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Nobodaddy on Folly Down
fly R. C. CHURCHILL rIOD' was the enigmatic answer when I once asked a mutual acquaintance what T. F. riowys looked like. That must have been in the days when he sported a beard and might have sat for one of Blake's drawings of Urizen: a kind of Nobodaddy on Folly Down. In the frontis- Piece to Mr. Coombes's book* he appears clean- shaven, during the last decade of his life; and Coombes's excellent study can be said to be clean- ;11aven, too, in that it concentrates on Powys the IterarY artist, the author of Fables and Mr.
eston' s Good Wine, rather than on Powys the Philosopher.
Such a distinction, while not being absolute, Is perfectly legitimate, for it must be agreed that Soliloquies of a Hermit, the early book in which PawYs puts his philosophy of atheism (or is it Pantheism?) most clearly, is a book difficult to get through and not a literary success by any standards. Whereas two at least of the novels— Mr. Weston and Unclay—with some dozen of the fables and nouvelles, including The Left Leg and The Only Penitent, must be accounted among the• most .genuine literary achievements °f the Twenties and early Thirties. That they are not commonly so counted is part of the motive behind Mr. Coombes's book, 'written in the belief that T. F. Powys is an original genius, one of the great writers of the twentieth century. . . . bespite the appearance from time to time of aPpreciative notices and articles and even sections of books, one feels perfectly justified in speaking °f Powys as a neglected genius.'
One certainly does. There is a Penguin edition of Mi. Weston, which must have been widely read, but neither that book nor the Fables (re- printed under the title of No Painted Plumage) as appeared in Everyman's Library, which has tnund room for Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley ant.(t Aldous Huxley. The British Council's 1, titers and their Work series does not seem to "ave caught up with Powys yet, though it includes ;says on such later and lesser writers as Charles illiams and Dylan Thomas—whose own broad- castcriticism of Powys, cited by Mr. Coombes, rfentinds one of the boomerang hurled with all his Tree by Lytton Strachey at the ghost of Matthew l'Irnold. In G. S. Fraser's The Modern Writer and his World, Powys gets more respectful atten- „(:16 n, but under thirty lines as contrasted with Rex warner's 140. • • • We should, however, bear three things in mind. first, that it is by no means unheard of for a great writer to win recognition very slowly, while e°mparatively minor writers are acclaimed from the start. As late as 1880, when Matthew Arnold took 'the roll of our chief poetical names,' he °Mitted Blake while including Scott, Campbell .,TisF.). POWYS. By H. Coombes. (Barrie and Rock-
and Moore. No critic Of Arnold's calibre today would prefer Campbell or Moore to Blake (or include Scott among the poets rather than the novelists); but Powys, already sharing Blake's recasting of Christian legend—compare, for example, the version of the Nativity in The Left Leg with that in The Everlasting Gospel—may well come to share also the poet-artist's slow but steady rise to classic recognition.
Secondly, the distinctive genius of Theodore Francis has to some extent been lost in the family name of Powys—as for many years the distinc- tive genius of Emily was lost in the family name of Brontt. We can easily judge what similar con- fusion might have been caused if the author of the Four Quartets had had an elder novel-writing brother named Mark Hawthorne Eliot and a younger poetical brother named Homer Long- fellow Eliot, besides some other Eliots who wrote other things. John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys are distinguished writers, each with his own obvious merits, but if we see them as altogether lesser artists than T. F. Powys at his best (it must be readily admitted that, at his worst, Powys can be very feeble indeed), we have a certain amount of justification in family tradi- tion as well as in literary criticism. There exists, I believe, an early letter of Llewelyn to Theodore, complaining that, while some of the family have had their successes in literature, the brother whom they all thought would be the finest flower, to wit T. F., had so far blushed unseen. And part of the genesis of the Fables was surely in Llewelyn's saying to Theodore, in suitable reminiscence of their ancestor Cowper's Task: 'You can write about anything'—or words to that effect--`write about that bucket or that rope!'
Thirdly, we must not forget that writers who win recognition early, especially in modern times, are usually those whose works have a clear con- temporary application, though a few of them are seen eventually to have more than that. There is nothing particularly 'contemporary' about Mr. Weston, the Fables, Innocent Birds or Unclay; and this is not primarily due to their rural setting in a largely urban age. For simile of Hardy's novels reflected contemporary problems, and there is a wide public today (and a massive repu- tation, including in one case a Nobel Prize for Literature) for American novelists writing about isolated communities in the Deep South. It is the persistent concern of Powys with the Eternal Verities that makes him non-contemporary or timeless, though he can be approached by way of Frazer and Freud as easily as through Antony and Cleopatra, the Pilgrim's Progress and the Songs of Innocence and Experience. He has one overriding theme, that of the Good Wine, essenz tially the same wine, which is served in two strengths : the Light Wine, which is Love, and can be represented doubtless by an X, and the Dark Wine, which calls for a cross of another kind. Virtually all his work consists of subtle variations on this theme, a topic as non-current and as undated as the Elegy in a Country Church- yard, though the common reader, in Johnsonian language, has yet to concur.
Whether Powys is most fittingly to be called an atheist, a pantheist or a Christian heretic depends largely on our definition of these terms. Blake died singing hymns of his own composition; Powys, though in later life a regular reader of the lessons at his village church (in the spirit of Pascal's wager, according to his brother J. C.) and outwardly Christian enough for a friend to re- mark of him, in a letter to Mr. Coombes, that he was 'a most devout believer,' regarded death as the end, a sentiment he puts into the mouths of many of his characters, including the Vicar of Maids Madder in that original and moving story, The Only Penitent. That this was his own per- sonal belief is apparent from the Soliloquies. There his atheism stems from his awareness that the most beautiful things in life blossom and fade, while the stones of the field and 'the ever- lasting mud' remain. His other fundamental belief, in the virtue of the grave as a place of rest—like Macbeth over Duncan, Mr. Weston feels some envy that after life's fitful fever man- kind should sleep well—is perhaps less logical. Although expressed so memorably in Mr. Weston and Unclay, the twin theories of death as the end and the grave as a place of rest are not really compatible. We only know we have been asleep when we wake up; if we never wake up, our so- called enviable rest is not evident to ourselves but only to those who survive us, to Macbeth but not to Duncan, to Powys the novelist but not to the originals of Ada Kiddie and Mr. Johnson.
Powys's Christianity is that of a man born into the centuries-old tradition of the Church, a man steeped in the language and ideas of the Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress, who finds he can best express even unorthodox beliefs in orthodox terms. A Quaker Christianity can exist without a priesthood; a Unitarian without belief in Christ's divinity. But it is difficult to see Powys's Christi- anity, from any orthodox viewpoint, as more than a top-dressing of traditional manure en- abling his atheistic or pantheistic roots to blossom more seasonably. The most that can be said, from the orthodox side, is that he appears to have shared the attitude of that other parson's son, Samuel Butler : that 'the spirit behind the Church is true, though her letter—true once—is now true no longer.'
Powys speaks through Mr. Neville in that bitter • and not entirely satisfactory novel, Mr. Tasker's Gods: 'The English Church . . . has become a very successful business. It took a great work out of loving hands and built in the Master's name a jam factory. They boil the stones of the fruit and call it "Christ's Church." Without Jesus our Church is really splendid. . . .' And his vision in the Soliloquies of 'the Christ, a poor dark Arab, lying beaten by the rods of the Roman soldiers,' is more akin to Blake's Lambeth visions than to Eliot's Thoughts after Lambeth.
The novels and stories remain, whether we agree with the writer's philosophy or not. Atheists can forgive his Christian terminology, Christians his heresies, in common appreciation of a compassionate love for man's humanity, and a hatred for the unaware, the unfeeling, the proud and the cruel, that have seldom in twentieth-century literature found more original, and at the same time more traditional, expres- sion. To that appreciation Mr. Coombes's book adds its considerable tribute and its powerful persuasion. ,
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