There were once three brothers who wrote – John Cowper, Theodore and Llewelyn – and very good writers they were, too, though perhaps few people have ever appreciated them equally. Chatto and Windus published Theodore, T. F. Powys, but could not abide his elder brother John Cowper Powys, turning down six of his books in ten years. This has a lot to do with the negative reports of the novelist and critic Frank Swinnerton: “Mr Powys thinks of a thing to say about a man, doubles it, and keeps on doubling until he is tired”. Samuel Beckett, who was also briefly published by Chatto, was “very disappointed” by a couple of T. F. Powys’s novels, but this did not stop him from borrowing an image from one of them, Mr Tasker’s Gods, just as he remembered a single powerful image from the book by Aldous Huxley he liked to call Cunt Pointercunt.

Llewelyn Powys, meanwhile, was the first of the brothers to inspire an individual biography (by Malcolm Elwin in 1946), but, as an essayist, he specialized in a genre that does not seem, on the whole, to inspire the fervour of critical remembrance that is reserved for works of fiction. In recent volumes of The Powys Journal, which is published annually by the Powys Society, he receives more biographical than critical attention, and this is heavily outweighed by that given to his elder brothers. Indeed, Llewelyn’s American wife, Alyse Gregory, and American mistress, Gamel Woolsey, make their own significant appearances; The Powys Journal is nothing if not thorough in its task of setting the brothers’ individual achievements in the context of the wider circle of family and friends. The Revd Charles Powys and his wife Mary had eleven children, after all, including a headmaster, an architect, a farmer and an expert lacemaker.

This already wide circle The Powys Journal would like to make still wider. There turn out to be connections not only between the Powyses and Beckett, but also between them and Ezra Pound, Iris Murdoch, Marie Stopes, Carl Jung, David Garnett, Charles Kingsley and others. James Hanley’s friendship with JCP led them both to becoming longstanding “resident foreigners” of Wales, in the 1930s, and members of the Gorsedd of Bards. Woolsey’s marriage to Gerald Brenan was her escape from Llewelyn, though in fact it was his wife Alyse who would come to be her closest friend. This, after Alyse had been prepared for her rival to have Llewelyn’s child, as she could not, if only he would not leave her altogether (“sifting through the rubbish of the past”, Woolsey wrote, “I found I had committed all the sins”). When Woolsey needed encouragement with her poetry, in later years, Brenan only gave her his books to type – and only belatedly realized “what a true poet she was”.

The outward, connecting impulse is just one source of enrichment on offer here. Over forty years after the long-lived JCP’s death, The Powys Journal continues to bring forth previously unpublished material from the archives in Dorchester and Austin, Texas, and other resting places, such was the prolific nature of the family as a whole. Some of this material may not be entirely exciting – for example, it is possible quite coolly to compare John and Theodore’s attempts at writing theatrical scripts – but that old Powys thrill has not gone. The volume for 2000 gives an instance of Llewelyn in his attractive mode of professional diarist, shaping for publication the genuine record of his return from East Africa to Dorset in 1919. The returning “exile” finds his father “stricken in years”, Theodore touched by “an infinite sadness”, and his native Dorset much as it ever was:

Sept 30th. To Sutton Poyntz, a little village under the downs, and here I came upon an old eighteenth-century sundial let into a delicious red brick wall with the words “Life is a shadow” written underneath it. I wondered what old village philosopher was responsible for these emphatic words. I like them very well.

Despite this show of variety, the latest volume of The Powys Journal, the eighteenth, carries a plea from the new Editor, Richard Maxwell, which will be familiar to readers of the Journal’s precursor, The Powys Review: “[we] would welcome more essays about Powyses who are not John Cowper”. In this volume alone, as well as contributions on JCP’s lecturing, his novels Weymouth Sands and A Glastonbury Romance, and his friendship with the poet Roy Fisher, there are reviews of Morine Krisdóttir’s biography Descents of Memory and of the “historical romance”, Porius, that Krisdóttir has co-edited with Judith Bond. More on Descents of Memory is promised for future volumes. It might be a relief for the reader to turn, therefore to the three short stories by TFP in the middle of all this, with their typical, uncanny simplicity, reassuringly present from the opening sentence: “The Rev. John Dady was a man who had a huge dislike for one community, and that community was the Roman Catholic Church . . .”.

THE POWYS JOURNAL
Volume 18
176pp. The Powys Society, available from Michael J. French, Wharfedale House, Castley, Otley, North Yorkshire, LS21 2PY. £6.
978 1 874559 36 8

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