65 years after publication, the sales finally take off

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Louise Thomas

Editor

HE HAS been compared to Tolstoy, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, ranked alongside Blake, and commended by Henry Miller and George Steiner - but mention John Cowper Powys to a member of the public and you will probably be greeted with a blank stare.

For decades his novels have gathered dust in second-hand bookshops, of little interest to anyone except a small band of devotees. But finally, 35 years after his death, Cowper Powys's time may have come. He is being touted as the unsung hero of the literary canon, a long-lost genius whose millennial themes resonate with the modern-day reader.

The Overlook Press, a New York publishing house, has reprinted a paperback version of A Glastonbury Romance, Cowper Powys's 1,100-page epic novel published in 1932. In the year since it hit bookshelves in America it has sold three times as many copies as the hardback edition did in the previous 15 years. A Glastonbury Romance has been available in Britain for two months, during which time the distributors have reordered three times. Another of Cowper Powys' novels, Weymouth Sands, will be available from next May.

"These figures certainly speak of a resurgence in interest," said Tracy Carns, publishing director of The Overlook Press. "It is better than any other literary reissue we have done, possibly with the exception of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy. His millennial themes may be a reason why he is striking a chord."

Mike Paine, assistant manager at Waterstone's in Hampstead, north London, said: "In the past three or four weeks we have sold a dozen copies which, for a pounds 15 paperback from the Thirties, without any advertising or marketing campaign, is pretty strong."

Cowper Powys and his family have had a cult following for some time. In 1967 The Powys Society was founded to promote the reading and discussion of the Powys family's works. Cowper Powys was one of 11 children born to a clergyman in Derbyshire. Two of his brothers were also writers, one sister was a painter and another an authority on lace-making.

Among Cowper Powys's fans are Martin Amis, who describes his work as "a monument of neglect", and Chris Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of Schools, who maintains that his quartet of Wessex novels published between 1929 and 1936, Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle, with his Autobiography (1934) and his two historical novels, Owen Glendower (1940) and Porius (1951) "stand comparison with anything written this century".

George Steiner reviewed A Glastonbury Romance saying it was: "The only novel produced by any English writer that can fairly be compared to the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky...with an immensity to which only Blake could provide any parallel."

Henry Miller wrote: "To encounter [Powys]... is to arrive at the very fount of creation. He makes us witness the consuming fire which rages throughout the universe entire and which gives not warmth nor enlightenment, but enduring vision, enduring strength, and enduring courage."

Not everyone would agree. In 1935 Edith Sitwell passed judgement on the man hailed as a genius. "I am rather bored," she wrote, "so bored that I have been reduced to reading Wolf Solent ... There's a great big primitive experience! I suppose the Messrs Powys were the first writers who experimented in deliberately boring their readers, and if so, I must admit that this particular brother has been wholly successful."