Like, I suspect, many of you, I have spent most of the last week digesting – or trying to digest – the results of the election last week. And I have many Thoughts. But none that you cannot read elsewhere, better expressed, by more knowledgeable people. I have also read The Owl, the Duck, and – Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe!, a novella? – short story? – reissued by Michael Walmer Publishers, in which fantasy, existentialism and quantum physics unite to beautiful effect. And this I recommend to you, very strongly, if you are a fan of these things.
It is spring in a filthy, ‘clanging’ city, ‘littered with sordid lives, strewn with wind-tost debris and bitter dust, exhaling mephitic stenches and corpse-chills’. An old couple, former circus performers, eke out their last days in a flat at the top of a house in a blind alley, poised between the railway and the Old Market Prison. Battered intermittently by the ‘howls of prisoners’ and the ‘mitigated thunder’ of the trains, which cause the flat to ‘shiver and shake’, the sole note of beauty is provided by several ailanthus trees, rooted in ‘the dusty ground’. The old couple live in fear of the Authorities, who periodically invade their flat to threaten them with being taken into a Home:
Had these days, which were marked, not in the Catholic but in the Commercial Calendar, been more frequent than they were, the old couple [...] would doubtless, like many other old couples in our energetic Civilization, have turned on the gas and laid themselves down to die.
(The picture of the New York tenement is from here.)
It’s a grim existence, but the couple are sustained by their love, their tenderness and grumpiness, for each other. And theirs is but one of several overlapping planes of existence in the flat. These are inhabited by the Other People, who comprise Inanimates, Gods, a ghost and a pair of fictional characters.
In the Living Room, the Stuffed Owl, the china Duck and Princess Olwen, the ‘beautiful young-lady doll’ occupy the mantelpiece. The Owl is anxious and prone to fretting. The Duck is obsessed with Princess Olwen and longs to touch her with his shining yellow beak, but, of course, neither of them can move and he is tormented with desire while she longs for ‘White Horses and Disguised Princes’. On the chest of drawers is a big glass Fish, devotee of the White Whale who wills everything, Good and Evil.
These Inanimates call the Living Room ‘The Known World’; they dream, they philosophise to each other without really listening. The other Inanimate in the flat is Falada, a ‘noble, melancholy’ two-legged wooden horse rescued from ‘Limbo’ (a rubbish bin on the street) by the old man and now living in ‘Hell (the Ante-room to the flat).
Standing on the old woman’s dressing-table in ‘Paradise’ (an Alcove), are the three ‘godlike inhabitants’ of the Known World. These are a blue statuette of Our Lady, ‘a minute image [...] of the great Chinese sage, Kwang-tze’ and a headless statuette of Lao-tze, who nevertheless continues to philosophise if not to speak.
The romantic, dreamy Princess Olwen is the only entity who can perceive two characters from an unfinished manuscript by a previous tenant of the flat. Lord Tormentil (a ‘dogmatic Materialist’) and Lady Potentilla (‘a High Church woman of strict piety’) are lovers divided by their beliefs. It has never been clear whether they were to be given a tragic or a happy ending, and so their characters and destiny are ‘frayed, ragged, blurred and indistinct’.
And Miss Rowe? Miss Rowe is the ghost of an old lady who was another former tenant of the Known World and who has become for the inhabitants of the Known World a sort of protective spirit. (‘Miss Rowe was not her real name.’) At times of desperation – when the Authorities are on the stairs – the inhabitants of the Known World cry out ‘in a thin, wild, wistful voice’ for ‘Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe!’
It is not clear to what extent the old couple perceive all these different beings living in their flat, but it is clear that all their existences are intertwined and necessary to each other at a fundamental level. Can Miss Rowe save them all from the Authorities and the Home? And what exactly would that mean?
Just like Karen, I have never read anything by John Cowper Powys before and jumped at this opportunity to try out one of his shorter works (and it is short!) as his more famous novels are massive. First published in 1930 as a limited edition of 250 copies, it seems it hitherto has not been widely available – another reason to get my paws on it. And I am so glad that I did! It is a strange, rich, beautiful parable about existence and belief and the importance of love; it is sad but also uplifting and enigmatic – weirdly perfect Christmas reading.
Thank you to Mike Walmer for sending me a review copy (and for those of you still hunting for Christmas presents, the Zephyr Books edition produced by Michael Walmer Publishers would make a very pretty and unusual gift). I shall be reading more John Cowper Powys now, for sure (but when, when, when?).
(The picture of the owl is a stuffed Victorian eagle owl by James Gardner. The picture of John Cowper Powys is from his Goodreads page)