Wolf Solent
30 March 2008
by: John Cowper Powys
He is an aqueous man with an aquiline nose. Who? the title above or the author below? What little I know of John Cowper Powys I’ve gleaned from his hero, Wolf Solent; what I know of Wolf Solent has been given to me by his creator, John Cowper Powys. Both are of aqueous form, both have an aquiline nose. Do not come unprepared unto this ground; do not get them confused.
As I skimmed through online articles while reading this book, I came across an image of this man, this eccentric writer, that lodged itself into my consciousness. It has been said, that every morning before sitting down to write, John Cowper Powys would submerge his head into a bucket of water for as long as he could take it, so that he was better prepared when he sat down with his ledger to make good talk with the underwater fishes, to better understand the underside of flotsam and jetsam, to better grasp the sway of the seaweed on underwater breezes. If it is only this practice that led to such passages which evoke such rivers of consciousness that break out into veritable ponds, lakes and seas, perhaps I too, one day, will attempt such a humorous method.
It is John Cowper Powys eery ability to transcribe our most subterranean thoughts that have established him, in my self, as another mania. An author I will dog until I have exhausted every possibility of every word ever written by this mythopoesis. Unfortunate for such a mania to strike in a non-English speaking country, for my fixes promise to be few and far-between. But no matter, I will feast off of Wolf Solent for as long as I possibly can!
A great thanks goes out to Henry Miller who managed to forge this introduction over countries and ages. Both Miller and Powys share an adhesion to life; life in its most destructive, chaotic, ugly to life in the most divine and over-worldly. And like Henry Miller, I do not suggest Powys for the weak of heart or spirit; some passages are too brutal and ghastly in their naked truth. But do not allow me to shy you away from this rare experience no other author offers.
‘I refuse to believe,’ Wolf said to himself, ‘and I never will believe until the day Nature kills me, that there’s such a thing as “reality,” apart from the mind that looks at it!. . . The “thing in itself” is as fluid and malleable as these trees.’
Wolf Solent has a ‘mythology.’ ‘Perhaps I have never known reality as other human beings know it,’ he thought. ‘My life has been industrious, monotonous, patient. I’ve carried my load like a camel. And I’ve been able to do this because it hasn’t been my real life at all! My “mythology” has been my real life.’ This ‘mythology’ is a life-illusion; the quickest way to go under with the fishes, I presume. This ‘mythology’ is, as I understand it to be, Wolf Solent’s version of the story, our story, his story; this story constructed in a wild mind with wild characters and synopsises.
Wolf Solent slips into his ‘mythology’ on his epic walks through the West Country; giving way to epic thoughts that swing, weave, float through possibilities, impossible or not. Does Wolf Solent slip-in to escape and not to endure? What constitutes an escape on such terms? The mind, given free range to roam, constructs hefty edifices, chosen deliberately or stumbled upon quite by accident; edifices that build one a castle or dig-up a tomb. This is the underwater mind that takes underwater swims, looping through underwater breezes; an underwater mind that visualizes it all from the bottom, up.
Between your happiness and that face [on the Waterloo Steps, of Living Despair] there was an umbilical cord. All suffering was a martyr’s suffering, all happiness a martyr’s happiness, when once you got a glimpse of that cord! It was the existence in the world of those two gross, vulgar parodies of life, ennui and pleasure, that confused the issues, the blighted the distinctions.
Why not drift off for a little escape? Dive down to depths where all things become vaporous and where the lines between, blur. Finishing Wolf Solent and coming upon the task of writing these notes I was seized by its contradictory substance of underwater molecules; I found myself forced to attempt multiple drafts. Finally, I came upon the solution: the question, what is my ‘mythology’ and what purpose does it hold?
But, before I dive deeper and deeper yet, I must make note: Wolf Solent ‘looses’ his ‘mythology.’ By giving in to the evil behind Mr. Urquart’s preposterous book: his perverted record of Dorset’s residents, past and present. By Wolf Solent getting paid for finishing this project, which he was originally summoned to Dorset to do, he loses the ability of his own secret ‘mythology’ to oppose ‘some equally secret “evil” in the world around him.’ The downright ‘evilness’ of this Urquart is unfortunately apparent in the state of Wolf’s predecessor, who occupies a plot in the local cemetery. Poor Redfern, he just couldn’t take it!
Oh, it was Wolf Solent’s own mind that was diseased. . . not Nature. Well, diseased or not, it was all he had! Henceforth he was going to take as the talisman of his days endure or escape.
With the ‘mythology’ gone I didn’t find much changed in Wolf’s days, besides maybe, a more wizened outlook and a more leveled ability of not jumping so hastily to wild conclusions. For the final scene, when Lord Carafax is seen through the window to have taken the ‘stunning’ Gerda upon his knee — she is still as much a child as she is Wolf’s wife — Wolf reacts ‘normally.’ Wolf takes himself out behind the pigsty and rattles the contents of his mind, sifting through it with his adroit and perpetual analyzations. In the end, he enters his gate to face the two of them, almost humming! Wolf Solent has taken to enduring. That he will spend the rest of his days as a teacher of history in the grammar school; that he will live on Preston Lane; that he is married to one girl who is his ‘grounding’ and has another girl who is his ‘true love.’ All this will be endured; all this will pass and pass well or not well, but pass-on, as it is. To endure or escape? Or as his father, the skull six-feet below the earth, says, ‘forgive and forget.’ When put in this way, endurance and escape sound the same to me.
To go back to my key to composing this piece: my own ‘mythology.’ For when I look at the state of my being, I am in no doubt of having one, perhaps as much as an escape as the ability to endure. If the term ‘mythology’ is already taken, I will succumb to the broader: my life-illusion. The consistency of which lies in the underwater realm of its perpetuations. For, if my whole life is not gathering itself up in some overwhelming life-illusion, I don’t know what it is doing. Like Borges says: We trust reality easily, perhaps because we intuit that nothing is real.
There is the phrase, ‘as malleable as the trees,’ that I find myself clinging through when passing through this Italian countryside, watching the sturdiness of trunks and limbs sway under the effect of my straying vision. John Cowper Powys genius descriptions of Nature have an extreme potency within me. It is in Nature that the threads of, the sometimes overwhelming, life-illusion glint with a powerful silver-light, blinding in its strength under the reflections of an eternal sun. I stand at my own sentinella. Jagged snow peaked mountains rise at the furthest periphery. The lake has taken the sky into its bellows, as the green slopes undulate around, with their olive trees riding abreast the ripple. Tender tree-buds unfurl like lime-green ruffles on thin grey-brown wrists. It is only in Nature where the simplistic nature of all this above blather, is restored. A simple place, full of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and all increments between, life and death, joy and sorrow; who am I to try and sort all this out?
‘Walking is my cure,’ he thought. ‘As long as I can walk I can get my soul into shape!’ Wolf Solent walks, from Blacksod to Ramsgard, from Blacksod to King’s Barton, as his mind and observations reel all the way. There are elements to John Cowper Powys that I am aware will not suit many; the evidence is in the fact, that despite him being dubbed as one of England’s “Greats” not many have tried him. What it is is his stunning version of truth and the bareness of tone. John Cowper Powys’ words ring strong, smashing the confines of literature built by that drudge, academia. His colors are too dazzling: how his metallic scales glitter when caught by the ray’s perfect angle of deep-sea light! Lusterful pinks and greens! What an aquamarine and perfect celeste to smash-up the dull-grey of preformed ‘intellectual’ plot and character!
Reading John Cowper Powys is a lesson in the vagrancy of vocabulary and a glimpse into the true freedom of written form. In his own way he plunges straight to the heart of the eternal questions that have stuck around since the beginning of written time. Reading John Cowper Powys is at once a descent and a flight. I have found another addiction. I must read more!
Bracciano Italia
March 2008
If you would like to Help! me continue writing and own the great book Wolf Solent follow this link to Amazon