The Powys Review NUMBER EIGHT Angus Wilson SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE "A very distinguished novel ... It is superb entertain- ment and social criticism but it is also a poem about the life of human beings - a moving and disturbing book and a very superior piece of art.'' Anthony Burgess, Observer "Wonderfully intricate and haunting new novel. The complex relationships between art and reality . are explored with a mixture of elegance, panache and concern that is peculiarly his ... magnificent." Margaret Drabble, Listener "As much for the truth and pathos of its central relation- ships as for the brilliance of the grotesques who sur- round them, I found Setting the World on Fire the most successful Wilson novel since Late Call. I enjoyed it very much indeed.'' Michael Ratcliffe, The Times "A novel which will give much pleasure and which exemplifies the civilised standards it aims to defend." Thomas Hinde, Sunday Telegraph "A book which I admire very much . this is an immensely civilised novel, life enhancing, with wonder- fully satirical moments.'' David Holloway, Daily Telegraph "... an exceptionally rich work . the book is witty, complex and frightening, as well as beautifully written.'' Isobel Murray, Financial Times Cover: Mary Cowper Powys with (1. to r.) Llewelyn, Marian and Philippa, c. 1886. The Powys Review Editor Belinda Humfrey Reviews Editor Peter Miles Advisory Board Glen Cavaliero Ben Jones Derrick Stephens 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 ©, 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 Mrs. Evelyn Elwin for permission to quote from the writings of Llewelyn Powys. The Powys Review may be obtained from Booksellers for £2, or from Gomer Press, Llandysul, Dyfed, for £2 plus 5Op 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, 34 Rouse Gardens, Alleyn Park, London, SE21 8AF. Tel. 01 670 2824 Contents Editorial Reviews John Cowper Powys's M. Krissdottir, After My Fashion: a series John Cowper Powys and the Magical of views. (Glen Cavaliero, Quest. BEN JONES 79 Ben Jones, Cedric Hentschel, Sylvia Townsend Warner Kim Taplin, G. Wilson Twelve Poems. CLAIRE HARMAN 81 Knight, T.J. Diffey) 8 Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood, Emyr Humphreys A Critical Biography. A Perpetual Curate 22 BERNARD BERGONZI 82 John Hodgson Frank Gloversmith, ed., On Reading Porius 28 Class, Culture and Social Change. BenJones A New View of the 1930s. John Cowper Powys's PETER MILES 83 Literary Criticism: Brian Lee, Continuity and Context 39 Theory and Personality: The Significance of T. S. Eliot's Denis Lane Criticism. PATRICK PARRINDER 86 John Cowper Powys, Tom Earley, Thomas Hardy and Rebel's Progress. GILLIAN CLARKE 87 48 the Faces of Nature R. L. Caserio, Mary Barham Johnson Plot, Story and the Novel: The Powys Mother 57 From Dickens and Poe to the J. E. Roberts Modern Period. PHILIP BENTLEY 89 Two Photographs of NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 91 John Cowper Powys 65 Gamel Woolsey to Alyse Gregory: Some Letters 1930-1957, edited by Kenneth Hopkins 68 The Powys Review Number Eight 1980/1981 Volume II iv Editorial There are obviously many and various ways a courteous, middle-aged man to a girl (and of reading So Wild a Thing, Llewelyn Gamel was twenty-eight, Llewelyn forty- Powys's letters to Gamel Woolsey, June three in 1927): "How generous and charm- 1928 to November 1939 (edited as a narrat- ing you were to me, dear Gamel. I can never ive by the late Malcolm Elwin and pub- forget your grace either of mind or body ... lished by the Ark Press, 1973). One can May I really keep this little book of poems, immerse oneself in them as the love-letters, the central petal of so lovely and cherished a often passionate, often lyrical, of a literary flower." They quicken after the arrival of man who has 'fallen in love'. One can stand Gerald Brenan in East Chaldon in July back disenchantedly and find these effusions 1930, soon to propose marriage to Gamel sometimes mawkish, sometimes cloying; (who had followed Llewelyn there from and, perhaps further to this, one can see America in May 1929). Forbidden love Llewelyn both consciously and unconsc- becomes stronger when threatened: "Our iously constantly extending, even convert- love is not over. It is ... like the daffodil in ing, reality into fiction, the fiction which the corner of the house of the secret garden was eventually to be composed into his where we used to cling to one another." But novel, Love and Death (1939). Or, aided by probably it is unfair to ask such questions Malcolm Elwin's excellent narrative of and make such observations; certainly they events into which the letters are inset, one are incongruous with the concept of roman- can approach them biographically, tracing tic love which underlies Llewelyn's letters. Llewelyn's active, literary and emotional The cloying elements of the letters come life from his meeting Gamel Woolsey in largely from Llewelyn's entry into what he November 1927 to his death in December sees as Gamel's own-created, fictitious 1939. Here one sees the life in the context of world of poetic vision, "middle earth", his relationships with Powys relatives and linked with fairy and medieval romance, a friends and their comments on his relation- curious amalgam of child and adult fantasy. ship with Gamel, and, above all, in the He will observe, for example, her "neck context of his relationships with those tol- with its tiny love-mark on its sun-brown erant and surely suffering people, his wife, skin like a little round hog-weed seed that Alyse Gregory, and Gerald Brenan. In this had been placed there to decorate (her) by biographical context and prompted by an acorn fairy who had loved (her) long ago Malcolm Elwin's own daring suggestions, in the south" or declare to her, "I said [to one can make psychological speculations as J. C. Powys] you were too medieval, like a to the complex of motives and feelings of woman in The Faery Queen, like a girl in a Gamel and Llewelyn. Did Gamel really forest glade or going to her turret by the want a child of Llewelyn's such as she tapestried passage out of the hearing of the proved physically unable to bear? (She lost sounds of fantastical hate!" Such escapist two of Llewelyn's children during preg- and lover's sweet-nothings have in- nancy, one by miscarriage, in America in gredients attractive to a variety of mid- 1928, one by abortion, in England, 1929, Victorian painters; one might in more pos- but these were not the only such losses in her itive defence of them observe that they are of life.) Was Llewelyn's love largely a longing the very world which, even now, in the to have a child? (For he repeatedly refers to world of the machine, our young children by a child: see especially pages 32, 33, 36, 37, nature wish to be the true world into which 47, 48.) Was his love quickened when it they will grow up (with the difference, per- became totally forbidden and physically haps, that the ideal world of children con- frustrated? The very first letters are those of tains plenty of laughter). But these love Editorial letters may be distasteful to adults, to what- or frustration. His country images give ever degree they are enchanted by day- more "joy to the living" when they come in dreams of child and lover. More positive apparently less contrived abandonment to distaste, of a very different kind, may be felt memory. Such evocations, despite some by those readers-between-the-lines who are apparent falling off after 1932, appear guided by notions of personal responsibility, throughout the letters. They vary from a the difficult business of loving one's neigh- revivifying of love through sketches of place, bour as one's self. Here enjoyment of as of September 1930: Llewelyn's world of love may be marred by I doubt there is a single spot between White an awareness that the third person in the Nose and Ringstead where we have not met, drama unfolded by So Wild a Thing, Alyse often in the grass walk, once on the hillock Gregory, was showing this virtue in an where the little dip is, often near Mrs Link- unusual way: for apparently she was asked later's, by the stile also, and by the badgers to foster her husband's love for his mistress the first time, in the fairy glade, by the thistles and did. This mode of reading, involving where the goldfinches fed ... moral judgement, and usually best avoided, to frequent association of her with country has already been deftly touched upon, sense-experience and always with the scents together with the related question as to what of summer flowers: "The memory of you is extent the writer of the love letters had an always like a honeysuckle hedge in the first eye to posterity, by Jeremy Hooker in a week of June" (1936) (so that one soon review (The Anglo-Welsh Review, Winter perceives Gamel as what John Clare would 1974, Vol. 24, Number 53, pp. 218-220). have called his "Rural Muse"), to the final Alyse Gregory, expressing the hope that country glimpses of her mistily vanishing or the love letters exchanged by Llewelyn and coming momentarily bodily near in the very Gamel would be published, commented: last letters of October and November 1939.