John Cowper Powys on the English Landscape: The Wanderer Returns

John Cowper Powys, from "After My Fashion":

"Drinking in, as he made his way through the wet grass, a hundred subtle fragrances, each one of which carried his mind back to the remote past, the wanderer felt that, however England might have changed, something essential in it, something that belonged both to the earth and the race, remained unchangeable and secure. The home of one's people! There must, he began to think, be some sort of intangible emanation proceeding from that which, more than any ritual, had the power to call one's mind back to its lost rhythm, to its broken balance."

Richard Storm, the returning wanderer in the novel, has been out of England for twenty years, the last four of them in France.

To be truthful, although I keep trying, I find the long novels of John Cowper Powys very hard to read, but he's good on landscape and the atmosphere of place.

Having spent 33 years of my own life overseas, I can understand some of the feelings of the returning wanderer- but not the mystical cultural nationalism stuff about "the English race" and "one's people".

"After My Fashion has an unusual publishing history. Although it was John Cowper Powys third novel written in 1920, it wasn't published until 1980. It seems that when his US publisher turned it down Powys made no effort to place it elsewhere" (Amazon).

See also, a blog posting by Ian Mulder on JCP's novel "Wood and Stone"

From "This Enchanted Isle" by Peter Woodcock:

JOHN COWPER POWYS
The way of the magician

"The world beyond appearances pervades the novels of John Cowper Powys (1881-1963). The world is full of everyday magic, the spirit of place lives and influences our lives. Out of the misty waters of the River Brue in Glastonbury a sword gleams, conjuring up Excalibur and the Arthurian legends. A strange sound is emitted from beneath the ancient hill site of Maiden Castle. In the mountains of Wales Merlin and Taliesin still dwell...

Powys was much more than a romantic writer. His works were vast and complex. A multi-faceted view of the world which incorporated pre-Celtic religion, Taoism, Hinduism and his own brand of animism. He believed that everything has consciousness: stones, trees, rivers, mountains, clouds, the weather, human beings. Ancient megaliths were repositories of ancient knowledge and wisdom, race memories emitting their secrets to the initiated. And Powys considered himself to be an initiate. He ceremoniously tapped his head against the stones to gain access to information, the collective unconscious...

Powys embraced nature in all its rawness and mystery. Not a benevolent nature, but one that contained the dark both in reality and in oneself. In his vast and densely written novels his characters interact with their environment. Moods and emotions change in conjunction with the elements. Water and fire, storms, floods, outbursts of madness and mystical visions...

If any writer evoked the genius loci, it is Powys. His novels are daunting in their length – A Glastonbury Romance is over one thousand pages. Not only did Powys write novels, but poems, books on philosophy, essays, short stories and he was a prolific diary writer. He was a literary giant. His life was equally gigantic. He went to America in 1905 to lecture. For many he was seen as charismatic, spellbinding, a sage, a great orator, but to others he could appear ruthless, even demonic at times...

He also admired painting, particularly the paintings of the eighteenth century French artist Claude whose landscape paintings have been influential, alongside Samuel Palmer and William Blake, with the Neo-Romantic painters...

John Cowper died in 1963. His ashes were scattered on Chesil Beach in Dorset".