Holograph of one of the final pages of A Glastonbury Romance
The novelist, John Cowper Powys, who died in Blaenau Ffestiniog exactly fifty years ago, in June 1963, tends to arouse either profound admiration or utter frustration and impatience among those who encounter his work. His detractors often dismiss his novels as self-indulgent and verbose, whereas his admirers point out their psychological subtlety, exquisite spiritual insights and intensely lyrical descriptions of the natural world. Many readers are daunted by their extreme length. Few of his novels are less than 700 pages long, and one of the greatest, A Glastonbury Romance, weighs in at around 1200 pages. In an age which prized brevity and economy in English fiction (as exemplified in the works of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark), Powys produced works of 19th century proportions, whose scope and ambition invite comparison with the great novels of the Russian tradition.
Although he has never found a place within the canon, Powys has always had a host of passionate and powerful advocates, particularly among fellow novelists. Iris Murdoch declared that “John Cowper Powys is really interested in sex, just as keen on it as Lawrence, but he understands and portrays it far better.” More recently, Philip Pullman has noted that “Powys evoked the English landscape with an almost sexual intensity. Hardy comes to mind, but a Hardy drunk and feverish with mystical exuberance.” And the eminent critic, George Steiner, famously remarked that Powys’s novels are “the only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared to the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.”
Manuscripts currently on display at NLW
Powys was born in Derbyshire in 1872, the son of an Anglican clergyman of Welsh descent, but he grew up in Somerset and Dorset, the area which became the setting for many of his fourteen novels. For twenty five years he earned his living as a charismatic and highly theatrical itinerant lecturer, travelling around America, and writing his books during long train journeys. In 1935, following his retirement, he and his American partner, Phyllis Playter, settled in Corwen, north Wales, the area which provided the setting for two of his late masterpieces, Owen Glendower and Porius.
The Library has been collecting the papers of John Cowper Powys since the early 1980s, and has by now amassed one of the richest collections in the world of his manuscripts. Among the many thousands of pages of his letters and literary drafts are eight hundred love letters to Phyllis Playter, and the holograph of one of his most popular novels, Wolf Solent. NLW has also acquired all thirty three volumes of Powys’s diaries, works which place him firmly among the 20th century’s great diarists.
A small exhibition chronicling his life and highlighting his major achievements can currently be seen in the Library’s World of the Book, display area. It contains a selection of manuscripts, books and photographs, together with a bronze bust of Powys by the sculptor Oloff de Wet. It runs until February 2014.
Geraint Phillips