'...reading two Books that I wd. give a lot to know your reaction to - both by the same bloke or chap or fellow or partner or Mr or Johnny - I don't know what he looks like. But he loathes humanity & retches at the common man's common ways, he vomits at the rampaging spectacle of the human zoo and at the horrors of the concentration camp of all human relations! And Nature (that patient Rest Home for the Maniac-Monkey-Magnons of the Powys family's Cave) is no help to him. He doesn't cotton to it. He sees spiders, he scents skunks, he fears snakes, & he is watched by Vultures.
Where therefore does this high-minded distinguished intellectual artist look? I mean whither does he wander? He drifts in among the little secret pleasures of (no, I must not blaspheme) of the Blessed Trinity; & there finds peace. I speak of Mr Graham Greene - not of the other two or three Greens of this epoch. The literary world seems to be only too green - "They must have their greens" as a Major-General once said to me, referring to the copulations of his troops...The books I refer to are 'Brighton Rock' and 'The Power & the Glory'. Now this Greene - whether he be a Greene you could call "old fellow" or wd. speak of as a matey pard - is clearly a Catholic, and by the Mass none of that bunch has fascinated, allured, infuriated and HORRIFIED me as he in these two books. They find my spot, they get my goat, they tickle my gizzard, they reach the place of the little me that's inside the inside of my Master Johnny Start-Up...'
from a letter dated September 15, 1945 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment