I did a couple of Melbourne Writers Festival events at a wonderful venue called The Mission To Seafarers on an area known as Docklands. An amorphous, ambiguous part of of the city, right on the edge of the CBD. It used to be quieter and more deserted, just vacant lots on the way to Port Melbourne one way and toward Footscray and the west on the other. It used to be quieter and more desolate. Slower, around that way. Now its no place to walk around, the freeway traffic all around .
Up to the late 90s there were still a couple of those WW2 Nissan huts to be seen around that way. Here is an image of some used for migrant hostels in the 1950s in another part of Melbourne.
Then a football stadium was dropped in it and the old Mission To Seafarers was sandwiched between that and all the new Docklands development and the roads leading off to the Freeway to the south eastern suburbs.
It has been lucky to survive redevelopment and I'm glad to see it getting used for arts events. It is still used as a facility for stranded, broke sailors from all parts of the world.
In Melbourne it is comparable to the wonderful TRADES HALL which has also been used for theatre and comedy productions and events. Walking up those stairs which have been smoothed by a couple of generations of union workers trudging up and down them to deliver good and bad news with added bullet holes in some areas adds a great ambience to theatre events. Other rooms with faded but well preserved 70s decor also add some stature to proceedings.
Actually, just to avoid being too parochial, I got to say that Semaphore Workers Club near Port Adelaide is hard to beat for sheer Commie Glamour.
Anyway, I did three events at the Melbourne Writers Festival, a festival curated in 2018 by Marieke Hardy who took it as a challenge to open it all up to people not necessarily from the world of publishing and literature. She copped some grief but she did a great job and thought a lot about the venues and the accessability of the whole enterprise. So, Kudos to her.
For my part, I like arts things to lean toward seriousness and high minded thoughts. My heart sinks when I see any touches of circus or burlesque type activity.
I also think writers should be as awkward and quiet as they like to be and shouldn't be expected to be entertainers or click in easily with panel type quipping situations.
Thats my bag. Keep it sober. Keep it weird. Let the writers be writers.
The first two events were to do with "words and music", writers and musicians. I had my book WORKSHY out and thats why I was there. To front up for the work. One of the events was at the Mission To Seafarers and another at ACMI. They were both enjoyable and nobody died. One was billed , strangely, as a "singalong". That was never going to happen, though I sang a song called HEROC BLUES when asked to do something in that area.
The third event I did was at Mission To Seafarers and it was my response to being asked to "read or perform something from a writer I liked". I suggested I read from the works of John Cowper Powys as I always love his books. They are very intoxicating.
This was billed as "Dave Graneys Poetry Jam". I went along with it. It was easy to introduce myself and say that I was going to read some prose from an author I loved. Not poetry. I got to the venue quite early as I was in town to do another event and it didnt make sense to travel in and out of town. I spent a few hours in the green room, reading my writers books in a corner as a group of twenty somethings battled for rights to speak and argued and flirted at a table on the other side of the room. Various genders and ethnicity from various states. Gender was a big theme in their discussions, dominated by a bearded young person in hippie Robinson Crusoe pants, topknot and beard who told everybody repeatedly about their identification and struggles as a trans writer in Brisbane. There was also a moment between a young woman from Brooklyn establishing some transient status with a young Canadian woman who was volunteering at the venue. Drama. You know I love that sort of stuff.
Then Will Anderson came in and got ready for his talk with retired footballer Robert Murphy. I sat in the room downstairs and listened to them. Eventually it was my turn to read.
These are the notes I read from ....
I like to start these sorts of things just talking in the moment rather than reading anything. I asked the people present not to laugh or snigger at anything they might think "weird" or "perverse" as thats a lot of what Powys is about. He celebrated all his kinks.
I started with the opening page of A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE.
"At 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 one 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.
In the soul of the great blazing sun,
too, as it poured down its rays upon this man’s head, while he settled
his black travelling bag comfortably in his left hand and his
hazel-stick in his right, there were complicated superhuman vibrations;
but these had only the filmiest, faintest, remotest connexion with what
the man was feeling. They had more connexion with the feelings of
certain primitive tribes of men in the heart of Africa and with the
feelings of a few intellectual sages in various places in the world who
had enough imagination to recognise the conscious personality of this
fiery orb as it flung far and wide its life-giving magnetic forces.
Roaring, cresting, heaving, gathering, mounting, advancing, receding,
the enormous fire-thoughts of this huge luminary surged resistlessly to
and fro, evoking a turbulent aura of psychic activity, corresponding to
the physical energy of its colossal chemical body, but affecting this
microscopic biped’s nerves less than the wind that blew against his
face.
Far nearer to the man’s conscious and
half-conscious feelings, with his overcoat buttoned under his chin and
his fingers tightening upon stick and bag as he moved to the
station-entrance, were the vast, dreamy life-stirrings of the soul of
the earth. Aware in a mysterious manner of every single one of all the
consciousnesses, human and subhuman, to which she has given birth, the
earth might have touched with a vibrant inspiration this particular
child of hers, who at twenty minutes after twelve handed up his ticket
to the station-master and set out along a narrow dusty March road
towards Brandon Heath. That she did not do this was due to the simple
fact that the man instead of calling upon her for help called habitually
upon the soul of his own dead mother. Jealous and exacting are all the
gods, and a divided worship is abhorrent to them.
John Crow had given a hurried, suspicious
sideways glance, before he left the platform, at the group of
fellow-travellers who were gathered about the heap of luggage flung from
the guard’s van. They all, without exception, seemed to his agitated
mind to be attired in funeral garb. He himself had a large band of crape
sewn upon his sleeve and a black tie. “I’m glad I ran in to Monsieur
Teste’s to buy a black tie,” he thought as he met the wind on the open
road. “I never would have thought of it if Lisette hadn’t pushed me to
it at the end.”
John Crow was a frail, thin,
loosely-built man of thirty-five. He had found himself a penniless
orphan at twenty. From that time onward he had picked up his precarious
and somewhat squalid livelihood in Paris. Traces of these fifteen years
of irregular life could be seen writ large on his gaunt features.
Something between the down-drifting weakness of a congenital tramp and
the unbalanced idealism of a Don Quixote hovered about his high
cheek-bones and about the troubled droop of his mouth. One rather
disturbing contradiction existed in his face. There was a constant
twitching of his cheeks beneath his sunken eye-sockets; and this
peculiarity, combined with a furtive, almost foxy, slant about the
contraction of his eyelids, contrasted disconcertingly with the
expression in the eyes themselves. This expression resembled one
particular look, as of a sea-creature without a human soul, that Scopas
gives to his creations".
I was reading from a lectern and had a stack of about ten books withpassages marked to read from and did so at random. I interspersed these with some quotes from people who tried to put him into some sort of context. I read from "Autobiography", "Poruis", "Maiden Castle", "The Brazen Head", "Weymouth Sands", "Two Confessions" and "Three stories". The latter was written shortly before he died at the age of 91 in 1963.
“He
was a writer of tragic grandeur and everyday comedy, of sexual perversion and
cups of tea. He wrote poems, essays, epic fictions, letters and autobiography.
Words poured out of him - and he never reread any of them”. Margaret Drabble
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..... Powys's
work is full of paradoxes and surprises. He was extremely prolific, yet a late
starter; his manner was heroic, yet bathetic. He was a writer of tragic
grandeur and of everyday comedy, of sexual perversion, and of bread and butter
and cups of tea. (More bread and butter is consumed and more tea drunk in the
novels of John Cowper Powys than in the whole of the rest of English
literature.) He wrote poems, and essays, and gargantuan epic fictions, and
manuals of self-help, and innumerable letters. Words poured from him, and he
was famous for never rereading any of them. It is left to us, the readers, to
lose ourselves in his creation, and to try to emerge from it and to make some
sense of it. It is no wonder that mainstream literary critics have avoided him,
and that a handful of scholars and addicts have clustered round his oeuvre. He
is so far outside the canon that he defies the concept of a canon.
His
six major novels - Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth
Sands (1934), Maiden Castle (1936), Owen Glendower (1940) and Porius (1951) -
are formidably long, and not always in print
The
most accessible of his important publications is probably his Autobiography
(1934)
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.... born
in 1872 in Derbyshire, where his father was then vicar at Shirley, near Dovedale.
...from
Cambridge he embarked on a curious freelance career as an itinerant lecturer on
English literature, supported in part by a small allowance from his father.
Under the auspices of the Dickensian agency of Gabbitas-Thring, he began
speaking in girls' schools and colleges in the south of England, much taken
with the slender beauty of the flurry of "sylphs" he encountered, but
soon, thanks to the Oxford Extension Society, he was covering the length and
breadth of the country. He was entertained in private houses, where he learned
much about class and society: "There was one weekly or fortnightly round
... that caused me to leave Newcastle on Tyne before six in the morning when I
used to see the sun rise over the bleak Northumberland hills, lecture in Lewes,
after I had seen the sun set over the South Downs, and get to my home in West
Sussex that same night."
Deeply
unhappy and restless, he went to the United States in 1905 and, apart from the
occasional visit to England, stayed there until 1934, working as a travelling
lecturer.
The
vanished world of the American lecture circuit, in which Powys was Ancient
Mariner and Don Quixote, Moses with his tables and the old man of the sea, made
strenuous demands on those who panned its gold for their livelihood. “Once on
this accursed tour my stomach was so upset that I dreamt of nothing else but
going to look for places where I could shit in peace.”
His
godson was to say of him, memorably, that he was "more plant than animal;
more mineral than either. He was dust and rock and feather and fin talking with
a man's tongue" (Seven Friends, Louis (Marlow) Wilkinson, 1992).
His
notions of sexual satisfaction centred around masturbation, voyeurism and
fondling. He liked girls to sit on his knee, and he also got sexual
satisfaction from reciting poetry at them.
His appetite for food
was as unusual as his appetite for sex: he became, nominally, a vegetarian, but
eschewed most vegetables, surviving for years, he claimed, on a diet of eggs,
bread and milk, with occasional treats of guava jelly. This gave him severe
gastric trouble, and he had to endure a painful form of surgery that he labels
"gasterenterostomy". In his later years, he depended for bowel
function entirely on enemas, a procedure of which he highly approved, as it
facilitated meditation.
Reality, in his own
phrase, lies "between the urinal and the stars".
After
My Fashion, written in 1919, was based in part on his unlikely friendship with
the American dancer Isadora Duncan: This did not find a publisher until Picador
brought it out in 1980. Once it was rejected, he did not bother to pursue its
fate, but let it go
Porius:
A Romance of the Dark Ages, a work that beggars description. He thought it his
best. Set in October in 499 AD, it is more like a mountain landscape or an epic
poem than a novel. Its characters include King Arthur, a Pelagian monk, a Roman
matron, a Jewish doctor, the shape-shifting Myrddin Wyllt (otherwise known as
Merlin), the bard Taliessin and a family of completely convincing aboriginal
giants, who live on the slopes of Snowdon. We also meet the Three Aunties,
grey-haired princess survivors of the old race. In this twilight of the gods,
the cult of Mithras, the old faith of the Druids, the fading power of Rome and
the rising force of Christianity do battle for a week beneath a waxing moon,
while Powys's characters intermittently find time to reflect on past times, and
congratulate themselves on being so modern. There is comedy, Miltonic
sublimity, chaos and confusion in equal measure.
Powys
has been described as "one of the great puzzles of 20th century
literature." His critics dismiss him as a crackpot mystagogue. His
admirers, and they are many, find it more difficult to describe what captures
their imagination. It is a fascinating aspect of his genius that he attracts
readers with widely diverse interests, and they treasure his novels for
different reasons - for his comic scenes, for his erotic fantasies, for his
entrancing images, for his penetrating psychological perception, for his
philosophy of life.
Powys
avoided literary company; he would no sooner have taken part in a writer's
conference than in a gathering of morticians. A triumphant solitary, he also
avoided nonliterary company.
yet
he did belong to at least one literary group -- his family. Of his ten
siblings, six ended up writing books.
"The deepest
emotion I have is my malice against the well-constituted as compared with the
ill-constituted," he declared in his Autobiography, adding,
"Dwarfs, morons, idiots, imbeciles, hunchbacks, degenerates, perverts,
paranoiacs, neurasthenics, every type of individual upon whom the world looked
down, I loved ... admired ... and imitated."
He
was forty-three when he published a collaborative memoir with his brother
Llewelyn titled Confessions of Two Brothers (1916).
At
age fifty-eight he began to earn his living, or what passed for a living, as a
writer.
A
diet of raw eggs, milk, olive oil, and bread crusts did little to assuage it.
His bowels were so out of whack that he had to have an enema every third day.
Powys
didn't bang his head so much as tap it against the mailbox, a ritual he
believed would ensure the safe delivery of a letter. He would also utter
lengthy incantations while bathing, and walk exactly the same route every day,
bowing to exactly the same trees and stones. One of these stones he named
"the god of Phudd." Another he named Perdita. Perdita, he wrote, was
"the only daughter I shall ever have"; he once felt obliged to kiss
his geologic offspring nine times because his dog had peed on it (her?).
He
never drove a car and never used a typewriter. He thought television was
pernicious. He didn't like talking on the telephone, because he didn't want his
words violated by a tangle of wires.
Powys's
literary output in old age was so voluminous that upon learning he had died in
his ninety-first year, in 1963, one is almost inclined to say "Yes, but
did he stop writing?"
“I tell you, any
lie as long as a multitude of souls believes it and presses that belief to
the cracking point, creates new life, while the slavery of what is
called truth drags us down to death and to the dead! Lies, magic, illusion –
these are names we give to the ripples on the water of our experience when the
Spirit of Life blows upon it.”
“though books, as Milton says, may be
the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious,
reactionary, fantastical, and wicked spirits! in books dwell all the demons and
all the angels of the human mind. it is for this reason that a a bookshop --
especially a second-hand bookshop / antiquarian - is an arsenal of explosives,
an armory of revolutions, an opium den of reaction.
and just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and
damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul,
they are still, as they have alwasys been, an object of suspicion to every kind
of ruling authority. in a second-hand bookshop are the horns of the altar where
all the outlawed thoughts of humanity can take refuge! here, like depserate
bandits, hide all the reckless progeny of our wild, dark, self-lacerating
hearts. a bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons,
a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.
of all the 'houses of ill fame' which a tyrant, a bureaucrat, a propagandist, a
moralist, a champion of law and order, an advocate of keeping people ignorant
for their own good, hurries past with averted eyes or threatens with this
minions, a bookshop is the most flagrant.
~ autobiography”
― John Cowper Powys
“It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill
thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in
his faded overcoat. Objects of this kind played a queer part in his secret
life-illusion. His stick was like a plough-handle, a ship's runner, a gun, a
spade, a sword, a spear. His threadbare overcoat was like a medieval jerkin,
like a monk's habit, like a classic toga! It gave him a primeval delight merely
to move one foot in front of the other, merely to prod the ground with his
stick, merely to feel the flapping of his coat about his knees, when this mood
predominated. It always associated itself with his consciousness of the historic
continuity---so incredibly charged with marvels of dreamy fancy---of human
beings moving to and fro across the earth. It associated itself, too, with his
deep, obstinate quarrel with modern inventions, with modern machinery....”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent
“The first discovery of Dostoievsky is,
for a spiritual adventurer, such a shock as is not likely to occur again. One
is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of
a dark passage; a hit in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at
one's throat. Everything that has been forbidden, by discretion, by caution, by
self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of the darkness
and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.
All
that one has felt, but has not dared to think; all that one has thought, but
has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from the unspeakable margins;
all the horrible wreckage and silt from the unsounded depths, float in upon us
and overpower us.
There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot,
will not, say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in
ourselves do not want said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures
humiliate and disgrace? What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare.
Such revelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We require embarrassment.
The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed chinks, no blind
alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, even down
there, where it has to be driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial
even the great writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker's
beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by the Demons of
our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what will serve their purpose!
This applies as much to the Realists, with their traditional animal chemistry,
as to the Idealists, with their traditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above
all, to the interpreters of Sex, who, in their conventional grossness, as well
as in their conventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand!”
― John Cowper Powys, Visions and
Revisions; A Book of Literary Devotions
“...we have a right to narrow down our
universe ever further and further; until like the world of the Iliad and the
Odyssey it is made up of certain simple endurances, enjoyments, mental and
physical struggles, surrounded by the washing of the sea, the blowing of the
wind, the swaying of the wheat, the falling of the rain, the voyaging of the
clouds, and the motions of the sun and moon and dawn and twilight.”
― John Cowper Powys
Wolf, speaking to his
father's skull in the ground beneath him, argues "There is no reality
but what the mind fashions out of itself. There is nothing but a mirror
opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round crystal, and a sky in
water opposite water in a sky"
The response is:
“‘Ho! Ho! You worm of my folly,’ laughed the hollow skull.
‘I am alive still, though I am dead; and you are dead, though you’re alive. For
life is beyond your mirrors and your waters. It’s at the bottom of your pond;
it’s in the body of your sun; it’s in the dust of your star spaces; it’s in the
eyes of weasels and the noses of rats and the pricks of nettles and the tongues
of vipers and the spawn of frogs and the slime of snails. Life is in me still,
you worm of my folly, and girls’ flesh is sweet for ever; and honey is sticky
and tears are salt, and yellow-hammers’ eggs have mischievous crooked
scrawls!"
And later
"My 'I am I' is no hard, small crystal inside me,
but a cloudy, a vapour, a mist, a smoke hovering round my skull, hovering
around my spine, my arms, my legs. That's what I am, a vegetable animal wrapped
in a mental cloud, and with the will-power to project this cloud into the
consciousness of others.
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-->In the end, I don't know what anybody made of it. People got up and left, people wandered in during the reading. Clare's brother Dennis was there and he enjoyed it. He is a lifelong theatre actor and a reader of Powys. I don't think there were many others matching his life experience/life illusion in the audience. It was just something I wanted to do and I hope I did his work justice.
