Anthony Powell and George Gissing by Anthony Curtis
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The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 40, Autumn 2010 ISSN 1743-0976 NEW AUDIOBOOKS OF DANCE – page 6 UPCOMING EVENTS Tuesday 14 September 6th Biennial Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre Anthony Powell Conference Saturday 23 October Whitechapel Bell Foundry and AGM Anthony Powell’s Saturday 6 November Literary London London Pub Meet – CHANGED DATE Friday 2 to Sunday 4 Friday 19 November Annual AP Lecture by Earl of Gowrie September 2011 Saturday 4 December Naval & Military Club London AP Birthday Lunch St James’s Square, London SW1 Details pages 16 & 17 See page 18 and enclosed flyer Contents From the Secretary’s Desk … 2 Powell & George Gissing … 3-5 REVIEW: Dance Audiobooks … 6-8 The Bag o’ Nails Revisited … 9-11 The Name’s Widmerpool … 12-14 Society News … 15 Dates for Your Diary ... 16-18 REVIEW: DJ Taylor … 19-22 Nancy Cutbirth Continued … 23-24 Cuttings … 25 From the APLIST … 26-27 Letters to the Editor … 28-29 Merchandise & Membership … 30-32 AGM Papers ... centre insert Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #40 From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society Registered Charity No. 1096873 Excitements, it seems, are somewhat like London buses: there are none and The Anthony Powell Society is a charitable then three come along together. So it is literary society devoted to the life and works that this Newsletter brings news of of the English author Anthony Dymoke Powellian excitements – some are Powell, 1905-2000. almost here, but others are timetabled Officers & Executive Committee for the months to come, thus stretching the London bus analogy. But then Patron: John MA Powell London’s buses are also a bit like tea in President: Simon Russell Beale, CBE Alice in Wonderland: “Jam tomorrow Hon. Vice-Presidents: and jam yesterday – but never jam Julian Allason today”. Patric Dickinson, LVO *Chairman: Dr Christine Berberich The first excitement is the welcome *Hon. Secretary: Dr Keith C Marshall release by Audible of a complete and *Hon. Treasurer: Dr Derek WJ Miles unabridged set of audiobooks of Dance. *Committee Members: News of this came very much out of the Dr Nicholas Birns (USA) blue, picked up from an internet news Stephen Holden feed about three months ago and Jeffrey Manley (USA) subsequently confirmed by both John Paul Nutley Powell and Audible themselves. You’ll Tony Robinson find my review of the audiobooks on Elwin Taylor (Switzerland) page 6. Membership & Merchandise Officers: Graham & Dorothy Davie The second excitement is confirmation Newsletter & Journal Editor: of the dates and venue for the 2011 Stephen Holden conference. Thanks to the good offices Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall of our Trustee Elwin Taylor we have secured a competitive deal with the All correspondence should be sent to: Naval & Military Club in London’s St Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford James’s Square as conference host – an Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK entirely appropriate and elegant venue. Phone: +44 (0) 20 8864 4095 We will be booking invited speakers for Fax: +44 (0) 20 8020 1483 the conference over the coming months, Email: [email protected] but meanwhile please consider submitting a paper of your own. You’ll * Members of the Executive Committee and the find more conference details on page 18 Society’s legal trustees. All trustees are resident in and in the enclosed “Call for Papers”. England or Wales unless stated. And then there are the delights of the Cover photograph © John S Monagan 1984 and Autumn programme of events, not least reproduced by kind permission. of which is the enticing prospect of Lord © The Anthony Powell Society, 2010 and the Gowrie giving the Annual Anthony individual authors named. All rights reserved. Powell Lecture on Friday 19 November. Published by The Anthony Powell Society. Details of the lecture are on page 17. Printed and distributed by Lonsdale Print Solutions, Wellingborough, UK. 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #40 Anthony Powell and George Gissing by Anthony Curtis To the collector of Gissing references in the work of later British novelists the fiction of the old Etonian author Anthony Powell is perhaps an unlikely quarry. But reading recently his O, How the Wheel Becomes It! – the novella Powell published in 1983 after he had completed the final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time – I discovered a reference to Gissing in relation to a novel written by necessitated a year’s exile in America”. Six one of the main characters. More of that in months later when Powell reviewed the a moment. letters to Bertz he is more explicit about Warming to the scent, I turned to what happened and his tone is much more Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers confident: 1946-1989, containing a collection of the There is an awful fascination about lead book-reviews Powell wrote regularly Gissing [he writes for his opening for the Daily Telegraph and some longer sentence]. Why did he make such a pieces published elsewhere. There is no mess of his life? Wherever one places review of Gissing as such in the whole him as a novelist, his talent as a writer collection but my grateful recourse to the was obviously exceptional. file of Gissing reviews kept by Pierre Coustillas revealed that Powell did review He goes on to add: two Gissing works in the newspaper in There is something ‘compulsive’ 1961, the year that Gissing scholarship about Gissing’s whole career. It is as began to emerge from its family-induced if he wanted to have a bad time. doldrums. They were the Letters to HG The fact that one of his friends was Wells edited by Royal A Gettmann and The Mme Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz divorced wife of the writer who gave 1887-1903 edited by Arthur C Young, his name to masochism, seems forerunners of the great award-winning nine perfectly apt. -volume edition of the letters from the Ohio University Press. The Gissing references in the collection of articles add nothing to this judgment. The It is clear from these reviews that Powell’s first is in a review of James Ogden’s study acquaintance with Gissing’s work and of Isaac D’Israeli (Oxford, 1969). Powell biography was fairly minimal. In writing of tells us that the Victorian prime minister’s the letters to Wells he takes Orwell’s father: admiration for Gissing as his starting-point and skates over the prison sentence thus: wrote a great many other books – “As a very young man Gissing had been poems, novels, stories, essays – as involved in trouble about money which well as the Curiosities of Literature 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #40 which was to be his chef d’oeuvre. It whom his contemporaries compared passed into endless editions, became him. a favourite of Byron’s, and was “A violent Gissing” is a contradiction in introduced into one of the Stalky & terms but Powell spoke truer than he Co. stories by Kipling, and into a knew. Crane’s early tale Maggie: A Girl novel by Gissing. of the Streets is very Gissing-like in style There are indeed two references in and content. Gissing’s fiction to D’Israeli’s accounts After that Gissing appears in a review of of writers, books and collectors. One in The Unknown Orwell by Peter Stansky The Unclassed where the hero, Osmond and William Abrahams (London, 1972): Waymark, asks the prostitute Ida Starr with whom he falls in love if she has read the Orwell’s method of novel-writing work! He aims to redeem her through meant that he was using up his literature as well as through love as novelist’s material at a reckless rate Gissing tried, unsuccessfully, to do with and he himself realized – if one may Nell. This passage was among the cuts speak flippantly – that the Gissing made by Gissing for the revised edition had to stop. of 1895 when the novel was reduced from three volumes to one. There is also a Oh dear, how many times has one heard reference in Thyrza where Gilbert Grail that boring quip! chances across D’Israeli’s Finally Gissing emerges in work. To Gissing who Powell’s Telegraph verdict believed in the life- on Philip Larkin’s Required transforming power of great Writing: Miscellaneous literature, the Curiosities Pieces, 1955-82 (a similar was a useful appetiser. kind of book to Powell’s) in Gissing appears again in which he mentions a piece Powell’s Miscellaneous by Larkin on Francis Verdicts in a review of the Thompson, the Roman Letters of Stephen Crane Catholic poet who wrote “The edited by RW Stallman Hound of Heaven”. (New York, 1960). Powell Incidentally, [writes confesses to a distaste for Powell] has it ever been Crane as a writer and a man noted that Francis but nonetheless admits that Thompson and George he “brought off a revolution Gissing must have in American literature by treating the Civil overlapped at Owen’s [sic] College, War [in The Red Badge of Courage] in Manchester, from one angle a splendid realistic, rather than romantic, terms”. pair of down-and-out literary alumni, He then goes on to say: even if Gissing was in his own way He has, perhaps, more in common intensely respectable? with Gissing – a violent Gissing, of He ties himself in knots making that course – than with Kipling, with comparison, and it is clear from Pierre 4 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #40 Coustillas’s article in last October’s Gissing weekend in Paris, Winterwade succeeded in Journal that the Manchester worthies, Percy bedding the fashionable glamorous bright Withers, Allan Monkhouse and CH Herford young female thing with whom Shadbold who instigated and implemented the only managed to remain on kissing terms.