Published in 1916, a first edition.
Never has so battered a book been added to a collection. Nevertheless, here it is, and with good reason - for it has been inscribed on the front free endpaper in 1920 or 1929 (sadly the exact date is obscured by damage) by Phyllis Playter, the partner of John Cowper Powys over many years.
Phyllis Playter 1894-1982
She was a reader for Haldeman-Julius, publishers of the Little Blue Books, to which Powys was a contributor.
She met the lecture-touring JCP in 1921, whereupon at the age of twenty-seven she became his 'femme de confiance’. From then until his death in 1963 she nurtured and gave direction to his chaotic, wayward genius.
She accompanied Powys back to England in 1934, following their five years together in up-state New York, where A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, and Autobiography were all written.
After Powys’s death in 1963 she continued to live in their tiny house at Blaenau Ffestiniog, North Wales.
Whatever the condition of the book when it was first acquired by Phyllis, its present condition would very likely have resulted from the various domestic upheavals over the years. She and JCP moved from Patchin Place in New York City, to Phudd Bottom in Up State New York, across the Atlantic to Corwen in Wales, ending up in a tiny little damp house in Blaenau Ffestiniog, also in Wales. Packing and unpacking, squeezing into more and more confined living spaces have all taken their toll on this book, with its worn out covers, grubby pages, water damage and, at some time, paper-consuming insects and grubs. Patina I say! The book’s condition certainly tells its own story. How wonderful to hold an object that has been packed and unpacked and re-packed so many times by the hands of Phyllis and John.
The Book
John Cowper Powys, Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations, G. Arnold Shaw, New York, 1916.
The price of choosing the dog-eared book for its association with Phyllis Playter is to have foregone the pleasure of possessing the dust cover.
Nevertheless, bibliographer Dante Thomas gives the promotional statement by JCP printed on the front of the dust wrapper. I will not reproduce this in full, but a couple of excerpts give a flavour of what to expect inside. This will be no dry academic reading of the authors considered in the work.
…I have tried to capture what might be called the “psychic residuum” of earlier fleeting impressions and I have tried to turn this emotional aftermath into a permanent contribution - at any rate for those of similar temperament - to the psychology of literary appreciation…
…I have called the book “Suspended Judgements” because while one lives, one grows, and while one grows, one waits and expects.
In 1923 a selection of essays in “Suspended Judgments” were reprinted by E. H. Haldeman-Julius of Girard, Kansas as Little Blue Books. These were:
Little Blue Book Number:
448 Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire
450 de Maupassant, Anatole France, William Blake
451 De Gourmont and Byron
452 Emily Brontë and Henry James
453 Joseph Conrad and Oscar Wilde
© John Dunn.
