John Cowper Powys
Sir, – As someone who wrote a dissertation on the autobiography and Wessex
novels of John Cowper Powys (University of Virginia, 1971) and published
extensively on him in literary journals during the 1970s, I wanted to
contribute the following addendum to Morine Krissdóttir’s excellent account
of his misfortunes at the hands of publishers, attorneys, and agents during
the 1930s (which was reviewed by Margaret Drabble, November 16).
In 1972, I was preparing to write an essay on Powys’s Owen Glendower (1940), a
two-volume, massively researched novel of the Welsh prince’s revolt against
Henry IV, and I learned that a historical novel on the same subject had been
published that year by G. P. Putnams. This was Martha Rofheart’s Fortune
Made His Sword (published in 1973 in the UK as Cry God for Harry). I quickly
got my hands on a copy to see if Powys and Rofheart had used the same
sources, but what I discovered was page after page of verbatim plagiarism.
This was no accident: I counted more than a hundred such instances,
extending over about 150 pages in the middle of the novel. I considered
writing to Putnams directly but was advised instead to contact Laurence
Pollinger, Powys’s literary agent and executor, detailing the plagiarism,
which I did.
I still have Mr Pollinger’s reply, acknowledging the plagiarism, advising me
as to the futility of seeking legal action against a rich American
publisher, and suggesting to me as a remedy that I send some money to
Phyllis Playter in Blaenau Ffestiniog to help her buy a badly needed set of
false teeth.
I sent her a $50 cheque, which was, I suspect, the last royalty ever collected
by the Powys estate on one of the greatest (and strangest) historical novels
in the English language.
DAVID A. COOK
Department of Broadcasting and Cinema, University of North Carolina at
Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina 27412.
Japan’s war
Sir, – One can readily understand the hostility towards American global
behaviour that so many British feel these days. But one can only wonder
about what fund of accumulated resentments could have given rise to John A.
Davis’s recent bashing communication to your periodical (Letters, November
2). In it, he suggests that Japan’s attack on the British Empire in late
1941 was largely attributable to Britain’s misguided policy towards Japan in
the interwar period, a policy pursued only at the “insistence” of the United
States and which served to turn a benign former ally in the First World War
into an unnecessary enemy in the Second. In addition to portraying the
Japanese as having selflessly come to Britain’s aid in 1914–18 without
expecting much more in return than “a few Pacific islands”, Davis regards
Japanese actions and purposes in the later Pacific War of 1941–5 to have
been provoked and defined by American interdiction of oil supplies necessary
for Japan’s industrialization.
It is perhaps to be anticipated that something occurring so long ago, and
affecting people so far away, as Japan’s thwarted attempt to impose its
Twenty-One Demands on China (1915) should now be forgotten in some quarters.
Less understandable, though, is forgetfulness about the subsequent course of
Japanese ambitions and aggressions in China in the years leading up to
Japan’s alleged “change of sides” against Britain in 1941, when the Germans
“threatened to take over Siberia”. (In fact, Japan entered the Axis Pact
with Germany in 1940, at a time when the latter was still in cahoots with
the Soviet Union and the Luftwaffe was engaged in trying to bomb London
flat.) The pursuit of Japan’s violent Chinese adventure – from the invasion
of Manchuria (1931) through the Rape of Nanking (1937) to the occupation of
parts of French Indochina (1940) – posed a dire threat to all the societies
of South East Asia, among which were key components of the British Empire.
This to some at the time seemed to warrant grave counter-measures, even at
the regrettable risk of war, which the cutting off of oil to Japan certainly
entailed. It was most fortunate for future generations, not excluding those
of the Japanese themselves, that Churchill was not alone in apprehending the
need to run that risk.
Mention of the British Empire brings us to the core of what seems to trouble
Davis most. In an unfavourable comparison with the wartime objectives of
Adolf Hitler (!), the Americans are castigated for having aimed at and
realized “the destruction of the British Imperium”. While a modicum of
nostalgia for Britain’s lost empire may be unobjectionable, it’s more than a
bit much to pin the loss on American duplicity and designs, as though the
peoples of Asia and Africa had no significant hand in their own liberation.
Even if there were many in the USA who believed that that “imperium” should
be retired, as there were in Britain, too, the global consensus now seems to
be that they and their progeny need not apologize for those views.
PETER DUNKLEY
Georgetown University,
Washington, DC 20057.
Austrofascism
Sir, – I concede to Heinrich Pöll (Letters, December 7) that I should have
described the Austrian Corporate State of 1934–8 as “anti-Nazi” rather than
“anti-fascist”, since support from Mussolini’s Italy enabled it to resist
Hitler’s Germany. But Mr Pöll is quite wrong to say that my description of
the Corporate State as conservative and authoritarian was “benign”, and in
his denunciation of it he repeats the Austro-Marxist error of equating the
Corporate State with the Third Reich as “two Fascisms”. The Corporate State
had one internment camp, most of whose inmates were Nazis; though a
one-party state, it operated cabinet government, not dictatorship; its
ideology was Catholic, not racist. One of its citizens, Sigmund Freud,
distinguished it sharply from the “violence” of Russia and Italy and the
“barbarism” of Nazi Germany, writing in Moses and Monotheism: “things have
so turned out that today the conservative democracies have become the
guardians of cultural advance and that, strange to say, it is precisely the
institution of the Catholic Church which puts up a powerful defence against
the spread of this danger to civilization”. Freud was too hopeful; but the
partisan concept of “Austro-Fascism” blurs important distinctions.
RITCHIE ROBERTSON
St John’s College, Oxford.
Georg Baselitz
Sir, – Roger Cardinal, reviewing the Georg Baselitz show at the Royal Academy
(Arts, November 30), says that “The Big Night Down the Drain” was “seized by
the GDR authorities as an affront to decency”. For once the Reds were not at
fault. It was the West Berlin police who removed the painting from Galerie
Werner & Katz in that city.
Also, in Cardinal’s review of the Kurt Schwitters catalogue raisonné (August
24 & 31), to which I contributed as a translator, readers were
challenged with ploughing through the “details” of the artist’s techniques
and materials in German. Actually, a glossary is provided at the back of
each volume. The one in Volume Two explains such arcane ingredients as
Rochenrogen, the roe of the ray (fish).
JOHN GABRIEL
Findorffstrasse 17, 27726 Worpswede, Germany.
Biblical echoes
Sir, – Beatrice Groves’s careful and detailed analysis of biblical echoes in
her Texts and Traditions deserved better than the careless and distorted
reading Andrew Hadfield provided in his review (November 16). Far from
arguing that Romeo and Juliet is “a paschal play of resurrection based on
the life of Jesus”, she shows how the Paschal motifs, increased in Q2, are
designed to “increase the tragic shock of the catastrophe”. Similarly, the
chapter on King John does not make the play “a weird defence of the divine
right of kings”, as Hadfield argues, but shows how the biblical allusions
“give Arthur a holiness that sets him apart”, and how the play asserts that
“royalty belongs to the dispossessed”.
This dismissive treatment of a scholarly book on religion in Shakespeare
concludes loftily by implying (grotesquely) that the book suggests “that
Shakespeare wanted his plays to be read as religious allegories”. Beatrice
Groves has taken us further than this slipshod review by a seasoned
practitioner who might have given a first book the privilege of a careful
reading.
GERARD KILROY
17 Catharine Place, Bath.
In Jerusalem
Sir, – “When the Muslims arrived in Jerusalem . . .” (according to Jonathan
Bloom, reviewing Oleg Grabar’s The Dome of the Rock, December 7). Is it
really necessary to be so bland as to be blind? This makes it sound as if
the Muslims in question were on a day trip to see the sights! Their
“arrival” was preceded by serious and successful war-making, during which
many thousands of Jews and others died, Jerusalem and other cities
surrendering to avoid more of the same. The Dome was placed on a site known
by the new masters of Jerusalem to be a site holy to the Jews, and an Arabic
inscription inside the Dome warns Christians “do not overstep the bounds in
your religion. The Messiah, Jesus, is only an apostle of God . . . far be it
from his [God’s] glory that he should have a son”. The Dome is a
triumphalist lapidary text, proclaiming, in the face of both Jews and
Christians, the military power and theological “superiority” of Islam.
Indeed, as your reviewer concludes, it shows “how long and deep is Islam’s
association with Judaism and Christianity” – but not in quite the happy
little ways he seems to have in mind.
JON GOWER DAVIES
25 Rectory Terrace, Newcastle upon Tyne.
London Library
Sir, – I was struck by Bamber Gascoigne’s letter (November 23). It made me
think. Like him I have not borrowed any books for a considerable time, and
have been keeping up my subscription out of loyalty to the Library itself.
It may be worth spelling out why I have not needed it as I used to. Most of
the things I needed to look up can now be looked up online. Almost any book
I need can now be bought cheaply and fast – using ADDALL, Alibris, the Book
Depository and Amazon. The books often come the next day, and even those
which are one-off reprints of books I should once have had to go to the
Library for, come quickly and cost less than the taxi fare to and from
Central London. I do not have the uncertain wait for other readers to return
things. London congestion and travelling times have increased, and it is
ecologically unsound to go up and down in taxis. Now we are accused of
bourgeois selfishness in being unhappy to see the subscription increased
from £210 to £375, I am thinking of cancelling my subscription altogether:
you can buy a lot of books for £375. I am writing this letter because I fear
there may be many subscribers in my position. And I do feel both affection
and loyalty to an institution I am subsidizing, rather than making use of.
A. S. BYATT
c/o Rogers, Coleridge and White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11.
