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The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 22, Spring 2006 ISSN 1743-0976 Society President Contents We are proud and delighted to Society President … 1 announce that Simon Russell Beale has From the Secretary’s Desk … 2 agreed to be the Society’s President* in The Writer’s on the Wall … 3 succession to Hugh Massingberd. 2005 Conference – A Personal View … 5 CUL Exhibition … 7 Simon is one the most accomplished Some Poets, Artists Review … 9 actors of his generation and members of Life Follows Art? … 12 the Society will need no reminding of his Dance for Readers … 13 brilliant characterisation of Widmerpool in Dates for Your Diary … 14 the television adaptation of Dance. It was Christmas Quiz Answers … 15 for this reason that the Wallace Collection Competition – Name the Journal … 15 had the bright idea of inviting him to open Society Notices … 16 the Powell centenary exhibition in Strategy Review Update … 17 October. In the course of his speech on Puck of Pook’s Hill … 18 that occasion it became clear that he was Borage & Hellebore … 19 himself a considerable fan of Powell’s AP + AT = Serendipity … 20 work, and this in turn prompted Keith Cuttings … 21 Marshall to suggest that he would make an From the APLIST ...22 eminently suitable President. Letters to the Editor … 24 Simon is currently appearing on Broadway in Spamalot, the musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where he took over the part of King Arthur from Tim Curry. His opening night was on 20 December, the eve of Powell’s 100th birthday (which seemed a good augury), and he was rewarded with glowing reviews – for his singing as well as his acting. Spamalot comes to London’s Palace Theatre in October prompting Chairman Patric Dickinson to suggest that it would make an interesting Society outing. * The appointment of the President has to be ratified by members at the AGM. Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #22 From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society Registered Charity No. 1096873 What a stunner! No, not a sexist comment but the response to the Powell centenary The Anthony Powell Society is a events and in particular the conference and charitable literary society devoted to the the Wallace Collection’s superb exhibition. life and works of the English author The conference was attended by a total of Anthony Dymoke Powell, 1905-2000. 145 delegates over two days; almost 50% more than we had planned for. Everyone Officers & Executive Committee hugely enjoyed the weekend’s events from Patron: John MA Powell the buffet reception through to the Sunday morning walks and lunch. President Elect: Simon Russell Beale The Wallace Collection’s exhibition – Hon. Vice-Presidents: Dancing to the Music of Time: the Life and Julian Allason Work of Anthony Powell – was an equal Hugh Massingberd success: it attracted tremendous critical *Chairman: Patric Dickinson acclaim from the media and in its three *Hon. Secretary: Dr Keith C Marshall month run was attended by over 15,000 *Hon. Treasurer: Kevin Jewell visitors, many making special journeys just to see it. This has brought the Wallace to a *Committee Members: whole new audience, something museums Dr Christine Berberich and galleries constantly need. Dr Nicholas Birns (USA) Leatrice Fountain (USA) With all the other smaller events – from Stephen Holden Cambridge University Library’s exhibition Tony Robinson to the BBC’s broadcast of From a View to a Prof. Ian Young (N Ireland) Death in their “Book at Bedtime” series – Powell has received a great boost, and the Newsletter Editor: Stephen Holden Society has seen a 20% increase in Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall membership. We now need to ensure these PR/Media Adviser: Julian Allason new members find the Society enjoyable and worthwhile and they stay with us. All correspondence should be sent to: I would personally like to thank everyone Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society who was involved for the part they played in 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford the centenary celebrations. The Society Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK would especially like to thank the Wallace Phone: +44 (0)20 8864 4095 Collection for their generosity in hosting the Fax: +44 (0)20 8864 6109 conference and their foresight and hard work Email: [email protected] in putting on the exhibition. The fourth biennial conference is * Members of the Executive Committee who are provisionally scheduled for the weekend of the Society’s trustees. All officers are resident 8-9 September 2007 at University of Bath. in England or Wales unless stated. However without a volunteer coming © The Anthony Powell Society, 2006 and the forward in the very near future to lead the individual authors named. All rights reserved. organising team the conference will not Published by The Anthony Powell Society. happen. The conference needs YOU! Printed and distributed by Express Printing, Peterborough, UK 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #22 The Writer’s on the Wall by Simon Barnes An exhibition at an art gallery dedicated to a writer? This would be perverse, were the writer not Anthony Powell. Powell paints. Not views and people and places: actual pictures. He is a novelist who puts a frame round things, and creates an unmoving tableau of immense significance from the most humdrum material. The eighth of his great twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, dances – clockwise – away from you, with called The Soldier’s Art, opens in a the dancers still to turn your way looking gentleman’s outfitters, as the narrator buys progressively less alluring. a military overcoat. He observes two dummies, and at once creates a still life. The exhibition marks the centenary of Powell’s birth. The Dance, said AS Byatt, One of these effigies wore in her uncompromising fashion, is “one of Harlequin’s diagonally spangled the two or three greatest works of fiction tights, the other scarlet full-dress every written”. But Powell’s work has yet uniform of some infantry regiment, to settle onto its spot in public esteem: allegorical figures, so it seemed, something that puts enthusiasts for Powell symbolising dualisms of the in something of a missionary position. antithetical stock-in-trade surrounding them. Civil and Military. Literature is full of painters, most of them Work and Play. Detachment and the writer himself disguised in overalls and Involvement. Tragedy and Comedy. paint-stains, word-drunk and without War and Peace. Life and Death. visual imagination. In Powell’s novels, painters credibly paint. Thus, by an adroit painterly They are full of vivid recession, Powell takes us Powell paints … fictional paintings, too: the from ironical observation, homoerotic scenes of right to the very heart of He is a novelist Edgar Deacon, the awful the matter. who puts a frame but compelling portraits of The Wallace Collection round things, and Horace Isbister, Barnby’s houses the Poussin painting nudes of the waitress from from which Powell took creates an Casanova’s Chinese the title for his novel unmoving tableau Restaurant. sequence: and it inevitably Osbert Lancaster and Mark forms the centrepiece of Boxer both provided covers for Powell’s the exhibition. It is more sinister than you work. Lancaster gives us the doomed recollect, behind its chocolate-box-of- Maclintick, lurching across the road from genius colours: one minx of a dancer his awful dwelling, bound jug-in-hand for looking you boldly in the eye and she the Nag’s Head: the lights gleaming from 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #22 within making this grim place an oasis of at Orwell’s funeral, for Powell helped to sanity. Boxer gives us portraits, done with organise this occasion. And there is the half a dozen inspired lines: and there is X juxtaposition of Powell’s Volunteer Air Trapnel, brilliant but equally doomed, with Raid Warden certificate, issued in 1938, his death’s-head swordstick and his tie with some carefully cut out images of yet with naked-lady motif. more naked ladies, apparently involved in some exotic and rather expensive debauch. The exhibition also includes portraits of Powell and friends, many half- Everything, even war, even the greatest of recognisable from the Dance. There are human passions, is both faintly ludicrous also manuscripts, photographs, paintings and a matter of life and death. The absurd from Powell’s own collection, a recreation and sinister, the comic and the dreadful, of Powell’s extraordinary writing-room, the ironic and the almost unbearably and photographs, poignant: all these things including those of a are to be found juxtaposed weekend romp recreating Powell was a closet in Powell’s great works of the Tranby Croft scandal. words. But they are collager … the revealed, far more The Dance is that most explicitly than usual, in deeply serious of literary juxtaposition of these purely visual works. forms, a comedy. It Powell’s Volunteer Nothing makes coherent encompasses, then, all the Air Raid Warden sense: everything is grimness of existence, as profoundly appropriate. well as everything that certificate with ... yet makes life worth living. more naked ladies And through it all runs And if that seems like a Widmerpool, one of contradiction, then it is: literature’s greatest as the headless dummies in the creations, running at school for prizes he gentleman’s outfitters told us. will never win, ugly, awkward, unlikeable, rising to ever greater heights in public life, Powell loved antithesis: the banal with the winning the hand of the most beautiful epic, the comic with the tragic, the woman in the book, and then seeking still detached irony with the most desperate more exotic worlds to conquer: a man who and painful involvement. And a great deal seldom drinks but is throughout drunk on of this love is to be found in the greatest the search and the acquisition of power.

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