The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 52, Autumn 2013, ISSN 1743-0976, £3 STILL TIME TO BOOK 7th Biennial Anthony Powell Conference Friday 27 to Sunday 29 September 2013 Eton College, Eton, Windsor, Berkshire STILL TIIMnvEit eTdO Sp BeaOOKkers: DJ Taylor, Peter Berthoud, Patric Dickinson Recital: Paul Guinery Celebratory Address: Lord Gowrie Including Bring & Buy Book Sale Annual Lecture 2011 Violet Powell Conference A Stone in the Alastair Laing on Proceedings Shade Anthony Powell and Sculpture Now Available Review, page 3 Friday 6 December see pages 10, 30 Shop, pages 10, 30 Wallace Collection, London Tickets £14 – see page 17 Contents From the Secretary’s Desk … 2 REVIEW: A Stone in the Shade … 3-6 In the Footsteps of X Trapnel … 7-9 New Publications … 10 Kaggsy’s Ramblings – LM … 11-13 Kaggsy’s Ramblings – CCR … 14-15 Dates for Your Diary … 16-17 Society Notices … 18 Archive Acquisition … 19 & 26 REVIEW: Rex Whistler … 20-25 Cuttings … 27-29 Merchandise & Membership … 30-32 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #52 From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society Registered Charity No. 1096873 There is a lot in this Newsletter to which I The Anthony Powell Society is a want to draw your attention: charitable literary society devoted to the 2013 Conference. There is still time to life and works of the English author book your place. Details in the enclosed Anthony Dymoke Powell, 1905-2000. flyer. AGM. Saturday 19 October. If you can’t Officers & Trustees attend, please use your proxy vote. The Patron: John MA Powell formal business will be followed by President: The Earl of Gowrie PC, FRSL Georgia Powell in conversation with Harry Mount about the life and work of Hon. Vice-Presidents: Lady Violet Powell. Julian Allason Patric Dickinson LVO Annual Lecture. Friday 6 December. Michael Meredith To be given by Alastair Laing on AP and Dr Jeremy Warren FSA Sculpture. Tickets now available. Society Trustees: Added to which we have two new Dr Christine Berberich publications available: Stephen Holden Violet Powell, A Stone in the Shade. Jeffrey Manley (USA) The fourth and final volume of Lady Dr Keith C Marshall (Hon. Secretary) Violet’s autobiography. Dr Derek WJ Miles (Hon. Treasurer) Proceedings of 2011 Conference. Yes, Paul Nutley (Chairman) we’ve finally published papers from the Tony Robinson last conference. Prof. John Roe And please don’t forget the other events: Elwin Taylor (Switzerland) London Group Birthday Lunch on Membership & Merchandise Officer: Saturday 7 December. Dr Keith C Marshall Hon. Secretary’s New Year Brunch on Saturday 18 January. Newsletter & Journal Editor: Stephen Holden Details of all events on pages 16 & 17. Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall Finally a word about this issue, which contains a lot of book reviews. This is All correspondence should be sent to: partly because some are topical, but also Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society because that is what is available. The 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford Editor and I want to provide you with a UB6 0JW, UK diverse and interesting Newsletter, but to Phone: +44 (0) 20 8864 4095 do so we need your help. Yes, your help Fax: +44 (0) 20 8020 1483 by writing articles for us. So if you have Email: [email protected] an idea please put (metaphorical) pen to Cover photograph © John S Monagan 1984 and reproduced paper for us. by kind permission. © The Anthony Powell Society, 2013. All rights reserved. PS. There is a major acquisition to the Published by The Anthony Powell Society. Archive too! ■ Printed and distributed by Lonsdale Direct Solutions, Wellingborough, UK. 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #52 BOOK REVIEW Schooled to Unpompousness The Final Instalment of Lady Violet Powell’s Memoirs Violet Powell A Stone In The Shade: Last Memoirs Stone Trough Books, 145 pp, ISBN 978-0954454289 Reviewed by Nicholas Birns The fourth and last volume of Lady Violet was gleaned from a Browning volume Powell’s (1912-2002) autobiography, Anthony Powell took with him to published and handsomely produced, by Morocco, and there are accounts of early George Ramsden’s Stone Trough Press, is American responses to Dance, particularly in a sense the fifth literary version of the an interview by Ved Mehta in The New same set of experiences: the Powells’ life Yorker. We also gain insight into the in the 1950s and after. We have the dramatization of Afternoon Men and the fictionalized version in Dance, two staging of The Garden God, as well as on different renditions in Anthony Powell’s Malcolm Muggeridge’s friendship- memoirs, To Keep The Ball Rolling, and shattering review of The Valley of Bones, his Journals, a sampling of letters in John which Lady Violet attributes to Powell Saumarez Smith & Jonathan Kooperstein’s making no comment when Muggeridge The Acceptance of Absurdity, and now, had attacked the Royal Family for being here, Lady Violet’s account in A Stone In unexciting. This sense that “restraint” [63] The Shade. That so much can be gotten out of such seemingly undramatic events speaks to the skill, in both Powells, of conveying nuance and tone, of making us care about the people they care about even though, to most of us, the real-life figures chronicled here are as beyond actually meeting – now for reasons of time as much as circumstance – as Ada Leintwardine or Gibson Delavacquerie. The previous volume of Lady Violet’s memoirs, The Departure Platform (1998), contained some seriously meaty nuggets about the sources and genesis of Dance characters. There is admittedly less here – aside from a lucid account of Moreland as character and his relationship to the obvious model, Constant Lambert – immediately pertinent to her husband’s great literary achievement. Lady Violet reveals that the title of The Soldier’s Art 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #52 and Italy, as well as non-cruise visits to the US – that takes up the book. The description of the funeral of Powell père also expands into a general description of the situation of The Chantry, its remoteness and vulnerability to snow and winter, and the Powells’ periodic sojourn to London as well as trips elsewhere. (In retrospect, it is truly impressive how quickly and assuredly Dance was written considering what a peripatetic life its author led). There is also a long, interesting description of the Pakenham estate – now called Tullynally – in Ireland, Lady Violet Powell sketching at Avila, which occasions some sprightly satiric Spring 1964 poetry on the part of Lady Violet. provoked Muggeridge into severing a Lady Violet mentions having the run of the formerly close and intellectually London apartment of her sister, Lady Mary productive friendship reveals the nonpareil Clive, and had Violet seen her own verbal weapon shared by both the Powells: centenary as Mary did, this book might tact. The years largely covered here, the have been even longer. As it stands, its early- to mid-1960s, saw the development energy is concentrated in the 1960s, of Dance from the most rigorous extant although there are references to the 1970s chronicle of the haute raffishness of the and the book is clearly written in the late Bright Young Things to a sequence 1990s or even early 2000s (as seen in the spanning the tumultuous twentieth century use of phrases such as “gap year”). Most and constituting one of the more profound of the book is straightforward description artistic responses to it. The sixth and of people and places, often laced with a seventh books registered the extension of barb or wry observation, as when the the work into the war and, thereby, Carthaginian goddess Tanit is described as expanded its resonance, an amplification snobbish for only accepting the sacrifice of (as Pennistone might put it) missed, alas, well-born children – an observation by Muggeridge’s snide response. To this, Flaubert would have loved. Lady Violet’s narrative supplies unobtrusive yet crucial background. Characters familiar from the memoirs and Journals – the d’Avigdor-Goldsmids, the A Stone In The Shade commences with an Bruces, the Mizeners, Bill Davis, Sir event mentioned but undetailed in To Keep Maurice Bowra (captured in an Anglican The Ball Rolling, the death of Anthony’s moment), Sir Mortimer Wheeler and John father, Philip Lionel Powell. The senior Betjeman – are seen anew from Lady Powell had been a widower for over half a Violet’s slightly different vantage point. decade, and his death left the Powells free Lady Violet points out the physical to spend holidays on a series of Swan’s resemblance between herself and Valerie Hellenic Cruises which provided much of Eliot, providing a new point of contact the travel – to Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, between Old Possum and (to use Hugh 4 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #52 Massingberd’s term) the Sage of The are inevitable British-American Chantry. There are also cameos of misunderstandings which are just part of interesting people unmentioned in the Transatlantic game. Anthony Powell’s oeuvre, such as, from the present, Dorothy Sayers, and, from the There remains the question of Lady past, Louisa May Alcott. Though always Violet’s style as a writer. Though she told as kind as she can be about people and (the late) Cassandra Jardine of the places, there are moments where Lady Telegraph, in a September 1998 interview, Violet’s opinions are beyond dispute: in that she had no serious literary aspirations thinking John Profumo was over-punished, herself, not only did she produce eleven for instance, or in condemning the full-length books but, I would argue, she barbarism that succeeded Haile Selassie’s also achieved the most indisputable trait of overthrow as Emperor of Ethiopia. There a serious writer, her own style.