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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

There is a marvellous early letter to Dorothy Richardson, who has asked him why he does not write about the country he has seen the most of, in the previous decades, that is to say America? He replies with a superb prose-poem evoking the quiet of his part of Manhattan on a Sunday morning. Then he adds:

A year or two later he is able to confide in Richardson the peculiar personal circumstances in which he lives, and which explain the need, even after his 60th birthday, to be exacerbating his stomach ulcers by an exhausting programme of lecture tours. He needs to pay money to assuage the guilt of a failed marriage:

The non-syntax here is suggestive. What was he trying to say? That the wife he had deserted after a disastrous marriage was really all right, or that his strange son had been undamaged by the experience? Incidentally, the newest biography tells us that he did not tell his wife and son about the Sin and Adultery for another four years. I wonder which is right?

And what of the companion, Phyllis Plater, a young American 22 years his junior, with whom he lived until his death in a tiny house in Blaenau Ffestiniog, North Wales, in 1963? We already know a lot about her, especially since Morine Krissdóttir published in 1995 Petrushka and the Dancer: The Diaries of Powys, 1929-1939, with an introduction which is an intrusively devastating analysis of the relationship. Phyllis Plater was Powys’s child-bride. He saw her as his Petrushka, and he nicknamed her the Tiny Thin, or T. T. The diaries chronicle her rages, her painful menstrual cycle, her violence and her domestic incompetence. But she was also his muse, his secretary and his beloved companion.