The Letters of Henry Miller and John
Cowper Powys, edited by Jacqueline Peltier
This volume brings together in one place, for the first time in
English, the correspondence between these two great writers who
both had such a profound influence on each other.
PROTEUS AND THE MAGICIAN includes an introduction, by Jacqueline Peltier, notes, bibliography, index, photos and reproductions of original
letters and dedications.
When a young American, ‘a kid from
Brooklyn’, enraptured by the world of words and books hears an
English writer, the future author of Wolf Solent, A
Glastonbury Romance and Autobiography, delivering
unforgettable public lectures to all kinds of audiences
throughout America, we may well imagine the powerful impact it
had on a gifted young man, obsessed with the ambition to be a
writer. This is exactly what happened to Henry Miller. Some time
in the 1920s, after having listened to John Cowper Powys
lecturing at the Labor Temple in New York, elated and
fascinated, he wished to celebrate the great achievement of the
writer he admired so much: that was when Powys entered the
pantheon of Henry Miller's literary masters. Some thirty years
later, Henry Miller, busy writing what would become The Books in
My Life remembered the emotion he had felt while listening to
Powys's lectures and suddenly decided to write to him. In the
correspondence which followed, from 1950 to 1962, the reader
will witness their profound understanding, their particular
interests, often shared, their vivacious exchanges bearing
essentially on books, those they wrote and those they read.
Their letters are exciting to read and are also a passionate
tribute to pure literature. How apt for Miller to have found the
expression 'a living book', and to have applied this to John
Cowper Powys, for it is an expression that could also easily
refer to Henry Miller himself.
Auntie John
In March 1950, Henry Miller, then living in Big Sur, CA, “poor
in pocket” though the author of several famous books, introduced
himself to John Cowper Powys in Wales: “I suddenly thought of
you and the very great influence you had upon me years ago,
when I was just a lad ... I read everything of yours I could lay
hands on”. Miller asked Powys if there was anything he could
send him from across the ocean. The older writer, delighted to
receive this fan letter, replied graciously, “any books of
yours, for though I have been snatching at fragments of your
work for years & years I don't possess one single book”.
Thus a pen-palship was born, which lasted till Powys's death in
1963. The book Miller sent was not one of the Tropics, or Nexus, Sexus or Plexus — the content of
which he feared might alarm the elderly Englishman — but an
anthology of milder writings, Sunday After the War. Powys
enjoyed them: “I tell my friends over here & my brothers and
sisters that my new friend is an Atlantean Heathen Primitive
like myself.”
Judging by the letters contained in Proteus and the Magician,
a 160-page collection of the two authors' correspondence, Powys
might have preferred something stronger. It was not the alleged
friend Miller who was eager to introduce sexual topics into the
letters, but the Glastonbury romancer. He did so in an un-Tropic-like
manner:
For all my instinctive sex-vices my inherent sadism & masochism
& spiritual & mental homo-sexuality (which is a weird sort of
twice inverted Lesbianism when I really examine it) are vices
that could easily exist in an extremely fastidious old maid . . . .
Powys contrasted his old maidishness with his correspondent's
"possession of . . . nerves blood marrow flesh skin & magnetism
— these overtones & undertones of 'love' . . .". He signed off,
"your old Auntie John o' Dreams".
Miller stuck to old-fashioned courtesies ("I am still just a
mere lad, in writing to you"). Instead of taking the hint and
mailing one of what Powys called his "volcanic" works — all
selling well in France but banned in Britain and the US — he
recommended that Powys seek out The Spirit of Zen by Alan
Watts. "There is more to it than tea ceremonies." The old maid
wrote back that he was "a Mausoleum of Man-Woman Secrets".
Miller suggested Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.
An unexpected actor in the drama is a young Londoner, Graham
Ackroyd, who wrote audaciously to Powys: 'About the book I'm
doing on Miller — it will contain letters — so perhaps you will
be kind enough to loan me any letters that Miller has written to
you". Powys asked Miller what to do. With typical openness,
Miller replied that while Ackroyd was not "ready" to write a
book about him, Powys should let him have the letters anyway. A
note tells us that Graham Ackroyd is the father of the novelist
Peter and that the Miller book never got written.
© The TLS
(30 May 2014)
Wise Old Codgers
A review by Lindsay Clarke in Resurgence.
“These days so
much fiction is written in a spare, almost anorexic prose that it’s
salutary to be reminded how once, and not so long ago, there were
novelists who took delight in appealing to their readers’ senses as
well as to the intellect by regaling them with a feast of language.
Prominent among them were two brave writers, of different generations
but kindred temperament, whose imaginations travelled far beyond the
current vogue for ironical scepticism in their need to articulate a
vision of cosmic range. Now the Powys Society has done us a valuable
service by making available in English the full, generous-hearted
correspondence between Henry Miller and John Cowper Powys.”
Read the complete review here