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Open, Yet Missed the Powyses, John Cowper and Autobiography in Paradoxically Enigmatic Figure Powys Notes CONTENTS the semiannual journal and newsletter of the In This Issue 4 Powys Society of North America Powys's Alien Story: Travelling, Speaking, Writing BEN JONES 5 Editor: "The People We Have Been": Denis Lane Notes on Childhood in Powys's Autobioqraphy A. THOMAS SOOTHWICK 13 Editorial Board: Friendships: John Cowper Powys, Llewelyn Powys, and Alyse Gregory Ben Jones, Carleton University HILDEGARDE LASELL WATSON 17 Peter Powys Grey, To Turn and Re-Turn: New York A review of Mary Casey, The Kingfisher1s Wing Richard Maxwell, CHARLES LOCK 24 Valparaiso University Editor's Notes 27 Charles Lock, University of Toronto Editorial Address: * * * 1 West Place, Chappaqua, N.Y. 10514 Subscription: THE POWYS SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA $10.00 U.S. ($12.00 Can.) for two issues; includes membership in PSNA Founded in December, 1983, the Powys Society of North America seeks to promote the study and Subscription Addresses: appreciation of the literary works of the Powys In the U.S.: InCanada: family, especially those of JOHN COWPER POWYS Richard Maxwell Ben Jones (1872-1963), T. F. POWYS (1875-1953), and LLEWELYN Department of English Department of English POWYS (1884-1939). Valparaiso University Carleton University Valparaiso, IN 46383 Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 5B6 The Society takes a special interest in the North American connections and experiences of the Powyses, and encourages the exploration of the extensive POWYS NOTES, Vol- 5, No* 1: Spring, 1989. (c) , 1989, The Powys collections of Powys material in North America and the Society of North America. Quotations from the works of John involvement, particularly of John Cowper and Llewelyn, Cowper Powys and T. F. Powys used by kind permission of Laurence in American literary culture. Pollinger Limited. Quotations from the works of Llewelyn Powys used by kind permission of The Society of Authors on behalf of POWYS NOTES, the Society's publication, appears in the Estate of Llewelyn Powys. Spring and Fall issues and presents scholarship, reviews, and bibliography of Powys interest. IN THIS ISSUE Powys's Alien Story: Travelling, Speaking, Writing BEN JONES Will the real John Cowper please stand up. Such might be the demand of many an exasperated reader of John Cowper Powys, particularly if he or she has Autobiography (1934) is an entrance point to the study delved beyond the novels, and entered the realms of of John Cowper Powys not only because of the the Autobiography, or the popular essay-books, or information it provides. It is a rich source of the voluminous correspondence. Powys appears to us biographical detail, but we know it also for its in these media in so many forms, presents so many narcissistic fictionalizing, its ingenuous confessing luminescent but evasive facets of his mind, his (with its many references to cerebral sadism), and for sensations, his creativity, that— as A. Thomas its evocation of British and American literary Southwick readily admits in his discussion of the culture— more often the margins of that culture than Autobiography— "confusion" often results. its center— in the first three decades of the 20th century. It is regrettable that Paul Fussell in Our fare in this issue consists of three Abroad (his study of Modernist literary travellers) explorations of this thoroughly open, yet missed the Powyses, John Cowper and Autobiography in paradoxically enigmatic figure. When he wrote particular. But the Powyses were often missed. Autobiography ( which figures prominently in two of "Being missed," I suggest, has something to do with the discussions), Powys appears to have been in the being alien, and this is what I shall talk about here. midst of a span of relative calm and stability. In 1932 he told an interviewer: "My first stroke of Autobiography is most significantly an entrance prosperity came when I sold my manuscript of Wolf point because as a text it testifies to Powys's Solent. .With the money I bought seven acres of attempt to re-orient— partly to de-mystify— himself, ground near Albany, with an old house on it. It is to reform his imaginative life and work. While it beautiful country, like Derbyshire where I was records the initiatives of this imaginative bom. .1 can be quiet as I like. I read and re-orientation, it also, with the novels of the write and enjoy the country and mix with my farm period, demonstrates such re-orientation. It provides neighbors, and I can live in that fashion on the a statement of Powys's alien status from his childhood return from my books." For all this bucolic onward. The discourse is formed by the repetition of testimony, however, Ben Jones asserts there are good the alien scene. Although it is dedicated to his reasons to debate Powys's alien status, not just mother, suggesting an affiliation to his home, she is in terms of his personal position, but more deliberately left out of the text. Her absence is, as specifically in the way that "the idea of the he says, the "the only reticence in this book," a alien...informs us of Powys's narrative gestures and reticence that paradoxically remains a reminder of a strategies." A. Thomas Southwick reminds us how primal alien scene. Arrival and departure form the curiously protracted Powys's childhood was, and how procedure of the story. Motion through space is the it seemed to last almost into middle age. And in recurring act. Autobiography celebrates the alien her personal recollections of JCP (and of Llewelyn), status that he assumed to be his own particular way, Hildegarde Lasell Watson provides a further view of or that he invented as his particular way. He said John Cowper: as friend, as actor, and (apparently) elsewhere in about the same year: "The wise man spends as devourer, both of audiences and sugar. [D. L.] his life running away" (1933). On the Cover: Sketch of John Cowper Powys by Ivan The novels, particularly those written in the years Opfer, 1934. Courtesy of the Colgate University just prior to and following Autobiography carry out Powys Collection; Melissa McAfee, Special the alien theme: the return of a native from foreign Collections Librarian. places, where he has in most cases followed 6 * Powys Notes Ben Jones * 7 intellectual pursuits, to re-establish a claim to his point which does require more discussion, but for inheritance. But the return becomes the discovery which we shall have to wait). He seems to have that the "native" ground is not familiar, indeed that travelled constantly from the time that he began his it is hostile, even conspiratorial. As Freud has studies away from home during his years in Cambridge, shown us in the essay on the "Uncanny," the "heimlich" years which comprised a kind of walking tour ("'Yes!' is indeed the "unheimlich." The expected inheritance, he says in Autobiography, 'wherever I go I shall even if it could be "identity" instead of money, is carry with me to the end what I learnt from illusory. The revelation is that life proceeds from Cambridgeshire while I was at Cambridge ",z (my exile to exile: this is the continuity of a Powysian emphasis). And after Cambridge, he travels as narrative. It is demonstrated in the first instance tourist and/or lecturer through Europe and North by Adrian Sorio in Rodmoor (1916), that strange America, to the final settlement among the slate tips "romance" dedicated to another alien, Emily Bronte. of Blaenau Ffestiniog. Adrian starts the line of wanderers, and it continues with Richard Storm in After My Fashion (written about The letters identify the alien status: how much he 1919), and with Rook Ashover— in Ducdame (1925)— who hates Memphis, how much he likes Arkansas (just across is less a physical than a mental traveller. Rook is the river), how difficult the Chautauqua circuit is, identified in the dedicatory epigraph of Ducdame as how close he feels to certain minority groups, how one of those who impossible it is to digest food. And there is other GO WHERE THEY ARE PUSHED evidence: the itinerary itself, the pressure of FOLLOW WHERE THEY ARE LED, finding engagements, the failure of the managers, the LIKE A WHIRLING WIND, realization in the late 1920s that he could no longer LIKE A FEATHER TOSSED ABOUT, support himself, not to mention his family at home, LIKE A REVOLVING GRINDSTONE. by his lecturing. His health was deteriorating, the More aliens follow: Wolf Solent, John Crow, John audiences were gone. There is the fascinating, if Geard, Persephone Spear, both Magnus Muir and Sylvanus somewhat "antiquarian," discovery of the many Cobbold of Weymouth Sands, Dud No-Man and the manuscript pages, particularly of Wolf Solent, equestrienne Wizzie Ravelston of Maiden Castle, written on hotel stationery. The letterheads attest Rhisiart ab Owen of Owen Glendower and Porius, too, to the itinerary, and to alien status. One of the divided as he is between Rome and Wales (not to most interesting documents on this theme of the alien mention time and space). The structural repetitions is the short essay "An Englishman Up-State," written that give the novels form identify alien status as during the years that he lived near Hillsdale, New central to Powys's achievement. York. In it he talks as if Upstate New York, Columbia County, his house Phudd Bottom, would be his final Let me outline two uses of the word "alien": both "resting place." It would appear as if the wandering lead to potentially valuable areas of exploration. years had ended: "And certainly among all the First, "alien" gives us a sense of Powys's own life, a floating vignettes of rural scenes, those airy life marked by exile. Autobiography, as I have memory-pictures frcm innumerable train-windows and indicated, is the most obvious source of information from innumerable explorations on foot through secret for this area of study, but with it we include his by-ways and hidden trails, that come crowding in upon extensive correspondence, the commentaries on him by my mind when I am in a mood for calling up the past, his family and his personal and literary associates, not one reminds me of England as does Columbia County, and his journals.
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