St Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie
In October 1914 John Cowper Powys met somebody who was going to count a lot in his life, as he wrote to Llewelyn:
"O we have discovered a Master my dear! Did you read Sister Carrie or Jenny Gerhardt or The Titan by Theodore Dreiser? Well, this excellent fellow has been discovered by us and has become extraordinarily friendly. He lives in West 10th Street quite close, with a girl who is either his wife or his tart." (15 October 1914)And so it was that a few months later he proudly announced: "Old Theodore Dreiser was tickled to death when I lectured on him at St Mark's church. It was difficult to persuade him to come - but he came and his girl with him." (8 December 1914)
The rector and Vestry of old St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie will be obliged if you will kindly correct an error in your headline this morning, under which you mention Mr. Powys's lecture - a dithyramb, as your reporter acutely terms it - on "Byron, the Revolutionary Poet." While entirely within the proprieties, given as it was from a lecture platform, it would have been most improper to have been uttered, as your headline states, from a pulpit....
In its new endeavour to link itself with the throbbings and yearnings of the many nationalities surrounding it, to minister to their needs, and to provide a platform for free discussion, it is not the intention of the new management to permit St. Mark's pulpit to be given over to the promulgation of any such cult as that of the dashing Mr. Powys, whose command of daring phrases and delicious paradoxes yesterday delighted an audience in a hall where it would have offended that same audience, if delivered from the pulpit of a Christian church.
John Brooks Leavitt, Senior Warden. N.Y. Feb. 19, 1912
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