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The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 43, Summer 2011 ISSN 1743-0976 !!! NOW BOOKING !!! 6th Biennial Anthony Powell Conference Friday 2 to Sunday 4 September 2011 Now with addedN avualct ion& Military Club, 4 St James’s Square, London SW1 Invited Speakers: Glenmore Trenear-Harvey, Ferdinand Mount, Simon Vance See accompanying leaflet, pages 18 & 19 for details Contribute to the auction, p18 Time to book for the … you don’t Conference ... want to miss it! Contents From the Secretary’s Desk … 2 Powell in Clubland … 3-7 Alice Delysia … 8-10 Reviews: Powell Parodied … 11-16 Society Notices … 17, 18, 20 Dates for Your Diary … 19 The Black Art of Pricing … 21-22 From the APLIST … 23-27 Cuttings … 28-30 Letters to the Editor … 32-33 Society Merchandise … 34-35 Society Membership … 36 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #43 From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society Registered Charity No. 1096873 At long last I get the feeling the conference really is upon us. After The Anthony Powell Society is a charitable months of planning and bursts of activity literary society devoted to the life and works this is where the real work begins to of the English author Anthony Dymoke make it all hang together on the day. Powell, 1905-2000. This is a time of hard work, cool heads Officers & Executive Committee and, even after all these years, lots of Patron: John MA Powell butterflies in the stomach. Will we get President: Simon Russell Beale, CBE enough bookings? Will we cover our costs? Will anyone let us down at the Hon. Vice-Presidents: Julian Allason last minute? Most importantly, will it be Patric Dickinson, LVO the success for the delegates (you!) the previous conferences have been? *Chairman: Dr Christine Berberich *Hon. Secretary: Dr Keith C Marshall All the Trustees are well aware the *Hon. Treasurer: Dr Derek WJ Miles conference is more expensive than we *Committee Members: would like. Everyone likes cheap. But Dr Nicholas Birns (USA) we have to exist in a commercial world Stephen Holden Jeffrey Manley (USA) without sponsorship or, today, many Paul Nutley negotiable discounts. Thanks to the Tony Robinson good auspices of a couple of members Elwin Taylor (Switzerland) we think we’ve got the best deal we can Membership & Merchandise Officers: while providing a quality event at a Graham & Dorothy Davie quality venue. And in the world of AP, Newsletter & Journal Editor: quality is important. Stephen Holden The first bookings have already landed Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall on my desk. But we need many more. All correspondence should be sent to: We need YOUR booking! Help us Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society make this Conference another success 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford story. You really don’t want to miss it! Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK Phone: +44 (0) 20 8864 4095 You’ll see on page 18 we also need a Fax: +44 (0) 20 8020 1483 volunteer to take over the merchandise Email: [email protected] part of Graham and Dorothy’s role. We are working on the launch of an online * Members of the Executive Committee and the shop – to help drive up revenue and Society’s legal trustees. All trustees are resident in membership – but we need someone new England or Wales unless stated. to take on the merchandise before we can launch! Cover photograph © John S Monagan 1984 and reproduced by kind permission. Graham and Dorothy manfully stepped © The Anthony Powell Society, 2011 and the in a few years ago to ease my workload. individual authors named. All rights reserved. Now we need someone to develop the Published by The Anthony Powell Society. merchandising further. Why not you? Printed and distributed by Lonsdale Print Solutions, Wellingborough, UK. 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #43 Powell in Clubland Julian Allason explores the milieu of the gentlemen’s clubs to which the novelist and certain of his principal characters belonged Anthony Powell knew his way around Clubland as well as he did Soho, those two quartiers that appear on the legend of no official map. For they a define a social topography rather than corresponding to the bureaucratic precision of borough or postal district. Clubland is invariably described by lazy gossip columnists as synonymous with St James’s. Yet several of the traditional gentlemen’s clubs in which Powell and some of his characters socialised were – still are – to be found well to the northwest and to the east of St White’s Club James’s Street. The Garrick and the the wit-to-bore ratio,” I was warned before Cavalry & Guards are but two illustrious lunching as a guest there. However my outposts, though they could hardly be amusing neighbour proved to be Eric more disparate in character. And full of Ponsonby, tenth Earl of Bessborough, disparate characters they are, the surely the nephew of “that damned fellow eccentricities of whom have inspired Ponsonby” who trod on General Conyers’ generations of gentlemen novelists. gouty foot during Palace reception duty as For practical purposes let us take the a gentleman-at-arms. A characteristic geographical boundaries to be the Mall to Powellian tease, that. the south. The Turf Club – its membership Piccadilly forms the natural northern being comprised of owners not jockeys – frontier, crossed to view the Royal commands the best view of royal Academy’s summer exhibition or perhaps weddings. One member is reputed to have en route to Sotheby’s salerooms to flog lobbed a bread roll into an open carriage at more of the family silver-gilt. Christie’s, the first wedding of the Prince of Wales characterised as gentlemen playing at (an honorary member here as at White’s). being auctioneers, is better placed in King This sort of behaviour would probably Street, epicentre of St James’s. Sotheby’s attract an armed response today, but one are held to be the opposite: auctioneers can imagine Umfraville attempting it after pretending to be gentlemen. Quite a season bowling with the Newmarket unjustly as the firm’s present and second XI. immediate past chairman are members of The eastern boundary we shall take as White’s, clubland’s senior institution in lower Regent Street, enclosing the clubs age – founded 1693 – and exclusivity. that slumber in St James’s Square. The And by exclusivity one does mean literally Beefsteak falls outside it, but then that. The socialist firebrand Aneurin Clubland proper has always been wary of Bevan was famously kicked down the its custom of taking the next vacant seat at steps of White’s by a member of Brooks’s the dining table. “Something to do with who was just enough of a gentleman to 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #43 then fall upon his sword and resign. When the late gossip columnist Nigel Dempster invented the ‘White’s Shit of the Year Contest’ in Private Eye some members enquired how they could vote. The Aga Khan was the first notional – and entirely undeserving – winner, if memory serves: one suspects the unforgiving Dempster might previously have been on the sharp end of a letter from His Highness’s solicitors. Occupying most of the north-western Brooks’s block at the top of St James’s Street, White’s was considered in Powell’s day to club’s eclectic mix of Foreign Office be the last stop before Gloucestershire for panjandra, gentleman spies and a Champagne cocktail. This was justified maharajahs amusing, whilst reputedly on the grounds that the Ritz Hotel, in a deprecating the former’s practice of parallel position one street west, then lunching alone with secret telegrams lacked for a bar, and was, according to propped up in special holders furnished by Randolph Churchill, full of hairdressers. the steward. But then this was where so In fact White’s, of which he was a many rounds of the Great Game were member, had and has its own resident rehearsed over brandy and soda. barber, Mr West, who for many years For many years the Travellers’ genus loci shared a surname with the club secretary was Monsignor Alfred Gilbey of the gin (no relation): friends of Powell were thus family, the last Roman Catholic priest to inclined to offer suggestions for provide his own patrimony – upon which improvements to the menu – for which he lived as the sole resident member. there was some scope – while having their Never a natural revolutionary the eminent hair cut under the impression that the monsignor had resigned as chaplain to Wests were one and the same. The Cambridge University after suggestions were duly struggling to cope with the passed upwards and duly enthusiasm of female ignored. students for “the pill”. He Powell joined the wore a frock coat, gaiters Travellers’ Club in Pall and a shovel hat. This was Mall, a magnificent stolen and Gilbey was building on a scale that distressed to see it being would have satisfied even worn by a girl in the street. Donners. If its marbled Insult was added to injury walls could speak they by its combination with would surely whisper miniskirt and boots. colonial secrets overheard Powell was well liked at from Palmerston, Disraeli Brooks’s up on the western and Churchill. Powell side of St James’s, and by appears to have found the Randolph Churchill uncommon consent second 4 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #43 only to White’s in esteem. He found the erudite company agreeable. Altogether racier was the St James’s Club, later to merge with Brooks’s. Before and during the Second World War there had been the club bore to circumnavigate at the St James’s, Denis Capel-Dunn known as “Young Bloody”.
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