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'I have tried to write my life as if I were confessing to a priest, a philosopher, and a wise old woman. I have tried to write as if I were going to be executed when it was finished. I have tried to write it as if I were both God and Devil.' One is tempted to say only John Cowper Powys could have written that, and, beyond doubt, only John Cowper Powys could have written the idiosyncratic and spellbinding work we have here. Yes, he was influenced by Yeats and Rousseau, especially the latter's Confessions, but there is no other work quite like this. It seems almost too pedestrian to say it covers the first sixty years of his life (he lived for another thirty years) and to say anything about them, as J. B. Priestley memorably put it, 'would be like turning on a tap before introducing people to Niagara Falls.' J. B. Priestley also said 'It is a book which can be read, with pleasure and profit, over and over again. It is in fact one of the greatest autobiographies in the English language. Even if Powys had never written any novels, this one book alone would have proved him to be a writer of genius.'… (altro)
Years ago, never having read the Autobiography, I read a description of it as "extraordinary. very frank, very covert". It is certainly all of those things. An autobiography "without women" which sedulously excludes wife, mother and other female relatives, but which finds room for street girls, is one aspect of it. As a lover of JCP's major 'mid-period' novels and their intensely realised English settings it was unexpected to find the figure portrayed here to be that of a inexhaustible itinerant mountebank lecturer, rather than the settled novelist he became, and an adopted American, widely travelled within that country. Much space is occupied, too, with appreciative descriptions of some of the characters he has encountered and who have become lifelong friends. These elements to me were more unexpected and even slightly unsettling, far more so, in fact, than the incessant references to his erotic obsessions, battle with sadistic imaginings, and his persistent gastric ulcers, which all stride vigorously through this monstrous 722-page outpouring. What he has done with his life is to take the elements of his individual nature, irrespective of morality or utility, and quite deliberately focused, intensified and contemplated them until they have become explosively powerful tools to crack the secrets of both his own inmost being, and that of the universe and the nature of life itself! Such an approach, in our modern rigidly moralistic, psychoanalysed world, crammed with conventional, nay compulsory, understandings of everything to the exclusion of the individual, seems both anarchic and old-fashioned, not to say unfeasible and even discredited. Hostile critics, whether of his life or work or both, would say so: hence his reputation as a charlatan, in perhaps both life and art. But don't knock it till you've tried it. He will always divide readers and critics. Those who love his novels would do well to investigate this tome; those who don't should stay well away. ( )
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The part of Derbyshire which centres round the Peak is like the boss of a shield.
Citazioni
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi.Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
It comes to pass, even while we are still in life, that when our soul loses itself in the long continuity of kindred lives, it does not lose itself in any power less gentle, less magical, less universal than itself, or less the enemy of cruelty; for what it finds is what it brings, and what it sees is what it is; and though the First Cause may be both good and evil, a power has risen out of it against which all the evil in it and all the unthinkable atrocities it brings to pass are fighting a losing battle.
Ultime parole
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi.Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
And thus it comes to pass, even while we are still in life, that when our soul loses itself in the long continuity of kindred lives, it does not lose itself in any power less gentle, less magical, less universal than itself, or less the enemy of cruelty; for what it finds is what it brings, and what it sees is what it is; and though the First Cause may be both good and evil, a Power has risen out of it against which all the evil in it and all the unthinkable atrocities it brings to pass are fighting a losing battle.
'I have tried to write my life as if I were confessing to a priest, a philosopher, and a wise old woman. I have tried to write as if I were going to be executed when it was finished. I have tried to write it as if I were both God and Devil.' One is tempted to say only John Cowper Powys could have written that, and, beyond doubt, only John Cowper Powys could have written the idiosyncratic and spellbinding work we have here. Yes, he was influenced by Yeats and Rousseau, especially the latter's Confessions, but there is no other work quite like this. It seems almost too pedestrian to say it covers the first sixty years of his life (he lived for another thirty years) and to say anything about them, as J. B. Priestley memorably put it, 'would be like turning on a tap before introducing people to Niagara Falls.' J. B. Priestley also said 'It is a book which can be read, with pleasure and profit, over and over again. It is in fact one of the greatest autobiographies in the English language. Even if Powys had never written any novels, this one book alone would have proved him to be a writer of genius.'
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