Wild Welshman

OWEN GLENDOWER -- John Cowper Powys--Simon & Schuster ($5).

The chief use of most historical novels is to improvise high chairs for small dinner guests. Owen Glendower is tactfully printed on thin paper and split into two portable volumes, as if the intention were that it be read. But in other respects it runs true to type. It is longer than most good books (938 pages); it is padded (the story hardly starts in the first 100 pages). All it lacks to be perfectly in the vogue is a jingoistic theme.

So far as Welshman John Cowper Powys is concerned, it has that too. It is about Wales during the years 1400-1416. The title character is that subtle, flawed part-genius who led a Welsh-French army toward the London of Henry IV, and died a hermit. Its hero, a venturesome Oxford student named Rhisiart, is a young man with a "narrow skull . . . predatory beak and snatching lips." He becomes Owen's secretary, engulfs himself in an almost pathic loyalty-love for his boss, and has become an English Justice by the time Glendower dies.

Some 60 other characters, invented and actual, supply the color. The wild Stone-Age magic that survives in Welsh blood has been responsible for much of the greatest in English poetry. But Author Powys, a professional Wild Welshman (and proud of it), has never got his wildness quite under artistic control. In his thefts from Homer, Keats, Joyce Kilmer, the marriage service and Shakespeare, Burglar Powys invariably knocks over the china closet or steps on the cat. The following not untypical sentence should be engraved on the tomb of Krafft-Ebing: "He was witnessing . . . what few men have been privileged to contemplate: namely, the writhings of a lust-demented lady on the breast of a man whose arms were tied behind his back."

There are two possibilities about Powys. One is that he is just as innocent and headlong as he seems. The other is that, like Ted Lewis or the latter-day John Barrymore, he is a master of ham-for-the-hell-of-it, a talented and laughing charlatan who gives the people super-portions of what they seem to want. In either case, he makes his audience uncomfortable, but he holds them to the end.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.