Containing Multitudes, the Radical Act of Reading with Walt Whitman and John Cowper Powys

 

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 page, whose works does not make, “generic choices so much as generic accumulations” (Esty, 2003: 62), presenting its readers with a sheer myriad of perspectives and loose-ends, a novel aimed at the destruction of the "monologic" (see Lock) whilst also inscribing the author's “presence” in every sentence – embodying his own contradictions. One such contradiction greets us in the very opening paragraph of AGR

On 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 on 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. 

(Powys, 21)

It's a mad and monumental opening, giving the reader the entire scope of the novel from the minute particular of the man emerging from the carriage, to the universal "divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life". And yet, it simultaneously manages to be "the striking of noon" as well "twelve nineteen". Is this an intentional contradiction? Is it a glaring mistake? The ambiguity of this opening sentence subsequently gets lost in becomes part of the background chaos which follows in the next thousand-or-so pages of similarly ambiguous prose. Powys had read Whitman and the following comes to mind:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

(Whitman, 78)

The 'Song of Myself' from Leaves of Grass (1891-2) provides us with a good marker for understanding such ambiguities. Whitman's poem celebrates his utter Joy at the diversity of everything that is. It is a Pantheistic vision in the spirit of Wordsworth, seeing himself and the reader (for how can a “song” exist without a listener?) as a part of the grand, flowing, inexplicable multitude of existence. As such, he composes in free verse, an act which, through all its potential flaws and contradictions, comes across as radically honest and vulnerable.

Such vulnerability I have explored in a previous post, as it appears in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which Miller similarly describes as a “song”. For Miller, this provided the only way to produce authentic art under the conditions of capitalist modernity: “A man who belongs to this race [an artist] must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art” (Miller, 254-255). For Miller, the act becomes a lot more grotesque and sordid, but this is somewhat already anticipated in Whitman: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” (Whitman, 78). In that post I also connected such a performance to Powys's dramatic style of lecturing, his self-identification as an “actor,” as well as his writing being an intensely honest reflection of himself.

Whitman, who describes such a “barbaric yawp” as “untranslatable” (Whitman, 78), reveals the potentially radical act behind his craft. We cannot derive a singular, objective meaning from his words – there is no way to adequately represent the text. The failure of our interpretation before it has even begun is paralleled by Whitman's own failure to represent himself

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,

They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

(Whitman, 39)

The text cannot be entirely separated from Whitman as it is a product of his “affections” yet, simultaneously, it cannot encapsulate the entirety of those “affections”. The knowledge we seek cannot be wrought just from the words, they are in the fullness of experience

Writing and talk do not prove me,

I carry the plenum [fullness] of proof and every thing else in my face,

With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

(Whitman, 50)

If this is so, what possible value can words have if they do not hold the “plenum of proof”? The answer lies in the poem's self-description as a “song”. It is something which appeals to the reader's (or listener's) own affections – their own subjective experience of the text as something profoundly moving. The truth here is its beauty, as Keats famously put it, and beauty is truth. Here we can connect with Whitman's poem as its equal through the foregrounding of our own subjectivity, both sharing in its Joys but also recognising its own particularities and idiosyncrasies.

Whitman also makes frequent references to democracy, which indicates the underlying ethical principles of the poem. The only way to properly understand the poem is through our own subjectivity, the particularity of which becomes universal: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” (Whitman, 53). The act of reading becomes a creative act itself, fraught with the possibility of misapprehension and vulnerability, but also establishing the potential for connection, understanding and inspiration. It is not through any ideological framework or specialist knowledge that this is possible, but through the reader approaching the text personally with their own peculiarities and “self-contradictions”. This is something for which every person is an equal participant.

What Whitman does with “song,” a form intended to confer an aesthetic (and therefore communicable) unity over the myriad, indescribable contradictions within himself and the world, Powys does with story. As a song, Whitman highlights something raw and essential about his work and the relationship between speaker and listener, or author and reader. For Powys, it is the similar, profoundly emotional effect of storytelling which drives his fiction, as McGann writes

Powys is famous, notorious, for declaring how he covets of his “sensations”. When that temperament gets harnessed to making prose fictions, “story for its own sake” and – even more crucially - “the sensation of telling oneself a story” become the subject of the writing. His fictions are all staged performances of the act of writing. […] Starting from a condition of intense subjectivity, the writer-as-artist gets engulfed in his own writing, which then takes on a life of its own.

(McGann)

Story becomes the effort of aesthetic unity which will always fail to adequately capture the multitudes contained within. Nonetheless, it is absolutely essential as a form of communication between author and reader - something timeless, which will always elicit an emotional response. This is not to say that Powys's contemporaries were failing to do this. All fiction has something of a story in it and elicits emotional responses from its readers. But Powys puts the personal relationship between author and reader at the forefront of his creative enterprise, insisting on its timeless powers to move people.

This is something I discovered throughout my own reading of Powys. He is an author I find myself drawn back to again and again, despite often finding myself exhausted from the efforts of reading and the intellectual strain of comprehending his work. It is because, in reading him, you feel as if you are opening up a channel of communication directly to Powys himself. This is the archaic relationship between storyteller and listener. He disliked the detachment and “aesthetic tyranny” of High Modernism, and sought to get back to this raw, human quality of stories.

The song of himself he relates throughout the pages of Autobiography are something of a “hero myth” (Krissdóttir, 44), yet it is a work as famous for the intimacy of its detail as it is notorious for its omissions. It cannot contain the man himself, as none of his novels can, but my own engagement with it has felt like a dialogue. Unlike a dialectic, there cannot be a synthesis between our two perspectives, they are both equally as subjective and equally as truthful. The evidence for this mode of reading can be inferred from Powys's discussion of charlatanry, an insult he turned into a term of empowerment, in a revealing passage I shall end with:

Charlatanism, at least the brand I cultivate of this disreputable commodity, consists in being so transported by the large, general, simple aspects of something exciting in life, or nature, or books, or history, or psychology, that without waiting to get the details correct, or the passage verified by exact scholarship, you just rely on your private taste, prejudice, imagination, inspiration, and abandon your whole being to the delight of brooding over what you see and feel. The impulsive communication of your feelings in this matter to others is the gesture which brings down on your head this term of abuse. Judged by the standard of the professional persons who dare not even feel a reaction to anything wonderful and magical in Nature or Art without being sure of all the evidence and without congratulating themselves on their credentials as adepts and on their documents as experts, why! some of the most illuminating writers in the world would have to be labelled by this disparaging word.

(Powys, 387)

Works Cited:

Krissdóttir, M. (1980) John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest, London: Macdonald General Books.

Lock, C. (2019) 'Diversions and Digressions: What happens in the reading of A Glastonbury Romance' in The Powys Journal, 29: 28-56. 

McGann, J. (2006) '"The Grand Heretics of Modern Fiction": Laura Riding, John Cowper Powys, and the Subjective Correlative', in Modernism/Modernity, 13(2): 309-323. 

Powys, J. C. (1975) A Glastonbury Romance, London: Picador.

Powys, J. C. (1982) Autobiography, London: Picador. 

Steiner, G. (1977) 'The Difficulties of Reading John Cowper Powys' in The Powys Review, 1. 

Whitman, W. (2009) Leaves of Grass, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Image used: 'John Cowper Powys' by Gertrude Mary Powys (1944)