Autobiography by John Cowper Powys

Author:John Cowper Powys
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, British Literature, Philosophy
ISBN: 9780571309467
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

What I realized at that time was indeed nothing less than the very thing I had so delighted that Chinaman, as I fumbled towards it, drunk with Corpus wine, by just touching—the mystic marriage of Psyche and Eros!

Tough-minded clever people would have gazed with humorous disgust at my antics under the combined spell of Lily and the Roman liturgy. “Hypocritical loathsome sentimentality!” they would have thought. But I am prepared now, after thirty years, to defend my raptures to the uttermost! You can’t sponge a powerful emotion such as I had then off the slate by repeating “disgusting sentimentality.” The fragrance from the personality of Lily—though the cheap scents she used were worse than the pieces of felt with which she padded her little body—cast a glamour round whole districts of London for me! It was in “the Borough” I used generally to meet her. How well I came to know all those streets that led southward, past the old Elephant and Castle! I used sometimes to cross London Bridge to reach this district, and sometimes Waterloo Bridge. The words “The New Cut” come drifting back to me in connection with those happy days. But though the names grow faint that belong to the great City, her spirit does not, nor her divine courage, nor her infinite relish for life, nor her subtleties in enjoying it! Country-born and country-bred as I was, my quest for the magic that women alone can work endeared London for ever to me! In Paris I found pornography enough, enough to satisfy the trembling knees and the shaking fingers, but in London, always, always, I found poetry and romance! If I did not quite reach the point of crying with Elia: “O City abounding in whores, for thee may Rainbarrow and Bullbarrow, Pilsden and Polden, Alfred’s Tower and Shaston Camp go hang!” it is certain that the girlish magic which emanated from the consumptive chest, padded hips, and false jewellery of Lily gave to London, especially on Shakespeare’s side of the Thames, a deep rich intoxicating glory, like one of those quivering sketches of Turner, where the thick smoke clings about funnels and masts and bridges and warehouses, like the desire of a lover about the limbs of his mistress!

It was in some dark, sombre warehouse-shop, just the sort of place that Dickens, after Scott and Hardy always my favourite novelist, would turn into a circus-tent of angels and demons, that I bought a little leather-bound Roman Psalmody. Do you think I refrained from making Lily write her name—“With love from Lily”—in the title-page of this book? I can well remember the very spot where I made her do this in a street near Kennington but she scolded me, like the ultra-conventional girl she was, for “attracting attention” by writing in a book in a place “where it might make anyone wonder.”

I am sure I am not deceiving myself when I say that Lily never had any particular affection for me. I was continually shocking

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