The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 48, Autumn 2012 ISSN 1743-0976 !! AVAILABLE NOW !! 2013 Calendar : Anthony Powell’s London Thirteen specially commissioned photographs by Keith Marshall including the Albert Memorial, Hill Street, Maida Vale Canal and Chester Gate. UK: £7, Overseas: £11 (inc. p&p). Details page 6. Anthony Powell Lecture 2012 7th Biennial Think First, SELLING FAST Anthony Powell Conference Fight Afterwards Anthony Powell to be given by in the ’20s & ’30s AN Wilson Friday 27 to Sunday 29 SELLING FAST The Wallace Collection September 2013 Manchester Square, London W1 Eton College Friday 30 November 2012 Eton, Windsor, UK Details page 16 See page 18 and enclosed flyer Contents From the Secretary’s Desk … 2 What’s Become of Waring … 3-4 Paul Fussell and Anthony Powell … 5-6 BOOK REVIEW: Paul Johnson … 7-10 Caledonia Names Updated … 11 Clothes in Books … 12-13 Literary Anniversaries 2012 … 14-15 Dates for Your Diary … 16-18 Society Notices … 19 Desert Island Disks … 21 Cuttings … 22-23 From the APLIST … 24-29 Merchandise & Membership… 30-32 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #48 From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society Welcome to the latest instalment in the Registered Charity No. 1096873 saga of the Society, and to the 48th edition The Anthony Powell Society is a of our quarterly Newsletter – that’s 12 charitable literary society devoted to the years of continual publication under the life and works of the English author guidance of our Editor, Stephen Holden. Anthony Dymoke Powell, 1905-2000. This is an important Newsletter too. First of all we have a number of events coming Officers & Trustees up, not least of which is the Annual Patron: John MA Powell Lecture (in collaboration with The President: The Earl of Gowrie PC, FRSL Wallace Collection). This year we are delighted that the lecture will be given by Hon. Vice-Presidents: the writer AN Wilson. Since its Julian Allason announcement in early August tickets Patric Dickinson LVO have been selling faster than hot cakes, so Michael Meredith if you haven’t already booked you need to Dr Jeremy Warren FSA do so fast! You can find details of the Society Trustees: lecture and other events on pages 16-18. Dr Christine Berberich Secondly we are delighted to announce Stephen Holden that the 7th Biennial Conference will be Jeffrey Manley (USA) held on 27-29 September 2013, and we Dr Keith C Marshall (Hon. Secretary) are lucky to be able to return to Eton Dr Derek WJ Miles (Hon. Treasurer) College, Powell’s alma mater and the Paul Nutley (Chairman) venue of our first ever conference in Tony Robinson 2001. There are lots of details still to be Prof. John Roe worked out, but we have some great ideas Elwin Taylor (Switzerland) for making this the usual quality event. Membership Office: Details of the conference are in the “Call Dorothy & Graham Davie for Papers” included with this Newsletter. Newsletter & Journal Editor: Thirdly there is a new departure for the Stephen Holden Society. We have put together a calendar Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall for 2013 comprising 13 specially commissioned photographs of Powell’s All correspondence should be sent to: London (as it is today) taken by me as Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society part of an on-going project. This is very 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford much a trial and deliberately slightly “low Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK key”. If the calendar is a success we will Phone: +44 (0) 20 8864 4095 look to produce one each year. There are Fax: +44 (0) 20 8020 1483 lots of ideas for future calendars, but we Email: [email protected] can’t afford to produce them if they don’t sell. So it is all down to you, my friends! Cover photograph © John S Monagan 1984 and reproduced At £7 (inc. p&p) for UK members (£11 by kind permission. © The Anthony Powell Society, 2012. All rights reserved. overseas) can you afford not to buy one Published by The Anthony Powell Society. for every member of your family?! ■ Printed and distributed by Lonsdale Direct Solutions, Wellingborough, UK. 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #48 Anthony Powell’s What’s Become of Waring By Nicholas Birns In mid-March I had a whirlwind visit to London to address a special meeting of the Anthony Powell Society, held at the Conference Room, St James’s Piccadilly where I worshipped the next day. (Enjoyed it, but still have not found my perfect London church after trying at least seven parishes.) I also had the special treat of taking a long train ride (from London Paddington to Westbury in Wiltshire) and taxi trip (driver, the amiable J Grey) out to The Chantry, near Frome, Somerset, where Anthony Powell lived for the last forty- Nick Birns eight years of his life, and being warmly hosted by his son John, who with his older brother Tristram is now the custodian of “Jenkins manqués” who have populated his father’s legacy, and who showed me all the earlier books: Zouch, Lushington, manner of Powell papers and artefacts, as Atwater, Blore-Smith. Moreover, several well as giving me At Lady Molly’s in characters appear seem to have direct links German, which I somewhat surprisingly to characters in Dance: Hugh Judkins, the am able to read with facility. (Funniest narrator’s boss at the publishing firm for line: “Der Verlobte war Widmerpool”.) which he works, Judkins & Judkins (“Which Judkins do you prefer? Judkins, The focus of my talk was Powell’s work emphatically”) is, like Daniel Tokenhouse aside from A Dance to the Music of Time, in Dance, modelled partially on Thomas and we particularly discussed Powell’s five Balston, Powell’s boss at Duckworth in the short, comic pre-war novels. Of these, 1930s. (Perhaps unconfidently, this novel What’s Become of Waring (1939) has was the only one of the 1930s books not always seemed the most difficult to place, published by Duckworth, a firm that partially because as many critics – most Powell had left a few years before.) recently and cogently Michael Henle in his 2003 Balliol talk – have pointed out, The Manasses in chapter 4 appear to be certain of its traits – the first person linked with Rosie Manasch in Dance as narration, the greater sense of Manasses and Manasch are both forms of intellectuality – seem to resemble Dance Manasseh, the older brother of Ephraim in more than the other four 1930s novels. the Bible. (In other words a Jewish name The narrator’s taste for Stendhal, on whom is obviously meant; my late friend the poet he moots writing a treatise, Stendhal: and Samuel Menashe would want me to Some Thoughts on Violence, seems more observe that his surname had this in the manner of a Nick Jenkins than the etymology as well.) The séance scene is 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #48 diverse friends and his talent for friendship. Though Powell says that whenever he reread the book he felt the unease of the last ominous months before war, I have a completely different reaction; the book seems sunny, summery. It is less sinister than Agents and Patients or From A View to a Death; the greatest villainy is literary fraud. The book has the shimmering, comic lightness of some of Shakespeare’s breezier comedies, where an underlying melancholy gives backbone to some diverting plot-strands and intriguing scenes. TT Waring’s fraudulence – the fact that this acclaimed, mysterious young travel- writer is not who he seems (I am not giving away the plot; though I do in Understanding Anthony Powell) – is surely premonitory of that in The Acceptance some sort of comment on some innate World. fraudulence either in the publishing Yet in form and execution the book is very industry, the writers of Powell’s own much in the métier of its compeers and generation, or both. (Stephen Holden, who Powell himself said, in Messengers of alas was ill during my visit, was to serve Day, that he felt his style was getting in a as my interlocutor on these issues; I hope rut and that it would have to change, the to resume this conversation hopefully in a impact of war accelerating perhaps, but not London pub meet.) Waring is a portrait of fundamentally altering, the inevitable a writer of Powell’s own age group, and process. the compromises that writer has made to achieve success seem undoubtedly to be I feel the character of “Tiger” Hudson – some sort of early mid-life self-assessment bluff, verbal but not intellectual, likable – on Powell’s part. The famous lines at the is in a way the ancestor of the kinds of end, to the effect that everyone in the book people Jenkins befriends in Dance – wants power, tacitly exempts the narrator, people who share some of his traits but not or at least implies that he wants a different all of them. Also, Hudson’s breakup with sort of power; the power of a writer who, Roberta Payne only to get together with like Powell – as I reflected as my taxi from Beryl Pimley is the reverse of what Zouch The Chantry drove me back to Westbury – does in From A View with Joanna Braddon had both subtlety and integrity. and Mary Passenger and this is a point on A version of this article first appeared on The his behalf. Hudson is one of the factors Tropes of Tenth Street blog by Nick Birns on 28 that, to my mind, makes the book so March 2012. It is available at http:// sunny. This heralds one of the principle tropesoftenthstreet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/ pleasures of Dance: Jenkins’s multitude of anthony-powells-whats-become-of-waring.html ■ 4 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #48 Paul Fussell and Anthony Powell By Joe Trenn Anthony Powell is cited several times in Paul Fussell’s light yet illuminating book Uniforms: Why We Wear What We Wear (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002).