Wolf Solent


Wolf Solent is a novel by John Cowper Powys that was written in rural upper New York State and published by Simon and Schuster in May 1929 in New York City. The British edition, published by Jonathan Cape, appeared in July 1929. This, Powys's fourth novel, was his first literary success. It is a bildungsroman in which the eponymous protagonist, a thirty-four-year-old history teacher, returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy. Wolf resembles John Cowper Powys in that an elemental philosophy is at the centre of his life and, because, like Powys, he hates science and modern inventions like cars and planes, and is attracted to slender, androgynous women. Wolf Solent is the first of Powys's four Wessex novels. Powys wrote both about the same region as Thomas Hardy and was a twentieth-century successor to the great nineteenth-century novelist.
The novel is set in the fictional towns of Ramsgard, Dorset, based on Sherborne, Dorset, where Powys attended school from May 1883, and Blacksod, modelled on Yeovil, Somerset, as well as other places in Dorset like Dorchester and Weymouth that were also full of memories for Powys.

Background

Wolf Solent was Powys's first successful novel. There were six impressions of the first edition between 1929 and 1930, three of the British. A German translation appeared in 1930 and French in 1931. However, Powys had to cut some 350 pages from his manuscript before Wolf Solent was published by Simon and Schuster. Following the success of Wolf Solent three of Powys's works of popular philosophy were also best-sellers: The Meaning of Culture, In Defence of Sensuality, A Philosophy of Solitude.
Prior to this Powys had published three apprentice novels: Wood and Stone, Rodmoor, Ducdame, and had also written After My Fashion in 1920, though it was not published until 1980. He had begun work on Wolf Solent in February 1925, It is "the first of the four Wessex novels which established John Cowper Powys's reputation", an allusion not only to the place but to the influence of Thomas Hardy on him: his first novel, Wood and Stone was dedicated to Hardy.
In the Preface he wrote for the 1961 Macdonald edition of the novel Powys states: "Wolf Solent is a book of Nostalgia, written in a foreign country with the pen of a traveller and the ink-blood of his home.
Wolf Solent is set in Ramsgard, based on Sherborne, Dorset, where Powys attended school from May 1883, as well as Blacksod, modelled on Yeovil, Somerset, and Dorchester, Dorset and Weymouth, Dorset, both in Dorset, all places full of memories for him.
While Powys had been born in Shirley, Derbyshire and lived there for this first seven years of his life, his father then returned to his home county of Dorset, and, after a brief stay in Weymouth, the family resided in Dorchester from May 1880 until the Christmas of 1885. Powys's paternal grandmother lived in nearby Weymouth. For the rest of his youth Powys lived in Montacute, just over the Dorset border in Somerset. Also in the 1961 Preface Powys records the fact that he and his brother Littleton would often "scamper home" on a Sunday from school in Sherborne via Yeovil: "Sherborne was five miles from Montacute; and Yeovil was five miles from Montacute".
The seaside resort of Weymouth is the main setting of his novel Weymouth Sands while Maiden Castle, which alludes to Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, is set in Dorchester. Powys had first settled in Dorchester, after returning from America in 1934. These two works, along with Wolf Solent and A Glastonbury Romance make up Powys's four main Wessex novels. A Further indication of the importance of familiar places in Powys's fiction is that Glastonbury is just a few miles north of Montacute.
, from London in 1921.

Plot summary

The novel begins with its eponymous, thirty-five-year-old hero on a train returning to his native Dorset to Ramsgard. This follows the loss of his job as a history teacher in London, following an outburst in class in which “he found himself pouring forth a torrent of wild, indecent invective upon every aspect of modern civilization”. This nervous collapse had been triggered by a look of “inert despair” that he had seen on the face of a man on the steps of Waterloo station in London. He is journeying back to his childhood hometown because he has been hired as a “literary assistant” by the squire of nearby King’s Barton. Wolf in “escaping from an insensitive, brutal world and trivial world” of London, is moving to a place “where he will have a greater freedom to know and be himself”.
This is also a homecoming for him, as he left Ramsgard with his mother when he was ten and it is the place where his father died. In Ramsgard he feels “free of his mother” with whom he has always lived and whom he left in London and “Bound up in some strange affiliation with that skeleton in the cemetery”. In due course Wolf discovers that his father had sunk from being a respected history teacher and had died in the Ramsgard workhouse “in obscure circumstances after some ‘depravity’”, which involved the pornographic bookseller Malakite, Wolf also finds out that his father had had several affairs, and that Wolf has a half-sister, and that Malakite had an incestuous relationship with his elder daughter.
Peter Easingwood suggests, that “nderlying ‘’Wolf Solent’’ is a sensuous-mystical feeling for the natural world that goes with an attempted rejection of human society”. However, Wolf cannot escape human involvement. He has to work, and this involves him in a moral dilemma, because he comes to believe that Squire Urquart is “the embodiment of evil” and his planned book dangerously immoral. Furthermore, he cannot escape the influence of his mother who arrives unexpectedly in Dorset. But, more seriously he cannot, through his sensuous pleasure in nature, escape from his body and in particular sex, and Wolf soon becomes involved with two women: "Gerda, the child of nature, whom he marries, and the more intellectual and complex Christie", the younger daughter of Malakite. It therefore appears that Wolf Solent is "designed to show how Solent has chosen Dorset as his best retreat, only to find himself cornered". Or, as another writer suggests: "The landscape and the emotional intimacies of his relationships in Dorset manage to attack inner life as no physical or personal contact in London had done".
Wolf Solent is a novel that focuses on the inner psychic tensions in its protagonist's life, central to this is what Wolf calls his "mythology": "Wolf has taken refuge in a mythological world of his own invention; and at the heart of his 'mythology' there is a struggle between good and evil, seen in the black and white terms of conventional morality".
By the end of the novel Wolf realizes that he and his wife Gerda have little in common and "that he has confused love with 'a mixture of lust and romance'", and that he should have married Christie Malakite. However, he had believed "that any closer involvement with Christie would destroy his 'mythology" and his stubborn clinging to this idea ruins their relationship.
Wolf at the end faces the loss of his "mythology" and questions how human beings can "go on living, when their live-illusion was destroyed". Suicide seems a possibility, but the novel ends with Wolf having "a kind of vision" involving a field of golden buttercups, and realizing "that traditional morality" the kind his "mythology" operated under "is too simple". "Powys's vision is not tragic but essentially comic-grotesque". The final words of 'Wolf Solent" are "notoriously bathetic": "Well, I shall have a cup of tea".

Main characters

An important recurring image in the novel is that of the face on the steps of Waterloo Station in London, which precipitates Wolf's emotion collapse in front of his history class, and loss of his job. The face of "a man regarded by Wolf as an epitome of the kind of suffering which challenges belief in a benevolent creator". In a letter to his brother Llewelyn, written from Chicago on 18 February 1925, in which Powys mentions working on Wolf Solent, he refers to a beggar that he had seen with "a 'shocking' face". Professor Peter Easingwood suggests that from this encounter came the idea for the face which forms such a "dominant pattern of symbolic imagery" in the novel. This face "of inert despair" is seen by Wolf as linked to "the appalling misery of so many of his fellow Londoners".
Morine Krissdottir in her biography of Powys, Descent of Memory, dates the action of the novel as taking place between March 1921 and May 1922, just three years after the end of World War I and notes that a "triumphal Victory Arch" was formally opened as the main entrance to Waterloo Station in London on 21 March 1922, to be a memorial to the dead. She also records that "in an ironic twist, the steps soon became a place where beggars, many of them mentally and physically crippled ex-sevicemen gathered". Furthermore, she also suggests that while there is no direct reference to the war in Wolf Solent "the metaphors and imagery" do in fact allude to it, and that "he novel is in fact about a world after the great war--a world in which everything is irrevocably changed".

Critical reception

In his review of the British first edition, in The Spectator, 10 August 1929, writer and critic V. S. Pritchett wrote: Wolf Solent is a stupendous and rather glorious book The book is as beautiful and strange as an electric storm, and like the thunder on the Sinai, it is somewhat of a sermon." More recently, also in The Spectator, A. N. Wilson wrote: "The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys — Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Jobber Skald and Maiden Castle — must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language."