The year 1929 was a watershed in the life and work of John Cowper Powys. His first major novel, Wolf Solent, was published that year in the United States and Britain, shortly followed by The Meaning of Culture, which quickly became a best-seller. At 57, after 24 years of lecturing across the American continent, Powys decided to give up his chosen career and move from Manhattan to upstate New York to concentrate on his writing.
But 1929 was also the year in which Powys began to keep a journal, an experiment that remained a regular feature of his daily life for the next 30 years. The 1929 diary spans the Atlantic and covers his travels and meetings with relatives and friends on both sides, beginning in June as he sails home to England for a two-months trip. It sheds significant light on the complex relationships within the extensive Powys family and circle, in particular his own with the two Littletons — his son and brother — and his estranged wife Margaret, as well as the emotional entanglements of Llewelyn Powys, Alyse Gregory and Gamel Woolsey.
But it reveals too the genesis in his mind and on paper of A Glastonbury Romance, that vast, panoramic masterpiece which Professor G. Wilson Knight called 'perhaps the greatest literary work of our generation'. With the diaries for 1930 and 1931 already in print, it is time to start at the beginning with the full journal for 1929. Powys's very mobility in this year, frantic at times, gives the diary a particular narrative dynamism and interest. As with all his autobiographical writings, it shows his intense and sensitive response to the natural world, and his delight in the oddities of his fellow human beings — and not least in his own. As Anthony Head writes in his Introduction, 'By turns humorous, quirky and poignant, the 1929 diary, like everything he wrote in fiction and philosophy, reveals the workings of an extraordinary mind, and the inspiring response to life of the wise, humane and deeply cultured spirit that was John Cowper Powys'.
215mm x 138mm, 170 pp. & port. frontisp.
ISBN 1-897967-32-2. £24.95
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