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The Brazen Head

de John Cowper Powys

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995273,273 (3.58)5
In this panoramic novel of Friar Roger Bacon, John Cowper Powys displays his genius at its most fecund. First published in 1956, this novel, set in thirteenth-century Wessex, is an amalgam of all the qualities that make John Cowper Powys unique. The love-story of Lil-Umbra and Raymond de Laon, and the quest of the Mongolian giant, Peleg, for Ghosta, the girl seen, loved, and lost on the battlefield, are intermingled with the historical, theological and magical threads which form the brocade of this novel. Dominating all is the mysterious creation of Roger Bacon one of the boldest as well as most intricate of Powys' world-changing inventions. Professor G. Wilson Knight called this 'A book of wisdom and wonders'.… (mais)
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Exibindo 5 de 5
Powys seems to have enjoyed himself writing this at 84. Lots of humour and many barbs at the Church for its overbearing sequestration of spirituality. The plot is thin - but the characters are wonderful, weird and eccentric.
  ivanfranko | Jun 8, 2021 |
After Porius, John Cowper Powys wrote three late novels, when he was aged 78-84 and had found a sympathetic publisher who exerted no control. The Inmates, set in a lunatic asylum; Atlantis, on Odysseus' voyage west in old age, but more about an insurrection against the Olympian order by a Chaos of individual life and the older divinities of giants, animals, women. Powys was always engaged in a fight against the scientific view of life - a prophet on behalf of what he called the magical view. This left him 'so alien to the temper of the age as to be impossible for people to take seriously' (a quote from Wiki). What serious novelist has the First Cause, away in the universe, interact with the organism of his hero – in the first paragraph? - A Glastonbury Romance. Attributes thoughts to stray leaves that float into the human action of a scene? Posits the care and the vain attempts at emotional emanation of an old oak towards a frightened lamb bleating in its shelter?

These latter examples are from The Brazen Head, the last of his late novels put out by Faber Finds. Its plot obviously tackles questions of science and religion; but strangely at first glance, the sanest people in the book are the scientists – Friar Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus – who furthermore think of themselves as conventional Christians still. The most insane is a guy who walks about with a phallic lodestone down his pants, in contact with his sex organs – he's always got a hand on it, too – with which he conducts experiments in magnetism upon people. Roger Bacon has invented a brass human head that has the rudiments of thought and can utter oracles. The head too is baptised by a sexual magic, a woman's this time.

What is this brazen head about? I don't know. Maybe I'll figure that out next time. And what's the point of the horse that wanders through the story – a “superintelligent” horse who has silent communications with people – with a deformation in its neck that everybody takes to be a human head about to burst out, that everybody is drawn to and obsesses over, to the horse's sad patience? I don't know that either. I'm a bit defeated by what I must feel to be the irresolution of the plot, at the end. Though I hesitate to declare the plotting faulty, since I might not be getting it.

I also felt as a fault that he descends into comedy: I say descends because he comes across as satirising himself. He's perfectly allowed to satirise himself at the age of 84, so I don't know why I have a quarrel. A couple of techniques I do like: his convoluted or crazily fantastic similes; and speech that at times is not naturalistic but better-than, as if the writer gives you what they meant, what they tried to say, or even a rendition of unformulated thoughts (I found this effective in M. John Harrison's Viriconium stories; and why does a novelist have to decline this trick, that old poets had up their sleeves?)

I am attracted to these late, weird, fantastical works – when he had a friend he knew was going to publish whatever he wrote; when the prophet in him didn't have much time left to get his message out. For those who wonder whether they want to read a writer known for mysticism, can I quote this, that I suspect to be his own beliefs at this stage of his life? I'll quote extensively because it's what I'd want to know before I touched a mystical novelist with a bargepole. You can skip the passage if that word doesn't scare you. Sir Mort Abyssum's wife reports on his philosophy:

Sir Mort's theory was – and though he would swear to her and to the children that it was based on his own experience, she never could see, however excited he got about it, that it was possible for one man's experience to cover such an immense field – that there was what he was pleased to describe as an invisible Dimension that existed over the whole surface of land and sea; and that into this Dimension rushed all the thoughts and feelings and passions and even sensations of everything that was subject to these things. His theory culminated in the amazing dogma that everything that existed had such feelings, not even excluding rocks and stones and earth-mould... In fact he insisted that this invisible Dimension, or atmospheric sounding-board, of the planet upon which we live, while predominant in it are the feelings of all living men, women and children, includes also the feelings of all beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects and worms as well as of trees, plants, mosses, funguses, grasses and all vegetation. And when we thus speak of the projected thoughts and feelings and emotions of all things, it must be remembered that we are not suggesting the existence of any actual souls that can survive the death of their bodily presence. When we are dead, Sir Mort maintained, we are absolutely dead. But while we live we are all, including the myriads of sub-human lives in air, on land, and in water, from whales to earth-worms and the tiniest gnats, in constant contact with an invisible overshadowing atmospheric mist, crowded with feelings and dreams and emotions and what might be called sense-emanations and thought-eidola issuing from all that exists, whether superhuman, human, or sub-human, whether organic or inorganic. This atmospheric dimension does not, Sir Mort argued, contain the sort of entities we are in the habit of thinking of as souls; for these perish when we perish, but it contains the thoughts and feelings and intimations and sensations which, though they grow fainter with time, do not cease to exist when the body and soul which projected them have both come to an end.

If you haven't run away, you can see what a canvas he has to paint on, or what a cast he has available; why an ancient pine nearby can comment on human goings-on; why the story can follow the fate of a leaf that happens to waft through a conversation – with concern for that leaf. He’s a novelist of psychic processes, or physical-psychic processes – way way way beyond ‘he thought this, she thought that.’ He delves into sub-thoughts, quasi-thoughts and a hell of a lot of other experiences. Certainly I've never seen 'psyche, psychic' used so frequently. It's his sphere.

Here’s a sequence that I thought captured a few reasons why I read him – that might convey what is typical of him. Two gentle and decent people, Roger Bacon and Friar Tuck the priory cook, are having a sensible conversation, in the midst of which the novelist decides to tell us, in total non-sequitur: what a moment this would have been for a perfect proof as to how the most unorthodox, improper, shameless, outrageous thoughts flit through the heads of upright, honest, and thoroughly good men busy with entirely blameless activities! For Brother Tuck wondered how soon Prior Bog would detect something amiss if he, Tuck of Abbotsbury, fried his own excrement for the Priory supper; and Roger of Ilchester wondered whether it would be possible for a female yellow-hammer to lay eggs if she were impregnated by a dead mate who had been galvanised into momentary sexual excitement by a thunderstorm. Roger Bacon has picked up a yellow-hammer that dashed itself to death in the room. He keeps it in lap or hand through the conversation, and being under house-arrest, asks Tuck to attend to its last rites: he was suddenly seized with a pang of remorse for not having already thrown the bird's little feathered corpse out of the window so that the first-born of the innumerable little worms that were bound to be engendered out of the putrefying corpse beneath those tender feathers might not perish in being thus separated from the elements... “O please take this, will you, Tuck, and bury it somewhere? Bury it just underground, not more than an inch or two deep – you can make a hole with a stick, or anything you find under your hand: it needn't be deep down – but I want it to be quickly and properly eaten by worms, not flown away with by carrion-crows, or lugged off down a rat-hole! See what I mean, Tuck, my old friend?”

Which called to mind Hamlet's 'If the sun breed maggots in a dead dog –' – only here’s a version with true religiosity, that line converted into a hymn. Next I thought of St Francis and the birds - founder of these friars’ order, patron saint of animals. John Cowper Powys felt so strongly about cruel animal experimentation he wrote a novel in protest – that's Morwyn. Cruelty and power are his evils, from what I've gathered so far: I think he had anarchic leanings, and there's a spokesperson for the serf oppressed in this novel, a revolutionary old granddad.

A very strange writer, nothing if not original, who has me utterly intrigued. I'm off to explore Atlantis next. I four-star only because I think both Atlantis and Porius are going to be better. ( )
3 vote Jakujin | Jun 16, 2012 |
Imagine The Name of the Rose written by DH Lawrence in a Tolkein novel.

It is 1272. Roger Bacon, Franciscan, Aristotelian, scientist and inventor, and probably the most modern mind of the medieval world, is a virtual prisoner of the Catholic Church in Bumsett Priory in Wessex. He has constructed a brazen head, an automaton. His arch enemy Bonaventure, soon to be Pope, arrives to interrogate him for heresy. Bacon’s allies summon Albert of Cologne to assist in the debate. Meanwhile, the Lord of the Manor of Roque, Sir Mort, is engaged with war with the neighbouring lord of Lost Towers, the evil Sir Maldung. Peter Peregrinus, sometime mercenary, owner of a lodestone, magician, has come to Bumsett to destroy the head and proclaim himself antichrist in the presence of Bonaventure. Meanwhile, the giant Peleg, loyal henchman of Sir Mort, has been reunited with his lost love the jewish girl Ghosta, who is chosen by Bacon to assist in the baptism of the brazen head…

Welcome to the strange world of John Cowper Powys, one of the most eccentric and brilliant of the British novelists of the 20th century.

The medieval world is conjured up magnificently, especially in the relationship of the main characters with nature, which is a strong presence in the book, as it is in all Cowper Powys’s work. Powys’s view of man’s place in nature is profoundly holistic, mystical, metaphysical. Trees, streams, marshes, flora and fauna take on living characteristics, and have as strong an impact on events as do ideas and historical forces. In an incident that is typical of Powys’s world view, one of the characters, in running across a field to stop the marauders, slips and falls, because he has by chance or fate or causality stepped on two baby moles who have just been weaned and have crawled to the mouth of their burrow, where they are blissfully asleep in the sun for the first time in their tiny lives, only to be crushed into a bloody mess by the heel of the runner. Most of the similes in the book revolve around natural processes of decay and regeneration, and the descriptions of nature are marvellous.

Cowper Powys is profoundly anti-Catholic, and the internal monologues of Bonaventure are sardonically funny, satirising the pretentious nonsense of scholasticism and the theologians. I must make them understand that I have so yielded myself to God that His will is now my will and my will entirely His will…. It is all in my love for God and His love for me. We love each other so much that I feel sure God allowed me to be with Him…. When anyone loves God as I do He gives you wonderful privileges…Part of the narrator’s rage at the Catholic church is the way that Christianity has usurped the power of love for its own nefarious ends, and this is also the occasion for sarcasm: You may now learn that the great God of Love, and I his disciple in Love, are about to punish punish punish this thrice accurst Roger Bacon, till not only his Brazen Head but his own worse than brazen skull will split into atoms.

In contrast to the iniquities of religion, is this image of Bacon and Ghosta observing the dust motes dancing in a beam of sunlight. Bacon comments: This whole business of being one of the lucky millions of dust-specks, out of the trillions and quadrillions of less lucky ones, must be so exciting to every one of those little objects that the whole of its being would be so absorbed in what is happening to it that it wouldn’t have a particle of power left to ask a question of anybody. Yes, and I would say… that if it had any choice left to it, it would feel it was wiser to lavish all its power of response on that lucky moment than to ponder on suitable philosophical questions to put to-….

The image and the comment on it are typical of Cowper Powys’s whole world view, which emphasises the immediacy of individual response to life, a metaphysical view of nature, and a revolt against bullshit and authority. The book is full of marvels, full of insights, remarkably drawn characters, and all presented in rich, lush prose. Cowper Powys is the kind of writer who is not afraid to take risks. He doesn’t always pull them off, but you have to admire him for trying. An oddity, to be sure, but there is more sheer originality of vision and art on one page of Cowper Powys than in whole books by most contemporary novelists. ( )
13 vote tomcatMurr | Jul 25, 2010 |
What is it about those severed heads? ( )
1 vote | Porius | Oct 13, 2008 |
Prof. Alice KIskimin whom I had for late Chaucerian poetry at Yale, recommended Cowper Powys to me. I did not get into him then. but I am still trying
  antiquary | May 28, 2012 |
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It did not take Lil-Umbra long with her fifteen-year-old legs and her slender figure to scamper down the quarter-of-a-mile avenue of over-arching elms that led due eastward from the Fortress of Roque, where she lived, to the ancient circle of Druidic stones that had come to be known as "Castrum Sanctum".
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In this panoramic novel of Friar Roger Bacon, John Cowper Powys displays his genius at its most fecund. First published in 1956, this novel, set in thirteenth-century Wessex, is an amalgam of all the qualities that make John Cowper Powys unique. The love-story of Lil-Umbra and Raymond de Laon, and the quest of the Mongolian giant, Peleg, for Ghosta, the girl seen, loved, and lost on the battlefield, are intermingled with the historical, theological and magical threads which form the brocade of this novel. Dominating all is the mysterious creation of Roger Bacon one of the boldest as well as most intricate of Powys' world-changing inventions. Professor G. Wilson Knight called this 'A book of wisdom and wonders'.

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