Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Powys and Emma Goldman: The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman

The strange experience of England

edited by David Goodway
Cecil Woolf, 188pp, £30,

A. N. Wilson

Wednesday, 13th February 2008

A. N. Wilson on the life and letter of John Cowper Powys

Every now and again there is an attempt at a revival. A brave publisher will reissue one of the novels and print on the jacket the plaudits which Powys has received: ‘The only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’, wrote George Steiner. ‘To encounter Powys’ (Henry Miller this time) ‘is to arrive at the very fount of creation’. Angus Wilson, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch and Simon Heffer are among the faithful. But many university students taking a course in the English literature of the 20th century could achieve their degree without so much as hearing Powys’s name. And yet he is an author whom, once you have discovered him, you will go on reading for the rest of your life. He has lowered his bucket deeper than most into the mystery of things. He is able to write not only about the experience of memory, love, obsession, sex and childhood experience. More than that, he has his ear cocked to the life of the universe itself. I was fascinated to read, in a letter to Dorothy Richardson (another forgotten writer):

I have got Wordsworth here and am reading his Prefaces as well as the Excursion (every word) — I tell you I have discovered the trick of ‘getting the best’ of Wordsworth (in both senses) — disregard completely his Christianity, his morality, his chat about duty etc and read with meticulous care all he says when he is describing things or sensations, or theories about sensations.

He wrote that in 1929, the year in which Wolf Solent, the first great novel, was published. Dorothy Richardson, the first writer of fiction to whom the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ was applied, was one whose novels he admired. He earned his living as a freelance lecturer in the United States, and he first met her on a trip to London in 1929, when he called on her and her artist husband Alan Odle in St John’s Wood. Both sides of the correspondence survive, because Richardson typed and kept carbons. The letters have been in the Beinecke Library in Yale awaiting an editor, and thanks to the enterprise of Cecil Woolf, who has already brought out ten volumes of Powys letters, we are now able to enjoy both these, and, in another volume, his letters to the American anarchist Emma Goldman. Both volumes cover the period of his greatest creativity, the 1930s. Since he was born in 1872, it will be seen that he was that rare thing in a writer, a late developer.

It had all been ripening inside him, the whole strange experience of England. He had grown up the son of a clergyman. He was the eldest of 11 and of his remarkable siblings, Theodore (T. F. Powys, the author of Mr Weston’s Good Wine) deserves a mention as another writer who far outshone his contemporaries. Most writers are not speakers. Tolstoy never made a public speech of any kind, and you could almost say as a general rule that utterance kills the written word. But there are exceptions, of whom Dickens is the most obvious. Dickens wrote to be performed. With Powys it was the other way around. He was a performer from the beginning. He always writes well about the power of the spoken word over mass audiences — a key theme of the 1930s. The power mania of Jerry Cobbold, the stand-up comedian in Weymouth Sands ,is contrasted with the ranting preaching of his mad brother Sylvanus who has unwholesome designs on little girls. Powys, needless to say, ‘is’ all these people. For most of his adult life, before his writing came into focus, he was tramping about the United States lecturing on literature, and holding large audiences spellbound. Without the long period of exile in America, it would have been impossible for him to bring his England, almost an alternative-universe England, into being.