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Wessex #3
Weymouth Sands
Weymouth Sands is the third in the great quartet of Powys's Dorset novels, the others being Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle. In drawing on his vivid childhood memories of the seaside town of Weymouth Powys created a wealth of characters and showed his deep sympathy for the variety, the eccentricity, the essential loneliness of human beings. Magnus Muir the Latin teacher, Sylvanus Cobbald the nature mystic, Adam Skald the Jobber, Dog Cattistock the brewer: these are especially memorable characters.
But this is not all; the town of Weymouth, the sea, the sands, the stones of Chesil Beach are as much characters as the human beings. As Angus Wilson writes in his introduction, "The setting, though recognizably Weymouth and Portland, is much more than that, it is a claim for a pantheistic (yet never declaredly transcendental) universe in which men, their acts and the memories of those acts survive only through the timeless, so-called inanimate world they live in."
But this is not all; the town of Weymouth, the sea, the sands, the stones of Chesil Beach are as much characters as the human beings. As Angus Wilson writes in his introduction, "The setting, though recognizably Weymouth and Portland, is much more than that, it is a claim for a pantheistic (yet never declaredly transcendental) universe in which men, their acts and the memories of those acts survive only through the timeless, so-called inanimate world they live in."
572 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1934
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481 people want to read
About the author
John Cowper Powys
177 books174 followersPowys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar. His mother was descended from the poet William Cowper, hence his middle name. His two younger brothers, Llewelyn Powys and Theodore Francis Powys, also became well-known writers. Other brothers and sisters also became prominent in the arts.
John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.
He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.
Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.
John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.
He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.
Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.
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August 16, 2016
Some rather rambling thoughts...
Here are the first couple of paragraphs which, more than anything I could say here, set out both the strengths and the problems with JCP's style. In particular, at least for me, the first sentence is a wonderfully complex and concise observation of nature, the second moves rapidly towards JCP's own unique, eccentric, concept of the Universe (and his granting of a certain kind of consciousness to things that do not warrant it), which I personally find instantly irritating:
"The Sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave. Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach, was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth's ancient antagonist.
Such at any rate was the impression that Magnus Muir — tutor in Latin to backward boys — received from the waves on Weymouth Beach as in the early twilight of a dark January afternoon, having dismissed his last pupil for the day and hurriedly crossed the road and the esplanade, he stood on the wet pebbles and surveyed the turbulent expanse of water.
Lean, bony and rugged, with hollow cheeks and high cheekbones, the consciousness that looked out from his grey eyes assumed an expression that would have been very difficult for the cleverest onlooker to analyze or define. It was certainly to no easy, relaxed enjoyment of those darkening waves that Magnus was now yielding himself in his release from his day's labour. His face was wrought up rather than relaxed, strained rather than casual, grim rather than complacent; and if he had been a priest, occupied with the rendering of some complicated fragment of ancient liturgy, he could not have appeared more gravely concentrated."
His skill with character description, which I love, is nicely on display here. In particular the rhythm of the final sentence is just fantastic. One can also certainly hear echoes of both Hardy and James in the sentence structure.
While his essentialism (i.e. "Woman" does/is X) grates, he can certainly not be accused of misogyny -
"…as if by the mere hugging of her knees between her arms she could return to that unconscious state in which twenty-six years ago she lay, an embryo-mite, before she was born into a world like this; a world in which for a woman not to be beautiful, not to be seductive and appealing, means after all a series of futile desperations, of shifts and make-shifts, of pitiful and sorrowful turnings to the wall."
for example.
His focus is on a certain kind of solitude, which is not the same as being deliberately isolated or selfish, that allows one to reveal the connection, the continuity, between that which is self and that which is non-self - a kind of ecstatic transcendence - is appealing, to a certain extent, but the use of terms like "soul" and "consciousness" with a rather wild abandon, often leads to confusion and pseudo -mysticism.
Here are a couple of quotes to give you an idea of those parts of his writing most likely to put you off - of course it is entirely unfair to put them here out of context, but hopefully their length will do much to mitigate that:
“And the obliviousness of Rodney and Daisy to that crying of the gulls above Spy Croft added a new burden, a new weight, a new quota of insensibility to the age-old indifference of so many human souls of the two Boroughs to the objects and to the sounds that had become the tutelary background of the place. To a mind not grown quite callous to what Mr. Gaul would have called the "representative potentiality of inanimate identities" it might be easily conceived that between St. Alban's Head, the White Nose, the Nothe, Chesil Beach, the Breakwater, the Town Bridge, the White Horse, Hardy's Monument, King George's Statue, St. John's Spire, the Jubilee Clock, and this perpetual crying of sea-gulls and advancing and retreating of sea-tides, there might have arisen, in their long confederacy, a brooding patience, resembling that of an organic Being; a patience that approached, if it never could quite attain, the faint, dim embryonic half-consciousness that brooded in the sea-weeds, the sea-shells, the sea-anemones, the star-fish and jelly-fish, that lay submerged along those beaches and among those rock-pools.”
***********
"He doesn't play like a musician," she thought. "I know he is making mistakes."
But she had hardly thought, "He is making mistakes. He is playing badly" than she felt compelled to shut her eyes. An immense flood of happiness lifted her up and carried her away. Her irritation with this man of many masks dropped from her and sank as if into deep water. Her revulsion against Lucinda fell away, too, sinking down like a pebble-stone. Her loneliness, her anxiety, her pessimism, all were submerged. She was herself, and yet not herself! She became a disembodied spirit that floated in, and over, this quivering flood. Across these waves she skimmed, light as a seamew; and, as the man went on playing, it was as if every moment in her past life, when she had been happy, darted up from its hiding-place, an arrowy jet of gleaming luminosity, and diffused itself through the whole air on which she floated; till she felt as if she were drifting through the liquid ether of a substance that resembled mother-of-pearl. But when all that had ever thrilled her, whether of taste, or touch, or sight, or smell, was transformed into a super-ether, this ether itself melted into that sound-sea, that rolled and rippled and towered and toppled and carried her along. Everything became sound. Thought had no reality. Things had no substance. Memory had no meaning, hope no shape. Sound was life. Sound was death. Sound was fate. Sound was the pouring forth, out of the abyss, of something beyond all reason and all knowledge! She herself, the Perdita she lived with, became a sound among other sounds, a sound that was nothing but the rising and falling of darkness and light. Past and future were lost in each other. Nor did any present that could be called a present take their place. This conscious sound, that had been Perdita's soul, was a thing that had neither inward nor outward, neither subject nor object. It was an Absolute, self-existent, self-generated, self-complete. Only it kept breaking up into innumerable waves of darkness and light, that fell and rose, rose and fell, till they were an eternal oneness in their manifold, and an eternal manifold in their oneness . . .”
There is enough hesitancy in these passages (note the "might" in the first passage for example) for me to be more forgiving, though I would expect others may not agree. It is not that I think he is wrong in, for example, his description of Perdita's experience (and what would it mean to say someone was "wrong" when describing such a thing?) and I accept that he is attempting to render a certain phenomenon in prose that it may not be possible to render in language, but there is something about those exclamation marks in particular that annoys me.
However, JCP is also the only writer I know who could write something like this:
"Jerry had indeed something in him that went beyond Rabelaisianism, in that he not only could get an ecstasy of curious satisfaction from the most drab, ordinary, homely, realistic aspects of what might be called the excremental under-tides of existence but he could slough off his loathing for humanity in this contemplation and grow gay, child-like, guileless. "
Which I would be hard-pressed to find fault with.
I don't know. He is certainly on of the great writers, not least for his uniqueness and his willingness to commit completely to an expression of his world-view, reader-be-damned. I certainly intend to read all his books. But I also don't think he is for everyone, nor is he someone I would be quick to recommend. However, one thing I would say is that it is important to allow him a certain amount of time, say 100 pages or so, to get under your skin before you dismiss him. I find that it always takes me a while to submit and cease my resistance, and I am glad when I do.
Regardless, we you to be interested in reading him, I would not suggest starting here. Judging by the reviews it seems Wolf Solent is a good starting place.
Here are the first couple of paragraphs which, more than anything I could say here, set out both the strengths and the problems with JCP's style. In particular, at least for me, the first sentence is a wonderfully complex and concise observation of nature, the second moves rapidly towards JCP's own unique, eccentric, concept of the Universe (and his granting of a certain kind of consciousness to things that do not warrant it), which I personally find instantly irritating:
"The Sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave. Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach, was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth's ancient antagonist.
Such at any rate was the impression that Magnus Muir — tutor in Latin to backward boys — received from the waves on Weymouth Beach as in the early twilight of a dark January afternoon, having dismissed his last pupil for the day and hurriedly crossed the road and the esplanade, he stood on the wet pebbles and surveyed the turbulent expanse of water.
Lean, bony and rugged, with hollow cheeks and high cheekbones, the consciousness that looked out from his grey eyes assumed an expression that would have been very difficult for the cleverest onlooker to analyze or define. It was certainly to no easy, relaxed enjoyment of those darkening waves that Magnus was now yielding himself in his release from his day's labour. His face was wrought up rather than relaxed, strained rather than casual, grim rather than complacent; and if he had been a priest, occupied with the rendering of some complicated fragment of ancient liturgy, he could not have appeared more gravely concentrated."
His skill with character description, which I love, is nicely on display here. In particular the rhythm of the final sentence is just fantastic. One can also certainly hear echoes of both Hardy and James in the sentence structure.
While his essentialism (i.e. "Woman" does/is X) grates, he can certainly not be accused of misogyny -
"…as if by the mere hugging of her knees between her arms she could return to that unconscious state in which twenty-six years ago she lay, an embryo-mite, before she was born into a world like this; a world in which for a woman not to be beautiful, not to be seductive and appealing, means after all a series of futile desperations, of shifts and make-shifts, of pitiful and sorrowful turnings to the wall."
for example.
His focus is on a certain kind of solitude, which is not the same as being deliberately isolated or selfish, that allows one to reveal the connection, the continuity, between that which is self and that which is non-self - a kind of ecstatic transcendence - is appealing, to a certain extent, but the use of terms like "soul" and "consciousness" with a rather wild abandon, often leads to confusion and pseudo -mysticism.
Here are a couple of quotes to give you an idea of those parts of his writing most likely to put you off - of course it is entirely unfair to put them here out of context, but hopefully their length will do much to mitigate that:
“And the obliviousness of Rodney and Daisy to that crying of the gulls above Spy Croft added a new burden, a new weight, a new quota of insensibility to the age-old indifference of so many human souls of the two Boroughs to the objects and to the sounds that had become the tutelary background of the place. To a mind not grown quite callous to what Mr. Gaul would have called the "representative potentiality of inanimate identities" it might be easily conceived that between St. Alban's Head, the White Nose, the Nothe, Chesil Beach, the Breakwater, the Town Bridge, the White Horse, Hardy's Monument, King George's Statue, St. John's Spire, the Jubilee Clock, and this perpetual crying of sea-gulls and advancing and retreating of sea-tides, there might have arisen, in their long confederacy, a brooding patience, resembling that of an organic Being; a patience that approached, if it never could quite attain, the faint, dim embryonic half-consciousness that brooded in the sea-weeds, the sea-shells, the sea-anemones, the star-fish and jelly-fish, that lay submerged along those beaches and among those rock-pools.”
***********
"He doesn't play like a musician," she thought. "I know he is making mistakes."
But she had hardly thought, "He is making mistakes. He is playing badly" than she felt compelled to shut her eyes. An immense flood of happiness lifted her up and carried her away. Her irritation with this man of many masks dropped from her and sank as if into deep water. Her revulsion against Lucinda fell away, too, sinking down like a pebble-stone. Her loneliness, her anxiety, her pessimism, all were submerged. She was herself, and yet not herself! She became a disembodied spirit that floated in, and over, this quivering flood. Across these waves she skimmed, light as a seamew; and, as the man went on playing, it was as if every moment in her past life, when she had been happy, darted up from its hiding-place, an arrowy jet of gleaming luminosity, and diffused itself through the whole air on which she floated; till she felt as if she were drifting through the liquid ether of a substance that resembled mother-of-pearl. But when all that had ever thrilled her, whether of taste, or touch, or sight, or smell, was transformed into a super-ether, this ether itself melted into that sound-sea, that rolled and rippled and towered and toppled and carried her along. Everything became sound. Thought had no reality. Things had no substance. Memory had no meaning, hope no shape. Sound was life. Sound was death. Sound was fate. Sound was the pouring forth, out of the abyss, of something beyond all reason and all knowledge! She herself, the Perdita she lived with, became a sound among other sounds, a sound that was nothing but the rising and falling of darkness and light. Past and future were lost in each other. Nor did any present that could be called a present take their place. This conscious sound, that had been Perdita's soul, was a thing that had neither inward nor outward, neither subject nor object. It was an Absolute, self-existent, self-generated, self-complete. Only it kept breaking up into innumerable waves of darkness and light, that fell and rose, rose and fell, till they were an eternal oneness in their manifold, and an eternal manifold in their oneness . . .”
There is enough hesitancy in these passages (note the "might" in the first passage for example) for me to be more forgiving, though I would expect others may not agree. It is not that I think he is wrong in, for example, his description of Perdita's experience (and what would it mean to say someone was "wrong" when describing such a thing?) and I accept that he is attempting to render a certain phenomenon in prose that it may not be possible to render in language, but there is something about those exclamation marks in particular that annoys me.
However, JCP is also the only writer I know who could write something like this:
"Jerry had indeed something in him that went beyond Rabelaisianism, in that he not only could get an ecstasy of curious satisfaction from the most drab, ordinary, homely, realistic aspects of what might be called the excremental under-tides of existence but he could slough off his loathing for humanity in this contemplation and grow gay, child-like, guileless. "
Which I would be hard-pressed to find fault with.
I don't know. He is certainly on of the great writers, not least for his uniqueness and his willingness to commit completely to an expression of his world-view, reader-be-damned. I certainly intend to read all his books. But I also don't think he is for everyone, nor is he someone I would be quick to recommend. However, one thing I would say is that it is important to allow him a certain amount of time, say 100 pages or so, to get under your skin before you dismiss him. I find that it always takes me a while to submit and cease my resistance, and I am glad when I do.
Regardless, we you to be interested in reading him, I would not suggest starting here. Judging by the reviews it seems Wolf Solent is a good starting place.
October 2, 2020
Weymouth Sands is the sea.
That’s the best way I can encapsulate the essence of this book. Like waves, storylines surge, gain momentum and peter out without consequence as others suddenly come crashing into the scene with unexpected force, picking up the remains of the former and whirling them into new directions. All this movement is everything and, as such, leads nowhere. The myriad stories contained in this grandiose soap opera, like water, swirl and recirculate, take on new form, at times frightening and at times serene.
Cowper Powys might beg to differ, but I felt that reading this book is like taking a peek into the mind of Spinoza’s God, where everything that happens anywhere in existence is part of an endlessly complex and ultimately inconsequential chain of cause and effect, wherein the agency of a human mind is as critical a determinant of the course of history as the direction of the wind.
JCP’s ecstatic and masturbatory writing is, as usual, seething with colourful details so numerous they can only be admired as a whole, like a cloud of plankton. Only in this book it did get a tad too much at times; insofar as there is one, the plot takes place over the course of a week and is stretched so thin as to basically be irrelevant. The way to get through it is to let the tug and pull of the psyches of its many characters carry you either for as long as you can take it or until they spit you, with the turn of the last page, back onto dry land.
So yeah, unlike A Glastonbury Romance , which was a lot more epic in scope and mystical in content, this is the Cowper Powys equivalent of a comedy of manners, a small intimate book about people. The mind of each character is a turbulent sea of its own, and what strangely wonderful characters they are: Gypsy May, the sardonic clown Jerry Cobbold, the jobber Adam Skald, the woeful and wistful Perdita Wane (what a great name!), the chilly and withdrawn agent of evil Dr Brush… and possibly the most disturbing author insert of all time, Sylvanus Cobbold.
This book delves a lot into what I can only describe as... family-friendly paedophilia? Cowper Powys was a self-declared paedophile who derived sexual pleasure from sitting young girls on his lap, a fact that tormented his consciousness but that he was also proud to be able to control through masturbation (I’m paraphrasing, don’t shoot the messenger). So not a child molester, so to speak (that we know of, anyway). Sylvanus Cobbold has this same fetish, and throughout the book there is this highly dubious conflict between him and the authorities, who don’t like his befriending the town’s young girls who he then sleeps with - and the author goes to greath lengths to emphasise that literally all they do is just sleep. It’s a strange sort of self-exploration/self-justification that depending on your mood can either be disturbingly wonderful or wonderfully disturbing.
An epilogue of sorts
When we finally reach the chapter told from Cobbold’s POV and we discover he has befriended the shimmering reflection of a ray of sunlight projected onto a wall from a bucketful of water, a dancing sprite he calls Trivia, I was at once sure of two things: that that was one of the most beautiful things I had ever read and that I was seriously ready for a break from Cowper Powys. Seriously, I have read two and a half of this guy’s books in a row. This is some heavy shit. I need to step out of his brain for a minute lest I forget myself and start conversing with the specks of humidity growing on the corners of my office wall. He is the most brilliant author I have discovered in a long time, but I need to breathe. Will return to him in due time.
That’s the best way I can encapsulate the essence of this book. Like waves, storylines surge, gain momentum and peter out without consequence as others suddenly come crashing into the scene with unexpected force, picking up the remains of the former and whirling them into new directions. All this movement is everything and, as such, leads nowhere. The myriad stories contained in this grandiose soap opera, like water, swirl and recirculate, take on new form, at times frightening and at times serene.
Cowper Powys might beg to differ, but I felt that reading this book is like taking a peek into the mind of Spinoza’s God, where everything that happens anywhere in existence is part of an endlessly complex and ultimately inconsequential chain of cause and effect, wherein the agency of a human mind is as critical a determinant of the course of history as the direction of the wind.
JCP’s ecstatic and masturbatory writing is, as usual, seething with colourful details so numerous they can only be admired as a whole, like a cloud of plankton. Only in this book it did get a tad too much at times; insofar as there is one, the plot takes place over the course of a week and is stretched so thin as to basically be irrelevant. The way to get through it is to let the tug and pull of the psyches of its many characters carry you either for as long as you can take it or until they spit you, with the turn of the last page, back onto dry land.
So yeah, unlike A Glastonbury Romance , which was a lot more epic in scope and mystical in content, this is the Cowper Powys equivalent of a comedy of manners, a small intimate book about people. The mind of each character is a turbulent sea of its own, and what strangely wonderful characters they are: Gypsy May, the sardonic clown Jerry Cobbold, the jobber Adam Skald, the woeful and wistful Perdita Wane (what a great name!), the chilly and withdrawn agent of evil Dr Brush… and possibly the most disturbing author insert of all time, Sylvanus Cobbold.
This book delves a lot into what I can only describe as... family-friendly paedophilia? Cowper Powys was a self-declared paedophile who derived sexual pleasure from sitting young girls on his lap, a fact that tormented his consciousness but that he was also proud to be able to control through masturbation (I’m paraphrasing, don’t shoot the messenger). So not a child molester, so to speak (that we know of, anyway). Sylvanus Cobbold has this same fetish, and throughout the book there is this highly dubious conflict between him and the authorities, who don’t like his befriending the town’s young girls who he then sleeps with - and the author goes to greath lengths to emphasise that literally all they do is just sleep. It’s a strange sort of self-exploration/self-justification that depending on your mood can either be disturbingly wonderful or wonderfully disturbing.
An epilogue of sorts
When we finally reach the chapter told from Cobbold’s POV and we discover he has befriended the shimmering reflection of a ray of sunlight projected onto a wall from a bucketful of water, a dancing sprite he calls Trivia, I was at once sure of two things: that that was one of the most beautiful things I had ever read and that I was seriously ready for a break from Cowper Powys. Seriously, I have read two and a half of this guy’s books in a row. This is some heavy shit. I need to step out of his brain for a minute lest I forget myself and start conversing with the specks of humidity growing on the corners of my office wall. He is the most brilliant author I have discovered in a long time, but I need to breathe. Will return to him in due time.
April 9, 2021
After the monstrous and monumental "A Glastonbury Romance" (AGR), "Weymouth Sands" (WS) is a bit of a letdown. While it shares many of the qualities of AGR, notably a wide variety of characters of considerable interest, a couple things are notably missing. For one, the sort of crazy intensity of many of the characters in AGR has been removed, instead we have relatively "normal" people. Also with the exception of one magnificent sunrise, WS doesn't have the Hardy-inspired nature descriptions of AGR (or Wolf Solent or Powys' earlier fiction). So it's largely a character study, without any main protagonist, with some cultural points to make about vivisection in particular, but relative to AGR, it's a bit of a slog.
One gets the sense that JCP is just "writing a novel" to get it done, he doesn't have his usual investment of his "philosophy" that permeates AGR and Wolf Solent. One could argue that the removal of the "First Cause" nonsense in AGR is a definite benefit, and WS represents a more mature, less tormented work, and they would be right, but on the other hand, the missing "madness" is kind of a bummer (as they say).
There are occasional lapses of writing - not found in AGR - where JCP writes a sentence or two which could have used some editing, lazy sentences.
Perhaps the best thing in the book is the rich psychological insight into his characters, and the strong sense of "reality" that permeates the work.
I've also been reading JCP's diaries and letters from around this time, and also about his family. I was expecting that these readings might add to my understanding of WS, but the characters in WS seem more like compilations of people from his real life than directly drawn. I got a sense from the diaries that this work may have been a little rushed - he'd entered into a contract to provide 3 or 4 of these novels.
So in the end, while worth reading and a fine novel, a weaker effort from JCP than his earlier novels.
November 21, 2018
“What I like about Germans is that they take ideas seriously, and regard the conflict of ideas as the most deeply stirring drama upon this planet, as in my opinion it most certainly is.” - John Cowper Powys, Autobiography.
I read Wolf Solent earlier this year and didn’t know what to make of it. Then I read his autobiography, which might be the best thing I’ve read in 2018. Then I read this.
Looking back, I think the above quote is an important key to appreciating his books. The beginning of Wolf Solent seemed to promise a conventional return-of-the-native style narrative, which expectation I was never able to shake off even as it became apparent across 600+ pages that Powys was not interested in delivering on it.
Weymouth Sands has less pretence to conventionality. Its narrative moves between characters, registering the impressions made on them by the environment - by the sands, by the monuments, the sea, the sun etc. There are plot points, but the 'drama' which arises from them is internal - the external or objective ramifications of events are unpursued (and if they were, would be found to be minor even compared to a Jane Austen novel). The most vivid and heart-pounding passages are long internal monologues, or exact delineations of physical places.
Here’s a passage in which Sylvanus Cobbold sticks in his hand into the soil before the dawn:
“And as he squeezed the wet earth of the molehill, the whole vast expectancy of that rolling Down-land, waiting like an enormous beast for the Dawn’s coming, seemed to reach his consciousness and flow through his veins with a touch of something that was live-cold, like the shivering nipples of a She-Leviathan. And as Sylvanus buried his forehead in that rain-drenched mole-hill he felt the night receding out of the body of the earth like the water of an ebbing sea-wave receding out of the crannies of a pebble-bank, and as he felt the night receding, he felt the dawn –the wet fungus-breath of the invisible horses of the dawn – stealing into the very substance of this dark chalkridge.”
Immediately prior to this, Sylvanus has just escaped from a sanatorium by help of a sectioned ornithologist who believes he is a phoenix.
It also says something of the difficulty of assessing Powys by regular critical standards, that my favourite part of this book is an obvious piece of propaganda; two brothers-in-law sit in the dark by an empty grate, while Powys moves between their thoughts. One is a rich miser, the other the manager of the aforementioned sanatorium – Hell’s Museum – where a lot of sadistic vivisection of dogs apparently goes on too. (Powys seems to have hated vivisection above everything else in the world: he talks about it at length in his autobiography, but it is obvious from this book as well. One might speculate that it was a convenient symbol for him – suggesting inherent cruelty in the scientific pursuit of knowledge, which Powys loathed.) Powys places his worst fears about scientists into the sanatorium-manager’s head, as the man fantasises over vivisecting his brother-in-law. It is absurdly obvious that we are reading an inserted diatribe, a straw-man – yet it is also fascinating and strangely powerful, particularly as we then shift into the mind of the would-be victim, at that point articulating his own philosophy of miserliness.
Clearly, Powys had an eccentric world-view, one which is articulated over and over again in his books. I'm not sympathetic to everything he believed, but it is fascinating to read nonetheless. It just begs the question - if more people were to write and publish books this personal, this unfiltered and unheeding of established convention, how strange and different might literature as a whole be?
I read Wolf Solent earlier this year and didn’t know what to make of it. Then I read his autobiography, which might be the best thing I’ve read in 2018. Then I read this.
Looking back, I think the above quote is an important key to appreciating his books. The beginning of Wolf Solent seemed to promise a conventional return-of-the-native style narrative, which expectation I was never able to shake off even as it became apparent across 600+ pages that Powys was not interested in delivering on it.
Weymouth Sands has less pretence to conventionality. Its narrative moves between characters, registering the impressions made on them by the environment - by the sands, by the monuments, the sea, the sun etc. There are plot points, but the 'drama' which arises from them is internal - the external or objective ramifications of events are unpursued (and if they were, would be found to be minor even compared to a Jane Austen novel). The most vivid and heart-pounding passages are long internal monologues, or exact delineations of physical places.
Here’s a passage in which Sylvanus Cobbold sticks in his hand into the soil before the dawn:
“And as he squeezed the wet earth of the molehill, the whole vast expectancy of that rolling Down-land, waiting like an enormous beast for the Dawn’s coming, seemed to reach his consciousness and flow through his veins with a touch of something that was live-cold, like the shivering nipples of a She-Leviathan. And as Sylvanus buried his forehead in that rain-drenched mole-hill he felt the night receding out of the body of the earth like the water of an ebbing sea-wave receding out of the crannies of a pebble-bank, and as he felt the night receding, he felt the dawn –the wet fungus-breath of the invisible horses of the dawn – stealing into the very substance of this dark chalkridge.”
Immediately prior to this, Sylvanus has just escaped from a sanatorium by help of a sectioned ornithologist who believes he is a phoenix.
It also says something of the difficulty of assessing Powys by regular critical standards, that my favourite part of this book is an obvious piece of propaganda; two brothers-in-law sit in the dark by an empty grate, while Powys moves between their thoughts. One is a rich miser, the other the manager of the aforementioned sanatorium – Hell’s Museum – where a lot of sadistic vivisection of dogs apparently goes on too. (Powys seems to have hated vivisection above everything else in the world: he talks about it at length in his autobiography, but it is obvious from this book as well. One might speculate that it was a convenient symbol for him – suggesting inherent cruelty in the scientific pursuit of knowledge, which Powys loathed.) Powys places his worst fears about scientists into the sanatorium-manager’s head, as the man fantasises over vivisecting his brother-in-law. It is absurdly obvious that we are reading an inserted diatribe, a straw-man – yet it is also fascinating and strangely powerful, particularly as we then shift into the mind of the would-be victim, at that point articulating his own philosophy of miserliness.
Clearly, Powys had an eccentric world-view, one which is articulated over and over again in his books. I'm not sympathetic to everything he believed, but it is fascinating to read nonetheless. It just begs the question - if more people were to write and publish books this personal, this unfiltered and unheeding of established convention, how strange and different might literature as a whole be?
January 25, 2015
The sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave. Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach, was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth’s ancient antagonist. – page 1 (When I collected these words to include in this reflection, I started to read the book all over again!)
The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.—Margaret Drabble, The Guardian, The English Degenerate, August 11, 2006
John Cowper Powys is adored by a loyal type of reader who once they’ve found him will be forever grateful, yet he is often scorned by other readers with the trite accusation “Nothing happens!” Indeed, reading Powys is like taking a long rambling walk through a landscape—if you enjoy lingering over mosses and funguses, meadows and forests, absorbing birdsong, the wind through the trees, the rattle of pebbles on the beach, and becoming immersed in mysticism, psychology, and the legends from long ago, you will love Weymouth Sands.
It is enchanting—haunting—provocative; the complexities of the human puzzle, made up of eccentric misfits and lonely monsters. There is a beautiful sense of place, the wonders of nature, the transcendence of the ordinary; the passionate love of home, the reassuring familiarity with landmarks; obsessive-compulsive behaviors, emotionally overwrought to the point of being tenderly maudlin. The epic longing for a cup of tea at most times equals the yearning for the attentions of a woman, or the overwhelming desire to cave in the head of the miserly richest man in town with a pebble stone—all this in the day-to-day lives of the population of Weymouth. There is more going on in the lives being lived—much of the antics of the residents could be considered madness—and apparently, it’s chronic enough that a place dubbed “Hell’s Museum” exists. It is a place where unsettling rumors about a laboratory in which vivisection is secretly performed on dogs is a worrisome outrage that lingers in the back of most of their minds. There are moments of bawdy comedy, perverted and hilarious, that mesh with the intimate dramas disseminated throughout this human document. No one’s perfect, on the surface they put on a proper façade in order to exist in society (such as Perdita Wane, Magnus Muir, and Mr. Gaul and the assorted elder ladies of the town), while some are clearly of the “fuck it, I am what I am” sort (such as Jobber Skald, the brothers Jerry and Sylvanus Cobbold, and Gipsy May) who have embraced their nature and go about with a "come what may" attitude.
Only he could write such a formidable tale with such intense characters—he is a writer’s writer. The words flow from his pen, coming into existence—Powys followed his bliss. Can you imagine, the constant vision, the outpouring of thoughts, the compassion, the persistence, the intensity of his mind (the exhaustion) to create everything he wrote? (I can.) Turning on the creative spigots and leaving them on is a deluge with an understanding that human nature is complicated and not everything is going to be resolved from beginning to end—tho’ it is certain that Weymouth Sands is a story in which a pebble stone starts out riding in the Jobber’s pocket as a bludgeon with intent, to becoming a paper weight with a final resting place—everything else that happens in between is incidental.
A few moments from the dog-eared pages.
How well he knew this spot! It was one of those geographical points on the surface of the planet that would surely rush into his mind when he came to die, as a concentrated essence of all that life meant! –Page 10 (Magnus Muir)
…as if by the mere hugging of her knees between her arms she could return to that unconscious state in which twenty-six years ago she lay, an embryo-mite, before she was born into a world like this; a world in which for a woman not to be beautiful, not to be seductive and appealing, means after all a series of futile desperations, of shifts and make-shifts, of pitiful and sorrowful turnings to the wall. (Perdita Wane) Page 49
Sue Gadget suddenly felt as if all the waves of the sea did not contain water enough to wash out the pity and trouble and pain and weariness of being alive in this world.—page 578
For further indulgence, you may enjoy this lovely website “tour” of Powy’s Weymouth—I didn’t come upon it until after I finished reading the book, upon finding it this morning, it confirmed my vision:
http://www.powys-lannion.net/Powys/Weymouth/weymouth.HTM
The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.—Margaret Drabble, The Guardian, The English Degenerate, August 11, 2006
John Cowper Powys is adored by a loyal type of reader who once they’ve found him will be forever grateful, yet he is often scorned by other readers with the trite accusation “Nothing happens!” Indeed, reading Powys is like taking a long rambling walk through a landscape—if you enjoy lingering over mosses and funguses, meadows and forests, absorbing birdsong, the wind through the trees, the rattle of pebbles on the beach, and becoming immersed in mysticism, psychology, and the legends from long ago, you will love Weymouth Sands.
It is enchanting—haunting—provocative; the complexities of the human puzzle, made up of eccentric misfits and lonely monsters. There is a beautiful sense of place, the wonders of nature, the transcendence of the ordinary; the passionate love of home, the reassuring familiarity with landmarks; obsessive-compulsive behaviors, emotionally overwrought to the point of being tenderly maudlin. The epic longing for a cup of tea at most times equals the yearning for the attentions of a woman, or the overwhelming desire to cave in the head of the miserly richest man in town with a pebble stone—all this in the day-to-day lives of the population of Weymouth. There is more going on in the lives being lived—much of the antics of the residents could be considered madness—and apparently, it’s chronic enough that a place dubbed “Hell’s Museum” exists. It is a place where unsettling rumors about a laboratory in which vivisection is secretly performed on dogs is a worrisome outrage that lingers in the back of most of their minds. There are moments of bawdy comedy, perverted and hilarious, that mesh with the intimate dramas disseminated throughout this human document. No one’s perfect, on the surface they put on a proper façade in order to exist in society (such as Perdita Wane, Magnus Muir, and Mr. Gaul and the assorted elder ladies of the town), while some are clearly of the “fuck it, I am what I am” sort (such as Jobber Skald, the brothers Jerry and Sylvanus Cobbold, and Gipsy May) who have embraced their nature and go about with a "come what may" attitude.
Only he could write such a formidable tale with such intense characters—he is a writer’s writer. The words flow from his pen, coming into existence—Powys followed his bliss. Can you imagine, the constant vision, the outpouring of thoughts, the compassion, the persistence, the intensity of his mind (the exhaustion) to create everything he wrote? (I can.) Turning on the creative spigots and leaving them on is a deluge with an understanding that human nature is complicated and not everything is going to be resolved from beginning to end—tho’ it is certain that Weymouth Sands is a story in which a pebble stone starts out riding in the Jobber’s pocket as a bludgeon with intent, to becoming a paper weight with a final resting place—everything else that happens in between is incidental.
A few moments from the dog-eared pages.
How well he knew this spot! It was one of those geographical points on the surface of the planet that would surely rush into his mind when he came to die, as a concentrated essence of all that life meant! –Page 10 (Magnus Muir)
…as if by the mere hugging of her knees between her arms she could return to that unconscious state in which twenty-six years ago she lay, an embryo-mite, before she was born into a world like this; a world in which for a woman not to be beautiful, not to be seductive and appealing, means after all a series of futile desperations, of shifts and make-shifts, of pitiful and sorrowful turnings to the wall. (Perdita Wane) Page 49
Sue Gadget suddenly felt as if all the waves of the sea did not contain water enough to wash out the pity and trouble and pain and weariness of being alive in this world.—page 578
For further indulgence, you may enjoy this lovely website “tour” of Powy’s Weymouth—I didn’t come upon it until after I finished reading the book, upon finding it this morning, it confirmed my vision:
http://www.powys-lannion.net/Powys/Weymouth/weymouth.HTM
June 15, 2009
The sheer actual size of this book meant that it sank to the bottom of my pile of books yet to be read. An article in New Welsh review stating how brilliant Powys is reminded me to actually read this book.
It's a magnificent, wide ranging book, atmospheric and beautiful, full of eccentric characters, meditations on the human condition and a reverence for nature and the landscape.
The best parts of the book are his shimmering descriptions of Weymouth Sands and his perceptive delvings into human motivations and philosophies.
Don't let the often long winded 1930s style and the odd Weymouth dialect of most of the dialogue put you off reading this wonderful book.
Not for nothing has this writer been compared to Tolstoy.
It's a magnificent, wide ranging book, atmospheric and beautiful, full of eccentric characters, meditations on the human condition and a reverence for nature and the landscape.
The best parts of the book are his shimmering descriptions of Weymouth Sands and his perceptive delvings into human motivations and philosophies.
Don't let the often long winded 1930s style and the odd Weymouth dialect of most of the dialogue put you off reading this wonderful book.
Not for nothing has this writer been compared to Tolstoy.
Read
December 1, 2023deep, pagan, tidal, gorgeous
March 21, 2024
Four stars in comparison to A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE, but that's a near-impossible act to follow.
January 3, 2023
In het jaar 2022 ontdekte ik de vergeten Britse schrijver John Cowper Powys. Jubelend las ik het fraaie "Wolf Solent" (1929), het ronduit grandioze "A Glastonbury Romance" (1932) en Powys' wel heel merkwaardige en eigenzinnige "Autobiography" (1934). En op oudejaarsdag las ik "Weymouth Sands" (1934) uit. Weer een heerlijk excentriek boek van deze geweldige excentrieke schrijver: zeker niet zo meesterlijk als "A Glastonbury Romance"- mijn favoriete boek van 2022!- , maar wel weer erg onderhoudend, intrigerend en inspirerend.
"Weymouth Sands" is om te beginnen heel pluriform en meerstemmig, omdat de naamloze verteller ons meeneemt in de grillige innerlijke roerselen van ruim 20 totaal uiteenlopende personages. Bovendien zijn al die personages opvallend excentriek en ongewoon, en juist daardoor zo aanlokkelijk: hun blik op de wereld is heel anders dan de onze, hun ook voor henzelf onbegrijpelijke psychische onderstromen leiden tot heel andere ervaringen dan bij brave burgermannen zoals u en ik. Zo is er Jobber Skald, een buitenmaatschappelijke sjacheraar die een opmerkelijk intense liefde koestert voor de verweesde Perdita Wane, maar die tegelijk wordt gekweld door zijn obsessieve voornemens om een door hem gehate rijkaard om te brengen en met hem ten onder te gaan. Ook is er de beroemde clown Jerry Cobbold, die zijn afgrondige zelfhaat en zijn al even afgrondige haat tegen heel de mensheid botviert in werkelijk adembenemend groteske harlekinades en bijna schrijnend tragi- komische clownerieën.
Zijn vrouw, de beeldschone Lucinda Cobbold, is dan weer een vat vol exploderende, destructieve en zelfdestructieve waanzin. Zijn broer Sylvanus Cobbold is een mysticus, die zich op buiten- rationele wijze overgeeft aan koortsdromen over Het Absolute en die poogt in gesprek te komen met de kosmos door allerlei wel heel onconventionele erotische verhoudingen met vaak behoorlijk geaberreerde en soms heel jonge vrouwen. Bijvoorbeeld een lijkbleek meisje wier leefwereld vooral bestaat uit de carnavaleske marionetten en verhalen van Punch and Judy- voorstellingen. Ook is er nog een filosoof die het universum - en vooral de ongrijpbare essenties van dit universum- in een wel heel merkwaardig systeem denkt te kunnen vatten, een leraar Latijn die op even naïeve als ontroerende wijze verliefd is op een jong meisje uit armoedige kringen, een krankzinnige geleerde die via vivisectie en via observatie van de in zijn kliniek opgenomen Sylvanus Cobbold door wil dringen tot de diepst verborgen duistere geheimen van onze wereld en onze geest, een zigeunerin die de wereld opvat als duivelse kluwen vol van redeloos toeval die alleen via tarotkaarten en andere magie nog een beetje te begrijpen valt. Daarnaast zijn er nog diverse andere personages, die allemaal op nog weer geheel andere wijze volkomen excentriek en buiten- conventioneel zijn. En alle personages zijn bovendien heel intrigerend. Want hun excentrieke breinen, en hun al even excentrieke en verrassende perspectieven op mens en wereld, komen bij Powys echt geweldig tot leven.
Door al deze excentrieke pluriformiteit was "Weymouth Sands" een regelrecht leesfeest, althans voor mij: alle verhaallijnen zijn grillig en verrassend, en er is geen enkel centraal thema dat al deze verhaallijnen overkoepelt. En precies dat ontbreken van elk centrum is in deze roman ook een existentiële kwestie. Veel personages zoeken namelijk vergeefs naar een Centrum dat hun bestaan verankert: een vervullende liefde bijvoorbeeld, of een glimp van Het Absolute, of een ultieme verklaring waarom de dingen zijn zoals ze zijn. En dat doen ze vol intense passie. Maar al die zoektochten zijn volstrekt verschillend, en geen een ervan levert definitieve conclusies op. Behalve dan de conclusie dat er geen conclusies zijn, en dat de zo intens gezochte Hoogste Oorzaak volkomen ontbreekt: "And it seemed to him that the Absolute, like that Nothingness which must have confronted Mr. Looney before he drowned himself, replied that It was not the First Cause, or the Last Cause, or any other Cause! It simply was Everything, and there was no room in Everything for the Idea of Cause. There was only All there was; and it was the inherent nature, throughout eternity, for All there was to change". Ook zijn er diverse prachtig beschreven sublieme natuurervaringen, waarin "iets" bovenzinnlijks en bovenaards zich lijkt te onthullen, maar dan wel op volkomen raadselachtige wijze. Bijvoorbeeld: "But he stopped today on the crest of the pebbles and gave a deep groan of wonder; for the dawn- mists from the marshes had broken into troops and squadrons of ghostly figures, who, as they swept away over the sea, dissolved into thinner and thinner vapour, until they melted into nothing at all; and it struck Larry's mind as if he were contemplating a spiritual suicide, as if some phantom Jesus, followed by all his disciples, had decided to perish in the waves". Geen waarneming dus van een Hoogste Licht, of van een Hoogste Waarheid die het bestaan fundamenteel verheldert, maar de verbijsterende waarneming van in het niets verdwijnende spookbeelden van mist. En die spookbeelden suggereren dan ook nog eens een "spiritual suicide" als van een "phantom Jesus" die verdwijnt in de zee...
Alle personages ervaren in "Weymouth Sands" kortom op geheel eigen wijze dat de wereld geen enkel centrum heeft, geen enkele betekeniskern, en dus een Ultiem Mysterie is. En precies die - vaak opmerkelijk extatische- ervaring wordt nog extra onderstreept door de centrumloosheid van het boek als geheel: door de volstrekt ongeremde pluriformiteit ervan, waarin je geen enkele centrale verhaallijn of centraal personage kunt ontdekken. Als lezer word je dus ondergedompeld in een volkomen chaotisch en mysterieus multiversum, net als de personages. En dat vond ik overweldigend. Te meer omdat de personages, losgezongen als zij zijn van onze burgermannenconventies, wel heel intense ervaringen en verlangens hebben, en geregeld in extase worden gebracht door een toevallige associatie of een natuur-tafereel dat mij nauwelijks zou opvallen. En u evenmin.
Zie bijvoorbeeld hoe Perdita Wane helemaal in verrukking raakt als zij, samen met de mysterieus- vreemde jongen Larry Zed, een onbeweeglijke reiger ziet: "Breath after breath of incredible pleasure dit Perdita draw. She had never seen such a thing in her days! It was not merely the heron that created the spell that held her. It was the melancholy waste of those brackish marshes behind it. It was the pallid cheeck and blood- red hair of the lad, across whose profile she gazed at the huge bird, and whose fingers she was pressing against her side. It would have puzzled her to put into words the emotions she felt at that moment; but when the heron, catching the sound, one might almost have thought, of the beating of those two young hearts, spead its enormous wings and flipped way over the ditches, there surged within her, with a dark delicious trembling, a particular feeling she sometimes had when she thought of death- its release, its finality, its great escape".
Dat is naar mijn smaak toch van een werkelijk buitengewoon meeslepende intensiteit. Net als haar latere liefdeservaring met Jobber Skald: "[A]nd as they pressed their bodies and their faces together they were beyond any definite kisses, just as they were beyond astonishment, surprise, thankfulness, happiness even. He could taste the salt of her tears, pouring, pouring, from what seemed like the whole surface of her face, and she could feel herself rising and falling, up and down, on the crests and throughs of his immense, slow, shaking sobs. It was as if they were not just human lovers, not just sweethearts finding each other again. It was as if they were animals, old, weak, long- hunted animals, whose love was literally the love of bone for bone, skeleton for skeleton, nor any mere spiritual affinity, nor any mere seksual passion. Skeletons, literally, they both were! His face was positively ghastly in its disfigurement, in its tattered raggedness, and hers, though, her features being less pronounced, it showed less emphatically, was the face of the dead come to life". Een passie dus die voorbij de conventionele grenzen van passie voert, voorbij de geijkte termen als "geluk", "seksuele vervoering" , "affiniteit" en zo meer. En bovendien een passie die voorbij de grenzen van het gezond verstand beweegt, die de grenzen van het zelfbehoud opzoekt, die door zijn tomeloze intensiteit bijna de grenzen overschrijdt tussen leven en dood en tussen menselijkheid en dierlijkheid. Prachtig!
Ook andere personages hebben dit soort extatische ervaringen. Zelfs de zo naïef lijkende docent Latijn en Grieks heeft bijvoorbeeld buitengewone visioenen, waarin hij zijn geliefde als een geïdealiseerde en subliem- ongrijpbare vorm ziet opstijgen in de ongrijpbare pracht van het lichtspel boven land en zee. "Weymouth Sands" is kortom 578 bladzijden lang gevuld met extatische, vaak zelfs mystieke grenservaringen van diverse uiterst markante en excentrieke personages. De intensiteit van die buiten-rationele ervaringen vond ik meeslepend. En even meeslepend vond ik hoe alle personages ons onderdompelen in de afgrondige mysteriën van onze chaotische wereld en onze minstens zo mysterieuze geest. Ook deze roman van Cowper Powys vond ik dus weer heerlijk.
"Weymouth Sands" is om te beginnen heel pluriform en meerstemmig, omdat de naamloze verteller ons meeneemt in de grillige innerlijke roerselen van ruim 20 totaal uiteenlopende personages. Bovendien zijn al die personages opvallend excentriek en ongewoon, en juist daardoor zo aanlokkelijk: hun blik op de wereld is heel anders dan de onze, hun ook voor henzelf onbegrijpelijke psychische onderstromen leiden tot heel andere ervaringen dan bij brave burgermannen zoals u en ik. Zo is er Jobber Skald, een buitenmaatschappelijke sjacheraar die een opmerkelijk intense liefde koestert voor de verweesde Perdita Wane, maar die tegelijk wordt gekweld door zijn obsessieve voornemens om een door hem gehate rijkaard om te brengen en met hem ten onder te gaan. Ook is er de beroemde clown Jerry Cobbold, die zijn afgrondige zelfhaat en zijn al even afgrondige haat tegen heel de mensheid botviert in werkelijk adembenemend groteske harlekinades en bijna schrijnend tragi- komische clownerieën.
Zijn vrouw, de beeldschone Lucinda Cobbold, is dan weer een vat vol exploderende, destructieve en zelfdestructieve waanzin. Zijn broer Sylvanus Cobbold is een mysticus, die zich op buiten- rationele wijze overgeeft aan koortsdromen over Het Absolute en die poogt in gesprek te komen met de kosmos door allerlei wel heel onconventionele erotische verhoudingen met vaak behoorlijk geaberreerde en soms heel jonge vrouwen. Bijvoorbeeld een lijkbleek meisje wier leefwereld vooral bestaat uit de carnavaleske marionetten en verhalen van Punch and Judy- voorstellingen. Ook is er nog een filosoof die het universum - en vooral de ongrijpbare essenties van dit universum- in een wel heel merkwaardig systeem denkt te kunnen vatten, een leraar Latijn die op even naïeve als ontroerende wijze verliefd is op een jong meisje uit armoedige kringen, een krankzinnige geleerde die via vivisectie en via observatie van de in zijn kliniek opgenomen Sylvanus Cobbold door wil dringen tot de diepst verborgen duistere geheimen van onze wereld en onze geest, een zigeunerin die de wereld opvat als duivelse kluwen vol van redeloos toeval die alleen via tarotkaarten en andere magie nog een beetje te begrijpen valt. Daarnaast zijn er nog diverse andere personages, die allemaal op nog weer geheel andere wijze volkomen excentriek en buiten- conventioneel zijn. En alle personages zijn bovendien heel intrigerend. Want hun excentrieke breinen, en hun al even excentrieke en verrassende perspectieven op mens en wereld, komen bij Powys echt geweldig tot leven.
Door al deze excentrieke pluriformiteit was "Weymouth Sands" een regelrecht leesfeest, althans voor mij: alle verhaallijnen zijn grillig en verrassend, en er is geen enkel centraal thema dat al deze verhaallijnen overkoepelt. En precies dat ontbreken van elk centrum is in deze roman ook een existentiële kwestie. Veel personages zoeken namelijk vergeefs naar een Centrum dat hun bestaan verankert: een vervullende liefde bijvoorbeeld, of een glimp van Het Absolute, of een ultieme verklaring waarom de dingen zijn zoals ze zijn. En dat doen ze vol intense passie. Maar al die zoektochten zijn volstrekt verschillend, en geen een ervan levert definitieve conclusies op. Behalve dan de conclusie dat er geen conclusies zijn, en dat de zo intens gezochte Hoogste Oorzaak volkomen ontbreekt: "And it seemed to him that the Absolute, like that Nothingness which must have confronted Mr. Looney before he drowned himself, replied that It was not the First Cause, or the Last Cause, or any other Cause! It simply was Everything, and there was no room in Everything for the Idea of Cause. There was only All there was; and it was the inherent nature, throughout eternity, for All there was to change". Ook zijn er diverse prachtig beschreven sublieme natuurervaringen, waarin "iets" bovenzinnlijks en bovenaards zich lijkt te onthullen, maar dan wel op volkomen raadselachtige wijze. Bijvoorbeeld: "But he stopped today on the crest of the pebbles and gave a deep groan of wonder; for the dawn- mists from the marshes had broken into troops and squadrons of ghostly figures, who, as they swept away over the sea, dissolved into thinner and thinner vapour, until they melted into nothing at all; and it struck Larry's mind as if he were contemplating a spiritual suicide, as if some phantom Jesus, followed by all his disciples, had decided to perish in the waves". Geen waarneming dus van een Hoogste Licht, of van een Hoogste Waarheid die het bestaan fundamenteel verheldert, maar de verbijsterende waarneming van in het niets verdwijnende spookbeelden van mist. En die spookbeelden suggereren dan ook nog eens een "spiritual suicide" als van een "phantom Jesus" die verdwijnt in de zee...
Alle personages ervaren in "Weymouth Sands" kortom op geheel eigen wijze dat de wereld geen enkel centrum heeft, geen enkele betekeniskern, en dus een Ultiem Mysterie is. En precies die - vaak opmerkelijk extatische- ervaring wordt nog extra onderstreept door de centrumloosheid van het boek als geheel: door de volstrekt ongeremde pluriformiteit ervan, waarin je geen enkele centrale verhaallijn of centraal personage kunt ontdekken. Als lezer word je dus ondergedompeld in een volkomen chaotisch en mysterieus multiversum, net als de personages. En dat vond ik overweldigend. Te meer omdat de personages, losgezongen als zij zijn van onze burgermannenconventies, wel heel intense ervaringen en verlangens hebben, en geregeld in extase worden gebracht door een toevallige associatie of een natuur-tafereel dat mij nauwelijks zou opvallen. En u evenmin.
Zie bijvoorbeeld hoe Perdita Wane helemaal in verrukking raakt als zij, samen met de mysterieus- vreemde jongen Larry Zed, een onbeweeglijke reiger ziet: "Breath after breath of incredible pleasure dit Perdita draw. She had never seen such a thing in her days! It was not merely the heron that created the spell that held her. It was the melancholy waste of those brackish marshes behind it. It was the pallid cheeck and blood- red hair of the lad, across whose profile she gazed at the huge bird, and whose fingers she was pressing against her side. It would have puzzled her to put into words the emotions she felt at that moment; but when the heron, catching the sound, one might almost have thought, of the beating of those two young hearts, spead its enormous wings and flipped way over the ditches, there surged within her, with a dark delicious trembling, a particular feeling she sometimes had when she thought of death- its release, its finality, its great escape".
Dat is naar mijn smaak toch van een werkelijk buitengewoon meeslepende intensiteit. Net als haar latere liefdeservaring met Jobber Skald: "[A]nd as they pressed their bodies and their faces together they were beyond any definite kisses, just as they were beyond astonishment, surprise, thankfulness, happiness even. He could taste the salt of her tears, pouring, pouring, from what seemed like the whole surface of her face, and she could feel herself rising and falling, up and down, on the crests and throughs of his immense, slow, shaking sobs. It was as if they were not just human lovers, not just sweethearts finding each other again. It was as if they were animals, old, weak, long- hunted animals, whose love was literally the love of bone for bone, skeleton for skeleton, nor any mere spiritual affinity, nor any mere seksual passion. Skeletons, literally, they both were! His face was positively ghastly in its disfigurement, in its tattered raggedness, and hers, though, her features being less pronounced, it showed less emphatically, was the face of the dead come to life". Een passie dus die voorbij de conventionele grenzen van passie voert, voorbij de geijkte termen als "geluk", "seksuele vervoering" , "affiniteit" en zo meer. En bovendien een passie die voorbij de grenzen van het gezond verstand beweegt, die de grenzen van het zelfbehoud opzoekt, die door zijn tomeloze intensiteit bijna de grenzen overschrijdt tussen leven en dood en tussen menselijkheid en dierlijkheid. Prachtig!
Ook andere personages hebben dit soort extatische ervaringen. Zelfs de zo naïef lijkende docent Latijn en Grieks heeft bijvoorbeeld buitengewone visioenen, waarin hij zijn geliefde als een geïdealiseerde en subliem- ongrijpbare vorm ziet opstijgen in de ongrijpbare pracht van het lichtspel boven land en zee. "Weymouth Sands" is kortom 578 bladzijden lang gevuld met extatische, vaak zelfs mystieke grenservaringen van diverse uiterst markante en excentrieke personages. De intensiteit van die buiten-rationele ervaringen vond ik meeslepend. En even meeslepend vond ik hoe alle personages ons onderdompelen in de afgrondige mysteriën van onze chaotische wereld en onze minstens zo mysterieuze geest. Ook deze roman van Cowper Powys vond ik dus weer heerlijk.
July 9, 2010
Weymouth Sands, by John Cowper Powys is a big book in every sense. Set in 1934, it’s a properly interconnected, multi-POV rambling around the town of Weymouth, in Dorset, and discusses the big issues of life, love, death, sexuality, and doesn’t shy away from a spot of philosophy. I couldn’t even begin to summarise the plot in one blog post – kudos to the author for that – but one of the main thrusts is of a brutish man, Jobber Skald, and his intentions to kill the local quarry owner, whilst coming to terms with his affections for newcomer, Perdita Wane. Add to that mix a famous clown and his mad brother (though Powys’s non-judgemental ways of handling the madness were wonderful), a middle-age teacher and his affections for a questionably young lady (whose love is possibly directed elsewhere), a gypsy, a philosopher (Richard Gaul – perhaps a voice of Powy’s himself) and “Hell’s Museum”, a residence / mad-house in which experiments on people and dogs take place… you get the picture. All in all, it’s like Thomas Hardy on acid, and if you can get to grips with the intense exposition – which I loved – and the representation of the local dialect, then it’s worth picking up in order to discover this often-forgotten classic writer.
November 12, 2012
An arabesque of rare beauty may be found in the persona of this novel by the author of A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. Set in an English seaside town, saturated in the mists and salt breezes, it is a strange, perverse sort of story, depending on the interplay of characters. Most of these are abnormal or drawn out of line, but as such they take precedence over the rather obscure, indirect arabesque that masquerades as a story. A few of the characters are unforgettable: the elderly clown, married to a half crazy wife and in love with a girl in his own troupe; an evangelist who courts disaster by preaching on the Esplanade instead of the sands, and who captures the worship of a young girl, the daughter of a Punch and Judy man; a seaman, obsessed with hate for the town capitalist who has wronged him; several girls, thwarted in their emotional life, and seeking adventure, -- a strange group. I would recommend Wolf Solent as a better introduction to the charms of Powys, but this novel, with passages of rare beauty, is worth turning to if you have already tasted the fine wine of the prose of John Cowper Powys.
December 24, 2013
Somehow both thrilling and bathetic, I was happy to be in the grip of Weymouth Sands' ~600 pages for a few weeks. I nearly missed my train stop too many times to count. It's a beautiful book full of characters it's easy to invest yourself in. And so many allusions! Finishing this book was truly a bummer.
March 12, 2013
I am now officially in the sublime and mystical grip of Mr. Powys.
December 30, 2021
4.5. Bonkers, full of mad philosophising, microscopically operatic, overwrought; loved it.
October 19, 2018
John Cowper Powys is a great writer, an incomparable writer. Had I read Weymouth Sands before anything else of his, I expect it would have been enough for me to become enamored. And it's great to see how many loving, appreciative reviews the book has here; I do believe it deserves them.
Yet, coming to it after acquaintance with its successors (what follows Weymouth Sands in Powys's output is the seven-novel run Maiden Castle to The Brazen Head), this is rather thin and unsatisfying stuff.
Really! The landscapes are not yet as full as they will be; the prose not as luminous; the situations not as deftly drawn; the characters not as memorable; the emotions not as rich; the rhythm of the narrative not as irresistible; the structure not as daring; and the ending, gorgeous as it is, not as wonderful as the endings in novels to come.
So though it's the Wolf Solent / A Glastonbury Romance / Weymouth Sands / Maiden Castle quartet that gets all the hype, I believe many (though not all; it's a potent witches' brew Powys cooks in his later-years pot, with a flavor too funky for some) who have loved him because they've read some or all of these four books would be truly well served by reading on.
Yet, coming to it after acquaintance with its successors (what follows Weymouth Sands in Powys's output is the seven-novel run Maiden Castle to The Brazen Head), this is rather thin and unsatisfying stuff.
Really! The landscapes are not yet as full as they will be; the prose not as luminous; the situations not as deftly drawn; the characters not as memorable; the emotions not as rich; the rhythm of the narrative not as irresistible; the structure not as daring; and the ending, gorgeous as it is, not as wonderful as the endings in novels to come.
So though it's the Wolf Solent / A Glastonbury Romance / Weymouth Sands / Maiden Castle quartet that gets all the hype, I believe many (though not all; it's a potent witches' brew Powys cooks in his later-years pot, with a flavor too funky for some) who have loved him because they've read some or all of these four books would be truly well served by reading on.
February 15, 2019
Compared to Tolstoy, called a lion of British literature...I'm not surprised he was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize, nor that he didn't win it. This book had some utterly astonishingly beautiful passages -- and I was always aware I was in the hands of brilliance. But it was a bit too much for me -- too poetic, too metaphysical, too rambling. Also it's tough to relate to a time and place (small town England, 1930s) with sensibilities and mores that feel either unfamiliar or downright cryptic. Many characters had secret affairs -- was this typical of that time and place? I know there are statements being made here that I can't interpret.
August 6, 2023
I really enjoyed two of his other books and had high hopes for this but it was all over the place and also very disturbing in parts. I couldn’t wait to be done
November 5, 2013
Why Powys has had books written about him is evident in "Weymouth Sands." Vivid imagery, readable eloquence, a talent for depicting the metaphysical (yes, to the only person who has noticed [me], I have basically abbreviated my earlier review of Tom Robbin's "Jitterbug Perfume," but, understandably, it is fresh on my mind, what was written is true for this book as well, and I am a mental sloth). However, this book falls short where "Jitterbug Perfume" does not for two reasons.
First, Powys has the narrator recite a majority of the philosophies and observations of human nature present in the novel, whereas Robbins perfectly fits his principals into his story; obviously Robbins' method is a far more enjoyable read considering the reader is seeking out a novel and not a educational text.
(side ramble: which is exactly why I do not understand the popularity of most classics, like Dostoyevsky, for example, who does not tell a story so much as list his personal biases and observations; but, once again, a matter of preference, I suppose. Dostoyevsky is also unnecessarily wordy and know that I say this with a general preference for lengthy paperbacks).
Secondly, NOTHING SUBSTANTIAL HAPPENS. Of course, this is not to say that the characters do not undergo their own personal changes, only they are nothing above the average occurrences, changes we are all familiar with.
This said, Powys captures the every-day in an enjoyable manner and avoids the fault of unnecessary wordiness like most his predecessors with a similar writing style. I would like to read more of his work, only I hope the next work of his I do read has a notable climax.
First, Powys has the narrator recite a majority of the philosophies and observations of human nature present in the novel, whereas Robbins perfectly fits his principals into his story; obviously Robbins' method is a far more enjoyable read considering the reader is seeking out a novel and not a educational text.
(side ramble: which is exactly why I do not understand the popularity of most classics, like Dostoyevsky, for example, who does not tell a story so much as list his personal biases and observations; but, once again, a matter of preference, I suppose. Dostoyevsky is also unnecessarily wordy and know that I say this with a general preference for lengthy paperbacks).
Secondly, NOTHING SUBSTANTIAL HAPPENS. Of course, this is not to say that the characters do not undergo their own personal changes, only they are nothing above the average occurrences, changes we are all familiar with.
This said, Powys captures the every-day in an enjoyable manner and avoids the fault of unnecessary wordiness like most his predecessors with a similar writing style. I would like to read more of his work, only I hope the next work of his I do read has a notable climax.
November 5, 2022
This book surprised me. I didn't expect a story so completely absorbed in the emotions and thoughts of its characters. It spends the vast majority of its 579 pages inside the head of one or another of its many characters: the middle-aged Latin teacher, the deranged mystic, the young arrival from Guernsey, the passionate fisherman, and several others. Powys never seems to put a foot wrong in his exploration of their thinking and it doesn't ring a false note. But, like his idol Thomas Hardy, Powys does have the tendency to go off on a tangent and spend paragraphs, even pages, declaiming his mystical views. This is sometimes absorbing, sometimes dull, very occasionally cringe-worthy. But in the end, I read it with an absorption and at a pace I've rarely experienced. Not for all tastes, but a significant accomplishment.
Read
January 3, 2011I couldn't finish it. I found reading about the author's life quite fascinating and I feel like I've failed a lit class I should never have signed up for, but God, how I wanted to put this massive novel down, and so I did.
August 31, 2011
Good hearty stuff, with Powys's strengths to the fore: unsettling psychological undercurrents with a heavy dose of mysticism, vivid sense of place, and not much of a story despite 500+ pages.
February 28, 2014
Neither over- nor underwhelmed. I kind of regret not having read it in English. Strong recommendation for Proustians.
August 1, 2015
An evocative, far-reaching insight into the lives of people in Weymouth and its environs. Countless beautiful, memorable moments and characters.
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