John Cowper Powys in 1923
I first disovered and read the extraordinary novels of John Cowper Powys in the late 1970s via a circuitous route, having been given a book about one of his brothers, Llewellyn Powys. You know how it is, one book just leads to another . . .
His early novels are set in Somerset and Dorset , where I spent much time with close friends who lived near Weymouth for 20 years, until they moved to Somerset in 2000. I would regularly march them off to some remote spot; for example, a midwinter walk along a clifftop in thick fog, in search of places that had a special connection with one or other of the Powys siblings.
Such a grip did John Cowper Powys have on my imagination that I tracked down as many of his novels, essays and collections of poetry as I could. Anything that wasn’t in print, I sought out from secondhand and specialist booksellers and dealers, most notably in the 1980s from a lovely man who ran a bookstall in London's Exmouth Market. (Exmouth Market was then a real market, with street traders and stalls; now it’s another slice of gentrified inner city, all designer opticians and St Tropez tanning salons.) As a result, I now have a splendid collection of rare and first editions, as well as books by other members of his family, including Llewelyn and another brother, T.F Powys, who wrote Mr Weston’s Good Wine.
But Powys has long been out of fashion; only a handful of his books now remain in print and he has a reputation as a ‘difficult’ writer although this, as in all things, is a matter of opinion. Yes, his books are complex; myth, legend, spirtuality, physical landscape and the natural world intersperse his charting of the inner human landscape. And many of his novels are great thick tomes that you can’t exactly race through in an evening; they demand time and careful reading.
I was thinking recently that I might sell my Powys collection, until I switched on yesterday’s Open Book programme on Radio 4 and there was A N Wilson (not my favourite author) talking about Powys and saying how marvellous his books are. This was in the light of the publication of Descents of Memory, a new biography of John Cowper Powys by Morine Krissdottir, who has a longstanding interest in his work. There's a recent article by Dr Krissdotir on theblogbooks over at Guardian Unlimited and I feel reassured that she too finds that Mr Powys eludes categorisation. I’ve added Descents of Memory to my ‘must read’ list and I think I’ll have a reread of my collection before I do anything rash. I may discover that I’m more attached to the Powys family than I realised.
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