“Powsels” and “thrums” are old words for waste threads, especially the end of a warp thread in a loom, which weavers kept for their own use. Alan Garner, ever alert to dialect and etymology, here extends a metaphor to include his own practise – “the oldest of stories, made into other tales” – and to this book itself, which contains two dozen essays, lectures and poems, the off-cuts that make up a “tapestry of a creative life”. It’s a very long creative life. He began The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in 1957, and published Treacle Walker in 2021. He calls the pieces collected here the “powsels and thrums of research and experience and imagination and story”. Together they weave into something quite thrilling.
Garner, who has just turned 90, himself comes from a long line of artisans, including handloom weavers, and is blessed with a prodigious memory and/or archive. There are episodes of memoir, as the book reaches back to his schooldays at Manchester Grammar School. He won a scholarship by dint of being outrageously smart and characterful. He offers fond vignettes of his schoolmasters, some recently demobbed, who are a lost race of eccentrics. “It was one thing to hear about the Athenian Acropolis from a white-haired scholar, and quite another to be taught by a man that… had taken part in a commando attack up its steepest face.”
Inevitably, however, Powsels and Thrums centres on place as does Garner’s entire creative career. He insists that the land, the real land, is vital to his works of imaginative fiction. “With the one exception, everywhere I have written can be seen from Alderley Edge,” he writes, referring to his ancestral home in Cheshire. “Issues of topography could be settled at once.” The exception was The Owl Service of 1967, his fourth book, which was set in the Welsh valley of Llanymawddwy. “I covered the walls of my room with photographs to form a saturation of Welsh light and shade, so that Cheshire was obliterated and I was enclosed by 360 degrees of Merioneth. At each visit I collected geological and botanical specimens so that I could touch and feel and smell. Ordnance Survey maps became a necessity.”
We might think of imagination or fantasy as something fanciful or unconstrained. Throughout the book, in several lectures, Garner insists: “It is essential for me that the story is shaped and controlled by a physical reality within which the metaphysical is played out; otherwise the result would be arbitrary. Far from being restrictive, grid references guide the imagination.”
However, as his readers know, being firmly located in place offers extraordinary reach of time. In real life too: not only did he find himself an already ancient house (Blackden, where he still lives, was bought in 1957 for £521 – he is ever accurate with figures), but the building turned out to be sited on Bronze Age, even Mesolithic, remains. Then, within reach of his home, within his imaginative landscape, came the Jodrell Bank radio-telescope station. Who could ask for more? What more is there?
Creativity, he writes, is connectivity. His account, recalled after many decades, of how he came to write Red Shift, pulls in a number of odd thrums. He recollects weaving together a newspaper cutting he found “rummaging through a dustbin in 1956”, a local legend that the lost Ninth Legion may have passed nearby, and an infamous Civil War battle. These details were stored in that ever-receptive brain, biding their time, until he read a line of graffiti dashed in lipstick on Alderley Edge Station in 1966. At that moment “the sky fell in”. Red Shift was finished in 1972. It’s this amassing, pulling together, mulling and igniting which he calls “creativity”, and which arrives “unsought, uninvited, confusing, chaotic” to dominate one’s life, until it goes away again.
Consequently, and contrary to the modern fashion, Garner is forgiving of the flawed artist, the gifted creative who may be monstrous in his private life. Dylan Thomas is a favourite. He is less forgiving of academics, and academic-ese. One incident, when he found himself helping an old man into his trousers, gave him an essential aspect of the protagonist in his novel Strandloper. Those who write asking for opinions on “structuralism, deconstructuralism, phenomenology, semiotics… if only they could see that writing lay more in trying to keep an old man’s trousers up… and from such moments came a novel.”
But also there is the down-time, the mulling. Fellow writers will rejoice to hear him on the subject of waiting. “No use writing for an audience,” he says. Between the barging interruption of the creative impulse, the moments of crazy connection, much time must pass. “I become torpid and unintelligent. It is what I call the oh-my-God bit. I sleep for long periods. I stare into the fire, watching the pattern of flames; waiting.”
He himself admits that “charges of parochialism, cramped-mindedness, obsession, humbug” could be laid against him. “If so, there is no answer.” But there is a question. Is it possible for a globalised world to produce another writer like Alan Garner? A writer who was a child in wartime when there was genuine threat, an author steeped in ancestral landscapes, alert to the history and dialects of his parish, “the land, the life-force”, a beneficiary of scholarship and university grants, a home-boy with incredible imaginative reach? An artist who works with a profoundly local topography but is able to find and slip through portals in time? (His essay “The Valley of the Demon”, which elucidates the novel Thursbitch, describes such an experience.)
Reading Garner’s essays one is reminded of other landscape-obsessives such as Tim Robinson, of Connemara in Ireland, and more than once of George Mackay Brown, whose imagination was so famously Orkney-based. Or Susan Cooper, who set The Dark Is Rising series in her native Buckinghamshire. One may think also of poets Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, who could likewise sense the mythic England behind the everyday. Brown was a decade older, but the others are contemporaries of Garner. Was it the threat of the war that awaked the mythic imagination? Garner, speaking of the legend of the sleeping knights, which seems to occur everywhere, says, “I remember, as a child during World War II, listening to adults joking, yet only half joking, and nervously, that if the knights were ever going to wake now was the time”.
The war itself gave way to a postwar drive for equality. “Lowborn young men and women that had benefited from the Golden Age of the 1944 Education Act were released into the arts. I was of their generation.” This was a wave of writers, he suggests, that brought working-class or artisanal speech into English literature. (He credits Thomas Hardy as a precursor). But for all that education, all that Oxford, “the creative mind keeps hold of childhood”.
Maybe that’s it. The nature of childhood has changed. There may not be another Alan Garner if children cannot ramble around their home streets and hills and fields. The less they know of their local dialects and histories, the more shrunken will be their imaginations and the more shrivelled our literature. “Creativity is play,” he says. “Landscape spoke to me before I knew what it was, but I heard.”
“The Keelie Hawk: Poems in Scots” by Kathleen Jamie is published by Picador
Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life
Alan Garner
HarperCollins, 176pp, £14.99
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[See also: Alan Hollinghurst’s intimate vision]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break