One Way of Love was finally published in 1987 by Virago, having been accepted for publication before 1930, reaching the proofing stage only to be shelved due to the publisher’s fear of litigation for sexual explicitness. It is widely held to be a fictional account of the author’s marriage to Rex Hunter, and resonates with Llewellyn Powys’ own fictional biography, Love and Death, for many years believed to be about his first love, but stated by his wife Aylse Gregory to be about his affair with Gamel Woolsey. It would be interesting to read this novel purely as fiction, but having read Alyse Gregory’s journals, The Cry of a Gull, as well as Love and Death, for me the novel exerts a fascination almost entirely centred on the character of Mariana, undoubtedly Llewellyn’s strange medieval girl, the Dittany Stone of Love and Death and the Gamel Woolsey of reality.

The book begins: A young girl was lying in a house by the sea… This prologue is a strange little portrait of youth and innocence; the girl’s head is full of fairy tales and magic: TO BE BEAUTIFUL AND BELOVED, - You must take seven drops of wine from seven cups, seven crumbs…

We rejoin Mariana living alone in Greenwich Village, New York, where she’s introduced to the colony of artists and writers by a girl she encounters by chance in a publishers’ office. Her friendship with Alan Douglas and their subsequent marriage and estrangement, even the abortion she undergoes in order to preserve her health (she is in the early stages of tuberculosis), all seem to leave her strangely passive and unmoved; although there are moments of passion and gaiety the central feeling of the novel is of the loneliness and apartness of the human condition, the fact that no one can know or love the very core of another truly – we are all ships that pass in the night, each of us essentially alone.

There is little here to shock twenty-first century sensibilities apart from the thoughts the author has given to Jack Holworth before he practically rapes Mariana:

Mariana attracts you so much because she is decently grown up, has even been married so that your desires are possible and lawful, and yet you can think of her as a child who could be raped – without really hurting her.

Given parallels elsewhere in the novel, it is difficult not to see similarities, at least in physical appearance, between Jack Holworth and Llewellyn Powys – although Llewellyn could never be described as lacking in education. And Holworth is the name of a hamlet very close to the coastguard cottages on the clifftop in Dorset where Llewellyn lived with Aylse, and to which Gamel followed him from America, determined to have his child. The resulting pregnancy, like the first by her husband, was terminated due to concerns for her health.

Mariana seemed to me some idealised form of the author herself, a picture she nourished in her mind and set on paper, her apartness something precious and possibly untouchable, unless by the fairy tale frog who, when kissed by the princess, magically changes into a prince - an ideal man driven less by lust than true love. Mariana herself is moved to a beautifully described orgasm by the sexually adept Alan, yet he is unable to reach that inner part of her well of loneliness, and leaves her unchanged and separate, ultimately innocent. Interestingly, Innocence is the original title of the novel. Gamel Woolsey allows us insights into the thoughts of the men with whom Mariana is intimate – imagined or revealed to the author? It would be fascinating to know. They seem at first to see her as a child – that innocence again – finding desire building to overwhelm them, but throughout the book Mariana delves no deeper into their psyches than their feelings towards herself, unknowingly fuelling their passion by detachment and passivity, that air of ‘otherness’ .

In The Cry of a Gull, Alyse Gregory mentions that Gerald Brenan, whom Gamel married after her affair with Llewellyn, said that there was something calculating about her. How true this was we can never know, yet in spite of the odd slip in One Way of Love where we catch glimpses of a less detached and inward-looking side of Mariana, she remains, like the author herself, tantalizing and enigmatic, her truth ultimately unknowable.

Finally though, the feeling I was left with was that taking Mariana as a thinly disguised Gamel would be a mistake; Mariana is the eternal child inside every woman, waiting forever for the prince of the fairy tale, her innocence and hope living on in spite of the difficulties of life.

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