Petrushka and the Dancer: The Diaries of John Cowper Powys, 1929–1939 ed. by Morine Krissdóttir

Abstract

primacy to existence, to thatness over essence.” To medieval notions of the real, Aristotle is very often an exceedingly unstable guide, his popularity with Aquinas and other medievals notwithstanding. In his fourth chapter, “Medieval and Modern Understandings of Mode of Presentation,” Myles engages the potential contributions from phenomeno­ logical analysis to Chaucer’s “technique of realistic psychological character­ ization” (75) and finds, vis-à-vis the issue of intentionality in particular, that the phenomenologists have much to offer — as long as their insights are formulated in ways that correspond to the dominant medieval seman­ tic theory, which has its roots in Augustine. Chapters Five and Six bring the weight of Myles’s total argument to bear on a discussion of Chaucerian “Entencioun” in the Friar’s Tale, and specifically, the “ententes of rente.” Although this chapter is oddly devoid of reference to earlier scholarship of which it is substantially an elaboration (Jeffrey 1971, 1976; Fleming 1979, 1984; Peck 1967), the Friar’s Tale is unarguably a good text for his purposes. Myles’s conclusion, that intentionality remains a persistent subject in western art substantially because of the residue of ancient no­ tions of the “real,” is certainly sustainable, and his book makes a virtuous contribution toward clarifying the basis upon which that sustentation can become virtuous pedagogy as well. d a v id lyle Je f f r e y / University of Ottawa Morine Krissdottir, ed., Petrushka and the Dancer: The Diaries of John Cowper Powys, 1929-1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). xxvii, 340, illus., $39.95 cloth. As Morine Krissdottir notes in her introduction, “there can be no neutral re­ sponse to [John Cowper] Powys” (xviii). Either he is accepted as a genius — in the recently published The Merry Heart, Robertson Davies describes him as “one of my great men,... as great a writer as Joyce — in my view greater” (14)— or he is dismissed as a ranting charlatan. An eccentric in the age of high modernism, writer of seemingly endless intellectual romances which of­ ten had to be slashed to ribbons before publication (what may well be his masterpiece, Porius, did not appear in an uncut edition until 1994), born either too late or too early (sounding on one page like a provincial Victo­ rian, on the next like a tricky postmodernist), part-clown, part-visionary, part-genius, he could only be seen as absurdly out of step in the world of Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf. But he has always commanded a small band of devoted admirers (I admit to being one of them) who cannot have too much of his refreshing, quirky writings. It is primarily for such readers that this selection of his diaries has been published. 483 Powys began writing a diary at the urging of his longtime companion Phyllis Playter, referred to throughout its pages as the T.T. (short for “Tiny, Thin” ), when he was fifty-six years old and she was thirty-four. He contin­ ued it for the rest of his long life until shortly before his death in 1963 in his ninety-first year. Two volumes — those covering 1930 and 1931 — have recently been published in full, but financial considerations make the appear­ ance of the complete diaries unlikely in the immediate future. Meanwhile, the Chairman of the Powys Society and Adjunct Professor at the University of Guelph has compiled the present volume containing selections from the first eleven-and-a-half years, from the end of Powys’s precarious career as itinerant lecturer in North America, through a brief return to the Dorset he knew so well as a child, to his all-but-final settling in a remote corner of North Wales. Professor Krissdottir was required by her publishers to confine her selections to the limits of a single volume (which meant one tenth of the whole) and to forgo annotations. A less than ideal situation, but she provides informative prefaces to each year and occasional bridging summaries to en­ sure continuity. The result is inevitably impressionistic, but an astonishingly vivid portrait of an extraordinary personality manages to emerge. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this book is its presentation of a view of human life...