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The Chapel at Colgate University
Photo John D. Hubbard
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On the night of December 9, 1929, the Colgate Chapel had few empty seats. Townspeople, students and faculty had come in great numbers to hear John Cowper Powys. Professors E.W. Smith, Stanley Baldwin, and Carl Kallgren looked pleased. They had worked hard persuading other professors, townspeople, and students to buy tickets at fifty cents each. The usual Chapel speaker was a returned missionary - always good, often dull. John Cowper Powys, the first literary man of stature to visit Colgate, would be different. In the Chapel that winter night he spoke as one who had had both a blood and a spirit transfusion from the author whose work he was praising and appraising. He was a glow from the central light in the mind and heart of his subject. On the platform, tall, dark, mercurial, he glided about like a man possessed. He had, more than any other person I have ever heard, the ability to make great numbers of people feel that reading good books can be an experience attended by excitement and delight. His own speech was as spontaneous as birdsong. Loud and prolonged was the applause of the Hamilton-Colgate audience. And I found myself telling myself, "It's going to be rough on the next good man from China or Africa."
(Russell Speirs, A Man from the West Country - Philobiblon)
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The subject of John Cowper's lectures is such a vast one that necessitates some explanations. As he tells us in Autobiography he was greeted on his arrival in the States by Frederick B. Miles, President of the ASEUT. And for about six years he worked with the Society's Secretary, Charles D. Atkins. During these years Powys combined exhausting tours in America with his lecture tours in England. In 1911 he decided to remain in America, and soon was enroled in the University Lecturers Association of New York, the ASEUT's rival association, set up by Louis Wilkinson and Arnold Shaw. Fleeing to America must have seemed to him the solution. And so it was that America was going to provide a wide space which Powys would criss-cross for a quarter of a century.
It is curious the way a person can adapt himself to a life apparently completely alien to that for which he was born! This whole long epoch of my life, from the time when I was forty till the time when I was fifty-five, I spent almost entirely in trains and hotels. It was a queer existence. (Autobiography)
Extract from a letter addressed to The Dial by J.W. Abernethy, April 5, 1917:
It was my official duty, a few years ago, to attend Mr Powys's lectures for the purpose of reporting on their character and influence to the trustees of the institution for which he was lecturing. I found a clever, literary vaudeville performer, entertaining a gaping and tittering audience with irreverent balderdash and "stunts" of every conceivable sort.
Mr Powys loves freedom and hates restraint. He groans under the "dead weight of cultivated opinions". He abhors the necessity of being respectable, his soul yearns for the happy liberty of the hairy savage and the dancing satyrs.
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But to return to my own affairs at a much later date I began to grow aware as I went about this continent that I was really performing a definite rôle in America, a rôle where I had no rival. I mean I was attracting to myself like a magnet all the neurotic unhappy ones, all the lonely ones, all the misfits, in the whole country. I became the acknowledged enemy, and I hope I shall always remain so, of all the well-constituted and successful, as these opposed themselves to the failures and the abjects and the ill-adjusted. (Autobiography)
For about twenty five years, John Cowper earned his life as a renowned lecturer who travelled to all the states except two, as he says in his Preface to Wolf Solent. All the people who attended John Cowper's lectures are unanimous to say that he was endowed with extraordinary gifts. When he was young he had entertained the desire to become an actor and for his listeners every time he ascended a platform to deliver his lecture, clad in his Oxford gown 'which was really a Cambridge gown', it was an unforgettable experience. He had a fine voice and he spoke entirely without notes.
When I stopped, after lecturing for an hour and a half, or even sometimes for two hours, I felt light, airy, frivolous, gay and butterfly-like; whereas my audience were so wilted, so drooping, so exhausted, so wrung-out, that they were like people who had spent a night of the extremest form of erotic debauch! (Autobiography)
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We have the testimony of four people who attended his lectures. One was Clayton Hoagland, then an art student in his early twenties, who came to Powys's lectures in Cooper Union after work, at the end of 1925:
As I recall, his voice was strong, and particularly full-rounded, and, as it was a time before microphones were commonly used, he had to fill the large hall with the sound of it. I should say the hall was well over half occupied, perhaps 700 or so.
...I have no recollection that he read from anything, or even appeared to use notes, but he could be described as "orating". He had a large, elastic mouth, deep-set eyes, and began his peripatetic movements usually from a stance in which his legs were spread, and his hands behind him. He had broad shoulders, held the left higher, and made remarkable use of his long arms. He would bend one, with fist clenched, and swing the other, as he strode across the broad stage, tilting his head, one shoulder thrown up. He spoke slowly, and struck his poses for emphasis. He undoubtedly won the interest and attention of his audience, for I noted in my journal that the applause was "long and loud, after an hour of intense listening." (C. Hoagland, "I am a born orator", The Powys Newsletter, 1970, Colgate Univ.)
The other eye-witness is Anne M. Reed who attended three of his lectures at Columbia University in New York City in November 1930:
Powys in 1930 was a slender sapling, head up, eyes flashing, arms waving bat-like, feet limber and dancing. He skipped about at times like a grass-hopper, yet his face was like that of an old falcon. His actions were those of a sprite, his head like that of an eagle.
I had read many of his works and was electrified by his astonishing appearance when on Monday evening, Nov. 10, 1930, I went to hear him talk on Dante. He looked like a bat, especially when he opened wide his arms, a favorite gesture - for he wore that night, over evening vest of black, a silk gown with wide flowing sleeves - all black - but, unlike most college gowns, it was short, reaching barely to his knees. The black trousers depending from this full skirted, short gown, ended in black shrouded feet, and I cannot recall white about his neck if there were any. His face was thin, lined and eager, his delivery rapid, incisive, fiery.
And Anne Reid describing him in a following lecture adds:
Soon, however, warming to his subject, he careered nimbly from side to side of the shallow stage, he fixed you with his eagle eye, or pointed his finger at people in the front row - of whom I was one. He hurled his sentences as if daring you to contradict even in thought; and few there were, I am sure, who wished to do so. He ended suddenly, and fleetly disappeared behind the wings, as if fearing some one might approach to greet him. (Powys Journal, Vol. VII)
But the most surprising and what struck many people, who later described the phenomenon, was the personification that took place under their eyes, which was noticed also by such professionals as Maurice Browne of the Chicago Little Theatre:
Once I heard him talk on Hardy for over two hours to an audience of over two thousand in a huge auditorium in the heart of Chicago's slums; throughout those one hundred and thirty odd minutes there was not a sound from his listeners save an occasional roar of applause or laughter; and when he had finished speaking we rose like one person to our feet, demanding more. The man was a great actor.(Maurice Browne, Too Late to Lament)
Powys himself was aware of this:
It was really a great new art. By getting rid of all "high-brow" solemnity, of all academic "correctness" and "documentation," under the Rabelaisian encouragement of my unique circus-manager, I succeded eventually in hollowing myself out, like an elder-stalk with the sap removed, so that my whole personality, every least movement I made, and every least sound I made, and every flicker, wrinkle, and quiver of my face, became expressive of the particular subject I was interpreting. I was "the Reed shaken by the Wind "that the people did go forth into the desert to see; but the fact that Arnold and I had the same schoolboy contempt for every species of pretentiousness made me in the end a sort of deboshed John the Baptist. I became in fact the kind of Jokanaan that a Salome might really have loved before she cut off his head. (Autobiography p.449)
In all these lectures, that were so much more than lectures, I worked myself up to such a pitch that I became the figure I was analysing...I gave myself up to the spirit of my particular man of genius. and it was with almost an erotic emotion, as if I were indulging myself in some kind of perverted love affair, that I entered the nerves of Dickens or Paul Verlaine or Henry James or Dostoievsky or Keats or Blake!...What I aimed at was a sort of transmigration of my soul, till, like a demon possessing a person, I serpentined myself into the skeleton of my author, and expounded his most eccentric reactions to life from the actual nerve-centres where these reactions originated. (Autobiography p.457)
Many other people have watched, awe-struck, the prodigy that was John Cowper on the platform and recorded it later. Joseph Resnick, for instance, wrote about his memories of Powys lecturing:
In his lecture on Shakespeare's Hamlet, he became Hamlet himself, filling the reincarnation with a revivified eclat. As his audience waited for him in the rows of simple benches in the Labor Temple on 14th Street, at Second Avenue, he arrived as at a summons from some high authority. Swinging down the middle aisle, as turned heads became aware of the wind of his arrival, he dashed towards the steps of the platform with the air of one entrusted with some valued news. Hoisted on the stage, he breathed the incense of his own presence, flung the shock of hair backwards over his head and thrusting the folds of his great black cape to either side of him, surveyed with surprise the attentive congregation before him.
His form lurched toward left and right, the lids of his eyes opening like shields of auto-lights, his gaze already beyond the precincts of lecture-hall and listeners. His words carried the vibrations of his flesh and mind, married to the flutterings of unreachable spaces.
(...)
His words were woven with the intense thrust of his thought. He paced the platform as though indeed he were alone in a cell expostulating to the walls the uncontainable fervor of his being. So visual did he become that what he was saying also seemed to take on bodily form and reached his hearers with physical force.
(...)
Strangely, however much one attached every word of Powys to the image of himself, this had the extraordinary pervasiveness for absorbing and understanding his utterances in the lightning intensity of one's own excitement. One carried away not the accumulation of a linkage of words, but the impress of a figure illuminated by life and giving life its illumination. (in "Stroker 21" Magazine, New York, 1981)
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