Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys

by Morine Krissdottir

Book Overview

In this, Powys's first comprehensive biography, eminent scholar Morine Krissdottir delves into the life of the writer, from his childhood in Derbyshire through his celebrated lecture tours through... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1585679178
• ISBN13: 9781585679171
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Overlook Press
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A Detailed Life

Morine Krissdottir has created a richly detailed biography of the writer John Cowper Powys. Powys' life was complicated and deeply intwined with that of his family, including ten siblings. Powys can be viewed as a rather eccentric man, and Krissdottir makes his views understandable. Powys wrote an Autobiography that left out details of all the women in his life. "Descents" fills that gap. Krissdottir includes many endnotes and information regarding the literary figures that influenced Powys during his lifetime. Krissdottir has also edited a recent edition of Powys, novel "Porius", which deals with Merlin(Myrddin) and should be of interest to anyone who enjoys Arthurian literature. Overall, "Descents of Memory" demystifies a writer who was a magician of his times.

A top pick for literary collections

What produces truly magnificent writers? "Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys" is an analytical biography covering the life story of John Cowper Powys, one of the most influential and important novelists in recent history. From his career as a lecturer and his constant changes in settings, anyone trying to understand the man and his work will find some answers. "Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper Powys" is a top pick for literary collections.

A guide through this novelist's labyrinthine mind & fiction

Unlike many who will open this biography, I have not yet read Powys. Figuring this introduction by a leading Powys scholar would be the best way into the labyrinth, I wandered in. As I expected, the fiction itself appears to reflect the preoccupations, friendships, rivalries, and obsessions that JCP poured out in the diaries and correspondence that Krissdóttir analyzes meticulously. "The Glastonbury Romance" has been traditionally accounted his best novel, one of a half-dozen or so (at least in Britain) in print. Krissdóttir's lengthy exegesis embedded here convinces me that praise may be heaped on what's recently been issued in tandem with her study, his later, and until she co-edited the complete typescript, substantially abridged (which on the other hand reflects the reactions of publishers and many less courageous or patient readers to Powys' main work, stupendously long and as in GR, with 47 "main characters" in a text rivalling for length "War & Peace" and for ambition "Middlemarch") "Porius." This opus patterns itself on seven stages of the alchemical process of Paracelsus, involves what JCP came in his elderly engendering to regard as his own channeling of Welsh memories from late October 499 and his way out of his self-imposed maze. The labyrinth opens this account. As a child, he "learned to make structures, often apparently aimless, but of a pattern so complex that it was difficult to find the centre, and once inside, almost impossible to escape. He called them Romances." (17) Raised in Darbyshire a vicar's son, educated at Cambridge, he turned himself into a Welsh pagan after a quarter-century of peripatetic lecturing first in England and then America. His black gown, his accent, and his literary effusions-- half-brilliant dramatizations of great ideas and grand writers, half-stand-up performances of his own interior philosophizing via "dithyrambic analysis" enchanted (or confused) his audiences. His rival in love, Louis Wilkinson, satirized JCP: "First he hypnotised them by incantations of some genuine power; then he would reel off clap-trap, launch joyously into bombast, strike out shamelessly for naked melodrama." (147) Around fifty, he settled in first England and then Wales. A complicated mixture of a man who consumed pornography, celebrated sadism, pursued masturbation, eschewed coitus, romanticized prostitutes, and who lived eleven years with his mistress (he never divorced his long-estranged wife; his second lover was the former paramour in a triangle with Ezra Pound and H.D. [Hilda Doolittle]) before summoning the courage to tell his wife, his son, and his siblings, JCP had lived among the avant-garde of San Francisco in the early 20c and the socialist-radical set in Chicago. He, like many thinkers, sought escape, however, from the excesses of scientific and technological progress, back into a mythic realm. This entered his massive fictional portrayals of British rural life. Krissdóttir sums up his credo: "the hoped-fo