|
Presented with
lapidary finality in Unclay, Powys’s vision
is
deeply at odds with contemporary sensibility. Theodore Powys is a
religious
writer without any seeming vestige of orthodox belief, a dark poet who
celebrates passing beauty and a stark realist who is also a supreme
fabulist.
Unless one unlocks these paradoxes one cannot fully understand his
work, or
appreciate the rare delights it contains.
Achieving such an understanding
is no simple matter, for while Powys writes with exquisite clarity his
way of
thinking is gnomic and often hard to decipher. In a penetrating
assessment of
this elusive mind, Alyse
Gregory observed in her journals that Powys
‘sees
Man’s place in the universe as ephemeral, inconsequential and doomed.
He is a
combination of the Baron d’Holbach, John Bunyan, Schopenhauer and Traherne with a
sprinkling of Sterne. Who will
understand him or do justice to him?’
The
incongruous mix of writers
mentioned here by Gregory underscores the difficulty, and several other
seemingly ill-assorted authors could be added. Jeremy Taylor, the
seventeenth-century Anglican divine and author of The Rule
and Exercises of
Holy Dying,
was a powerful influence; the word “unclay” that
gave the
title to Powys’s novel comes from a poem of Taylor’s. But Nietzsche, a
furious
atheist, was also a commanding presence throughout Powys’s life as a
writer.
Powys’s intense ambivalence towards religion is one of the keys to his
work.
One sometimes has the feeling that he views religion in the manner of
the
eighteenth-century arch-materialist Holbach – as a fantasy distracting
humans
from clear awareness of their true situation. Yet it is unthinkable
that Powys
could have shared Holbach’s dream of a world without religion. Like
Freud –
whose writings he read and admired – Powys saw human beings as
creatures
animated by illusion: if they give up religion it is usually only to
run after
other fantasies. In any case – Powys asks – what would a human life
without
illusions be like?
Though Powys is
a religious
writer, for him religion was not about belief. As he put it in Soliloquies
of a Hermit, an early volume first published in America in
1916 in which
many of the themes of his mature fictions are prefigured, ‘I am without
a
belief; – a belief is too easy a road to God.’ Religion – ‘the only
subject I
know anything about’
– is not, for Powys, a
set of propositions or a creed. It is a mood, or a shifting pattern of moods, whose intimations are fleeting. Spiritual truth was best approached by silence – or else by the indirect art that Powys employs in his wonderful Fables (1929), where pots and pans converse with fleas and corpses. If Powys had any religious beliefs they were, in the terms of conventional Christianity, highly heterodox, even heretical. Except in the shape of mortality – which, in the
figure of John Death, is the central
protagonist of Unclay – there is nothing of
salvation to be found in
Powys’s writings. Far from death being the supreme evil – as it was for his brother Llewelyn, a consumptive from the age of twenty-five who spent his life battling his illness – it enters the world to make the burdens of human life lighter. In Unclay, John Death is God’s messenger, instructed to “scythe” or “unclay” two inhabitants of the village of Dodder. Losing the parchment that contains their names, he determines to spend the summer in the village. Throughout his stay he gives and receives joy, relishing sexual encounters with the village women and rejoicing in his mission of bringing release to suffering humaniy.
From
John
Gray’s Introduction
|
Back,
Spine & Front cover
* * * * *
| JOHN
GRAY is
Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of
Economics. He is
the author of Straw
Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other
Animals (Granta),
Al
Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (Faber),
Black
Mass: Apocalyptic
Religion and the Death of Utopia (Allen Lane/Penguin), Gray’s
Anatomy:
Selected Writings (Allen
Lane/Penguin), The
Immortalization Commission:
Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (Allen
Lane/Penguin) and other
books.
|
| JOHN
GRAY
|
|
|
Theodore Powys and The Paradox
of
Immortality
Are people foolish to crave everlasting
life? Writer Theodore Powys’ reflections on immortality capture the
paradox –
and downsides – of living forever, says philosopher John Gray.
John Gray reflects on the
paradox of
immortality as captured by the writer Theodore Powys, “The longest life
may fade and perish but one moment can live and become immortal.”
Read John Gray’s article on
BBC News
website: http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19004818
Listen to it here: http://bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l1ggb |
*
* * * *
|
KINDNESS IN A
CORNER
by T. F. POWYS
With
an Introduction
by Glen Cavaliero
Theodore Francis Powys (1875-1953) was one
of three West Country brothers whose numerous books made the family
name well
known during the inter-war years. Unlike his elder and younger
brothers, John
Cowper and Llewelyn, he was known exclusively as a writer of fiction,
in his
lifetime publishing eight full-length novels and well over a hundred
novellas
and short stories. While living in a remote Dorset village he was to
enjoy a
certain vogue in the nineteen-twenties, thanks
in part to the good
offices of his friends David Garnett and Sylvia Townsend Warner; and
his work
was later to be championed in the academic world by the influential
Cambridge
critic F. R. Leavis. But with the possible exception of Mr
Weston’s Good Wine (1927) his novels have never reached a
wide
public, so that this reprint of its immediate successor is all the more
to be
welcomed.
|
|
|
Price: £11.99 Softback
ISBN-13: 9780955152351
Book Dimensions: 210 × 148
mm
KINDNESS IN A CORNER
T.F. POWYS
|
|
|
|
DELIVERY WITHIN UK
£11.99 |
DELIVERY To EUROPE
£14.99 |
DELIVERY To ROW
£17.99 |
| Please
select appropriate delivery button
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kindness
in a Corner
(1930) is among the
most purely enjoyable of T. F. Powys’s books and is thus a good
introduction to
its author’s rustic world. On the face of it a quaint and mannered
piece of
amiable literary whimsy full of touches of light satire, it introduces
us to an
absent-minded
scholarly bachelor clergyman,
devoted to his books, to his armchair, and to his
dinner,
a man who
lives in a benevolent
tranquillity
cared for by a tactful housekeeper and protected by the resourceful
sexton, Mr
Truggin. The setting is the village of Tadnol and the author provides
Mr
Dottery’s parishioners with dialogue in the picturesque tradition
already
familiar from the novels of Thomas Hardy; and the narrative proceeds
through
simple statements of fact, authorial rejections and apothegms of a
tendentious
nature – altogether a relaxing literary methodology. The scene conjured
up is
just such a one as the more acidulous imagination of M. R. James had
already
subjected to invasions of a malign and preternatural character, and the
Reverend Silas Dottery seems clearly marked out for disturbance in his
serene
and comfy corner. But the disturbances turn out to be of a humorous
and
farcical character rather than of a disabling kind.
Working in the literary tradition both pilloried and immortalised by Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932), T. F. Powys had, in his early work especially, subjected his readers to a harsh portrayal of rural brutalities. Mr Tasker’s Gods (1925), for example, is written with a ferocity that challenges comparison with the contemporary short stories of Caradoc Evans, with their unflattering depiction of narrow- minded Welsh chapel congregations; but Powys’s ferocity is unleashed on behalf of the economically exploited as much as it is of their hypocritical exploiters. For even in this, the most savage of his novels, his vision is coloured by the Christian teaching instilled in him by his parents – Charles Francis Powys, Vicar of Montacute in Somerset, and Mary Cowper Johnson, descendent of a family that numbered among its luminaries the poets William Cowper and John Donne. In Theodore a similar sensitivity to pain, an awareness of mortality, of natural injustice, human fears and greed, were the more pronounced for being offset by a belief in the self-authenticating power of selflessness and love. He is not a writer likely to appeal to those of an easy-going or hedonistic temperament; and for all its playfulness Kindness in Corner is a novel that deals in the profounder human issues.
From the Introduction
by Glen Cavaliero
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
GLEN
CAVALIERO, Fellow Commoner of St.
Catherine’s College,
Cambridge, is a noted poet and critic. Among his books are The Supernatural and English Fiction
(1995), The Alchemy of
Laughter
(2000) and Charles Williams:
Poet
of Theology
(reissued, 2007). His last
collection of poems was The Flash of Weathercocks (2015).
[Glen’s death in October 2019 was greeted with sadness by all who knew
him including this publisher who enjoyed much amusement and laughter
with him. He also provided excellent introductions to three of
Sundial’s books.]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
* * * * *
|
|
THEODORE FRANCIS
POWYS (1875–1953) was the third of eleven children born to the Reverend Charles Powys, vicar of Montacute for thirty-one years. After a spell at farming in Suffolk he eventually left to pursue a career in writing, residing in the village of East Chaldon in Dorset from 1904 to 1940, where he wrote the novels and short stories that were to make him, and the village, famous.
Powys’s
first major
work, The Soliloquy of a Hermit, foreshadowing all
his later narratives,
was published in the US in 1916 and subsequently in the UK in 1918 as Soliloquies
of a Hermit. Then, with the encouragement of writer-friends
David Garnett
and Sylvia Townsend Warner, Powys published The Left Leg, a
collection
of three novellas, in 1923, followed later that same year by his novel Black
Bryony. Sales were negligible but both were praised by
critics.
|
By
1926 Powys had
published four more novels – Mark Only (1924), Mr
Tasker’s Gods (1925),
Mockery Gap (1925), and Innocent
Birds (1926) – and had
established himself, in his brother John’s words, as ‘one of the most
arresting
and formidable of writers of modern fiction.’ But he was most highly
praised
for the allegorical novel Mr Weston’s Good Wine (1927),
his best known
work. Mr Weston, Powys’s representation of God, arrives in Folly Down
to sell
his light and dark wines, symbolic of Love and Death – always, ‘the two
great
realities’ for Powys.
Powys’s
most widely
read creation was followed by four further major works: his most
unified
collection of short stories, the astonishing Fables (1928);
his most
benign novel, Kindness in a Corner (1930); the
separately published
novella,The Only Penitent (1931); and later the
same year, his final novel
Unclay, the complement to Mr
Weston and
a summation of his life’s
work. Soon afterwards, he declared himself out of business, stating ‘a
writer
should know when to stop.’ |
|
|
