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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

That said, Krissdóttir is a real authority on Powys. She has been studying him throughout a long life, she knows the material well and she has produced a book which no reader of Powys will want to be without.

An earlier, more genial book, Richard Perceval Graves’s The Brothers Powys, tells us on the final page that a friend visited Powys in hospital on the last day of his life and found him singing ‘John Peel’. ‘That last day his old head looked inexpressibly noble against the pillows in his bed.’

Noble he was, in appearance, in utterance, and, I believe, in character. As a keen cigarette-smoker to the end, who indulged in paedophile fantasies and liked singing the anthem of the hunt, you could say he was the embodiment of nearly all that New Labour Britain disapproves of. As such, he surely deserves a monument in Westminster Abbey. Krissdóttir ends her book, however, with old Powys in the cottage in Blaenau, staring miserably into space. There then follows a coda in which she herself corresponds with Powys’s nephew, Peter Grey. ‘Powys died, aged 90, apparently a happy man. In October, 1992, the doomed Peter sent me his last journal and committed suicide.’ Aged seven, little Peter had spied on his old uncle ‘pump-shipping’ (i.e. urinating in the garden). The two had a row, Powys shouting that he hated the child, and the Tiny Thin trying to kiss away the boy’s tears. This happened in 1930. Peter’s mental illness and death over 60 years later were no doubt extremely sad, but they surely can’t be attributed to Powys losing his temper on this occasion? Krissdóttir offers her complicated, largely hostile, vision of JCP to this tormented nephew as a way of unravelling the mazes which Powys used to draw for him when he was a child.

Central to Powys’s writings, fictional and non-fictional, is that we all have what he calls a life-illusion, which, if we can cultivate it aright, will enable us to overcome all our psychological inadequacies, all our fears and angers and look upon life in a healthy, cheerful, defiant mood. Powys was bold enough to write a book called The Art of Happiness and he seems to his admirers to be someone who has mastered that art and passed it on to others. For that, and for the books he wrote, we shall always be grateful. His faults were glaringly obvious, and he acknowledged them. From a biographer, it would have been good to read a bit more well-deserved praise.

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