Ebony and Ivory Essay - Critical Essays

Critical Evaluation

Llewelyn Powys, the youngest of three brothers to achieve literary fame, was a rather gifted and remarkable British writer. He was educated at Cambridge, worked as a stock farmer in Kenya during World War I, and then moved to New York to work as a journalist for five more years. The stories in EBONY AND IVORY, many of which were published in the best magazines of the time, were written during his stay in Kenya and New York. They present perhaps the best and most representative examples of his outlook and art.

Powys’ outlook and art are very closely related. His vision of life informs every aspect of his art, while his art is an attempt to answer that vision. This tension between outlook and art, truth and style, content and form, provides Powys’ stories with their intensity and force.

Powys’ vision of life, the spirit that informs these stories, was grounded in pain and death, cruelty and mortality, vanity and doom, for Powys was obsessed with agony and fate, which for him were the sole absolutes of life. His stories dwell overwhelmingly on the tragic soul-destroying aspects of life and have much the same spirit as ECCLESIASTES, the RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM, and much of the fiction of Joseph Conrad. They show an intimate acquaintance with the terror, cruelties, and savagery that plague men. Powys knew the futility and mortality of humanity. This was the lesson he learned in Africa.

In this collection, there are the Ebony stories and sketches, which take place in British East Africa, and the Ivory tales, which take place in Europe. The title obviously contains an ironic play on skin color, on black and white, but beyond this fact and far more important is the reference to the Arab proverb: “On Ebony and Ivory the same dark doom is writ.”

The Ebony stories provide the hard core of Powys’ vision; their total effect is that of hopelessness and despair. These sketches show the soul-killing effect of Africa on the European and African alike. The unrelenting sun, the harshness of color and noise, the voraciousness of animal and human life all reduce men to their naked, cruel selves. The European is demoralized, and all of his illusions are destroyed. His rule is stripped of its benevolence in Africa and is shown to rest on brutality and cunning. In “Black Parasites,” a hard-hearted, mediocre farmer sets fire to his brushland after tying up a native sheep thief in the middle of it. In “How It Happens,” a sensitive boy arrives in British East Africa from England, and in his harsh, new surroundings, he is demoralized by his mediocre associates, gets syphilis, and commits suicide. Given his outlook on life, Powys’ theme, the loss of innocence, was almost inevitable. In “Black Gods,” he declared that the bottom of the well of life contains no hope, that the surface was all, the depth hollow and empty.

When Powys’ heroes undergo any change, it is in the direction of shedding illusions, of descending...

(The entire section is 1226 words.)