Pascal,Powys and Ligotti

M

Malone

Grimscribe
I've just been reading J.C. Powys' essay on Pascal and certain passages brought both Lovecraft and Ligotti's work and philosophy to mind:

'One realises how few writers there are whose imagination is large enough to grapple with the sublime horror of being born of the human race into this planetary system....[His] essential grandeur consists in the fact that he tore himself clear of all those peddling and pitiful compromises,those half-humourous concessions,those lazy conventionalisms,with which most peole cover their brains as if with wool,and ballast their imagination as if with heavy sand...He tore himself clear of everything;so as to envisage the universe in its unmitigated horror,so as to look the emptiness of space straight between its ghastly lidless eyes.One see him there,at the edge of the world,silhouetted against the white terror of infinity...'

Beautiful stuff,eh?Incidentally,I've never read any of Powys' fiction,but am toying with doing so,so if anyone has dipped into it,I'd love to hear their thoughts.
 
J.C. Powys' fiction is marvellous. I went through a stage in the Seventies of reading eveything he has written. THE GLASTONBURY ROMANCE is of particular memory for me.

I can quite see the connection with Ligotti
 
Powys's literary essays, on Pascal and many others, are fascinating and mesmerizing to read. Powys himself was so strongly individual an author that I've often wondered what on earth he'd have to say about others who were seemingly unlike himself. Dante? Henry James? Voltaire? But he always ends up being quite illuminating, sometimes in eccentric ways, and generous even to an author he admits he doesn't like (Voltaire). And all the while he never ceases to be uber Powysian.

Collections of his literary criticism have numerous overlaps in their contents, but you have to ignore the feeling that you're buying the same book over and over if you want to get all the essays. I own three of the collections -- Enjoyment of Literature, Suspended Judgments, and Visions and Revisions -- but I know I'm still missing some of his criticism. The only reason I bought Suspended Judgments was for the fine, cantankerously elitist essays "The Art of Discrimination" and "Suspended Judgments," but I see that this volume is also the only one I have that contains the essays on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Anatole France. Is anyone still reading this? I feel that I've wandered off into a thicket here.

Even more than the literary essays, I admire Powys's works of visionary philosophy: In Defence of Sensuality, The Meaning of Culture, and A Philosophy of Solitude.

Oddly, I've only read one of his novels, Wolf Solent, which I found to be dense, incantatory, and immensely powerful. A Glastonbury Romance looks like a huge lap-breaker to me, whereas Wolf Solent is "merely" 500 or 600 pages. I definitely plan to read more of his novels. In my current state of premature but rapidly advancing senescence, I'm drawn more to nonfiction than fiction -- a complete reversal of the reading tastes of my younger self. I'm still capable of occasionally reading fiction with real appreciation, but I have to be in a special mood for it.

I know there are at least two other Powys-heads on this site (besides Nemonymous and myself). Perhaps they could be persuaded to say a few words.
 
Thanks a lot for the two replies so far.I picked up 'Suspended Judgements' only yesterday,but am already enchanted by Powys' individualism.As observed,even he's talking about an author one knows little about,his prose and sheer power keep you hooked.
I have Wolf Solent somewhere and am now determined to take a proper run at it.Incidentally,here's a link to an interesting article praising T.F. Powys as being the greatest of the three brothers.Apparently,'Mr.Weston's Good Wine' and 'Unclay' are the ones to keep an eye out for.


http://www.newstatesman.com/200112030043
 
gveranon said:
I know there are at least two other Powys-heads on this site (besides Nemonymous and myself). Perhaps they could be persuaded to say a few words.
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Powys-head! Says the Bernhard-head! ;)

I've been called worse, G! It is very late here in Oz, and I will compose something more substantial when I am more alert. I have read almost everything that JCP ever published (including one ultra-rare, privately printed epic poem--my edition contains a signature from the man himself, in vibrant blue ink, and I have spent many hours tracing those elegant letters with my fingertip, hoping to absorb a particle of that daemonic genius). About a decade ago I went on a Powys orgy, and his work is now part of my DNA.

After reading this thread I was suddenly reminded of a passage from Visions and Revisions. Ligotti rarely has anything positive to say about Shakespeare--that "ultimate insider" and literary showman; but here is what Powys has to say concerning the Bard:

Shakespeare is, at bottom, the most extreme of Pessimists. He has no faith in "progress," no belief in "eternal values," no transcendental "intuitions," no zeal for reform. The universe to him, for all its loveliness, remains an outrageous jest. The cosmic is the comic. Anything may be expected of this "pendant world," except what we expect; and when it is a question of "falling back," we can only fall back on human-made custom. We live by Illusions, and when the last Illusion fails us, we die. After reading Shakespeare, the final impression left upon the mind is that the world can only be justified as an aesthetic spectacle. To appreciate a Show at once so sublime and so ridiculous, one needs to be very brave, very tender, and very humorous. Nothing else is needed. "Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither. Ripeness is all." When Courage fails us, it is--"as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport." When tenderness fails us, it is--"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time." When humour fails us, it is--"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world!"

So much for Life! And when we come to Death, how true it is, as Charles Lamb says, that none has spoken of Death like Shakespeare! And he has spoken of it so--with such an absolute grasp of our mortal feeling about it--because his mood in regard to it is the mood of the natural man; of the natural man, unsophisticated by false hopes, undated by vain assurance. His attitude towards death neither sweetens "the unpalatable draught of mortality" nor permits us to let go the balm of its "eternal peace." How frightful "to lie in cold obstruction and to rot; this sensible warm motion to become a kneaded clod!" and yet, "after life's fitful fever," how blessed to "sleep well!"


With that, I'm off to bed.
 
The mighty signature of a literary titan:

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Really envious about the signature, B & I!

I do have a copy of 'Lucifer' in Village Press (1974) that I bought new in that year.Who published your edition? Was it 1956 (the original publication date): Macdonald & Co.?
 
Here are a few paragraphs from Powys's essay "Melville and Poe" (from Enjoyment of Literature). His thoughts here about Poe, and the way he expresses them (really getting into the spirit of his subject matter, I'd say!), seem both Ligottian and Lovecraftian.
It is because our critical approach to Poe's poetry has been from the wrong direction that we have laid him open to these disparagements. In place of trying to explain what psychological perversions in his character and what unhappy accidents in his life moulded his genius, we ought to accept his genius -- for all his own mania for analysing it -- as the pure inspiration it was, and then, occupying ourselves with the nature of this inspiration rather than with the pathological weaknesses of its mortal medium, to seek to follow him into those particular purlieus of our race-consciousness whither his intense and abnormal subjectivity carried him.

And the interesting thing to notice here is, as I have already hinted, that there should be so little that we can localize, or trace the origin of, in the actual New York or Maryland or Virginia of this poet's sojournings.

For myself, a traveller for a score of years between all of Edgar Allan Poe's particular cities, and knowing the country round them a good deal better than I know my native Derbyshire, I confess -- though it may be because of a kindred sensibility towards the ghostly, the weird, and the horror-hinting -- I have found even in those districts, though of course far more in the "deeper" South, elements here and there that corresponded with disturbing closeness to the frightening things in his imaginary landscapes.

But it is not from those haunted pine-woods and those livid morasses and those treacherous estuaries and those weedy Lethean wharfs that the darker vistas and more troubling vistas of Poe's inspirations come.

They are conjured up from the occult symbols of pre-incarnate tremblings that we all find written on the nerves of our race, though only a few abnormal individuals can render articulate these hieroglyphs of "holy terror."

And it is as if by turning this burden of ancestral "night-thoughts" into the loveliness of perfect rhyme he was able to bestow an enchanted peace -- the peace and fulfillment of beauty -- upon the "perturbed spirits" of this "ghoul-haunted" region of the human brain.

A traveller along strange roads is the soul of man; and there come to us all, along with the undying life-seed of the generations, hints and glimpses of dark moods and occult experiences, that only a few individuals, down the long line of our dead, have been destined really to know.

Poetry as beautiful and strange as this could only have been written by a proud and lonely spirit whose intense subjectivity tapped some abiding reservoir of these debouchings from the normal path of the pilgrim soul.

​
 
Nemonymous said:
Was it 1956 (the original publication date): Macdonald & Co.?
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Yes, it is the 1956 edition published by Macdonald, London. An exquisite book: the thick heavy pages sound like real pages should when you turn them in your hands; the black text is deeply impregnated in the woven texture of the deckle-edged paper. The book also contains original woodblock engravings, one of which depicts the dark hand of Lucifer as he leaves his fingerprints on the fleshy petals of a wild convolvulus flower.

I envy anyone reading Powys for the first time. As to the fiction, I would suggest that one begin with the Great Four Romances: Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Weymouth Sands (1934) and Maiden Castle (1936). ("Maiden," by the way, is the modernised English of "Mai-dun," which refers to a great neolithic earthwork near Dorchester, inhabited by old gods.)

The historical novels--or, more accurately, his novels set in the re-imagined past--are also wonderful. In Homer and the Aether (1959) Powys inhabits the souls and bodies of those ancient Greek warriors, and their gods, as if he had lived through the war himself. (He is particularly bewitching when it comes to describing the "bare flashing ankles" of nymphs and other slender sirens--for more on this I would recommend his colossal Autobiography (1934).)

In fiction I seek out one quality above all others: depth of inwardness. In my reading experience no other author can match Powys in his representation of inwardness. His characters possess inner lives so abundant and rich that it is intoxicating to follow their thoughts. Tolstoy once gave us the mind of an abused horse. Powys goes beyond him. Powys gives us the inner life of the great blazing sun and lets us feel the vibrating connections as experienced by the "flesh-covered skeletons" below: "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." That passage comes from the first page of A Glastonbury Romance. Over one thousand pages later the novel, unfortunately, ends.

Late in life Powys himself was rather dismissive of his fiction, calling it "personal propaganda,"--that is, the propaganda of an eccentric man's inner life. But what an inner life it is!
 
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Bleak&Icy said:
Nemonymous said:
I envy anyone reading Powys for the first time. As to the fiction, I would suggest that one begin with the Great Four Romances: Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Weymouth Sands (1934) and Maiden Castle (1936).
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I go along with those. I'm a bit distant now from my reading of JCP (though he does feature in my novella 'Weirdtongue') - so possibly not as close to it as B&I. But 'The Glastonbury Romance' was a major event in my life, and caused me to take my then young family to Glastonbury on holiday - in the Seventies, before the Glastonbury Festival was famous. Or Glistenberry, as I call it! :)

I have a first edition of JCP's novel PORIUS, but strangely enough it is the one novel of his that I don't really get on with.
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In my late teens I discovered Powys while just wandering around the University of Iowa library. I think Philosophy of Solitude was the title that caught my attention. I read that and then read several other of his non-fiction books. The more of his non-fiction books I read, the better I was able to understand his views (which are sometimes expressed obscurely or obliquely). I recommend Homer and the Aether, which is a re-telling of the Illiad. Powys adds his own interpretations, which are observations and insights he divulges through the voice of the aether.
In regards to Theodore Powys, I read and enjoyed Mr. Weston's Good Wine. His non-fiction book, Soliloquies of a Hermit was also very impressive. I intend to re-read it at some point since his ideas are also sometimes difficult to grasp.
 
From Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions by John Cowper Powys:

Deep yawns below Deep; and if we cannot read "the writing upon the wall," the reason may be that there is no writing there. Having lifted a corner of the Veil of Isis, having glanced once into that Death-Kingdom where grope the roots of the Ash-Tree whose name is Fear, we return to the surface, from Nadir to Zenith, and become "superficial"--"out of profundity."

The infinite spaces, as Pascal said, are "frightful." That way madness lies. And those who would be sane upon earth must drug themselves with the experience, or with the spectacle of the experience, of human passion. Within this charmed circle, and here alone, they may be permitted to forget the Outer Terror.
 
I've discovered that several of Powys' non-fiction works are available on Project Guttenburg for free perusal and download,including Visions and Revisions and One Hundred Best Books.
 
Malone said:
I've discovered that several of Powys' non-fiction works are available on Project Guttenburg for free perusal and download,including Visions and Revisions and One Hundred Best Books.
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There is another website--manybooks.net--which allows you to download ebooks in a dozen different formats. You can even create a custom pdf document. At present they have four non-fiction works by JCP available: http://manybooks.net/authors/powysj.html
 
Three Fantasies is one of the weirdest books I own and, sadly, the only book of Powys's that I have read. I have tried several times to read some of his longer works, but occult circumstances always prevent me from reaching even the hundreth-page mark (in the case of Porius, though, I merely decided that the book was terrible).

What about the other other Powys, Llewelyn? I have been curious about him ever since I learned that he was Larkin's favourite.
 
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