A Question of Selection

    As one plunges deeper into the wilderness of this work, it becomes increasingly difficult that to keep in mind that it is not the first novel of a very young man indeed. All the usual signs are there: the complete absence of objective grasp; the interminable soul-searchings of the hero; the megalomaniac inconsequence of the plot; the feverish effort to get everything in. To these generic defects Mr Powys adds a conscience condemned, by the lack of fixed principles, to constant overwork, and a style of such unsophisticated badness as becomes, in the long run, almost endearing.
    Wolf Solent is a man of 35, whose inner life, through a prolonged or rather petrified adolescence, has ben entirely in daydreams, to which he attaches a mystical significance and which, his adult acquaintance having presumably outgrown them, he believes peculiar to himself. This belief the author seems, unfortunately, to share. Wolf's return to his native Dorset, and his experiences there, drive him out into reality a little, but how far the reader must be left to decide; for none of Wolf's irrelevant and repetitive musings are ever spared him, and they resemble each other very closely from first to last.
    The bok is full of the grandiose beginnings, loose ends and meaningless gestures of the amateur. It is, on the whole, heavy reading, for Mr Powys does not attempt to select -- his aim is to transcribe.
This is no doubt a form of sincerity, but still, sincerity is only a means; and an accumulation of detail merely puzzles the mind, as the car is puzzled by a succession of unrelated sounds. A Novelist, besides, must leave out something. Mr Powys' method is to leave out the difficult things. Important transitions, the growth of relationships, her passes over in silence, assuming in the next chapter, that they have taken place, and leaving the how and the why for ever a mystery to the astonished reader.
    To say that a book is without selection, proportion, or logical development, is to condemn it at once as lacking the qualities of mind. Now there may be art forms in which the will and the intellect have a subordinate place, but the novel is not one of them. The novelist must know his own mind before he can advance a step; otherwise, concerned as he is with life directly and as a whole, he is obliged to put everything in. Anything that presents itself may, for all he knows, be the essential thing, and besides, if he leaves it out he feels it will be lost for ever. Great novels are based on principles, and Mr Powys, for lack of them, is a prey to all the bugbears of the imagination.
    Wolf Solent has two bugbears-- will and energy. They take in his mind the forms of modern civilisation and sex. The first he escapes, though it continues to haunt him at intervals, by returning to Dorset and living in a small workman's villa: beautiful houses are apparently too voluntary and coherent for him.Sex he cannot escape, being as much attracted as repelled by it. Sex, therefore is, what this book is about. It is treated with a mixture of pedantry and superstition hard to describe; indeed, Mr Powys quite loses his head over it. For example: the bad Squire has engaged Wolf as his collaborator in a history of Dorset; he is introduced with every circumstance of the sinister and hair-raising; then he begins to talk about his history:
    We must select, my friend, we must select. All history lies in selection. We can't put in everything. We must
    out in only what's got pith and sap and salt. Things like adulteries, murders and fornications.
 
    Wolf, however, continues to take him seriously; indeed, he is shocked. He is in a continual state of shock; shocked at his friends, shocked at himself, shocked still more when he is not shocked.; shocked by sex particularly, but not exclusively.
    Behind the pigsty! It seemed to him odd that he had lived there a whole year and never seen this familiar shed
    from the back. It was queer how he always shirked reality, and then suddenly plunged-- plunged into its
    inmost retreat! Behind the pigsty! It was only when he got desperate that he plunged into the nature of
    human beings-- that he got behind them!
    Ay! how coldly, how maliciously, he could dive into people he knew and see their inmost souls...from behind,
    from behind! Poison and sting...the furtive and the sex clutch, yes, a spasmodically jerking, quivering
    ego-nerve, pursing its own end-- that what was behind everyone!

    He torments himself unflagging over his ideals without having any clear notion what they are, or any impulse to sit down and think them out. In fact, Mr Powys has rediscovered the hundred per cent. romanticism of Sturm und Drang-- and he does not appear to entertain the lats suspicion that it has been discovered before.
    His moral sensitiveness, indeed, and patience in recording impressions might give this book some value if he had command of English enough to do them justice. Unfortunately, he has not. At the end of a long, serious, introspective sentence, suddenly you come upon an exclamation make: it strikes on the ear like the blunder of a too genial guest at a gentel and rather strained tea-party. This hearty symbol, however, recurs so often that one comes to take it in the right spirit, as a mere confession of inadequacy.
    Mr Powys' literariness is a more consistent shock. 'Miss Gault's face,' he says, 'was like an
ancient amphitheatre full of dusky gladiators.' Faces, interpretated by Mr Powys, are seldom without some monstrous oddity. Smiles are reflected in them like bunches of honeysuckle. In fact, this book is so strenously over-written that it was hardly possible it should be expressive. It has been grossly over-praised.