Descents of Memory by Morine Krissdóttir (2007)

 This is, as far as I am aware, the only substantial biography of John Cowper Powys. There have been pieces dedicated to all three writer brothers, there have been works of literary criticism with strong biographical content, but this is the first attempt to cover him solo from a biographical standpoint. Of course, the Powyses being what they were, there is no avoiding Theodore and Llewelyn, as they were critical in their brother's imaginative and practical life, makeup and exigencies. All the other children of the family are here in reasonable detail also, as are the parents, who were equally influential. Krissdóttir's angle is psychological, an extremely fruitful one when it comes to this subject. Not only was he fascinated by it, allowing it to leak into all his works to varying degrees, he was also subject to great swathes of manias, conceits and theorisings in his personal life, as far as those two things can be separated in such a Herculean being. The picture that is built up is an extraordinary one, of a character seething with ego and not necessarily recognising it, of the eldest of the clannish family running amok with the respect with which he was accorded by them, of early beginnings of somewhat curdled sexuality and decadence, of what became typical brazen selfishness covered over with childlike manipulation, of the eventual development of incredible levels of complexity and vision in novels which have the quality of being both folie de grandeurs and inspiringly magnificent. This piece also releases another vital story, although in a slightly muted fashion - that of Phyllis Playter, his second partner. Records of her in the form of letters or diaries are a lot less common, which explains the partial quality of the portrait. I would have liked to see a little more decision in the analysis of their connection, a plumping for reasons - it seems to me that this has happened in the case of Powys himself, but Krissdóttir has declined to do the same for Playter. There are surely conclusions to which a biographer could come regarding the deeper contexts of their relationship - what we get is a "maybe-ing" instead. The one thing which I think the book is fully missing also relates to Playter, though it may be something to do with length. It's already a very long book, quite appropriately, with somewhat spidery text on 44-line pages with slim margins - it really should have been two volumes, and falls in half very readily. But, having grown familiar to a significant extent with Playter, having had her hard life exposed from both a strictly biographical standpoint and a feminist one, and grown to care about these things, we should, I feel, have had an epilogue about her life between Powys' death in 1963 and hers in 1982. The lack feels like a missing last figure in the pattern. But what is here is an extraordinary and serious revelation, the result of a titanic amount of work, and to be celebrated with not exactly joy, but a feeling of enlightenment.