John Powys: After My Fashion

To get hold of it was one thing, however; to get it out of the pond was another matter.

Desperate were Richard’s struggles to get the animal up those slippery banks. With the rain hissing into the pond below him and lashing his face in driving gusts as the wind whirled it round within that enclosed circle, he pulled and tugged and wrestled with that bleating mass of drenched wool until at last, with a superhuman effort, he got it safely over the brink.

He placed the thing on its feet, pushed it under the railings and clambered over them himself.

To his annoyance and surprise, instead of trotting off as he had expected, the animal fell over on its side, uttering once more a long-drawn pitiful bleat.

Now it became clear that either in its own struggles to escape, or in his struggles to help it, the unfortunate beast had broken or seriously injured one of its legs.

Richard sat down beside the bleating sheep and uttered a wild laugh. He lifted up his face to the sky and was met by the whirling downpour of merciless rain. He began to be alarmed lest Canyot’s two hours should have passed and the young man, returning with some conveyance, should find him gone.

With this thought in his mind he took a few steps down the slope of the hill in the direction he fancied the ploughland to commence. But the miserable bleating of the wretched sheep, apparently realizing its desertion, brought him to a standstill. No! He could not leave it there — even to meet the messenger who brought the deciding of his fate.

Hurrying back to where the creature lay, he stood regarding it, uttering once more a wild chuckling laugh.

The fever in his veins was running high by this time, giving him an unnatural strength. His one instinct was to convey this animal to some sort of shelter, if it were only the inadequate shelter of that hawthorn hedge! Once there, if Canyot came with some kind of conveyance, both himself and the sheep could be rescued together.

If Canyot came!

On Canyot’s appearance, with the message he brought, everything in the world at that moment seemed to depend.

‘Nelly, my darling!’ These words seemed to the man who uttered them aloud into the wind and rain, to issue from some other being than himself — some stronger, braver, nobler being at whose imperious bidding the shivering exhausted wretch who called himself Richard was now compelled to act.

He bent down, and after two or three hopeless struggles he succeeded in getting the sheep upon his back, its belly round his neck and its feet held tightly in both his hands.

Burdened thus, and swaying under the creature’s weight, he staggered down the slope in the direction in which he supposed the hawthorn hedge to lie.

As he went, with the rain whirling round him as if the darkness itself were one great river of water, all manner of strange ideas passed through his mind. It seemed to him as though he were carrying on his back the burden of his great unfinished poem, the poem which he had so often changed in character — and which had now taken the form of a sheep!

Then it seemed to him as if he were arguing with Nelly’s father about the existence of God. It seemed as though God too, like his poetry, had turned into a heavy woolly sheep that bleated pitifully into his ear.

Then he suddenly, thought of Karmakoff the Russian; and he imagined himself putting the question to him as to whether they would have slaughter houses in an ideal state!

And he thought of Elise dancing, dancing on the edge of a great grey sea swept by hurricanes of rain …

He knew he must be getting near the hedge, because of the feel of ploughed-up land under his feet. It was just then that he stumbled and bent low under the weight he carried and something seemed to snap in his heart.

After that he saw nothing at all — nothing but darkness, dense black rainy darkness, that seemed full of bleating cries, cries, that called upon him for help.

‘All right! It’s all right!’ Was it he who uttered those words?

Something pricked his face. The hedge! The hedge!

He stumbled to the ground beneath its shelter, and fell heavily down with the animal above him.

The next thing he was conscious of was the sensation of something burning being poured down his throat and of a swinging lantern. With one last desperate effort he forced his eyelids to open against a weight like lead.

‘I — can’t — get — my breath,’ he gasped. ‘Does she forgive me?’

‘She loves you,’ said Robert Canyot.

The look of unutterable happiness that spread over Richard’s face, as the lantern flickered upon it, remained to the end of the painter’s life the best return he ever obtained for a love that had learned to be unpossessive.

The head of the dead man fell back upon the living body of the sheep. And so it was that the moment most unalloyed by critical self-consciousness in all the experience of the author of the Life of Verlaine was that moment which, in human speech, it is the custom to refer to as his last.

Canyot, using his one arm with well-calculated effect, lifted the man and the sheep upon the cart he had brought from Furze Lodge. The weight of both the living and the dead was heavy upon him as he drove towards Littlegate through the darkness. She killed him because she loved him , he thought. Well! She will have his child; and I shall have — my work!

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) was born in Derbyshire, brought up in the West Country (the Somerset/Dorset border area was to have a lasting influence on him), went to Cambridge University and then became a teacher and lecturer mainly in the USA where he lived for about thirty years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his long life.

Those are the bare bones of his life. In some senses they seem unimportant when set alongside his extraordinary writing career. Not only was output prodigious, it was like nothing else in English Literature.

Indeed, George Steiner has made the bold claim that his works are ‘the only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared to the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’. And even that doesn’t touch on their multifarious strangeness.

John Cowper Powys wrote compulsively: letters, diaries, short stories, fantasies, poetry, literary criticism, philosophy and, above all, novels poured out of him. He also wrote a remarkable autobiography.

In addition to his Autobiography his masterpieces are considered to be Wolf Solent, Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Porius . But his lesser, or less well-known, works shouldn't be overlooked, they spring from the same weird, mystical, brilliant and obsessive imagination.

John Cowper Powys is a challenging author with an impressive list of admirers. In addition to George Steiner, these have included Robertson Davies, Margaret Drabble, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Miller, J. B. Priestley and Angus Wilson.