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EARTH MEMORIES

BY

LLEWELYN POWYS

With an Introduction

by

Van Wyck Brooks

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 5

INTRODUCTION BY VAN WYCK BROOKS 6

A Struggle for Life 10

The Partridge 19

On the Other Side of the Quantocks 22

A Pond 27

The Shambles Fog-Horn 29

The Yellow Iris 31

Natural Happiness 34

Unicorn Legends 38

A Grave in Dorset 40

God 43

A Moon Circus 45

When the Unicorn Cons the Waters 49

A Locust Message 52

The Genius of Peter Breughel 55

Natural Worship 59

A Butterfly Secret 62

The Blind Cow 64

An Owl and a Swallow 67

Merton Wood’s Luncheon 69

An Ancient French House 72

A House of Correction 77

Of Egoism 80

Shakespeare’s Fairies 84

Bats Head 89

The Grave of William Barnes 92

Gypsies 95

Jordan Hill 100

The Sea! The Sea! The Sea! 102

Cerne Abbas 105

Poxwell Stone-Circle 108

St. Aldhelm’s Head 110

Dorset Cliff foxes 113

Easter in Dorset 116

West Bottom 119

Heroes Out of the Past 121

A Rector of Durweston 124

Studland 128

Weymouth Bay and the Lake of Galilee 131

Gay Leopards 134

Stinsford Churchyard 137

Out of the Past 139

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 143

DEDICATION

DEDICATED

TO

GERALD BRENAN

Friendship goes dancing round the world proclaiming to us all to awake to the praises of a happy life.

—EPICURUS.

FROM AN ANCIENT NURSERY RHYME

White bird, featherless,

Flew from Paradise,

Pitch’d on the castle wall;

Poor Lord Landless

Came in a fine dress,

Took her up handless

And never let her fall.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

GRATEFUL acknowledgment is made to the following magazines and journals for allowing certain of these essays to be reprinted: The Weymouth Carnival Magazine, The Rationalist Press Annual, Country Life, The Week-End Review, The New Statesman, The Adelphi, The London Mercury, The Dial, The Atlantic Monthly, The Dorset Echo, The Dublin Magazine, John O’London, The British Weekly, The Spectator, The Manchester Guardian and The Western Gazette.

INTRODUCTION BY VAN WYCK BROOKS

IT was in 1921 that I first saw Llewelyn Powys, in the New York office of The Freeman. He had just come from Africa, where, for five years, he had managed a sheep and cattle ranch on the shore of Lake Elmenteita. One of a group of brothers and sisters who were all but prodigiously gifted, with two great English poets among their forbears—John Donne and William Cowper—he was already at work on the sketches of African life that soon announced a master of English prose. With his bright curly hair and weathered features and his deep-set eyes that were used to the glare of the sun, with his rough gray woolen coat and sprig of holly, he had an old-country look that suggested some shaggy god in exile, an Apollo playing the shepherd in a faraway land.

When, later, he used to walk to Westport, by the Wolf Pit Road and Nash’s Pond—for he was a notable wayfarer and he often stayed at Norwalk—he gave me this impression still more strongly. He was at home in the country, and only there. Well as he knew cities, and many of them, from London to Jerusalem and San Francisco, he had nothing whatever in common with their tone and temper. Men who had forgotten how to hunt or to grow corn or catch wild fowl were mechanical dolls to this lover of life. He preferred farm laborers or gypsies. One could scarcely imagine him reading a newspaper—his style is untouched by newspaperese; and his speech was full of rustic saws and rhymes. But even in his rusticity there was something strange, a vague hint of the prehistoric that clung to his personality, with the ripeness of his culture and the sweetness of his courtesy. If the day was cold, he sometimes wore the old plaid shawl that had once belonged to the poet Edward FitzGerald, the friend of his great-uncle, old Donne. Cold or not, the day seemed always May-day. He had contrived to find a little knot of field flowers where no other eye had seen them by the road, and he had brought spring with him in his hand. But this spring, in his talk and presence, recalled the pagan rites of Druids and the ancient earth-worship of the flint-men. It was not the spring of modern poets, or even of Herrick or Shakespeare, although Powys repeats their note in many essays. It evoked the first may-poles in the dawn of England, the smell of goats, the chants of the diviners in days when men whose bones lie under barrows, mad in their zest for living, adored the sun.

At that time, no one knew Llewelyn Powys as the formidable pagan thinker he has since become. He had not yet published The Cradle of God, that wonderful meditation on the biblical story, so grave and often sublime, perhaps the most deeply reasoned of all his writings. While few true believers have embraced the story with any such poetic understanding, he follows Ecclesiastes there as elsewhere: For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything. In half a dozen other books, he reiterates this with a splendid eloquence. Brief as a rainbow your dream also will be. There is no clemency, no reprieve, no escape; no, not for the strongest heart deep mortised in life. There is no existence save that of the senses, no acceptable state of consciousness aside from this, and the senses die with the beasts of the field—such is the burden of his thinking. One doubts if there has been a writer since Robert Burton and Thomas Browne in whom the contrast of life and death has inspired more magnificent periods. But why this passion of negation? It suggests an immense vitality incomparably menaced, and that this is the case we can see in his beautiful essays in autobiography, especially Skin for Skin and Black Laughter. In more than one sense, FitzGerald’s mantle has fallen upon his shoulders, for Omar’s phantom Caravan never included a mighty hunter with a keener sense than his of the bird of time. But he himself has said, I cannot reconcile myself to the lack of gusto that FitzGerald displays in his quatrains, their wan Pre-Raphaelite sadness; and his own gusto, his thirst for life, is beyond all measure virile and eager. When such a man for thirty years dwells in the constant presence of death, he may well find the light sweet and rejoice that his eyes behold the sun. When every hour of every day has been snatched from the hand of fate, the things of the hour and the day are beyond all price. It is true that in some minds, in these conditions, the super-sensual world becomes all-important; and perhaps for most men, under any conditions, a philosophy of the senses is insufficient. But most of the pessimists—for Powys is a pessimist—are so because they find life insufficient, whereas for him existence is a daily rapture.

It might not be difficult, running through Powys’s various books, to trace the natural history of his view of life. In the Swiss sanitarium, which he describes in Skin for Skin, he first became convinced that nothing mattered. To possess the present, to see, to hear, to taste, to touch, this was enough for a young man who believed that he was dying and who could almost feel his nostrils, mouth and ear-holes bunged with potter’s clay. His African adventure accentuated this animal faith. Kill! kill! kill! was the rhythm of existence there, hand against hide, claw against horn, beak against fur. In the trees moulting vultures waited, and the jackal and hyena prowled at night. Every game-path and open glen was frequented by silent-footed shadows on their eternal quest for blood, and life was a perpetual pursuit, a perpetual flight. There chance was the only law, and the past was nothing, the future nothing. All nature seemed to cry, Seize the moment; and Llewelyn Powys’s writings have shown us with what superb and reckless courage a man can hold this faith and act upon it. No one has ever lived more dangerously, and few indeed are the modern writers who have drawn such a harvest of joy from their moment of life. As sensitive as a hare in the brush or a dace switching his tail in some English river, he has thrown the huntsman off the scent and eluded the fisherman’s hook, while snuffing the sun-soaked earth and exulting in wind and water. His astonishing gift of metaphor and the richness of his language are proofs of this alertness of the senses; and with what zest he absorbs new places and new atmospheres, how expert he is in describing new sensations! There are passages in his travel-writings about Africa and the Rocky Mountains, Palestine, Switzerland and Capri that fairly take one’s breath away. One feels as if these places had never been seen before, so startling are the reports of his rabble senses. What reader can ever forget, for instance, the chapter in Black Laughter in which the man of God appears in his hut at night?—the witch-doctor’s cry outside, with all the lunatic misery of the debased outraged soul of the African Negro, the motionless form that invades the room with its odor of rotting blood and flesh and the footprints stamped in the dust of the threshold, visible with the rising sun, one a foot with toes, the other a foot with claws. No palate was ever more sensitive to the wine of life, however the wine may be mingled at moments with gall.

Wherever Llewelyn Powys has lived, his mind has always turned towards England, the homeland that haunts him like a passion. Under the stars in the African jungle, poring over Robert Burton, whose rhythms have left long traces in his style—a style that is often archaic and always rare in texture—he dreamed of English gardens. In New York, in the clattering streets, he would see the cuckoo perched singing on the top of Sandsfoot Castle. He can always regain serenity, he says in one of his essays, by thinking of the playground of his childhood, the pear trees of Montacute Vicarage. High as his fever may be, the memory of this enchanted ground quiets his pulse in a moment; and his pictures of England suggest the eye of the convalescent, as if the world had been reborn for him. They are full of an all but miraculous freshness. He has told us with what delight, returning home, after his exile in Switzerland, when all his sensibilities had been sharpened by illness, he absorbed the sights and sounds of the Somerset meadows, how he came to know every lane and bypath, the character of each field-gate, the gap in every hedge, the alder-shaded pools and grass-strewn bartons. Scrambling about the high chalk cliffs with the rain lashing against his face, he studied every rock and ledge of curlews, marveling over the gleaming pebbles, the cries of the gulls at dawn and the old stone circles of the Druids. In all the years that have passed since then he has kept his astonishing sensitivity, as the readers of this volume will discover. Indeed, he perceives more acutely than ever the homestead and the farmwain, the glittering dew on spider’s web and burdock, the barking of foxes at twilight and every common earthy odor, the smell of the fur of water-rats and of horses’ backs hot in the sun. He can tell you the sound of a hare drinking in some dreamy meadow where owls with clutching pounces float from tree to tree. England for Powys is still a mirage-world, quivering with yellow sunshine and hay-field grasses. It inspires in him that heightened awareness of the poetry of existence which he never ceases to praise as the true religion.

Beneath this sensuous England there are other Englands that have left their deposit in his mind. One feels in his pages depths upon depths of historic experience, a life of the heart and the soul as well as the instincts that carries one back to the men of the old stone circles. I have said that a hint of the prehistoric clings to his personality. Is it because he retains some trace of every epoch, or because his interior world knows nothing of time? A deeply compassionate nature, he is indifferent to secular interests. We should grow less involved in society, he says in Damnable Opinions, and more deeply involved in existence. His chosen companions are those for whom existence is incomparably more engrossing than the things of the world, the fisherman, peasants and shepherds for whom time has no reality and who live, as he wishes to live, in the fugitive moment. Deeply akin as he is to these earth-bound natures, he shares their poetry and wisdom. But let no one suppose that Llewelyn Powys is merely another nature-writer, eloquent, observant and persuasive. He has something to say to this age of despair and darkness, an age in which writers in all the tongues of Babel repeat that life is futile and worse than nothing. It may be that only a man who has had to fight for existence can prize it and exult in it as he does, beating his forehead upon the grass in jubilant acquiescence and uttering daily paeans to the earth and the sun. All the more should we cherish his will and his courage and the noble and beautiful art that permits us to share them.

VAN WYCK BROOKS

Westport, Connecticut

A Struggle for Life

IT was in the month of November of the year 1909 that I first discovered I was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. Up till that time, although I had been conscious of feeling unwell, I had never suspected the serious nature of my malady. Probably it was fortunate that the disease so early in its advance broke a blood vessel. I was immediately examined by a doctor, who declared that I must leave England for a health-resort in Switzerland as soon as ever I was in a fit state to travel. Meanwhile the windows of my bedroom were removed from their frames and for three weeks I lay on my back contemplating the bare elms and misty autumnal roof-tops of the town of Sherborne, from, as it were, some open barn-loft unprotected from the weather.

Always of a nervous temperament, the doctor’s diagnosis had been no small shock. As each morning I was waked from my restless dreams by the ringing of the bell of the convent in Long Street it seemed incredible that it was I, already so inordinate a lover of life, who had been selected as a victim to this terrible disease, selected almost certainly to die young.

I feel ashamed now when I think of how I dramatized my illness, talking incessantly of what it felt like to be dying, to be dying of consumption! My five brothers came to my bedside and with each of them in turn I discussed my fate. And as the rain drifted gustily in on to the bare deal floor, which in consequence gave out continually the curious chilled smell of a room where scrubbing has lately been in progress, they would lend their attention to the subject with philosophic detachment, treating it in a tone as frank as my own, for all the world like five disillusioned jackdaws gathering about one of their kind who has been winged by a sportsman’s gun. I asserted emphatically that if I lived to be thirty I should be satisfied.

The excitement of going to Switzerland kept me in good spirits; though occasionally it happened, in spite of all my bravado, that I became conscious of a dull uneasy sense of lonely apprehension as though I were about to set out upon a journey the length and weariness of which I could not foresee. For example, when a workman from the village at home who had come to visit me casually remarked that I had a churchyard cough I felt myself immediately wide awake to the reality of my predicament, a predicament devoid of sentiment, bereft of drama, bleak, unpretentious, and natural.

The first few months of my stay in Switzerland saw me recovering rapidly. If I had had the wit to return to England then, all might have been well; instead I allowed myself to be persuaded to stay on through the summer so as to make sure of my cure. Immediately I became careless and spent time diverting myself in the company of patients who were sick in bed. I believe by this means I reinfected myself, for otherwise I can in no way account for the fact that my sickness, quite unexpectedly, took a turn for the worse. The disease now advanced more rapidly than it had ever done. All the dreaded symptoms of consumption began to show themselves. I felt poisoned, listless, and would easily fall asleep only to wake up drenched with sweat. Each night my cheeks burned with an ever increasing fever. Each time that I was weighed it was found that I had lost several pounds. In a few weeks I became so thin that I could easily enclose my thigh in the small circle made by holding my two thumbs and two first fingers together. My decline had been so rapid that it seemed certain I should be dead within a few months. I could tell by their discreet manners that the Sanatorium doctors thought as much. Every time I coughed, with a sickening sense of impending physical disaster, I tasted corruption, as though at its very center my body harbored some foul mildew.

My attitude to mortality has always been childish. Invariably when I contemplate death my thoughts turn to the fate of my body, as though my timorous consciousness would still be aware of what happens to it after I am dead. Looking now into the future I shivered, my mind recoiling desperately from the thought that before the Christmas of 1910 I would be a member of that recumbent congregation of all nationalities who lie on their shoulder-blades, under the mountain snow, row upon row of them, to the right and to the left of the black-spired Protestant church of Davos-Platz.

Then on the night of July 11th I had a hemorrhage. The shock of it caused me to tremble from crown to heel; but I believe, for all that, it saved my life, clearing away much diseased tissue and allowing me, as it were, to make a fresh start in my struggle for life. In the early part of the night the doctors were at my bedside constantly injecting me with gelatine. Later, they were called away to a neighboring room to attend a young English boy named Burton who also had been taken suddenly ill. All through that night my abrupt fits of coughing, the particular significance of which could not be mistaken by anyone acquainted with the sickness, were answered by the abrupt fits of coughing of my friend, as he also gasped for breath, in his small hygienic room on the further side of the white corridor. Towards morning the blood ceased to flow and I lay on my back not daring to move, watching a moth crawl up and down the flat impassive face of a large window-pane which already had received upon its surface the first pale indications of dawn. After the hemorrhage I remained in bed for four months. Throughout this time I was under the care of a Norwegian nurse to whose tireless devotion I have always felt I owe my life. Three weeks after the attack I was allowed to see my friend Wilbraham. I asked for news of Burton. "Burton! Why, Burton has been dead and