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Edited by Paul Roberts and with
an Introduction by Kenneth Hopkins
The Letters of John Cowper Powys
to Hal and Violet Trovillion
John Cowper Powys and Hal Trovillion: the Merlinesque creator of such epic novels as A Glastonbury Romance and Porius in his remote cottage in Wales and the Republican newspaper man from Herrin, Illinois. It is hard, at first, to imagine what they might have had in common, but, as these letters reveal, both men shared many qualities: an enormous generosity of spirit, an intense curiosity for the adventure of life and a love of books. Indeed, Hal Trovillion was an occasional writer and anthologist himself and, with his wife, owned the Trovillion Private Press which published many fine books.
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'I have an almost vicious mania for writing letters, a regular itch scribendi epistolorum, doubtless inherited from my letter-writing ancestors, all maniacs in this indiscreet and self-pleasing line!' wrote John Cowper Powys in 1942 and it has been estimated that there are at the very least some fifteen thousand of these letters extant. This collection of sixty-seven letters is typical of many others in its characteristic vigour and ebullience, its author's all-encompassing fascination with life, which could lead him effortlessly and naturally from recollections of his childhood in a country rectory to an attempted assassination of Queen Victoria by an aspiring laureate and discussions of Paul Robeson and Aristophanes. This first publication of the letters of Powys to the Trovillions contains an introduction by the poet Kenneth Hopkins, a friend for many years of both correspondents, together with several previously unpublished photographs and an essay by Hal Trovillion, 'A Visit with John Cowper Powys'.
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