Wolf Solent has pressed his beautiful young wife against an ash tree, presumably as a prelude to sex, but he begins rubbing the bark: ‘Human brains! Human knots of confusion!’ he thought.  ‘Why can’t we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?’ (Wolf Solent, “’This Is Reality,’” 356) I have learned that it is just when writers, many writers, write the strangest things that they really mean it.  John Cowper Powys has, like any good novelist, has a strong sense of irony, but he also has a fantastic, visionary mode that pushes past it.  As with his trees. To step back for a moment.  The first page of A Glastonbury Romance introduces three characters.  They are: The First Cause, which passes “a wave, a motion, a vibration” into the soul of A “particular human being,” John Crow (name on the next page), a “microscopic biped” who is leaving the third-class carriage of a train, returning to his home town just like the protagonist of Wolf Solent.  He is not especially affected by The sun, which is experiencing “enormous fire-thoughts.” On the next page, another character is added, “the soul of the earth.” John Crow turns out to be not the protagonist of A Glastonbury Romance but one of many, which is how Powys gets to 1,100 pages.  But the other characters or sentient metaphors or whatever they are recur occasionally.  Powys is, among other things, a fantasy writer, even aside from his use of the King Arthur and Holy Grail stories.  His landscape, his cosmos, is full of sentience, of which he occasionally gives me a glimpse.  For example, the old trees that are in love with each other: As a matter of fact, although neither of these human lovers were aware of this, between the Scotch fir and that ancient holly there had existed for a hundred years a strange attraction.  Night by night, since the days when the author of Faust lay dying in Weimar and those two embryo trees had been in danger of being eaten by grubs, they had loved each other…  But across the leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their subhuman voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women. (AGR, “Conspiracy,” 786, ellipses mine) My single favorite passage in Glastonbury is also about the language of trees: The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds.  What to these lovers [lovers again!], for instance, would the singular syllables “wuther-quotle-glug” have signified?  (“The River,” 89) John Crow, one of the lovers, has just uttered a phrase – “It is extraordinary that we should ever have met!” – that “struck the attention of the solitary ash tree… with what in trees corresponds to human irony” because this is the fifth time in a hundred and thirty years that the tree has heard the exact same phrase.  Powys gives me the details – an “old horse,” a “mad clergyman,” an “old maiden lady” to her long-dead lover.  “An eccentric fisherman had uttered them addressing an exceptionally large chub which he had caught and killed.” All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish: wuther-quotle-glug. That chub, or its descendant, appears again about 700 pages later as a prophetic talking fish.  I believe the last talking fish to appear on Wuthering Expectations was the trout in John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981).  The talking chub is in the most Crowleyish chapter, “’Nature Seems Dead,’” about the night the of the powerful west wind, “one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury.”  Crowley has put a magical, history-changing west wind into a number of his books. I thought about writing about a marvelous antique shop Powys describes early in A Glastonbury Romance, but I will instead finish with one line of the description, a description of his own novels. But it was a treasure-trove for the type of imagination that loves to brood, a little sardonically and unfastidiously perhaps, upon the wayward whims and caprices of the human spirit.  (“King Arthur’s Sword,” 345)

Last summer I read John Cowper Powys’s novel Wolf Solent (1929) and recently I read A Glastonbury Romance (1932), not his first novels but the first that anyone noticed.  Wolf Solent is a plump 600 pages, and Glastonbury a monstrous 1,100.  Powys was 56 when the first was published, and 59 for the second, a mature writer, a seasoned weirdo. These novels are genuine eccentrics, in ideas and style, as odd as D. H. Lawrence or Ronald Firbank.  Powys, like Lawrence, is a direct descendant of Thomas Hardy, at least that is clear, not just writing about the same part of England but employing a Hardy-like narrator (although Powys’s narrator works with his characters rather than against them) and using explicitly fantastic devices.  In Glastonbury he pushes the fantasy quite far.  I’ll save that idea for tomorrow. Writing about these books has been a puzzle.  I am tempted to just type out weird sentences.  Maybe I will do that after a tint plot summary.  Wolf Solent – that, surprisingly, is the name of the main character – “returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy.”  I am quoting the anonymous author of the novel’s Wikipedia entry.  That is, in fact, the plot of the novel, although it does not seem like it so much while actually reading, thank goodness.  A Glastonbury Romance earns its 1,100 pages by expanding to a large cast and many stories.  A mystic uses an inheritance to jumpstart the tourist industry of historic Glastonbury.  Many things happen to many people, murders and visions of Excalibur and the Holy Grail, all kinds of things.  Lots of sex, in Wolf Solent, too.  Powys is as earthy as Lawrence, if not as explicit, or not as explicit as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), but also abstract: Both the two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured First Cause possess the energy of sex.  (AGR, “Tin,” 665) This is nominally the thought of an industrialist leaving a cave where he plans to establish a tin mine.  Or it is the philosophical narrator floating along with him.  Hard to tell. And the ecstatic quiver of that great cosmic ripple we call Sex runs through the whole universe and functions in every organism independent of external objects of desire!  (666) That exclamation point is a Powys signature. ‘Walking if my cure,’ he thought, ‘As long as I can walk I can get my soul into shape!  It must have been an instinct of self-preservation that has always driven me to walk!’  (WS, “Ripeness Is All,” 601) The characters use the exclamation point; the narrators love them.  Sometimes I can sense the need for emphasis, and other times I am puzzled. Powys’s characters are great walkers, that is true.  These two novels are fine examples of the domestic picaresque.  Powys can organize close to the entire plot just by having characters walk around, dropping in on each other’s homes, varying the pattern with “party” chapters like “The Horse-Fair” (WS) and “The Pageant” (AGR) where Wolf Solent can just wander around the fair, bumping into and advancing the story of every single character in the novel in whatever arbitrary order Powys likes.  A brilliant device; use it for your novel. Powys has the true novelist’s sense, or let’s say one of the kinds of true senses, in that he always knows where his characters are in relation to each other, in town, in a room.  If a character walks this way he will pass these houses in this order, and is likely to meet these characters.  He can over do it, as at the pageant – “At the opposite end of the sixth row from where Mrs. Legge and Blackie were seated were Old Jones and Abel Twig” (AGR, “The Pageant,” 560) – but he actually uses this kind of detail when the show begins.  He has it all in his head.  Or he made a diagram, I don’t know. Those are some aspects of these particular Powys novels.  They are original enough that I can see how readers can develop a taste for, or be repelled by, their strong flavor. Tomorrow I will write about Powys’s trees.

One of these books is 1,100 pages long.  It was just by chance that I read two genuinely disgusting books at around the same time. FICTION A Glastonbury Romance (1932), John Cowper Powys -  I will write a bit about this beast, soon.  That line in the title is from Chapter 25, p. 798 of the Overlook edition Claudius the God (1934), Robert Graves A Buyer's Market (1952), Anthony Powell – The second novel in a series of twelve.  I will write about this, too, but I do not know when.  Each time I read one in the series I think, just one more, then I will know what I want to write. Giovanni's Room (1956), James Baldwin Dispatches from the Central Committee (1992), Vladimir Sorokin – Actually from the early 1980s, mostly, but unpublishable, real antinomian anti-Soviet gestures.  Sorokin had two main tricks, first, to begin in a conventional vein but suddenly interrupting the story with something disgusting or otherwise awful, and second, to suddenly switch rhetorical modes, say from realism to bureaucratic nonsense to grotesquerie to surrealism.  The suddenness is always the key effect.  In a sense the stories are satire but by the end I took it more as a kind of protest literature.  The book includes perfectly suited, disgusting new illustration and is well produced, not always true of Dalkey Archive books.  I guess it could be full of typos but given the nature of the text how would I ever know. POETRY Auroras of Autumn (1950), Wallace Stevens 17 Poems (1954) & Secrets on the Way (1958), Tomas Tranströmer Scattered Returns (1969), L. E. Sissman – The great Boston cancer poet. MEMOIR Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (1950), József Debreczeni – Debreczeni, a Serbian-Hungarian journalist, passed through Auschwitz but was mostly imprisoned in labor camps and eventually a bizarre hospital camp, the “cold crematorium,” thus the curious, accurate subtitle.  Debreczeni emphasize the disgusting side of life in the camps, not exactly a neglected aspect in other accounts but I have never seen so much direct focus on it.  But again, that hospital camp, boy.  Please see Dorian Stuber’s review for more detail, if you can stand it.  As many Holocaust memoirs as we have now, it is a shame that this one did not appear in English until 2023. The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (2024), Sonny Rollins – Full of notes about fingering and the effects of his diet on his blowing, this artifact is for fans only, but this is Sonny Rollins, a titan.  Become a fan! IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Claudine à l'école (Claudine at School, 1900), Colette – Young Claudine has a crush on her almost as young new (female) teacher, who is perhaps having some sort of affair with the only slightly older (female) school principal.    Colette later said that all of the (barely) lesbian stuff was forced on the novel by her odious husband Willy, which is plausible given that Colette abandons the plot – all plot – about halfway through for a long long long section about taking the bac, the final exams.  I found all of that fascinating and wish I had read the novel long ago.  But it was for some reason the lesbian stuff, not the test-taking, that gave Colette her first bestseller. Poesia, te escrevo agora (Poetry, I Write You Now, 1950-84), João Cabral de Melo Neto – The major works of Cabral de Melo Neto, including full versions of his great long poems like “The River or On the Course of the Capibaribe River from Its Source to the City of Recife” (1953) in one handy book. Recommended to the Portuguese language learner – easier than they first look, and highly rewarding.  I assume, and hope, that the English translations are good.

My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read.  I read Alison Entrekin’s English translation because 1) I did not have a Portuguese text handy and 2) I figured it would be too hard for me, which I think is right.  I had enough trouble with the book in English. When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy!  (162) For 90 pages, Lispector alternates scenes of Joana’s childhood and the beginnings of her marriage.  Then we get a hundred pages of the marriage falling apart.  The husband has, for example, a pregnant girlfriend, although that is more of a symptom of the collapse.  The real cause is that Joana is psychologically, hmm hmm hmm, unusual. How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it. (101) That is maybe the strangest clear thought she expresses.  Joana’s stream of thoughts are generally much more abstract.  Entirely abstract.  Here is the ending of one abstract paragraph moving into the beginning of another. Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession. Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form – it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form! – and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity. (36) Joana’s thinking, outside of the childhood scenes, if often unconnected, or just barely connected, to a scene, or anything material at all.  A lot of this: How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? would a triangle be born fatally? things were rich…  Where does music go when it’s not playing? (164, ellipses mine) I would describe passages like this as philosophical if I understood how Joana moves from one thought to another, which I generally did not.  Sometimes I felt a move toward Surrealism, although without the playfulness or materiality I enjoy in Surrealism. The man was a child an amoeba flowers whiteness warmth like sleep for now is time for now is life even if it is later… (165, ellipses in original) This is Joana falling asleep, so here I did know what Lispector was depicting.  I could, in this section, draw a connection between my own perceptions of what I call “reality” and Lispector’s representation of an aspect of reality, the process and psychology of falling asleep.  But mostly I found that hard to do. Another possibility is that Joana is meant to be a pathological case study, repellent to understanding.  Or that she is meant to be entirely normal, a version of the way Lispector sees the world, however nuts she looks to me, the kind of mismatch I often bounce off when reading D. H. Lawrence, where I think I am reading about someone who is psychologically unusual and begin to think, oh no, he thinks everyone is like this. Yet another idea is that the novel is full of nonsense and anti-rationality, again like Surrealism, something I usually enjoy a lot.  I could have used more, I don’t know, jokes, I guess.  Surrealism is fun.  And material, too, not abstract.  Paris Peasant is about walking around in the mall. Benjamin Moser, in the introduction, suggests that Lispector’s “project was less artistic than spiritual… not an intellectual or artistic endeavor” (xi), a good clue about my difficulties with Near to the Wild Heart.  Beyond a couple of the childhood scenes I never found a hook into the art of Lispector’s novel.  It is the biggest mismatch of a book with my taste that I have bumped against in quite a while. Tony Malone liked the novel more than I did but his response, section by section, looks similar to mine: “the internal monologues were a little too abstract at times,” were they ever. Someday I will try another Lispector novel, perhaps one from the 1960s, and see how that goes.  Perhaps I will try one in Portuguese.

Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature.  I’ll do it again someday. FICTION The Peony Pavilion (1598), Tang Xianzu – written up back here. The Story of the Stone, Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin & Gao E – some notes here.  The quotation in my title is from p. 94. Naomi (1924) & Quicksand (1930), Junichiro Tanizaki – and these are over here. Calamity Town (1942), Ellery Queen – A very lightly metafictional mystery.  Not only does the detective share his name with the book’s actual “author,” itself a fiction, but he is a mystery writer who at times seems to be generating the crime within the novel so that he will have something interesting to write about.  But not quite doing that, unfortunately.  That novel would have been more interesting.  The actual novel was fine.  This is one of those mysteries where every instance of clumsy plotting is in fact a clue. A Question of Upbringing (1951), Anthony Powell – I think I will write something about this book once I have read another volume of the series. Damned If I Do (2004), Percival Everett – short stories.  A perfect Everett title.  It is all his characters need since it doesn’t matter what will happen if they don’t.  They always do. On the Calculation of Volume I (2020), Solvej Balle – a Groundhog Day story told with more philosophy and less humor.  A good fantasy on its own terms, but the puzzle is that the series has six more volumes, two of which have not been written yet.  The whole thing will be at least 1,200 pages long, for all I know more.  This first volume is reasonably complete, so I have no idea where the series might be going.   POETRY NOT IN FRENCH OR PORTUGUESE Selected Poems (1968), Zbigniew Herbert   TRAVEL, MUSIC HISTORY Tschiffelly's Ride (1933), Aimé Tschifelly – a Swiss English teacher rides a pair of Pampas horses from Buenos Aires to Washington, D. C., just for fun, and writes an equestrian classic.  Lots of emphasis on the horses and horse-riding.  My geographical knowledge of South and Central America has greatly improved.  I have only been to one of the countries Tschifelly passes through.  Peru gets the largest number of pages; Mexico second. Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (2023), Jeremy Eichler – Before I finished The Emigrants in 1996 I knew that Sebald was going to be an important writer.  I knew that people were going to want to do what he was doing.  That was the only time I have been right about that, really, and I did not predict how much Sebaldian visual and musical art would follow, nor that there could be Sebaldian music history, which is what classical music critic Jeremy Eichler has written.  Lightly Sebaldian – he includes uncaptioned photos, yes, but always says, somewhere in the text, what they are.  The book is about World War II memorial pieces, built around Schoenberg’s A Survivor in Warsaw (1947), Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and several Shostakovich works.  Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of thing.   IN  FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE Odes et Ballades (1828), Victor Hugo – young, young Hugo.  I had read the first half several years ago; now I finished it up.  He sounded like himself from the beginning, but he would not become the greatest French poet until, well, almost immediately after this book. Les songes en equilibre (1942) & Le tombeau des rois (1953) & Mystère de la parole (1960), Anne Hébert – Lovely dream and childhood poems from a Quebecois poet.  I have not read Hébert in English, but I will bet there are some good translations.  Her Catholic poems did not do much for me.  If you have opinions about her fiction, please share them. Éthiopiques (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor – One would not – I would not – guess that he would be President of Senegal four years later.  I have visited his childhood home. Post-Scriptum (1960), Jorge de Sena Flores ao Telefone (1968) & Os Idólatras (1969), Maria Judite de Carvalho – I do not remember exactly how this book was recommended to me by a soon-to-be distinguished Portuguese author.  “If you like sad stories about depressed people, these are good.”  Carvalho has a place in Portuguese literature and feminism perhaps a little like Edna O’Brien in Ireland or Grace Paley in the United States, sharply ironic domestic stories, although without O’Brien’s sexual explicitness or Paley’s humor.  Culture hero Margaret Jull Costa is bringing Carvalho into English and is presumably working right now on these books, recently published in Portuguese in Volume 3 of Carvalho’s collected works.  Of course with that recommendation I had to buy a copy.