SOURCE: "A Seer of the Flesh," in the Times Literary Supplement, No. 4807, May 19, 1995, pp.3-4.

In the following excerpt, Bayley praises Petrushka and the Dancer and The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Frances Gregg, Vol. 1 (edited by Oliver Marlow Wilkinson and Christopher Wilkinson).

It seems unlikely that the critics will ever resolve the question of John Cowper Powys's status as a novelist. There is no version of the canon, or the "hundred best novels", in which his inclusion is taken for granted; he is not a standard author in any series, or regularly revived in paperback, like most classics. But in a sense this absence is itself his status. It seems to keep him absurdly, disconcertingly alive, while the oeuvre of James Joyce, say, becomes more purely monumental by the year. The Joyce industry works on the monument like the restorers on the Albert Memorial; whereas the...