A Mystical, Bohemian Tree-Hugging Sadist

He wrote from the perspective of inanimate objects and gods. Was he a genius or a madman?

• This essay will appear in Issue 6 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

• Note from the Editor: In case you missed it, my first novel Stop All the Clocks is coming out with Arcade Publishing in June, 2025. Arcade is quickly shaping up to be one of the country’s premier literary fiction publishing houses—and I’m not just saying that because they’re publishing me. I also happen to know they’ve got some exciting, not-yet-announced stuff on the back burner. Subscribe to their Substack below for updates, plus twenty free e-books.

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Patchin Place: The Powyses and Literary New York

by Raymond Crozier

Independently Published, 285 pp., #10.99

Edward Burne-Jones. The Beguiling of Merlin. 1872–1874. 186 cm × 111 cm.

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Raymond Crozier’s Patchin Place: The Powyses and Literary New York, recently reissued in paperback, might be less unusual for its subject matter—the luminaries and semi-luminaries of New York Bohemia who inhabited the gated row of three-storey townhouses facing the present Jefferson Market Library on West Tenth Street—than for its choice of focus. The Powyses of the title refers to Llewelyn Powys, an expatriate Anglo-Welsh novelist who lived at Patchin Number 4, and his sister Marian, a lacemaker, but above all to their elder brother John, the novelist, mystic philosopher, and lecturer, who took over his brother’s flat in 1924 and spent just short of eight years there, though he mainly used it as a base from which to crisscross the country, lecturing on subjects ranging from Dickens and Dostoevsky to modern poetry and Plato’s Eros. Why, instead of better-known Patchin residents such as Djuna Barnes or E. E. Cummings, did Crozier focus on John Cowper Powys?

The answer is partly personal: Crozier, a retired psychology professor at Cardiff University in Wales, has long admired Powys and was drawn to Patchin by that interest. (As a specialist in the study of blushing and creativity, his attraction to the shameless and fecund Powys perhaps requires little explanation.) And yet a gracenote toward the end of the book suggests a deeper affinity. Letting his mind wander over the tree whose boughs Powys would have looked out at from the upper-floor room he shared with his lover Phyllis, Crozier wonders:

If the ailanthus leaves could speak, what would they tell us about comings and goings among the residents of the alley and their visitors? The conflict within the Patchin family at the end of the nineteenth century that reaches the courts, where a young woman resident in France sues her father for her share of the properties? The production [sic] of Dudley Digges’ production of Yeats’s play The King’s Threshold at midnight on July 1, 1918, that stopped the trains on the elevated railway on Sixth Avenue? Jessie Tarbox Beals and Berenice Abbott setting up their heavy photographic equipment some twenty years apart?

Besides being a clever way of recapping the book, which begins with property development and proceeds to canvass New York’s first “downtown scene” of the 1920s and ’30s, complete with political operatives (then mostly of the radical and anarchist Left) and private theater (then sufficiently well-connected to halt public transport so as not to disturb the performance), this reverie is deeply in tune with John Cowper’s unique sense of place.

As the author himself put it in A Glastonbury Romance, his great novel of the 1930s, begun at Patchin, “Human thoughts, those mysterious projections from the creative nuclei of living organisms, have a way of radiating from the brain that gives them birth.” What allowed the lowlands around Glastonbury—that womblike receptable of spiritual yearnings and creeds—to manifest the Holy Grail to him is the same phenomenon that made it possible for “any supermaterial eye endowed with psychic perception” to perceive the psychic residues, or “thoughtshapes,” left at the scene of any human encounter. Powys regularly conveyed not just the emanations, but the perspectives, both of human characters (living and dead) and an array of non-human entities, from the cosmic (e.g., the sun, or “the divine-diabolical First Cause of all life”) to the decidedly earthly, including, yes, trees, and even stones.