Maiden Castle

Wessex #4

by John Cowper Powys

Following the death of his frigid ex-wife, Dud No-man, a historical novelist, allows a circus performer named Wizzie Ravelston to live in his house. By the author of A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, 20th Century, British Literature, Modern

608 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Powys 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.

Reviews

[Mariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovie had divined the fact, after one glance at that majestic, nebulous, sickly-looking face bending down to pick up that bit of paper, that here was someone who treated existence exactly as she did, that is to say, who regarded what you were pretending as the only real reality in your life.

The Faustian all life is a symbol. Dud No-Man is an infant without his stick, an old man within his selfish probing tentacles. Medusa groping Wizzie's 'lurin' figure, all things to do with his eyes. The first thing he sees when he meets the world baby is the life flashing before your eyes death bed and reborn counting mine toys. Most everyone I meet here has that look of the couple that stays together. They aren't in love but it's colder out there. If anyone checks to see if your life is still there, well, there it is. At least I have, I'm a couple, doing the right thing. He bought her, he bought her. His Bronze Age Captive. If they were a man and a girl today he could have selected her from a mail order bride website. Wizzie the pinched pale face from the circus. She lept onto her horse's back. The horse is with the pretty, untalented girl when he's happy, and fallen with his star. I wondered more than once how he felt when she jumps onto him. If his inner eye, not the solemn wise gaze of the penned, was running without the weight. Wizzie doesn't think about this. It's not a getaway car. It's applause and a ring of fire. It's not a gypsy wedding to his lodgings, either. I hear her as if she's taped over a cassette of at least I've got, fate, watch yourself. I see Dud's lidded eye to keep smoke and mirrors. If I had to concentrate as hard as he did to get aroused it wouldn't work for me. Wizzie would have to pull back and see herself in the action. I don't know about Powys when he gives Dud No-Man as this no man at all. Wizzie is his every woman. I don't take this at all. I wish he hadn't said any of that about them.

"Or I'd like to ask her, and I warrant we all would, if there exists in the world any really good picture of this weird struggle between sun and fire. Some would say the fire was defeated; but I don't think so. It's not as yellow as at night but I think it's redder in some odd way, and I think it has a more supernatural and impossible look, if you can follow me, as if it really had the personality of one of those old four elements they worshipped, before the Romans used-"

Were Thuella to know of this really good picture I would say what was she leaning towards the semimortuus corpse-god for? If Wizzie could hug herself to herself, the pleasure D. No-Man got out of building his bonfire in the slimy pond. So long as I can remember I've been reaching for this sided pleasure and then ruining it. I would want to ruin it. Powys claims in his Autobiography that he conquers this sadistic side of himself when he's fifty. I don't agree that it wasn't veined in A Glastonbury Romance either. They bleed under him. Maybe it's just me that loved it when Wizzie accidentally throws her daughter's paper doll into the fire. When old man Mr. Wye counts his pockets for the Plato volumes that are his escape I start to see why they are reaching for the emptiness between them. Because they don't know where the blood is. I will read all of Powys to get this. The edges where it meets when it is enough to keep you alive and when it is killing you that it isn't. My own life-delusions I would break into pieces on purpose. I wonder how the Black Man from Glymes (come on?! No young women were going to be sexually obsessed to a man "well over sixty" who never bathed or changed his clothes. He had to be on some scale of obesity, as well. This beggared my belief too much. Come on, Powys!) lost his frothing at the mouth when he has to (I was not sympathetic) get a paying job and the expected disciples don't rain as cats and dogs in heat. They were foreign to me in not savoring the reminders of these restrictions. Dud's natural father loses me in his insanity. I am pissed at Powys for dubbing the young Thel and Wiz as "cruel" for not bending over to do what he will. We must be at odds in what people owe other people. I stop caring about what the likes of Mr. Quirm don't have if they try and buy it on someone else's life. Same goes for Wiz who lived off of Jenny's toil. He doesn't announce Wiz's reckonings spiritual or philosophical the numerous times she's put out that her landlady Jenny (and Thel's sister) didn't have meals ready for them. Go make it your fucking self! Rather than her body's natural responses or the egos nourishment to the men in her life, I felt it was how she was so limited to herself. How boring to only see yourself (comparing yourself favorably to other women doesn't count). Wiz judges the grown ass man's wife Nancy for leaving him by himself when earlier in the book she had abandoned her own three year old, Lovie, in the care of no one at all. What a stupid bitch. The scratching of her ego's sex drive by the burdenous Mr. Quirm didn't move me at all. I understood Thel's loneliness for ideas a bit more, but really it was whenever anyone was alone with themselves that I felt for them. The talkity talk of ghost-winds that follow a person from Maiden Castle if its believer were or was not descended from a great and ancient race of people. If he loses the next day after that... I don't know, I got to feeling like it was all "about" what gets you off than what makes them tick. Maiden Castle loses my spirit when it's about that. I had an uncomfortable feeling about these people who lived where Thomas Hardy lived, under his demon with the grin it knew the joke at the backside of creation. In the thinking hard, willing all your might into believing what is in front of you is what you want to see, that thing that must have made your dick hard that other time.... There's a rottenness to Dud's no man at all. He holds Wizzie in bed and never makes real love to her. The cuckolds of his heart burn on ice water. I'm so jealous of him when he has the deep meets deep water. All the names of the birds, the blackberries, thistles, little thorny things that must cling to your trousers. I'm jealous of his nicknames for them (Thel is the "Venetian Post" and Jenny "horse-head"). I do the same thing myself and I'm still jealous. I love to make myself envious of things I could do myself. I would love to watch Claudius (another nickname) watch the two ducks he has named. I had my own fat ducks lolling in the grass to make me happy. It's nothing anyone else can't have and I know well how one can not see that you have it too. I love to see others having it. I want to be Dud thinking about the symbols unearthed from the chalk. His romances and have you ever felt safer feeling close to someone who might have done what you are doing long ago than the people who might be doing it right now? Thel wouldn't have been able to break down crying by the bonfire that there was no point to make her art because no one cared if she woke up to see that everyone she knew was in the same paper boat to hell. Could she? Would you make yourself feel alone on purpose so you could reach what you would still have no matter what? (I would.) I will read every Powys because he has things like the bed posts that from inside Dud bend their could be for good but he purposed its malevolent will on the proceedings he believes are happening. I wanted one myself even though I would make them out of every inanimate in my world. His decade of making love to a wraith of his creation, and his half in the world of the living and dying in the dead, by never once making real love to Wizzie when he has her.


Maiden Castle is my least favorite Powys so far. I can't help but play favorites. I like to be mean to my least favorite so that I can get vengeful and then make it up (the communist arguments bored me to trapped tears and I wanted to get into the book to tell everyone off for using Jenny to pay for everything, clean for them, take care of their kids, cook and not once wish SHE was happy). I wished it were the others and I miss reading it, in some places. I missed it when I watched "my bird" (I don't even know what species it is. Dud would know their family tree) hopping on the bushes in front of where I spend my work lunch breaks.

If Wizzie stuck around it would probably be just a few years before her twenty-three year old self was as "old" as the thirty-five year old's Nancy and Jenny. The already old men would be after little Lovie, of course. Of course they would. I'll never understand why youth is ever considered a virtue instead of only a pleasure and pain that is gone. One day you won't be remembered, you'll be a no-man and an every woman of the ages. A ghost-wind to follow someone home and if any of your fight looks like their fight.... If there is any of you left.... Does it matter if Wiz or No-Man are selfish and.... And what I really want to keep is the away from everyone else so it can't be mad, the no one can read your mind and no one knows, and it can't hurt anyone else. This business of life that is tiring and hard and your weight can't hurt because you were from a long time ago. I liked Wiz best when it was Dud and Dud best when it was Wiz. I liked how Powys called them "our friend" but they were only my friends when they were their own people that couldn't hurt. It feels more like the good kind of hurt that way. In Wolf Solent there's a mutual slaughter-house fear. In Weymouth Sands it is the mad house that would sneak onto your diurnal dreams and steal your breath. The red prison in Maiden Castle is everything like the moon. I wondered a lot what would happen if Dud were its man. Would it change his life at all? Would it make a difference? (I even liked reading about which roads Dud would or wouldn't take to get somewhere.)

I loved Powys for not doing "secret world of the abused". Wizzie was molded into her passion for circusry in flesh and spirit, the only parent she had known since before her convent days. The man hides under old age with a nickname (I don't love this one) Old Funky and cowers under his wife's (you just know a man like this would refer to his own wife as a grandmother, was probably born doing so) underwear fortress. He rapes Wiz and doesn't take no for an answer so that she couldn't feel she said no. It was a shock, it just happened. Into the fire her life and then like some archaeological discovery like that Maiden Castle relic is dug up her circus life, and the daughter she didn't want, and her mysteries and knowledge she imagines held over Thel's head. Wiz believes in secret world of the abused but I know Powys feels it like the long ago days when someone was sacrificed to some asshole's deity, or some other fucked up thing (maybe Claudius' tedious communist talk). What becomes your before and after, a leaping point. Wiz's is before, onto the horse, and her soul give up feels like so much pacing. She runs away when Thel asks her to. She had been thinking about it a lot before as a way to stand outside of life. It's not a secret to stand outside. She could still be, and definitely would have been if not pushed. I loved that he makes her torn in this way as if she couldn't reach herself. So someone from a long time ago. If she was not choosing so that her life was the image just like D.'s perversions. That was pretty great.

'But, lad, you can't face life four-square. That's where you make your mistake, and so many others. The back side of your square turns away from life. Life never sees it. It cannot see life. It's like the other side of the moon! And yet nobody has ever doubted that there is another side to the moon.

[Fergus Nm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I seem to be a little out-of-step with my fellow Powysians, who largely regard this as somewhat of a disappointing end to the Wessex quartet*, while I found it to be one of the strongest and most enjoyable volumes of the series. Maiden Castle takes a step back from the polyphonic approach of A Glastonbury Romance (and to a lesser extent, that of Weymouth Sands) and returns to the more insular narrative focus of Wolf Solent. Those familiar with that book will notice a fair bit of Wolf (and of course, a lot of JCP) in Maiden Castle's main character Dud, a phlegmatic and impotent novelist with a habit of avoiding the troubles of functional adulthood by way of sinking into mental worlds of sensation and fancy. Dud is a widower and a bastard. Among other things, he's obsessed with eroticizing the memory of his deceased wife Mona, to the point that he's visited nightly by a kind of thought-form succubus version of her. Seeking to break this spell leads Dud to a chance meeting at a Dorset cemetery, and before you can say "neurotic sensualism" our antihero is entangled within a circle of eccentrics, as well as catapulted into a frightfully unfair pseudomarriage with the vivacious dancer Wizzie. Oh, and Dud's father? He might be the local mystic, a man increasingly convinced of his identity as the incarnation of Celtic bardic spirituality.

Business as usual for Powys, maybe, and for that reason first-time readers are directed to Wolf Solent over this. Those wanting to gaze further into his uniquely compelling/repulsive worlds are rewarded here by some of the man's most beautiful and striking passages - the midday bonfire scene is a personal highlight that I found myself rereading a couple of times before continuing - as well as a narrative switch-up in the final third that adds a surprising dimension of insight and depth to one of the main players.

*There's a few versions of this floating around, earlier editions apparently trimmed by the editorial knife to the book's detriment, so that might account for this being seen as a flat send-off when compared to the preceding Wessex novels.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Cowper Powys can be the most infuriating of writers, able to combine the most exquisitely atmospheric writing with moments of obscurantism that one knows is deliberate and may be unnecessary.

Nevertheless, this book shows us his genius. Ostensibly the tale of a group of Dorchester folk over a year of their lives, the personalities are ‘types’ (obviously so in the male Cast of Characters).

Yet they are also real persons, certainly the women, in the detail of their reactions to each other and events. Theatrical and stage managed scenes compete with scenes of the most vivid realism.

The time is indeterminate but ‘contemporary’ – repeatedly a main scene of the action is referred to as having been pulled down. The political debates could only have happened within a decade or so of the writing.

The homage to Hardy is obvious. Powys likes to make things explicit, sticking his symbolic representations in front of our eyes, yet he suggests depths of meaning that may or may not be there.

The ‘hero’ of the novel is an impotent early middle aged writer with a limited emotional range (an artistic achievement in representation by Powys) who is called, in that jarring way of Powys’, Dud Noman.

This evidently symbolic name is then attached to a character that is to be described in very realistic terms. An interplay between realism and symbolism is essential to the Powys project.

The first section is made up of a detailed, almost Proustian, account of Mr. Noman’s rising, with every detail of his room superbly described, in a way that grabs our attention from the start.

This is an attention that is sustained all the way through to his meeting at the graveyard with the first of the circle to which he will become attached.

Once you understand that the novel is about sex and, particularly, the attempt by the uncomprehending male (any Noman) to understand the varieties of female response, then things start to fall into place.

The male characters appear to have interior lives that are constructed out of ideas – the Platonist, the dim-witted Fascist, the ‘New Man’ Communist.

Even the second hero of the novel ,the simultaneously fascinating and unattractive Enoch/Uryen Quirm, who turns out to be Noman’s father, is defined by the way he exists through a mythic narrative.

Uryen's narrative loses its power when it is expressed in the written word. Hmmmm!

The sexual centres are Enoch/Uryen, whose intense sexual attraction for women is a mystery to the reader, as I believe it is supposed to be, and Wizzie, the circus girl with an illegitimate child.

Noman, in a classic tribute to Hardy, purchases Wizzie to live with him in what proves to be a sexless mistress relationship.

To describe the flow of energies between the characters – four or five women and four or five men, depending on who you think important to the dynamic – is to describe a catalogue of possible relations.

I am not going to ruin the book for you by describing that dynamic here.

What Powys has done with consummate brilliance is to confuse our perceptions about the reality of what is going on in order to concentrate our attention on specific moments.

At these moments, two persons ‘connect’ – as if in response to EM Forster’s famous appeal on this matter.

If he does not always succeed, this may be because he is trying to capture the indescribable in words as he subverts the conventions of literature (as it stood in the English 1930s).

The traditional novel appeared to give verisimilitude to relations by setting them in a ‘real’ narrative.

This merely succeeded in masking the fact that such relations have been conventionalised in order to engage the reader in the narrative.

Powys, on the other hand, describes very recognisable and specific but relatively momentary points of human connection.

He adds a degree of unreality or locks an exchange between persons into a clearly manufactured context. This makes the book extremely hard to describe.

It is not a narrative with a ‘point’ or clear conclusion (the ending, you are warned is incoherent and perfunctory) but a concatenation of set-piece incidents.

These are strung together with sufficient narrative to create an air of credibility that begins to collapse only when we think about it.
Whatever the technique, with all its unlikelihoods, it works.

The mind concentrates on the incident or the anticipation of the incident (though Powys often cleverly set us up for something that does not happen) but not the consequences. The 'why' is often unclear.

The perfunctory ending is in accordance with the book’s style. What happens next is not very interesting to the author. Indeed, what actually happens is not of enormous interest.

What is interesting is how people respond to events. It is the ‘incident’ that matters, not the cause and effect, because the ‘incident ‘contains the truth of the relationship.

As a result we come to think we know the women in the novel as persons whereas the men remain weak, not merely unknowable but not subjects we wish to know more about.

Again, there is a genius in this. Powys, a man, seems to have decided that he can only try to get to an understanding of women if he presents the men as mere catalysts.

These men passively and conventionally worship a mistress, challenge a daughter, suffer a rejection and so on.

The women in this book are very different. All are personalities, rather than just obvious ‘types’, who take their time acting but either act or choose not to act in a determined way.

They are ‘formidable women’ – most men reading the book will fall a little in love with one of them at some point.

Does Powys succeed in this mission to understand women by abstracting men? I am not sure he does entirely but it is a gallant effort and it triggers the paradox underlying the book.

The male ciphers and hysterics (three of the main male characters exhibit hysterical or emotional loss of control in a way conventionally associated with women) are one thing.

The women are another. They are pragmatic and, above all, proud and self-contained.

The way the women relate to these ciphers and hysterics turns back in on itself to tell us something about male responses. This is where the genius lies.

The male reading this book, by not identifying with these male types, can relate to the internal selves of the women in each case and feel that he is ‘understanding’ them for the first time.

It is as if Powys has sought a technique for getting inside a woman’s mind based on his observation of behaviour and then opening it up to scrutiny with an implicit cry – ‘There, see, this is how they work!’

Furthermore he tells us that the workings are reasonable and can be understood as reasonable.

There is certainly nothing in the interior workings of the women that is not reasonable or presented as anything other than a mind to be respected as having its own legitimate perspective.

Even the irrational resistance to sexuality of Jenny in relation to Claudius, that appears to be countered effectively by the unexpected and passionate intervention of her father, is explained.

Past history allows this intervention and shows a mind changing with new facts and ideas where conventional arguments failed. Whether Powys has ‘got it right’ only women can answer.

Men will think he has done enough to open a door to understanding what women are really like instead of how conventional literature has presented them, to themselves as much as to men.

Yes, this is a flawed work (those occasional obscurities and the perfunctory closure) but it is a remarkable attempt at dealing with one of the great challenges of all literature.

That challenge is how to present the minds of the other sex without falling into conventionalism.

It is a novel of psychological realism set within a deliberately jarring narrative, realistic enough to make us believe that we are presented with ‘reality'.

This reality, though, is imbued with enough implicit magical or irrational elements to shake us into engaging with the material, with life, with a fresh eye.

There are many insights to be had from this book but perhaps one of the most interesting is Wizzie’s (the circus girl’s) attitude to Old Funky.

Old Funky is the unattractive and a-moral man who taught her the skills that make her feel alive but who also raped her and is not averse to blackmail.

Conventionalism would make a woman’s feelings far from ambivalent but reality can make her compare his engagement with life a cause for a very negative comparison with the sexless ‘love’ of Noman.

It is only a fleeting moment but it is true to interior life and this brings up another technique of Powys which he carries with commanding effect.

How the mind can move rapidly through emotional change and see other persons with very different eyes at different times.

The book is set on single days, dealt with in great detail, with long gaps in the narrative between those days.

This effect also jars because relationships have advanced between the days without the reader having any idea how or why a change has taken place.

We have to work back to ‘imagine' the cause of the change. The only male whose interior life is reported in detail is Noman himself whose lack of self-knowledge is startling in retrospect.

Noman is also used by Powys to show just how ‘fickle’ the male mind is in its feelings.

At more than one point, he is attracted and unattracted to several women (as men are) in succession. Wizzie’s flow of thought shows a similar flow.

This works against convention as well, so that the overall effect is to raise up the ‘personhood’ against conventional representation in what is really an artistic experiment.

I am no expert on Powys but there is a short if unenlightening Prefatory Note to the novel (in this edition) that seems to confirm that Powys was working out his feelings about ‘formidable women'.

The women in this novel are both formidable and ordinary – above all, they are not caricatures.

The triumph of Powys is to imbue an air of eroticism around these women without any obvious sexual acts, although Powys is relatively open about sexuality compared to most of his contemporaries.

As a male, I could sense Powys’ own erotic responses to these formidable women who may be types themselves but at a far more sophisticated level than the males.

The variation of erotic response is definitely not conventional and it is certainly skilfully made, as momentary for the reader as it is for the protagonists.

From this perspective, this is a novel about transitory responses and male hysteria and a powerful step forward in male literature’s ability to come to terms with strong women.

In that sense, it is a small but important step towards the modern age, one in which conventional sexual stereotyping can be replaced with a better understanding of actual sexual difference.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

My least favourite of his. This may be me or it may be him, I can't tell. It just did not work, did not flow properly. And there was far far too much of the most frustrating JCP tic for me: his gender essentialism. Fundamentally I would rather be re-reading the other three of this quartet.

[Richard S · Rating 3 out of 5]

The excessive strangeness of Powys' "Autobiography" carries over into this his next novel, the last of the four "Wessex" novels, set in Dorchester itself. Powys' strange sexuality, his repulsion towards the act of intercourse, is described explicitly in the main character, "Dud No-Man", who is modeled on himself. His weird perversion dominates the novel, but unlike Wolf Solent, where the main character was strange and everyone else was normal, in this novel pretty much everyone is excessively odd and disturbed in one way or another, with the notable exception of the admirable character of Dud No-Man's "love" interest Wizzie, to whom the point of view of the novel shifts about two-thirds of the way in.

Among the cast of characters is a completely insane old man obsessed with Maiden Castle, a very odd "Platonist" who keeps copies of the Phaedrus and TImaus in his pockets, Thuella, a tall thin odd girl who paints clouds, Claudius, a crazed communist, and Jenny, his friend. The interaction of all of these people is kind of like dealing with a madhouse. There's never a normal moment.

The book seems somewhat autobiographical, but surprisingly, despite reading his letters and diaries from the time he wrote the book, it's difficult to identify characters in the book with people in Powys' life - more they seem like various aspects of himself, like he divided himself into different people.

The book is excessively long, entire pages are devoted to a second of time, and most of it is psychological commentary. Powys does have a very rich deep insight into the human psyche and soul and many of his comments and situations show that. It's just that the intensity of the insanity is so overbearing, it's like drinking an exceptionally strong liqueur. As such the book was incredibly slow going - 6 weeks to read 480 pages. I couldn't even bear to read it every day, and sometimes only a few pages. It required an enormous amount of concentration to get through.

Sadly there's very little of what I like the most about Powys, the nature descriptions and epiphanies. The constant obsession on the disturbed sexuality - as in the Autobiography - makes the book largely unreadable. Part of it is the particular sexuality is so utterly selfish in nature. Like in his brother Llewelyn's "Love and Death" one is astonished at this - although in this case the target of his "affections" does respond appropriately, in a way, saying he's "not a man."

Mostly it made me feel sorry for Powys' "girlfriend" Phyllis Plater who had to be subject to this in real life, although it appeared in the diary that from time to time the sexuality between her and Powys was more normal. This may sound odd, but the complete change of tone and style towards the end of the book and the perspective from Wizzie made me very suspicious that she had written it, or maybe he was writing down what she shared from her perspective. The plain, simple tone reminded me of certain passages in Wolf Solent and Glastonbury where she may have stepped in and edited.

Regardless, there's very little in this book to recommend, compared to his earlier Wolf Solent and Glastonbury and his later Porius. I would only recommend it to devoted Powys diehards (like myself). Otherwise, only if you really must (for some reason).

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's quite similar, from memory, to A Glastonbury Romance: in that Glastonbury Tor/Maiden Castle, at least half-alive, with attached myth, history and religion, overshadow the plot, which is otherwise about people’s sexual and psychological lives; and with a railroad of modernity cutting through.

I chose this as my next Powys with the idea Wizzie was an old circus clown. No, she’s a young girl acrobat and the novel is heavily about the two sexes. Which tires me in Powys, since I don’t believe what he believes. He sees the sexes as infinitely different – I mean, down to cell material. Women are always wiser and better. I don’t know how he knows this, but I want to pop up and tell him, ‘I’m not.’ Still, wasn’t D.H. Lawrence writing around this time? Him I cannot stand, and Powys I can stand.

Powys is very, very same-samey. Is this a bad thing, though? Maybe, if I read 6 of his books, I’ll understand his ideas. I don’t yet.

Again he has a corpse-god. In Porius it’s Merlin, here it’s Urien, who’s strongly redolent of Merlin (I didn’t mean to make a joke, but – they smell alike. They smell like corpse-gods).

Instead of guessing any further as to what this is about, I’m going to tell you a story. From 1936, by coincidence Maiden Castle's publication year. Henning Haslund tells of a Solon shaman:

As his only son had been killed by a Japanese car, he decided on a last attempt to stop the development which was destroying his world. He thought that he would be able to achieve this by fighting one of the Japanese locomotives that had begun to push their way through the wilderness which had been a quiet refuge for him and the spirits. He prepared for the fight for many days, assisted by his fellow tribesmen. The blood from many sacrificial animals coloured the snow, night after night the forest echoed with the beating of drums and the piercing cries for help to the assistant spirits, and when Ba Shaman finally went off to his fight he was possessed as in the great days of his youth. But as the days and weeks passed without Ba Shaman returning and as the Japanese steam-engines continued to rush through the wilderness of the Solons, his people understood that the old spirits had had to give up in the face of the new stronger power.

Claudius the Communist worships aeroplanes, while Urien – an assumed name – who believes he has lived other lives as Urien back to Arthurian times, might be the type to battle trains, one on one. Powys has been called a shaman and I suppose it's why I read him, doggedly as I do.

[Jed Mayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last, and in some ways least, of Powys' great Wessex sequence, this is nevertheless a rich and complex meditation on the connection between people and place. This is in some ways the Powys novel most concerned with women's issues, and that is the source of some of its greatest weaknesses as well as strengths. A peculiar inversion of Hardy's MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE, this begins with the purchase of a young woman and ends with her liberation. There's a wonderful shift that occurs a little over halfway through the novel where the point of view shifts to this young woman's perspective, and though there is a lot of troubling noise about the "eternal feminine," there are also deeply felt expressions of empathy with women's experience. For all its flaws, this remains an important chapter in the Powys saga.

[Sini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ik ben sinds kort een vurige fan van de vergeten Engelse schrijver John Cowper Powys. Zijn vaak idolate volgelingen roemen vooral zijn vier Wessex Novels - "Wolf Solent" (1929), "A Glastonbury Romance" (1933), "Weymouth Sands" (1934) en "Maiden Castle" (1936) -, zijn onnavolgbare "Autobiography" (1934), en zijn twee historische romans "Owen Glendower" (1941) en "Porius" (1951). Die zeven highlights ben ik dus allemaal aan het lezen, in chronologische volgorde. Daar ben ik trouwens ook best ver mee: in 2022 las ik zijn eerste drie Wessex- novels en de "Autobiography". En ik amuseerde mij als een kleuter. Vooral "A Glastonbury Romance" vond ik echt een grandioos boek, en zelfs het mooiste van alle mooie boeken die ik in 2022 las.

Onlangs las ik dus mijn vijfde Powys: "Maiden Castle", de laatste van de vier "Wessex Novels". Ook weer dik (480 bladzijden), ook weer onnavolgbaar excentriek, ook weer vol magie die het wereldraadsel nog vergroot. Kortom: helemaal Powys. Maar volgens velen is het ook verreweg de minste van zijn higlights, en IS het zelfs geen highlight. Welnu, dat begrijp ik helaas volkomen. Het boek kwam oorspronkelijk in een sterk ingekorte versie op de markt, wat vast niet goed was voor zijn reputatie. Maar ik las de niet ingekorte versie, en ook die beviel mij echt veel minder goed dan de andere Powyssen die ik tot nu toe las.

Zeker, ook "Maiden Castle" bevat weer de nodige passages waar ik flink van zat te smullen. En zeker, ook dit boek zat weer vol met intrigerende excentrieke invalshoeken. Ook is het weer doorregen met aanstekelijke verlangens naar glimpen van het onbekende, het bovennatuurlijke, het buiten- rationele, het raadselachtig Goddelijke dat nog niet een begrijpelijke vorm heeft aangenomen in een religieus verhaal of een navolgbaar geloof. Bovendien zijn er veel verrassende en intrigerende plotwendingen. Maar deze keer vond ik de personages vaak te excentriek, te bordkarton-achtig en karikaturaal, en daardoor soms bijna oninteressant. De vele grillige plotwendingen vond ik soms heel aanstekelijk en verrassend, maar het waren er mij te veel en ik vond ze vaak geforceerd. Andere boeken van Powys zijn vol, want doseren is niet zijn ding, maar "Maiden Castle" vond ik door al die plotwendingen echt overvol. De dialogen zijn bovendien vaak best fascinerend, maar vaak ook behoorlijk onnatuurlijk en soms zelfs ongewild lachwekkend. Uitlezen van dit boek was dus echt een kwestie van doorzetten. Maar toch ben ik blij dat ik het gedaan heb, want anders zou ik de nodige mooie passages hebben gemist.

De hoofdpersoon heet, bizar genoeg, "Dud No- Man": een bastaard, een buitenmaatschappelijke excentriekeling, een gemarginaliseerde buitenstaander die losgezongen is van de conventies, en dus inderdaad een "niemand" met heel andere gevoelens en gedachten dan een normaal "iemand". Al tien jaar lang heeft hij een vreemdsoortige, perverse en tegelijk idealiserende, quasi- erotische en tegelijk seksloze verhouding met het alleen in zijn verbeelding bestaande spook van zijn gestorven vrouw. Met wie hij nooit het huwelijk consumeerde, ook niet bij leven en welzijn. Alsof hij ook tijdens haar leven liever het fantasiebeeld lief had dan de vrouw van vlees en bloed. Dud krijgt echter een verhouding met Wizzie Ravelston: een veel jonger circusmeisje, al jarenlang wees, en nu geadopteerd door o.a. de volstrekt bizarre Funky: een karikaturaal- groteske figuur die op momenten toch ontroerend is, ook al blijkt later dat hij Wizzie heeft misbruikt en met een onecht kind heeft opgezadeld. Maar Dud koopt Wizzie van dit circusgezin, en heeft vervolgens met haar een wel heel buitenissig soort relatie: zonder conventionele seks, zonder formele huwelijksband, en op normale wijze samenwonen doen ze ook al niet. Ook zijn er nog diverse andere, zeer merkwaardige personages. Bijvoorbeeld Thuella, schilderes van wolken die een mond heeft die oogt als een tragische wond. Of de stinkende Enoch Quirm, die - naar ineens blijkt- de biologische vader is van Dud, en die zich "Urien" noemt omdat hij zich helemaal vereenzelvigt met de irrationeel- duistere sferen van oeroude Welshe mythen en sagen. En ook zijn er nog een excentrieke communist, een tamelijk groteske fascist en een wereldvreemde Platonist: drie karikaturale dromers die vergeefs zoeken naar zingeving en transcendentie. Alle personages - ik heb ze bewust niet allemaal genoemd- hebben zo hun eigen markante en vreemde trekken. En ze hebben ook nog eens zo hun eigen vreemde verhouding tot "Maiden Castle", een oeroude vestingheuvel vlak in de buurt, die de belichaming is van oud- Romeinse, oud- Keltische en oud- Welshe invloeden. De belichaming ook - althans, voor sommigen- van magische of goddelijke figuren die aan elke ons nu bekende godsdienst voorafgaan, of van magische krachten van goed en kwaad die zich door geen enkele logica laten vatten.

Kortom: een rariteitenkabinet, nog gekker dan het gekste boek van Dickens. Daar moet je als lezer wel tegen kunnen. Maar volgens Powys IS de wereld gewoon een rariteitenkabinet, een grotesk pantomime, een carnavaleske circusvoorstelling. En precies DAT zet hij in al zijn zo gekke boeken bewust op de voorgrond. Bovendien, juist mensen die buiten de conventies staan hebben volgens Powys meer gevoel voor de raadselachtige grilligheden van onze wereld dan brave burgermannen zoals u en ik. De alwetende vertellers van zijn boeken zijn juist in die grilligheden geïnteresseerd, en kijken daarom graag in de hoofden van buitenissige personages die deze grilligheden vanuit een heel eigen perspectief bekijken. En die dan heel andere dingen ervaren dan wij. Wat soms medelijden en afkeer oproept, maar soms ook enige jaloezie. Zo van: konden ook wij maar op een vergelijkbare wijze kijken naar onszelf en de wereld.

In het eerste deel volgen we vooral de blik van Dud, die zich, zelfs naar aanleiding van de meest gewone dingen, helemaal in allerlei barokke associaties onderdompelt, dromend van werkelijkheden voorbij de werkelijkheid en realiteiten voorbij de realiteit. Zie bijvoorbeeld zijn verrukte mijmeringen bij het zien van doodgewone "cuckoo- flowers" (pinksterbloemen): "What they have about them is something that you lose after the first glance, something that belongs to things seen through mist, through rain, through water, something that belongs to things seen IN water, seen in mirrors, seen in glass, seen in polished silver! Generation after generation must have felt what I felt a minute ago. It's gone now, because I've begun counting their petals and examining their little fretted leaves. What WAS it that I felt, all of a sudden, just now? It was a glimpse of a reality just beyond our reality, a reality that I've been longing for all my days, a reality that has nothing hurting or harsh or sour or comic in it. But why can't those marsh marigolds give me this peculiar feeling? It must have something to do with this faint lilac colour, like the first ripples of dawn, or the drifting of spray over twilight sands. Too rich colours, too emphatic shapes, dam up our escape into this reality behind reality, hinder our dipping into these pure springs where each generation washes away its brutality, its blood, its executions [...]!". Juist die zo bescheiden pinksterbloemen doen Dud dus dromen van een ongrijpbare "reality just beyond reality", die zo fragiel en ongrijpbaar is als spiegelingen in water, en die meteen vervliegt zodra je die pinksterbloem (of die beelden die de pinksterbloem oproept) aanraakt en analyseert. Maar juist door zijn fragiele ongrijpbaarheid, zijn altijd intacte raadselachtigheid, is die "reality just beyond reality" voor Dud ook zeer onontbeerlijk. Want de realiteit van alledag, of die van de conventionele wereld om hem heen, is voor Dud te eendimensionaal, te versimpelend, te armoedig, te opdringerig en te banaal. Dus koestert hij zijn associaties en zijn dromen, als een voor hem onmisbare "life- illusion".

Ik vond Duds snakkende dromen vaak mooi en aanstekelijk. Maar op een gegeven moment ook wat irritant, vooral omdat we steeds alleen maar in zijn egocentrisch- excentrieke hoofd zitten. Terwijl we in "A Glastonbury Romance" en "Weymouth Sands" steeds in verschillende excentrieke hoofden zitten, en daardoor een fascinerend en pluriform multiversum krijgen aangeboden vanuit meerdere heel verschillende perspectieven. En in "Maiden Castle" miste ik aanvankelijk dat fascinerende multiversum, die bonte veelvormigheid. Dat veranderde echter zodra ik over de helft van het boek was, omdat we dan plotseling de wereld zien door de ogen van Wizzie. Zij verrast ons dan met een intrigerend kritische blik op de volgens haar belachelijke dromen en gedragingen van Dud. Dat is naar mijn smaak echt heel opmerkelijk, omdat Duds associaties sterk doen denken aan die van Wolf in "Wolf Solent", en die van Cowper Powys zelf in zijn "Autobiography". Dus Wizzie werpt niet alleen nieuw licht op de associatieve dromerijen van Dud, maar ook op die van Wolf Solent (de hoofdpersoon van Powys' meest populaire roman) en Powys zelf. Zij heeft zelf bovendien veel aardsere dromen en verlangens, die weliswaar duidelijk minder magisch zijn dan die van Dud maar zeker even ontroerend en aanstekelijk. En zij volgt deze dromen ook, op een wel heel verrassende manier die ik niet ga verklappen.

Dat leidt naar mijn smaak helaas wel tot een aantal behoorlijk drakerige en melodramatische passages en plotwendingen. Maar andere passages las ik weer met rode oren: bijvoorbeeld die over Wizzies passie om een "circusgirl" te zijn, acrobatisch rondrijdend en sprongen makend op de rug van een paard, opgetild door het applaus en de buiten-wereldse vreugden van de circus- arena. Dus ook dromend van een "reality just beyond reality", zij het een veel aardsere en concretere dan die van Dud. Dus misschien eerder een alternatieve realiteit "within reality", en juist niet "beyond". Bovendien, juist haar zo van Dud afwijkende perspectief onderstreept dat diens dromen niet de enig mogelijke zijn, en dat de wereld dus wel degelijk een pluriform multiversum is dat zich vanuit veel verschillende perspectieven laat genieten. Temeer omdat ook Thuella, schilderes van wolken, eveneens - al schilderend- van " realities beyond reality" droomt. Op haar heel eigen wijze. Net als haar vader (de eerder gememoreerde Platonist), net als de even excentrieke als dromerige communist die ook nog een rol heeft in dit (overvolle) boek. Ook zij ontvluchten de conventionele realiteit, net als Dud, maar op heel andere manieren. Ook zij dromen, maar anders en op een andere wijze intens en aanstekelijk. Dat vond ik, na bladzijden lang in het fascinerende maar ook nogal vermoeiende hoofd van Dud te hebben gezeten, zonder meer een verademing. En bij vlagen ook inspirerend.

Bovendien staan Duds dromen in een intrigerend contrast met die van zijn biologische vader, Enoch "Urien" Quirm. Want Urien geeft niks om pinksterbloemen of associaties naar aanleiding van gewone objecten of natuurverschijnselen. Hij droomt namelijk niet van een "reality JUST beyond reality", zoals Dud, maar van een totaal en radicaal ANDERE realiteit. Dus wil hij al het bekende en vertrouwde TOTAAL doorbreken. Ten koste van alles. Daarom geeft hij zich helemaal over aan de pre- logische werelden van de Welshe mythologie, zoals beschreven door John Rhys (een door Powys zeer bewonderd auteur) en de mysterieuze Taliesin. Hij denkt zelfs dat hij het medium is geworden van deze mythisch- magische wereld. En ook van de magische transcendentie waarnaar in deze wereld zo wanhopig werd verlangd. Dat leidt tot gepassioneerde en eruptieve monologen als: "If John Rhys were alive, I would have left you all, years ago, and gone to tell HIM the whole thing. He'd have understood, for he put me on the track of it. He knew how all Taliesin's prophesies were about me. He knew how all the old bards worshipped what works through me. He knew the mysterious secret of my race, of his race - that straining, that longing, that yearning, that craving, that meadnes to break through. "Hiraeth" is our word for it - no other tongue on earth has a word like that! - and he knew what it meant. Desire, but not ordinay desire. Desire grown beside itself! Desire driven against custom, driven against habit, driven against the cowardice of mankind - that's what "hiraeth" is!". Dud droomt van realiteiten voorbij de realiteit, en daarvan dromend wandelt hij rond in de wereld om hem heen. Urien daarentegen snakt naar werelden die aan elke realiteit vooraf gaan, naar magische bovenwerelden die zelfs nog ongrijpbaarder zijn dan die van welk geloof dan ook, en wil dus door alle grenzen heen breken. Ook door de grenzen van leven en dood, zoals later blijkt. Met een verlangen dat zelfs de grenzen van elk verlangen te buiten gaat: "desire grown beside itself". Hij snakt kortom naar het onmogelijke, het ongrijpbare, het onbereikbaar ultieme. En precies dat maakt hem naar mijn smaak fascinerend en groots.Al ben ik uiteraard te laf of te pragmatisch om dit na te willen doen.

"Maiden Castle" gaf mij kortom best veel te genieten, hoe moeizaam leesbaar ik het vaak ook vond. Het excentrieke gehalte van de personages en hun perspectieven vond ik intrigerend, hoe drakerig en over the top soms ook. En hun zo verschillende verlangens naar een "reality beyond reality" boeiden mij. Iemand die met Cowper Powys begint kan beter een ander boek kiezen, zoals "Wolf Solent". Maar voor Powys- liefhebbers als ik was dit boek prima te pruimen, ondanks alles. Mooi dus dat ik het gelezen heb. En op naar "Owen Glendower" en "Porius".

[Mark Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a John Cowper Powys 'fan', having read three of his other novels (Wolf Solent, Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands). He's certainly hard going in places and an acquired taste! But there is something in his writing that is deeply compelling; you might say, the vision of an authentic genius. Maiden Castle is not as great as the other three 'Wessex' novels. Some of it seems absurd, wooden, frankly weird. I wonder if JCP was in fact in some respects literally insane. There is an ongoing theme of fetishism running through. It wanders around, seems to be going nowhere. I had to stop reading halfway through, take a break and read something else. But then you get these sudden passages of extraordinary, almost luminous perception and beauty. An intensity of vision that is almost other-worldly. This book, in the end, comes together beautifully and leaves you with the sense that you've come through something massive and unexpectedly profound. Maiden Castle has many faults. But ultimately it's an extraordinary book. JCP may be an acquired taste - but it's one you never forget.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powys is a sort of cult figure whose books are quite long and depend on a lot of Celtic esoterica.

"Maiden Castle"'s central character is a somewhat misanthropic writer whose eccentric personal habits and inability to comprehend women in other than oddly idealized form seems to me fit into some tradition of anti-heroes ("Confederacy of Dunces"' Ignatius Reilly and Anthony Burgess' Enderby come to mind but there are probably closer examples).

The narrative also revolves around a kind of very specifically Welsh magical mysticism that pops up in all sorts of books worth reading, including Madeleine L'Engle's "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" and John Wain's "A Winter In the Hills", which I hastily summarized in this blog post http://soldbyvolume.blogspot.com/2008...

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last of the Wessex novels I had left to read - and I think fair to say the least. Perhaps because I read what I take to be the abridged version (Picador classics edition) I didn't feel it suffered some of the more extreme longueurs of his other books, but it also had fewer of those rhapsodic forays into the natural world and into the psychological response of the Powys stand-in. His novels are usually novels of place, in which syncretic layers of meaning are gradually built up upon in reaction to the environment until by the end he can evoke strange and feverish climaxes which involve almost no external action, but which leave one breathless.

In some ways it felt like a more self-reflective novel than any of his others: Dud No-Man is modelled on Powys and expounds something probably very similar to Powys' own "philosophy of life". But we see in No-Man and several other characters the problems that arise when selfishly clinging to a philosophy that alienates one from normal channels of behaviour - even if that philosophy be or seem to be true. No-Man is ultimately abandoned by his lover because of his unwillingness to be a normal man. He wonders whether he should give up the idiosyncratic interior life that he has cultivated for himself over decades and try to get on in the "objective" world. But ultimately he rejects this - as I'm sure the real Powys did. These reflections, coupled with the switch in point of view to Wizzie, were revealing of a degree of self-awareness that I had not hitherto supposed Powys to possess.

[Lucy Cummin]

Can't continue with this having just spend five months reading the final Knausgaard. Also, I am . . . non-plussed by the story, as in not really very engaged by it and not expecting to be. The thing about Powys is that the 'story' is sometimes the least important thing: the thoughts and the setting, the odd and eccentric people, but this nonetheless has an inferior work quality -- as opposed to Porius (pure genius) and A Glastonbury Romance (not quite as pure genius but right up there). I may come back to it once I've had some shorter, less challenging reads.

[Gabriel Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, I have no idea how to rationalise or assess this demented retelling of the Mayor of Casterbridge. The characters are all mad or sociopathic. The plot is minimal. The action is 90% long (LONG) conversations or interior monologues. But it compels! And if it concludes in a sort of moral, the moral is all the more powerful for being a sort of gentle out-breath after a final crisis and chain of melodramas. Realism or credible storytelling really isn’t the point with Powys.

[Athanase Pernatte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my entry point for Powys and left an indelible impression. I still remember the first few pages felt like a bushy, dense foliage out of which eventually unfolds an incredible psychological drama. Powys juggles artfully with the mystic and the mundane and his characters’ introspective description is matchless. His characters are as bizarre as they are rounded and real.

[5greenway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cracking finish to my (slow) gallop through the BIG JCP novels. Overwrought brilliance.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 4 out of 5]

An historical novelist, a 'nameless bastard' who none-the-less has dubbed himself Dud No-Man, returns to the Dorchester of his youth after a long absence. In an unlikely yet striking scene straight out of Thomas Hardy, he buys a wild young orphan with 'a 'lurin figure' named Wizzie Ravelstein from an old and disreputable circus couple.
At the same time, No-Man becomes familiar with two families who share and interconnecting cottage not far from Maiden Castle, called The Gylmes.

Dud's unusual choice of surname has nothing to do with Odysseus, yet the text is awash with classical and Celtic allusions, the latter largely inspired by the figure of Enoch 'Uryen' Quirm, a mystical Welsh antiquary who has a secret to tell.

- a spiritual struggle between his dead wife Mona's 'eidolon' and Wizzie his 'Stone-age captive'.

- he is the kind of writer that can turn an everyday object like a bed-post into an object of 'Faustian "desire" to penetrate and enjoy -even in forbidden directions- the huge mystery of the Cosmos.'

Cowper Powys is a wonderful writer, but also a somewhat whimsical one that won't be for everyone. He constantly refers to his protagonist as 'our friend', likes to place inverted commas around all manor of concepts and is perhaps too fond of italics and exclamation marks.
But I love him. Like the Welsh wizards he is so obsessed with, he is capable of conjuring things up out of thin air, emotions and impressions so vivid and extraordinary that you can only marvel.

(just notes, full review to follow)

[Michael Martin]

Cowper Powys is fascinating - I have read this before but enjoy returning to his peculiar world view, though it does seem to be limited to a Saxon / Celtic world. In John Cowper Powys's novels all the characters are a version of him. They are all obsessed with the same things but just take slightly different angles.

[Tom Newth · Rating 4 out of 5]

bit overwritten and a bit overcosmic as usual, but the flashes of psychological acuity are abundant