Powys Society Newsletter 88

JERRY BIRD
John Cowper Powys’s
A Glastonbury Romance
A Glastonbury Romance is a magnificent tour-de-force of a novel, derided and
admired in equal measure by critics when it was first published. It concerns the lives,
loves and obsessions of the inhabitants of a Glastonbury undergoing the pain of
transition from a traditional rural way of life to a modern industrial-based economy.
It also portrays the nascent ‘New-Age scene’ of twentieth-century Glastonbury
between the wars. Glastonbury is a massive book of nigh on half a million words
and provides a rich tapestry of plot and sub-plot with human strengths, weaknesses,
obsessions and endeavours richly painted on a canvas woven from myriad strands of
mythology, magic and folklore.
Nearly fifty characters are portrayed, each having a unique relationship to, and
perspective on, the town of Glastonbury and its mythology, lore and legend. The
action moves slowly, and the novel often feels somewhat formless, but reading it is
an exhilarating experience, and the reader is left in awe at the author’s magnificent
vision in attempting such a deep analysis of the mythology of place in a novel.
A Glastonbury Romance is almost impossible to summarize — suffice to say, it
revolves around the religious revivalist ambitions of the individualist, grail-seeking,
charismatic preacher and mayor of Glastonbury ‘Bloody’ Johnny Geard and his circle
who envisage the town as a kind of spiritual commune. Set against them is John
Crow, intellectually, an agnostic who rails against his own mystical leanings, and
his cousin Philip Crow, an ardent modernist and capitalist, whose aim is to promote
the town as a centre for commerce and industry, and to sweep away the ‘monkish
mummery’ of the grail legend. Philip wants to
conquer it, this effeminate, flower-garden of pretty-pretty superstitions and medieval
abracadabra! He would plant factory upon factory in it, dynamo upon dynamo! He would
have mines beneath it, railways across it, airlines above it! (230).
Red Robinson, a communist agitator, for whom the town’s mystical heritage is
oppressive anathema, forms an uneasy alliance with these two, and the scene is
soon set for a psychic battle between the sacred and the secular, the commonplace
and the extraordinary. In Powys’s Glastonbury, the indigenous population is largely
sceptical of both camps; when Philip crow defeats Geard in an impromptu public
debate between industry and spirituality, the crowd’s reaction is described thus:
There was a feeling among them all as they went off as if they had stretched out their
arms as if to receive a Golden Bough and had been rewarded for their pains with a
handful of dust (342).
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