Philippa Powys

Novelist, poet and playwright

Some Reviews of The Blackthorn Winter

Read a chapter from The Blackthorn Winter

Poems

   Philippa Powys belonged to one of the most distinguished families in modern literature. Among her brothers were the novelists John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) and Theodore Francis Powys (1875-1953) and the essayist Llewelyn Powys (1884-1939) as well as Littleton Powys, headmaster of Sherborne Prep School, and the architect A. R. Powys who was Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and published several books on architecture. Of her sisters, Gertrude Powys was a painter of striking portraits and powerful landscapes, Marian Powys an authority on lace and lace-making. Philippa Powys was the ninth of eleven children in the Powys family's largest and most talented generation and was known to relatives and friends as ‘Katie’.

   ‘Katie is the most delightful person to show over anywhere - so enthusiastic.’ Llewelyn Powys, her most beloved brother, wrote of his teenage sister in 1903 after a visit to Sherborne with her. Over 60 years later his widow Alyse Gregory wrote of Katie, 'I have wondered who has ever really known her heart where so many turbulent battles have raged,  so many bitter disenchantments been brought to terms.' Between these extremes of time and mood was a life of rare sensibility and emotional intensity, of who was, as Alyse Gregory wrote, 'so delicately balanced, combining so vigorous an egoism with so burning a capacity for love and so great a need for reassurance.'

   Catharine Edith Philippa Powys was born on 8 May 1886 at Montacute in Somerset, where her father had been installed as vicar the previous year. She received some schooling from governesses at the rectory, in the manner of the day, but had no formal education, and most of the knowledge she acquired in her youth was self-discovered or taught by her brothers and sisters. Imaginative, inquisitive, adventurous, living in a part of rural England idyllic in its beauty and growing under the tutelage of affectionate and liberal-minded parents, they were a self-sufficient breed, indeed a happy one. Not for the Powys children the miserable tedium of Victorian rectory life or the stifling Christian severities that so affected a Samuel Butler or an Edmund Gosse.

   But when Katie was only seven, this idyll was shattered by the death of her 14-year-old sister Nelly. Perhaps the very closeness of the brothers and sisters helped them recover from this devastation; but it must have struck Katie in later years that it was a harbinger of the irreparable process of loss which often seemed to characterise her life.

   Perhaps, too, the death of an elder sister encouraged in Katie an especially protective affection for her younger one, Lucy, with whom she developed in adolescence a particularly close relationship and on whom she became increasingly dependent for companionship and emotional support. She spent the summer holiday of 1909 with her at Sidmouth in Devon, and there became friendly with two local fishermen brothers, Bob and Tom Woolley, and with their lodger, Stephen Reynolds, a handsome, well-educated young socialist. He discussed literature and politics with Katie, and encouraged her opinions. He gave her his own newly published book to read - A Poor Man's House, about his life among the Sidmouth fishermen - and read to her from Walt Whitman, her favourite poet. John Cowper had recently introduced her to Whitman and she was to maintain an almost mystical devotion to him throughout her life, rarely travelling without a copy of Leaves of Grass to hand. Reynolds introduced her to Nietzsche too, bringing to life her dormant intellect and also, unbeknown to him at first, a romantic and soon obsessive passion. But the few letters he wrote to her, one of which she forever kept in her copy of Whitman, began 'Dear Miss Powys' and did not exceed the bounds of propriety and tact. Her veneration was not reciprocated.

   In 1910 she moved with Lucy to join her younger brother Will at the farm their father had purchased for him at Witcombe, near Montacute. But her imagined life of happy companionship with her youngest sister ended almost as soon as it began. In May, a friend of Will's — Hounsell Penny — visited them. By August he and Lucy were engaged, and by the spring of next year married. Katie was secretly inconsolable. The crossroads were reached where Lucy and I parted,' she confided in the diary she had started in 1903, and was to keep on and off for the next 60 years. 'She crossed the bridge and now we can only talk over it.'

   As if to cushion the emotional blow of Lucy's departure, Katie's fantasies homed in again on Stephen Reynolds. She had seen him in the summer of 1910, and briefly after Lucy's marriage in 1911, but that was to be their last meeting. In that year she broke off her diary, and over the next year her simmering emotional tensions boiled over into a nervous breakdown. Brought back to Montacute Vicarage, she had to be constantly nursed, threatening suicide if not allowed to see Reynolds - who kept his distance. By September 1912 she was in such a serious condition that her father finally submitted to pressure within the family and agreed to have her admitted to a sanatorium in Bristol, where she recovered in good time. In 1913 she began training at an agricultur­al college in Warwickshire and spent the summer of 1914 on a women's co-operative farm in Sussex. That year her mother died and Katie returned to Montacute, renting a small dairy, 'Roper's Farm', there where she lived with a few cows, making butter and selling milk.

   Stephen Reynolds died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, but he remained the great love of Katie's life. She is still recording his birthday and her feelings in her diary 20 years later. She made frequent pilgrimages to his grave in Sidmouth, noting in one entry, 'I ran to Steve's grave with mackerel from the sea and bay leaves and Walt Whitman as well.’ After a visit to the house where they had last met (about 16 years earlier), she reflects on her fate 'to have seen so little of him and then at the last only to have a memory - a memory which brings tears, for longing of what cannot be.' The painful experience of her passion for Reynolds she evoked in a 'prose-poem' The Phoenix, an excerpt from which was published in The Dial in 1928. She remained lifelong friends with the Woolleys and the fishermen of Sidmouth, and wrote about them both a play, The Quick and the Dead, and later a novel, Further West, neither of them ever published. In later years she rented a cottage near the sea-front in Sidmouth, to be near them and share in their lives as he had done, dispensing cups of tea to the fishermen returning from their all-night catches and going out with them sometimes on their early morning expeditions.

   Katie worked on her farm for several years, living there with Emily Clare, the children's old nanny, until 1923, when a fall from her horse necessitated having her teeth extracted - a painful and humiliating experience which may have precipitated her decision to give up farming. She went to Paris to visit Gertrude (trying to pick up the threads of her career as an artist), and in November 1923 arrived in New York to visit John Cowper and Llewelyn, both now living there with Phyllis Playter and Alyse Gregory. The four months she spent in America were among the happiest of her life, capped perhaps by a visit to Walt Whitman's house where, in an act of devotional vandalism, she secretly carved her initials on the chair in his study.

 Chydyok Farmhouse

Katie returned to England in April 1924 and with Gertrude, herself back from Paris and freed from the care of looking after their father, who had died the year before, moved into Chydyok, an isolated house on the headland between the sheer Dorset cliffs and the village of East Chaldon in the rolling green downlands where Theodore Powys had also settled. And it was largely through Theodore's encouragement that, in April 1927, after a trip to Ireland where she met 'AE' (George William Russell), who discoursed on Whitman for her, she took up her diary again. 'Now I am so old as 40 I feel less and less inclined towards strangers and towards ordinary teaparty conversation,' she wrote, and life at Chydyok suited her accordingly. She rode her pony Josephine, grew vegetables in the garden and combed the beach for driftwood, recording her happiness in finding one day a box bearing the word STEPHEN washed ashore. She sat on it for a while, then carried it up the cliff and buried it under a clump of elders.

   Another diary entry of this time gives a fleeting indication of her struggle with her emotions. 'I achieved today the feeling that I used to have,' she notes, in a particular mood of peace and security after a visit to her brother Theodore. Emotions, for Katie, were not only to be felt; they were something to be achieved. A few months later she is admonishing herself over her feelings for Llewelyn, on the verge of a return visit to America - 'I must learn not to love.' And when his departure is imminent, she falls into a heightened, psalm-like prose, wanting to feel more important to her brother than she felt she was: 'Oh my God, my God why hast thou made me so. My life is like a spring that flows over rough stones and fertilizes no pastures. Where I would have it warmed by a sun, instead the frost covers it with cold ice...' She was depressed too by her lack of achievement: 'I have done some writing but my farm­ing has failed; and as I am slow and uncertain in my writing it is of no commercial value. Thus the good my life is to mankind, is NIL.'

   Out of this spiritual impasse - and promptly into another - Katie was led by the enticingly androgynous figure of the young Valentine Ackland, who had settled in East Chaldon in 1925 to escape an unhappy marriage and who offered her encouragement with her writing, being herself a budding poet. It was not long before Katie was hoping she might offer something more, and found herself overtaken by new but familiarly intense and frustrating passions. But Valentine was 20 years her junior and was often up in London. She also attracted, and was attracted to, a variety of other women—and Katie was not emotionally equipped to interpret or deal with Valentine's behaviour.

   For several years she was preoccupied with her feelings for Valentine. She visited her in London early in 1929, but noted how she 'was screened from me after the usual manner of lovers, thus stirring that love to wilder force.' Valentine excited and depressed her more than anyone in the world. 'How I wished she loved me as I love her but it can't be so . . .' She visited her there again the following year and felt again self-conscious of her 'clumsy body' and frustrated by their 'inability to surmount the last barrier of our friendship.' But 1930 had its compensations. After her failure to find a publisher for two previous novels — Budvale and Joan Callais — her novel The Blackthorn Winter was published, quickly followed by Driftwood, an aptly-named volume of 24 poems, some of which Valentine had helped her with, and which Katie dedicated to her accordingly. This must have done much to restore Katie's self-esteem. But in the autumn of that same year, the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, a friend of her brother Theodore, arrived in East Chaldon and it was soon common knowledge that she and Valentine had become lovers — a knowledge which produced some hysteria from Katie and some violent imagery in her diary.

   In an entry for August 1928, Katie had written: 'Yea I can rise excitement often more from my own sex than from the opposite. Oh the irony of it! I suppose it is that I have failed in my relations with men, but unless my passion is roused I have small wish for their affection. I'd rather be with the hills, the wind or my own horse Josephine.' But in 1931 she befriended Jack Miller, a Lulworth fisherman she had met while walking on the cliffs, and they were soon lovers, Katie delighting in, but also at times having to guard herself against, his 'overpowering passion' and rough physicality. 'He satisfied as none has the living want of my womanhood,' she later wrote. But she was disappointed that her revelation of this affair stirred no hint of jealousy in Valentine, 'whom I love next to S[tephen] in the world', and by 1934, shortly after returning from East Africa where she had spent most of the previous year with Will, she records her disenchantment with her liaison with Jack — 'Life a terrible failure: love turned to disappointment ... I enter too intensely in the lives of those I love. I want. I suffer.'

   Katie wrote at least four more novels, probably all during the 1930s, but the three slim pamphlets of poems which appeared locally during the decade completed her published work, and it seems likely that she gave up writing after that. In the summer of 1938, however, she took up her diary again after a six-month break, penning a loving eulogy of her sister Gertrude and recording her feelings of shame over the Munich affair. By now John Cowper was settled in Wales and Katie notes the 'easy continuance' of her relationship with Phyllis; 'but I found my love for her became one of a different standing. It became more the love of sisters than what it had previously been.' Reading between the lines of these letters from John Cowper, we may reasonably infer that Katie, so essentially bisexual in her passions, had at some point had a crush on Phyllis too, her 'sailor-girl' as Powys calls her, perhaps with sympathetic tact.

   But her love for her youngest sister was as strong as ever. A visit by Lucy to Theodore when Katie especially wanted to be with her prompts a mood of self-abasement — 'How I fumbled to reassure myself of her love but I could only see her back retreating before me' —and some homespun philosophy: 'Certainly love brings me curse after curse and until I can learn to stand aloof from it I shall always be caught in its bog-holes.'

   The curses continued. In March 1939 Jack Miller was suddenly taken ill, and when Katie returned to his home having rushed to give the news to his relatives, he was already dead. She poured her grief into her diary, realising the painful meaning of his loss — 'I was like a vixen crying out for her dead mate the dog fox.' She fled to the cliffs for consolation: 'The seagulls were my comfort, their flight, their cries were my respite.' The respite was brief. In December 1939, Llewelyn died in Switzerland after years of battling consumption. Not for six months could Katie bring herself to mention it - 'Our very lifeblood receded with him. All writing, all words became futile. His death retards all.' Throughout the summer of 1940 'Death, death, death' resounds through her diary like a litany, as she recounts the dog-fights and air raids over Dorset, which drove Theodore the same year to move inland to Mappowder, and the multiplication on an infinite scale of her own loss and pain. Nearly a year after Llewelyn's death, Katie finally breaks into a passionate outpouring - 'Like a knight he has held the Banner of love and its joys aloft. If it had not been for him where should I have been. Caught still in the snares of the Victorian age. Unless married they say all natural joys should be refused. Lulu! Lulu! Lulu! My Brother my lover. No more shall the joy of your coming bring light to my eyes or gladness to my heart.'

   During the war years Katie remained at Chydyok with Gertrude, and joined now by Alyse. Her passions and memories were still untamed - still the frustration of Valentine, still the desolation of Stephen's loss. 'I felt there was no rock bottom anywhere to my life,' she recalled of his death. 'I remember longing to have the nerves to commit myself to the Atlantic waves as the ship bore me to New York. It was to Phyllis that I poured out my woes.' As the years passed, Katie began to live in the knowledge she would not achieve recognition as a writer, and found her happiness among her friends in Chaldon, where she was a popular figure, drinking her beer with the other locals at the 'Sailor's Return' after the long walk down over the hills from Chydyok.

   In 1952 Gertrude died, in 1953 Theodore, in 1955 Littleton. Katie and Alyse, their powers failing, found life on the headland increasingly difficult, but Katie wanted to die at Chydyok as she had lived, as free from conventions as the seagulls wheeling above the cliffs. In 1957 Alyse decided to move to Devon, and Will and Lucy finally persuaded Katie to move inland to Buckland Newton, a village near Lucy's home in Mappowder. It was the indomitable Lucy, her own husband dead, who journeyed through the Dorset lanes to visit and tend to Katie, now 71.

   Katie wrote to John Cowper about her new surroundings and the friendly people, giving him snippets of local news and walking in the fields with Lucy whenever she could manage it. Marian flew in for a visit from New York, and Will came over from Africa. She was reading Dostoievsky and only wishing John Cowper could visit her too. Only in 1961 does she feel like giving up all pretence of being well. 'How hard it is to learn to accept your Fate,' she writes to John Cowper. 'I find it is impossible. I try my hardest to hide my feelings; but it is often unattainable — instead I find it much more easy to moan & curse. If not openly to others, I do it when alone - If it was not for the Sun I long for the eternal sleep of the grave.' When John Cowper turned 89 later the same year, she wrote to congratulate him - 'Few can claim the same. You are following Lulu's desire to live—How different from myself. Every day I wish I could [be] found like Aunt Dora dead in my bed.'

Increasingly crippled physically, her mind was still alert. As ever she struggled with emotions, looking back perhaps on the turbulent pas­sions and the loves of her life, with only Lucy now faithfully at hand. 'A slave to loves she could neither subdue nor conceal,' Alyse later wrote of Katie, 'unable to accept or assimilate the most bitter instructions of life, with periods of withering lucidity and self-castigation she suffered every reverse with a combination of entrenched defiance and crushing lonely grief.'

   Yet Katie's own hard-won philosophy, distilled from Leaves of Grass and Thus Spake Zarathustra ('my Bible and my prayer book'), had long sustained her. She had stated it at the outbreak of the war: 'Seize happiness where you can. Lose no lover and learn philosophy under adversity. Take refuge in Nature.' And it was for Nature, perhaps, with the 'bone-deep reciprocity' she felt for it, as Alyse wrote, that Katie reserved her greatest passion. She was at one with this lover - ever present and thrilling. Nothing pleased her more than a thunderstorm or an autumn gale, or the little red fox-cubs playing on the cliffs, or the high­land cattle that loomed like buffaloes out of the mist as she walked across the Downs. She would pull some tail feathers from a dead magpie and note they were 'more blue than they seem in flight', and watch the porpoises from the cliff top 'one springing over the back of the other.' She would bathe in the Channel herself, watching the gulls or seeing the moon eclipsed. A family friend, Oliver Holt, recalls her 'dark, wild, haunted, flashing eyes' and an account of how once 'she was sitting by the open window of her bedroom when a dove flew in, closely pursued by a hawk, and how she gathered the dove to her breast and outfaced the glaring eyes of the predator while its wings beat against the panes!' Hardly a day passed when she did not watch for the movement and direction of the wind, like a lover possessed - 'Oh! How I enjoy the wildness of the wind. The mad careering wind. Flinging itself against me like unwanted love. Indeed indeed it is a moment like that when my spirit is truly satisfied. In the meeting of wind do I find myself.' And in winter when the snow fell and the drifts piled high, it was the most exciting thing she had ever experienced — 'more thrilling than words can say.'

   In just such a winter, on 11 January 1963, when the snow covered the hedge rows and lay deep across the hills, Katie died. She was buried, as she had wished, beside an old friend, Alice Hewlett, in East Chaldon churchyard.  

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