We are sorry to hear that Max, husband of Jacqueline Peltier, died on 29 November. He was instrumental in the creation of the powys-lannion website, helped produce la lettre powysienne and had a long association with the Powys Society. We send condolences to his son Jean-Francois who came to our 2019 Conference at Llangollen to take part in the tributes to Jacqueline.
View our new DVD page: now available in DVD format: our 2002 Conference In View of Glastonbury with contributions from Iain Sinclair, Colin Wilson, Margaret Drabble, P.J. Kavanagh, Timothy Hyman and Richard Perceval Graves. Our thanks to Raymond Cox.
View our publications news page: a new edition of The Owl, The Duck, Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe!, and a new translation of The Book of Taliesin.
Our President, Glen Cavaliero, has died aged 92. His advocacy for the work of John Cowper Powys, and his many years as President of the Powys Society will always be remembered with gratitude and affection.
We can be thankful that Glen was able to attend our 50th anniversary celebration in Cambridge this year, where Charles Lock read Tony Head's tribute to Glen (see NL97 p.15-16). Glen then read to us from his diary an account of his visit to John Cowper Powys in 1958. In retrospect that celebration in Glen's home city was a great opportunity to express our fondness and admiration for a vital link in the chain between the Powyses and the present members of the Society.
Seven archive documents covering the period from the 1967 meetings that led to the formation of the officially constituted Powys Society in 1969 are now available in a new archive section – see navigation bar drop-down menu under ‘The Society’.
We were sorry to hear of the recent death of Liam Hanley, who was JCP’s godson. The funeral is to be at St Dominic's Priory. London NW5 at 12.00 noon on Tuesday 15 October. Family flowers only. It is also planned to hold a celebration of his life sometime next year - also probably in London. Liam Hanley was the son of James Hanley whose correspondence with JCP was published last year, edited by Chris Gostick, who will be writing a fuller tribute for the Newsletter. Chris adds here:
Liam was always a great favourite with JCP and Phyllis when the two families lived close to each other in Corwen during the mid-1930s when he was still a young baby. He was always affectionately known as "Curley-Tops" by John Cowper because of his unruly shock of wiry dark hair! Liam always stayed in touch with them, visiting them at 1 Waterloo after they moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog on his regular trips back to Wales from London. One of the last letters in Powys and Lord Jim is from Liam to John and Phyllis about a planned visit to see them in May 1960. He always spoke with great affection about them both.
Victoria Sturgess of Black Pug Books, a second-hand bookshop in Wimborne Minster, has recently acquired a large collection of all three Powys brothers' books, and books about them. Several are quite obscure, and there are also many first editions. Before putting them on general sale, Victoria offers Powys Society members first rummage among them. VIEW LIST OF TITLES
We have created a new page for audio / audiovisual material which currently includes the only known film clip of John Cowper Powys, preparing for a debate with Bertrand Russell in 1929, and — uploaded today — an audio recording (32:57 mins) of David Jones speaking at the 2017 Powys Society Conference about his childhood memories of living next to John Cowper Powys and Phyllis Playter at Cae Coed near Corwen.
We were sad to learn that Jacqueline died on 24 July.
A tribute to Jacqueline by Pierrick Hamelin and Goulven Le Brech has been posted on their blog Entre les vagues.
The picture shown here was taken at Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris at the 2014 launch of Proteus and the Magician, the correspondence between JCP and Henry Miller, which Jacqueline had edited. Jacqueline was a committed Powysienne: she edited la lettre powysienne (2001-2017) and created the website www.powys-lannion.net. A vital part of the Powys community, and lively presence at our conferences, Jacqueline will be sadly missed.
To the memory of John Cowper Powys 1872–1963.
From Fisher’s preface:
“The poem is also an homage, from a temperament very different from his, to the profound, heterodox and consistent vision of John Cowper Powys, to whom I owe thanks for some words of exhortation he gave me in my youth and in his old age. More importantly, I am indebted to his writings for such understanding as I have of the idea that the making of all kinds of identities is a primary impulse which the cosmos itself has; and that those identities and that impulse can be acknowledged only by some form or other of poetic imagination.”
RIP Cecil Woolf, publisher of many volumes of John Cowper Powys’s letters and of the Powys Heritage Monographs.
We are grateful for his enthusiastic championing of the Powys brothers. Our condolences to Cecil Woolf’s family and friends; in particular Jean Moorcroft Wilson (pictured with him, left), whose obituary of her late husband is included in an appreciation of his life by Paula Maggio, the Virginia Woolf blogger. See our Newsletter 97 (July 2019) for a full tribute.
Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle are all available as Kindle eBooks. See publications.
Powys Society Newsletters from No 88 (July 2016) onwards are uploaded as PDFs and available for reading
W.J. Keith’s four much loved Reader's Companions to JCP‘s major works are also available from Articles for download
Our publications page now offers online book purchasing
JCP is mentioned in this Guardian article (11 Mar 2019) about his friend James Purdy, who died 13 March 2009. Charles Lock, editor of The Powys Journal, keeper of Purdy's ashes, (and champion of his literary reputation), is taking Purdy's ashes to a tenth anniversary commemorative event, at which they will be interred beside the grave of Edith Sitwell.
The society has published four Powys eBooks. see society publicatons page
The contents of all twenty-eight volumes of THE POWYS JOURNAL are now available to view in digital format at JSTOR
Online annual membership subscriptions are now processed via the Society’s own PayPal account.
It is with great sadness that we report the death of JEFF KWINTNER founder of the Village Press which reissued so many works by John Cowper Powys in the 1970s. A truly remarkable individual to whom all Powysians owe a debt of gratitude, directly or indirectly, a short notice will feature in the July Newsletter and fuller tributes and an obituary of Jeff will appear in the November Newsletter. In the meantime you may wish to read JEFF KWINTNER AND THE VILLAGE BOOKSHOP by Paul Roberts.
Warmest congratulations to the Society’s President, GLEN CAVALIERO,
who celebrates his 91st birthday.
“John Cowper Powys is a writer who changes how you
see the world:
”A Glastonbury Romance is deeply flawed, yet
utterly remarkable”
Michael Henderson —
read full article
was launched at the famous Shakespeare & Co bookshop, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Paris
on Sunday 11 May at 5pm.
Front row: Chris Thomas, Fawzia Assaad, Liliane Ruf,
Dana Wentworth, Jacqueline Peltier and Goulven Le
Brech
Second row: Marcella Henderson-Peal and Charles Lock.
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Last updated 27-Apr-2024
— Web Editor Paul Cheshire