Pause at the bookstall of any airport or railway station in England and you are almost sure to find numerous handsome Penguin or Picador editions of the works of John Cowper Powys. Once a newsmaker in the United States, a popular figure of the lecturing circuit for almost twenty-five years, Powys is now largely unknown in America, except among a coterie of devoted scholars and those readers of novels who can remember the original publication of his works here in the twenties and thirties. All of this is likely to change. Should the planned serialization by British television of his vast A Glastonbury Romance result in its being imported by the American educational networks (a strong possibility in view of the present popularity of many televised versions of the English classics), then there will be a veritable resurgence of interest—such as has been seen in England over the past ten years—in the life and work of this extraordinary man.

John Cowper Powys (pronounced Poe-iss) was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, on 8 October 1872, but his formative years were spent in the Southwest of England, first at Dorchester, and then at Montacute in Somerset, where his father, the Reverend Charles Francis Powys, had been appointed vicar in 1885. All of this may seem unremarkable in itself, but John Cowper was the first of eleven children, most of whom went on to achieve distinction in one way or another. In addition to John, the brothers Theodore and Llewelyn became writers of note; Philippa was an essayist and poet, Gertrude an artist, while Marian, who subsequently emigrated to America, established herself as an authority on lace, which she appraised for the U.S. Customs Service. Seven of the eleven Children, in all, were to publish books.

The self-insulating world of this late-Victorian family, "private and tribal," as one critic has described it, had enormous impact on Powys the writer. The shadow of the father looms large in Powys's early work, and although his ultimate, essentially humanistic viewpoint amounts to a stinging rejection of his father's staunch Christianity, it also represents an acceptance of the benevolent and sensitive spirit that accompanied it. Then too, Powys's love of nature, which can be found on every page of his novels and which invests them with their fibrous richness, was an inheritance from the father for whom, in Powys's words, nature was "part of his passionate—but totally subjective—romance of life." His early attachment to literature Powys acquired from his mother, a somewhat timid and enduring woman (portrayed lovingly by Llewelyn in his Skin for Skin) who was herself descended from the English poets Cowper and Donne. Though the family atmosphere was far from oppressive, there was nevertheless an inward orientation—a sense of separateness—that left a distinct imprint on some of the children, particularly when it came to establishing contacts in what was for them an "outside" world. Theodore, for instance, seems to have been claimed quite early in life by a sort of mental morbidity that he was unable fully to shake loose, while John, although subsequently renowned for his graciousness and amiability, was given at public school and university (Sherbourne and Corpus Christi, Cambridge, respectively) to the deliberate cultivation of bouts of mania and eccentricity.

It was in America that Powys was able to channel these neuroses in a positive direction, and it was in his novels—many of which carry figures of self-portraiture—that he submerged them. Powys first came to America in 1905, but it was an estrangement from his wife of fourteen years and the need to support an only son that in 1910 led him to pursue on a permanent basis the lucrative territory of America in his career as a public speaker. For almost a quarter of a century Powys crisscrossed the country, familiarizing himself with its cities and towns and, on endless walks ("one of my chief life-exigencies"), its suburbs and waysides. He traveled incessantly by train, knew the great railroad termini (few airports then) and the grand hotels of the day; spoke at such various places as the old Lincoln Center in Chicago, Cooper Union and the Labor Temple in New York, and at scores of colleges and universities throughout the South and Midwest. He debated publicly the likes of Will Durant and Bertrand Russell; secured the adoration of Isadora Duncan, the friendship of Theodore Dreiser, and the admiration of Henry Miller. On the platform, Powys was by all accounts a masterly performer, a truly magnetic personality who could command the attention of vast and varied audiences. In this, it seems, his striking physiognomy—a noble head dominated by searching eyes and topped with a mass of curly hair—served him well. Will Durant's 1931 portrait of Powys in Adventures in Genius provides an unforgettable description of the fantastic lecturer in high form: "… tall, thin, ungainly, angular … long arachnid legs, long simian arms, long, restless, pseudopodian fingers, the Word made not flesh but bone and naked nerves; the stooping carriage of a solicitous giant … the trembling mouth of the poet … the eyes startled and piercing, hunted and hunting, tossed and pulled about with things vividly seen, haunted with mystery and frightened with understanding…." This was the speaker who caused Ariel Durant, hearing Powys for the first time in New York, to rush home to Will to exclaim that she had just "seen Shelley plain."

Powys's subject was "culture"—in short, literature and philosophy—but it also included forays into political the or and social organization. He was a subtle analyst of capitalism and the capitalist frame of mind, as can be witnessed in print in his 1936 essay "Farewell to America" and in the characterization of the industrialist Philip Crow in A Glastonbury Romance. As a lecturer, his style and viewpoint were not to everyone's liking, however. His detractors called him a charlatan, a term that Powys, who was a genuine maverick and natural self-publicist, embraced with pride. "I am a born actor," he would frequently declare, adding that he was one who had "rebuked the mighty and exalted the leper."

This much is the public memory of John Cowper Powys—proselytizer, lecturer, ardent individualist—but along with this Powys was gradually building in America another reputation: that of writer. Typically, the output was prodigious, particularly when one considers the rigorous speaking schedule he was following at that time. In one eight-year period, 1915 to 1923, he produced no less than twelve books—novels, poetry, philosophy, autobiography, and literary criticism—together with countless articles in magazines and newspapers (the Dial, Forum, and Scribner's were favorite outlets). As Kenneth Hopkins notes, by 1917 Powys's public stature was sufficient to allow him to appear for the defense at the prosecution of the Little Review in connection with its publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. He was also an early defender of Dreiser when he too came under attack. Although Powys's own work never encountered difficulties of this type, it was some few years before it was accepted with anything approaching widespread admiration. The turning point occurred in 1929 with the appearance of two books: first, his powerful and unusual novel, Wolf Solent, the forerunner of what can be considered his major novels, and then, the highly successful The Meaning of Culture, the first of a series of books of popular philosophy consisting of eclectic and personal formulas for independent living, prototypes of which had appeared earlier in the Little Blue Books series of the Haldeman-Julius Company.

By this time Powys had reached the age of fifty-eight, a late start for a writer but one that he seized with relish, especially now that, having retired from lecturing because of ill health, he had taken up residence "deep in the land of the Mohawks," at a Dutch cottage near Hillsdale in upstate New York, "I have what I've never had before," he wrote to one of his brothers, "real time to write in, hours and hours of time. I can shuffle time, like you shuffle snow, in a great wooden spade." It was there, and in North Wales, where he finally settled in 1935, that Powys produced the five or six novels that are his masterworks, and where also he was to write the work entitled Autobiography (1934), that astonishing piece of self-revelation that J. B. Priestley justly describes as "one of the greatest autobiographies of the English language."

While Powys was to celebrate his energetic years in America ("incomparably the best years of my life") in both the autobiography and the essays of the period, America nowhere appears in his central novels. That world remains, in surface texture at least, the world of his childhood, of Dorset and Somerset, and in two later novels the historic world of the Powyses' ancestral Wales. The westcountry wanderings of the eponymous Wolf Solent, for instance, clearly replicate those of Powys's own younger days, as is reflected in his 1961 preface (written, with amazing clarity, when he was eighty-nine): "Wolf Solent is a book of Nostalgia, written in a foreign country with the pen of a traveller and the ink-blood of his home." Yet to say that Powys's novels center upon Wessex is to define only partly the world they inhabit, for his vision is so copious and so extensive that ultimately their true setting is nothing less than the cosmos itself. In brief, they debate the nature of the universe and man's place within it. Like later novels, the seminal Wolf Solent reveals Powys's belief in the transforming powers of the human will and the human imagination, and his belief—so germane to us today—that every man and woman has the creative potential to shape a future of happiness and self-fulfillment, irrespective of the particular circumstances under which he or she labors. Thus all of his novels exist as imaginative efforts to reconcile this faith in individual creativity with the reality of human experience. From Wolf Solent, his first major figure, to Porius, his last, he maintains a long line of characters bound up in a state of "deep contemplative tension," each calling upon his will's "unbounded power," and each in his own manner fulfilling the Powys credo that the universe is "always capable of being further discovered and further created."

On the surface, Powys's philosophy, as espoused in novels and essays alike, appears to argue against the cultivation of ordinary contacts with human society—a communion with nature, for instance, is always depicted with prominence as a saving grace in life—and there is no doubt that collectively they abjure the modern world, just as they implicitly question modern religion and modern philosophy. Yet they remain deeply human. They concentrate primarily upon individual dramas, dramas seen less in relation to the present than to the past, but that nevertheless combine trenchant insights into social, sexual, and familial relations in modern life. The climax of Wolf Solent, a study of emotional evolution in a young man of severely introspective habits, occurs behind a pigsty—a typically Powysian metaphor of the modern world—when Wolf's mental turmoil is finally put to rest in a vision that replaces his previously complacent idealism with the realism inherent in a life based upon perpetual renewal and endurance. Such a note of psychological pragmatism, embodied in a novel of eloquence and descriptive beauty, led Theodore Dreiser to comment that it "holds speculations so intense, so searching and ennobling as to suggest little less than revelation—at their lowest ebb high poetry."

If Wolf Solent was to establish Powys's reputation, then his next novel, A Glastonbury Romance (1932), served to confirm it. The binding element in this huge, labyrinthine chronicle—estimated by one critic to be the longest undivided novel in the English language—is the mystical and spiritual ethos of Glastonbury, whose impact Powys tests upon his characters. The focus, wide and all-inclusive, falls now upon numinous rather than emotional awareness. We are here truly in the domain of the Powys novel: characters are many and Dickensian in variety (the front matter lists forty-seven "principal" characters alone); events encompass the dramatic and the miraculous (a crucifixion, a devastating flood, a murder, even an exorcism); mood is intense and quickened by the spiritual presence of figures of myth and tradition; a rich iconography interweaves the ancient with the modern, the historical with the legendary. The novel is the outgrowth of Powys's lifelong interest in religious and philosophical creeds. Thematically, it deals with the religious response to life. It is a searching examination, conducted by means of exempla and personal experience. The stories of John Crow, Sam Dekker, and "Bloody Johnny"—John Geard, the street-corner revivalist turned provincial guru—all contribute in various ways towards a definition of what is religious in life and to an explanation of the origins of religious instinct. In the course of his investigations, Powys questions many systems of values, even at times his own, and it may be these episodes (by their presence if not their substance) that are the most significant and the most telling. Some critics have suggested that in this way Powys deserts the reader, by providing no positives, no definitive answers, but such is exactly his intention. "I try to advocate," the wrote in the preface to a 1955 edition, "… an acceptance of our life in the spirit of absolutely undogmatic ignorance," and he would argue that a book is worthless that pretends to solve life's mysteries with a system. Despite its underlying tone of philosophical circumspection, A Glastonbury Romance stands as a wonderfully human document. Panoramic in design, charged with scenes of great vividness, and informed by its author's quizzical vitality, it is nothing less than a giant of a novel. Its style is unmistakably Powys's own: a sweeping, stirring, prose, rich in elemental imagery and archetypal symbol. There is no doubt that it will make superb television; indeed, it would be a fine instance of poetic justice, for tragically Powys himself never made a penny from the novel—its royalties being swallowed up by a disastrous libel suit brought by a westcountry landowner.

There followed two more novels with Wessex settings. The first, Weymouth Sands (1934)-"my seaside tale," as Powys fondly called it—was the last product of his American years. Its integration of separate narrative episodes into an all-inclusive mixture of humor and pathos makes Weymouth Sands the most innovative, the most compact, and, for many readers, the most enjoyable of his novels—"a happy book" is how G. Wilson Knight describes it. Its message concerning the triumph of perseverance over despair is worked out through a series of streams of consciousness, overlaid by, or set against, the cumulative metaphors of the book; the sea, the sands, the rocks, and the settlements of the Dorset coastline. In short, Weymouth Sands is a novel of the margins, its sands the margins of consciousness, where the psychic residua of its characters are confronted and laid bare. The Weymouth area was, interestingly, the final resting place of John Cowper Powys, for it was at Chesil Beach, one of this novel's central locations, that his ashes were scattered following his death in 1963. After Weymouth Sands came Waiden Castle (1936), a moral fable about the negative powers of presumption. Here, in a novel written during a year's stay in England, Powys broke new ground as he began to give full rein to his mythopoeic genius. Set in and around the great neolithic earthwork of Maidun, Near Dorchester, the novel presents a fascinating study of human relationships, of their fruition and decline, within a close circle of what Powys called "enemy-friends," and of the abrasions and incompatibilities that can result from close and repetitive contacts. These difficulties are heightened by the claim of one of the characters to powers of reincarnation, a claim that Powys, though judicious in his depiction of the reactions of other characters, did not entirely diminish. At the novel's core are considerations of pain and cruelty, death and the past, a combination that caught the eye—not surprisingly perhaps—of the late Dennis Wheatley, whose works explore these murky areas.

The homecoming to Wales marked Powys's final phase, but his energies were by no means depleted: two of his best novels and a cluster of fantasies, the products of extreme old age, were yet to come. Wales, never far from the center of Powys's imagination (his family traces its descent from the ancient Welsh princes of Powysland), consumed it entirely when he made his eventual move there in 1935. Thinking of himself then as an "Aboriginal Welshman," Powys renewed his lifelong interest in the history and literature of Wales and in later years even learned to read and write Welsh, a feat of considerable proportions in view of the acknowledged difficulty of the language and his own advanced age. This deep-rooted interest in the culture and traditions of his adoptive home was poured lavishly into the work of his last twenty-five years. Where Powys had moved gradually into the past with the historic associations of the Romance and Maiden Castle, in Owen Glendower (1940) and Porius (1951) he broke with the present entirely to re-create, in fifteenth-and fifth-century settings respectively, two panoramic episodes in Welsh history. Owen Glendower, following in its broadest outline the known facts of its hero's great rebellion against the English, is a marvelous blend of historicity and vision, of mythology and romance, and for this it has won high praise from such eminent voices as those of Angus Wilson and George Steiner. Essentially, the novel is a restatement of Powys's earlier theme of self-determination, only this time in terms of national rather than individual significance. Porius, however, is a world unto itself just as, equally, it is the summit of Powys's achievement. Eight years in the writing, Porius is in fact a mythic rendering of Powys's personal creed and his candescent belief in the existence of "an old human vitality … that will yet make man, rather than any Man-God, or God-Man, the creator of man's future." The novel's brilliant and teeming action, couched in an atmosphere that is both elemental and regressive, is too complex to summarize. But this much can be said: that for all its atavism of mood and setting, Porius is nonetheless a manifestly twentieth-century novel, and it is so because it presents a doctrine that finds philosophical solace in variety rather than in any ultimate or absolute theory. It speaks to an age that, like the Dark Ages in which it is set, is fraught, in Powys's words, "with the terrifying possibilities of human disaster," but it does so in terms that iterate the power of diminishing such possibilities and stress the view that good, whether in "fellow-feeling" or "kindness," is capable of increase. It was perhaps this work more than any other that spurred G. Wilson Knight to nominate Powys for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1959. (Although Powys did not win the Nobel—the honors that year went to Salvatore Quasimodo—he had the previous year been the recipient of the Plaque of the Academy of Arts of Hamburg, a distinction granted previously to only one other novelist, Thomas Mann.)

It is upon the six novels that I have mentioned and the autobiography that future interest in John Cowper Powys will undoubtedly center. These works represent a unique and impressive achievement. Their concerns are as wide as they are profound. They attempt to find or portray an actual, valid, and preeminently practical interpretation of the universe. For some readers they offer alternate values to those held by the twentieth century; for others they offer pragmatic advice on living one's life in a spirit of courageous acceptance. Collectively, Powys's novels are a forceful antidote to the Age of Anxiety. They are written out of an affirmative spirit, capturing with richness and with vision man's organic desire for peace and happiness, yet they do so without blinking at ultimate problems of human perversity, suffering, and death. A reasonable optimism is how we might best characterize the moral legacy of John Cowper Powys.