‘T.F. Powys, that master of rural understatement whose wry humour and warmth, and whose marvellous narrational “pull”, are irresistible.’
— Ronald Blythe
‘Theodore
Powys wrote extraordinary fables of English country life.
Bloomsbury admirers hailed them as the singular works of a dark and
brooding
genius.’ — P. Wright
‘The renewed
availability of Powys’s earlier novels allows one once again to survey
and
admire the whole valley. More readers should
pay it a visit.’— Michael Caines, TLS
‘Theodore Powys, the brother of Llewelyn, is a rare person.’ — T. E. Lawrence
About T. F. Powys (1875–1953)
In the remote Dorset village of East Chaldon, T. F. Powys wrote a steady
succession of novels, novellas, fables and short stories which first
appeared in print during the 1920s and early 1930s. These tales of
startling originality, strange beauty and shocking revelations, offer
wry observations on the human condition, the enigma of God, and
arresting insights into the nature of good and evil, infused with
subtle and dark humour of the rarest vintage.
Author
of Soliloquies of a
Hermit, a remarkable trinity of novels: Mr. Weston's Good Wine, Unclay, and Kindness in a Corner as well as the extraordinary Fables and arresting The Only Penitent.
From
the opening chapter of Innocent
Birds
‘A village is like a stage that retains the same scenery throughout all the acts of the
play. The actors come and go, and walk to and fro, with gestures that their
passions fair or foul use them to.
Sometimes the human beings who occupy the stage, that is, the farms and village cottages,
remain the same—or almost the same—for many years; sometimes they change more
quickly.
A country village has a
way now and again of clearing out all its inhabitants in one rush, as
though it
were grown tired of that particular combination of human destinies, and
shakes
itself free of them as a tree might do of unwelcome leaves.
This shake
comes perhaps
like the last trump, with a loud noise; as when Farmer Mew set afire
his
gunpowder, and so caused the people to go off in all directions: some
far and
some near, but all bent on going.’
T.F. Powys's best known fiction
Mr. Weston’s Good Wine
Among the residents of a small
Dorset town called Folly Down, an unlikely struggle between the forces
of good
and evil is taking place. For a single winter's evening, Time stands
still and
the bitter-sweet gift of awareness descends upon the people.
From the vintage Penguin paperbacks blog:
‘Mr. Weston, for a common tradesman - and the most princely of merchants is only
that - possessed a fine and creative imagination. And, although entirely self-taught - for he had risen, as so many important people do, from nothing - he had read much, and had written too. He possessed in a very large degree a poet's fancy, that will at any moment create out of the imagination a new
world.
Mr. Weston had once written a prose poem that he had divided into many books, and was naturally
surprised when he discovered that the very persons and places that he had but seen in fancy had a real existence in fact. The power of art is magnificent. It can change the dullest sense into the most glorious; it can people a new world
in a moment of time; it can cause a sparkling fountain to flow in the driest
desert to solace a thirsty traveller.
Mr
Weston is a genial old man, with a head
of hair as white as wool concealed beneath his brown felt hat. He was
once a
writer, the composer of a prose poem, but these days it is difficult
for him to
find anyone interested in his literary work. He is travelling through a
small
part of Dorset in an old Ford van which bears his name on its side,
intent on
supplying his good wine to any inhabitants willing to drink or receive
some,
and he is accompanied on this journey by a companion named Michael who has an
unusually detailed understanding of the interests, thoughts and hopes of the
locals, and who can describe at length all recent events in the area.
The pair enter Folly Down late in the afternoon, and by means of some mechanical contraption they illuminate
the sky as evening falls, advertising themselves and their wares; a little later they
head to the local inn in search of custom. But something strange happens when
Mr. Weston enters Angel Inn: the clocks throughout the village cease recording
the passage of time at exactly 7pm, and steadfastly hold to that time as long
as Mr. Weston remains in the village’.
“Generally considered his masterpiece” — The Washington Post
“Grimly brilliant” — John Carey, The Sunday Times
“Mr Weston's Good Wine is a book without parallel. It is an allegory, it is a bucolic farce,
it is a religious (or anti-religious?) masterpiece.” — A N Wilson
Fables
Inanimate objects take life and
animals speak in T. F.'s collection of fables, which was first
published in
1929: a dish-cloth and an old pan, lying on a rubbish heap, discuss the
emotional intricacies of the household that has discarded them; the
efforts of
a determined spinster to marry off all her furniture end in tragedy; a
rabbit
takes advice from a viper to avenge the death of her son. Set in the
Dorset
countryside that also inspired Powys's novels, these are tales of
morality,
original and surprising, as all good fables should be.
‘In all the world there lived no one who thought more of weddings than did
Miss Hester Gibbs. She lived in a little cottage at Madder, and kept it
so clean and tidy that not a thing was ever out of place, nor a spot of
ugly dust seen anywhere.
Even
when Hester Gibbs was a very little girl she plainly showed that she
had a whimsical mind. This mind of hers, that seemed to be settled
somewhere under her dark hair— that never had a curl that wasn't as it
should be—had ever pursued into many strange windings all the mysteries
of matrimony.
But Hester soon found, even though she followed her natural studies
bravely, and noticed the behaviour of men, beasts and birds, that
nothing so odd or so very queer occurred. She would wish that far
stranger weddings happened in the world than anything that she saw or
heard of at Madder. She needed much more than plain Madder life to
interest her—some events more like a proceeding that had happened in a
book of fables that she had once read, where a little mouse wished to
be joined in holy wedlock with a lioness, who, unluckily going out to
meet her little dear before the wedding, chanced to set her foot upon
him’.
The Seaweed and the Cuckoo-Clock
‘Even
though we waves lie for centuries in the deeps of the waters, so deeply
buried
that no man could think that we should ever rise, yet as all life must
come to
the surface again and again, awakening each time from a deep sleep as
long as
eternity, so we are raised up out of the deeps high above our fellows,
to obey
the winds, to behold the sky, to fly onwards, moving swiftly, to
complete our
course, break and sink once more.
We,
who are waves, know you, who are men, only as another sea, within which
every
living creature is a little wave that rises for a moment and then
breaks and
dies. Our great joy comes when we break, yours when you are born, for
you have
not yet reached that sublime relationship with God which gives the
greatest
happiness to destruction’.
John Pardy and the Waves
‘These stories treat of the general and unalterable, with subtlety of
thought and feeling, and with simplicity of presentation. Wisdom and
humour are embedded in them. They reveal the infinite mystery, the
fluid inconsistencies of life. They are delicate, wiry and human. God's
eyes are a-twinkle; but the main business is the incalculable doings of
that oddity, Man. ... Powys's unorthodox version of Christianity
reveals strands of mysticism, quietism, and pantheism, but the major
influence upon him was the Bible, and he claimed that Religion 'is the
only subject I know anything about'. Sometimes savage, often lyrical,
his novels and stories explore universal themes of Love, Death, Good
and Evil within the microcosm of the rural world. In spite of the
apparent realism of his settings, Powys is a symbolist and allegorist’.
From the Preface to God's Eyes A-Twinkle by Charles Prentice.
Kindness in a Corner
KINDNESS IN A CORNER 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 apophthegms 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.
‘Theodore Powys is a master of English, and for this, for
the exquisite texture of expression, he should be read, if for nothing
else. But the reading will disclose much else, and especially a genius
so rare it seems not of this earth, a humanness of spirit not
frequently to be encountered, and a wit so exotic it will seem at times
little other than perverse. And Kindness in a Corner displays
all the Powys characteristics in their fullness and at their best.’
— New
York Times
Unclay
The author's last novel and final masterpiece is a work of great originality and imagination.
'Unclay, the most affectively
powerful of Powys's novels, much bleaker than Mr. Weston's Good Wine (and less popular in consequence) but at least equal to it in literary worth.' — Barron
'In my view, Unclay is Powys's crowning achievement, since it contains the fullest artistic expression of his meditations on life, beauty, evil, love, and death.' — Marius Buning (author of T.F.
Powys: A Modern Allegorist)
From Chapter Four of Unclay:
'Tell me your name,’ asked Mr Hayhoe, who began to think that the poor man must have
escaped from a madhouse, 'so that, if I have the good fortune to discover your
property, I may be able to restore to you what you have lost.’
'My
name is Death,’ answered the man.
'A
Suffolk family?’ rejoined Mr Hayhoe, 'for I know a village in that
county where
your name is common, and I have seen it too written upon a tombstone in
this
neighbourhood. But I trust you will not think me rude if I ask you to
tell me
your Christian name too?’
'I
have never had one,’ replied Death simply, 'though in coming here this
morning
I met a little girl who made fun of my beard and called me “John".’
An
excerpt from Modernity
and Medievalism in T.F. Powys‘s Mature Fiction by Marius Buning:
A similar allegorical journey or imaginative quest for ultimate reality is undertaken in Unclay, Powys's
last novel, which can again be read on different levels: psychologically, as a search for identity and self-knowledge; philosophically, as an examination of the relation between love and death; artistically, as an exploration of the
creative process and the way we as readers respond to it, and (most importantly) as a religious quest in search of the ground of man's
being. In Unclay John Death, whose appearance and behaviour remind us at times of his
medieval predecessor on the stage, visits a Dorset village in order to carry out the
divine command to 'unclay', that is to kill a pair of young lovers and two villains.
Both he and the narrator present love throughout in terms of pain and sorrow,
which can only be alleviated by Death, 'God's best gift', since it releases us
from the burden of life (the pensum vitae) and the bonds of time. This
theme is dramatically presented in the transfiguration scene at the local
churchyard, where John Death is seen to divide the living from the dead:
"upon this side, the folly of passion, suffering, and pain . . . upon the
other side, the sweet silence of God. Although love and death are depicted as
opposing forces, fighting each other like husband and wife, they form actually
an indissoluble pair.
Then the change comes in life.
The first change - the forerunner of Death - is Love. When the sun of
Love
rises, and a man walks in his glory, he may be sure that a shadow
approaches
him - Death. Love creates and separates; Death destroys and heals.
This quotation highlights the novel's central paradox: Death is both love
and death, pain and peace, existence and non-existence. In my view, Unclay
is Powys's crowning achievement, since it contains the fullest artistic
expression of his meditations on life, beauty, evil, love, and death.
Major Works of T. F. Powys
Soliloquies of a Hermit (1918)
The Left Leg (1923)
Black Bryony (1923)
Mark Only (1924)
Mr Tasker's Gods (1925)
Mockery Gap (1925)
Innocent Birds (1926)
Mr Weston's Good Wine (1927)
The House with the Echo (1928)
Fables (1929)
Kindness in a Corner (1930)
The White Paternoster (1930)
The Only Penitent (1931)
Unclay (1931)
The Two Thieves (1932)
Captain Patch (1935)
Bottle's Path (1946)
God's Eyes A-Twinkle (1947) Anthology
PUBLISHED POSTHUMOUSLY
Rosie Plum (1966)
Father Adam (1990)
The Market
Bell (1991)
Mock's Curse (1995)
The Sixpenny
Strumpet (1997)
Selected Early
Works (2005)
OF
BIOGRAPHICAL INTEREST:
Cuckoo in the Powys Nest by Theodora Gay Scutt (2000)
T. F. Powys: Aspects of a Life by J. Lawrence Mitchell (2003)
CRITICISM
The Ordinary and the Short Story: Short Fiction of T.F. Powys and V.S. Pritchett by Milosz Wojtyna (2015)
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.’
Powys began to write Mr Tasker’s Gods during the First World War, almost a
decade before its publication. It alludes darkly, more than once, to
what was going on elsewhere in the world, perhaps not that far from
Powys’s home on the coast of Dorset – across the English Channel, say –
without referring to it directly. The style is typical of early Powys
(much admired by Q. D. Leavis, who quoted approvingly and at length
from Mr Tasker’s Gods in Fiction and the Reading Public), a thing of
biblical cadences and a plain yet resonant vocabulary. Like David
Garnett, Sylvia Townsend Warner, T. E. Lawrence, Liam O’Flaherty and
other literary mavericks, Dennis Wheatley responded strongly to this
earthy, unfashionable fiction, calling Powys the “English Tolstoy”.
Others called him a heretic; Frank Kermode saw him as, above all, an
ironist. His brother John Cowper Powys repeatedly hailed him as an
“original”.
With the first
lighting of a cottage candle a man becomes an entirely new being, and
moves in a totally different world to that of daytime. He is now born
into a world whose god is a rushlight, and a man’s last moments in this
world generally come when the light is extinguished and he creeps into
bed.
Every common
appearance that during the day the vulgar sun has shown, becomes
changed by candlelight. For now a thousand whimsical shapes, dim shades
and shadows, come, that no daytime has ever seen or known. The bright
sun of heaven that has made all things upon earth only too real is not
now to be feared by the housewife as a telltale, for all is become
magic and a pretty cheat. Dust upon a book or in a corner, a straw upon
the floor-cloth, show now only as objects of interest. The black stain
that the smoke from the lamp has made upon the ceiling becomes colour
and is not unlovely. The cheap wallpaper, though wrinkled and torn, has
now a right to be so, and is not regarded with displeasure. Nothing after
sunset need be looked at too closely, and everything pleases if
regarded in a proper evening manner.
Man is drugged and
charmed by this beneficent master whose name is darkness; he becomes
more joyful, and thank goodness, less like himself. With the first
lighting of the lamp, love and hatred, the sole rulers of human life,
take a new form and colour. Love becomes more fantastical in the
darkness and malice less logical, and both the one and the other are
more full of the strange matters that dreams are made of.
Duration itself
has a mind to dance or stand on one leg, for a winter’s evening here is
often felt to be a period of time as long as a lifetime, and is filled
more fully than ever a lifetime can be with unlikely happenings. Even
the soft mud of a road in late November, and the little clinging drops
of misty rain that may be falling, change their aspect in the darkness
and become different in character from what they were known to be in
the daytime…
Michael would have said more, only Mr Weston interrupted him.
T F Powys GOAT GREEN
Gwenda Morgan engraving
Soliloquies of a Hermit:
‘Though not of the Church, I am
of the Church. Though not of the faith, I am of the faith. Though not
of the fold, I am of the fold; a priest in the cloud of God, beside the
Altar of Stone. Near beside me is a flock of real sheep; above me a
cloud of misty white embraces the noonday light of the Altar. I am
without a belief; — a belief is too easy a road to God.’
Among the residents of a small
Dorset town called Folly Down, an unlikely struggle between the forces
of good
and evil is taking place. For a single winter's evening, Time stands
still and
the bitter-sweet gift of awareness descends upon the people.
Mr
Weston is a genial old man, with a head
of hair as white as wool concealed beneath his brown felt hat. He was
once a
writer, the composer of a prose poem, but these days it is difficult
for him to
find anyone interested in his literary work. He is travelling through a
small
part of Dorset in an old Ford van which bears his name on its side,
intent on
supplying his good wine to any inhabitants willing to drink or receive
some,
and he is accompanied on this journey by a companion named Michael who has an
unusually detailed understanding of the interests, thoughts and hopes of the
locals, and who can describe at length all recent events in the area.
‘In all the world there lived no one who thought more of weddings than did
Miss Hester Gibbs. She lived in a little cottage at Madder, and kept it
so clean and tidy that not a thing was ever out of place, nor a spot of
ugly dust seen anywhere..jpg "T.F. Powys God's Eyes A-Twinkle (faber finds)")
‘These stories treat of the general and unalterable, with subtlety of
thought and feeling, and with simplicity of presentation. Wisdom and
humour are embedded in them. They reveal the infinite mystery, the
fluid inconsistencies of life. They are delicate, wiry and human. God's
eyes are a-twinkle; but the main business is the incalculable doings of
that oddity, Man. ... Powys's unorthodox version of Christianity
reveals strands of mysticism, quietism, and pantheism, but the major
influence upon him was the Bible, and he claimed that Religion 'is the
only subject I know anything about'. Sometimes savage, often lyrical,
his novels and stories explore universal themes of Love, Death, Good
and Evil within the microcosm of the rural world. In spite of the
apparent realism of his settings, Powys is a symbolist and allegorist’..jpg "T F Powys KINDNESS IN A CORNER (1st US edition)")
KINDNESS IN A CORNER 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,.jpg "T. F. Powys KINDNESS IN A CORNER (Sundial Press)")
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 apophthegms 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..jpg "T F Powys UNCLAY (U.S. 1st)")
'Unclay, the most affectively
powerful of Powys's novels, much bleaker than Mr. Weston's Good Wine (and less popular in consequence) but at least equal to it in literary worth.' — Barron.jpg "T F Powys UNCLAY with an Introduction by John Gray (Sundial Press edition)")
creative process and the way we as readers respond to it, and (most importantly) as a religious quest in search of the ground of man's
being. In Unclay John Death, whose appearance and behaviour remind us at times of his
medieval predecessor on the stage, visits a Dorset village in order to carry out the
divine command to 'unclay', that is to kill a pair of young lovers and two villains.
Both he and the narrator present love throughout in terms of pain and sorrow,
which can only be alleviated by Death, 'God's best gift', since it releases us
from the burden of life (the pensum vitae) and the bonds of time. This
theme is dramatically presented in the transfiguration scene at the local
churchyard, where John Death is seen to divide the living from the dead:
"upon this side, the folly of passion, suffering, and pain . . . upon the
other side, the sweet silence of God. Although love and death are depicted as
opposing forces, fighting each other like husband and wife, they form actually
an indissoluble pair.