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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

Krissdóttir, who has also written on Powys and magic (John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest, 1987) and who is herself a psychologist, has now come up with a biography. Many of Powys’s admirers must have felt some misgivings as they awaited the publication of this book. The brew has been bubbling in Krissdóttir’s cauldron for a very long time, and while retaining her sense of Powys’s genius, she seems to have lost her personal sympathy with him a long time ago. True, he writes in his letters and journals a great deal about his stomach ulcers, his constipation, his perceived need for enemas, administered by the Tiny Thin, his obsessions with the bodies of little girls, his fondness for masturbation, mutual and otherwise, and his only occasional desire to make love to the T. T. in the normal way. Any biographer would be called upon to make sense of all this stuff, and to disentangle the webs of myth from truth-telling. True, Powys was a very rum bird indeed, but clearly the Autobiography is a sort of novel, and it should be obvious that part of Powys’s oddness was a need to show off, to be a buffoon.

So although these aspects do dominate Powys’s life from his fifties onwards, it is hard to know whether it was right to give them so much space in a third- person narrative. Would not any great person — Churchill, say, or George Eliot — seem ridiculous if their biographies were written in terms of bowel movements and sex, or its lack? There were times in Krissdóttir’s book when I felt that a medical casebook had turned into a brief for the prosecution in some unlooked-for trial. Also that much of the literary criticism was pedestrian and unlikely to awaken a passion for the great books in one who had never tried them. She gives us much of Powys the magician and the symbolist, but not much of Powys the orator, prophet, jokester and literary ventriloquist who is among other things one of our greatest comedians, or of Powys the poet of the humdrum — is there any novelist who better evokes the consolations and irritations of such day-to-day necessities as doing the washing-up?