Discovering
the Powyses: Powys Memories
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
