretations of literature whilst channelling som...