Anthony Powell died on 28 March 2000, twenty-five years ago today. It is also fifty years since he completed his 12-novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time, written over a quarter of a century.
How well has this unique opus worn? With a title taken from Poussin’s masterpiece of the four seasons, Dance, has been described as ‘Proust Englished by P.G. Wodehouse’. But perhaps Powell’s closely-observed study of 20th-century bohemacy has suffered from being too real: its texture a trifle tweedy; its colours slightly faded.
Anthony Powell, the novelist, deserves to be read
Powell was not an escapist like Wodehouse; a moralist like Orwell, nor a satirist like Waugh. And yet his 3,000 pages, 1 million words and nearly 500 characters are still a singular and extraordinary achievement – a very English life over 60 years through the eyes of the narrator Nicholas Jenkins.
Auberon Waugh said on the publication of his father’s diaries, ‘[They] show that the world of Evelyn Waugh’s novels did in fact exist.’ This is even truer of his friend and contemporary. Powell’s Dance is not just a roman-fleuve, a series of novels, each complete in themselves; it is also largely a roman-a-clef: in essence, Nick Jenkins is Anthony Powell.
Jenkins and Powell were both born into the British military caste (Anthony Dymoke Powell – he insisted on the Welsh pronunciation, ‘Pole’ – was born the only child of Lt-Colonel Philip Powell, DSO, CBE and Maud Wells-Dymoke, in 1905). Both were educated at Eton and Oxford; both took their friends from the upper classes and a more mobile bohemian crowd, and from there they both took lovers; both published their first novels in 1931; both wed earls’ daughters from large families (Powell married Lady Violet Pakenham, sister of the social campaigner and Labour politician, Lord Longford); both had two sons.
Come the second world war, Jenkins joined the Intelligence Corps and became, like Powell, a liaison officer. Both were literary editors before settling in the country to resume their careers as novelists (the Powells bought a limestone Regency house called The Chantry in north Somerset – thus completing his double – a wife with a title and a house with a drive).
And it was not just the narrator. To the abiding irritation of the author, ‘spotting the original’ became a sport for Powell fans, particularly the inspiration for his anti-hero, Kenneth Widmerpool. Powell’s brother-in-law, Frank Pakenham, would take peculiar pleasure in seeing himself in Widmerpool (there was a probably more of him in the character of Lord Erridge). Widmerpool was surely his most developed fictional character; but many others were taken from life: Hugh Moreland (Constant Lambert); St John Clarke (John Galsworthy); X Trapnel (Julian Maclaren-Ross); Mark Members (Peter Quennell); Lindsay Bagshaw (Malcolm Muggeridge); Quiggin (perhaps the academics C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis, but Cyril Connolly is also a likely model); and Pamela Flitton (Barbara Skelton).
Hilary Spurling’s authorised biography, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time (2017), displays an absorbing and acute knowledge and analysis of the novels. But among such a colourful cast, Jenkins in art – and Powell, in life – are elbowed off the stage. He remains shadowy, even after 429 pages. Tellingly – it could be Powell – one of the characters in Afternoon Men, his first pre-Dance novel, asks ‘Do you mind if I speak plainly?’ ‘Yes … I do. I should hate it.’
Spurling wrote with grace and great authority – but also with great affection for her subject. Powell was, after all, a friend. One tends to think Spurling went soft on him. Michael Barber’s distinctly unauthorised life (2004), on the other hand, deserves pole position.
On his completion of Dance, Powell had another quarter century to live. Increasingly crusty, remote and squire-like, he collected three volumes of his reviews, wrote two more novels, four unrevealing volumes of memoirs and three unintentionally revealing journals. The last exposed him as a high-and-dry Tory, obsessive genealogist and a diarist as waspish and liverish as his friend, James Lees-Milne.
As to his being a walking Burke’s Peerage, Powell’s memoirs begin with one Rhys the Hoarse who lived from 1169 to 1234. He admitted that he and Violet ‘absolutely love looking people up’. To the charge of snobbery, he countered, rather unconvincingly, ‘If there were a Burke’s Bank Clerks I would buy it.’
The writer Philip Hensher quite plausibly suggests that ‘Powell’s snobbery much more resembles a mania for drawing unlikely connections’ but the historian A.N. Wilson recounted a conversation with Cyril Connolly’s widow who told him that
She had on one occasion sat in the back of the car with Powell at her side all the way from Eastbourne to London, and that he had not drawn breath on the subject of his wife Lady Violet’s quarterings.
What would have pleased the genealogist enormously was the marriage, in 2018, of his son Tristram’s daughter, Georgia Powell, to Henry Somerset, the 12th Duke of Beaufort.
One of the satirist Craig Brown’s best parodies was an imagined entry in the journal of ‘the Sage of the Chantry’:
Reread Hamlet by Shakespeare, a competent but unreliable author, though now rather dated and always prone to wordiness. Never to my mind managed a novel. Hamlet is a not uninteresting play, but the plot is flawed. The Danes are really extremely minor royalty, even by Scandinavian standards, scarcely worth a lengthy play … Prince Hamlet wouldn’t have lasted long in Pratt’s where Danish royalty is taken with a fairly hefty pinch of salt. ‘Hamlet,’ a peculiar name – any relation one wonders to the Fotherington-Hamlets of Much Hadham? … I would guess Shakespeare stole many of his more notable lines from the immortal titles in my own Dance to the Music of Time sequence. But I should hate to pass judgement.
But Anthony Powell, the novelist, deserves to be read. Though, like the last century, it was not a merry one, his Dance can be enjoyed – its elegant ebb and flow, its cadences and coincidences, its galaxy of recurring characters, and its message that time takes its toll.
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