Novelists in their 80s

Francois-Joseph Sandmann: Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène (1820)

My brother Ken, one of various novelists in our extended family, once explained to us his intention to stop writing at the age of 60. After that there was a great risk of letting your senile lack of judgement falsify the true nature of your oeuvre, he claimed. He'll be hitting that mark next year, so it'll be interesting to see if he follows his own advice. My bet is he won't.

Nvertheless, I would have to admit that there's a certain amount to be said for this view. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), for instance, might have been well advised to hang up his spurs before perpetrating, in his sixties, such disappointing works as The Arrow of Gold (1819) or The Rover (1923). James Joyce (1882-1941) died at the age of 60, having finished his work on Finnegans Wake (1939), so we were spared that late epic about the sea he was allegedly intending to write next. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) stopped writing novels in his fifties and switched to poetry, claiming that he now preferred the conciseness attainable in verse as against the sheer heavy lifting required by novels. Herman Melville (1819-1891) stopped writing prose in his forties, though in that case there was the late flowering of Billy Budd, after nearly thirty years of verse writing.

Sixty might be a bit on the conservative side, but what of eighty? Life expectancies (in the developed world, at any rate) have vastly increased with the advent of modern medications against cholesterol, heart disease and a slew of other silent killers. Perhaps 80 is the new 60?

Over the summer I've been reading some novels - by some of my favourite authors - which nicely illustrate this dilemma. They are:

• Umberto Eco: Numero Zero (2013 / 2015)


• Tom Keneally: Napoleon's Last Island (2015)


• Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero (2013 / 2015)

(In the case of Eco and Vargas Llosa, the first date in brackets is the date of original publication, the second the date of publication of the English translation).

Umberto Eco was born in 1932, and died in 2016, at the age of 84. Tom Keneally was born in 1935, and is at present 82. Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936, and is now 81. Neither of the latter two show any signs of stopping writing: and writing novels, too. Both have published another one since the title listed above. So what are they like, these late works by an Italian polymath, an Australian jack-of-all-trades, and a Peruvian phenomenon? Surprisingly diverse, to be honest.

•


Umberto Eco, b. 5 January, 1932-d. 19 February, 2016

I have to admit to being a bit blind to the merits of The Name of the Rose when it first burst upon the world in the early 80s. It seemed laboured and over-constructed. I did enjoy the movie, though.

It wasn't until I read Foucault's Pendulum that Eco's true distinction started to dawn on me. It could not be said to be a particularly well-constructed book, either - and it certainly drove away many of The Name of the Rose fans who expected him to continue in the same vein, like a kind of Brother Cadfael for Intellectuals. But the idea of the book was, I thought, brilliantly clever (and prescient, considering how much it predated Dan Brown and his ilk). I began to see how pointless it was to judge Eco by the standards of other writers: he demanded his own style of reading, as cerebral as he was himself, but with a strong streak of emotional vulnerability hidden away inside somewhere.

The Island of the Day Before is probably my favourite of all of his fictions. Again, it was very clever - but the various intermeshing plots seemed to spin more smoothly than Foucault's Pendulum. He was clearly learning on the job. Baudolino and The Prague Cemetery were less pleasing. While full of rich material, they seemed more predictable and linear than their predecessors.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana was an exception to this tendency, however. It's hard not to admire the portrait he paints there of a disintegrating mind - the suspicion that some of it might be autobiographical added particular poignancy to the novel.

Numero Zero has the makings of a brilliant book. The idea of painting a counter-history of post-war Italy based on the conceit that Mussolini did not in fact die, but went on hiding in the Vatican for many decades more, is an excellent (though disconcerting) one, and the portrait Eco provides of the world of petty journalism and jobbing writers that constitutes mid-century Italy's New Grub Street is similarly interesting. It is, nevertheless, a terrible piece of writing.

Why? Because it's too short to hold up the weight of its central conceit - because the conversations sound like lecture fragments, and the characters like stick figures in a powerpoint presentation - because he resorts to the most desperate mystery story cliches to finish off this albatross of a narrative. Because, in short, he lacked the energy and time to complete it, and yet somehow managed to persuade himself that it still merited publication.

It's a sad coda to the life work of a unique and brilliant writer. Should we have been allowed to read it? Curiosity was probably always going to commit it to some kind of publication. I suppose the real problem is that it appeared during his lifetime rather than posthumously. A preface apologising for its brevity and lack of finish would have ensured a much better reception, though, I would have thought.

Umberto Eco: Numero Zero (2015)

Umberto Eco (1932-2016)


1. The Name of the Rose. 1980. Trans. William Weaver. 1983. London: Picador, 1984.


2. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. 1983. Trans. William Weaver. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.


3. Foucault's Pendulum. 1988. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.


4. The Island of the Day Before. 1994. Trans. William Weaver. 1995. Minerva. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1996.


5. Baudolino. 2000. Trans. William Weaver. 2002. London: Vintage Books, 2003.


6. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. 2004. Trans. Geoffrey Brock. 2005. London: Vintage Books, 2006.


7. The Prague Cemetery. 2010. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2011.


8. Numero Zero. 2015. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Vintage, 2015.

•


Eva Rinaldi: Thomas Keneally, b. 7 October, 1935 (aged 82)

So, if we take Umberto Eco's last novel as a vote against publishing such late fictions, what of Thomas (now 'Tom') Keneally's next-to-latest tome, Napoleon's Last Island?

I have to admit that, after a somewhat shaky start, I came to love this book. It seemed to me to combine all of Keneally's virtues, and very few of his faults. This despite that fact that the tale of Betsy Balcombe and her relationship with the ex-Emperor is a familiar one. I remember seeing a television play based on the story when I was a teenager, and it's come up for me in a number of other contexts since.

I think the first book I read by Keneally was his wonderful American Civil War epic Confederates. His command of the vernacular and incidental detail seemed to me superior to anything I'd read before about that war, even by bona fide American authors. It was his talent for ventriloquism which first impressed me about him, then.

After that I read desultorily in his work: the books which had been made into films (Schindler's Ark, Gossip from the Forest), and also the ones about Antarctica (The Survivor, A Victim of the Aurora). In all these cases I was struck by how much better they were than they had to be. That sounds a bit paradoxical, but what I mean is that there's a kind of middle style and general competence which many novelists evolve and which drags them through their day-today labours. It sounds terrible, but they don't really pull out the stops unless they absolutely have to.

Keneally was not at all like that. Each new challenge seemed to fill him with gusto. He clearly relished the difficulty of interpreting unlikely characters, and entering strange and alien environments. Reluctant to repeat himself, he remained on the lookout for fresh woods and pastures new.

In the case of Napoleon's Last Island, this has led him to concoct an excellent pastiche of Jane Austen's prose-style and psychological penetration, set in the strange landscape of the tiny mid-Atlantic island of St. Helena. Betsy Balcombe has a good deal in common with Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennett, with the Emperor as a kind of super Darcy, and even a long-suffering older sister to provide her with a foil.

The dramatic nature of the story leads one to expect a kind of costume drama potboiler, but Keneally's interests seem altogether elsewhere: in the oddities of human psychology as shown under stress, and in the paradox of the man of destiny reduced to an atom in the sea of humanity, but still somehow retaining his uncanny charisma and fascination. Like Foucault's Pendulum, Napoleon's Last Island appears to have disappointed a good many admirers of Keneally's Australian epics: but it's an admirably subtle piece of work for all that.

Chalk that up as a vote for keeping up with your craft even as you approach your ninth decade, then. (The list of his works below is only a selection, I should emphasise: the books by him that have ended up in my collection. A full listing would occupy many more pages).

Tom Keneally: Napoleon's Last Island (2015)

Thomas Keneally (1935- )


1. The Fear. 1965. London: Quartet Books, 1973.


2. Bring Larks and Heroes. 1967. London: Quartet Books, 1973.


3. Three Cheers for the Paraclete. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.


4. The Survivor. 1969. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.


5. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.


6. Blood Red, Sister Rose. 1974. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1976.


7. Gossip from the Forest. London: Collins, 1975.


8. Season in Purgatory. Sydney: Book Club Associates, 1976.


9. A Victim of the Aurora. London: Collins, 1977.


10. Passenger. London: Collins, 1979.


11. Confederates. 1979. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1981.


12. The Cut-Rate Kingdom. 1980. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 1984.


13. Schindler’s Ark. 1982. London: Coronet Books, 1983.


14. Searching for Schindler. 2007. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2008.


15. The Playmaker. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987.


16. A River Town. Port Melbourne, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1995.


17. Napoleon's Last Island. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2015.


18. Crimes of the Father. 2016. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2017.

•


Mario Vargas Llosa, b. 28 March, 1936 (aged 81)

So what of that wondrous, protean genius Mario Vargas Llosa? He's not the best known of the great writers of the Latin American "boom" of the sixties and seventies (it took him until 2010 to win the Nobel Prize his near-contemporary Gabriel García Márquez was awarded as far back as 1982), but he is - to my mind, at least - the best of them.

Year after year, decade after decade, he's produced a dazzling series of works, constantly reinventing himself and experimenting with new style: after the majestic, quasi-Faulknerian gravitas of those first three socio-historical novels The City and the Dogs, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, he post-modernised himself into the prankster of Pantaleon and the Special Service and the autobiographical Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

How I pored over his works while working on my Doctoral thesis on European Images of South American in the late 1980s! The book I was writing about, The War of the End of the World seemed to combine the virtues of both his late and his early style: the trickster in bed with the sociologist at last.

It wasn't for a long long time that he attained similar heights, however. He stood (unsuccessfully) for President of Peru in the late 80s, and his work seemed to suffer somewhat from the increasingly public nature of his life. His politics, too, had gone far to the right to the point that he was hardly on speaking terms with many of his former literary comrades in arms.

None of the books he wrote during these years was unreadable or unchallenging in its way (even the quasi-soft porn of In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), but it wasn't really until his dictator-novel (almost the classic Latin American subgenre) The Feast of the Goat appeared in 2001 that he really amazed the world again.

The Way to Paradise and The Dream of the Celt are both good ficto-biographies in their own right, but they hardly seemed up to the standard of his earlier work. The Discreet Hero is not among his masterworks, either, but it's a fascinating read for the fans (in particular).

Those of you who've read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter will recall how the latter's scripts start to fold in on themselves, with characters appearing in the wrong contexts and contaminating the plotlines with unexpected interventions. So many of Vargas Llosa's own old characters - Lituma, Don Rigoberto, the 'Stepmother' herself - turn up in this novel that one has, at times, the odd feeling that the whole thing is set in Vargas-Llosa-land rather than any kind of recognisable Peru.

His obsession with the provincial Peru of the 1950s, its constant recurrence in its work, is supplanted here by an rather more 'contemporary' Lima and Piura. The characters all seem to live in the past, however: his past, Vargas Llosa's, rather more than their own.

The novel is neatly plotted and full of unexpected treats - though perhaps more for readers familiar with his work than any newcomers. The playfulness may seem a little forced at times, the virtuosity a bit tired, but there's no doubt that Vargas Llosa at his worst (and this book is a long way from his worst - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, say) is still superior to most other novelists at their best.

Would he, too, be wise to give up this strange compulsion to dream on paper and call the end-result art? I don't think so, no. The Feast of the Goat came after such a long dry spell that most critics had already written him off. I'm not expecting anything as good as that to come up again, but then, the essence of the unexpected is that you don't expect it. Who can say what the future holds for Mario Vargas Llosa? I hope not something as sad as Numero Zero, but it may well contain something as luminous and strange as Napoleon's Last Island.

Let's just say that as long as he's writing, I'll be reading (and buying). To hell with nay-sayers and agists! One can write a bad book at any age - and (I firmly believe) go on to redeem it with a good one. And always in the wings shimmers the alluring prospect of a Billy Budd, that late, redemptive masterpiece that comes out of left field - albeit often posthumously - to astonish the world ...

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero (2015)

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (1936- )


1. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Cubs and Other Stories. 1965 & 1967. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1979.


2. The Time of the Hero. 1962. Trans. Lysander Kemp. 1966. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.


3. The Green House. 1965. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1968. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.


4. Conversation in the Cathedral. 1969. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1975. London: Faber, 1993.


5. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. 1973. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. 1978. London: Faber, 1987.


6. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. 1977. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1982. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1984.


7. The War of the End of the World. 1981. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1984. London: Faber, 1986.


8. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. 1984. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1986. London: Faber, 1987.


9. Who Killed Palomino Molero? 1986. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1987. London: Faber, 1989.


10. The Storyteller. 1987. Trans. Helen Lane. 1989. London: Faber, 1990.


11. In Praise of the Stepmother. 1988. Trans. Helen Lane. 1990. London: Faber, 1992.


12. Death in the Andes. 1993. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1996. London: Faber, 1997.


13. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. 1997. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1998. London: Faber, 1999.


14. The Feast of the Goat. 2001. Trans. Edith Grossman. 2002. London: Faber, 2003.


15. The Way to Paradise. 2003. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. London: Faber, 2003.


16. The Bad Girl: A Novel. 2006. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.


17. The Dream of the Celt. 2010. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2012.


18. The Discreet Hero. 2013. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2015.


19. The Neighbourhood. 2016. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

The True Story of the Novel

Margaret Anne Doody: The True Story of the Novel (1996)]

The other day I was looking around a second-hand bookshop in Takapuna when I chanced upon a copy of this book, The True Story of the Novel, by Margaret Anne Doody. It cost me $16.

[Professor Margaret Anne Doody (University of Notre Dame)]

I guess I picked it up with a certain frisson, because it suddenly occurred to me that someone else might have finally written the book I'd been secretly planning myself for years: an alternative history of the novel, written in opposition to Ian Watt's classic (but somewhat reductionist) The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957). For years I'd been irritated by Watt's implication, codified into dogma by generations of lazy critics, that Samuel Richardson was somehow the "first novelist", and Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded(1740-41) thus the "first true novel."

Ian Watt: The Rise of the Novel (1957)

What of Daniel Defoe, you may ask? Surely he (at least) predates Richardson? After all, Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719. More to the point, what of earlier long prose fictions such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688)?

Thomas Southerne: Oroonoko (1776)

Well, the received wisdom appears to be that works such as Defoe's and Behn's (and all the other novel-length narratives, going back all the way to the Latin and Greek writers of the early Christian era) were simply romances, rather than actual novels.

And what, you may ask, is the precise distinction between a "romance" and a "novel"? A novel - we're told - is basically realistic in focus, preoccupied with the psychology of its characters, and (as a form) is associated with the growth of individuality and self-consciousness in the early bourgeois era (roughly: from the late seventeenth, early eighteenth century onwards).

Unfortunately this doctrine makes little sense of works such as Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605 / 1615) which was written as a basically realist parody of chivalric romances, but which has nothing in paricular to do with any kind of bourgeois revolution, and is - in fact - contemporary with Shakespeare's experiments with psychology and self-consciousness (Hamlet (c.1603), for instance).

Nor does the distinction between "romance" and "novel" really work in languages other than English. In French, for example, the word roman means "novel" as well as "romance." In Spanish novela can means "short story", "novel" or "romance" (though the word romanza also exists, but stands basically for a "romance novel" - in the Mills & Boon sense - or else a libro de caballerías: romance of chivalry).

Don Quixote, mind you, however influential it is and continues to be on world literature, is not exactly a psychological novel in the modern sense. But psychology and self-consciousness certainly figure in prose fiction long before that. What of Lady Murasaki's masterpiece The Tale of Genji (c.1000), for instance?

Margaret Anne Doody: The True Story of the Novel (1996)]

Given my fascination for the subject, how did I avoid coming across Professor Doody's pioneering work before? It was, after all, published in 1996. And, leafing through its pages, I saw that she was far more well-informed than I on the fallacies in the existing model of the "rise of the novel." Not only was she a specialist on Richardson, having written and edited various critical books about him and his contemporaries, but she'd also taught herself Greek for the purpose of better understanding the classical novels which are the main focus of her study.

What's more, a brief glance at her index disclosed references to the Chinese and Japanese novels which I consider indispensable to any real discussion of the growth of the "novel" genre over the past two thousand years.

There isn't much about the Tale of Genji or the Red Chamber Dream (c. 1750) in her book, though, beyond the mere invocation of their names. A true scholar, Doody tries to avoid discussing in detail any work she is unable to read in the original.

Sun Wen: Scenes from The Red Chamber Dream

Which brings me to the main point of this post. Was I disappointed to discover that I'd been gazumped? That this book had been sitting there on the shelves all the time I was gathering materials towards my own "true history" of the novel? Not really, no.

Actually, in a sense, it was more of a relief. What had put me off getting to work seriously on the project was precisely this question of linguistic competence. I can read a few European languages with reasonable fluency, but not Greek or even Latin. Nor do I speak any Oriental languages. I lack the Persian and Arabic (and even, possibly, Sanskrit) which would be required to chart that part of the novel's journey to world dominance. I did study Old Icelandic once, and could probably work my way through some of the sagas with a bit of help, but not with any real facility.

Professor Doody would know what I'm talking about. I'm sure that she's aware that her own alternative genealogy of the novel - from Greek and Latin novels, through medieval romances, to the eighteenth-century novel of sentiment - leaves out vast tracts of the story: the Indian and Persian frame-story, transplanted into Arabic in the form of the 1001 Nights; the late medieval Icelandic family sagas; the glorious tradition of the classic Chinese novel; and - last but not least - the sublime Genji and its successors in Japanese literature.

Learning Greek

As she herself puts it, though: "Endeavouring to learn Greek took a while; I cannot say I have mastered it, I do not 'have' Greek, but I am no longer reliant on translators" [p.xviii]. Let those who have never tried to learn another language scoff at this statement. The idea of having to learn six or seven more difficult languages as a mere preliminary to a closer study even of the acknowledged prose masterpieces in these very separate (and complex) traditions would be enough to daunt a Burton, let alone an indifferent scholar such as myself! I salute Professor Doody for the immensity of the labour hidden behind this sentence, but I can't follow her example - not in any feasible universe known to me, at any rate.

Doody goes on to comment: "It is to be hoped that Chinese and Japanese writers will tell their own 'Story of the Novel' and explain the traditions and tropes of their own fiction. After all, there have been contacts between East and West through the millennia; if there had not, the West would have no novel, or a different one" [p.xix].

In any case, even the partial revisionism of Doody's own book, seeking to reinscribe the so-called "Classic Romance" into the mainstream of the history of the Western Novel, appears to have met with a good deal of resistance. In the notes to her final chapter, she outlines some of the more extreme reactions:

J. Paul Hunter in Before Novels [1990] expresses a sense that getting rid of the categories "Novel" and "Romance" would be "dangerous." He expresses a fear of a "new literary history built thoughtlessly on the rubble of the old" (4: my italics). A change in the categories would be a kind of bomb, reducing structures to leveled rubble and encouraging the mushrooming of jerry-built hutments. ...

When I gave a talk on the early novels and their influence on eighteenth-century literature at a meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies in Providence, R.I., in April 1993, I was asked during the question period "why I wanted to bash everything down to one level?" I had not hitherto thought of my thesis in that way, but I could see that, to anyone used to the Rise of the Novel as a story of hierarchy and spatial erection, my narrative could seem like a loss of attributed eminence. I tried to reply that my own spatial metaphor was different - I saw it in terms of leaping over a paddock fence and escaping into a larger space. [p.529]

I think that that gives some idea of what Doody was up against when she published her book in the mid-nineties. Most professors have already written their "Rise of the Novel" lectures and course-notes, and few want to dust them off and reconsider them unless they absolutely have to.

I myself have noticed a glazing-over of the eyes among some of my colleagues when I suggest to them that any true understanding of the novel must take not simply Pamela, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote into account, but also the four classic Chinese novels (The Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, Journey to the West and the Red Chamber Dream), as well as the Genji - not to mention the Arabian Nights and the Sanskrit Ocean of the Streams of Story (both of which have a number of novel-length stories incorporated within them).

I can therefore sympathise with how Doody felt when she informed her scholarly audience that they couldn't really begin to comprehend the "bourgeois novel" they'd all devoted so much time to without a much more intimate knowledge of Apuleius, Chariton, Heliodorus, Longus, Lucian and Petronius. Goethe and Fielding knew these texts well - can their latter-day interpreters really afford not to?

Abraham Bloemaert: Charikleia and Theagenes (1625)

It's interesting, in this respect, to observe that the wikipedia article on the Genji remarks that it is "sometimes called the world's first novel, the first modern novel, the first psychological novel or the first novel still to be considered a classic." But even the Genji is long predated by Apuleius's Golden Ass - surely just as much of "a classic"? And, if you dispute Apuleius' status as a psychological novelist, what of Heliodorus? If you haven't ever read him, you really should.

There are various reasons for the neglect of Margaret Anne Doody's book, mind you. The explicitly feminist colouring of her analysis, useful though it is as a focus for her argument, gives other, more partisan critics an excuse to ignore or disprize it. What's more, the book is not of uniform merit throughout. Her clear and cogent account of the Ancient Novel in Part One, is followed by an equally persuasive historical section charting its influence up to (and including) the Eighteenth Century. After that, however, comes an 150-page attempt to identify the common tropes inherent in all novels, ancient and modern, which is inevitably more speculative, and which goes off at times into religiose musings which completely lack the persuasive solidity of the first two sections.

Part Three: Tropes of the Novel is extremely interesting, mind you. She breaks them down into seven basic clusters of event / description / plot construction:

1. Breaking and Entering: "Novels often begin with a 'break' or a 'cut.' These, or analogous words - 'pierce,' 'sunder,' 'shatter,' etc. - are likely to be found in the first paragraphs." [p.309]


Trajan's Column



2. Marshes, Shores and Muddy Margins: "Beaches and marshy margins are omnipresent in fiction ... The place between water and land functions most obviously and overtly as a threshold. Its presence signifies the necessity of passing from one state to another. It is liminality made visible and palpable." [p.321]


The Water Margin (1973)



3. Tomb, Cave and Labyrinth: "Taphos or taphros - tomb or trench, sepulchre or grave. The place of sepulture can be envisaged as miniature house of the dead ... or as the pit, the ditch. The place of sepulture gapes for novel characters, and they not uncommonly find themselves in the hole. The matter may be treated any number of ways by novelists: it may indeed form the stuff of comedy ..." [p.338]


Jim Henson: Labyrinth (1986)



4. Eros: "Eros (or Cupid) as a trope of fiction is a multiple and subtle signifier, even when introduced in apparently incidental embellishment. He stands, usually, outside the story proper, yet to come upon him is to encounter him, an experience always important for the reader, whether the character is conscious of Eros or not. The encounter itself fulfills the trope." [p.359]


Marta Dahlig: Eros & Psyche



5. Ekphrasis: Looking at the Picture: "Although other kinds of creative and created things may be invoked over and over again within any given novel, the visual image has a special place and a peculiar status ... It reminds us of the visible world, and thus of the sensible universe, but it also speaks of stasis, and artifice - of things out of nature. It transforms us into powerful gazers ..." [p.387]


Nicolas Poussin: Et in Arcadia Ego (c.1637)



6. Ekphrasis: Dreams and Food: "A novel customarily contain both tropic Moment (or Stations): the Art-work in ekphrasis, and the Dream. Both are tropes of contemplation. The Artwork helps us with recognition of our familiar cultural world, our public images, historically valuable modes of imaginative apprehension ... The Dream is not only a greater challenge to our powers of interpretation, but also a disturber of all sorts of systems of separation, or taxonomies. In the Dream .. we make contact with imagination, and with the imaginative element in all consciousness." [pp.406-7]
   ... "Whereas dreams issue (supposedly) from the deep 'interior' of the character, enabling us to posit a vivid and complex psychic life, and hence a human reality 'within' the character, food disappears 'into' the supposed physical interior of the character, persuading us that a character has a solid physical life." [p.421]


Alice Rutherford: My Boyfriend Dreams of Food (2012)



7. The Goddess: "The Novel as a genre ... has an innate desire to allude to the female deity, or rather, to allude to Divinity as Feminine. The multitude of references to goddesses in the ancient novels represents no peculiar aberration. Nor does the emphatic appearance of a goddess in any individual work of fiction indicate a peculiar swerve from Novel into "Romance." [p.439]


Milo Manara: The Golden Ass (2007)

For myself, I find this kind of thing almost entirely unpersuasive. There's really no way in which so sweeping a hypothesis - a set of tropes which seems to include virtually everything in the heavens above and the earth below - could ever be subjected to empirical testing. For every piece of evidence adduced, another contradictory one could easily be supplied.

It's rather a nice poetic notion to encapsulate the totality of the "novel" over the ages in such a way, but it would probably have been better to publish this section separately - it lacks the authority of Doody's assault on the "received wisdom" about the novel, and therefore has the effect of opening her up to attack as just another universalising crank.

My own ideas on the subject are rather simpler. It seems to me that long prose fictions have, in each of the novel traditions I've looked into myself, have developed out of other, prior genres: Historiography, above all; Biography; Autobiography (particularly in the form of "Confessions" of various types); and from the extension of the folktale into the form of the Frame narrative (as evidenced by the Arabian Nights or Boccaccio's Decameron).

The lines inevitably become a bit blurred in places, but it's possible to distinguish at least seven distinct traditions of extended prose fiction (which I would call "novels", though not everyone would agree with me) within world literature:

Panchatantra Relief (Java)



1. The Eastern Frame-story [c.1st millennium BCE to 18th century CE]:
   • The Jātaka Tales (c.4th century BCE)
   • The Panchatantra (c.3rd century BCE)
   • The Book of Sindibad [Syntipas] (c.1st century BCE)
   • Alf Layla wa Layla [1001 Nights] (c.8th-14th century)
   • Śivadāsa: Vetala Panchavimshati [25 Tales of the Vampire] (c.11th century)
   • Somadeva: Kathā-sarit-sāgara [Ocean of the Streams of Story] (c.11th century)
   • Narayan: Hitopadesha (c.12th century)


Alexander Romance (c.17th century)



2. The Greek and Roman Novel [c.1st century BCE to 4th century CE]:
   • Pseudo-Callisthenes: The Alexander Romance (c.360-328 BCE)
   • Petronius: Satyricon (c.27–66)
   • Chariton: Callirhoe (mid-1st century)
   • Achilles Tatius: Leucippe and Clitophon (early 2nd century)
   • Apuleius: The Golden Ass (c.125–c.180)
   • Longus: Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century)
   • Heliodorus of Emesa: Aethiopica (3rd century)


Lady Murasaki (c.978 – c.1014/1025)



3. The Japanese Monogatari [c.9th-18th century CE]:
   • Konjaku Monogatarishū [Anthology of Tales from the Past] (c.9th-12th century)
   • Taketori Monogatari [The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter] (10th century)
   • Ochikubo Monogatari [The Tale of the Lady Ochikubo] (late 10th century)
   • Murasaki Shikibu: Genji Monogatari [The Tale of Genji] (c.1000)
   • Heike Monogatari [The Tale of the Heike] (12th century)
   • Ihara Saikaku: Kōshoku Ichidai Onna [The Life of an Amorous Woman] (1686)
   • Ueda Akinari: Ugetsu Monogatari [Tales of Moonlight and Rain] (1776)


Ramon Llull (c.1232-1315)



4. The Medieval and Renaissance Romance [c.12th-16th century CE]:
   • Ramon Llull: Blanquerna (1283)
   • Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo: Amadis de Gaula (1304 / 1508)
   • Giovanni Boccaccio: Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1343-44)
   • Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)
   • Joanot Martorell: Tirant lo Blanch (1490)
   • Francesco Colonna: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili [Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream] (1499)
   • François Rabelais: La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (1532-64)


Íslendingasögur (13th century)



5. The Sagas of Icelanders [c.13th-14th century CE]:
   • Snorri Sturluson (attrib.): Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar [Egil's Saga] (c.1240)
   • Brennu-Njáls saga [Njal's Saga] (late 13th century)
   • Eyrbyggja saga [Saga of the People of Eyri] (c.13th century)
   • Gísla saga Súrssonar [Gisli's Saga] (c.13th century)
   • Grettis saga [Grettir's Saga] (c.13th-14th century)
   • Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða [Hranfnkel's Saga] (c.13th-14th century)
   • Laxdæla saga [Saga of the People of Laxárdalr] (c.13th century)


The Three Kingdoms: The Peach Garden Oath (1591)



6. The Chinese Novel [c.14th-18th century CE]:
   • Luo Guanzhong: Sānguó Yǎnyì [The Three Kingdoms] (c.1400)
   • Shi Nai'an: Shuǐhǔ Zhuàn [The Water Margin] (late 14th century)
   • Xu Zhonglin: Fengshen Yanyi [Creation of the Gods] (c.1550s)
   • Wu Cheng'en: Xī Yóu Jì [Journey to the West] (1592)
   • Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng: Jīn Píng Méi [The Golden Lotus] (1618)
   • Wu Jingzi: Rúlínwàishǐ [The Scholars] (1750)
   • Cao Xue Qin: Hóng Lóu Mèng [The Red Chamber Dream] (late 18th century)


Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote (1605)



7. The Modern Novel [c.17th century CE to the present]:
   • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605 & 1615)
   • Madame de La Fayette: La Princesse de Clèves (1678)
   • Aphra Behn: Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87)
   • Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719)
   • L'Abbé Prévost: Manon Lescaut (1731)
   • Samuel Richardson: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740)
   • Henry Fielding: An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741)

All in all, I think it's time to forget about mercantile capitalism and bourgeois individualism leading to the rise of the novel as we know it. If you want to read Pamela, do so for its own sake, not because it's the first anything. We may have only a fraction of the novels which were actually written during antiquity, but even so it's pretty obvious that Petronius and Apuleius were writing at the end of a long process of development, not the beginning ...

Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)

Three September Launches:

[Paula Green & Harry Ricketts, 99 Ways into NZ Poetry]


TALKING POETRY:

Launch Event for
99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry

Auckland Central Public Library
Friday, 17th September
5.30-7.00 pm

Introduced by Paula Green & Harry Ricketts,
the book's authors,
ten poets will each have 3 to 5 minutes to chat informally
on the subject of poetry.

Here is the list:

Sarah Broom
Janet Charman
Murray Edmond
Anna Jackson
Michele Leggott
Selina Tusitala Marsh
Jack Ross
Robert Sullivan
Albert Wendt
Sonya Yelich

•

[Jack Ross, Kingdom of Alt]


Titus Books

DUAL BOOKLAUNCH

Thursday, September 23rd
at Alleluya Cafe, Karangahape Rd, Auckland.
6pm start

Alex Wild Jespersen
The Constant Losers

A novel of text-talk, musomania, mix tapes, student bars and library intrigues, The Constant Losers starts with a google search for 'boykrew fan club' and ends in a 'zine war'. The book's heroes are two students whose strange relationship begins in print and develops through a series of chaotic encounters.

Jack Ross
Kingdom of Alt

Is writing about staying on the sidelines, or getting involved - marginal observation, or "skyline operations" (Auden)? This book of short stories (plus one novella) offers a series of takes on the possibility of a truly engaged literature. Not all the conclusions it comes to are entirely pessimistic.

See you there

or

Order the books here

[Alex Wild Jespersen, The Constant Losers]

•

[Gabriel White & David Simmons, Stories of Tāmaki]


Wednesday 29 September
6:30pm

FREE Public Event

The premiere screening of
Gabriel White's new film
Stories of Tāmaki
with David Simmons

Academy Cinema
44 Lorne Street
city centre
(below Central City Library)
Auckland

This 50 minute film testifies to rich ancestral heritage of Tāmaki Makaurau, a landscape many take for granted.

NB: Stories of Tāmaki was funded by The Screen Innovation Fund and supported by The Auckland Heritage Festival 2010.

[Gabriel White]

The Voices of Time

Ballard in front of Paul Delvaux's The Violation
[original lost, believed burned in 1940. Copy by Brigid Marlin]

i.m.
James Graham Ballard
(born 15th November, 1930 in Shanghai
- died 19th April, 2009 in London)

Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character, they had taken him all summer to complete, and he had obviously thought about little else, working away tirelessly through the long desert afternoons.

I guess my first acquaintance with the work of J. G. Ballard must have come when I ran across the story "The Voices of Time" in some old Sci-Fi anthology in the school library. I was already a rabid fan of Clarke, Heinlein, Le Guin and all the others, but this seemed off-key somehow, from a rather different (though possibly contiguous) universe. The notes in the back of the book were less than helpful. Ballard, they said, was interested in the exploration of "Inner Space."

Now that I knew about. I'd been reading Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf, The Journey to the East) for years. The back of one of my paperbacks even called him "the prophet of the interior journey." I'd read Kafka (The Castle, The Great Wall of China), too. I'd even heard of Absurdism, Existentialism, lots of other isms. Clever writing for clever people (my brother Ken had a thick, daunting-looking copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness by his bedside, which impressed me inordinately). But that didn't seem to fit sentences like this exactly, either:

After Whitby’s suicide no one had bothered about the grooves, but Powers often borrowed the supervisor’s key and let himself into the disused pool, and would look down at the labyrinth of mouldering gulleys, half filled with water leaking in from the chlorinator, an enigma now past any solution.

“The Voices of Time.”The Complete Short Stories, 2001 (London: Flamingo, 2002): 169.

I wasn't sure if it was Sci-fi, but I liked it. It was languid, that was the word for it: languid. Ballard's heroes (and heroines) were cool, sexy, disillusioned. They didn't have adventures so much as play strange mindgames or develop inexplicable psychological tics ("Powers had watched him from his office window at the far end of the Neurology wing, carefully marking out his pegs and string, carrying away the cement chips in a small canvas bucket"). There was an air of consequence about it all, though. It was as if the moment one fathomed what was going on something wonderful would appear. It was, I realise now, the voice of the Postmodern.

After that I started to collect his books whenever I came across them, garish seventies paperbacks, with lurid covers, and titles such as The Unlimited Dream Company or Myths of the Near Future. There seemed to be dozens of them, novels and collections of stories, but that I was used to from my other Sci-fi heroes: Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick ...

The first ones that I read were (accidentally?) the first ones that he'd written: a series of Apocalyptic disaster stories in the tradition of John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids or John Christopher's the Death of Grass. I say in the tradition of, but certainly not in the same manner.

Wyndham and Christopher had gripped me with their bleak picture of a future of starvation and struggle. Ballard, by contrast, in novels such as The Drowned World, The Drought, The Crystal World and The Wind from Nowhere didn't really seem particularly interested in his human protagonists at all. His attention appeared to be more on the aesthetic frisson of great ruined vistas of desert cities, drowned swamps in the heart of the Home Counties.

He charted, in prose as lush as Joseph Conrad's, a series of journeys to the Heart of Darkness - but then his heroes decided to stay there. To stay and immediately start making excavations in the floor of an abandoned swimming-pool. It was, to impose a phrase which would not become current till long long afterwards, post-human writing.

It could become tedious, mind you. His books were nothing if not repetitive, and while reading a couple of them could blow your mind, surfeiting and over-indulging could lead you to long again for the simple boosterism of an Asimov or an A. E. Van Vogt. I dabbled in the shallows of J. G. Ballard, let us say.

"The imminence of a revelation that does not occur," said Borges, "is this not, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon?" That seemed to sum him up. I loved the idea of him more, at times, than the actual detail of his minutely-crafted, ingeniously-told stories.

[Steven Spielberg, dir.: Empire of the Sun (1987)]

Then came Empire of the Sun.

Say what you like about the movie - simple-minded, over-the-top in parts (the Spielberg factor) - it was powerful. And suddenly everything fell into place. J. G. Ballard was (as he'd been saying all along to anyone willing to listen) a Science-Fiction writer only by title. What he'd been writing all along was an exploration of his own inner space - the psyche of a child separated from his parents, imprisoned in a Japanese prison camp in the immense, turbulent incomprehensible world of wartime Shanghai, a literal witness of the first Atomic blast.

No wonder so many of his stories were set on Pacific atolls covered with bunkers and equipment manuals, no wonder he was obsessed with urban wastelands (one of his most effective, in Concrete Island, is set in the grassy zone between two motorway ramps - no-one can escape because the cars will never stop). He wasn't imaginative so much as brave - what he was writing was a series of description of the furniture of the inside of his head ...

[J. G. Ballard: The Writer's Room]

"Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan" - that was the title of one of his short stories. Another was "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race." Empire of the Sun was all very well - beautifully, sparely written, correcting all the excesses of the Spielberg version when I finally got round to reading it. He succeeded in making his "real" childhood landscape a legitimate province of the Ballardian cosmos. But there was something just a little too easily-assimilable about it, I suspect, for him.

World War II had been slobbered over and preempted quite enough already, I suspect he thought. His interests were in the now, or (rather) in the now-plus-one. The coming Apocalypse preoccupied him far more than those past disasters (not that they could ever be truly "past" for him). Hence Crash.

[David Cronenberg, dir.: Crash (1996)]

For once a book of his found adequate incarnation in the movies. David Cronenberg's inspiration did not so much run parallel as in closely analogous territory to Ballard's. Crash shocked, disgusted, fascinated, repelled - most of all turned on audiences all over the world. It was shocking, garish, tasteless, hard to take - banned in some countries, cut in lots of others. Talk about drawing a connection between sex and violence!

It might have looked a bit worrying on the page, but by now Ballard was rapidly becoming a G.O.M., a Grand Old Man of letters. Translated onto the big screen, though, no polite masks or evasions were possible. This man was sick. What's more, he was telling the rest of us that we were too - that is was time to wake up and smell the coffee with a vengeance. Put on the Jackie Kennedy wig, roll over, and spread 'em ...

His later work may have been more subtle - certainly his books were now packaged as serious "literary novels" rather than pulpy sci-fi - but he never lost that subversive edge, that bleakness of vision, that sense of a world spread out before us not so much like "a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new," as like a radioactive motorway offramp leading down to an airstrip littered with abandoned bombers and fragmentary, water-soaked instruction manuals for the maintenance of same ...

There, there'll always be a beautiful stranger flitting round at the corner of your eye. Be warned, though: the only way to attract her is to start right away on your project of assembling old bicycle parts into a mandala. Then she'll come, when you're lying there dying of thirst, and sit just out of arm's reach, idly making a daisy-chain out of spent fuel rods as you try in vain to remember the opening verses of the Bardo Thodol ...

On that note, then, a heartfelt farewell and thanks to J. G. Ballard. There's never been a greater visionary (I firmly believe) than this humble man. He enriched us all - those who were willing to listen, at any rate - with his multiple, various body of work, which will survive him. As for his own body, that now departs into the void:

Oh you compassionate ones possessing the wisdom of understanding,
the love of compassion,
the power of acting,
& of protecting in incomprehensible measure,
one is passing through this world & leaving it behind.

No friends does(s)he have,
(s)he is without defenders, without protectors and kinsmen.
The light of this world has set.
(s)he goes from place to place,
(s)he enters darkness,
(s)he falls down a steep precipice,
(s)he enters a jungle of solitude,
(s)he is pursued by karmic forces,
(s)he goes into a vast silence,
(s)he is borne away on the great ocean,
(s)he is wafted on the wind of karma,
(s)he goes where there is no certainty,
(s)he is caught in the great conflict,
(s)he is obsessed by the great affecting spirit,
(s)he is awed and terrified by the messengers of death.

Existing karma has put hir into repeated existence
& no strength does (s)he have
although the time has come to go alone.

[Bardo Thodol]

Who's Afraid of John Cowper Powys?

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)

At the striking of noon on a certain Fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.

In the soul of the great blazing sun, too, as it poured down its rays upon this man's head, while he settled his black travelling bag comfortably in his left hand and his hazel-stick in his right, there were complicated superhuman vibrations; but these had only the filmiest, faintest, remotest connexion with what the man was feeling. They had more connexion with the feelings of certain primitive tribes of men in the heart of Africa and with the feelings of a few intellectual sages in various places in the world who had enough imagination to recognise the conscious personality of this fiery orb as it flung far and wide its life-giving magnetic forces. 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. ...

So what's your first, spontaneous reaction to that piece of prose, eh? Be honest.

If you find it bold, attractive, intriguing, then it might well be worth your while to explore further the bizarre regional-cosmic romances of John Cowper Powys, greatest of an extraordinary set of Welsh-English brothers (Llewellyn and Theodore [T.F.] Powys were the other writers among them).

If, by contrast, your response is to yawn and start skimming to the end of the paragraph - well, then, better not bother.

Ever since I first encountered that extraordinary opening to Powys' greatest, or at any rate most celebrated, novel A Glastonbury Romance (1933), I've felt a curiosity about its author, the shaggy old Mountain Man in the picture above.

Picador published a number of his novels in the late 70s and early 80s, but not by any means all of them. It's therefore been quite a job to assemble anything like a complete set, but I think I might finally have succeeded.

The main impetus for this post, then, is my recent discovery of the Faber Finds series, who've decided (very wisely in my opinion) to put back into print, simultaneously, his first four novels and four of his later ones. To wit:

Early Novels:

• Wood and Stone (1915)
• Rodmoor (1916)
• After My Fashion (1919)
• Ducdame (1925)

Later Novels:

• Morwyn (1937)
• The Inmates (1952)
• Atlantis (1954)
• The Brazen Head (1956)

This has pretty much enabled me to complete my set of his "fictions" (early and late). Some of them are a bit difficult to classify - Homer and the Aether, for example, a kind of novel-commentary on Homer's Iliad. There's also a fairly large selection of what the author himself referred to as his "senilia" - mad, childish writings composed in extreme old age (he did live to 91, after all). Some might think that a few too many of these have appeared in print, but then to true fans it's doubtful that anything JCP wrote is entirely devoid of interest.

So here's my attempt at an itemised list:

Novels:

1. Wood and Stone (1915) - JCP's first novel, written very much under the influence of Thomas Hardy's "Novels of Character and Environment."
2. Rodmoor (1916) - this one I'd never previously managed to locate, so I'm eagerly awaiting my "Faber Finds" copy.
3. After My Fashion - written in 1919, this one wasn't published until 1980 by Picador, who must have had a real success with their reissue of the Dorset novels in the 70s.
4. Ducdame (1925) - the Village Press repackaged a number of the master's obscurer works in rather minimalist paperback editions in the mid-70s. My copy is one of these.
5. Wolf Solent (1929) - possibly (still) his best-known novel, frequently reprinted by Penguin, and the first of the four "Dorset Novels" which constitute his major claim to fame.
6. A Glastonbury Romance (1933) - a colossal, bizarre masterpiece, well over a thousand pages long.
7. Weymouth Sands (1934) - There'd been a lawsuit over potential libels in A Glastonbury Romance, but that resulted only in a couple of minor excisions. This book was really hauled over the coals in court, though. Bringing frivolous libel suits was quite a profitable business in Britain in the 1930s, according to Graham Greene, who also suffered from it. The law was weighted against any author who dared to set his work in a contemporary setting or used names which might be those of real people. As a result this book was reissued in an expurgated form in the UK, under the new title Jobber Skald (1935). It didn't reappear in full there until the late 1970s.
8. Maiden Castle (1936) - the last of the Dorset novels.
9. Morwyn: or The Vengeance of God (1937) - I owe my copy of this eccentric work to the "Dennis Wheatley library of the Occult", which republished it in the 1980s. It's a kind of anti-vivisectionist tract disguised as an account of a trip to Hell. Much more entertaining than you'd think.
10. Owen Glendower (1940) - the first of his Welsh historical novels.
11. Porius (1951) - another historical novel, this one set in the fifth century, during the reign of King Arthur. So long and weird that it could only be published in a heavily-edited form at the time. A complete, restored text came out from Colgate University Press in 1994. I'm glad to say that I have both versions. Tough going at times, though, but.
12. The Inmates (1952) - a rather wistful and charming account of a love affair in a lunatic asylum.
13. Atlantis (1954)- this one I'd been looking for for ages. There was a copy in Auckland University Library when I was studying there, but I never succeeded in obtaining one of my own till the blessed Faber Finds people put it back into print.
14. The Brazen Head (1956) - another odd historical novel, this time about the medieval alchemist Roger Bacon.
15. Homer and the Aether (1959) - commentary / fiction about the Iliad, rather like a more esoteric version of T. H. White's Once and Future King
16. All or Nothing (1960) - if you think some of the others are odd, try reading this piece of raving lunacy.

Shorter fiction

1. The Owl, The Duck, and - Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe! (1930) - no idea. I've never seen it. The title is certainly intriguing, though.
2. Up and Out (1957) - two novellas: "Up and Out: a mystery tale" & "The Mountains of the Moon: a lunar love-story." Not like any sci-fi you've ever read, I bet you.
3. Romer Mowl and Other Stories (1974) - haven't seen this.
4. Real Wraiths (1974)
5. Two and Two (1974)
6. You and Me (1975) - or any of these three novellas.
7. Three Fantasies (1985) - I do have a copy of this, though, and very weird it is, even by JCP standards.

So what else would I recommend? One of the very best of his books is his Autobiography, first published in 1934. In it he gives a pretty full account of his curious way of life: the strange observances to Nature and the other deities in his pantheon, various misadventures at home and on the lecture circuit, etc.

There's a very funny story about him being called to testify in favour of Joyce's Ulysses at an obscenity trial in New York in the twenties.

"Who's that?" asked one of the bystanders.

"Oh, that's the English degenerate, John Powys," replied his neighbour.

Powys would probably not have objected greatly to the description, though he might have had certain problems with the exclusivity of the adjective "English."

He was also a very fine essayist, and published a number of books on literature and culture. There've also been various volumes of his letters issued since his death, a form that particularly suited his discursive, polymathic personality.

Powys was (by contrast) a fairly conventional poet, but there's some nice pieces in this selected volume of Poems, edited by Kenneth Hopkins in 1964, immediately after his death.



There's a goodly number of biographies and critical books about him and his brothers. You can find links to various of them from Wikipedia or the Powys Society website.

I'd recommend G. Wilson Knight's pioneering The Saturnian Quest (1964), as well as Richard Perceval Graves' joint biography of the trio, The Brothers Powys (1983). There's an ever-growing corpus of books about all three of them to choose from now, though.

•

[Update: 11/11/19]:

I've just received a fascinating email from Canada. Matthew Handscombe writes as follows:

My father collected the Powys family and every now again I get the urge to enter Powys and Collector into Google to see what comes up. This time, it was you and I very happily read your blog post from 2009.

His collection is now housed in the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, but amongst a pile of papers after his death, I found this.

Thought I would share. All best from Winnipeg.

John Cowper Powys: Undated Letter (c.1962-1963?)

Here's the present state of my own JCP collection, ten years on from the preliminary report above - by no means complete, of course, but not too bad for an occasional collector on the far side of the world:

John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys
(1872-1963)

Fiction:


1. Powys, John Cowper. Wood and Stone: A Romance. 1915. London: Village Press, 1974.


2. Powys, John Cowper. Rodmoor. 1916. Faber Finds. London: Faber, 2008.


3. Powys, John Cowper. After My Fashion. 1919. Foreword by Francis Powys. London: Picador, 1980.


4. Powys, John Cowper. Ducdame. 1925. London: Village Press, 1974.


5. Powys, John Cowper. Wolf Solent. 1929. Preface by the Author. 1961. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.


6. Powys, John Cowper. A Glastonbury Romance. 1933. John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1933.


7. Powys, John Cowper. A Glastonbury Romance. 1933. Preface by the Author. 1955. London: Picador, 1975.


8. Powys, John Cowper. Weymouth Sands. 1935. As ‘Jobber Skald’. 1935. Introduction by Angus Wilson. 1973. London: Picador, 1980.


9. Powys, John Cowper. Maiden Castle. 1937. London: Picador, 1979.


10. Powys, John Cowper. Morwyn: The Vengeance of God. 1937. The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult, 45. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1977.


11. Powys, John Cowper. Owen Glendower. 1941. London: Picador, 1978.


12. Powys, John Cowper. Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages. London: Macdonald & Co., (Publishers) Ltd., 1951.


13. Powys, John Cowper. Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages. A New Edition. 1951. Ed. Wilbur T. Albrecht. Hamilton, New York: Colgate University Press, 1994.


14. Powys, John Cowper. Porius. Ed. Judith Bond & Morine Krissdóttir. Foreword by Morine Krissdóttir. Overlook Duckworth. New York: Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., 2007.


15. Powys, John Cowper. The Inmates. London: MacDonald, 1952.


16. Powys, John Cowper. Atlantis. 1954. Faber Finds. London: Faber, 2008.


17. Powys, John Cowper. The Brazen Head. 1956. London: Picador, 1978.


18. Powys, John Cowper. Up and Out. London: Macdonald & Co., (Publishers) Ltd., 1957.


19. Powys, John Cowper. Homer and the Aether. London: Macdonald & Co., (Publishers) Ltd., 1959.


20. Powys, John Cowper. All or Nothing. London: Village Press, 1973.


21. Powys, John Cowper. Three Fantasies. Afterword by Glen Cavaliero. 1985. Paladin Grafton Books. London: Collins Publishing Group, 1986.

Miscellaneous Prose:


22. Powys, John Cowper. Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions. 1915. Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1955.


23. Powys, John Cowper, & Llewellyn Powys. Confessions of Two Brothers. 1916. Introduction by Malcolm Elwin. London: Sinclair Browne Ltd., 1982.


24. Powys, John Cowper. In Defence of Sensuality. 1930. London: Village Press, 1974.


25. Powys, John Cowper. The Meaning of Culture. 1930. The Travellers' Library. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1936.


26. Powys, John Cowper. Autobiography. 1934. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1949.


27. Powys, John Cowper. Autobiography. 1934. Introduction by J. B. Priestley. 1967. London: Picador, 1982.


28. Powys, John Cowper. The Art of Happiness. 1935. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1935.


29. Powys, John Cowper. The Pleasures of Literature. 1938. London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1946.


30. Powys, John Cowper. The Art of Growing Old. 1944. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1944.


31. Powys, John Cowper. Obstinate Cymric: Essays 1935-47. 1947. London: Village Press, 1973.

Poetry:


32. Powys, John Cowper. Wolf's Bane: Rhymes. 1916. London: Village Press, 1975.


33. Powys, John Cowper. Mandragora: Poems. 1917. London: Village Press, 1975.


34. Powys, John Cowper. Samphire. 1922. London: Village Press, 1975.


35. Powys, John Cowper. Poems: A Selection from His Poems. Ed. Kenneth Hopkins. London: Macdonald & Co., (Publishers) Ltd., 1964.

Diary & Letters:


36. Krissdóttir , Morine, ed. Petrushka and the Dancer: The Diaries of John Cowper Powys, 1929-1939. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited / New York: St. Martin's Press / Paris: Alyscamps Press, 1995.


37. Powys, John Cowper. Letters of John Cowper Powys to Louis Wilkinson, 1935-1956. London: Macdonald & Co., (Publishers) Ltd., 1958.


38. Powys, John Cowper. Letters to Nicholas Ross: Selected by Nicholas and Adelaide Ross. Ed. Arthur Uphill. London: Bertram Rota (Publishing) Ltd., 1971.


39. Powys, John Cowper. Letters from John Cowper Powys to C. Benson Roberts. Ed. C. Benson Roberts. London: Village Press, 1975.

Secondary:


40. Brebner, John A. The Demon Within: A Study of John Cowper Powys’s Novels. London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1973.


41. Graves, Richard Perceval. The Brothers Powys. 1983. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.


42. Hopkins, Kenneth. The Powys Brothers: A Biographical Appreciation. 1967. London: Village Press, 1974.


43. Knight, G. Wilson. The Saturnian Quest: A Study of the Prose Works of John Cowper Powys. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1964.


44. Marlow, Louis. Welsh Ambassadors: Powys Lives and Letters. 1936. Introduction by Kenneth Hopkins. London: Village Press, 1975.


45. Marlow, Louis. Forth, Beast! London: Faber, 1946.