Upcoming Society Events

Saturday 20 April 2024 — A meeting to discuss Chapter XI, Consummation, of JCP’s novel A Glastonbury Romance, led by Dawn Collins.

Southlake Moor in winter, taken from Burrow Mump, (c) Patrick Mackie
Venue: The Old Fire Engine House, 25 St Mary’s Street, Ely.
11.00 to 16.00 (with break for lunch)

All are welcome. The event is free with the exception of lunch which is optional and may be taken in the restaurant at the venue. A contribution towards the cost of refreshments is voluntary.
If members wish to attend please notify Hon Secretary by 31 March 2024.

JCP began writing his Glastonbury book on 20 April 1930. By 30 October 1930 he had reached Chapter XI. He wrote in his diary: “It is at Whitelake Cottage I am now describing a momentous day in the lives of Sam and Nell.” In this beautiful and atmospheric chapter of AGR, JCP explores the passionate relationship between Sam Dekker and Nell Zoyland. John Brebner notes that Chapter XI is “an amazing combination of sensitivity and honesty in its handling of the lovers’ relationship.” However, Sam’s state of mind is conflicted – he physically desires Nell yet he also longs to be a saint: “I will be a lover and a saint! his heart cried.” The chapter also includes rapturous descriptions of the connection between JCP’s characters and the landscape surrounding them: “He was conscious of a vague feeling of fertility in the damp spring air and of the hidden stirrings of vegetable juices in roots and stalks as his feet sank in the soft turf of the river bank”. JCP goes on to describe how Sam identifies with the vital presence of elemental things: “He became a wave in the Bristol Channel, a bracken frond in the Quantock hills, a crystal in a Mendip stone wall, a black striped perch in the Brue under Pomparles bridge…an identical magnetism poured through the man’s flesh and blood and shivered through the vegetable fibres of the tree.”

   

Chris Thomas

    

Tuesday 13 August 2024 — Llewelyn Powys birthday walk

sailors return
This be the sign

From Neil Lee-Atkin:

The Llewelyn Birthday Walk & the annual gathering of the Dandelion Fellowship will take place on Tuesday August 13th 2024 which this year will also be a Memorial Walk to commemorate my wife and Paul Gillingham, both long time members of our little band of the Friends of Llewelyn Powys who have left us recently.

We will meet as usual at The Sailor’s Return in East Chaldon at 12 noon for lunch, the annual toast, and a reading from Llewelyn’s Book of Days.

The walk will commence around 1.30pm. All are welcome.

For enquiries & information please contact Neil Lee-Atkin at reblee.tom@gmail.com

Saturday 19 October 2024 — A meeting to discuss T. F. Powys’s allegorical novel Mr Weston’s Good Wine, led by Marcel Bradbury.

 
Mr Weston's good wine
Mr Weston's Good Wine (1927), frontispiece, G. Charlton
Venue: The Old Fire Engine House, 25 St Mary’s Street, Ely.
11.00 to 16.00 (with break for lunch)

All are welcome. The event is free with the exception of lunch which is optional and may be taken in the restaurant at the venue. A contribution towards the cost of refreshments is voluntary
If members wish to attend please notify Hon Secretary by 31 March 2024.

Mr Weston’s Good Wine was written between January 1924 and the autumn of 1925 and first published by Chatto & Windus in 1927 with illustrations by George Charlton.

Harry Coombes, in his book about TFP, published in 1960, notes: “Mr Weston’s Good Wine, though tragic in its recognition of evil, of man’s blindness, weakness, and failures, of their common fate in death, is tragic also in the profound sympathy…with which Powys observes and comments on the human scene…It is Powys’s masterpiece because it is his fullest and most perfect artistic utterance….Mr Weston’s Good Wine is among the finest of those ‘novels as dramatic poems’ which hold more of the English body and spirit, more essential Englishness than any other genre since Jacobean times.”

 

Chris Thomas