The Snug: A Blog

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            Dracula’s was where–in the form of several out-of-print volumes in a box–I first came upon that most eccentric of immortals, John Cowper Powys, “Old Earth Man,” Prester John of the Welsh Mountains. The mere mention of the mad old bugger’s name brings peace to my soul. I'm devoted to the man now, but back then, like most people, I’d never heard of him. He’s an acquired taste, and for a minority at that, but once sampled he makes all pretenders appear second-rate. I was led to his work through Hardy’s Wessex, via a brief detour into the odd backwater of John Cowper's brother Theodore’s religious and sardonic Mr. Weston’s Good Wine, in which Mr. Weston is God, and God is both a traveling wine salesman and the wine itself, and Dorset is Heaven, a Christian conceit atheistic and/or pagan Hardy would have had none of (except the last part). But it was so artfully told and so evocative in its Dorset village setting, and the characters were so robust and cunning, and it had such a strong flavor of the old master’s Michael Henchards and Jude Fawleys and Bathsheba Everdenes and gnarled Wessex woodsmen and farmers, that the next time I saw the name Powys, on the spine of a chrome-yellow paperback in that cardboard box on the floor of Dracula's, I snatched it up (and actually paid for it). It was John Cowper’s Wolf Solent, my gateway into the  wonderland of another timeless Wessex. How he captures the muddy, bloody essence of England!

            But Powys isn’t confined to his own country, although he was as weird and thorough an Englishman as any Hardy or Dickens. His true homeland temporal and spiritual was Wales, the homeland of his ancestors. And yet he loved France and Italy, too, and his hometown for many years was New York, from where he traveled all over America, giving lectures in a throbbing baritone on his favorite books and writers and (why not?) The Meaning of Life. His job was to help people toward a better life through literature. Great books, to Powys, were far more than the soap operas of the masses that TV and mass mod “culture” has turned them into; they were humanity’s highest achievements, as vital to everyone’s life as exercise or sunlight. And to spread this gospel he traveled all over the raw and still-new United States, raising high the banners of Homer, Rabelais, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Shakespeare, Byron, Dante, and other champions of the Western canon, exhorting the forgotten townsfolk of remote hamlets in Colorado and New Hampshire and Nebraska and Oregon to join the legions of the enlightened. Of course, Americans are always ready for a good dose of that old-time evangelism, or just a plain old freak show, whatever the subject, but—Literature? And the messenger of literary wisdom a tall, gangling Englishman with a plummy accent and bizarre facial tics? That was the freak-show part of his audience appeal, no doubt heightened when he fell down onstage, as he did a few times, overcome by emotion and chronic gastritis. The crowd must have roared. As he said himself: “America is the ideal country for mystagogues, demagogues, thaumaturgic preachers, theosophic illuminants, occultists, conjurers, table-turners, mediums, Chautauqua-culturists, Utopians, Shakers, Mormons, Second Adventists, East Indian Yogists, Red Indian ‘Controls,’ worshippers of Quetzalcoatl, worshippers of Mumbo Jumbo, new-thoughtists, psychists, psycho-analysts, psychiatrists, psycho-careerists, not to speak of teleportists, telepathists and televisionists.”          

          Entertainers all. Still, it’s almost incredible that he made a living at his own form of mass entertainment, and a quite good living, too, over a period of twenty years or so, with sufficient income to enable him to support, at long distance, his wife and son in England. But there was a kind of ancient magic in Powys to which the unhappy, forgotten people of his day responded. Henry Miller, who put so much so badly, put it well: “I had an unholy veneration for the man. Every word he uttered seemed to go straight to the mark. All the authors I was then passionate about were the authors he was writing and lecturing about. He was like an oracle ... Leaving the hall after his lectures, I often felt as if he had put a spell upon me.”

              The spell held until the 1930s, when Powys had made enough to retire to upstate New York and dream of Wales, and then, finally, to retire to Wales itself. I sympathize with this: Powys lived half his life in America, and admired the country, and revered its virtues, but he had a clear insight into its failings, and anyway he remained a Briton through and through and longed always for Britain, and grafted its identity onto his. I responded instinctively to Powys’s atavism; after all, haven’t I done the same with my ancestral lands of Europe? And I go through the same longing—unfulfilled, as yet, except in my novels. 

             But it wasn’t as a modern Briton that Powys longed for the hills of his fathers. (This, too, deepens his appeal for me.) He was an ancient Briton, half Saxon, half Roman, straight out of one of his own Arthurian novels, Ducdame or Morwyn; and he would probably have been burned at the stake in the fifteenth century or earlier for possessing magical abilities, or speaking too much truth to power. But his magic would have been lost on succeeding generations. TV would have trivialized him. (“I think,” he once said, “these Televisions have done more harm to human intelligence than any other invention.”) He needed the direct appraisal of a live audience in a weary time after a great war when no verities seemed to stand the test of life. No verities? Nonsense, he’d say: The great books are your eternal verities. Read, and see clear! What’s important in life but love and the great works that help us endure?  For beyond our narrow existence, there’s the jolly old “vaudeville-burlesque of the whole cosmogonic show”! There are few in my experience who on a daily level can so reassure the battered romantic, with observations like this one:

Glimpses of sky, motions of leaves, flickerings of sunlight and shadow, voyagings of clouds, roof-edges against infinite space, it is upon these things that we fix our eyes—consciously as well as unconsciously—while we are struggling to take a grim and stoical rather than self-pitying view of our particular tragedy.

     Yes. “Tragedy,” not “condition” or “predicament.” I like that. And that “stoical rather than self-pitying” is the key: The man is a modern stoic par excellence, a combination of Rabelais and Marcus Aurelius.  For me, he supplied a remedy for ordinariness.