notes from recent writers festival event reading John Cowper Powys

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.