'It is a criminal blunder of our maturer years,'
writes Mr Powys at the beginning of this autobiography, 'that we so tamely
and without frantic and habitual struggles to retain it, allow the ecstasy
of the unbounded to slip away out of our lives.'
Mr Powys himself retains it both frantically and
habitually. His intimations of boundlessness began early at his father's
Derbyshire vicarage.There was a grassy hill which gave him a 'dim feeling
of immensity'; it became 'synonymous with sublimity.'Oddly enough, a pair
of boots and their thick souls conveyed 'my father's intensity of earth-feeling.'
'An oceanic in-pouring of this unbounded' was occassioned by his father's
axe. It made, he adds, in what might be called the cosmic humourlessness
of this book, 'An even greater dent in my mind.'
Mr Powys' romanticism and egolatry, which he begs
us not to confuse with Rousseau's; there is no danger of that -- have their
real rival in the amateur-philosophical writings of another celebrated
transatlantic lecturer, Count Keyserling.By floodlighting every episode
with symbolism, some dramatic effects are obtained, particularly in the
uncovering of new kinds of vice. At Sherborne:
I tried to overcome the most formidable
of human passion-- anger and desire-- by the abandonment of the vice
of pure gluttony. In that one night I ravenlously devoured a whole
sponge cake.
Against the crime of eating sponge cake we must
place the rhythmic significance of telegraph wires seen rising and falling
from a moving train. His meditations upon sadism tell him that 'from an
intense absorption over a long period of time there must emanate magnetic
vibrations of some sort permeating the surrounding air and leaving an evil
impress that only gradually dies away.'
These quaotations may indicate the embarrassment
of the task of reviewing Mr Powys' book. One has the sensation of entering
some Turkish bath of the psyche, and of there seeing Mr Powys naked in
the hottest room of the subjective process. He sits steaming confusedly
away, an ascetic-looking figure for all his verbal sensuality, declaiming
theatrically and monotonously among the vapours and secretions. He is determined
to sweat every drop out of his system.
Whether Mr Powys' naked and shameless candour is
as candid as it sounds is doubtful. He is naked yet hidden in the vapour
of his own confession. He seems to me to have wrapped himself in sensationalism.
Thus, the objectives facts of his life in the 650 closely printed pages
of this book,are few.One hears a little of the other members of his distinguished
family, one gathers a portrait here and there from Sherborne, and has a
guess or two at what happened at Cambridge and later at Brighton, where
his caree as a lecturer began.
There is a gentleman who had had sunstroke in Singapore
and who wrote poetry. He said, 'Powys, we must propitiate magnates.' There
is a working man who introduced the sex, symbolism and magic-obsessed lecturer
with his 'impersonal lust,' to the 'chaste whores' of Liverpool. There
are brief glimpses of America. The rest is boundlessness, wordy tunnellings
down the long arches of the solitary ego.
Mr Powys' case will no doubt be clear to psychologists;
this, incidentally, seems to irritate him for it puts a stop to boundlessness.
His book is often a rich and fascinating document. A great great part of
his life he was obsessed with what he calls sadistic erotic perversions.
Normal sexual phenomena revotled him. He dreamed of sylph-like, idealised
girls. He developed a passion fpr erotic literature and was even able to
get sexual stimulus from the blameless Ally Sloper's Weekly. Naturally
he hated women. He even went to the extent of hating trees and plants for
their feminie parts. He feared he might become a woman. He loathed to see
a woman holding a handkerchief in her hand.
There is a secret life held back in everyone by
the sluices of shame, and Mr Powys' public confession may bring private
release to others. The very secrecy of that life, stagnant behind its shames,
breeds those perversions, those fears and obsessions which, in this book,
make Mr Powys give a disproportionate value to irrelevant matter. They
cut a man off from his fellows. They have cut Mr Powys off.
So that, fishing in the Glastonbury gloom of consciousness,
he feels the line jerk, hauls away and brings up a creature whose length
he immediately exaggerates. It does not occur to him that others are drily
comparing catches with him; and it never enters his head when he cries--
borrowing the manner of a de Quincey of a Hazlitt-- 'You will hardly believe
it, reader, when I tell you...' that his Glastonbury Monster seems to other
fisherman rather less than a sprat.
With poetic intuitions--yet no poet; emulator of
prose styles, but no stylist; with an ability to draw character, but no
novelist; a priest washing his sins in rhetoric; a mystic only too much
in tune with the indefnite; an actor, but fatally insisting upon a one-man
play; a man as easily bogged in the sublime as in the ridiculous, his self-dramatisations
collapsing at a touch into bathos-- with all his itntuitive and imaginative
gifts, Mr Powys ends by making turgid what he has the ability to make clear.
He rejoices in the revolt against reason:
The people who use this term against
me are exactly the type of persons who all the way down history have
been the enemies against everything
I value most in life. They hate, distrust and despise imagination....
Personally for myself I would define
this vein of 'charlatanism' in me which you are so afraid of as a clown-
element, or the comic-actor element,
in the esence of all psychic truth. Without this element-- which
is the
perilous drop of the aboriginal berry-juice
of old Saturn's blood-- the pursuit of truth would resemble some-
thing between a four hours' speech
by Mr Gladstone and a four weeks' visit to some scientific retreat, where
they investigate dogs' saliva through
slits in their necks.
Excellent intoxication, but it is verbal and not
imaginative. One can only answer Mr Powys out of his own mouth:
...it is the element of self-love,
in totally irrelevant happenings, that accounts for the indescribale tediousness
of many autobiographies.