Open; the Third Door Was Closed, That Subject

The Powvs Review NUMBER SEVENTEEN The Powys Review Editor Belinda Humfrey Reviews Editor Peter Miles Advisory Board Glen Cavaliero Ben Jones Ned Lukacher Correspondence, contributions, and books for review may be addressed to the Editor, Department of English, Saint David's University College, Lampeter, Dyfed, SA48 7ED. Copyright (c), The Editor The Powys Review is published with the financial support of the Welsh Arts Council. We are grateful to Mr Francis Powys and Laurence Pollinger Ltd., for permission to quote from the writings of John Cowper Powys and T. F. Powys, and to the late Mrs Evelyn Elwin for permission to quote from the writings of Llewelyn Powys. The Powys Review may be obtained from Booksellers for £2.50, or from Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed, for £2.50 plus 60p postage. The Powys Review is printed by J. D. Lewis & Sons Ltd., Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed. Enquiries about advertisement in The Powys Review should be made to James Dawson, 99 Corve Street, Ludlow, Shropshire. Tel. Ludlow (0584) 2274. Contents Roland Mathias Reviews John Cowper Powys and 'Wales'. A Limited Study 5 Gillian Clarke Selected Poems Colin Style ANN STEVENSON 63 On Hardy's Sacred Ground: Gwyn A. Williams JohnCowperPowys's Weymouth Sands 27 When was Wales? A History of the Welsh Wynford Vaughan Thomas Peter G. Christensen Wales: A History Middlemarch: A Point of Reference in PAUL BENNETT MORGAN 64 Weymouth Sands 39 John Cowper Powys Margaret Moran Paddock Calls "Premonitory Hints and Embryo ANTHONY HEAD 67 Suggestions in J. C. Powys's Wood and Stone and Rodmoor 48 Valentine Ackland For Sylvia: An Honest Account CLAIRE HARMAN 70 G. Wilson Knight: The Editor's Preface 56 Kenneth Hopkins, ed. The Letters ofGamel Woolsey Francis Berry To Llewelyn Powys, 1900-1939 The Collected Poems of Gamel Woolsey G. Wilson Knight: His Life and Work 58 JOHN HARRIES 72 Reviews 63 Richard Taylor, ed. Emma Hardy Diaries Letters to the Editor 81 BARRIESAYWOOD 74 Notes on Contributors 83 ' Patrick Parrinder James Joyce WILLIAM BAKER 76 Kenneth Hopkins Bertrand Russell and Gamel Woolsey CARLSPADONI 79 The Powys Review Number 17 1985 Volume Vi John Cowper Powys: Corwen. A photograph from Louis Wilkinson, Welsh Ambassadors, 1936. Roland Mathias John Cowper Powys and * Wales'. A limited study In an essay entitled "The Sacrificial Prince: A south lands in silence and alone, noting their Study of Owen Glendower'' which I wrote swelling feminine breasts and the dramatic for Belinda Humfrey's Essays on John bareness which seems to whisper continually Cowper Powys (1972) I came to certain con- of the . Celts or pre-Celts who once were clusions about 'Powys and Wales' which, to there and now are not, might—according to an extent, I now regard as impressionistic background and disposition—either share JCP's sense of deprivation in Wales or rather than well-judged. I commented, first, breathe a sigh of relief. The chalk is an empty that in Wales "the animal and vegetable arena in which the first achievement of man in levels of sensibility, so intermingled with his emergence from the savage has audible the human in other Powys novels" are echoes. They are there, whispering around rapidly squeezed out and that what results is overt memorials like Stonehenge, the Cerne "a relatively thin diet of 'atmospheric' Giant or the White Horse, and there, even food".1 Secondly, Dinas Bran, the ancient more, in the mute unapologetic pride of the 5 grass-covered fortress which crowns the Earth-Mother. mountain above Llangollen, although it Wales, in comparison, was poor and back- appears to Rhisiart, the homecoming ward and could be seen by Powys only as a student who has something of the 'home- mountainous refuge, in which "the rough coming' John Cowper in him, "the castle of masculine nature of the terrain . speaks his imagination" and "not less [but] more 6 2 of defence, not of an opulence of power." than the picture he had in mind", is soon I call this verdict impressionistic because revealed as little more than marginal to the it is partly visual, partly historical, and liter- thrust of the narrative and ultimately lost in 3 arily based, with less than complete care, on a confusion of symbols. "Tis our wold one book. Defence, and even more defeat, Corfe, looks 'ee", declares Jimmy generates its own myths and J.C.P., accust- Mummer, "Ees, 'tis wold Corfe to the 4 omed to evasion, propitiation and defeat, image this toomble-down pleace", but this was fascinated by them. Nothing was attempt to import some of the Dorset magic farther from his interest than "an opulence is unconvincing. Thirdly, except perhaps in of power". Even a reading of Owen the Forests of Tywyn, the 'emanations' of Glendower less concerned with the improb- landscapes in Wales—despite one or two ability of the Prince's successes might have fine naturalistic descriptions—are on the noticed more carefully his refusal of the whole perfunctory and minimal in compar- ultimate victory at Woodbury Hill in the ison with those found in J.C.P.'s Dorset Abberleys, where his camp overlooked the novels. I continued as follows: Severn crossing at Holt: the landscape of Wales and its myth-impreg- His chance had been given him; and some- nation . did not afford JCP the degree of thing in his own nature had balked. He thrust sustenance which he had readily obtained his hand under his pillow of rugs and touched from the chalklands of his childhood. This the rusty bronze that had been the death of . need not be matter for surprise. Anyone that old peace-maker of Dinas Bran; and as he of sensitivity who has contemplated those did so the impression came over him . that *A revised version of a paper delivered to the Powys Society, August 1985. 6 John Cowper Powys and "Wales" he and his people could afford to wait, could wrote while actually living in Dorset, a afford to wait till long after his bones were matter of some importance if one is to dust and Henry's bones were dust. He knew measure the maturity of response as between how his own soul could escape, escape with- 7 a Dorset novel and a Welsh one. Where out looting cities and ravishing women . Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance and C. A. Coates thinks this the answer to the Weymouth Sands were evocations, from "historical puzzle"8 of why Owain wasted Phudd Bottom, Hillsdale, New York State, this opportunity amongs others. Any of the remembered landscape of youth, historian of the period, however, would embroidered with the richer patterns of make it entirely plain that the retreat from mature emotion and later reading, Maiden Woodbury Hill was a matter of military nec- Castle was face to face, so to speak, an essity. No ultimate victory was possible. entirely contemporary response to the Glendower's decision in the book was as excavations of Mortimer Wheeler on the site Powysian as the description of the Prince in of the title. C. A. Coates comments that "the rich complexity and physical density of his last hiding-place under the Gaer-mound: 10 the land of Wales, says our author, is the the earlier novels is missing" and goes on preserve of the mythology of escape: to echo G. Wilson Knight by describing the Dorchester of the novel as "a vague if unspec- This race avoids and evades, pursues and is ified locality", a verdict which, in any context pursued ... Alone among nations it builds no other than that of Powys's own work, might monuments to its princes, no tombs to its be remarked as odd. For my part, I would prophets. Its past is its future, for it lives by describe Maiden Castle (after due allowance memories and in advance it recedes. The for cuts) as the most closely controlled of all greatest of its heroes have no graves, for they J.C.P.'s novels: the cast of characters is will come again. Indeed, they have not died; 9 limited, the narrative stripped of unneces- they have only disappeared. sary digressions and, comparatively speak- This is a very particular Wales, with a ing, of irrelevant ideas: and the insertion of mythic charge apparently quite different the mythic element into the concerns of from the one that John Cowper gave his more normal society (though what Powys- Wessex landscapes. It is necessary, I think, ian society is ever truly normal?) is gradually to examine the whole question again. and carefully done. Those hostile to my thesis here may well argue that it is in What emerges may well be a more confus- Maiden Castle that John Cowper comes ed answer, as confused indeed as J.C.P. closest to reading like another and more sometimes seems to have been himself. It ordinary novelist and that that in itself is must be said, however, that the re-examin- damning. I would reply that it is in Maiden ation offered here takes place within very Castle that he demonstrates for the first time limited parameters, for in extenso the nature some of the elements of novelistic technique and meaning of Powys's relationship with missing earlier—such as imagining the Wales might well be worth as many as three shape of his story from the beginning, or four critical essays. What I have done is to knowing how much one may reasonably get add a close examination of Maiden Castle to into 496 pages instead of carrying on like "a that of Owen Glendower and to draw tog- Stonehenge Bard of Interminable Prose ether a few threads from A Glastonbury 11 Narrative", and curbing his authorial Romance, Porius, Autobiography, Letters self-indulgence in the interest of developing to his Brother Llewelyn and Obstinate characters who are neither embodiments of Cymric.

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