untitled

An aff ectionate life

of Anthony Powell

rescues the witty

postwar novelist

from oblivion, writes

Robert McCrum

Forgotten giant of a golden generation

Anthony – Tony – Powell was born in
1905 , part of a brilliant generation that
included Eric Blair, AKA George Orwell
(1903) , Evelyn Waugh (1903) , Malcolm
Muggeridge (1903) and Graham Greene
(1904). Among these headstrong
Edwardian boys, inside-outsiders
all, Powell, who outlived them , is the
least colourful and the most English:
phlegmatically reserved, aloof and
non conformist. He was, in the heyday
of his 12-volume masterpiece A Dance
to the Music of Time , very much a a
contender, but has now been eclipsed.
In posterity’s cruel audit, A Dance
lingers as a curiosity in second hand
bookshops, while its author is almost as
neglected, outshone by Orwell, Waugh
et al. Hilary Spurling ’s authorised
biography arrives in the nick of time to
remind us of her subject’s quiet genius.
Addressing Powell’s “work, life and
loves”, hers is the fi rst full-scale life. It
must also, perforce, grapple with what
we might call the Powell Problem.
There is, immediately, a debate about
A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell’s
principal claim to fame, a work that has
not worn well. Powell’s social comedy
is realistic, based on closely observed
contemporaries. Unlike Wodehouse, for
example, whose lunatic Eden is timeless
and untroubled by the 20th century,
Powell’s milieu has come to seem dated,
its texture threadbare and its colours
faded. He is not a moralist like Orwell,
nor a great satirist like Waugh. He lacks
Greene’s Manichean ferocity. He is,
perhaps, too true to himself to be in the
company of those big beasts.
Powell’s Dance is many things, most
of them admirable. Outstandingly,
however, it is a roman à clef, triggered,
coloured and inspired by its author’s
life whose career it dominates. This is
another problem. His biography must
be more than a series of footnotes to a
sequence of novels, however brilliant.
Powell’s rootless childhood and
education at Eton and Oxford have their
moments, notably in the antics of his
extraodinary parents. Once he found
his vocation, these vivid countrifi ed
beginnings are overtaken by the routine
grind of the writer’s life. Despite these
formidable obstacles, however, Spurling
has triumphed. She has achieved an
aff ectionate portrait of a man who, in
the words of one contemporary, was
just “a colourless young man with
some humour”.
Spurling’s solution to the Powell
problem is to treat Powell as he
himself treated his alter ego and
protagonist, Nick Jenkins, in A Dance:
to make him a camera lens on the
inter war decades that became the
neurasthenic playground for some
bright young things.

BIOGRAPHY

to terms with the painful challenge of

the pram in the hall. How, as Spurling

wittily puts it, “to survive marriage

without being wholly engulfed by

boredom, loneliness or insanity”.

Falling in love is one of the themes

of A Dance, and Powell seems to

have become addicted to casual or

commitment-free relationships. But

then, after another aff air with another

crop-haired beauty in a polo neck, he

met Violet Pakenham , a junior member

of the Anglo-Irish dynasty. She was

everything Powell was not: pretty, funny

and vivacious with an appetite for

experience, especially at parties.

The couple bonded through their

shared experience of a rootless

childhood. Wisely, I think, Spurling

does not delve too far into their

marriage, except to report that Violet

had an aff air with “the love of her life”,

an unidentifi ed man, during Tony’s

wartime absences.

The married Powell turned his

back on his rackety metropolitan past,

shed some fashionable friends such

as Constant Lambert , and, once his

sons were born, converted the joyless

discipline of daily writing, his antidote

to the lifelong threat of depression,

into the engine that would drive the

narrative of A Dance.

Its long gestation was interrupted

by the second world war, which took

Lieutenant Powell to Northern Ireland

and, briefl y, on Churchill’s say-so, to

some months with the joint intelligence

committee. It was in the 1940s that

Powell’s relationship with his Etonian

contemporary Eric Blair came into its

own. Some of Spurling’s most moving

pages describe Orwell’s last years in

wartime London, his struggle with

Nineteen Eighty-Four , and the Powells’

support for “a friend for whom it was

impossible not to feel a deep aff ection”.

Once the war ended, Powell’s world

was dead and buried, too. A Dance came

to the front of his imagination, partly

inspired by John Aubrey ’s Brief Lives.

Whatever the Proustian dimension to

A Dance, Powell had no appetite for the

blind alleys of modernism. A Question of

Upbringing , his opening volume , would

have a simple English clarity rooted

in his remembrance of his recent past,

seen through the eyes of that colourless

narrator. But it took the fancy of the

reading public.

On publication in 1951 , the Observer

saluted “the most exciting experiment

in post war English”. Some reviewers

even put Powell in the fi rst division,

comparing him to Waugh and

Beerbohm. He was soon deep into

sequel after sequel, writing steadily

with his unique mix of wit, austerity

and reserve from a lovely house

in Somerset.

There were other distractions

(reviewing for the Telegraph; a stint

on Punch ), but the rest of his long

life would be consumed by A Dance.

Spurling, who now steps into the

story as a fan for whom these novels

“changed my life”, is exceptionally good

on post war Grub Street, a world she

understands in her bones.

The experiences of a man chained

to a desk, writing 300 words a day, are

hard to animate. Some diverting literary

gossip, braided with speculation about

the models for the odious Widmerpool ,

does not make for a scintillating

life. Awkwardly, too, Powell’s

contemporaries began to turn against

him. Muggeridge knifed him; Larkin

eviscerated what was left.

The thing that rescues this long

biography is Spurling’s wit, intelligence

and deep, ironic aff ection for her

subject, whom she knew as a friend.

She has converted her admiration

into a compelling portrait of a lost

Englishman, a writer profoundly

embedded in the literary life of his

century and whose reputation is still in

the balance. In the posterity stakes, she

has certainly done him a favour.

To order Anthony Powell: Dancing

to the Music of Time for £21.25 go

to guardianbookshop.com or call

0330 333 6846

Books

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the

Music of Time
Hilary Spurling
Hamish Hamilton £25, pp528

Powell’s neutrality was widely

noticed. “Nobody could get the

wrong impression of you,” wrote one

exasperated lover, “because you don’t

give anything to go on.” He had a lot of

aff airs. Spurling’s account of his sex life

revels in a succession of sleek, gamine

girlfriends, often in matelot costume,

voracious young women with shingled

hair, a cocktail in one hand and a

cigarette holder in the other.

As an attractive, blond heterosexual

with two or three well-received novels

(notably Afternoon Men ) to his name,

Powell cut a fi gure in the boho crowd

of Chelsea and Fitzrovia as fresh, smart

and up-to-date. Later, in A Dance, he

would rattle his fi ctional kaleidoscope

to connect a disparate cast of characters.

It was a small world. Everyone was

writing novels, and everyone was

writing and talking about everyone

else. Spurling enjoys the gossip of the

age, an impression reinforced by her

extensive use of fi rst names. Powell is

always “Tony”, except, oddly, on p 396;

Waugh is “Evelyn”; Orwell “George”;

Muggeridge “Malcolm”; and so on.

What’s at fi rst irritating becomes

integral to Spurling’s exploration of a

world as remote as Restoration England.

Powell had made his name with

social comedies obsessed with the

torments of unrequited love. By the

mid-30s, his generation was coming

‘Obsessed with the torments of unrequited love’: Anthony Powell outside his home near Frome in Somerset in the 70s. Martyn Goddard/Rex/Shutterstock

Katharine Norbury on Robert Macfarlane

and Jackie Morris’s lovely hymn to lost words

Page 36

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full of swagger and insight, writes Sam Leith

Page 34

Prizewinning 13-year-old Syrian poet

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Page 35

The Observer | 01. 1 0. 17 | THE NEW REVIEW 33