We Wish All Members & Friends of the Society a Peaceful Christmas and A
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The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 29, Winter 2007 ISSN 1743-0976 We wish all members & friends of the Society a Peaceful Christmas and a Prosperous New Year Contents From the Secretary’s Desk … 2 The End of the Dance … 3 Widmerpool Goes to Ground … 8 Conference 2007 Report … 12 Dates for Your Diary … 16 Society News … 17 Subscriptions … 20 A Chantry Docent … 21 Umfraville & Bagshaw Exposed … 22 Book Review: Bright Young People … 23 Cuttings … 25 Letters to the Editor … 28 Merchandise & Membership … 30 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #29 From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society Saturday 17 November 2007 saw yet Registered Charity No. 1096873 another important, even momentous, day The Anthony Powell Society is a for the Society. It was the occasion of charitable literary society devoted to the the inaugural Anthony Powell Lecture, life and works of the English author given at the Wallace Collection in Anthony Dymoke Powell, 1905-2000. collaboration with the Society. The inaugural lecturer was the novelist, Officers & Executive Committee historian, film-maker and left-wing Patron: John MA Powell activist Tariq Ali. President: Simon Russell Beale While his talk concentrated mostly on a Hon. Vice-Presidents: discussion of Dance, it was wide- Julian Allason ranging, thought-provoking and touched Hugh Massingberd on almost the whole of Powell’s œvre – *Chairman: Dr Christine Berberich only the two post-Dance novels got no *Hon. Secretary: Dr Keith C Marshall major mention. Tariq touched too on his *Hon. Treasurer: Dr Derek WJ Miles personal likes and dislikes within Dance *Committee Members: and tried to make some sense of the Dr Nicholas Birns (USA) recent rather anti-Powell remarks by Sir Stephen Holden Vidia Naipaul. The questions posed Jeffrey Manley (USA) after the lecture were equally interesting Tony Robinson and incisive. Elwin Taylor One interesting point Tariq made in his Newsletter & Journal Editor: talk was that one cannot properly Stephen Holden understand any work of fiction (indeed Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall any work) without understanding the PR/Media Adviser: Julian Allason context against which it was written. All correspondence should be sent to: This reflects something I have been Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society saying for a while about understanding 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford Dance, although I had not crystallised Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK my thoughts in this beautifully clear and Phone: +44 (0) 20 8864 4095 precise way. Fax: +44 (0) 20 8864 6109 Email: secretary@anthonypowell.org The Society thanks Tariq Ali for this inaugural lecture; we hope it is the first of many more; Tariq will certainly be a * Members of the Executive Committee who are the Society’s trustees. All trustees are resident hard act to follow. We also thank The in England or Wales unless stated. Wallace Collection, especially Jeremy Warren and Emmajane Avery, for their continued support, friendship and Cover photograph © John S Monagan 1984 hospitality. and reproduced by kind permission. © The Anthony Powell Society, 2007 and the It remains only for me to wish all our individual authors named. All rights reserved. members and friends a peaceful Published by The Anthony Powell Society. Printed and distributed by Express Printing, Christmas and a prosperous 2008. Peterborough, UK. 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #29 Michael Frayn The End of the Dance by Michael Frayn This article first appeared in The Observer on 7 September 1975. Tomorrow, the final volume of Anthony Powell’s much-acclaimed novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, will be published by Heinemann. Here, MICHAEL FRAYN explores the extraordinarily complete world that Anthony Powell has created. Sometimes, when I pass the Quadriga, at used to think that people who looked Hyde Park Corner, I remember for an and behaved like Widmerpool had instant what has long been too obvious to really no right to fall in love at all. be noticed: how it felt to be grown-up. I suddenly catch the flavour of a sweltering Widmerpool, Jenkins, Barbara Goring, and summer’s night in the 1950s, when I all the events of that night are of course walked all round this part of London part of another world – the world created talking to a girl I’d just met at a party. It by Anthony Powell in A Dance to the must have been nearly dawn. We walked Music of Time, the huge novel which is down the middle of the empty roadways, finally completed tomorrow with the and I felt that after all those unsatisfactory publication of the twelfth volume, Hearing years of being young I had suddenly Secret Harmonies. inherited the entire city as my rightful estate. People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true, [says X Sometimes, though, it’s another memory Trapnel, one of the novel’s several that the Quadriga brings to mind – also of characters who are themselves something that happened here after a party novelists, in this final volume.] on a hot summer’s night. But this one was Exactly the reverse is the case. in, I think, 1929, several years before I Because a novel’s invented, it is true. was born. On the edge of the pavement Biography and memoirs can never be here, in Grosvenor Place, Kenneth wholly true, since they can’t include Widmerpool confided to Nicholas Jenkins every conceivable circumstance of the agonies of love he had been suffering what’s happened. The novel can do over Barbara Goring. They had just left that. The novelist himself lays it the Huntercombes’ dance in Belgrave down. His decision is binding. Square, where Barbara had poured the sugar over Widmerpool’s head. It was a I think (and I think that Powell thinks) that disclosure that came as something of a the relationship of imagined worlds to shock to Jenkins, partly because he too had perceived ones is more complex than this, been suffering over Barbara, and partly particularly where, as with Powell’s, they because in those far-off youthful days he occupy objective space and time. But in essence Trapnel is right. The world 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #29 remembered by Nicholas Jenkins For 25 years this world has been in the (Powell’s first-person narrator) is in many process of creation – the first volume ways better established, more publicly appeared in the same year as the Festival accessible, more objectively there, than the of Britain. I didn’t stumble upon it until worlds we ourselves remember (or somewhere in the early sixties, when it had imagine we remember). reached the outbreak of the Second World War, and the threshold of my own You don’t remember my walking up conscious experience of life. It was like Grosvenor Place, but (if you’ve read discovering a complete civilisation – and Powell) you remember the night that not in some remote valley of the Andes or Widmerpool was there. In fact I remember the Himalayas, but in the midst of London, it better myself. I’ve forgotten now who in the midst of my own life. It altered my was at the party I’d come from, and I don’t perception of the world – and not only of know what’s become of the girl I was Hyde Park Corner. I began to see in my with. But I could tell you the names of own life the kind of patterns which were quite a number of the guests at the emerging in Jenkins’s life; glimpsed how Huntercombes’ dance. tremendous changes prepared themselves I know what became of Widmerpool. I unseen beneath the surface of the remember clearly the sequence of events apparently immutable course of events, which now began to occur in Grosvenor and then quite suddenly deflected one’s Place, and the position they came to life into some new course, apparently no occupy in the larger pattern of events less immutable. Another world had been which developed over the next 40 years. superimposed upon my own, refracting How Widmerpool stepped back to say and reflecting it. good night, and collided with Edgar One of the pleasures of Powell’s world is Deacon and Gypsy Jones on their way its sheer size. You can live in it – you can home from selling ‘War Never Pays!’ to get lost in it. Its texture is close and fine, late travellers at Victoria; how all four of its population dense enough to operate as them went off to have coffee at the stall by an autonomous society, with its own Hyde Park Corner – Widmerpool already political and business life, its own books falling in love with Gypsy, already and paintings. And everything in it is in becoming entangled into 40 years of perpetual movement and evolution, from increasingly bizarre political affiliations; the first appearance of Widmerpool, like how the air was full of the heavy summer some legendary ancestor of the tribe, as he night scent of the park; how at the coffee doggedly returns from one of the runs he stall an elderly man in a dinner-jacket was imposes upon himself at school, on a bleak very slowly practising the Charleston, the December afternoon “in, I suppose, the tips of his fingers in his coat pockets; how, year 1921,” until his final disappearance as they drank the coffee, Charles from the stage, now in his late sixties and Stringham, with whom Jenkins had shared stark naked, on another self-imposed run a study at school, reappeared from the in (I suppose) 1970. past, urbane and detached, and already in that state of curiously sober inebriation in You come across people you knew which he was going to spend so much of donkey’s volumes ago, often in the most his life.