The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter
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The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 3: Summer 2001 50p AP Society Newsletter #3 Editorial Announcement by Stephen Holden Society Patron and President So, after many months of planning the First Biennial The committee are delighted to announce the appointment Anthony Powell Conference finally happened at Eton of both a Patron and a President for the Society. College on 23 April. The inaugural conference was attended by some 65 delegates from around the world; a John Powell, second son of Anthony Powell and Lady wonderful mixture of enthusiasts, academics, literarists Violet Powell, has graciously agreed to be the Society’s and journalists. Amongst the audience were John Powell, Patron. John has taken a keen interest in the Society since AJ Tucker, AN Wilson, DJ Taylor, Hugh Massingberd, its inception and provided much valuable assistance with George Lilley, Patric Dickinson. After lunch the the planning of the 2001 conference. delegates were given a tour of the College, including the library where there College's collection of Powell The Society’s President is Anthony Powell’s long-time memorabilia was on display. The Society is most grateful friend Hugh Massingberd. Hugh is not just an author, to Michael Meredith, the Eton College Librarian, for editor and genealogist but also the historian of The Ritz arranging and leading the tour. Hotel, setting for a number of scenes in Dance. As those who attended the conference will know Hugh is also an The conference received wide attention in the British entertaining speaker with an almost encyclopaedic press, occasioning articles in The Daily Telegraph, The knowledge of the literary and genealogical worlds. Like Times, and The Independent. There was even a piece in John, Hugh also provided valuable help in getting the Private Eye, purporting to be entries from Anthony conference off the ground. Powell’s Journals… Both John and Hugh bring to the Society a wealth of The day before the conference a number of delegates had experience, knowledge and contacts as well as great Sunday luncheon at The Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly - setting warmth and friendliness. We are delighted that they have for a number of scenes in Dance. The luncheon was both agreed to be a part of the Society’s development. addressed by Hugh Massingberd, the Society's new President, and historian of The Ritz. The Society is very grateful to Hugh Massingberd for allowing the text of this Anthony Powell at The Ritz address to be printed in this Newsletter. Text of talk after luncheon of the Anthony Powell Society at The Ritz on 22 April 2001 The proceedings of the conference are being edited and will be published later in 2001. More news of these in the by Hugh Massingberd Autumn Newsletter. Following that sumptuous luncheon, I fear that the The Society will hold its inaugural Annual General prospect of having to listen to me talking "no end of rot" Meeting on Saturday 15 September 2001. Please see the (as Le Bas put it in his speech at the Old Boy Dinner held announcement below for further information. in this very Hotel) will be as welcome to you as the spectre of Widmerpool at the feast - an apparition that, as All Newsletter contributions are welcome and should Charles Stringham put it, "Knocked Le Bas out. Knocked be sent to the editor, Stephen Holden, The Anthony him out cold..." At the very least, I hope what I am about Powell Society, 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford, to say will not induce any strokes... Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK . Email: [email protected]. Widmerpool, you will recall, began his "uncalled-for" speech with "a kind of involuntary grunt" before launching into an incomprehensible rant about the Advance Notice abandonment of the Gold Standard - one of those passages Anthony Powell Conference 2003 in Dance that probably owed something to the City expertise of Anthony Powell's Harrovian friend Sir Harry The Second Biennial Anthony Powell Conference will be d'Avigdor-Goldsmid. We'll start, though, with a vignette held on Monday 7 and Tuesday 8 April 2003 at Balliol from A Writer's Notebook (published earlier this year): College, Oxford. Pageboys at the Ritz: "It's General de Gaulle in there." Powell read History at Balliol College after leaving Eton "Give me News not History." in 1923, so it is an appropriate setting for our second Anthony Powell told me that story in the late 1970s, when conference. I was researching my own history of The Ritz. His brother-in-law, Robin Mount, had overheard the exchange Detailed planning for the conference has not yet started, on his way to lunch in the hotel's restaurant with the so further information will be announced as and when Powells (as Lady Violet, Anthony Powell's widow, available. confirmed to me on the telephone yesterday). The anecdote duly found its way into Dance. If you wish to book a provisional place on the 2003 conference, please contact the Hon. Sec. (address at the So, tempting as it may be to indulge in a straightforward end of this Newsletter). And if you can help with the retread of the History of The Ritz - the building of which, conference organisation or raising sponsorship please also incidentally, was completed to the Entente Cordiale/Belle contact the Hon. Sec. Époque designs of Mewes & Davis shortly before the birth of Anthony Powell in 1905, or indeed to pursue my pet theory about the revolutionary steel-framed structure of the hotel hidden by its conventional stone cladding 2 AP Society Newsletter #3 being matched by the deceptively mould-breaking Jenkins has come to The Ritz to meet Mark Members in approach of Dance - I feel that I ought to take note of that order to discuss St John Clarke's introduction to The Art of pageboy's withering injunction. "News not history..." Horace Isbister. Peter Templer, who accosts him, assumes that Jenkins must be waiting for "some ripe little Well, only yesterday I stumbled on something that may be piece", or perhaps "a dowager." "I'm waiting for a man," News - or at least it was news to me. In Dance, shortly says Jenkins. "I say, old boy," says Templer, "sorry to before the pageboy story, Colonel Flores - Jean Duport's have been so inquisitive. Things have come to that have second husband who, as the first husband, Bob Duport, they?" "You couldn't know." puts it, "looks like Rudolph Valentino on an off-day" - explains to Jenkins how the Victory Service of 1945 did In the event, of course, Members does not turn up and J.G. not represent his first visit to London: Quiggin - who has supplanted him as Clarke's secretary - "I was here - what - fifteen years ago, it must be. makes a dramatic entrance in his black leather overcoat. With all my family, an absolute tribe of us. We "His arrival in the Ritz - in those days - was a remarkable stayed at the Ritz, I remember..." event", records Jenkins. Surely, in the measure of Dance - where everything connects - this "absolute tribe" could be the very same From the time the hotel opened in May 1906, when bunch of Latin Americans described in The Ritz's first Anthony Powell was five months old, The Ritz had been appearance in the sequence some fifteen years previously le dernier cri in grandeur, smartness and sophistication. (or perhaps thirteen). In the Palm Court, Jenkins writes: Lady Diana Cooper, the great survivor from la belle "A suggestion of life in warmer cities, far away époque, recalled to me in the 1970s that The Ritz was the from London, was increased by the presence of a first hotel to which young unmarried women were allowed large party of South Americans camped out not far to go unchaperoned. "My mother would not let me go to from where I found a seat at one of the grey hotels, but for The Ritz she made an exception - it was marble-topped tables. They were grouped beautiful, a palace." picturesquely beneath the figure of the bronze nymph perched in a grotto of artificial rocks and The Ritz's rich aura probably appealed more to Anthony fresh green ferns, a large family spreading over Powell's friends Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly than three or four of the tables while they chatted to himself. When I was researching my history of the amicably with one another. There were swarthy hotel, Anthony Powell enjoyed pulling their legs over young men with blue chins and pretty girls in their reputation as Ritz habitués: "Cyril prided himself on smart frocks, the latter descending in point of age knowing the place inside out - though once when he was to mere children with big black eyes and brightly showing off his knowledge of the hotel's geography to coloured bows in their hair... Away on her some friends he became hopelessly lost and ended up in pinnacle, the nymph seemed at once a member of some broom cupboard." When Evelyn Waugh took a this Latin family party, and yet at the same time Bishop to lunch at The Ritz in order to speed up the morally separate from them: an English girl, annulment of his first marriage (to a flatmate, incidentally, perhaps, staying with relations possessing business of Powell's future sister-in-law, Lady Pansy Lamb), he interests in South America, herself in love for the asked the divine what he would like to start with: "Caviar, first time after a visit to a neighbouring estancia. oysters, smoked salmon...?" "Yes," said the Bishop. Now she had strayed away from her hosts to enjoy "That would be very nice." delicious private thoughts in peace while she examined the grimacing face of the river-god And poor Waugh got another nasty jolt in middle age carved in stone on the short surface of wall by the when, having always assumed that the old cloakroom grotto.