Defy
the modern world with forgotten genius John Cowper Powys!
Excerpt from
SETTING OUT
Few writers have tickets for the express train. Those
that do ride smoothly on the rails of ‘great
literature’ ever after, sitting back in the carriages of the canon
club: Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence,
Woolf, Tolkien – the names which a hundred years on have the
redolence of luxury brands and some of the same hard coating of gloss. One of
their contemporaries, John Cowper Powys, is an example of what can go wrong,
what happens when a potential giant ends up trundling into the backwoods on a
branch line.
There’s standing room only on Powys’s train, carriage after carriage of forgotten authors
on their way to nowhere. Many will have had bestsellers or even been feted as
creators of a masterpiece, but there’s no way back now. It matters in Powys’s case because his work is extraordinary and because
he’s so relevant to
our anxious 21st-century world. It’s lazy to say he was a genius. What does it mean?
Calling Powys a genius only lumps him with Lionel Messi and Laurel and Hardy.
It would be more accurate to argue he’s the most distinctive and interesting of English
authors, the most exciting and addictive for anyone bookish.
Then again Powys might have been a charlatan. Most
guardians of literature thought so, claiming he was better off in the
hinterland, the kinds of places where there’s always likely to be something nasty in the woodshed.
In an age when review pages are part of a process of publicity, more cosy than
critical, the response to Powys can be extreme. The first biography, published
in 1983, covered John Cowper as well as his author brothers Theodore and
Llewelyn. The Times’ review was run under the headline ‘A Bunch of Nutters’. In 2007 the only biography of John Cowper was
written up by the Daily Telegraph with
the conclusion he was a “monstrous man” and “remorselessly unattractive”.
Powys had a talent for manipulation. He said he would
have liked to have been an actor, and his lectures were a performance where
even the university gown he wore was a borrowed costume. He also knew how to
thrill – Iris Murdoch thought Powys wrote about sex better than anyone. How
genuine, then, were his ideas and his popularity? For all those American ladies
attending his lectures, yearning for a dose of highbrow from the Old World, he
was always going to be a pin-up.
One of the likeable aspects of Powys’s character is that he wasn’t offended by these kinds of criticisms. A charlatan?
Yes! Why not? And it’s fair to say his novels are difficult in lots of ways. His philosophy
is uncomfortably counter-cultural and there’s a need for a level of open-mindedness that goes well
beyond what’s expected from
reading authors in the canon. This is why he’ll never make it onto that express train and there’s no good in campaigning for
it. Instead of being part of any system of required or even recognised reading,
Powys has relied on being discovered independently. He’s stumbled over by happy
accident and it’ll probably always
need to be that way.
* *
* * *
TIM BLANCHARD
Tim
Blanchard
has been exploring Powysland for the past fifteen years as a reader and member of
the Powys Society. He once made an appearance at a Society conference to give a
thrilling paper on drugs and rebellion – which in Powys’s case meant drinking
cups of very sugary tea.
In the past he’s worked as a journalist and a PR and
communications consultant. Much of this time has been spent focusing on the
reputation of universities in the UK and internationally, ghostwriting for
academics and senior figures for national broadsheet newspapers and
professional media on everything from astral physics to the future of sewage.
His
head full of Powys, Tim gave up on a regular career to work for himself as a
freelance writer and communications professional.
Tim has previously contributed essays to Slightly Foxed and New Escapologist.
*
*
* * *
Defy
the modern world with forgotten genius John Cowper Powys!
“He produced a whole torrent of books about
the magic contained within everyday life, and how to defy the competition and
conformity demanded by the modern world.
Powysland isn’t a straight biography – it wouldn’t suit him. Instead it explores the places that made the man and his eccentric philosophy, the huge rhapsodic novels and his life as a touring literary prophet. It sets out to discover how he attracted both a fanatical following over the past 100 years, why he’s mattered to so many people then and now – but also became reviled, neglected and forgotten. There’s a binary divide between those who think Powys one of the giants and geniuses of literature – and those who thought he was a nut and really just too much to stomach. Among the fans have been Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, JB Priestley, and more recently Iris Murdoch, Iain Sinclair, Bernard Cornwell, Margaret Drabble and Philip Pullman. American intellectual George Steiner said he’s the only writer in English language we’ve got who can stand comparison with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
On the other side you’ve got a big chunk of
the literary establishment, reviewers and academia. Which has meant he’s had no
chance of making it into the literary canon.
I’ve made my own adventures in
Powysland over the past 15 years, joining with the hardcore followers of Powys,
visiting the important places to him, trying to figure out how and whether
there’s anything to be gained from thinking and living like a Powysian. In a
sanitised world, we need Powys. But he’s a writer who’s running out of readers.
This book will be one way to make sure this one-off in literary history, an
English eccentric with so much to say about modern angst and disenchantment,
isn’t carelessly forgotten.”
Tim Blanchard
