Ebony and Ivory
By Llewelyn Powys and Edward Shanks
()
About this ebook
“When Llewelyn Powys puts pen to paper, something miraculous happens with words. And that’s literature.”—New York Herald Tribune
“This writer has a great gift of saying the essential thing in a few words. Not one of these essays extends beyond half-a-dozen pages yet how full of good matter they are.”—C. K. Shorter
“Llewelyn Powys is a poet in the loving, absorbing, indwelling quality of his experience.”—Basil de Selincourt
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Ebony and Ivory - Llewelyn Powys
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Text originally published in 1923 under the same title.
© Valmy Publishing 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Publisher’s Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.
EBONY AND IVORY
BY
LLEWELYN POWYS
With a Preface by
EDWARD SHANKS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
THE AUTHOR 4
DEDICATION 5
PREFACE 6
PART I: EBONY 9
I—BLACK GODS 9
II—A SHEEPMAN’S DIARY 13
III—RUBBISH 20
IV—BLACK PARASITES 23
V—HOW IT HAPPENS 29
VI—A LEOPARD BY LAKE ELMENTEITA 34
VII—DEAD MATTER IN AFRICA 37
PART II: IVORY 38
VIII—THE BROWN SATYR 38
IX—THE STUNNER 40
X—THRENODY 44
XI—NOT GUILTY 47
XII—TREACHERY IN THE HEAVENS 50
XIII—SPHERIC LAUGHTER 52
XIV—UN MUFLE 55
XV—THE WRYNECK 57
XVI—THE FOOD OF MAN 60
XVII—DEATH 62
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 65
THE AUTHOR
Llewelyn Powys is one of a family of eight children and the brother of John Cowper and T. F. Powys and was born in Dorchester in 1884. After attending Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he delivered a course of lectures on English literature for the American University Extension Society. Presently, because of his health, he was compelled to spend a year and a half in Switzerland. He then went to British East Africa and for five years managed a stock farm in the highlands there. In 1920 he sailed for the United States where he visited California and the Rocky Mountains and published Ebony and Ivory, Black Laughter, Thirteen Worthies and Skin for Skin. After marrying in 1925, he and his wife visited Palestine and the West Indies, until in 1933, when he again fell ill, he has been living at Clavadel in the high mountains of Switzerland and hopes before long to be able to return to his cottage on the Dorset Downs.
DEDICATION
Dedicated to
JOHN COWPER POWYS
WHOSE COLD, MYSTERIOUS, PLANETARY HEART I HAVE HAD THE AUDACITY TO LOVE
PREFACE
ONE of the functions of art, perhaps the chief among such of its functions as can be expressed in any formula, is to take the moment, the moment of sensation or emotion, to pluck it out of the universal flux, in which all moments otherwise go down and are forgotten, and to give it some kind of immortality. Some kind of immortality! The writer of the pages which I am given the privilege of introducing here might possibly relish that dubious and rather ironic form of words. If,
he says, if our days in the garden of the earth are in reality so uncertain, so brief, if there is indeed so little time for any of us to play under the blackthorn, if indeed as was made clear to me then, death cannot be gainsaid, then surely the secret of so sorry and insecure an existence must lie in detachment, for he who would lose his heart to a life so beset with tragedy had best have a care for his wits.
But Mr. Powys’s detachment, as I hope soon to have an opportunity of proving, is not much more than a form of words. He does at any rate withdraw the moment from the universal flux and give it as much permanence as man may.
But the æsthetic ways of man are mysterious; and there are things which he destroys only because he would fain keep them alive. This it is which causes in all of us so profound a distrust of what we are accustomed to call fine writing.
The sonorous and evocative qualities of words lie at the disposal, almost, of any fool. Any popular song uses words and combinations of words which may in their manner release our deepest and most painful feelings. But it is the poet who, snatching from the universal flux the moment which is to be preserved, can preserve it for us in such a way that it is not cheapened, not debased, not robbed of all its significance. There are precisely as many ways of doing this as there are authors who deserve consideration. For the moment exists only in the mind of the man who experiences it: every poetic record of a sensation or an emotion is a thing absolutely unique. There is perhaps the thing in itself perceivable by some ideal intelligence; but what concerns us is what some human temperament has made of the thing.
In the matter of fine writing
Mr. Powys may not be easily challenged. He has, I think, some kind of cousinship with Edgar Allan Poe, and can infuse into his sentences the same sort of mysterious intensity with which that great genius knew how to endow the most ordinary expressions. He has read Mr. Conrad, and he has profited from the peculiar new branch which the Polish author has successfully and permanently grafted on the English language. I might draw from the succeeding pages a hundred examples in which the collocation of words has done its inexplicable utmost towards the communication of an inexplicable feeling. Mr. Powys is not however what used to be called a stylist: the sonority and evocativeness of words are with him not masters but servants. The man who allows these things to dominate him in virtue of their own beauty and effectiveness is the follower of a delusive marsh-light. He will, like Pater, write ornate but hollow rhapsodies on something that Leonardo never meant to put into the Gioconda; but he will not achieve the effect of truth, which remains in the power of much cruder craftsmen.
What seems to me important in the work of Mr. Llewelyn Powys is that he combines beauty and sonority of language with absolute truth to his own temperament. Here is something of the world as it is seen by a man who is determined not to permit himself to suffer from what he sees. Mr. Powys has two scenes. His ebony
scene is laid in a new
country, where white men rule black men by indifferently applied force and fraud. In Africa the refinements and decencies of civilisation provide no more than an ironic commentary on the exuberant and cruel life of the tropics. A white man, who is not really a Caligula for viciousness, ties up a black thief in a valley which he intends to destroy by fire. A white, boy, new to the country, overwhelmed by his surroundings and his senses, corrupted by the example of companions to whom he is too shy to admit his temptations, contracts a disease and kills himself in despair. The author shoots the female of a pair of zebras—I bet you a rupee I send a bullet into the guts of one of them
—and the next day finds the male keeping watch over the corpse, furiously driving away the vultures from it.
As he watched the frantic and futile zebra he knew that this untamed, fantastical animal, restlessly running to and fro, in the vivid sunshine of that tropical neon, had thrown out a challenge against the material universe, more desperate, more beautiful, and more convincing, than any I had ever heard from pulpit or platform.
When he comes to his ivory
scene, this challenge, in spite of his detachment, seems to ring more in his own voice. For his detachment is the despairing refuge of a sensitive spirit. On the surface each one of these pieces is cold and mocking. Is there anything more horrible and callous in literature than the story of the deaf and dumb servant girl to whom the young man, heated by a spring night, made love under a misapprehension? She continued to purr and grunt in high rapture at having at last found someone to love her, to passionately embrace her.
The mind which can imagine such a situation and dwell on