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Unlike T. S. Eliot, John Cowper Powys is not particularly associated with French literature, but as David Gervais reveals in this penetrating comparison of the two writers' critical approaches, Powys had a deep knowledge and keen appreciation of numerous French authors and wrote about them with insight. From early essays on Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Hugo, Maupassant, and Remy de Gourmont, to later discussions of Proust, Valery and Flaubert, Powys demonstrated a refreshingly catholic and untendentious attitude. It is a telling indication of his differences with Eliot that the one book Powys devoted to a French writer was Rabelais (1948). Dr. Gervais, Honorary Fellow at the University of Reading and an authority on Flaubert, gives this aspect of Powys's enormous œuvre the serious critical attention it deserves in this judicious study, noting that if Eliot's essays are "full of judgements", Powys's are "full of hints". |
