Cracked Image

AUTOBIOGRAPHY--John Cowper Powys-- Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

Since the world began, few men have thought or written so much about their precious selves as John Cowper Powys. If it were not for the personal pronoun and the exclamation point he would be tongue-tied. A more unabashed egotist than most authors, he gave his ego a field day last week by publishing a grotesque 595-page autobiography. Whether or not the mirror he holds up to himself is distorted, most readers will agree that the image it reflects is a little cracked. Author Powys admits: "I know, and I daresay my reader will willingly bear me out in this, that I am -- all the while -- never wholly sane." He has tried to report his life as if he were confessing to "a priest, a philosopher, and a wise old woman." Readers who are not in those categories will be sometimes bored, sometimes infuriated, at most times skeptical, but they will admit that the show Author Powys puts on is almost worth the price of admission.

Eldest of eleven children of an English country parson, apparently a solid character, John Cowper Powys was erratic from the start. From early childhood, he says, his life was dominated by a besetting neurotic sin. He calls it sadism but from the many examples he gives it sounds more like the peeping passion. As a young man he used to make trips to Brighton for the sole purpose of looking at girls' legs as they lay on the beach. For years he periodically bought and feverishly devoured armfuls of French pornographic books. When he first went to Manhattan, penny-in-the-slot peep-shows were his delight until he discovered the more compelling joys of the burlesque theatre. He had other eccentricities: he always ar ranged his knife and fork on his plate so that they should not point at his breast, was forever washing his hands, could not bear anything made of cotton. It still sets his teeth on edge to think of wiping his mouth with a napkin; he does it with the back of his hand.

Conscious of his neuroses, Powys sometimes turned them to account. At school he got out of a disagreeable fix by successfully pretending to be mad. His vociferous strangeness attracted a few disciples at Cambridge. When he went to the U. S. in 1905 and began to lecture, he found his metier: "Yes, the platform has been everything to me. It has been the bed of my erotic joys. It has been the battlefield of my fiercest struggles. It has been the gibbet of my execution. It has been the post of my scourging. It has been my throne. It has been my close-stool. It has been my grave. It has been my resurrection. On the platform I have expressed by a whisper, by a silence, by a gesture, by a bow, by a leer, by a leap, by a skip, by the howl of a wolf, by the scream of a woman in travail, certain inspirations concerning the secrets of life that, without any vain boasting, I do not think have been expressed very often in this world."

Boasting, whether vain or not, comes easily to Autobiographer Powys: "I know I am not being silly or conceited when I say that in certain directions I have as powerful an imagination as Swift." He thinks he is "too much of a demented satyr and too much of a fanatical saint." He admits, however, that his enemies call him "a tiresome poseur, full of silly affectations, and a long-winded, tedious rhapsodist." Powys realizes that his literary reputation is not comparable with his brothers', Theodore and Llewellyn, comforts himself with the statement that his writing is "simply so much propaganda ... for my philosophy of life." What that philosophy is he has never, in his 62 years, been able to make clear. But occasionally his cumbersome farrago is punctuated with flashes of insight: "We are all in secret fighting for our sanity."

Though shrewd Publishers Simon & Schuster announce it as their "sincere belief" that no such personal and intimate autobiography has been written since Rousseau's Confessions, many a plain reader will feel that Powys has dodged the point. His text is excellent: "If all the persons who wrote autobiographies would dare to put down the things that in their life have actually caused them their most intense misery, it would be a much greater boon than all these testy justifications of public actions." But, like many a sermon, Author Powys' is more exhibitionistic than instructive, and it goes on much too long.

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