Critical Woodcuts/Llewelyn Powys
LLEWELYN POWYS, like R. L. Stevenson, entered upon his literary career with a sinister experience which I have heard the witty euphemists in a sanatorium describe in jeweled phrase as "spitting rubies." This experience subsequently gave a fine edge to his appreciation of the Masai curse: "May you never spit white again!"—the noble savage as observed in East Africa does not overflow with brotherly love. It also contributed—this experience—toward edging his appreciation of many other things, and, again, as in the case of R. L. Stevenson, it already bids fair to get him into serious trouble with the critics.
Mr. Powys emerges for us out of a background reekingly British. He emerges by virtue of his talent for bringing into high and often into startling relief the universal interest in whatever theme he touches.
He has, for a minor example, the habit of talking in print about the members of his own family, and the habit of dedicating his books to them. What with affection, derision, humor and cutting irony he has, within the limits of "Skin for Skin" given a distinct flavor and a memorable word to both his parents and to nearly all his numerous brothers and sisters. Yet they but flicker across the pages. They are but notes of the background from which he himself emerges with
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a figure—not reekingly British—the figure of an uncompromising post-war pessimist with a marvelous faculty for expressing a vision which will encounter quick sympathies in disenchanted people all over the world.
He was born in 1883, eighth of eleven children, at Dorchester, famous town in the domain of the "Wessex" pessimist, whose somber intuitions of long ago we feel as so prescient and so refreshing. He was born in a very English home, apparently fixed in English traditions of what used to be considered the best sort: upper middle class; Church of England; Cambridge University for generations; addiction to country life in the southern countries; William Cowper somewhere in the family tree; the sword of an East India uncle hanging in the library of the rectory; family prayers; maids bringing in cakes and tea.
As for the immediate family, a mother with the gift of sorrow; a white-headed pater, a fine leonine figure of the Victorian divine; a sister with the gift of ecstatically identifying herself with nature; brothers—three or four of them writers, notably. Theodore and John, and the lot of them men of enterprise and talent, unconventional thinkers, talkers, suitable persons to sharpen one's wits upon, suitable fellows to assist one in breaking out of the paternal sheepfold—goatish sharp-horned young pagans in their youth, butting their way out of the "bourgeoisie," butting their way to intellectual freedom.
We got our first sharp impression that Llewelyn Powys was arriving with something of more than parish lane concern when, in 1923, he published an arresting little volume called "Ebony and Ivory," containing sketches and stories of East Africa and southern England—containing also a personality with a pungently bitter tang. In 1924, ostensibly eschewing "æsthetic effects," seeking only the beauty of a merciless veracity, he returned in imagination to the swart continent, and plucked at its mystery with even starker grip, with even more potent effect, in "Black Laughter." Now, in "Skin for Skin," with only occasional allusions to the profound and shattering adventure of his soul as a stockman in Uganda, he reverts to the origins of his vision and his point of view, giving us, in the same almost incredibly poignant style, his experience as an invalid in an Alpine sanatorium and as a convalescent in Southern England, during the period between his twenty-fifth year and his five years' sojourn in Africa.
I read these three books with a quickening of consciousness which I regard as one of the chief rewards for reading anything. I read them with intense excitement, exclaiming over page after page: "Upon my soul, what a writer! How the man can write!"—or words with an even higher accent but to the same effect. Among imaginative modern interpreters of nature and the soul of alien peoples, he belongs with men of the first mark—with Pierre Loti, Charles M. Doughty, D. H. Lawrence.
But already I hear a dissentient murmur rising, which sounds something like this: "Yes, a very striking writer, to be sure. Impressive books—in a way. But unpleasant . . . morbid . . . a taint in them. Clearly a man of abnormal sensibilities. Really, unhealthy books, you know . . . cruel and of a most dubious morality. A sick man's vision of life—after 'Skin for Skin' transparently so."
A sick man's vision of life. My first impulse is to parody Lincoln on Grant's whisky-drinking; you remember, when critics informed him that his commander was habitually soaked in whisky he inquired: "What brand? I want to send some to my other generals." My first impulse is brutally to ejaculate: "Would that more of our authors were ill!" But one must be serious and sober, and one must admit that here is a subject that asks a little threshing-out. What is the relation of disease, particularly tuberculosis, to the development of literary talent? Does it affect one's vision of life in such fashion as to invalidate the vision?
A night or so ago I was sitting before a fire with a robust and sanguine friend who, like myself, restricts a physical strength adequate for a lumberjack, adequate for driving logs through the rocks of a foaming river, to driving a little fountain pen over sheets of smooth white paper. We were full of the summer, full of the delight of not even trying to think, full of remembered pleasure in making something with our hands and in going somewhere with our feet—the sweet, heavy thoughtless monotony of building stone walls all day long in a country garden, the joyous, thoughtless effectiveness of swinging an ax in the woods and such entirely satisfying activities as swimming, canoeing and tennis.
"The ideal human life," I said, "is in some physical action which one has just brains enough to perform." "Yes," agreed my literary friend, and he began to brag of the beauty of his garden tools and of the glorious workmanship and singing rhythm of a scythe. "I am convinced," he concluded, "that no one takes to writing who hasn't something physically or mentally the matter with him." We were in precisely the mood, you see, to be impressed by recollection that Powys and Stevenson and Symonds and Hood and Keats and Sterne were "TB's" and that there must have been something abnormal about Chaucer and Shakespeare—must have been! Thank heaven, there was.
Now, in the case of Stevenson, evidently it was a point of pride and honor to play the part of a well man in life and in letters. So far as possible he suppressed in his public thinking and feeling, and even in his private consciousness, the fact that on his body a "damned defeat" had been made. Latter-day critics ridicule his point of honor; declare him unsuccessful in his gallant pretense; "explain" him by tracing everything to his illness; and—quite absurdly, in my opinion—attempt the destruction of his literary reputation by the same stroke. I doubt whether Stevenson himself was fully aware in how many ways and how deeply his art was affected by his disease. But that is another question. Our point now is that he based his honor and his philosophy and his art upon the assumption that he possessed a normal mind, equal to all hazards, and also competent to furnish sound entertainment to healthy people.
Mr. Powys is of another generation, which attacks the "problems of life" from a different angle. I fancy he is consciously somewhat anti-Stevensonian. He speaks, at any rate, superciliously of the "courtly collect," "Virginibus Puerisque," which Stevenson wrote at the Davos Platz sanatorium. I can even imagine his swearing, with a round Elizabethan oath, that he will have none of this "gallant pretense." As for him, his honor, his philosophy, his art, are to be fashioned in absolutely open recognition of this stunning fundamental fact of his bodily circumstance: that he, a young fellow to whom life has just feigned to wish the top of the morning, he, strolling through flowers of a sunlit garden, rejoicing in his youth,—discovers of a sudden that myriads of cane-like micro-organisms have taken lodgings in his lungs, and that the struggle for possession of them is "on" between him and invaders more ruthless than Vandals and Huns.
It was rather a shock. It did not come to him gradually, but abruptly, in a mouthful of blood—knowledge of the sort of infested tenement he had leased, consciousness that his spirit now, at any time, might be evicted without notice and turned adrift on the chill air. It was a shock, but it did not floor him.
On the contrary, it startled him upright, it stabbed him broad awake. He began to think and to feel with unwonted vividness. And in a world which had become singularly bright and sweet to his senses, a vision dawned for him and abided with him and widened till it made a background for all our banqueting and revelry. Should he veil it? Nothe. The first sentence of "Skin for Skin" flaunts his theme: "I first discovered that I had consumption during the small hours of a November night in the year 1909"—and it is 1925 now. In the entire period of his literary production, then, Mr. Powys has had a lively awareness that his house was on fire and that he was his house; that to Alpine snows and African heats he must flee from what he must carry with him.
A vision of life reported by a sick man under menace of death—may we dismiss that as "interesting, in a way," but not significant for the rest of us? Evidently Mr. Powys thinks not. His contention is that he, by a slight excess in the malignity of nature toward him, has attained an intenser sense than most men of the conditions which nevertheless confront and encompass us all. We—the rest of us—dance before a pictured curtain masking a bottomless abyss. For him, the veil has been rent—that is all; he dances with a wilder elation because he sees where the last figure ends.
The men of science and the physicians, in their confidential hours, are in agreement with: Mr. Powys. They tell us that the difference between a well man and a sick one is so small that we should brag about it in whispers, for fear of the overhearing gods. We are all infected, and it is merely a question of how long we can "keep up." We are all hosts of invisible enemies waiting only for some favorable coincidence of falling temperature, tainted food and wet sidewalks to make an insurrection and dispossess us. We are all swimming in seas of noxious micro-organisms; the stronger swimmers manage to keep their noses above the surface a little more steadily and a little longer than the others; but sooner or later they too grow weary, throw up their arms, gasp, get a mouthful and go under, go down, forever and ever. That is the normal thing.
The abnormal thing—no, let us not say that—the queer, inexplicable thing, is that, though we have a proverb "as sure as death and taxes" most of us think and feel and act as if we should live forever, not in our Father's mansion, but right here in our five-room apartment at the corner of Riverside Drive and Seventy-second Street. We never get up to see the rising sun nor watch to see the going down of the planets nor walk to the house where Washington Irving lived, six blocks east of us; but, half asleep, we go mooning along in the strange hallucination of health and longevity till cold hands take us by the throat and remind us, when it is time to die, that we have not yet begun to live.
It does seem to stand to reason that the soundest views of life should be expressed by men who refuse opiates and briskly manage their affairs and husband their moments in a shrewd wide-eyed awareness that they are under sentence of death.
But this bottom-of-the-cup realism, this straight unblinking look at The End—doesn't it freeze the heart, palsy enterprise, overcast heaven's blue and the verdure of earth and, in short, destroy both the illusion of seriousness and the reality of mirth in the play of the petites marionettes who make their trois petits tours and then go away? The traditional portion of his family, friends, and neighbors thought that it should.
When Llewelyn Powys was stricken—so he remembers it—they dealt with him in the manner established by Job's comforters for dealing with a man who has "got his." They engloomed his bedside with orthodox prayer and bungling condolence and mute bewilderment and the general lack of imaginative sympathy customary on such occasions. His father supplicated divine intervention. His mother, "who ever loved sorrow rather than joy," resented his purposed migration to Switzerland, wishing him to return to the family home—"to die there peacefully clinging to the Christian hope." One brother nervously betrayed his fear of infection. The old stonemason assured him that he had "a churchyard cough." And, amid these ministrations, he had transient moods—so he tells us with a devastating stroke of his irony—he had transient moods when, taking the sacrament in the parish church, he thought he might "become as a little child and go to heaven along with the Master of Corpus."
"To become as a little child—along with the Master of Corpus." Obviously that is one of the points at which one exclaims: "Upon my soul, what a writer!" One aspect of the genius of Llewelyn Powys, the Voltairean aspect, is lit by the blinding flash which issues from that astounding juxtaposition. I have murmured the phrase over and over to myself—"Along with the Master of Corpus, along with the Master of Corpus"—and each time that I have murmured it I have seemed to hear all the stained-glass windows of fashionable Christendom rattle as in an earthquake. It is necromantic—no less.
Mr. Powys revolted from the ministrations at his sickbed. He did not wish to die—still less did he wish to spend the residue of his days, long or short, in preparing his genial spirit for the shroud. Life clamored within him that it is better to be anything alive—a midget, a mud-eating lobworm, a white-bellied beetle—than a "dead" stone. At first he was stung into sharp rebellion by what he mistook for the exceptional character of his fate. He felt an extraordinary mental activity. "I became," he declares, "like one drunken with wine. A torrent of words issued from my mouth." He dramatized his situation and railed at God. But he didn't expect to be heard. He didn't even believe with any "realizing sense" in the reality of his fate. "My head became completely turned, and I chittered at Death like a little gray squirrel who is up in a fir tree out of harm's way."
It was in a high-class sanatorium in Switzerland that coolness returned to Mr. Powys and self-collection became possible, and he began to shake off the mortuary consolations of English parish Christianity, and to reconstruct his personal philosophy on a realistic basis. I admire enormously the little delicate strokes with which he produces just enough of the sanatorium life and atmosphere to suggest how and where it impinged upon his consciousness, modifying it steadily, insensibly, in the direction of the creed held, perhaps, by most experienced inmates of such institutions—a creed which might be described as a mild and cautious form of Epicureanism, with intervals of great philosophic quietude following the excessive "spitting of rubies."
These young people draw the covers over their heads when the rumor runs that a clergyman or a pious "good woman" is coming through the corridors. And yet nothing interests them, among themselves, like exchanging free views, in absolutely free language, upon religion and metaphysics and the wider implications of science.
Nothing interests them like religion, unless it be love—playing at love, delicately, with girls of an ivory pallor, not averse to a caress in their "zero hour," or when they are lying in mortal stillness after a return from an "engagement" in the front line trenches. After one has chatted for a little with a Hungarian pessimist who gives one an aphorism on the necessity of working in order to forget one's destiny, one taps at the door of Daphne, and sits with her for a while: "I could not endure that you should be wicked with any one but me."
No, nothing interests them like love, unless it be bawdry. Their first inquiry of a newcomer is: "Have you any naughty books?" For these and their scribbled verses and their epigrams and their picturesque imprecations on the food and service of the sanatorium—imprecations to the excogitation, elaboration and artistic polishing of which they devote a morning's careful meditation or long hours of the midnight watch—all these circulate, along with their Victrola records, from room to room, as the chief media of social exchange. And when any remark particularly "good" or particularly "naughty" is devised by any of them it floats through the halls, swift as a whiff of ether, bringing relief and a quickened sense of life to liers-inbed, a little bored by watching the rise and fall of their temperatures and by wondering what progress or regress has been made since the last time they looked, with the aid of the X-ray, into the operations beneath their own breastbones of those swarming micro-organisms, so zealously obeying the Almighty's behest to "increase and multiply."
In a sanatorium "enlightened selfishness" may be described as the official philosophy, and it is deliberately prescribed to patients as the only philosophy fit for them to embrace. The two positive watchwords which Mr. Powys recalls from that period are "good manners" and "expedience." On the negative side: "Insensitiveness is the one cardinal sin." In the depths of consciousness, however, one places as the grand consolation, the foundation stone upon which rise courtesy and gaiety and vivacity and all other amenities—in the bottom of consciousness one rests ultimately upon this grand consolation: "Nothing matters." The maxim is not incompatible with a great deal of eagerness in all the chief concerns of life and punctilious care in the little ones. Often it seems conducive to just the proper degree of internal coolness for the best external functioning of hot little men.
When Mr. Powys emerged from the philosophical school of the sanatorium he found that he did not relish "the smell of the inside of churches," but that the inside of an English tavern seemed savory and right and all in consonance with his new realism: "Here, at any rate, no spiritual treachery is tolerated; here, at any rate, no deceitful idealism stretches tendrils white and sickly. He who sits down on a tavern settle must even take the world as he finds it. He must know what birth means, and that we come into the world in no very cleanly manner; he must know what love means, and wrath, and lust, and, above all, death. In a tavern, come winter, come summer, the truth will out."
Now in "Ebony and Ivory" and in "Black Laughter" Mr. Powys carried his personal philosophy far from the sanatorium, where he first encountered it in general practice, and tested it for its universal values among the brutalized English stockmen and big game hunters, the Indian traders, the black "boys" and the animals, wild and domesticated, of a ranch in Africa of 30,000 acres, grazing 2,000 cattle and 14,000 sheep.
But before he entered on his career as ranch manager he had subjected his sensibilities, acutely sharpened to the sweetness of life by the prospect of death—to the loveliness of southern England, where he tasted the delight of a stately Elizabethan garden and brushed the dew from bluebells and pink campions while the cuckoos called, and roamed on Egdon moor, "in the meadows by the river Yeo," and between "musk-laden Wiltshire hedges," trying his brother John's advice to the convalescent, to divert his mind "from what is mean and sordid, so that large, luminous thoughts may roll in upon it like amber-colored waves."
The effect upon him of passing from the most exquisitely cultivated beauty of the English scene to the raw savagery of an African wilderness vibrates in all three of his books. The contrast is an obvious principle of composition in "Ebony and Ivory." It is an even more intimate and pervasive element of his consciousness throughout "Black Laughter." Perhaps the reader will feel its potency most amazingly if he turns from reading "Skin for Skin" to "Black Laughter."
"Skin for Skin" ends, I ascertained by reference, with another attack of "spitting rubies," and with a picture of an invalid who, after having recklessly courted disaster, lies on his back, "perfectly motionless, like a rabbit that 'freezes' in a thicket of thorns, in the hope that he will not be seen, in the hope that the danger will pass him by." But what I remember, without reference, in this book is a fragrant gorse bush at the top of an English lane and a young man there, intent on the "murmuring rapture" of a honey-bee buzzing among the golden bloom.
From that one turns, in "Black Laughter," to darkness and wind and flying sparks from a little Uganda train which at midnight dumps this lonely fugitive at a station on a plateau of East Africa. He crawls exhausted into a rusty bed in a match-board shanty roofed with sheets of corrugated iron, leaving the door open so that he may look through its ebony-black aperture into the cavernous blackness of Africa. He is too much excited for slumber, visioning no longer the honeysuckle lanes and dreaming orchards of his childhood, but dark immensities of wilderness peopled by "naked black men, asleep at the moment by the white ashes of myriads of campfires with their tall spears ready to hand." When at length he dozes off, uneasily, filled with "ancestral misgivings," it is to open startled eyes and find himself sitting bolt upright on his creaking bed, roused by the long reverberation of a lion's roar. Before Mr. Powys is done with that astounding welcome, the reader himself is ready to yell with the excitement of it.
Doubtless the invalid's nerves were a little "jumpy" at first, overwrought and subject to "uncanny" suggestion. You and I might be startled by a lion's roar or rendered uneasy under "the flat equatorial moon" by the moaning of hyenas "as they slunk along the darkened banks of forest streams nosing for death with heavy, obtuse jowls." But who that was not a sick man would have been troubled at the tropical noontide by a sudden awareness that he was "being looked at, that from behind the trellis or from behind the bloom of a mammoth nasturtium, a haggard and very old chameleon was peering at me, intelligently, cynically." Who but a sick man would have been troubled by the excited eyes of rabbits—eyes "black as ivy berries"—eyes peering from a fissure of a rock as if in query as to what purpose "could have brought this pale, deliberate gorilla to invade their lofty isolated retreats."
But Mr. Powys's nerves steadied down as he went about his wholesome human business of managing black labor and tarring, dosing and castrating 2,000 cattle and 14,000 sheep, so that his brother, the former manager, might with an easy conscience be off to fight the Germans. The invalid's nerves, in the course of five years of farming, so far approached normality that he was able to slaughter and butcher a bullock, knock down a black boy, shoot a caged leopard, fight fire, trap lions, get a sulky native witch doctor out of a hut by touching a match to it, and, I should say, carry most parts of the white man's burden among subject peoples. He made, it appears, for a sick man, no bad deputy among the savages during that period when,—as he muses, his "own race"—the abler, "healthier" portion of it—"his own race, along with the others, was causing the very crust of the planet to tremble with its barbaric and malignant onslaughts."
Yet, going with steadier nerves about his business on an African ranch, he did, nevertheless, continue to observe things which bore on his personal philosophy and developed the fundamental pessimism which had originated in his primary philosophic intuition and upon which rests his superstructure of mild, cautious and sensitive hedonism.
He observed the hideous cruelty of white men from "Christian" countries toward their black servants and laborers. He observed the hideous cruelty of the blacks toward one another—poor, pitiful, abject devils in whom obviously was neither hope nor prospect of a "blessed resurrection." He pursued his observation down the scale of animal life, watched the rancher baiting the lion's trap with the headless corpse of a native, the leopard rending the cattle, the ticks clinging to the sleek body of the cheetah, ticks and maggots and tapeworms and smallpox struggling to reduce all life to carrion, while foul-beaked vultures hovered over all. Cruelty, rapacity and lust were at the heart of the plot, and with a strange shudder of exaltation he recognized all those hideous passions in himself, squarely faced the fact that he was one of the plotters.
I think critics rather misinterpret Mr. Powys's thrill at the discovery of his own cruelty. His exultation is due to his progress in self-knowledge. He is thrilled by seeing through himself and recognizing that he is cruel, like a lion, like a savage, like a bandit, like a prime minister, like a little child.
I will quote you now a philosophic summary from the first of the books, "Ebony and Ivory":
Africa, like one of her own black-maned lions, laps up the life-blood of all the delicate illusions that have so long danced before the eyes of men and made them happy. Truth alone is left alive. What was suspected in Europe is made plain here: At the bottom of the well of life there is no hope. Under Scorpio, under the Southern Cross and in the clear light of this passionless, tropical sunshine, the hollow emptiness of the world's soul is made certain—the surface is everything, below is nothing.
But we have said all this, haven't we? some of us—among ourselves—privately, and then dismissed it as morbid, as a sick man's vision of life, as inconvenient, as not a respectable way of conceiving things and not respectful to the universe. We have said these things. We have half way known them. Something—merely beginning with the introspection of an invalid—has made Llewelyn Powys flamingly aware of them. And the curious fact is that, in consequence of a general increase in self-knowledge and, still more, in self-acknowledgment, among "civilized" people since the World War, there is hardly any one to be found, no matter how sound his lung cavity happens to be, who will stand up and dispute the truth of them. Unless neomysticism has more for us than yet meets the eye it looks as if the reconstruction of our personal philosophies would have to begin there—about where Mr. Powys stands.