THE SPHERE

London, England

7 March 1953

(page 356)

The World of Books.

By Vernon Fane.

Mr. Louis Marlow [Louis Wilkinson] writes of SEVEN FRIENDS (Richard Press. 10s. 6d.), and a distinguished company they are, in Oscar Wilde, with whom the author corresponded as a schoolboy, though he never met him: Frank Harris, “the most remarkable literary blackguard”; Aleister Crowley, John Cowper Powys, T. F. Powys and Llewellyn Powys, and William Somerset Maugham. These reminiscences of the more or less contemporary scene are of considerable interest, and I found the brief chapters on the Powys brothers quite fascinating, whether as a revelation of their youth and early ambitions, or of their far from usual parents. Mrs. Powys, for instance had no sympathy for success and even felt distaste for people whose health was too good. When her son Llewellyn developed consumption, “she did not like his going to Switzerland, she did not like his having so many windows open. ‘These young men,’ she said, ‘seem to want to live for ever.’ ”