Thinking Lately
I've had lots of ideas for blog posts for the future. I see the topic I've chosen for my PhD as a bridge towards discussing a lot of other stuff. My intention for this blog has been, thus far, to use it primarily as an instrument in my research – when collating a large amount of information and ideas it really helps to write things down as you go, forcing yourself to think through an argument logically and consistently, finding the precise words you wish to use. I'm very much guilty of not doing this and it really takes some effort to translate thought to page, but I think it is absolutely essential practice as a researcher and a writer. This has been the main purpose of this blog so far, and I will continue to use it in this way throughout my PhD. However, I would also like to start using it to explore other ideas including stuff that's tangential to my research topic as well as my own personal thoughts and reflections. This is something I have already done with earlier posts, but it would be good to continue it with some sustained effort.
I haven't posted anything recently because I have been finalising my research proposal (tentatively titled: 'Spaces of the (Im)Personal: Ethics and Ecology in the Life-writings of John Cowper Powys and Herbert Read') which, if my application is accepted, I will post in full on here. Another thing I really hope to achieve with this blog is spread some awareness about these writers. A lot of my posts so far have been written from the depths of research and whilst I try to keep my posts relatively free of academic jargon, I admit they aren't the most accessible things to read for those unfamiliar with the texts discussed. My ultimate aim with this project is to write something of a history of the “personalist” writers (both an academic text and something “you know, for the general reader”), encompassing Powys and Read, but also the “New Apocalypse” poets who have been another significant focus of my research. Along the way, though, I will be posting some more accessible bits introducing people to their work, outlining why these are writers worth reading now and where to begin with their work.
In fact, spreading awareness is something I hope to do with my PhD – a major impetus for the project was the fact that these are writers who, despite their enormous contributions to literature, art, philosophy, cultural politics, and the overall development of modernism in Britain, have been hugely and unjustly overlooked in academia. This has also been why it has taken so long to cobble together a research project about them – besides my own lack of knowledge about modernism (having focused on romantic and Victorian literature previously), there's not a huge amount of existing scholarship on them already. After a lot of deep research dives I have managed to gather together the work that does exist on them. As it turns out, there is already a decent amount of interest in these writers; Powys has a journal dedicated to the study of his work (as well as that of his siblings, several of whom were also prolific writers), and several years ago a documentary came out about Read. With my work, I hope to draw some thematic connections between the two, as well as look at their influence on later authors. By creating this history, and by identifying Powys and Read as significant players in an intellectual struggle over the future of culture in the modernist period, I aim to establish a perspective on them which will render them more approachable in discussions of modernism.
At the centre of my discussion, however, will be a direct interrogation of what “modernism” is. The notion of “time” and “modernity” which arises from Powys's and Read's writings is altogether different from many of their contemporaries. This will be the subject of a future post, but my current understanding is that they both rejected certain tenets of “modernity” - perhaps its more classicist, rational side – whilst still engaging with the notion of “making it new”. I think that much of their ambivalence to certain aspects of modernism was rather more a fundamental scepticism to the idea of modernity itself.
Another post I have been considering writing is on Henry Treece. Treece is someone I very nearly included in my project. Him and Read were closely linked through the New Apocalypse group, and he edited a collection of essays on Read's work (Herbert Read: An Introduction to His Work by Various Hands). His turn towards historical romances occurs around the same time Powys turned to the genre and James Gifford considers them to be of the same “moment” and “inspiration”. I have enjoyed Treece's poetry for a while now, whilst I don't think it compares to the likes of Dylan Thomas (whose work Treece greatly admired), it does capture some of that poet's lyrical ornateness. I personally describe the aesthetic as “death metal”, its full of violence, foreboding and archaism:
“Black the wind wailing in the future's voice
And the broken years falling piece by piece;
The only music, hope in empty skull
And the old ones crying, crying under the hill.”
- from 'Sonnet' (1945)
I have recently finished reading his last novel, The Green Man (1966), which has given me a lot to think over. It was a very well-crafted piece of pulp fantasy, the prose concise yet effective, by turns grotesque, hilarious and exciting. It is set in a fragmented age – a post-Roman Britain presided over by an aged and feeble “Duke” Arthur. Behind its vulgarities, its violence, and its general sense of pessimism, there is an interesting interplay of power dynamics, as well as a subtextual exploration of the transformative nature of stories (both in terms of their own transformations/mutations, and their ability to transform the lives of others).
Given Read's and Powys's re-engagement with the primordial essence of storytelling, rejecting much of the formal, “high art” experimentation of their avant-garde contemporaries, there is definitely some overlap here. Their anarchistic approach to storytelling casts it as a shared, egalitarian means of societal transformation, and this is very much something on display in Treece's work. I find this interesting because, during my research into the emergence of Fantasy as a genre, and the surrounding intellectual discussion on the purposes of imaginative writing and myth, I found that much of it is dominated by right-wing voices – from The Inklings, to figures like Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, even perhaps more recent figures like Jordan Peterson. This will be part of my discussion in a later post.
But, to end this one, here is a poem from Treece:
In that stone head,
obscenity
Has been preserved a
thousand years;
A bible-leaf of
families
Have shuddered at the
pointed ears.
The sword that hangs
upon the wall
Is notched the length
of its long blade,
And children at the
village school
Dream of the trusses it
has mowed.
Close against the
lichened tower
Still lives a witch.
Around her head
She wears a shawl, and
white as flour
Her lips count every
step she treads.
But when the dusk-born
loves stand
The figure sobs, 'Oh
where's my soul?',
The sword sighs for the
long-dead hand,
The old hag huddles
from the owl.
- 'Relics' from The Black Seasons (1945) by Henry Treece
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