Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Ebony and Ivory
    Ebony and Ivory
    Ebony and Ivory
    Ebook112 pages1 hour

    Ebony and Ivory

    By Llewelyn Powys and Edward Shanks

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    First published in 1923, this book is a wonderful collection of short stories and sketches from the British novelist Llewelyn Powys—who also happens to be the younger brother of John Cowper Powys, another renowned British novelist of the twentieth century.

    “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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherValmy Publishing
    Release dateFeb 27, 2018
    ISBN9781787209909
    Ebony and Ivory

    Read more from Llewelyn Powys

    Related to Ebony and Ivory

    Related ebooks

    History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Panopticon: John Updike’s Apartment Stories

      Mar 9, 2018

      Has there, in American letters, at least, ever been a better noticer than John Updike?  By “noticer,” I don’t mean “writer of detail,” exactly.  There are many writers whose use of detail I find more narratively effective:  Saul Bellow, Joan Didion,

      5 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2023

      In the popular belief, ghosts are a selecting tribe, avoiding millions, speaking to one. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Demonology,” North American Review, 1877 Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose he

      3 min read

    • Article

      Where The Wild Bees Are

      Oct 1, 2023

      Where The Wild Bees Are
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Glassmaker Who Sparked Astrophysics: His curious discovery, 200 years ago, foresaw our expanding universe.

      Mar 20, 2014

      The lights in the sky above us—the sun, the moon, and the panoply of countless stars—have surely been a source of wonder since long before recorded history. Ingenious efforts to measure distances to them began in earnest in the 3rd and 4th centuries

      11 min read

    • Article

      Postcards from Fairyland

      Jun 15, 2023

      Postcards from Fairyland
      10 min read

    • Article

      Some Wars Are Just

      Nov 24, 2022

      Some Wars Are Just
      6 min read

    • Article

      Considering Carter

      Mar 9, 2021

      Considering Carter
      1 min read

    • Article

      To Hell And Back

      Sep 1, 2022

      The first complete English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy appeared in 1802, and over the past two centuries, new versions have proliferated beyond count, like Beatles covers or Sherlock Holmes movies. A diverting literary parlor game is to imag

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Last Naturalist

      Mar 1, 2022

      The Last Naturalist
      21 min read

    • Article

      'The Dispatcher' Is A Short Stroll In A Strange Neighborhood

      May 31, 2017

      John Scalzi's new novel — originally an audio book — imagines the implications of a world where 999 out of 1,000 murder victims pop back into existence, naked, confused and safe in their own beds.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Science Is Coming

      Apr 5, 2018

      An excerpt from David Reich's new book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, recently touched off a media and cultural firestorm in the United States. Appearing as an op-ed in The New York Times, "How Gen

      2 min read

    • Article

      Dune

      Dec 20, 2019

      Dune
      1 min read

    • Article

      My Life Became a Roberto Bolaño Novel

      Feb 25, 2019

      At a certain point during the writing of my book things seemed to turn very meta, as though I had entered a novel and become an unwitting character. The post My Life Became a Roberto Bolaño Novel appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Ebony and Ivory

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Ebony and Ivory - Llewelyn Powys

      This edition is published by Valmy Publishing – www.pp-publishing.com

      To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – valmypublishing@gmail.com

      Or on Facebook

      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

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1