Morine Krissdóttir
DESCENTS OF MEMORY
The life of John Cowper Powys
480pp. Duckworth/Overlook. £25 (US $40).
978 1 58567 917 1

John Cowper Powys
PORIUS
A novel
Edited by Morine Krissdóttir and Judith Bond
624pp. Duckworth/Overlook Press. £25 (US $37.95).
978 1 58567 366 7

John Cowper Powys is a biographer’s nightmare. He was immensely productive, he continued to publish until he was in his late eighties, he kept a diary, he wrote thousands of letters, and his handwriting was illegible. His immediate family was vast (he was the oldest of eleven children), all his siblings were important to him, and some to literary history. Hoards of his papers survived, some by chance in proverbial attics, and his last large novel, Porius, was never published in full in his lifetime, although the original manuscripts and typescripts also survived in scattered locations in different countries. How to make a coherent narrative out of this embarrassment of riches? It needed courage to take up the challenge, and Morine Krissdóttir has risen to it with outstanding success. Descents of Memory is a remarkable book.

Nearly all of Powys’s writing is openly autobiographical, rooted in his childhood, in his own troubled psyche, in the landscapes of Wales and the West Country and in the bizarre Powys family romance. This gives a biography an added interest and justification. Although he published, in 1934, one of the most astonishingly frank autobiographies since that of Rousseau, whom he made his model, this raised as many questions as it answered. Some of it seemed wildly implausible, the work of a voyeuristic, sadomasochistic and pornography-addicted fantasist, yet it is so brilliantly written and so packed with circumstantial detail that it compels respect, and most of it rings oddly true. Disentangling fact from fiction cannot have been easy, and it must have been tempting at times to abandon close investigation, but Krissdóttir has pursued her subject rigorously. She enters into his secret world of dark intensity, yet manages not to have been driven mad. She confesses, in her introduction, that his works “both attracted and repulsed” her, yet she became enthralled by them and by him. She is too discreet to intrude herself as narrator into the story, except at one or two well-timed and poignant (not to say heartbreaking) moments, but her volume can only have been the result of a long apprenticeship, a long friendship, a long quest. Powys and the partner of his later years, Phyllis Playter, emerge from this chronicle as two powerful, fragile, brave and eccentric figures, characters from a myth they wove for themselves.

The importance of Powys’s oeuvre is widely accepted and as widely ignored. This was partly his own fault. As his biographer reveals, he was, time and again, his own worst enemy, a man who had no sense of self-preservation, although he mysteriously lived to be ninety-two, in poor health and on a diet of stale bread and tea. His first forty years showed little promise of the great novels to come, for after an unhappy boyhood at Sherborne School (we learn in Descents of Memory that he did not tell the whole truth about his schooldays) and an undistinguished university career, he embarked on a pointless and unfortunate marriage, from which he escaped as an itinerant lecturer on literature in Britain, and then in the United States, where he stayed for decades. He was a hypnotic speaker, and could draw crowds of thousands as he lectured on Homer, Whitman, Nietzsche, Rabelais and other favourites: in those years he earned good money, much of which he sent home to support his wife and the child he hardly ever saw. But the good times did not last. He had his own high standards of integrity but no financial sense, and his follies on this front are carefully documented by Krissdóttir with a kind of impatient admiration. With the appearance in 1929 of his fourth published novel, Wolf Solent, when he was nearing sixty, it looked as though he was about to become a success in spite of himself, as the book sold surprisingly well, but he managed to avoid this fate by a series of ludicrously mishandled contracts, through carelessly incurring expensive libel actions, and by misunderstanding his English wife’s astute and self-interested reading of the financial implications of his relationship with his American mistress. It is a cautionary tale from which he emerges as a tragicomic clown, a role which many of his fictional characters assume.

The story of the disastrous libel problems, real and potential, arising from two of his major novels, A Glastonbury Romance (1932) and Weymouth Sands (1934), is told in full for the first time by Krissdóttir, and if the detail overwhelms a casual reader (though casual readers do not much favour Powys), it will grip his fellow authors. Publishers, agents and insurance companies are the villains of the piece, not the litigant. Powys seems to have been incapable of reading a contract, and this weakness was exploited even by those who ought to have protected him. Krissdóttir gives the context, reminding us that this period was notorious for libel and obscenity actions against writers (she cites D. H. Lawrence, James Hanley, Havelock Ellis, Compton Mackenzie and Llewelyn Powys’s lover Gamel Woolsey), but she concedes that Powys was singularly reckless and unfortunate – partly, as he claimed, because he was psychic, and guessed the truth even when he could not have known it, a danger peculiar to novelists.

In the first of these cases, the owner of Wookey Hole, then and now a famous tourist attraction in Somerset, claimed that Powys’s portrait of the entrepreneur Philip Crow, the fictitious owner of this cave, libelled him, and there were indeed coincidental similarities which might well have made him take offence. Captain Hodgkinson’s action was not edifying, but it was more justifiable than the ways in which Powys’s American and English publishers and their insurers tried to shift the blame and make Powys pay. Simon and Schuster, Bodley Head and the agent Laurence Pollinger were all somewhat shabbily involved in this battle, which, despite an appeal to the Society of Authors, proved disastrous. It would be unwise to attempt a precis of this account for fear of arousing further libel actions, but the outcome was clear: Powys was pushed to the brink of ruin, where he hung perilously for the rest of his life, refusing several offers of help. His publishers, fearing a second and similar onslaught on Weymouth Sands (1934), set very recognizably in the town of the title, forced him to cut and rewrite and rename his characters, and the book was born mutilated but, like its breech-born author, indestructible.

If establishing the facts of these and many other confusing sequences were all that Krissdóttir had achieved, we would still owe her a great debt. But she gives us much, much more. Her reading of Powys’s states of mind (his “life illusion”) and techniques for survival is unfailingly sensitive, and her use of the fiction, letters and diaries as illustration shows us why we need to pay attention to this man. She catches the colours of his landscapes and the very movement of his spirit. She salvages fine moments from unpublished holographs: here is Powys after the libel disaster, presenting himself as no-name Dud in an early draft of Maiden Castle, “a man”, she writes, “in intense shock, for whom even nature cannot give solace”:

"Keeping his eyes carefully on the rut before him, his mind visualized rather than articulated the syllables “Fever-Few” and, immediately afterwards, the syllables “Camomile” . . . . Here, in the margin between consciousness and unconsciousness, the two words, or rather the faint simulacra of the two words, hung suspended, like dimly-seen vessels in a region where sea and sky were indistinguishable."

This is Powys, the patron saint of all desperate introverts who hope to be saved, as his admirer J. B. Priestley put it, “by long solitary walks”. She quotes at more length some of his better-known passages, such as the extraordinary description of the flooding of the Somerset Levels:

"Up the sands and shoals and mudflats, up the inlets and estuaries and backwaters of that channel-shore raced steadily, higher and higher as day followed day, these irresistible hosts of invading waters . . . . There was a strange colour upon them, too, these far-travelled deep-sea waves, and a strange smell rose up from them, a smell that came from the far off mid-Atlantic for many days. They were like the death mounds of some huge wasteful battlefield carried along by an earthquake and tossed up into millions of hill summits . . . ."

And on the prose surges, for four pages, for, as she drily notes, “Powys never freed waters by half”.

Most of the colourful characters in the psychodrama of his life are members of the Powys clan. They include his writer-brothers, the dark, depressed, oddly large-headed Theodore, whose son was torn to pieces by “disaffected natives” while visiting one of his less eccentric uncles in Africa, and consumptive curly-haired Llewelyn, known as Lulu, who was not as angelic as he looked. Making love “à la Lulu” was John’s code for penetrative sex, a method he did not favour but occasionally practised, whereas Lulu practised it randomly and frequently. Then there were the sisters, sad Katie, independent lace-making Marian, practical bee-keeping Gertrude, and little Lucy, who lived on until 1986, and was buried with no flowers on her bier, but a tiny doll – a black coated clergyman. (Their father had been a clergyman, and so was John’s ill-fated son.) The feelings between several family members verged on the incestuous, and Marion’s son, Peter, appears to have believed for most of his life that he was the son of his uncle John; a belief that Marion and John seem not wholly to have discouraged, but which was almost certainly not true. (Peter committed suicide in 1992, having sent his journals to Krissdóttir.) The siblings offer neuroses too exaggerated to be described as textbook Freudian case histories, but Krissdóttir confronts all this melodramatic and at times ludicrous confusion with professional expertise, sympathetic distance and a much-needed wit. The Powyses found themselves funny at times, and luckily so does she. It was a period distinguished by proliferating psychoanalytic theories and outpourings of psychosexual confession, but the Powys romance takes us beyond Freud and Jung and Havelock Ellis, and into the wilder realms of tantric yoga, gland chemistry and alchemy, where Krissdóttir proves an expert guide.

The heroine of this saga was not born, and never legally became, a Powys. Phyllis Playter, known to John as the “T.T.”, or the “Tiny Thin” or the “Tylwyth Teg”, was his slender fairy sylph, his “elemental”, who fulfilled his need for embodied disembodiment. She was a young American woman whom he had met in 1921, when at the age of twenty-six she attended one of his lectures in Joplin, Missouri. She was twenty-two years younger than him. They immediately embarked on a correspondence which evolved into a lifelong union. Playter had a frail body and a sensitive, depressive and occasionally hysterical temperament, but in Powys she had met, in every sense, her match.

They both lived at a pitch of great emotional intensity, and recorded their storms in letters and diaries, some of which have only recently come to light. She wrote with a quivering and defenceless honesty of her rages, and she had much to rage about. When they were living, in the 1930s, at their remote country home, Phudd Bottom, in upstate New York, without electricity, heating, or indoor plumbing, she not only had to cope with scrubbing linoleum, lighting fires, filling oil stoves and carrying ashes and groceries, but also had to type manuscripts and administer enemas to her bowel-obsessed partner, and sympathize with him when his ulcer spat “with a froth of fury like a sea anemone”. He, meanwhile, never learned how to open a window or pull up a blind, and described lying on a sofa reading a book as doing his “yoga”. At one point she became so enraged by the holes in the carpet, and white piles of cigarette ash, that she seized his hair and pulled off his spectacles in “insane fury”, but “his pride and dignity did not seem to be even so much as crossed by the shadow of a dragonfly . . . . I deserve to be a bent sharp stick stuck forever in a muddy and uncomfortable crevice in Lethe forever”. Those familiar with the Powys style will recognize from such passages the nature of their bond.

One would expect, in the twenty-first century, to react with indignation against such archetypal exploitation, but their mutual fantasy and mutual dependence removes them to a mythic land where normal judgements do not seem to apply. Here is Powys, on Playter’s desire to have a real child to replace the “stone child” she had “adopted” and named Perdita. (They also had a toy doll called Olwen and an imaginary child called Glauk.) He wrote “I will not ever consider – in this point [my] deepest Selfishness or Egoism is Adamantine – even so much as a thought of a little Perdita! My only daughter is a Stone – the daughter of a stone – & my only little girl is the T.T.!”. Such a folie-à-deux goes beyond abuse and imbalance. Playter was an equal partner in and a co-creator of this myth, not a helpless victim of it. They were both role players, rescuing themselves from psychic torment and metaphysical despair by endlessly renewed invention. Photographs of Playter show her more frequently in fancy dress than in her ordinary clothes: we see her as a girl of fourteen in Breton costume, aged thirty-four in an antique Russian lace headdress lent to her by John’s sister Marian, and in 1939 as a dancer in Halloween costume, accompanied by Powys robed as a magician. Earlier in 1939, they had seen Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka in London, which became another of their alternative life myths: thereafter he frequently described himself as the sad clown Petrushka and Phyllis as “the Dancer”. (Krissdóttir is also editor of Petrushka and the Dancer: The diary of John Cowper Powys, June 1934–July 1935, 1995.)

So powerful are these imaginary worlds that it is slightly shocking to learn of some of the more ordinary of their daily activities – Phyllis’s much-needed restorative lunches in the Wessex Hotel during their Dorchester years, her shopping trips, John’s joining of the London Library, their evenings reading C. P. Snow and Alan Sillitoe in their last and most impractical of homes at Blaenau Ffestiniog. But they never dwindled into normality or banality. Powys’s last works, such as The Brazen Head and Atlantis, bring to mind some of Doris Lessing’s works of inner-space fiction: these bold minds travel into the unknown where few dare or wish to follow. Krissdóttir is critical of some of his more incoherent later efforts, but she reserves her highest praise for Porius, a gigantic novel (which includes giants in its cast) set in Wales in 499 ad, written when he was in his seventies, and first published in a heavily edited version in 1951.

Powys believed it to be his masterpiece, and so does Krissdóttir. As she says, “it is impossible to summarize this huge ‘Dark Ages’ novel of nine hundred typeset pages with its forty-nine characters and chaotic events”. Porius is, on one level, a historical novel which deals with the decline of Roman rule in Britain and Jessie L. Weston’s interpretation of the Grail legend, but it is also an overwhelming evocation of the primal landscapes of Wales, peopled by some everyday Welsh village characters from the twentieth century. She tells us that while he was writing it, Powys used to encourage his imagination by a ritual of holding his head under water in a basin to “think of the shells and sea-anemones and sea-weed and pebbles . . . . Thus I daily go back to the Edge of the Sea out of which all life originally sprang”. What he called his “ichthyosaurus ego” was still searching for its prehistoric origins, and for its reunion with the natural world.

The original text of Porius was heavily cut at the request of his publishers, whose initial reaction had been that it was indecipherable, overwritten, and long-winded: they may also, more prosaically, have pleaded the post-war paper shortage. He set about “scraping” his “great buggerly book” with reluctant vigour, boasting he was “a master-cutter”, and fearing that his publishers wanted to delay it because when “this old sod dies . . . his price will go up”. (They would have had to wait a long time, for he did not die until 1963, and Playter lived until 1982.) It has now been published in a new edition edited by Krissdóttir and Judith Bond, reassembled from many variant versions. Whole scenes have been restored, including a significant section about a magical child which Krissdóttir argues was an essential part of the original alchemical plot. One can only hope that this mythic masterpiece will now find the readers that it deserves, for it is, as critics have argued, fit to be compared both for ambition and achievement with Ulysses, while the biography, Descents of Memory, deserves to stand with Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce as a major work about a major artist.

Margaret Drabble's recent novels include The Peppered Moth, 2001, The Red Queen, 2004, and The Sea Lady, published last year. She has edited several editions of the Oxford Companion to Literature.

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