The Occasional Review: April 2020 |
Posted: March 30, 2020 |
In one of Boston's last good used bookstores, there is a copy of Enjoyment of Literature in a glass cabinet. Powys has inscribed it to his brother and sister, dedicating the essay on Shakespeare to one and Proust to the other, and sketched Janus -- one of the many mythological figures he associated himself with -- on the title page. Somehow, the book passed through the hands of the Powys family to the poet Geoffrey Hill, whose name is also inside, before finally settling beneath the glass case. I have only read one Powys novel, Wolf Solent, but felt a mysterious attraction to this volume, along with a completely unmysterious lack of $350, which is what it costs. I might have been remembering Robertson Davies's introduction to Wolf Solent, where he describes Powys's twenty-five year career as an extension lecturer in America. Powys, almost always broke, used his knowledge to dash off a few pamphlets like "One Hundred Greatest Books" for money, but Enjoyment of Literature (or The Pleasures of Literature, as it is called in England) is the mature fruit of all of those years of lecturing, composed only after he settled down to write seriously. This content was done with the help of Essay Writers! It is tough to write ordinary criticism -- to drape oneself over the edge of a sofa and declare "Oh how very fine" and then occasionally sigh, "Alas, that was not quite so fine" -- without feeling a little frivolous. Powys doesn't approach his task in this way. Is some of this too much? Undoubtedly, and there is plenty of hot air in this book, but no one can turn its pages and feel the same sense of dreary inconsequentiality that today's book review sections produce. Powys simply gets too much out of his reading -- he needs these books, he writes, in the "actual struggle of day-to-day life" -- and what he says about them is in a different world from the tedious grumbling of, say, Harold Bloom, whose enthusiasm for literature is far exceeded by his desire to scold and classify. Powys writes about many of the authors you would expect -- Homer, Cervantes, Wordsworth, Dickens -- and a few that you would not -- like Rabelais and Matthew Arnold -- but he never pretends that his choice is somehow eternally objective. He continues: "Thus the choice of books becomes, like the choice of a mate, or of a life-friend, a series of cross-roads of appalling significance." Isn't that last phrase wonderful? Floating on the occasional currents of fustian, there are touches like this that make even the weaker essays worthwhile. Powys is not much of a critic if you haven't read the books already. He doesn't give plot summary or do much close analysis of passages. He is a critic of essences and -- I know this is unfashionable -- self-help. He acknowledges that these authors have been discussed to death, but what has often been ignored, he says, is what "in unsophisticated circles is called a writer's 'message.'" He knows that such a statement is calculated to give "a scholarly student no slight shock," and it certainly made me suspicious, but the message that Powys teases out is never reductive. In his best essays, he points out what most readers have dimly felt, and attempts to lift our intimations a little further into consciousness before they sink back beneath the waves. So the goodly Odysseus spake and passed over the threshold. This is not an original remark, many people have felt it, but it takes an enchanter to carry both the thought and the feeling along in the prose. It also takes a certain courage to be obvious (this is precisely the courage, by the way, that is missing in most second-rate writers.) Here is what Powys writes in his essay on Proust -- I think he is making a related point:The pleasures of reading are not confined to the immediate excitement of reading. There are also after-thoughts; and when an exciting book leaves no after-thoughts we know well what has been wrong. The author has been afraid of being dull. As anyone who has picked up one of Powys's doorstop novels knows, he is absolutely fearless in this respect. I read Wolf Solent many years ago -- it is, in fact, only occasionally dull, but it is quite frequently unfathomable: I often had no idea what Powys was driving at. But I am going to return to his novels now: Owen Glendower or A Glastonbury Romance next, and then maybe Porius. Certain books give you the confidence to tackle a difficult writer, and Enjoyment of Literature is one of them. I can't seem to finish The Rainbow, for example, but I'll keep trying, because Lawrence's essays make it clear that he has something important to say to me. William Gaddis's essays, meanwhile, along with Charles Olson's interviews, both come off as so incoherent that I wonder whether it's worth making the effort to navigate their labyrinths. Enjoyment of Literature was published in 1938 and has never been reissued. Luckily, it is not too hard to find used on the Internet. Some courageous publisher -- maybe the Overlook Press, which publishes Powys's mature novels -- might want to bring it back in print. How one views issues of morality. How much one can control one's own thoughts and feelings. How one deals with a question which includes abstract or impossible concepts, or insufficient information, or ideas which may be non-sequiturs. To see how this works in practice, it is easiest to just take a handful of examples of thunk questions, including a few of my own, and some from 'The Little Book of Thunks', to see how they work within some of these themes. Can you have a friend you don't like? Is butter man-made or natural? What about plastic (which comes from oil, which comes ultimately from trees)? Many of the questions in the book are to do with definitions. How, for check this list do you define colour? Or what about the specific sound of music? And in the examples given here, how does one define or interpret the word 'friend'? As for the other example, 'man-made' is clearly a term which could be viewed in a simple or a more complex way.
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