John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) - photo 1

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)

Lot 303
15.12.2023 11:00UTC +01:00
Classic
Starting price
£ 100
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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Archive
ID 1109104
Lot 303 | John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)
Estimate value
£ 1 200 – 1 800
John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)
Seven autograph letters signed (‘John Cowper Powys’, ‘J.C.P’, ‘Jack’, and ‘Jack the Ripper’) and one unsigned to Reginald Pole, Cae Coed, Corwen, Merionethshire, January 1946-10 May 1948
38 pages in total, various sizes, with extensive notes and insertions in the margins. [With:] two different typescript introductions for the novels for presentation to the publishers written by Powys. Provenance: Sotheby's New York, 6 May 1981, lot 102.

‘I’ve had a regular whirlpool of contradictory old-time, mid-time, new-time, any-time, out of time reactions to this Remarkable Work of yours’: letters on literary subjects, focusing principally on a series of autobiographical novels written by Pole. The novels, entitled Westward Saga, are compared to Proust as well as Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe novels. Powys offers praise, criticism and advice as well as practical suggestions about finding a publisher: ‘you have chosen – because of reasons unknown to me – but probably inherent involved & intrinsic, in Reginald’s life character & genius – to combine the autobiographical with the novelistic and though I can of course only speak for myself this combination of autobiography & novel has a tendency to “soft-pedal”, as you might say, my eager primitive simple unsophisticated thrill as a lover of a story’. Elsewhere, his praise continues: ‘and to numb, drug and anaesthetize … a little, my intense and lively and almost wicked curiosity about the secret virtues and secret sins and hidden Dostoevskyish lapses of Reginald his very self!’.
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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