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Discovering the Powyses: Powys Memories by Peter Foss I recently came across an article on Llewelyn Powys by L. C. L. Drew (Dorset County Magazine No.73, [1978]), which described how the author went in search of the Powyses in East Chaldon and decided to put up at a small cottage on the village green only to find that this had been the first house of Theodore Powys. His host, it turned out, was Theo’s old friend, Walter Miller. The article started me thinking of my Powys memories, because it so nearly paralleled my own experience of coming to East Chaldon in the early 70s. My very earliest recollection of the name ‘Powys’ was in about 1965, when I was still at school. During the dinner-hour I used to wander into the Midland Educational Company bookshop in Hotel Street, Leicester, and was often intrigued by a substantial volume which seemed to reside permanently on the fiction shelves. Its combination of Celtic lettering and the word ‘Castle’ on a green spine produced for some reason a rush to the heart; and thinking that the subject matter was historical, I remember being most disappointed that the text turned out to be dense narrative and, what is more, without pictures! But the image – ‘Castle’ and giant – remained with me. Some years later I drifted through Oxford in something of a dream - waffling through a thousand years of Eng. Lit. (and Lang.) - but now find it strange that nowhere did I encounter a mention of the name Powys, not even in the bookshops, new and antiquarian, where I spent much of my time. In 1972 I began working as an assistant at Leicester University bookshop, and noticed one day a cream-coloured hardback arrive in the receiving department, with the striking title ‘Old Earth Man’. Even more striking was the picture opposite the title page of a man slumped on a dry earthen bank gazing into the dirt ditch of a deserted roadside. I experienced then that same rush of the heart that I had felt seven years before, and wanted, naturally enough, to know why. Who was this author, described in an epigraph as either a ‘god’ or a ‘devil’; who had come to ‘full creation’ apparently in his sixties and seventies, and who described himself as a tramp? I decided to find out. Walking across to the University library I was surprised to discover (in the light of no sign of him at Oxford) that there was a whole shelf of John Cowper Powys’s work. I took down the largest I could find – a book of nearly a thousand pages - and read the first paragraph. Surely no-one who encounters the opening page of A Glastonbury Romance – once described, I believe, as the worst in English Literature – is ever going to be quite the same again. Charlatan or genius? It took me an obsessed exhausting five weeks in 1973, to read that book - slowly, one might even say, succulently – carrying it with me everywhere, in cars, bars and buses (not an easy task), and the verdict was clear. There was no looking back. It so happened that I came across all three Powyses at about the same time. As serendipity determines, one of my colleagues at the bookshop mentioned to me the name of T. F. Powys. His girlfiend’s father was a book collector and spoke highly of this writer. During a visit to Chris and Celia’s at their Clarendon Park home I met the gentleman and his wife – Francis and Katherine Feather. And so opened another perspective on the Powys name. In a bookshop in Mansfield Road, Nottingham, where I found my first Glastonbury (a first at 75p), I also came across Llewelyn’s Skin for Skin and Elwin’s Life. Being rather infatuated by then with the family these were ideal books; but when I read them I realised again that here was yet another remarkable writer, totally different and yet totally absorbing. My feeling about Llewelyn did not produce the gut frisson of reading John Cowper, but instead a kind of release – what he would have described, I suppose, as liberation from cant. A belles lettre writer who was totally subversive! Two years later I arrived in East Chaldon with a tent and a motorbike. I knocked at the cottage on the green and was invited in by a small woman who called out to her husband, ‘Here’s a young man who wants to know about Theodore.’ I was soon sharing cake and tea with Mr and Mrs Miller, the old man laying full length on a sofa in the low-ceilinged front parlour. There was much conversation of course about Theodore, but also about Katie, and the cross Mr Miller had recently put up on her unmarked grave in the churchyard. We talked too about Llewelyn’s stone and how to find it on the downs. I later went in search of it, and remembered it being far more obscured than it is now. A few years on I returned to Chaldon and wandered down to Chydyok from the gate above Tumbledown. I then first met Janet Machen, and through her kindness in later years was able to stay at the cottage. I often went in the winter months, preferring both the solitude it afforded and the drama of wild weather to the hot dry days one gets in downland summers. In those days Chydyok was more isolated than now, without phone or permissive paths, and its simple character was all the more appealing. It is impossible now to capture quite that first effect of entering into the Powys landscape of south Dorset, discovering for one’s self, alone, these secret places. Now having come so far along the road as to have spent five years researching Llewelyn Powys for a doctorate, working on the bibliography and now back again with Llewelyn’s remarkable early diaries, with all their characteristic evocation of those scenes, I feel more than ever both the loss of more pure experiences, but also in an numbing world what joy and consolation there is in the continuing journey. Only recently, for instance, I located the remains of the garden on Jordan Hill where Llewelyn placed his shelter after the Great War; and nearby, a house hidden in a cove of the sea which was witness to another of Llewelyn’s early romantic assignations. His 1911 diary records that he stood here with a girl, at the time married to an old colonel, but who some years before he had parted from reluctantly. He recalled for her the very spot in the road where they had last talked and she remembered that he ‘liked girls with untidy hair’. ‘Afterwards,’ he writes, ‘we stood alone on a great field, the moon paving the sea with rippling silver.’ Peter J.Foss From The Powys Society Newsletter, No 45, April 2002 |
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WOLF SOLENT John Cowper Powys |
A Powys Society Meeting |
MR WESTON'S GOOD WINE T.F. Powys |
SOMERSET ESSAYS Llewelyn Powys |
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U.K. Registered Charity no. 801332 • ©2009 The Powys Society |
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