authour

Embodiment stimulates John Cowper Powys, or else, put it another way, ideas stimulate him and then he describes their embodiment, not natural embodiment then but his own powers thereof as an author or authour as Samuel Johnson spells it, which reminds me that only last night I was listening to an author or authour read from a short story in which the American narrator, who was described by his own creator as "persnickety," complained that American English had written away its o-u-rs. French was curlicued and rich, he said, occupying, unconsciously, an opposite position to that of Leopardi in the Zibaldone, where, as anyone who has read that book will feel compelled to remember, the writer spends an amazing and indeed jealous and resentful amount of time complaining that French is only popular with everybody because it is "arid."

Only popular because it has handed itself over to science, he said in the 1820s. It's so strait that anyone can pick it up. Italian, though -- and then he rails off into praise of Italian, which is closer to Latin and not arid, he insists, in fact infinitely flexible and magnificent and the queen of languages. I told a Spanish-speaking Peruvian about Leopardi's position and he said that Leopardi sounded about right, even though Spanish (said Leopardi) was not as good as Italian. He'd give it this though: it was better than French. English, says Leopardi, will never seriously catch on, because it doesn't have a solid foothold on the European mainland. Only overseas, he says. It's scattered around overseas in the British colonies but that's not enough to really make it work, as a popular language.

I believe that the character's complaint about o-u-r-s was supposed to be understood, by the reader or in this case the listener, as a sadness over the loss of a communal ours as well, which removes the story from the realm of psychological observation and puts it closer to literary sophistry, or, it takes the narration away from the character and gives it to the author and to us, as there is no reason why a person, in the privacy of his discourse, should conceal his own exclamation of pain in a pun.

But it was only one line and I might have been wrong. Now that I have the idea of Powys in my head I start to wonder what the author's story would have been like if she had been more Powys-ish, or like a Rabelais or a Robert Burton, or even Christina Stead in The People With the Dogs, who writes herself up to the arrival of a storm and then has an elaboration occur to her. Ruskin, also, with his pebble that goes to the mountaintop, or the boats in The Harbours of England that lead to the word "love," thus: "The nails that fasten together the planks of the boat's bow are the rivets of the fellowship of the world. Their iron does more than draw lightning out of heaven, it leads love round the earth," which seems so unusually optimistic and desiring in him, and so vulnerably overt, vulnerability being one of his characteristics, grinding against the invulnerable hides of his preacher-sentences, all designed from birth (he did not give birth to them, he inherited them) to be impregnable and to thrill.

So the narrator of the short story inherited an English without its o-u-rs; so Leopardi inherited a language that made him spend page after page defending its unpopular integrity.

a somewhat ludicrous fashion

Anne will be praised and pitied no matter what she does and Kombo will be sabotaged no matter what he does, surely for the same reason that Job in She is sabotaged, which is to avoid the humiliation or confusion that the author assumes would blossom throughout the book if the wrong kind of person became the hero; the cornerstone of wrongness, wrote Leopardi in his Zibaldone, is the inappropriate.

"Please, sir," he [Job] said, touching his sun hat, which was stuck on to the back of his head in a somewhat ludicrous fashion.

It is right of Job to wear his hat in a ludicrous fashion. He has sacrificed himself for the good of the book. But if the hero of She stuck his hat on the wrong part of his head then the author would look the other way; it would not be conceived, it would not happen, the hero will be rescued from the word "ludicrous," poor man standing there with his hat on his head at some nutty angle, begging to be noticed, the author resolutely staring out the window and whistling; the hero realising with a sinking heart that his antics will only be tolerated within certain limits -- he is not loved unconditionally after all. The reader of Fugitive Anne will never read this sentence: "Kombo turned from the gaze of the Priestess to meet Eric Hansen's pathetic eyes looking appealingly from his little white face, so child-like, and now so weary."

If the characters are facts in a metaphor that is meant to convey the ideals of a society that was not born in this novel and deserves not to have any influence over it (but actually has absolute influence) then Kombo will never see that Hansen has a "little" face, nor will he ever witness Hansen's eyes looking "pathetic," nor will Hansen ever be expected to react to a "pathetic" expression on Kombo's face with the kind of loving sympathy that we are meant to presume he is giving to Anne when she regards him with her face so child-like and now so weary, even if Kombo, also, looks child-like and weary as why should he not, on occasions, when he was a child once too, and has a normal set of veins, skeletons, muscles, etc, like everyone else in the book?

Eric Hansen is allowed to hold firm in his heroism, with one peccadillo when an Aca priestess decides to seduce him, but the seduction is a temporary lapse and he is allowed to explain himself, whereas Kombo will go on being a clown forever no matter how good he is, and Anne will go on being Hansen's little Chummy, "very childlike and very feminine," without a break, no matter how many chunks of scrubland she hikes through, or how many cannibals she outwits or brutal bullocky husbands she escapes by vanishing from her cabin with her friend Kombo's flawless assistance.

the earth is her habitation

But Ada Cambridge does not behave as if she is agonised, the way butoh dancers often do (or as they are known for doing, with their whitened faces, hands turned back, lips quivering, etc); she writes as if harm is always about to arrive and yet like the storm it invigorates her. "Bee—a—utiful!" In her first autobiography she wants to touch a wrecked ship: "When the Ormuz had that accident in the Rip she so tightly filled the dock that her skeleton bow was almost within my touch. No more do I wonder at what ships can go through, having seen how that giant frame was put together. I went down to the bottom of the dock and held up the great hull in the palms of my hands. It was a strange sensation." Noticing here that she remembers "almost" touching it as well as touching it, and that she had to move to complete the touch. "I went down ..."

So her characters like to touch as well and important moment in her book are sometimes marked by touching, one character hands another character a tray in A Humble Enterprise and their worlds change: the tray travels, a ship travels in Uncle Piper, the circumstances are altered, the first character goes from poor to rich like the ones in the Tasma book. It takes longer than just the tray-pass, but the tray-pass is the crucial moment. "The world became a changed place to Jenny Liddon from the moment when Anthony Churchill stood up to take her tray." Then she goes to the sea to think about it. "It was absolutely necessary to have the sea to commune with, under the circumstances -- darkness and the sea." She goes to a genuine place, St Kilda pier, or in other words a place that the author could herself touch and probably had touched.

Afterwards, when she has decided to marry Anthony Churchill, she is still invigorated by the weather on the pier at night: "nightly taking her down to St Kilda for that blow on the pier which still refreshed her more than anything."

The touch of a train half-orphaning her in the opening paragraph, and the launch that throws the couple overboard in the opening of Sisters destroying the book that had been building until then and transforming it into another book.

Thinking now of Leopardi in his Zibaldone saying that a state of nature is the happiest state, because it allows for "illusions" whereas reason does not allow for illusions and therefore makes a soul unhappy: the people of his day were unhappy because they had decided to rely on reason instead of nature, they were developing farther from nature with every year, he said, and as I remember him I wonder if he would believe as I think I do, that Cambridge is obliquely in sympathy with that point of view, or not even obliquely when she refers to "the dictum of nature, who is the mother of all wisdom" -- nature in this case advising everybody to get married -- A Humble Enterprise is a book that wants you to marry, which I suppose means that Ada Cambridge, the author of that book, is mistaking herself for nature and that the dictum of nature is in fact the dictum of Cambridge. Nature wants you to marry someone because it will make you enjoy touch: "the husband necessarily makes his wife feel that the earth is her habitation and the clouds of heaven many miles away."