After My Fashion

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John Cowper Powys had already written Wood and Stone and Rodmoor which were published by Arnold Shaw of New York. The reviews of both these early books were encouraging but the sales were infinitesimal. 1916 was no time to issue a novel in America. J.C.P. however was already thinking of a third book, one which had Sussex for a background, with nature obtruding itself less, a quieter novel, free from the influence or suggestion of any other writer — Thomas Hardy, for instance, to whom he had dedicated Wood and Stone and who was indeed a good friend.

During this period J.C.P. met Isadora Duncan and he speaks of her in a letter to one of his sisters.

Do you know Isadora sent me a telegram once from San Francisco to New York which said ‘I am thinking of you as I dance here tonight — love Isadora.’ And she danced the Marseillaise for me once in New York. That was one day when I found her reading Nietzsche’s Birthday Tragedy. I first met her in Marian’s [another sister’s] shop in Washington Square. Marian told her fortune and in her mischievous way kept saying ‘Why don’t you two go to Spain?’ She is the only one who ever gave your eldest brother — the veteran Chatangua lecturer — hundreds and hundreds of red roses, so that my little room in 12th Street was flooded with them.

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