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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rara Avis,
By
This review is from: Autobiography (Paperback)
WARNING: Do NOT try to buy this book directly from Amazon. Despite the claim that it ships in 4-6 weeks, it doesn't. If you place an order directly with them, as I did, you'll get an e-mail in about 3 or so weeks apprising you that they were unable to obtain it. I don't know why they haven't removed the Amazon shipment option. But don't opt for it. Choose one of the Amazon Marketplace sellers instead---if you wish to receive the book, that is!This is an exceedingly odd and enjoyable autobiography. It's truly sui-generis, meaning, of course, that there's nothing really with which to compare it. Powys here gives an account in his life that is roughly chronological in presentation - but VERY roughly. He is constantly jumping backwards or forwards and has no respect for anything like precise dates. He does not even remember when it was that he left England for America. There are many lacunae where one expects things that aren't there in this autobiography, such as even his wife's name. We are told about what he was doing while he was affianced, that he was married, that he had a son. But there's nothing at all about this wife. Powys is far more concerned with his mystagogue view of world and how it manifests itself during different periods of his life. The best thing to do then, it seems to me, is to furnish the prospective reader with quotes from the book to give him/her an idea of what s/he's in for. Thus, without further ado: "I touch here upon what is to me one of the profoundest philosophical mysteries: I mean the power of the individual mind to create its own world, not in complete independence of what is called "the objective world," but in a steadily growing independence of the attitudes of the minds toward this world. For what people call the objective world is really a most fluid, flexible, malleable thing. It is like the wine of the Priestess Bacbuc in Rabelais. It tastes differently; it is a different cosmos, to every man, woman, and child. To analyse this "objective world is all very well, as long as you don't forget that the power to rebuild it by emphasis and rejection is synonymous with your being alive." P.62 "We are all in secret fighting for our sanity." P.249 "What I really feel is a sickening pity for every sentient thing, victimized, as we all are, by the great sadist who created this world." P.455 "If it has happened, by the will of fate, that in your life the erotic element has not played the dominant part that it has in mine, you are at once luckier than I have been and less lucky! You have escaped a great deal of grotesque tragicomedy, but you have been deprived of many thrilling and rapturous expectations and perhaps also a few paradisic fulfillments." P.480 "Our unfortunate human nature has never been subjected to conditions quite so anti-pathetic to all the most interesting stimuli to poetic human feeling since the beginning of the world, as it has been subjected to in America." Pp. 494-5 "I consider how my deepest impulses are neither exactly sadistic nor masochistic or mystical or theatrical or quite sane or quite mad, that there ought to be coined a completely new formula for what I am; and perhaps this is true for every separate living soul." P.604 "What we do is important; but it is less important than what we feel; for it is our feeling alone that is under the control of our will. In action we may be weak and clumsy blunderers, or on the other hand sometimes incompetent and sometimes competent. All this is largely beyond our control. What is not beyond our control is our feeling about it." P.626 Very often in this book one feels one is at one of Mr. Powys lectures, by which he made his living before taking up the pen and writing the works that have no doubt led the prospective reader, like myself, to his autobiography. He admits herein that these lectures often ran over and that he often got quite carried away with himself.....But how spellbinding, like this book, they must have been!
0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
the Glastonbury Monster,
By Casca (Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Autobiography (Paperback)
'It is a criminal blunder of our maturer years,' writes Mr Powys at the beginning of this autobiography, 'that we so tamely and without frantic and habitual struggles to retain it, allow the ecstasy of the unbounded to slip away out of our lives.'Mr Powys himself retains it both frantically and habitually. His intimations of boundlessness began early at his father's Derbyshire vicarage.There was a grassy hill which gave him a 'dim feeling of immensity'; it became 'synonymous with sublimity.'Oddly enough, a pair of boots and their thick souls conveyed 'my father's intensity of earth-feeling.' 'An oceanic in-pouring of this unbounded' was occassioned by his father's axe. It made, he adds, in what might be called the cosmic humourlessness of this book, 'An even greater dent in my mind.' Mr Powys' romanticism and egolatry, which he begs us not to confuse with Rousseau's; there is no danger of that -- have their real rival in the amateur-philosophical writings of another celebrated transatlantic lecturer, Count Keyserling.By floodlighting every episode with symbolism, some dramatic effects are obtained, particularly in the uncovering of new kinds of vice. At Sherborne: " I tried to overcome the most formidable of human passion-- anger and desire-- by the abandonment of the vice of pure gluttony. In that one night I ravenlously devoured a whole sponge cake." Against the crime of eating sponge cake we must place the rhythmic significance of telegraph wires seen rising and falling from a moving train. His meditations upon sadism tell him that 'from an intense absorption over a long period of time there must emanate magnetic vibrations of some sort permeating the surrounding air and leaving an evil impress that only gradually dies away.' These quaotations may indicate the embarrassment of the task of reviewing Mr Powys' book. One has the sensation of entering some Turkish bath of the psyche, and of there seeing Mr Powys naked in the hottest room of the subjective process. He sits steaming confusedly away, an ascetic-looking figure for all his verbal sensuality, declaiming theatrically and monotonously among the vapours and secretions. He is determined to sweat every drop out of his system. Whether Mr Powys' naked and shameless candour is as candid as it sounds is doubtful. He is naked yet hidden in the vapour of his own confession. He seems to me to have wrapped himself in sensationalism. Thus, the objectives facts of his life in the 650 closely printed pages of this book,are few.One hears a little of the other members of his distinguished family, one gathers a portrait here and there from Sherborne, and has a guess or two at what happened at Cambridge and later at Brighton, where his caree as a lecturer began. There is a gentleman who had had sunstroke in Singapore and who wrote poetry. He said, 'Powys, we must propitiate magnates.' There is a working man who introduced the sex, symbolism and magic-obsessed lecturer with his 'impersonal lust,' to the 'chaste whores' of Liverpool. There are brief glimpses of America. The rest is boundlessness, wordy tunnellings down the long arches of the solitary ego. Mr Powys' case will no doubt be clear to psychologists; this, incidentally, seems to irritate him for it puts a stop to boundlessness. His book is often a rich and fascinating document. A great great part of his life he was obsessed with what he calls sadistic erotic perversions. Normal sexual phenomena revotled him. He dreamed of sylph-like, idealised girls. He developed a passion fpr erotic literature and was even able to get sexual stimulus from the blameless Ally Sloper's Weekly. Naturally he hated women. He even went to the extent of hating trees and plants for their feminie parts. He feared he might become a woman. He loathed to see a woman holding a handkerchief in her hand. There is a secret life held back in everyone by the sluices of shame, and Mr Powys' public confession may bring private release to others. The very secrecy of that life, stagnant behind its shames, breeds those perversions, those fears and obsessions which, in this book, make Mr Powys give a disproportionate value to irrelevant matter. They cut a man off from his fellows. They have cut Mr Powys off. So that, fishing in the Glastonbury gloom of consciousness, he feels the line jerk, hauls away and brings up a creature whose length he immediately exaggerates. It does not occur to him that others are drily comparing catches with him; and it never enters his head when he cries-- borrowing the manner of a de Quincey of a Hazlitt-- 'You will hardly believe it, reader, when I tell you...' that his Glastonbury Monster seems to other fisherman rather less than a sprat. With poetic intuitions--yet no poet; emulator of prose styles, but no stylist; with an ability to draw character, but no novelist; a priest washing his sins in rhetoric; a mystic only too much in tune with the indefnite; an actor, but fatally insisting upon a one-man play; a man as easily bogged in the sublime as in the ridiculous, his self-dramatisations collapsing at a touch into bathos-- with all his itntuitive and imaginative gifts, Mr Powys ends by making turgid what he has the ability to make clear. He rejoices in the revolt against reason: " The people who use this term against me are exactly the type of persons who all the way down history have been the enemies against everything I value most in life. They hate, distrust and despise imagination.... Personally for myself I would define this vein of 'charlatanism' in me which you are so afraid of as a clown- element, or the comic-actor element, in the esence of all psychic truth. Without this element-- which is the perilous drop of the aboriginal berry-juice of old Saturn's blood-- the pursuit of truth would resemble something between a four hours' speech by Mr Gladstone and a four weeks' visit to some scientific retreat, where they investigate dogs' saliva through slits in their necks." Excellent intoxication, but it is verbal and not imaginative. One can only answer Mr Powys out of his own mouth: "...it is the element of self-love, in totally irrelevant happenings, that accounts for the indescribale tediousness of many autobiographies."
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