Wolf Solent
by . New York: Simon & Schuster. 1929. 12mo. 2 vols. 966 pp. $5.00.
A NOVEL of such serious pretensions as Mr. John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent may not appear more than once in several years. It is a perverse and haunting piece of work, beautiful and yet ugly, crisscrossed with shafts of glancing light and strange, irrelevant shadows. Essentially, it is the story of one consciousness — that of a highly endowed, imaginative young man, who returns to his native Dorset village and there lives in a growing struggle with reality amid the savage complexities that make up life. Wolf Solent’s consciousness, within which the thousand pages of the story are contained, is a consciousness turned in upon itself, pondering its own problem of good and evil, fostering the rich growth of its secret life, its private ‘mythology,’ and attuned to a mystic feeling for nature outside. This subjective sort of pantheism provokes the loveliest passages in the book, which is strewn with green hills and hawthorn hedges, bird song, charmed sunsets, and meadows of buttercups — all the rainand sun-washed beauty of the English countryside.
But in contact with life this consciousness of Wolf Solent’s is beset by obsessions. First he is torn between a positive, living mother and a pagan father who is under the earth: then he is blown from the fleshly love of Gerda, whom he marries, to a cerebral passion for the wistful Christie; he is tormented by the forces of evil about him; challenged by pain and suffering among men; frightened by the threat of the machine age against his individualism; and played over, as by a sultry breeze, by the ambiguous affection of his friend Darnlev Otter. We follow him through the course of a year, buffeted by the impact of people and facts, and we finally see the hard crystal of his secret life evaporated and released, the private ‘ mythology ’ surrendered to reality. It is an incomplete surrender, made at the expense of peace and almost at the expense of sanity. But the individual remains. and with its motto ' Endure or escape it can hope to survive.
Wolf Solent’s character is imagined and presented with an unparalleled richness. We learn all the subtle complexities of his teeming interior life and the flickering world that reaches him through his senses. His major preoccupations, the duel between his mother and father and the duel between Gerda and Christie, give his character an importance, a dignity, that make it akin to that other uneasy consciousness, Hamlet — as he himself is half aware. The two love episodes are treated with touching effectiveness and complement each other perfectly. But beyond this circle, in the outer spaces of imagination through which it moves for most of its great length, the novel falls to a much lower plane. The other influences to which Wolf’s longsuffering consciousness is submitted are a bedlam rout of fantasies, a collection of leering shadows and moral chimæras too grotesque to have any meaning. It is as if the author had decided that every possible vice or complication must somehow be represented. He brings on a parade of superstition, adultery, incest, perversion worse confounded, and mortuary horrors that make the gorge rise; and we are not even allowed to know which are meant to be real aud which are the twisted creations of Wolf’s morbidity. As symbols of life in a problem of human adjustment they count for nothing.
In departing from the universal to the special, and in making Wolf merely a neurotic introvert beset by delusions, Mr. Powys has set limitations on his work which prevent it from being considered among the great novels of character Within its own rank it stands with the highest; its excellent prose and the fertility of its fancy deserve to be remembered long after its tricks and pretentiousness are forgotten.
MARSHALL A. BEST