First published in 1975 by Village
Press, London
John Cowper Powys was one of the first
to recognise the extraordinary genius of James Joyce, and this essay,
first published in 1923 and never reprinted until this edition, is a
major landmark in the huge body of criticism which had grown up
around the author of Ulysses and
his writings. Powys's association with Joyce goes back much further,
for when The little Review
was procecuted in New York in 1917 for the publication of Ulysses
he was one of the expert witnesses called for the defence (as he had
been defence of Dreiser's The ''Genius'' some
years earlier - a measure of Powys's reputation in America at that
time). Alone among the Powys brothers, John Cowper kept fully abreast
of developments in contempory letters all through his life, as
readers of his letters to Louis Wilkinson will know; he was keenly
interested in new books and authors, and generous in his
appreciation, but he was not uncritically so and his comments, time
and again, go to the heart of the matter.
This essay was
published in Life and Letters, an occasional miscellany issued
by the Haldeman-Julius Company, publishers of the ''Little Blue
Books'', and the obscurity of its presentation in what was mainly an
advertising sheet has served to leave it largely unknown, even to
Joyce scholars. Its reappearance was to Joyce's reputation as well as
Powys's.
