A Glastonbury Romance
By John Cowper Powys
Overlook, 1,120 pages, $24.95
John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) is remembered, if at all, as the oldest of a British family of writers who rivaled the Brontes in precocity and eccentricity and as the author of long, convoluted philosophical novels much less respected now than they were.
Powys was an overwriter with a weakness for interminable, self-indulgent digressions cast in fulsomely ”poetic” prose and burdened with archaic diction. He was also a superb creator of character and of extended dramatic scenes that often exude a practically Dostoevskian power.
”A Glastonbury Romance,” originally published in 1932, is an elaborately structured portrayal of parallel lives, set in and near the Somerset town long rumored to have been the original home of King Arthur.
The story is made up of protracted conflicts and more general cross-purposes among a vast gallery of characters (47 ”principal” ones are identified in an introductory listing), of whom five are dominant.
Evangelical preacher John Geard (a.k.a. ”Bloody Johnny”), the secretary and companion of the late Canon Crow, has inherited most of that patriarch`s fortune, to the envious dismay of the canon`s survivors.
These include Philip Crow, an industrialist whose dye factory employs most of the town`s workers, and his cousin John, an egocentric itinerant who counterfeits sympathy with Geard`s determination to use his new riches to serve God`s purposes.
Geard stages a religious pageant. He conducts public healing ceremonies at the ”holy” waters of Chalice Well, and his activist Christianity extends to supporting the workers` commune that springs up in protest of Philip Crow`s paternalistic control of his employees.
These characters, and three dozen or so others whose lives link up with theirs, are explored with a quite remarkable psychological fullness. We know Powys` characters to a disturbingly intimate degree; we perceive the inner motivating forces that drive them to be what they are.
Flood and sacrifice are important climatic elements in a plot that, to be sure, frequently labors in its ambition to encompass a huge spectrum of human interrelationships.
The novel flies in so many directions simultaneously that even its carefully worked-out patterns of contrast-Christianity and paganism, capitalism and communism, individual and community-are often obscured, as Powys follows the destinies of characters who`ve simply assumed a vividness out of all proportion to their importance in his scheme and commandeered his attention.
Novels nowadays seldom wrestle with such heady materials. ”A Glastonbury Romance” is about nothing less than the varieties of religious experience;
how we apprehend, by every imaginable means, that ”multileveled universe”
that includes us and transcends us.
Powys` prose style presents formidable obstacles. This is a crucially flawed great novel. It stands as a gigantic rebuke to a time of minimum-risk writers and readers, and I hope that many among them will be encouraged to attempt it.
