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Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys
A comprehensive portrait of the distinguished English author of such works as Wolf Solent and A Glastonbury Romance includes coverage of his childhood in Derbyshire, his celebrated lecture tours, and his relationship with his own writing.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published September 6, 2007
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About the author
Morine Krissdottir
5 books2 followersMorine Krissdottir was born in Canada of Icelandic descent. Trained in both English literature and psychology, her special interest is the relationship of myth and creativity. Her interest in the writer John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) is long-standing and she has written several analytical works, including The Magical Quest (Macdonald, 1980). She has recently completed the definitive biography of Powys, Descents of Memory, which is now published by Overlook/Duckworth.
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August 18, 2023
I read A Glastonbury Romance, all 1120 pages, and I was utterly flabbergasted – nay, gobsmacked. How did anyone write such an off the wall freaked out book, how did he get it published, and what kind of lunatic was he anyway? I found out that Morine Krissdottir* kindly wrote this first biography for me back in 2007, to explain everything.
When she was given the job of writing this biography of a widely unread novelist, “philosopher”** and all-out weirdo she wondered what material she would have to work from, since he died in 1962. What she got was 37 years of huge diaries, 800 letters to his wife***, many sacks of stuff from the family’s loft containing “in total disorder” hundreds of letters to and from the many brothers, sisters, friends and strangers, typescripts, manuscripts, photographs, old dog licenses, income tax returns, contracts and bills; and then the word got round that she was writing this biography so she started receiving sacks of other stuff from other people. I had to smile.
The father was a vicar in leafy rural England. This vicar had 11 children so Morine is often overwhelmed trying to keep track of the other ten kids, their spouses, their children, their fallings out and illnesses through the decades. Ah, also, all these kids were known to each other by nicknames, so there’s that too. It’s a lot to keep straight.
JCP fell into a job after university somewhat by accident. He became a lecturer in further education, first in Britain, then in the USA. You jump on a train and go to Hartlepool (or Minneapolis) and lecture to some randoms on the novels of Thomas Hardy then next day it’s off to Newcastle (or Little Rock) to do Chaucer – you get the idea. So it turns out he was brilliant at this, using the techniques later adopted by televangelists. He was wild, intense and unpredictable. They loved him!
Once I heard him talk on Hardy for over two hours to an audience of over two thousand in a huge auditorium in the heart of Chicago’s slums; throughout those 130-odd minutes there was not a sound from his listeners save an occasional roar of applause or laughter; and when he finished speaking we rose like one person to our feet, demanding more.
JCP described his lecturing :
When I stopped, after lecturing for an hour and a half, I felt light, airy, frivolous, gay, and butterfly-like; whereas my audience were so wilted, so drooping, so exhausted, so wrung-out, that they were like people who had spent a night of the extremest form of erotic debauch!
He was inclined to write about himself like this
My vitality is so adamantine, my will is so strong, that it is difficult for people to believe that so galvanized a Jack-in-the-box, making such lively gesticulations, should be completely skinless and raw under its motley jacket.
Now we must talk about his sex life. It started conventionally enough :
As well as pornography, he also tried prostitutes, and at one point was sleeping with “three sisters of the same family”, one of whom was only twelve, in a Brighton flop-house.
In 1896 at age 24 he conventionally married and was immediately unhappy. He discovered he could no longer stomach conventional sex, if he ever could. After 6 years Margaret, his wife, gave birth to a son. So here is a boggling account of how that came to be :
Powys in later years assiduously prompted the myth that he was unable or unwilling to have normal sexual relationships, and that in any case, he was particularly frightened of sexual intercourse with a virgin. Margaret… went to a hospital to be surgically “deflowered”. Nonetheless, since even “the least reference to normal sex functions turned my stomach” he considered her subsequent pregnancy a “miracle”.
Make of this what you will. Maybe it was the milkman!
So in 1905 (age 33) he went off to be a lecturer in America and from then on abandoned his wife & son. No surprise you know, men do this all the time (see Brideshead Revisited for a contemporary example). He always sent a big chunk of his earnings back to them. And being very middle class in the early 1900s you couldn’t expect her household to function with anything less than two housemaids, a cook and a gardener (p153).
When he was 49 he met a 26 year old American called Phyllis and they were together for the rest of his long long life. But he didn’t get a divorce, which in those days led to some awkwardness. His nickname for Phyllis was "the T.T." which stood for Tiny Thin as she was always tending to the anorexic, which he loved, because – of course – he had a thing for tiny girls who looked like boys. She put up with his thousand phobias, imaginary illnesses, bizarre choices of homes and self-invented religion all the way to 1962. And she did all the typing. Naturellement.
(didn't smile much - had all his teeth taken out and refused to have any false teeth)
What with the First World War and the Depression his lecturing started to nosedive so he decided to write six vast (600-1200 pages) flowery mystical novels and what appear to be from this biographer’s description fatuous borderline incomprehensible philosophical treatises called The Meaning of Culture, In Defence of Sensuality, A Philosophy of Solitude, The Art of Happiness – most of which, believe it or not, sold well. Our biographer, who is a huge Powys fan, tells us that some of these books do not make “comfortable reading in our politically correct times” meaning that they are hugely misogynistic.
That is not an assumption – in 1934 he wrote an autobiography called Autobiography which he said he was “going to make it the most original of all autobiographies by deliberately omitting all feminines in it” – that’s right, an account of his life with no mention of any women including his mother. Throughout his life he had a phobia of breasts which included a horror of himself growing breasts. This guy was a total mess. And yet, in the one novel I read A Glastonbury Romance there are many affectionately described female characters and I might have said before reading this biography he was a bit of a feminist. I think intellectual coherence and John Cowper Powys were complete strangers.
You might guess that JCP hated modern life, never owned a car or a telephone, always lived in tiny cottages, most of which had no running water or electricity, loved to commune with Nature, especially rocks, was a fanatical anti-vivisectionist and vegetarian, and scraped by most of the time on hand-outs from his less deranged brothers.
An interesting person, and a very cool biography.
*An Icelandic Canadian, in case you were wondering
**proto-New Age frother at the mouth would be a more accurate term
***only about 6 or 7 FROM his wife – was that a red flag? You bet!
When she was given the job of writing this biography of a widely unread novelist, “philosopher”** and all-out weirdo she wondered what material she would have to work from, since he died in 1962. What she got was 37 years of huge diaries, 800 letters to his wife***, many sacks of stuff from the family’s loft containing “in total disorder” hundreds of letters to and from the many brothers, sisters, friends and strangers, typescripts, manuscripts, photographs, old dog licenses, income tax returns, contracts and bills; and then the word got round that she was writing this biography so she started receiving sacks of other stuff from other people. I had to smile.
The father was a vicar in leafy rural England. This vicar had 11 children so Morine is often overwhelmed trying to keep track of the other ten kids, their spouses, their children, their fallings out and illnesses through the decades. Ah, also, all these kids were known to each other by nicknames, so there’s that too. It’s a lot to keep straight.
JCP fell into a job after university somewhat by accident. He became a lecturer in further education, first in Britain, then in the USA. You jump on a train and go to Hartlepool (or Minneapolis) and lecture to some randoms on the novels of Thomas Hardy then next day it’s off to Newcastle (or Little Rock) to do Chaucer – you get the idea. So it turns out he was brilliant at this, using the techniques later adopted by televangelists. He was wild, intense and unpredictable. They loved him!
Once I heard him talk on Hardy for over two hours to an audience of over two thousand in a huge auditorium in the heart of Chicago’s slums; throughout those 130-odd minutes there was not a sound from his listeners save an occasional roar of applause or laughter; and when he finished speaking we rose like one person to our feet, demanding more.
JCP described his lecturing :
When I stopped, after lecturing for an hour and a half, I felt light, airy, frivolous, gay, and butterfly-like; whereas my audience were so wilted, so drooping, so exhausted, so wrung-out, that they were like people who had spent a night of the extremest form of erotic debauch!
He was inclined to write about himself like this
My vitality is so adamantine, my will is so strong, that it is difficult for people to believe that so galvanized a Jack-in-the-box, making such lively gesticulations, should be completely skinless and raw under its motley jacket.
Now we must talk about his sex life. It started conventionally enough :
As well as pornography, he also tried prostitutes, and at one point was sleeping with “three sisters of the same family”, one of whom was only twelve, in a Brighton flop-house.
In 1896 at age 24 he conventionally married and was immediately unhappy. He discovered he could no longer stomach conventional sex, if he ever could. After 6 years Margaret, his wife, gave birth to a son. So here is a boggling account of how that came to be :
Powys in later years assiduously prompted the myth that he was unable or unwilling to have normal sexual relationships, and that in any case, he was particularly frightened of sexual intercourse with a virgin. Margaret… went to a hospital to be surgically “deflowered”. Nonetheless, since even “the least reference to normal sex functions turned my stomach” he considered her subsequent pregnancy a “miracle”.
Make of this what you will. Maybe it was the milkman!
So in 1905 (age 33) he went off to be a lecturer in America and from then on abandoned his wife & son. No surprise you know, men do this all the time (see Brideshead Revisited for a contemporary example). He always sent a big chunk of his earnings back to them. And being very middle class in the early 1900s you couldn’t expect her household to function with anything less than two housemaids, a cook and a gardener (p153).
When he was 49 he met a 26 year old American called Phyllis and they were together for the rest of his long long life. But he didn’t get a divorce, which in those days led to some awkwardness. His nickname for Phyllis was "the T.T." which stood for Tiny Thin as she was always tending to the anorexic, which he loved, because – of course – he had a thing for tiny girls who looked like boys. She put up with his thousand phobias, imaginary illnesses, bizarre choices of homes and self-invented religion all the way to 1962. And she did all the typing. Naturellement.
(didn't smile much - had all his teeth taken out and refused to have any false teeth)
What with the First World War and the Depression his lecturing started to nosedive so he decided to write six vast (600-1200 pages) flowery mystical novels and what appear to be from this biographer’s description fatuous borderline incomprehensible philosophical treatises called The Meaning of Culture, In Defence of Sensuality, A Philosophy of Solitude, The Art of Happiness – most of which, believe it or not, sold well. Our biographer, who is a huge Powys fan, tells us that some of these books do not make “comfortable reading in our politically correct times” meaning that they are hugely misogynistic.
That is not an assumption – in 1934 he wrote an autobiography called Autobiography which he said he was “going to make it the most original of all autobiographies by deliberately omitting all feminines in it” – that’s right, an account of his life with no mention of any women including his mother. Throughout his life he had a phobia of breasts which included a horror of himself growing breasts. This guy was a total mess. And yet, in the one novel I read A Glastonbury Romance there are many affectionately described female characters and I might have said before reading this biography he was a bit of a feminist. I think intellectual coherence and John Cowper Powys were complete strangers.
You might guess that JCP hated modern life, never owned a car or a telephone, always lived in tiny cottages, most of which had no running water or electricity, loved to commune with Nature, especially rocks, was a fanatical anti-vivisectionist and vegetarian, and scraped by most of the time on hand-outs from his less deranged brothers.
An interesting person, and a very cool biography.
*An Icelandic Canadian, in case you were wondering
**proto-New Age frother at the mouth would be a more accurate term
***only about 6 or 7 FROM his wife – was that a red flag? You bet!
January 17, 2016
Having loved Powys's Wessex trilogy since teenagehood, and read with varying responses several of his other novels, I was eager and curious to read a biography which has been welcomed enthusiastically. I feared a detailed, pedestrian, heavily footnoted and above all worthy tome, but this, while being 1 and 3, was certainly not 2 - pedestrian. My first surprise - tho' it shouldn't have been - was the extent to which a biography of JCP necessarily involves the involved and involving lives of his brothers and their satellites of friends lovers and jealousies. My second was a bracing experience of seeing some of JCP's beliefs and utterances treated with a cheerful scepticism. It would be easy for an earnest po-faced biographer to take all of Powys's convoluted obsessions and hierophantic pretensions at face value; conversely, an unsympathetic biographer could very easily tear to shreds him and his siblings and their literary exudations. MK does neither, but hesitates not to point out her subject's self-delusions, prevarications and idiocies. Yet she gives credit where credit is due, to his finest writings. My third surprise was JCP's chronic poverty, chronic health problems and sexual and parasexual obsessions. As a naive teenager, simply because by then (early 1970s) some of his oeuvre was widely known and praised, I'd imagined a grand old man finally, in his seventies and eighties, basking in comfort and popular respect. Not a confirmed and irredeemable eccentric in a never purely happy relationship, living out his final years in a cramped and damp one-up one-down cottage in Blaenau Ffestiniog, besieged by visitors ranging from dearly welcomed to frankly cranky. My fourth, and most unwelcome, surprise, was the poor proofreading of this important book. Most nouns ending in -x acquire a superfluous e, and I don't mean axe. Halifaxe, taxe, etc. Then perhaps there is a subtle reason for MK's nomenclature, but 'John', 'John Cowper', 'JCP' and 'Jack' are used variously and interchangeably. Less acceptable is 'John Cowpy', a textual variant ascribable only to crap proofing.
Is this a 'definitive' biography? Can there be a 'definitive' biography of JCP - or anyone? All biographers are "coming from" a particular angle, and according to her own website MK's 'special interest' is 'the relationship of myth and creativity'. In my book this certainly makes her an odds-on favourite to do justice to JCP, added to which is her unique access to a vast and, in less able hands, unmanageable archive of letters, diaries, receipts, shopping lists, story drafts, and so forth. It is a magnificent and unequalled achievement. But to me 'definitive' implies not only exhaustive and unsurpassably comprehensive - which this book surely is - but also somehow impersonal and delivering itself of judgments nothing less than Olympian. MK terms it 'a' life, not 'the' life, which is correctly modest, and the Life has precedence over the Art, which is as it should be. I can't argue in the least with, and would in fact without question endorse, her artistic judgments of the novels I also know and love. But I would have liked to see some judgment of his alleged occult and supernatural powers: MK dwells rightly on his much-worried-over 'sadism', but less on his countervailing "neurotic benevolence" and the reality or otherwise of their psychic effects. More detail of his very last years and the circumstances of his death would interest me. The Epilogue is far from conventional. MK brings in her correspondence with John Cowper Powys's nephew Peter, about whom she says little but implies much, and concludes with the latter's suicide. I may be missing a point here.
This is a splendid and important book, which will be sure to offend the high-minded transcendentalists and fringe weirdos which JCP's writings, by the very nature of his art and his obsessions, attract. I liked it a lot. Practically, it has the effect of determining me to buy and read 'Porius', of which I know nothing.
Is this a 'definitive' biography? Can there be a 'definitive' biography of JCP - or anyone? All biographers are "coming from" a particular angle, and according to her own website MK's 'special interest' is 'the relationship of myth and creativity'. In my book this certainly makes her an odds-on favourite to do justice to JCP, added to which is her unique access to a vast and, in less able hands, unmanageable archive of letters, diaries, receipts, shopping lists, story drafts, and so forth. It is a magnificent and unequalled achievement. But to me 'definitive' implies not only exhaustive and unsurpassably comprehensive - which this book surely is - but also somehow impersonal and delivering itself of judgments nothing less than Olympian. MK terms it 'a' life, not 'the' life, which is correctly modest, and the Life has precedence over the Art, which is as it should be. I can't argue in the least with, and would in fact without question endorse, her artistic judgments of the novels I also know and love. But I would have liked to see some judgment of his alleged occult and supernatural powers: MK dwells rightly on his much-worried-over 'sadism', but less on his countervailing "neurotic benevolence" and the reality or otherwise of their psychic effects. More detail of his very last years and the circumstances of his death would interest me. The Epilogue is far from conventional. MK brings in her correspondence with John Cowper Powys's nephew Peter, about whom she says little but implies much, and concludes with the latter's suicide. I may be missing a point here.
This is a splendid and important book, which will be sure to offend the high-minded transcendentalists and fringe weirdos which JCP's writings, by the very nature of his art and his obsessions, attract. I liked it a lot. Practically, it has the effect of determining me to buy and read 'Porius', of which I know nothing.
January 8, 2012
A complex and frequently painful life of Powys, particularly where it details his manias and obsessions and how they both enriched and damaged his life and the lives of his loved ones.
October 2, 2013
I have very little to say about this book. Powys is a potentially interesting biographical subject--although the author here notes that many parts of his life are rather stereotyped, for all of his reputation as demonic--but Krissdottir does him no favors. All biographies are, of course, going to be driven by the sources--this one more than most, though, and badly. The narrative lurches from the prosaic to the weird (e.g., Powys's letter to his brother proudly defending his love of masturbation). It starts out oddly, almost as an argument between the author and Powys's Autobiography, which is hard to follow for those who haven't already read that book, and, again, makes the selection of events seem capricious. There's really no drive to the story, beyond the passage of time. Krissdottir notes that she is interested in Powys because his life theoretically illuminates the connections between psychology and literature, but to the extent that this idea is fleshed out, it is mostly looking a how he wrote himself, his friends, and his family into his books. She ends with some truly dramatic incidents--Powys's nephew giving her his diaries, then committing suicide--but the episode seems tacked on, exploitative, a way to take what had been a mess of undigested writing (not unlike some of Powys's own) and redeem it. It doesn't.
April 11, 2019
I felt terribly sad after finishing this biography. JCP had many hard times in his life, often self inflicted, it has to be said; it made me, too, reflect back on my life. I read this immediately after his "Autobiography", a much happier account of his life (up to 1934), but with much omitted - which as far as could be, was fleshed out here. An extraordinary, complex, and damaged man, who tied so hard to be happy. Fascinating, rather than wonderful. Poor Jack and Jill... so many contradictions: freedom, and confinement; center and periphery. So many of his younger brothers, and sisters, and son, and friends died before him, as he became more and more immersed in myths.
And I am minded to explore other Powys brothers' and sisters' writing, and also others such as Frances Gregg, Gamel Woolsey, Louis Marlow, etc - - - so many intersections in their lives, and shared lovers and obsessions - incestuous, really. Even The Beast Crowley appears skimming on the horizon of his life.
And I am minded to explore other Powys brothers' and sisters' writing, and also others such as Frances Gregg, Gamel Woolsey, Louis Marlow, etc - - - so many intersections in their lives, and shared lovers and obsessions - incestuous, really. Even The Beast Crowley appears skimming on the horizon of his life.
Want to read
February 1, 2013I don't understand his novels, I thought this might help.
January 2, 2009
The mystery that is John Cowper Powys is in the magnitude of his life and how that has translated into his works. At least for me. The man is a mythopoeic genius and he stuns and stuns. I found in Descents of Memory what I didn't find in Autobiography. Morine Krissdóttir is suburb in rendering this massive man's life. Her work is meticulous and seems not to miss a thing. Read more here.
September 15, 2013
For a full review of this and Porius, go here:
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