("Mr. Weston's Good Wine," tells the story in which God, i...)
"Mr. Weston's Good Wine," tells the story in which God, in the person of Mr. Weston, the wine merchant, and his assistant, Michael, come down to the village of Folly Down, to sell to the inhabitants his two brands of wine, the light wine of love, and the dark wine of death.
(T. F. Powys is a forgotten genius like no other - and Unc...)
T. F. Powys is a forgotten genius like no other - and Unclay is his masterpiece New Directions is proud to present one of the most spellbinding novels you will read this year, and certainly the weirdest.
Theodore Francis Powys was a British novelist. Powys wrote a steady succession of novels, novellas, fables and short stories which first appeared in print during the 1920s and early 1930s. These tales of startling originality, strange beauty, and shocking revelations, offer wry observations on the human condition, the enigma of God, and arresting insights into the nature of good and evil, infused with subtle and dark humor of the rarest vintage.
Background
Theodore Francis Powys was born on December 20, 1875, in Shirley, England, the United Kingdom, to Charles Francis (vicar of Montacute, Somerset, for 32 years) and Mary Cowper (Johnson) Powys. Powys was one of three talented writers in his family - his brothers, Llewelyn and John Cowper are the other two.
But they were not the only talents in the family. Their sister Philippa Powys also published a novel and some poetry. Despite never achieving the success of her literary brothers she wrote at least two novels at Chydyok that were never published - The Tragedy of Budvale and Joan Callais - as well as a play, The Quick and the Dead. Marian Powys was an authority on lace and lace-making, published a book on this subject. Gertrude Powys was a painter, while another brother, A. R. Powys worked as a secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and wrote a number of books on architecture.
Education
Unlike his two brothers, Powys did not attend university; instead, he chose the life of a farmer and left school when he was 15 years old.
Career
Powys’s first major work, The Soliloquy of a Hermit (1916), was published when Powys was over thirty years old. This philosophical satirical essay, stylistically spare, was met with little attention; but Powys did receive notice from some critics - a reviewer in Dial called Powys a “satirist of a different kidney.” Kenneth Hopkins notes in Dictionary of Literary Biography that within this work may be found the “seeds of the conflict between good and evil and the approach to God and to humanity which characterizes the subsequent stories and novels.”
In his novella, the Left Leg, and his novels, Mark Only and Mr. Tasker's Gods, Powys presents gruesome, horror-filled worlds that are rife with symbolism. Powys began to write Mr. Tasker’s Gods during the First World War, almost a decade before its publication. It alludes darkly, more than once, to what was going on elsewhere in the world, perhaps not that far from Powys’s home on the coast of Dorset - across the English Channel, say - without referring to it directly. In the story, “The Left Leg,” God is represented by a character named Tinker Jar, and the Virgin Mary by a character called Mary Gillet. However, the Biblical story is given a sinister and ironic twist when Farmer Mew rapes Mary. Characters are simplified and twodimensional, dominated by a single characteristic. Villains and fiends - raping, murdering, and plundering - turn the ideal of countryside idyll on its head. Mark Only and Mr. Tasker’s Gods offer hopeless characters, consumed by evil and constrained by their human weaknesses.
With the 1927 publication of the allegorical novel, Mr. Weston’s Good Wine, Powys achieved his finest work, considered by many as the culmination of his talents, in this novel, Powys subtly mingles the supernatural with the quotidian while exploring such themes as whether God or mankind is ultimately to blame for the world’s evil and the human predicament. God is represented by Mr. Weston, a wine salesman who visits the village of Folly Down and sells light and dark wines, symbolizing Love and Death. Hopkins notes that Folly Down is inhabited by “brutal, greedy farmers and their dissolute sons; by sly village matrons exchanging malicious gossip; ... by maidens with little chance of remaining so.” Mr. Weston sells his wares and attempts to settle some accounts as different actions arc played out. Mr. Weston believes the dark (Death) wine to be the more palatable vintage, as it is reliable and definitive. However, as Brian Stableford explains in the St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, “the dark wine is not death in general but a specific sort of merciful death, which is contrasted with the more brutal deaths unceremoniously meted out by the wicked.”
Powys was a prolific short story writer, and many critics believe that this was the forum where he was at his best. No collection has been lauded more than Fables, a series of surreal dialogues between inanimate objects with human characteristics. Some of the speakers include a flea, a spittoon, darkness, seaweed, and a bucket and a rope. As John David Orlet writes in Dictionary of Literary Biography, “through their own interactions, their dispassionate (and often ironic) observations of human beings, or their interactions with humans, these characters reveal not facile morals but profound truths about life and death.” Through these conversations between objects, natural phenomena, and ideas, Powys articulates his tragic view of the world. “Yet Powys,” Orlet adds, “while often being biting in his criticism of mankind, possesses also a genuine sympathy for human beings buffeted by the harshness of existence.”
Ultimately, many critics found Powys to be “a rural writer bound by the parochial concerns of the English countryside,” Orlet notes. Yet “when he is at his best - as in Mr. Weston’s Good Wine, in short stories such as The Only Penitent, and in many of his fables - he is able to convey, often with great power, a vision unconstrained by topography, a vision of universal significance.”
Theodore Francis Powys's works Mr. Weston's Good Wine (1927) and Unclay (1931) and the short-story collection Fables are most praised. His novels are tales of morality, original and surprising, as all good fables should be. Powys wrote a steady succession of novels, novellas, fables and short stories which first appeared in print during the 1920s and early 1930s. These tales of startling originality, strange beauty, and shocking revelations, offer wry observations on the human condition, the enigma of God, and arresting insights into the nature of good and evil, infused with subtle and dark humor of the rarest vintage.
Powys’s range of theme and character is narrow - dealing mainly with the hardships and personal brutalities of rural life - but the quality of his work is enduring.
The son of an Evangelical clergyman, Powys struggled with his Christian beliefs, finding them at odds with his personal experience of the world. His writings reflect an idiosyncratic, unorthodox brand of Christianity, one that reveals the conflict between his Christian sense of morality and his pessimistic view of humanity. As a Times Literary Supplement critic noted in 1932, Powys "was an inverted moralist, his hope not in everlasting life, but in everlasting death as the only sure release from the pain and cruelty of which life is woven."
Politics
During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Powys was one of several British writers who campaigned for aid to be sent to the Republican side.
Views
Quotations:
"A village is like a stage that retains the same scenery throughout all the acts of the play. The actors come and go, and walk to and fro, with gestures that their passions fair or foul use them to."
Personality
Powys rarely left home or traveled by car, claimed to love monotony, and "never gave so much as a sunflower-seed for the busy, practical life."
The rural setting brought him much privacy and serenity, Powys suffered bouts of depressions and his emotional state was often precarious, and it became a vital part of Theodore’s writing.
Quotes from others about the person
T.F. Powys, that master of rural understatement whose wry humor and warmth, and whose marvelous narrational "pull", are irresistible. - Ronald Blythe
Interests
gardening
Philosophers & Thinkers
Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche
Writers
Thomas Hardy, John Bunyan, Cervantes, Jeremy Taylor, Jonathan Swift
Connections
In 1905, Powys married Violet Dodd. They had two sons and later adopted a daughter. After his marriage in 1905, he settled in Dorset and lived the life of a near-recluse until his death.
Father:
Charles Francis Powys
Mother:
Mary Cowper Johnson
Spouse:
Violet Dodd
Brother:
John Cowper Powys
Although Theodore Francis Powys and John were brought up in the same strongly theological household, their approaches to fiction soon diversified, John's becoming deeply mystical while Theodore Francis Powys's became more light-hearted and allegorical. Their style seems as polarized as their individual interpretations of Good and Evil.
