John Cowper Powys probably had more experience of American railroads than many people for he spent a lot of time travelling on them, at a time when there was no other means of long distance travel. He often refers to them and seems to have enjoyed mostly to be able to read quietly while looking from time to time at the surrounding landscape and being looked after by the sleeping car attendants (who would mostly today be referred to as Afro-Americans). Railroads
 |
|
(Courtesy Augustana College Library, Special Collections.) |
I daresay when you dreamed I was in danger my train nearly ran off the line & your affection for me pulled it up...(Feb. 21, 1921, Powys to Sea Eagle)
|
.... This lecture will have a terrific audience (1200 people) because its (sic) run by the Kiwani club of business rascals to ease their conscience to collect money for the children of this ferocious steel town...but when its (sic) over I shall get into an Erie train & pray to the spirit of my horse-riding wind-taming Valkyrie-sister to bring me safe back to one of those stations in Jersey City on the river you know so well. (Youngstown, Ohio, Dec. 1925 - Powys to Sea Eagle) |
|
It was always a pleasure to me to lie in my lower berth when I had a long morning of travelling before me, and there was nobody in the upper berth, and listen to the milk-cans rattle on the platforms of the smaller stations, and to all the vague village sounds that were penetrating enough to reach the interior of the train. And how I enjoyed it when I had, as often happened, the wash-room entirely to myself! And how satisfactory it was when "The Diner" - that all-hallowed word to travellers - was the very next car to where I slept! How well I can recall feeling about in the darkness behind those heavy green curtains for the book I was reading - some new volume of Conrad, perhaps, which I had propped up on the rack - and then carrying it in my hand with a sense of ritualistic well-being, just to have it as a companion, for I rarely read at meals, when I sat down by some window in "The Diner" to enjoy a leisurely breakfast! (Autobiography)
Special Collection Department, University Libraries, Virginia Tech)
Another great writer, some twenty years his junior, remembered how as a boy he also loved travelling by the night express, going from his native Russia to France:From my bed under my brother's bunk (Was he asleep? Was he there at all?), in the semidarkness of our compartment, I watched things, and parts of things, and shadows, and sections of shadows cautiously moving about and getting nowhere. The woodwork gently creaked and crackled....It was hard to correlate those halting approaches, that hooded stealth, with the headlong rush of the outside night, which I knew was rushing by, spark-streaked, illegible...Vladimir Nabokov and John Cowper Powys both went to Cornell University: Powys in 1930 for a lecture, Nabokov twenty years later to teach Russian and European literature.
A change in the speed of the train sometimes interrupted the current of my sleep. Slow lights were stalking by; each, in passing, investigated the same chink, and then a luminous compass measured the shadows. Presently, the train stopped with a long-drawn Westinghousian sigh...
Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a lone lamp. A dismembered newspaper stirred on a bench. Somewhere on the train one could hear muffled voices, somebody's comfortable cough. There was nothing particularly interesting in the portion of station platform before me, and still I could not tear myself away from it until it departed of its own accord. (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory)
|