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The Society Newsletter

Issue 21, Winter 2005 ISSN 1743-0976 Powell Centenary Issue

The Newsletter

Issue 21, Winter 2005 ISSN 1743-0976

Contents Review: The Girl with the Long Back … 51 Celebrating 100 Years of Anthony Powell … 5 The Quotable Powell … 53 Address Given at Anthony Powell’s Memorial Anthony Powell Residences … 54 Service … 7 Substance & Style in Powell’s Writing … 57 Powell 100th Birthday Party, … 11 Widmerpool Award 2005 Announcement … 68 In Memory of John Monagan … 13 Widmerpool Award 2004 … 70 Georgetown Symposium Report … 15 Agents & Patients Revisited … 71 Centenary Year Events Diary … 16 Venusberg: Anticipating Dance … 73 Local Group News … 19 Anthony Powell & … 74 Society Notices … 21 The London Geography of Dance … 77 1905 – Snapshot of a Year … 22 Other 2005 Literary Centenaries … 79 DJ Taylor Interviews Anthony Powell … 23 The Punch Magazine Table … 80 Edward Wadsworth … 27 My Day at Lady Molly’s … 82 Tea at the Chantry … 31 Anthony Powell’s Recipe for Curry … 87 Christmas Prize Competition … 33 You, Sir … 89 Afternoon Men … 34 and The Green … 90 Dance Music … 36 Absent America … 94 Character Models for Dance: Kenneth Powell and Larkin … 97 Widmerpool … 40 X Trapnel ... 100 Weekend Invitation … 42 Manure … 105 Life Imitating Art ? … 44 Cuttings … 108 Anthony Powell’s Cats … 45 From the APLIST … 110 Lady Violet Powell: An Appreciation … 48 Letters to the Editor … 114

A Peaceful Christmas and a Prosperous New Year to all members & friends Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society Registered Charity No. 1096873 So, at long last Anthony Powell’s centenary is almost upon us, as is the Centenary The Anthony Powell Society is a conference. The celebrations really started charitable literary society devoted to the with the opening of the Wallace Collection’s life and works of the English author fabulous Powell exhibition Dancing to the Anthony Dymoke Powell, 1905-2000. Music of Time: The Life and Work of Anthony Powell. If the Wallace Collection Officers & Executive Committee were only staging the exhibition the Society would be deeply enough indebted to them, Patron: John MA Powell but we must mine even deeper for sufficient Hon. Vice-Presidents: supplies of gratitude, for the Wallace are also hosting our Centenary Conference, three Julian Allason TLS sponsored lectures on aspects of Hugh Massingberd Powell’s work and four “reading group” *Chairman: Patric Dickinson Saturday afternoon events for which we are *Hon. Secretary: Dr Keith C Marshall delighted to be able to provide the speakers. *Hon. Treasurer: Kevin Jewell Oh and we must not forget there will be regular gallery talks as well. *Committee Members: As if this were not enough two new Powell Dr Christine Berberich, books are published this month. The first is Dr Nicholas Birns (USA), the long awaited Some Poets, Artists and ‘a Leatrice Fountain (USA), Reference for Mellors’ , Powell’s third Stephen Holden, volume of selected criticism. The other Tony Robinson, book, Seeing Secret Harmonies: Pictures of Prof. Ian Young (N Ireland) Anthony Powell, accompanies the Wallace’s exhibition and contains pieces by Hilary Newsletter Editor: Stephen Holden Spurling, DJ Taylor and Ferdinand Mount as Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall well as some images from the exhibition. PR/Media Adviser: Julian Allason

th And on Powell’s actual 100 birthday, 21 All correspondence should be sent to: December, there will be Society celebrations Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society in London, New York and Chicago. 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford In putting together this Centenary Newsletter , UB6 0JW, UK Stephen Holden has acquired for us a number of new articles, as well as reprinting Phone: +44 (0)20 8864 4095 some from previous issues, with the Fax: +44 (0)20 8864 6109 intention of creating a rounded overview of Email: [email protected] Powell, his work and his milieu which it is hoped will provide an ongoing legacy. * Members of the Executive Committee who are the Society’s trustees. All officers are resident Finally on a sad note we have to report the in England or Wales unless stated. death on 23 October of Society Vice- President, John Monagan. With John’s passing the Society has lost a true friend and © The Anthony Powell Society, 2005 and the individual authors named. All rights reserved. supporter. It is a shame that John was not Published by The Anthony Powell Society. around to see Powell’s actual centenary. Printed and distributed by Express Printing, Peterborough, UK 4 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Celebrating 100 Years of Anthony Powell

by Dr Christine Berberich, University of Derby

The event of the year from the Society’s In 1951, Powell published the first perspective is drawing closer: the Anthony instalment of what was to become his Powell Centenary Conference in early twelve-volume novel sequence A Dance to December and, following soon after, the the Music of Time. This project kept him Great Man’s centenary itself. Time to take occupied for another 24 years during a step back and consider the man, his life which he wrote a million words stretched and his achievement. over a thousand pages and created hundreds of characters that became like Anthony Powell was born on 21 December family to Powell’s fan community. Dance 1905. He was the only child of Philip earned Powell many national and Lionel Powell, an army infantry officer international awards and honours, among who was eventually made Colonel, and his them the James Tait Memorial Prize and wife Maud Wells-Dymoke. Powell the TS Eliot Prize, honorary doctorates enjoyed a childhood and upbringing that from the universities of Leicester, Bristol was typical for his class: four years at Eton and Oxford, fellowship of the American (1919-23) were followed by three at Modern Language Association and a CBE Balliol College, Oxford which Powell left and CH from the Queen. He followed the in 1926 with a third-class history degree. success of Dance with the publication of Always interested in books, he accepted a two further novels, O, How the Wheel position with the publisher Duckworth in Becomes It! (1983) and The Fisher King 1926. His personal literary contacts were (1986), as well as four volumes of useful for him: he numbered Cyril memoirs – Infants of the Spring (1976), Connolly, , , Messengers of Day (1978), Faces in My and among Time (1980) and The Strangers All Are his friends. Apart from his day job in Gone (1982) – and three volumes of publishing, Powell also worked on his own journals – Journals, 1982-1986 (1995), literary career. He published his first Journals, 1987-1989 (1996), and Journals, novel, Afternoon Men, in 1931, and also 1990-1992 (1997). tried his hand as a scriptwriter of “quota quickies” for Warner Brothers between Anthony Powell died at his home, The 1936 and 1937. He was a regular Chantry, in , on 28 March 2000, contributor to the Spectator and the Daily aged 94. Telegraph, while publishing further Despite the longevity of Powell’s career, novels: Venusberg (1932), From a View to his huge literary output and the critical a Death (1933), Agents and Patients acclaim with which it was received, (1936) and What’s Become of Waring Powell is still relatively unacknowledged (1939). During the Second World War, by and unknown to a broader readership; Powell served as Second Lieutenant with his work certainly deserves more publicity. the Welch Regiment and, later, in the In 2004, in the run up to the centenary Intelligence Corps eventually rising to the year, Michael Barber’s acclaimed rank of Major. biography of Powell, Anthony Powell: A

5 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Life, was published, followed by a hugely On a personal note, I have, over the past important and comprehensive literary year, tried to interest my own students in study of Powell’s entire opus, Powell’s work; with some success. Two of Understanding Anthony Powell, by my final-year students currently use Nicholas Birns, known to Society Powell’s work for their final year members as a ceaseless campaigner for the dissertations, one of them even focusing re-establishment of Powell within the on Powell’s early work. The fact that one academy. The success of the Society’s of them will present her findings at the first two conferences dedicated to Powell’s upcoming conference is a particularly work, as well as the response our Call for positive sign: it shows that in this so very Papers for this year’s event has seen, important centenary year, Powell’s work means that there is renewed hope for has struck a chord with a new generation increased interest and that Powell’s work of readers that can hopefully carry the becomes more accessible to a broader torch for Powell in the future and help get readership. The fact that Dance has just his work the public attention it so highly been reissued in individual instalments is deserves. certainly a good sign.

6 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Address Given at Anthony Powell’s Memorial Service Grosvenor Chapel, South Audley and he pointed out a connection between us through his Street, London, W1 mother’s family, the Dymokes of 4 May 2000 Scrivelsby, hereditary Champions and Standard Bearers of England. (I will spare by Hugh Massingberd you the details, otherwise we will be here until the evening.) The late Frankie Howerd – who personified Anthony Powell’s maxim that Tony believed that genealogical melancholy should be taken for granted in investigation “when properly anyone with a true gift for comedy – used conducted” [and Tony always liked to get to preface his patter with “Welcome, my things right] “teaches much about the brethren, to the Eisteddfod”. vicissitudes of life; the vast extent of human oddness”. It seems not unfitting this morning – as Tony Powell traced his descent to the Lord As for snobbery, Tony argued that Rhys who held the first recorded genealogy actually demonstrates the Eisteddfod at in 1176. Indeed extreme fluidity of class in this country. the Powell pedigree includes several His Journals confirm that he was equally Bards, such as Llywarch Hen (nothing to interested in the local Duke, who burped do with the Mitfords, but a descendant of his way through the National Anthem, as Old King Coel, who as Tony pointed out in the giggling girls who delivered the didn’t pronounce his name “Cowell’), a Sunday papers to The Chantry – his home knight of the Arthurian Legend – which so in Somerset, where he lived with his wife, beguiled the great 20th-century Bard, Violet, for nearly half-a-century. The author of 30 immortal books, we are Chantry is bordered by “Dead Woman’s celebrating today. Bottom”, but this historic name proved too fruity for “the plansters” (as John It is unfortunate that anyone keen on Betjeman called them) who wanted it genealogy risks being branded a snob, a changed to the ever so dainty “Chantry crashing bore – and probably off his rocker Vale”. Tony countered by saying he would (as Peter Templer in A Dance to the Music have his writing paper reprinted to of Time would have put it). In his incorporate “Dead Woman’s Bottom” as Memoirs Tony recalled that his own father, part of the address. Colonel Powell, “was not merely bored by genealogy, he was affronted”. The Tony’s inexhaustible curiosity about other Colonel “possessed little or no sense of the people (and not only people, but animals, past; still less curiosity about the whether his cats Trelawney and Snook or circumstances of other people, alive or the “goat of unreliable aspect” in Sir dead”. Magnus Donners’s tapestry) was the mainspring of his genius as a novelist. Tony, of course, was quite the reverse. Indeed he regarded an interest in other Genealogy meant a lot to him – as I people as the sine qua non of novel- discovered in the 1960s when I was writing – an attribute lacking in not a few working on Burke’s Landed Gentry novelists whose interest in people extends (perhaps his favourite work of reference) only to themselves. 7 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Tony’s fellow-novelist Iris Murdoch, church they were (as Tony, with typical herself an only child, thought that his understatement, put it) “surprised to be solitary childhood was the key to his all- received by a cleric wearing a knight’s embracing imagination – though Tony said basinet”. Thus accoutred, the priest duly that in his experience it was children of pronounced the burial service – but Tony large families who tended to exhibit the was characteristically exercised by the traditional foibles of the only child. question of whether or not the helmeted Among the multitudinous family he parson had “contrived to lift the vizor” in married into, he noted “the Pakenham order to conduct the ceremony. habit of contradicting anything anyone Like all fans coming face to face with their else says”. But Tony stood no nonsense. heroes for the first time, I was awestruck Although Tony did not have an easy when I went to meet the legendary relationship with his father, they had a Anthony Powell at the Travellers’ Club bond through the Colonel’s rather more than 30 years ago. Here was our unexpected admiration for Nineties artists, greatest writer and most eminent literary particularly Aubrey Beardsley – critic, whose witty novels had entranced incidentally, the wonky hour-glass on the me with their fastidious style, paradox, front of what Dicky Umfraville might have irony – and throwaway dialogue that cried called “today’s race-card” is taken from a out for dramatisation. Indeed in the early Beardsley illustration for a poem by Ernest 1960s, his first novel, Afternoon Men Dowson (another favourite of Tony’s). (1931), was dramatised successfully. This, in a sense, was the Bohemian forerunner Tony had a highly developed visual sense of Dance. Reading it as a schoolboy, I was and to the end of his life never tired of very struck by the author’s description of looking at art books or sifting through his an unprepossessing painter whose false eclectic range of post-cards. Not least nose at a party lends his face “an among “the all he gave his country” (to unaccustomed dignity”. Dance itself was adapt a pet catchphrase of his from one of not only the finest achievement in fiction his beloved von Stroheim films) was his of the 20th century, it was the 20th stint as a Trustee of the National Portrait century. Powell’s universe seems more Gallery. believable than the so-called “real world”. As an antiquarian scholar and biographer, His intriguingly connected characters live Tony effectively rediscovered John Aubrey and breathe. One cannot walk through, and his Brief Lives. Like Aubrey, Tony say, Bayswater without expecting to bump delighted in recording quirky anecdotes of into Uncle Giles sloping out of The Ufford his own times. There was, for instance, (or some less respectable establishment in the story of the parson who was Shepherd Market); or Hyde Park without officiating at a funeral in a church not his hearing Sillery’s cry of “Abolish the own – and arrived early to have a look Means Test”; or Pimlico without thinking round. Above one tomb he spotted a of poor Maclintick, the embittered music medieval iron and, as there was critic, gassing himself. time to kill, tried it on. Assuming this That evening at the Travellers’ – which head- was easy enough; removing it Tony, incidentally, had joined back in 1930 proved impossible. And so when the – I stupidly expected a grand, aloof, mourners and the coffin arrived at the formidable presence of chilling authority.

8 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Instead, there bustled into the Smoking famous last paragraph wiggings in Room a toothy, chatty, friendly man, full Telegraph reviews, correcting howlers. of dry jokes and spicy gossip. I was Above all, Tony believed that the only sort particularly struck by the Master’s of writing worth reading was sympathetic charming voice. A measured, mellow, writing. slightly sibilant drawl (redolent of Eton In the last entry of his Journals Tony and Balliol), it held out the promise – wrote: “I realise more than ever how much unfailingly fulfilled – of constant I depend on V, and on the rest of my amusement, stimulation, subtle, original, immediate family”. The devoted care often oblique, observation – so that every given to Tony in his last years by Violet minute in his company bucked you up. and the family is beyond praise. Special Above all, Tony was extraordinarily funny, tribute should be paid to John Powell, with a humorous curiosity and sympathy Tony’s younger son (a dear friend of my peculiarly his own. wife and myself, first encountered on a It was a tonic to hear Tony’s bracing views Dorset cricket-field in 1958), whose on the absurdity of power, politics and selfless commitment and dedication were public affairs (so witheringly portrayed nothing short of heroic. through the ambitions of Widmerpool, Anthony Powell died peacefully at The who yet always manages to back the Chantry surrounded by his family. The wrong horse) – as well as his strictures on only child had become the beloved the idiocy and incompetence of sub- Patriarch of a flourishing dynasty – his editors, publishers, journalists and so forth. elder son Tristram, the distinguished He took a robust approach to the Arts. television director, and his wife Virginia True aestheticism called for toughness; Powell, the artist, have a son, Archie – also discipline. Tony was essentially a working in what Tony called “the unruly practical man prepared to get his hands world of television” – and a daughter, the dirty – whether hacking at the glorious Georgia, married to Toby Coke. undergrowth around the Chantry grotto; or They have a son, Harry, and a daughter, preparing one of his farmhouse curries; Hope – Tony’s great-grandchildren. And so bottling wine from imported hogsheads; or covering the gentlemen’s lavatory with an the Powell pedigree goes on. elaborate collage. True to his military Tony felt his family motto – “True to the background, he was intolerant of End” – was on the feeble side, but, like sloppiness and had no time for horoscopes (in which he also took an sentimentality or self-pity (“the magic interest), mottoes can have a facile ingredient of every best-seller”, as he put fittingness. (Hence the old journalistic it). In his Journals he tells of how he formula of trotting them out in police suggested to the dotty fan prone to reports about disgraced peers.) telephoning at strange hours that he should consult a psychiatrist: “He said he had. For Tony was “True to the End”. He bore Told him to do so again.” (Sound advice, his long years of immobility with great which I took – hold on, it wasn’t me ...) fortitude – occasionally consoling himself with the thought that at least it was better Yet there was usually a Bowra-esque than being back with his old Regiment. element of leg-pulling and self-parody in His wartime service in the Army produced such astringency – and, of course, in his what many of his fans would regard as the

9 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 boat into The Chantry lake, it was like a vision of the ancient world which so bewitched the author’s imagination. Tristram read the dirge from Cymbeline (“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun ...”). John half-expected a mailed arm to rise up from the water. And everyone thought of the last lines from Dance – which we are shortly to hear read by – Widmerpool in Hugh Whitemore’s television adaptation of Dance – which gave Tony (a hardened scriptwriter himself in his time) such pleasure at the end of his life. Indeed my abiding memory of one of my last visits to The Chantry is of Tony chuckling away at Captain Soper’s reaction to Captain Biggs’s suicide. “In the cricket pav, of all places – and him so fond of the game.”

Anthony Powell in the garden at The Chantry. Violet said that Charles Addams’s cartoon Photograph by Andrew Crowley. of a man in a cinema audience roaring with laughter, while everyone else in the three finest novels in the Dance sequence house was weeping, represented Tony. (and indeed the best fiction of the Second The conversation between Tony and Violet World War) – beginning with The Valley of began in September 1934 when they first Bones, evoked so strongly in Harold met in Co. Westmeath and happily carried Pinter’s reading from Ezekiel and in the on – whether over games of slosh, walks closing hymn today. In that book, too, the in Regent’s Park or cultural cruises – for narrator writes of the inexorable pull of his 65½ years. Anyone lucky enough to have ancestry towards The Soldier’s Art (the overheard some of their hilarious and title of the second novel in the war harmonious exchanges will know what a sequence). blissful fusion of souls this was – and how Tony’s penultimate words – typical of his much Tony and his work owed to Violet’s courtesy and concern for others – were encyclopaedic knowledge, insight into “Help yourself to a drink”. And on his human nature and zestful love of life. final appearance in the library at The Finally, many of us now echo the feelings Chantry, he noticed Violet seemingly of the narrator of Dance when he sees his reaching for Burke’s Landed Gentry. He enchanting composer friend, Hugh said: “What are you looking up?” Moreland (one of the portraits that even On the day of the funeral, spring in Tony had to admit was drawn from life, in Somerset suddenly turned to winter. the person of ), for the Hilary Spurling had no doubt that the last time. “It was also the last time” [the snow had been laid on by Tony himself. narrator writes] “I had, with anyone, the As Tony’s ashes were scattered from a sort of talk we used to have together.”

10

Champagne Party

By permission of Chapter of the College of Arms

Champagne & Canapés

College of Arms Queen Victoria Street, London, EC4

Wednesday 21 December 2005 1830 hrs

Members & guests: £20 Non-Members: £25 Prior booking essential – booking form overleaf Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Anthony Powell’s 100th Birthday Champagne Party – Booking Form

To: Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society, 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford, Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK Phone: +44 (0)20 8864 4095 Fax: +44 (0)20 8864 6109

I wish to book tickets for the Anthony Powell 100th Birthday Champagne Party for: Members & guests (at £20 each): ______Non-Members (at £25 each): ______Name: Address:

City: County: Postcode: Country: □ I enclose a cheque (payable to The Anthony Powell Society) for £ ______□ Please debit my Mastercard / Visa card (delete as appropriate) with £ ______Card No.: / / / Expiry Date: / 3-Digit Security Code: Name on Card: Signature: Please provide your credit card billing address if different from the above.

Copy of a letter from Powell to member John Potter who lives in Japan. The much used typewriter and hand corrections are typical of Powell correspondence and manuscripts. 12 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 OBITUARY Monagan correspondence, now housed in the Special Collections room at Lauinger

Library, Georgetown University, It is with great sadness that we Washington DC, is as fun and enlightening report the death of the Society’s a read as Powell’s other non-fiction, with Vice-President John Monagan on the added treat of introducing the reader to 23 October 2005 John Monagan. John was born in 1911 in Waterbury, , of Irish Catholic background. In one of those astrological coincidences Powell so loved, his birthday was December 23 – two days after that of the Master, but unlike his natal date ensconced fully in Capricorn. John was also born slightly less than three months before Lady Violet Powell was born, in 1912. John graduated from Dartmouth College in 1933, where he was a classmate of John Meck, the friend of F Scott Fitzgerald who is mentioned in Powell’s memoirs. John’s newspaper obituaries mentioned he studied in French literature at Dartmouth, which must have given him common ground with Powell who was somewhat, though only somewhat, of a Francophile. John went to Harvard Law School and then went back In Memory of the Hon. John to his hometown of Waterbury, where he Monagan (1911-2005) entered local politics and served as a young mayor of Waterbury from 1943 to by Nicholas Birns 1947.

When John Monagan wrote Anthony For our non-American readers, let me Powell a fan letter in 1969, most likely explain a bit about Waterbury. Waterbury neither expected this would be the first is located in the industrial part of item in a correspondence that lasted a Connecticut, not the bucolic or patrician quarter-century. When Monagan first parts of the state more familiar to most encountered Powell’s Dance, he was a people. It is a largely working-class city Congressman from Connecticut, called “the City” from its traditional something which John always thought principal product, and despite not being made Powell take particular notice of his treated well by recent currents in American letter. For whatever reason, Powell and culture has maintained its pride and its Monagan struck a chord in each other as esprit. John’s mayoralty was a chink of their letters covered not only Powell’s light in a politics that has been generally work and its reception in the US but corrupt and has only very recently seen literary and political matters encompassing several terrible scandals. John was always much of modern times. The Powell- proud of being from Waterbury and very 13 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 loyal to it. Even though John stayed in always styled John). John’s extraordinary Washington after he retired (as do the vast intelligence was the first quality I noticed majority of former members of Congress about him when I met him in 2002 while and Senators) he still had family in doing the research for my book on Powell. Waterbury and kept in close touch with his He had a total command of all of Dance, former district. and an appreciation for the small complexities and ironies in the weave of John was elected to the US House of its intricate composition. For instance, he Representatives in 1958, and served in pronounced the name of General Congress for seven terms (fourteen years). Liddament “Leed-a-MENGH” as if it were He was instrumental in improving life in a French name, bringing to light the his district and the country at large in paradox that this lover of Trollope, who myriad ways, both great and small. He was so aghast when a junior officer under served on the Foreign Affairs committee his command said that he preferred Balzac and frequently travelled abroad, where he to the chronicler of Barsetshire, was maintained links with parliamentarians of himself of possibly French origin. John other countries and exhibited his command knew every corner of the novel, and his of several foreign languages. (John no reading of Powell’s great achievement was doubt would have done better than did not only appreciative but deep. Nick Jenkins on the oral French test administered in The Soldier’s Art.) Like a Both Michael Barber, in his fine biography good portion of Powell’s American fans of Powell, and I found talking to John a (interestingly, given Powell’s forthright great resource in our researches on Powell Toryism) he was a Democrat and served – and the correspondence a key archival during a time when Democrats were the repository in understanding the long career unquestioned majority on Congress. He of a prolific author. I also found John a was defeated in 1972 when the landslide joy to know in person. He was defeat of George McGovern could not enthusiastic and encouraging, and had a save John from his young Republican lightness of touch in his personal relations challenger. (The seat went again to the that was truly special. One of my Democrats two years later.) After leaving favourite moments in the correspondence Congress, John practiced law briefly and occurs in 1989, when John had purchased then concentrated his efforts on writing. a Macintosh computer. He asks Powell He wrote several books, including his own whether the Sage of The Chantry, to use memoirs, and wrote a book review on the Hugh Massingberd’s phrase, will join him legacy of Franklin D Roosevelt as recently in entering the electronic era. When I said as 2004. to John that, before turning to Powell’s reply, I knew the answer would be “no”, By this time, his friendship with Powell he let out a burst of laughter that was truly was already underway. Powell had made infectious. I truly appreciated all the help his last trip to the US in the mid-1960s, he gave me with the book and his before John had yet read his work, but unstinting and generous support of it. John and his wife Rosemary visited The Chantry four times, in 1975, 1984, 1987, When John called me this past summer to and 1988. On one of those visits, Powell help make for Georgetown noted the intelligence of “the University’s centennial symposium on Congressman” (as he and Lady Violet Powell, I at first mistook his voice for that

14 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 of a younger friend of mine, it seemed so John was over fifty years older than I was, fresh and lively and . Those who were but at his death I feel I have lost a friend. privileged to see John’s talk at the 30 But friendships live forever, and John’s September 2005 symposium saw twenty friendship with Powell – one of the great minutes of rich, detailed anecdote about literary friendships of the twentieth Powell and his friendship with him. The century – will continue to reward fans and week before, John had been able to have students of this extraordinary writer. tea with Hilary Spurling when she visited the Washington area, and this was clearly a source of great pleasure to him. Not only Georgetown Symposium Report did John give, at the age of 93, a full talk on Powell, but he also stayed to listen to by Nicholas B Scheetz two more talks and to take questions from Special Collections Division, . A number of his family Georgetown University Library members were there (including Rosemary and a grandson also named John), and a 30 September 2005, the 71st anniversary of huge gathering of friends and associates. the engagement of Anthony Powell and The symposium, organized by Nicholas Lady Violet Pakenham, was a stellar Scheetz of the Georgetown Library, was a Powellian moment at the Georgetown day to remember, and most of all because University Library in Washington, DC. of John. The centennial exhibition mounted in the John was always a great supporter of the novelist’s honour, “Anthony Powell at Society. He encouraged Keith Marshall to 100”, was heralded with an exciting half form and maintain it from the beginning. day symposium. We had as speakers Dr He served as its honorary Vice-President Nicholas Birns of the New School, Hon. and also wrote a long and highly John S Monagan, Dr Mark Facknitz of interesting memoir of his friendship with James Madison University, and Dr George Powell, The Master and the Congressman, O’Brien of Georgetown University. which was published by the society in John, Nick and Mark each gave wonderful 2003 on the occasion of its second talks and after the break all three joined in conference. At the symposium, he a panel discussion, superbly moderated by mentioned that he was concerned about the George O’Brien, with Society member, decrease in membership renewals, so John S Geiber, keeping the ball rolling perhaps the most immediate way to honour with his many questions and observations. John would be to renew your membership Some 40 attended and the day went well. for as long as possible! I wish John could All thought the exhibition a fine one and have been there for the exact date of were impressed by its size and scope, and Powell’s 100th birthday, but he lived well the many rarities it contained. The Society into 2005 and was fully aware of the was well represented by John Monagan planning of the conference and its broad (Hon. Vice-President) and Nick Birns area of coverage. John was not only a (Committee). The Georgetown University friend of Powell but a prestigious person Library; Todd Haines, exhibit co-curator; in his own right. His death is an and myself are deeply indebted to John, incalculable loss for the Society. Nick, Mark and George for making the event so very special.

15 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Anthony Powell Centenary Events

Exhibition Dancing to the Music of Time:

The Life and Work of Anthony Powell

The Wallace Collection Manchester Square, London, W1

3 November 2005 to 5 February 2006

Special Evening Event Love and Art in ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ Wallace Collection / TLS Saturday 3 December, 1800-2000 hrs Lecture Series Extracts from Anthony Powell’s novel Friday 18 November 2005 sequence, compiled by Hugh A Time to Dance: Anthony Powell, His Massingberd and read by James Purefoy Contemporaries and Our World and Annabel Mullion Ferdinand Mount in conversation Readings and a glass of wine, £20 with DJ Taylor Readings, wine and a three course Powell themed dinner in Café Bagatelle with Friday 9 December 2005 music, £40 He Came in Every Thursday: Anthony Powell and the TLS Booking: Please call 020 7563 9516 or Jeremy Treglown email danielle.cunningham@ wallacecollection.org Friday 20 January 2006 James Purefoy and Annabel Mullion Painting Time: Anthony Powell’s (Jenkins and Mona from ’s Pictorial Imagination 1997 adaptation of the novels) will read a Hilary Spurling series of excerpts based around the theme of love in all its extremes of glory and Lectures start at 1300 hrs in the Wallace desperation. All the readings will be Collection Lecture Theatre linked by their references to key works of art mentioned in the novels. Touching Advance booking essential; tickets £5 per and engaging with plenty of jokes and a lecture from + 44 (0)20 7563 9551 hint of sexiness ...

16 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Anthony Powell Centenary Conference Events All conference events are open to members and non-members on payment of the appropriate delegate fee. Full booking details from the Hon. Secretary.

Thursday 1 December 2005 Friday 2 December 2005 Pre-Conference Evening Buffet The Garden God Reception A rehearsed reading of Powell’s play Imperial College Rector’s House, College of Arms, Queen Victoria Street, 170 Queen’s Gate, London, SW7 London, EC4 Curtain up: 1930 hrs Friday 2 & Saturday 3 December 2005 Anthony Powell Centenary Sunday 4 December 2005 Conference Post-Conference Social Walks & Registration from 0900 hrs Lunch Conference: 0945 to 1630 hrs A leisurely, guided, Sunday morning The Wallace Collection, Manchester walk around parts of Powell’s London Square, London, W1 and ending at a pub for lunch

Dance for Readers The Society together with The Wallace Collection are offering four unique ‘book group’ sessions to discuss key themes and personal views of A Dance to the Music of Time. Each of the Saturday afternoon sessions will cover one of the Dance trilogies and will be led by a Powell specialist or enthusiast who will talk about the novels and lead a discussion. The aim is to provide fresh views and perspectives on the novels for those who already know Dance, and entice those who would like to read Powell’s masterpiece.

Saturday 10 December 2005 Saturday 14 January 2006 First Trilogy Third (War) Trilogy Stephen Eggins, Anthony Powell Dr Christine Berberich, Department of Society English, University of Derby Saturday 7 January 2006 Saturday 21 January 2006 Second Trilogy Fourth (Final) Trilogy Dr Peter Kislinger, Department of Dr Nicholas Birns, New School English & American Studies, University University, New York and author of of Understanding Anthony Powell

Sessions are free but advance booking is requested: call 020 7563 9551 or email [email protected] Sessions will begin at 1400 hrs in the Wallace Collection Lecture Theatre and will last between 60 and 90 minutes Café Bagatelle will be open for refreshments before and after the sessions

17 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 3 November 2005 to 5 February 2006 Wednesday 21 December 2005 Exhibition Anthony Powell 100th Birthday Party Dancing to the Music of Time: The Life College of Arms, Queen Victoria Street, and Work of Anthony Powell London, EC4 The Wallace Collection, Manchester Celebrate Powell’s actual 100th birthday; Square, London, W1 open to all; prior booking essential; details Details, opening hours, etc. at on page 11 www.wallacecollection.org or call +44 (0)20 7563 9500 Wednesday 21 December 2005 Anthony Powell 100th Birthday 15 November 2005 to 27 January 2006 New York Champagne Luncheon Anthony Powell Exhibition Century Club, New York Cambridge University Library, UK Prior booking essential; details from Bill Exhibition open to CUL readers; others by Warren on +1 212 259 8700 or special with Dr Emily [email protected] Mitchell on +44 01223 333122 Wednesday 21 December 2005 Friday 18 November 2005 Great Lakes Group Powell 100th Wallace Collection / TLS Lecture Birthday Celebration Details on page 16 Red Lion Pub, Lincoln Avenue, Chicago Open to all; no need to book; details from Thursday 1 to Sunday 4 December Stephen Pyskoty-Olle, Anthony Powell Centenary Conference [email protected] Details on page 17 Saturday 7 January 2006 Friday 2 December 2005 Dance for Readers, Second Trilogy Special Powell Centenary, Conference Details on page 17 and Christmas Newsletter Published Members will automatically receive one Saturday 14 January 2006 copy free; additional copies available for a Dance for Readers, War Trilogy small charge, see page 107 Details on page 17

Saturday 3 December 2005 Friday 20 January 2006 Wallace Collection Special Evening Wallace Collection / TLS Lecture Event: Love and Art in ‘A Dance to the Details on page 16 Music of Time’ 1800 to 2000 hrs. Details page 16 Saturday 21 January 2006 Dance for Readers, Final Trilogy Friday 9 December 2005 Details on page 17 Wallace Collection / TLS Lecture See page 16 22 March to 24 May 2006 Anthony Powell Exhibition Saturday 10 December 2005 Grolier Club, New York, USA Dance for Readers, First Trilogy Details tbc Details on page 17

18 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Local Group News

Report from the Swedish Group Extraordinary London Group Meeting by Hans Johansson By Keith Marshall In December 2004 the Swedish – or Stockholm – group had departed from The Society’s London Group held an their meeting with the intention to meet in extraordinary pub meet on the evening of spring 2005. Not until October 18 Tuesday 11 October at our usual venue, however did the meeting take place, then The Audley in Mount Street, in honour of at the same Korean restaurant, Busan, as member Jeanne Reed who was visiting the first time. This time of course from the USA. everyone was looking forward to the Centenary Conference which was to be Although there were only a small number visited by all of us. Flight hours and of members present and The Audley was prices were discussed, connections via somewhat crowded and noisy – as it often Stanstead, Luton and Gatwick were is on a weekday evening, though compared and the advantages of certain thankfully there was no football that hotels in Bloomsbury were weighed evening on the television – we passed an towards those in Sussex Gardens. enjoyable few hours immersed in the usual good food, good beer and Powellian The discussion also ranged over certain conversation. aspects of Dance. The description of Stringham and his development intrigued As normal for the London group the us as usual. Buster Foxe was mentioned conversation ranged widely from films of and we agreed that he wasn’t painted very John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, sympathetically but couldn’t agree on through Upper and Upper Middle Class precisely what was wrong with him. standards and choices of , Raven’s name was up again. Mats furniture and wallpaper, Powellian Wiklund had since last read some other coincidences and AP’s following in works by Powell. America to conference venues and future directions for the Society. We decided to meet for a joint meal in London, but after having compared our Regrettably the party broke up about 9 booking, we had to settle for a drink o’clock as Jeanne was on a whistle-stop together. What about next meeting in literary tour of England and and was Stockholm? Well that might be settled at due at the airport early the following the drink. morning. If any “out of town” member is visiting London the London Group are always willing to meet over a beer and/or some food if you give the Hon Secretary enough notice.

19 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Local Group News

NE USA Group Great Lakes Group

by Leatrice Fountain by Steve Pyskoty-Olle

Shortly after Keith Marshall opened the Two weeks before Halloween, on 15 APLIST [the Society’s email discussion October, the Great Lakes Anthony Powell list] for those who wanted to communicate Group gathered at the haunted Red Lion on the subject, a small group formed Pub on Chicago’s North Side to discuss around the New York area and began Hearing Secret Harmonies. meeting regularly. One of our members, Attending were Eileen Soderstrom, Tom Wallace who was Powell’s literary Anthony and Joanne Edmonds, Steve agent in his later years, held a December Pyskoty-Olle, Dick Goerne, Anthony get together at the Century Club in New Bruozas, and our youngest member ever, York which is always well attended and is Sabrina Bruozas. (Any rumours that she our main, festive event of the year. spent her time drawing spooky pictures As the group expanded, some people instead of joining in the discussion will be began to attend from farther away: two flatly denied.) from Boston, one from Amhurst, a Among topics discussed, between sips of graduate student in Rhode Island, and on cider and bites of shepherd’s pie, were several occasions Joan Williams has come whether the reader was ready for the down from Toronto. We try to meet every change in Widmerpool; Powell’s portrayal other month at the Mine Tavern in of Americans; and how one appreciates Norwalk, CT – an old mill and coaching this oft-maligned ultimate novel in the inn accessible to trains and two main Dance sequence the older one becomes. highways. Our next meeting at the Red Lion will be Our conversation ranges widely, but we try on Powell’s 100th birthday, Wednesday 21 to choose a Powellian and discuss it December, at 6 pm. There is no set topic, before branching off in our own directions. but attendees are requested to select a It's a congenial group, and we enjoy each favourite passage from Powell’s writing to other's company and sharing ideas and opinions about Anthony Powell. One of read aloud. our recent topics was General Conyers, Photograph on page 86. and for once we stuck pretty close to the point. Please get in touch if you would like to come to one of our meetings.

20 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Society Notices

Newsletter Copy Deadlines Centenary Year The deadlines for copy for forthcoming Subscription issues of the Newsletter are: Special Offer Issue 22, Spring 2006 Available to Copy Deadline: 10 February 2006 new & existing members Publication Date: 3 March 2006 all grades of membership Issue 23, Summer 2006 until 31 December 2005 Copy Deadline: 12 May 2006 Pay for 4 years Publication Date: 2 June 2006 get the 5th year free SPECIAL CENTENARY OFFER AGM Minutes Buy both the Eton and The minutes of the 2005 AGM will be Oxford Proceedings for just printed in the next Newsletter. £15 See page 117 for ordering details

Local Groups London Group Area: London & SE England Contact: Keith Marshall Email: [email protected] North East USA Group Area: NY & CT area, USA Contact: Leatrice Fountain Email: [email protected] Great Lakes Group Area: Chicago area, USA Contributions to the Newsletter Contact: Stephen Pyskoty-Olle are always welcome and should Email: [email protected] be sent to: Swedish Group Newsletter Editor, Stephen Holden, Area: Sweden Anthony Powell Society Contact: Regina Rehbinder 76 Ennismore Avenue Email: [email protected] Greenford, Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK Please contact the Hon. Secretary if you Fax: +44 (0)20 8864 6109 wish to make contact with a group and Email: [email protected] don’t have email. 21 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 1905 – Snapshot of a Year Monarchs and rulers in 1905 included party whose goal was independence for all Franz Joseph I (Austro-Hungary), Léopold of Ireland. II (Belgium), Wilhelm II (Germany), In October 1905 Wilbur Wright made a Vittorio Emanuele III (Italy), Carol I flight of 24.2 miles in his aeroplane Flyer (Romania), Nicholas II (), Edward III. The flight lasted for almost forty VII (UK), and Theodore Roosevelt (USA). minutes at Huffman Prairie in Ohio. In The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) Britain Sapper Moreton of the British continued with various Russian defeats, Army’s balloon section was lifted 2,600 leading Russia to negotiate peace feet by a kite at Aldershot under the (brokered by Theodore Roosevelt) rather supervision of the kite’s designer, Samuel than continue the war. (Lady Violet’s Cody. cousin, Admiral Sir William Pakenham, Albert Einstein published four papers. In was naval attaché in Tokyo during this particular, he formulated the theory of period.) special relativity and stated the law of In January 1905 the massacre of 200 mass-energy conservation: E=mc2. He demonstrators at the Winter Palace in also explained the photoelectric effect by Moscow was one of the triggers of the quantization, and mathematically analyzed abortive Russian revolution of that year. Brownian motion. Another trigger in June 1905 was a mutiny The Cullinan Diamond, the largest on board the ironclad, Potemkin. Later diamond in the world at 3,106 carats that year Tsar Nicholas II was forced to (621.2 g), was discovered by Frederick grant Russia’s first constitution, conceding a national assembly (Duma) with limited Wells at Cullinan in South Africa. powers. Various actors were born in 1905: Anna May Wong, Franchot Tone, , The First Moroccan Crisis (also known as Robert Donat, Joan Crawford, Henry the Tangier Crisis) took place, an Fonda, Clara Bow, and Myrna Loy. Mata international crisis brought about by the visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Tangier in Hari debuted in Paris in May 1905. Morocco on 31 March 1905. The Kaiser Debussy’s La Mer and Franz Lehár’s The made certain remarks in favour of Merry Widow premiered. Popular songs Moroccan independence, a challenge to that year included “In My Merry French influence in Morocco. Oldsmobile”, “It Ain’t All Honey And It Ain’t All Jam”, “On The Banks Of The In June 1905 the Norwegian Parliament Rhine With A Stein”, Harry Lauder’s “She declared the union with Sweden dissolved, Is My Daisy”, “Waiting At The Church”, and thus Norway achieved its “A Woman Is Only A Woman But A Good independence. Cigar Is A Smoke”, and “How’d You Like In Britain HMS Dreadnought was laid To Spoon With Me?” Musicians and down, revolutionizing battleship design composers born that year included and triggering a naval arms race. Powell’s friend Constant Lambert, , Michael Tippett, Tommy Dorsey, The Irish nationalist Arthur Griffith Jack Teagarden, and Maria von Trapp (of founded Sinn Féin in Dublin as a political The Sound of Music fame). 22 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

A Question of Upbringing DJ Taylor talks to Anthony Powell, one of the great survivors of the Brideshead Generation

This article appeared in The Sunday Times on 29 January 1995

From the distant Somerset hills, the wind smacks in against the tall bedroom Powell’s newly-published Journals 1982- windows. “Of course, we’re very high up 1986 ( £20) are full of bleak here. About 600 feet … Do you know this assessments of these dim-witted pilgrims. part of the world?” Pride of place in an extensive demonology Huddled comfortably in a chair, with a is reserved for a pair of Oxford nearby electric fire sending out penetrating undergraduates (“partly obsequious, partly rays of heat, Anthony Powell peers up immensely pleased with their own from his nest of rugs. He is painfully frail brilliance … really dreadful couple”) who these days, and not very mobile, but the were reluctantly admitted some time in voice – a purring, archaic quaver – is quite 1983. distinct, each sentence punctuated by a The room is stuffed with Powell murmured “Oh yes” or “Oh really” or a memorabilia; drawings of him by Adrian “How frightfully funny”. Like the writing, Daintrey and Nina Hamnett, designs his vocal style is one of chronic restraint. by Misha Black, cartoons, including an “There was rather a row about that” – the fantasia that shows sacking of Penguin as his paperback Evelyn Waugh presenting the kneeling publisher in the 1960s; “a very curious figure of to Pope Pius II. chap” – Cyril Connolly; “an odd fish” – Waugh’s reaction to this caricature, as Julian Maclaren-Ross, others too plentiful recorded in Powell’s memoirs, was an to mention. Handicapped by deafness and affronted “Not in the least like.” “I was an immense residual courtesy, Powell is standing behind him,” Powell volunteers, still capable of mixing brisk little feline “and I saw the back of his neck go pounces in among the suavity. At one absolutely scarlet. Connolly I never dared point, Kingsley Amis’s latest novel strays show.” into the conversation. “It’s about selfishness.” “Oh yes?” he replies, “Well, Waugh, Connolly, Lancaster. If nothing Kingsley would know all about that.” else, Powell (born in 1905) is the great survivor, the last fragment of that old, Behind our heads more wind rattles the smashed world of half a hundred memoirs, quivering glass. Downstairs, where Lady the final relic, for example, of the Eton Violet presides over morning coffee, Society of the Arts (Acton, Howard, diamond-wedding anniversary cards lie Byron) and The Eton Candle, of the whole over bookcases filled with copies of Brideshead Generation for that matter. Debrett’s and Burke’s Landed Gentry. You could say, if you were being unkind, Over the years, the path to The Chantry, that rather too much attention has been the Powell’ country house outside Frome, lavished on what was, with the exception has been well trodden by interviewers. of Waugh and Powell, pretty much a

23 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

DJ Taylor interviewing Anthony Powell at The Chantry in 1995. Photograph by Sally Soames. collection of gilded, non-achieving drones. and I remember asking somebody I knew “Oh, I quite liked old Harold [the late Sir who was already there who the great men Harold Acton] … I didn’t like were, and he said, oh Evelyn Waugh, Howard” (, whose dismal whom I knew nothing about … I think career prompted a 600-page memorial by was the other.” Does he see Marie Jacqueline Lancaster). In fact, any point of comparison between himself Powell is anxious to do the founder of the and the century’s other great comic Eton Society of the Arts some kind of English novelist? “To me, I seem very belated justice. “He had this curious sort different from Evelyn … Evelyn actually of personality … I remember at school stated somewhere that he only wrote for a wondering who this curious boy was.” purpose, and, you know, I never have at all.” The son of a regular army officer of calamitous temperament, Powell One agreeable characteristic that separates proceeded from Eton to Oxford to a Powell from most of the Brideshead gang dogsbody’s job at the publishing house of was his habit of befriending younger Duckworth. A connection with Evelyn writers, particularly those from the upstart Waugh, his greatest contemporary, was grammar-school cadres of the 1950s. strengthened in 1928 when Duckworth Kingsley Amis was invited to lunch on the brought out Waugh’s life of Dante Gabriel strength of one of his early reviews, a Rossetti. Chronology is important here: piece of talent-spotting on which Powell “Strictly speaking, we weren’t at Oxford still congratulates himself. On the other together, I think … I went up very young, hand, an acquaintance with Amis’s chum

24 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Philip Larkin came in for a tremendous posthumous debunking. Larkin’s secret dislike of Powell went public in 1992, in his Selected Letters. Powell discovered somewhat to his surprise that, when corresponding with Amis, Larkin liked to refer to him as the “horse-faced dwarf”. Did this offend him? Powell thinks about this. “No, not a bit … I never quite knew why Philip did really sort of dislike me so Pakenham Hall, now Tullynally much, but he obviously did.” “But Castle, Co. Westmeath Kingsley Amis is still a great friend of yours?” “I don’t know that Kingsley’s a great friend of anybody’s, but I never had critics have had trouble in squaring a row with him or anything.” Powell’s conventional Toryism with both his aesthetics (avant-garde for their time) In the 1930s, while he was working at and his liking for people who led Duckworth and then as a film scriptwriter unconventional lives. Powell’s and general literary man, Powell wrote Conservatism, painstakingly exposed in five novels, two of them – Venusberg the Journals (where he cheerfully refers to (1932) and From a View to a Death (1933) Dorothy Hodgkin OM as a “dreadful left- – highlights of English . The wing old hag”), is of an unexceptional 1940s were lean years, taken up by cast. “I’ve no wish to put the world right.” military service and the business of finding his feet in an uncertain post-war world. Perhaps not, but Powell did have a taste The 12-volume A Dance to the Music of for the bohemian life. Afternoon Men Time eventually got going in 1951. Some (1931), a first novel peopled by struggling artists’ models and neurotic painters, is a fair reflection of the company Powell kept as a young man about town. In fact, Powell’s affiliations with the raffish artistic sub-world were much more pronounced than those of a self- proclaimed bohemian such as Cyril Connolly. “Connolly was a very clever chap in a way,” Powell diffidently proposes, “although he was never able to express it quite … He had this kind of hypnotic thing about whom he wanted to sleep with. In the early stages it was his male contemporaries. Then afterwards he moved on to the opposite sex.” The Powells (he had met and married Ivy Compton-Burnett Lady Violet Pakenham in 1934) headed 1884-1967 west in the early 1950s. There followed a

25 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 quarter century of apparently example, is usually trailed by a keen “purposeless” work on Dance. Frequently awareness of comic possibilities. held up as a model of aesthetic Meanwhile Powell has moved on to the detachment, A Dance to the Music of Time, idiosyncrasies of his late friend Wyndham with its shrewd sense of the social and Ketton-Cremer (Norfolk squire and author political changes brought about by the war, of Felbrigg) “quite sexless, I think … actually bristles with ideological purpose. Violet said he was in love with some local Powell has often disparaged “committed” archdeacon or something, some dignitary left-wing writers of the period. Isn’t he of the church … but he never showed the simply a subtle example of a “committed” slightest sign.” novelist of the right? “Well, it’s a Ever reluctant to discuss his own books frightfully complicated thing … I hold (Q: “What do you think of your early very sort of Tory views, but I could never novels?” “A: “I never re-read them”), feel that was a particular reason for Powell consents to be drawn on his ability writing, or even in a kind of way for to devise authentic-sounding titles for voting. But I usually do just vote Tory.” works purportedly written by his There is a brief interlude in which Lady characters, for instance Ada Violet – a spry and loquacious 82 – Leintwardine’s I Stopped at the Chemist dispenses sherry. Primed by a memory of and X Trapnel’s Profiles in String (both a conversation with at the from ). “Oh Café Royal in 1940, the talk turns to the yes, it was extraordinary what I Stopped at regularity with which one overhears the Chemist (the 1940s equivalent of the Powellesque dialogue in pubs and on Diary of a Cosmo Girl) meant to some buses (again, the stylised otherworldliness people … I thought it was just about of these conversations is a critical contraceptives … I’m not sure I didn’t see commonplace). Powell suggests that the some artist who did some sort of novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett bring off a performance of profiles in string.” similar trick. Reminiscences of Compton- The wind blows in with ever greater Burnett (d 1969), whom both the Powells violence. I get up to go. “Were you at knew (“You were much more a chum of Cambridge?” Powell asks. He is relieved hers than I was,” Powell courteously to hear that I wasn’t: “I mean, it’s a terrible reminds his wife) lead to a gentle reproof sort of handicap to go to Cambridge.” of my lower-middle-class rendition of her Downstairs, the wide hall is dim and surname. “Burnett we call it,” Powell empty. Lady Violet has disappeared. I let mimics, “Said in an absolutely freezing myself out. The door – that low door in voice.” the wall Evelyn Waugh talks about in Several reviewers have already detected an , enclosing an arcady equally glacial tone in the Journals. But of shimmering quadrangles, all the dinner- to write them off as simply another jacketed young men – slams shut. outpouring of decayed English snobbery would be a mistake. Powell’s iciness over © DJ Taylor 1995 vintages or social provenance, for

26 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 When The Going Was Good Edward Wadsworth, Anthony Powell and the “Maresfield Set” 1927-34

by Dr Jonathan Black Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949) and Anthony Powell came from decidedly different backgrounds. Wadsworth was born in the small Yorkshire town of Cleckheaton, five miles south-east of Vorticist house magazine Blast! Lewis Bradford, the son of Fred – a self-made created Vorticism, along with Wadsworth man and proud owner of the prosperous and the American poet Ezra Pound, as a Broomfield Worsted Spinning Mill. British riposte to and improvement on the Unsurprisingly, Fred hoped his son would fragmented and semi-abstract pictorial follow him into the lucrative family style associated with Italian Futurism. The business but also wanted his only child to principle Vorticist watering hole and be educated as a gentleman. Wadsworth meeting place was the Restaurant de la was thus despatched to Fettes Public Tour Eiffel, on Percy Street, run by the School (1903-1905) in Edinburgh where flamboyant and mysterious Viennese he did not shine academically and which Rudolf Stulik and his lugubrious head he did not enjoy. From an early age he waiter Joe. The Restaurant, with its developed as a confirmed individualist inimitable ambience combining seedy with very pronounced ideas as to what charm and monstrous pot plants with career he should follow. After leaving delicious French cuisine, remained Fettes Wadsworth was sent by his father to fashionable with artists and writers until it study engineering draughtsmanship for a closed in 1938 and is described fondly and year (1906-07) in Munich. Without memorably in the second volume of To informing his father Wadsworth started Keep The Ball Rolling. studying part-time at the Knirr Art School and developed what would become a life- During the First World War, Wadsworth long respect for German art, literature and firstly served with Naval Intelligence in aesthetics. He also, unusually for an the Eastern Mediterranean, as a Lieutenant Englishman of the time, became a fluent in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, speaker and reader of the German interpreting early attempts at photographic language to the extent that he was able in reconnaissance. He then spent the last 1914 to provide a highly proficient partial year of the war devising eye-puzzling translation of Kandinsky’s ground- camouflage schemes with the “dazzle breaking essay “Concerning the Spiritual camouflage” section of the Ministry of in Art” for the first issue of the avant-garde Shipping under the direction of the marine magazine Blast! By 1914 Wadsworth had painter Norman Wilkinson. After the war emerged as one of the leading lights of Wadsworth held two very well received Vorticism – the militantly modernist exhibitions in London; one of woodcuts at artistic movement led by the permanently the Adelphi Gallery in March 1919 and disputatious painter-writer Percy one of “Black Country” drawings at the Wyndham Lewis – who also edited the Leicester Galleries in January 1920 27 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 (Powell would later purchase one of these Powell was also having an affair with evocative drawings, depicting the someone Wadsworth had known well pulverised industrial landscapes in the before the war, the talented artist and vicinity of Birmingham, from Wadsworth). notorious party animal Nina Hamnett. Indeed, Hamnett was to draw an In January 1921 Wadsworth’s life changed impressive portrait of Powell in 1927 significantly when his father died leaving before her ability was eroded beyond him just over a quarter of a million pounds repair by too much alcohol, drugs and late (approximately £7 million today). His nights. new wealth allowed Wadsworth to frequently visit France and, especially, In the summer of 1927 Wadsworth and his Marseilles and the area that was in the family moved from Addison Road to Dairy process of acquiring the name of the Côte Farm (later renamed Dairy House to divert d’Azur and the reputation as a playground overly persistent agricultural machinery for the rich and salesmen), fashionably Maresfield, a Bohemian. He was property on the rural also able to buy, in outskirts of Uckfield, 1923, a large house East Sussex. At on Addison Road, Dairy Farm Kensington, which Wadsworth became the focus for established a pattern a social circle that of hard work in his contained a number studio during week of up-and-coming days – in 1923 he artists, writers, critics had embraced the and musicians. demanding technique Wadsworth was of tempera painting always interested in and held highly the latest in literary successful trends and by the exhibitions of works mid 1920s had in this medium at the befriended a number Edward Wadsworth. Townscape. 1920. Leicester Galleries in of well-regarded November 1926 and young authors such as , April 1929 – while the weekends were , , AP reserved for extremely well victualled and Herbert and Stephen “Gamesmanship” often highly bibulous house parties. Potter. His wife, Fanny, a professionally Guests to Dairy Farm during the period trained violinist also attracted musicians when Powell knew it best, c.1928-33, and composers such as Arthur Bliss to the covered a wide spectrum of talented Wadsworth home on Addison Road. It people from the arts world including the was probably the future Sir Arthur who actresses Hermione Baddeley (also part introduced Wadsworth to his protégé owner, with her husband David Tennant, Constant Lambert* (1905-1951) who, in of the Gargoyle Club on Meard Street, turn, introduced him in 1927 to Anthony ) and Betty Arkwright, the eccentric Powell recently arrived in London and composer Gerald , the living in Shepherd Market. At the time “flapper” novelist Enid Firminger, the 28 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 painter and critic Gerald Reitlinger (with Powell also became friendly with whom Powell would also often stay), the Wadsworth’s daughter Barbara (1914- gallery owner Freddy Mayor, the painter 2005), encouraging her to write by Paul Nash, the sculptor Henry Moore and providing her with her first typewriter and the painter-photographer-travel writer to develop her nascent skills with a Richard “Dick” Wyndham who lived ten camera. Indeed, during this period she minutes walk from Dairy Farm at took a number of amusing photographs Tickeridge Mill. carefully pasted into a series of that are highly evocative of a vanished age While Wadsworth was known as a of louchely high-spirited amusements generous host and a mixer of lethal yet which yet remain curiously innocent. In irresistible cocktails, guests such as Henry 1929, for example, Barbara took a Moore remarked that his weekend parties photograph of the actress Betty Arkwright were attended by an unusually large sitting on Powell’s lap in what can best be number of highly attractive young women. described as a cave-woman fancy dress One of these women, Enid Firminger, outfit – rather too skimpy to have ever caught Powell’s eye and for a while he was featured in The Flintstones. Arkwright, in love with her despite the fact that Dick apart from being the girlfriend of the Wyndham was also known to lust after her. filmmaker Ralph “Bunny” Keene To further complicate matters at the time (someone Powell would later encounter at Enid’s sister Joan was being pursued by the BBC), was a close friend of the Wadsworth’s protégé Tristram Hillier who notorious “it girl” of the day, Betty May, introduced both Wadsworth and Powell to whose memoirs Tiger Woman, despite their the eccentric painter Edward Burra. (In scandalous content, were published by April 1934 Burra, Wadsworth and Hillier Powell’s employers Duckworth’s – largely would exhibit at the Mayor Gallery in the due to Powell’s enthusiastic one and only London show of Unit One, recommendation. During the early 1930s the short-lived modernist art movement Powell and Burra often met Wadsworth founded by Paul Nash.) and his family holidaying on the Côte William Roberts. The Vorticists at the d’Azur. Sometimes Wadsworth was in the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring. 1915. company of Constant Lambert and it Edward Wadsworth seated on right. would appear from a letter Lambert wrote to Powell at the time (reproduced in Michael Barber’s well-crafted recent biography of Powell) that he and the artist were both connoisseurs of the many brothels of Marseille’s vieux port: As I write I am surrounded by so many Negroes and dwarfs that I can hardly believe I am not in the heart of Old Bloomsbury … One feels at any moment the homely figure of Dick Wyndham may emerge from a bordel, or, that Wadsworth will be seen trying to retrieve his hat from some old hag or other. All the female whores look 29 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 like Greta [Dick Wyndham’s wife] and all the male ones like Brian Howard [the homosexual Oxford “wit”] … My obsessions are becoming more pronounced I’m afraid but not quite so narrow. I feel rather like Walt Whitman – all races, all colours, all creeds, all sexes etc. [Barber, 2004, p.62.] It is possible that, during the early 1930s, Wadsworth introduced Powell to Misha Black who would design the covers for his first three published novels: Afternoon Men (1931), Venusberg (1932) and From A Edward Wadsworth. Light Sections. View to A Death (1933). By 1934, 1940. however, Powell was beginning to move away from the somewhat raffish world of the “Maresfield Set”. In March 1934 Sources: Barbara, who appears to have supplied one Photograph Albums and Papers in strong motive for Powell to visit Dairy possession of the Estate of Edward Farm, had married the German Olympic Wadsworth/Barbara von Bethmann- Ice Hockey team player Johann Albrecht Hollweg. von Bethmann-Hollweg. Wadsworth had somewhat withdrawn from the social whirl To Keep The Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of after being involved in a traffic accident in Anthony Powell. Volume II: Messengers of May 1934 in which a man was run over Day, Anthony Powell, Heinemann, and killed. Wadsworth was at the wheel at London, 1978. the time and although he was completely To Keep The Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of acquitted by the courts, he felt guilty that Anthony Powell. Volume III: Faces in My his strenuous social life might have Time, Anthony Powell, Heinemann, impaired his otherwise capable driving London, 1980. abilities. In December 1934 Powell attained a new degree of social Edward Wadsworth: A Painter’s Life: respectability through marriage to Lady Barbara Wadsworth, Michael Russell Violet Pakenham. They took a house at 47 (Publishing) Ltd., Salisbury, Wiltshire, Great Ormond Street – ironically only a 1989. few doors down from what had been in Form, Feeling and Calculation: The March 1914 the headquarters of the Rebel Paintings and Drawings of Edward Art Centre – the turbulent precursors to the Wadsworth, Jonathan Black, Philip Wilson Vorticists including Wyndham Lewis and Publishers, London, 2005. Edward Wadsworth. Dr Black is a Research Fellow in History of Art at * As connoisseurs of Powell are doubtless aware, the Dorich House Museum, Kingston University. Lambert provided the model for the character of furtively amorous composer Hugh Moreland in A © Dr Jonathan Black, October 2005 Dance To The Music of Time.

30 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Tea at The Chantry kindly invited us to afternoon tea. The Chantry was built in 1826, and is a by Stephen Holden Regency building rather in the style of those Italianate villas in nearby Bath. After the Society’s AGM on Saturday 15 Upon entering the hallway I was September 2001, the dozen of us who immediately struck by the wallpaper – it is attended were invited by Lady Violet a deep red with a very large pattern in Powell to Chantry Church for the black of a military helmet (it reminded me dedication of a memorial commemorating of Britannia’s on the old British coins) Anthony Powell. The church, built by framed with a fan of spears and swords. Gilbert Scott in 1846, is set in a relatively To the left of the front door is a hat stand empty graveyard. The service was with a tower of on , a Homburg attended by Lady Violet and about thirty uppermost. As we passed into the dining family, friends and well-wishers. The room I noticed two long muskets on the church’s incumbent, the Reverend Dr wall, possibly Afghan jezails. Martin Weymont arrived with his dog The dining room is dominated by the (possibly a Border Collie) who, though not massive William Pye head of Powell, allowed inside the church, took a great which stands on a table by the window. interest in the proceedings from the Among the pictures in the room are the doorway of the vestibule. A tablet shows 1934 portrait of Powell by Henry Lamb the church’s incumbents since 1846, and and the 1986 one by Rodrigo Moynihan. includes two by the name of Fussell, the Another portrait, by Henry Mee, hangs by family of ironmasters who built The the stairs. We sat down to tea: sandwiches Chantry. The service was short, with (cucumber, cream cheese with watercress, prayers and a single hymn, ‘Guide Me, O egg) and cake (, ginger, some Thou Great Jehovah’, a hymn that features others I missed). A Powell cat made a in . (Later one of the brief appearance, totally unimpressed by guests mentioned that while Powell was the dozen strangers in the room. I chatted writing that particular novel, she and Lady to Hugh Massingberd about the Channel 4 Violet were required to stand at the foot of series of Dance and he admitted he had The Chantry staircase and sing the hymn become somewhat of a “groupie” on the to ensure Powell upstairs did not make a various sets while filming. Later I looked mistake with the lyrics.) In dedicating the through a couple of sketchbooks in the memorial Martin Weymont stood on a pew library; one of a trip to Mexico, another of to reach the plaque. The plaque itself, a voyage around the Mediterranean. The designed by Richard Kindersley, is a water-colour sketches (by Lady Violet) simple one of slate: the Powell crest were proficient and brightly-coloured: surmounts the inscription, “In Memoriam depictions of ruins and sights, sketches of Anthony Dymoke Powell, Author – CH local people and fellow tourists. CBE of The Chantry.” Directly opposite is a plaque to Powell’s parents, by Richard It felt strange to be standing in the library Kindersley’s father, David. surrounded by the actual copies of the many books that Powell mentions in his When the service had finished we walked memoirs, Journals, novels and reviews. through a field past cows grazing to The All four walls had floor-to-ceiling white Chantry where Lady Violet had very bookcases, with larger art books on the

31 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 bottom shelf. Most of the books were class photo from Powell’s father’s days at missing their dust-. There were some military academy where a young collected sets of Hardy, James, Conrad, Bernard Montgomery is also a cadet). Kipling, Fitzgerald; well-thumbed editions Then I was shown the first-floor room of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu in where Powell did most of his writing. It French and English (both the Scott was difficult for me not to behave like a Moncrieff and Kilmartin translations) gawping tourist in an eagerly-anticipated together with a shelf of books on Proust; museum. It’s small, now a bedroom, with many French and Russian novels including old Penguin Classics of Dostoyevsky; many books by friends such as Kingsley Amis, VS Naipaul and Alison Lurie; books by Powell favourites such as Alexander Lernet-Holenia and Julian Maclaren Ross. The bookcase to the left of the fireplace held English and foreign editions of his own books, and those to which he’d contributed. John Powell very kindly showed me around some of the house. The staircase to the basement is lined with framed lists of people who subscribed to Heywood Hill booksellers to buy Dance as it was published. The walls of the downstairs boiler-room-cum-Gents are completely covered with a collage done by Anthony Powell. Even a knee-high alcove for some piece of plumbing has been painstakingly collaged. According to John he started with some old French posters and then over the next fifteen years added pictures cut from newspapers and magazines. Certain sections of wall are “themed”, for example one corner has a cluster of pictures of French writers. A photo of Clive James led John Powell to remark Anthony Powell’s memorial plaque in that James still held the house record for Chantry Church. Photograph Keith the most sausages consumed at breakfast. Marshall, 2001. The billiards room next door had a half- a view down the lawn to the fields and size billiards table, more bookshelves hills beyond. Along with some Charles holding bound copies of Chums and the Conder pictures and a caricature of Max Boy’s Own Paper (favourites of Erridge in Beerbohm, there were also the originals of Dance) and various genealogical works; some of the Mark Boxer (“Marc”) some military ; and a selection of cartoons from the Fontana editions of photographs (Powell crewing at Eton; a Dance (including one of Widmerpool as a 32 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 schoolboy), and the Osbert Lancaster drawings (Castlemallock, Billson Christmas Prize Competition appearing nude at Stonehurst) from the Penguin paperbacks of Dance. There was a copy of Coriolanus on the bedside table, This year contestants are invited reminding me of Powell’s habit, to write a review of one of the mentioned in the Journals, of reading restaurants mentioned in Dance. Shakespeare in bed. Back in the dining room, Keith Marshall Entries must be no more than was having a useful conversation with 300 words. Maximum 3 entries Lady Violet about the places Anthony per person. Powell had lived. She said Powell probably couldn’t have identified (in The prize is a year’s Infants of the Spring) all the odd guest- membership of the Society. houses and so on that his family stayed at in Kensington during World War 1. They Send entries with your name and discussed a suitable place for a blue plaque in London, both agreeing that 1 Chester address to: Gate would be the most appropriate. Christmas Competition 2005 Powell’s birthplace is a block of flats near Anthony Powell Society Westminster Cathedral, and Lady Violet 76 Ennismore Avenue thought blue plaques did not go well on blocks of flats. Greenford Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK As we left The Chantry I overheard Lady Fax: +44 (0)20 8864 6109 Violet and a friend, in what struck me as a very Powellian and apt way, begin to Email: [email protected] discuss the genealogy of some of the to arrive by noon on 31 January guests. 2006

I am very grateful to Lady Violet for the The winning entry will be the one which invitation both to the church and to The most amuses the Society’s Chairman. Chantry. It was much appreciated. As Powell would say in his Journals, after a The winner will be announced in the particularly enjoyable gathering of people, Spring 2006 Newsletter

“Good party.” Competition Conditions. The Society This article first appeared in the Newsletter #4. Chairman’s decision is final and binding. Entry is open to Anthony Powell Society members and non-members. No purchase necessary. Entries must be original and the work of the person submitting them. Maximum three entries per person. Entries to be no more than 300 words. No cash alternative. The closing date for entries is noon on 31 January 2006. No correspondence will be entered into. The Anthony Powell Society reserves the right to publish the entries.

33 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Afternoon Men

by Rick Marin

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into “You know, when he talks about being, a vast Heath Robinson mental adventure. Then I feel mechanism, dually controlled by reinspired.” them and lumbering gloomily down “Reinspired to what?” vistas of triteness. With a sort of “Just reinspired.” heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually “Do you feel hopeless now?” adapted emotions of each of them “Rather hopeless.” became synchronized, until the “Do you really?” unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. “A bit.” Later they dined at a restaurant quite “Come back with me to my flat,” said near the flat. Atwater, “and have a drink there.” What a paragraph! From pages 106-7 in “Why?” my Sun & Moon Classics paperback of “We might talk.” Afternoon Men, Anthony Powell’s under- “What about?” known 1931 comic novel. And uncannily “Well, inspiration and so on.” similar in cadence and denouement to the “Can’t we talk here?” hyperbolic hangover account in Lucky Jim, “It’s very noisy, isn’t it?” whose punch line is “He felt bad.” The “I suppose it is.” epigram, from The Anatomy of Melancholy Atwater said, “I’ve got some rather (“… they are a company of giddy-heads, interesting first editions. I should like afternoon men …”) echoes Gertrude to show them to you.” Stein’s “lost generation” prelude to The His standard pick-up line, we are to Sun also Rises. William Atwater – assume, because when Atwater and Lola Powell’s “weedy-looking young man” wash up his place, Powell writes, “He with tortoiseshell who works in a could not do all that stuff about the museum – is far from the battle-scarred books,” and offers only, “There are these newspaperman Jake Barnes. But I situate and then there are those.” this young Powell between Hemingway and Amis – an essential title in the canon Powell admired Hemingway’s staccato, of the modern male. World-weary stylized speech, but the satire of male- romanticism camouflaged in cynical female arbitration – equal parts satyr and carousing and laconic dialogue. The satire – anticipates Amis’s difficulties with following exchange is with a woman girls. Indeed, any man who’s been single, called Lola: and felt himself a lost generation of one, will read himself into Powell’s hero, or “Do you read Bertrand Russell?” antihero, or whatever you want to call him. “Why?” “When I feel hopeless,” she said, “I “I’m a dying man,” Atwater announces read Bertrand Russell.” fliply, though he seems roughly the same “My dear.” age as the author: 26. But his yearning for

34 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 life, and love, become palpable later on: literature. Atwater smoked.” This is about “He laughed and lay in her arms, kissing Lola, whom Atwater tells: “Men do treat her. The universe seemed notably absent.” women badly. You must have discovered These arms do not belong to Lola, whom that by now.” But the women worth he describes at one point as looking like a having, which is not to say that they are “gnome,” but to rather a temptress called had, are smarter than most of the men, and Harriett Twining. Both these women are at least as intriguing. On Susan Nunnery: consolation prizes for a “ridiculous, lovely “She was not tall and she had big eyes that creature” called Susan Nunnery. She made her seem as if she were all at once drives the plot, such as it is – three acts amused and surprised and at the same time called Montage, Perihelion, and disappointed.” And: “How impossible it Palindrome. Atwater goes to parties, was to think of London without her. And restaurants, his boring job, and ends up yet he’d only known her about five with a gang of minutes.” (there’s a debt to Waugh, too) at a house in The Powell man is one who feels deeply, Brighton. but prefers not to burden the world with Perihelion, of course, is the point in the those feelings unless he has no choice – as path of a celestial body that is nearest to when Susan Nunnery tells him she doesn’t the sun. I looked it up. I also look love him back. A keen social observer, he forward to dropping farouchely into casual has no time for affectation, pretension or conversation. What a friend of mine calls bores, least of all when they are him: Afternoon Men’s “diabolically indirect” “Atwater talked for a short time about style is also part of what makes it a “guy” beards in history. No one listened.” But book, I think. The attitude is, “Either you he enjoys a few rounds of facetious, idle get it or you don’t, but I’m not going to jabber in the company of like-minded explain it.” The impulse is always to giddy-heads. undercut anything too heavy. After “We are wasting our youth.” delivering a magnificent page-plus rant “Do you think so?” which includes the complaint that “love Fotheringham said: “Every minute has come to mean the most boring form of the precious seconds flit by. The hour lust,” a member of Atwater’s circle named strikes. Every moment we get a little Fotheringham says, “I suppose I must have sounded rather depressed. You see, I had a closer to our appointed doom.” rather heavy lunch.” This is a fellow about Doom is defined as gentlemen’s clubs and/ whom Atwater says, “The aura of or children, though before decade’s end journalism’s lower slopes hung around the world would be at war again and him like a vapor.” Powell’s writing would change in a way that would render unrepeatable such a Now, a feminist might accuse Powell of spare, funny, poignant one-off as misogyny for remarks like, “I could never Afternoon Men. be any more than a friend to any fat girl.” * Or: “The toasting fork was lying on the Rick Marin is author of a memoir, Cad: table and he picked it up and struck her Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor. He lives in with it once or twice, but not hard.” Or, New York. more subtly, “And then art. She talked * about that for some time. Or, alternatively, This article first appeared in Newsletter #12. 35 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Dance Music Moreland for that matter) could have improved on the appropriateness of his by John S Monagan selections. A Dance to the Music of Time provides Anthony Powell made great use of music numerous examples of Powell’s reliance to sharpen the narratives of his novels. on musical forms to heighten the Since dance is the symbol of his major atmosphere of the sequence. novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, it is Unfortunately, these selections are not appropriate that the accompanying art “music”, but are the lyrics which raise the should have been given prominence. memory of the music, but one can in most These insertions were numerous and cases supply the notes from long-time contrasting and they added color and memory. Of course, this deficiency was impact to the scenes in which they were eliminated in the Dance TV movie. employed. Their aptness was such that it might lead a reader to conclude that the Early in A Question of Upbringing, the author was a skilled musician, but such first novel of the Dance series, when was not the case. Music was not one of Jenkins, Stringham and Templer have his skills. As he wrote in his memoir, To returned to the school chapel for evensong Keep the Ball Rolling, he “had no musical after the Braddock alias Thorne incident, sensitivities.” At The Chantry, no the author conveys the atmosphere in was in evidence, nor did one see there a musical terms: banjo casually laid aside for the moment The voluntary droned quietly for a on the great table in the library. No time at this muted level of sound. collection of CDs jostled the vast Emotional intensity seemed to meet collection of books on the capacious and mingle with an air of shelves. Powell was not a singer nor was indifference, even of cruelty, within he an instrumentalist, although, as Lady these walls. Violet points out, his mother in younger days, played the banjo in charity concerts Then the congregation rose to sing a at Brighton. Still, while attendance at hymn: operas or choral events was never a chosen form of relaxation for Powell, no Vaughan As o’er each continent and island Williams or Elgar (or Lambert or The dawn leads on another day, The voice of prayer is never silent Nor dies the strain of praise away. As the singing began, the atmosphere changed and, as Nick said, “Somehow I felt rather moved as the hymn rolled on.” Appropriately, shortly before, and in contrast to this atmosphere of reverence, immediately after the contrived arrest of the master, Le Bas, when the trio of companions had entered the slovenly “tea and minerals” shop for “a cooling drink”, a Chapel from an early 20th gramophone was playing: century postcard. 36 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Everything is buzz-buzz now, in the close of The Kindly Ones, in an Everything is buzz, somehow: unexpectedly melodious voice he sings: You ring up on your buzzer There’s a long, long trail a-winding And buzz with one another Into the land … of my dreams Or, in other words, pow-wow. Where the nightingale … is singing This uninspired lyric underlines the sharp And the white moon beams. contrast in the radically different locales There’s a long, long night of waiting and atmospheres of the two milieux. Until my dreams all … come true. Somewhat later in A Buyer’s Market, after Sometimes the song assigned by Powell Nick has started his career in London, the appears at first notice to be inappropriate, flavor of the period is unmistakably as, at the start of Casanova’s Chinese conveyed by the band at the Restaurant rendering the saccharine “Pale Huntercombe’s dance playing the Rodgers Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar”. On and Hart: reflection, however, one realizes that it was not the physical experience that was We’ll have a – Blue Room a – pertinent, but the nostalgia of the poet New room for – two room – lamenting the loss of his beloved (“where while across the square in musical rivalry, are you now, who lies beneath your an opposing band plays a piece by the spell?”) as Jenkins and Moreland lamented same couple: the loss of the public house where the two had spent so many happy hours in earlier In the mountain greenery days. Where God makes the scenery. Powell adds to his striking characterization With these insertions, the carefree feel of of General Aylmer Conyers with the the late 1920s is indelibly conveyed. description in At Lady Molly’s of the Powell makes frequent use of from general, in solitude, doggedly practising at the old music hall programs to define a his cello, and one can almost hear the character, as in the scene in The Kindly struggle to reach the rising notes as he Ones where Private Bracey, industriously reaches the climax of what is undoubtedly polishing his officer’s , happily and Schubert’s “Ave Maria”. softly hums to himself: Powell also uses another musical reference Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday to add an unexpected facet to a character May be merry and bright, when Canon Fenneau reveals, in Hearing But I’m going to be married on Sunday; Secret Harmonies, that Scorpio Murtlock, Oh, I wish it was Sunday night. the fearsome cult leader, as “a beautiful little boy”, sang the soprano solo in “Hail, Ted Jeavons, the appealing husband of Gladdening Light” in the Canon’s choir. Lady Molly, the easy-going hostess and aunt of the Tolland children, provides a After Nick had joined the Army, he was symbolic background and commentary on assigned to a Territorial infantry regiment the end of a whole era and the future and, upon introduction to its encampment, revolutions of World War II when, in the as he was being escorted to his billet on a company of his brother Stanley, and Nick gloomy day, he and his companions entered the chapel Sardis whose depths

37 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 were shrouded in a cave-like darkness. As sing “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah”, they moved along, they were met by one which, as “Cwm Rhonda”, is practically of the more dramatic moments in the novel the national anthem of Wales: when Guide me, O thou great Jehovah at the far end of the cave, like the Pilgrim through this barren land: anthem of the soloist bursting I am weak, but thou art mighty, gloriously from a hidden choir, a Hold me with thy powerful hand. man’s voice, deep throated and This is one place where one would like to penetrating, sounded, rose, swelled, be able to hear the compelling strains of in a lament of heartbreaking the famous hymn as well as read the melancholy: words. That’s where I fell in love, But the soldiers’ songs are not always While stars above religiously directed. As if to show the Came out to play: coarse, male essence of the Army, an For it was fièsta, example offered is the ballad which a And we were so gay, group of soldiers directed at Maureen, the South of the border, barmaid in The Valley of Bones, as they Down Mexico Way… rolled by in their truck:

She’ll be wearing purple , And she’s always in the pox, And she’s Mickey McGillagan’s daughter, Mary Ann… Powell inserts music at sometimes unexpected occasions as when Ted Jeavons on one of his periods of relaxation, sitting with Nick in Dicky Umfraville’s , on a pause in the orchestra music, suddenly and unexpectedly began to sing: I could say such – wonderful things to you The Grosvenor Chapel There would be such – wonderful things to do – And, as the singer continued to lament his If you were the only – girl in the world need to depart, a sad and monotary tone And I was the only boy … was introduced to Nick’s military Apart from its use in the fictional setting to matriculation. strike a nostalgic note in the midst of the Perhaps the most rousing musical selection cabaret activity, this song must have been in the sequence is the vigorous chant on a favorite with Powell, since at his the march of the soldiers of the Welch direction it was sung at his memorial regiment in The Valley of Bones, as they service at Grosvenor Chapel on 4 March

38 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 2000. Allowing Jeavons a dual rôle as a undoubtedly magnificent, were. And, sort of Greek chorus, underlines the does a band “strum” or is that performance capacity of Powell to create an attractive reserved for the strings? But this is character who is unforgettable, although a sticking at trifles, unimportant in minor figure in the total tapestry. reviewing a memorable depiction of a vast, dramatic and memorable scene. On occasion, Powell’s instrumentation does raise some question. In The Soldier’s Incidentally, too, Powell has Nick, in The Art, for Moreland’s imaginary “Fire- Valley of Bones, contemplating testing watcher’s March”, he provides the Jimmy Brent’s knowledge of opera by composer with “drums, perhaps, triangle singing the “Volga Boat Song”, but the and oboe.” A rather skimpy orchestration, song is not an aria, but a folk melody often unless it is considered that brass, reeds and sung, as Jean Duport suggests, by percussion are impliedly included. Chaliapin. On Powell’s sensitivity to music, one may There are other examples of Powell’s remember Kingsley Amis’s account of skilful use of music to add color to his beginning after dinner, during a Powell narratives, but those I have cited will be visit to Swansea, to play a record set of sufficient to make the point. These cases Constant Lambert’s music, and Powell’s simply demonstrate one particular Powell departure for slumber before the second skill which, among his numerous others, record of the set could be played. testifies to the genius of one of the great novelists of our time. Extensively describing the August 1945 Victory service in St Paul’s in The Military This article first appeared in Newsletter #5. Philosophers, Powell necessarily includes the music, picturing Nick, with detailed ruminations, pondering the meaning of Blake’s lyrics to “Jerusalem” and joining in the singing of all three verses of the National Anthem. Nick’s analysis of the anthem repeats a common judgement about national anthems: “repetitive, jerky, subjective in feeling, not much ornamented by imagination nor subtlety of thought and phraseology, the words possessed at the same time an unpretentious expression of sentiments suited somehow to the moment. Admittedly, Powell rather whips through the thanksgiving musical program of the service, describing the band of the Welsh Guards as “strumming away” at Holst, Elgar, Grieg and Handel. One is left to wonder what the choral pieces, Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin

39 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Character Models for Dance particularly like to find the models for Canon Fenneau, Mrs Erdleigh, Scorpio Murtlock, Professor Gwinnett, Sunny by Keith Marshall & Julian Allason Farebrother and Bijou Ardglass, all of whom we feel should be particularly There is always much interest, much identifiable. debate and much speculation, over who Anthony Powell used as the models for the characters in A Dance to the Music of Time. The author has explicitly stated that this “novel-in-twelve-volumes” is not a roman-à-clef. Nonetheless at least a couple of dozen of the 400 characters are clearly based upon real persons known to the author, and have been identified with varying degrees of authority. In a number of instances these identifications have been confirmed by Powell, or admitted as sources in his Journals. Powell has explained that fictional characters are always mixtures; no-one Kenneth Widmerpool “is” anybody. Friends of his such as Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Muggeridge Widely believed to have been based upon were too complete to be turned into Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, known fiction; he has said, “It is much more at the bar as “Bullying Manner”, who likely to be one’s bank manager or became in Macmillan’s dentist”. Indeed questions about models government, having been elevated as for characters have become the bane of Viscount Dilhorne. [Anthony Powell, Powell’s life: “People won’t believe that Journals 1990-1992, p 162] you are capable of inventing characters,” One episode which Powell has admitted he protests. drawing from Manningham-Buller was his All right a couple of people might getting a schoolfellow sacked from Eton occur to you but to make it work you for making improper advances to another have to invent a ‘third person’ to pull boy. [Anthony Powell, Personal it all together. Communication to Kenneth Rose] [Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 25 The novelist planted clues to September 1997] Widmerpool’s true identity in the third And consequently he had little time for volume of his autobiography. He refers to people who do what we have done here: the nickname of an unnamed officer under analyse the character models. whom he worked briefly in the during the war. It is The Papal Bun If anyone has good evidence for other – “a play upon his double barrelled possible character models [especially if surname, creed, demeanour, personal these can be substantiated] then please appearance ... a never failing source of contact the Newsletter. We would 40 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 laughter.” [Anthony Powell, Faces in My Colvin, former ambassador to Mongolia, Time, pp 155-6] who was a member of the same club, the St James where Capel-Dunn was known Kenneth Rose discovered that the historian there as “Young Bloody”. [Daily Desmond Seward had managed to deduce Telegraph, 30 December 1991] Widmerpool’s identity. This Rose put to Powell, who, in his elliptical way, replied: The Earl of Longford has claimed to be a “My impression is that Seward, a most source for later parts of Widmerpool’s life, amusing fellow, is on to something upon which Powell has commented “Lord there ...” [Sunday Telegraph, 29 Longford would like to think so.” December 1991] Widmerpool’s espionage career appears to have been based upon the cases of the Labour MP Denis Pritt, a GRU (Soviet Army Intelligence) agent involved in pre- war espionage, who, in the early fifties was expelled from the his party for Stalinism. [Nigel West, The Illegals, Hodder & Stoughton, 1994] The other possible source is Jeremy, later Lord, Hutchinson QC, who was suspected by MI5 of running a Communist front organisation for lawyers. He defended George Blake, the Russian spy in SIS. The identification of Widmerpool as based [Nigel West, A Matter of Trust, Weidenfeld upon Denis Cuthbert Capel-Dunn was then confirmed in AP’s Journals. [Anthony & Nicholson, 1982] Powell, Journals 1990-1992, pp 151, 161- Capel-Dunn died in an air crash in 1945 2] returning with other officials from the San Francisco Conference that established the The son of a consular clerk in , United Nations. As Kenneth Rose has Capel-Dunn became a barrister, and then a pointed out, had colonel in the Intelligence Corps, under he not sacked whom Powell served on attachment to the Powell the Cabinet Office for nine weeks in 1943. novelist would When Powell, an acting major, asked to be probably have retained in his post for a further fortnight shared his fate. in order that his rank might become As it was, the substantive, Capel-Dunn refused on the subordinate grounds “My nerves wouldn’t stand it”. survived to [Desmond Seward, personal make his boss communication to Julian Allason] immortal. “Like Widmerpool, Capel-Dunn was a [Kenneth Rose, very fat, extremely boring, Sunday overwhelmingly ambitious arriviste. His Telegraph, 29 conversations were hideously detailed and December humourless”, according to Mr John 1991]

41 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

A Weekend Invitation was accommodated in one of the principal guestrooms, where she discovered in the by Julian Allason bedside table several capsules of amyl nitrate – ‘poppers’ supposed to confer Key scenes in Dance are set in stately aphrodisial powers – and a French maid’s homes, and Powell assumes a familiarity outfit. Mentioning this to colleagues over with the rhythm of country house life dinner served by the Smith-like Bristol that may now be fading. butler, she was subsequently amused to find the drawer empty when she retired. Victor Hervey cut a figure sharp enough to warrant a place in the dramatis personae of A recent visit to Ickworth to inspect a Waugh’s satires. Aristocratic gunrunner, curiously under-catalogued Titian and party-giver, gentleman burglar, convict and some Chinese porcelain worthy of floggee, the sixth Marquess of Bristol was Pamela’s attention set me to reflect upon perhaps too colourful a figure to provide the country house parties in the Dance. character inspiration to a serious novelist, Each tableau intrigues by the manner in although acquainted with several. His which it both conforms to, and departs seat, Ickworth in Suffolk, was the venue from what was – and to some extent for numerous country house parties even remains – a rigid social prescription. What beyond its passage into the hands of the then was the format for the country house Treasury in lieu of death duties. His son, weekend during the decades of the Dance? the seventh Marquess, known as John Convention demanded arrival upon a Jermyn, maintained the family tradition of Friday afternoon in time for tea, at which a wild partying. Having retained a lease on gift would be presented to the hostess. Ickworth’s residential east wing he Meanwhile suitcases would be carried up terrorised National Trust visitors to the rest to bedrooms and unpacked by servants. At of the estate by racing vintage cars through the statelier homes cars were driven round it. to the stable block, washed and with luck By the time of his death from drug refuelled. Guests were then expected to addiction in 1997 aged 44 little of disappear until seven or so when cocktails Jermyn’s £30 million inheritance survived. were served prior to dining. In the Sotheby’s were called in by the executors Midlands it was usual to sound the gong to auction off what remained. The not for dinner – that would be announced director, a glamorous American blonde, by the butler – but twenty minutes earlier to winkle any latecomers out of the bathroom. (En-suite facilities were not

widely adopted until the 1980s, and are still rare in Scottish country houses and castles.) The ‘placement’ at dinner was automatic, being protocol driven, unless one of the lady guests was possessed of exceptional beauty, wit, or embonpoint, in which case Ickworth House, Suffolk promotion to the host’s left (but rarely

42 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

and prettiest women. If there was no ball to attend a neighbouring house party might join the dinner, swelling numbers to two dozen or more, and providing occasion to deploy the best porcelain and silver. Minor domestic staff would join butler and footmen to serve, and it was not unusual for servants from the visiting house to assist. Billiards, charades and party games might follow at the less stuffy houses. right) hand might be gazetted. After Photographic tableaux enjoyed a brief cheese the ladies would retire, leaving the vogue in the 1920s: Sir Magnus seems to men to port and cigars, and perhaps to have been a late starter – or a tenacious ‘water the lawn’. It is still considered poor promoter of the practice. form to keep your host up late on a Friday Appearance at breakfast on Sunday evening, particularly in the winter when an morning was no more obligatory than early rise for shooting might be on the attendance at Church from the Great War cards. on. Luncheon was another matter; at it Whatever the season a hearty breakfast gossip from the night before would be could be anticipated, to include such exchanged and loose ends tied. Guests’ dishes as devilled kidneys, kippers and departure would take place no later than cold cuts. Shooting brakes and Land 3pm, after the servants had been tipped. Rovers stood by to take the ‘guns’, never Such was the model to which all but the more than eight in number, off to the first most bohemian subscribed, a model drive. Some of the ladies might follow to scaleable downwards to more modest pick up downed birds, or join the ‘guns’ houses, but varying little even in ducal for lunch. palaces. Outside the shooting season Saturday To the contemporaneous reader of the afternoons were usually devoted to Dance such a pattern might have been cultural affairs – or just affairs. Options second nature, even if experienced only could include a tour of the property, its through the mediation of farceur or pictures and dungeons, a game of bridge, detective novelist. Today it seems the or expeditions to nearby churches or social minuet of a lost age. Yet any guest archaeological remains. Planchette and invited to stay at a Stourwater or even a bezique seem to have been reserved to the Thrubworth today would still be well unromantic upon rainy afternoons. advised to enquire, “Shall we be dressing Until the Second World War and for dinner?” But not, alas, at Ickworth, tails were the norm for Saturday dinner. now an hotel decorated in Festival of By the 1960s these had almost entirely Britain style. And certainly not in a given way to dinner jackets (tuxedos) French maid’s outfit. worn with black , long This article first appeared in Newsletter #16. remaining usual for all but the youngest

43 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Life Imitating Art…?

by Paul Guinery

At the end of the 1970s, I joined the BBC around the time when Dance was being dramatised for Radio 4. The training course I was supposed to be on was subsequently postponed indefinitely, a victim of some bureaucratic cut or other. But at least the far more paternal BBC of those days did offer me other temporary jobs. After a well-meant but quite uncongenial stint in “Engineering Purchasing” (where I managed to have 3,000 expensive but totally unsuitable batteries sent in error to a transmitter in Kirk O’Shotts) I found myself looking after the “sound effects” store-room for Drama Dept. Like some forgotten cobwebbed attic in Gormenghast Castle, this was located in the eaves of and displaying a curious posture: heels Broadcasting House. Very few people had together, feet turned outwards, hands on even heard of it, let alone knew where to hips. What role was he playing? He never find it but it was in fact right next to seemed to have any lines to speak and I Studio 6A where Dance was being realised eventually that this mute thespian recorded. Studio managers involved in the was in fact “the author” himself. The production would come in to collect items episode being taped must have been one of for “spot effects” ie. those done “on the the two devoted to A Question of spot” in the studio rather than from pre- Upbringing for Powell’s athletic poses recorded discs. The store was a were surely unconscious imitations of Le bewildering cornucopia of bric-à-brac: tea- Bas’s stance, described, I remembered cups, locks and door-handles, old later, as that of an oriental god or knave gramophones, various forms of bells and from a pack of cards. Though this was the whistles. One of my duties was to paint posture Le Bas took up when “vexed” I the letters “FX” in a rather repulsive shade think it might be going too far to imagine of blue onto every object there – I was that Powell was necessary displeased. He never quite sure why. Friendly studio certainly didn’t intervene in the rehearsal. managers took pity on me and would In any case the BBC producer, Graham encourage me to into the recording Gauld, was very good at his craft and got, cubicle of 6A if I felt like a break from I thought, excellent results from his casts. these important custodial chores. One But, for what it’s worth, it was a afternoon, as I watched part of Dance memorable vignette that’s stayed with me being rehearsed prior to a “take”, I noticed and a not insignificant example of life an actor standing apart from his colleagues imitating art … 44 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Anthony Powell’s Cats magazine (25 November 1989) by Alison Nadel entitled “Animal Passions: Anthony by Michael Goldman Powell’s Cat”. The singular is appropriate because the article majors on Snook, the To me one of Anthony Powell’s most cat resident at the time of the interview on endearing personal characteristics was his which it is based. I noticed a copy of the love of cats. The way that this eminent article on display in the exhibition in the writer of slightly mandarin demeanour Eton College Library which was one of the would treat his cats as if they had human most interesting features of the 2001 personalities must surely appeal to all cat Anthony Powell conference. I am grateful lovers. Ailurophobes, however, need not to Michael Meredith, the Librarian, for stop reading here because Anthony sending me a photocopy very promptly in Powell’s attitude to his cats was not response to my request. Last but certainly cloying or repellent – as some might find, not least, Lady Violet helped me to bring for example, JR Ackerley’s attitude to his this article up to date and she was also dog Tulip – but sober and sensible, at least very prompt in replying to my queries. to other ailurophiles. Anthony Powell’s Alison Nadel’s article and the third volume written references to his cats resemble the of Anthony Powell’s memoirs give rather deadpan references to minor contradictory information on his first cat characters in the novels. and I prefer to rely on the autobiography. The great mystery, however, is why no cat Soon after their marriage, while living in appears in A Dance to the Music of Time Great Ormond Street, the Powells acquired even in a walk-on part. I am relying on a Siamese cat whom they named Bosola my memory, having read each volume as it after the devious character in The Duchess appeared and then the whole of the of Malfi. sequence twice, though not recently, but Bosola was a strong feline Lady Violet Powell confirms my personality, intelligent, serious, impression. I am also grateful to her for noting such things as Violet tying an pointing out the only appearance of cats, to unaccustomed ribbon in her hair, but her recollection, in Anthony Powell’s also a trifle neurotic. We thought a fiction: that is in Agents and Patients companion of his own breed might (pages 26 and 29, original 1936 edition): steady Bosola’s nerves, give him a Stepping over two cats … Maltravers friend to confide in, so a year or two walked across the room … The two later, after we had moved from cats who until now had been asleep Bloomsbury to Regent’s Park, rose simultaneously and pompously acquired another Siamese neuter. walked across the room. This was not a success. Paris (his pedigree name), younger than Bosola, There are some mentions of cats in the was hearty, carefree, bouncing, not third and fourth volumes of To Keep the unfriendly, but Bosola could never Ball Rolling and many in the Journals: this get used to his extrovert ways, was article is mainly based on those sources. indeed a little afraid of him. Also helpful, though divergent from the Nevertheless, although not main sources in one or two instances, was developing truly fraternal feelings an article in Weekend towards each other, Bosola and Paris

45 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 would occasionally enter into a honour at the venerable age of temporary alliance to exclude from nineteen-and-a-half. what they regarded as their own territory any cat they looked on as a Next, in 1977, came Trelawney social inferior. a Cornish Rex also of aristocratic origins … one of the most At the outbreak of war in 1939 the two affectionate cats I have ever met, and Siamese were sent to live in the country one of the most intelligent, though not far from London, an arrangement which, intended to be temporary, turned less intellectual than Fum. out to be permanent. The name derived partly from his Cornish origin and “partly because one of his After the war, in 1946, there was a Russian ancestors was called Marina Mystic, Blue called Smoke who was killed in a thereby recalling Dr Trelawney in Dance.” road accident only a month after the It is Trelawney’s tremendous appetite, not Powells acquired him. The policeman Albert’s, that Lady Violet remembers, also who found him gave them a non-pedigree his capacity for opening doors in order to kitten, tabby with a white front, get at food. It may be that this talented cat whom they called Albert – after Albert could also read, for he tore down from one Lechat, a Belgian assistant military attaché food cupboard a notice which said “Keep with whom Anthony Powell had worked during World War II. He was “a very bolted”! popular member of the local cat There are several references to Trelawney community” in Chester Gate and “also on in the Journals, mostly to do with his exceptionally good terms with dogs.” dislike of being photographed. He appears Albert moved with the Powells to The in one of the photographs in the Journals Chantry in 1952 “complaining loudly all whereas Albert and Flixey Fum appear the way in a crowded railway carriage.” twice each. However, it think it must have He took a little time to get used to his new been Trelawney who, I remember, sat surroundings then “settled down rather self composedly on Anthony Powell’s knee -consciously as a country cat.” He died of during a television interview some time in over-eating when he was thirteen in 1958, according to Anthony Powell, but Lady Violet’s memory is different: “Albert did not die of over-eating” but simply of age. A pedigree dark brown Burmese followed, called Kingsplay Flixey Fum, brother of the Burmese champion. Anthony Fum, though he liked being Powell with photographed on social occasions, Trelawney. was unambitious in the professional This 1984 field. Something of an intellectual, a photograph by strong character with a warm nature, John Monagan he was universally loved and is used as the respected. He died full of years and Society’s postcard. 46 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 the 1980s, washing himself apparently thirteen, “greatly mourned.” Lady Violet unconcerned by the camera. writes that Snook: The saddest of all Anthony Powell’s has been replaced by Jake, a 13 references to his cats is that in the Journal month tabby (no white) with Maine for 7 May 1988: Coon ears. He is most affectionate and comes from a rescue centre near The Trelawney (cat) situation has Trowbridge. He has settled in well. now come to the worst. He is a little bag of bones, finding difficulty in Anthony Powell’s A Writer’s Notebook eating, lifting his head with an effort, contains only one major reference to cats, tho’ will jump on my knee. It breaks in the form of a list of possible names: one’s heart. Only six months ago the Blogram Vautrain Lord Jim vet commented that it was nice to see a cat of Trelawney’s age looking so Gentleman Brown Zero well. He is now within a month off The puzzle here is the spelling of the first his eleventh birthday. V and John two names. Blogram must surely be took him in today to the vet to make derived from Robert Browning’s Bishop an end of things. I felt ashamed that Blougram and Vautrain from Balzac’s this unpleasant job fell on them. Vautrin, so why the variant spellings? Dreadfully distressing … A Very, Four possible explanations suggest very sad day. themselves: Maintaining a pedigree/moggie alternating ● they were deliberate (but for what sequence, the next Powell cat was Snook, reason?) so called because on 1 July 1988 he came ● Anthony Powell made two mistakes from the Snook family at a nearby farm. (surely not?) The month old tabby kitten with white ● errors occurred in transcribing the shirt front and white paws seemed “very notebook pleased with himself.” ● poor copy editing and/or proof reading. On 26 September “Snook recognised Do other readers of the Newsletter have Kingsley [Amis] at once as a cat victim, any other theories? sat on him, then to show off jumped on the lintel of the library door.” Other journal The Weekend Telegraph article is entries also refer to Snook showing off, illustrated with a photograph of the “preposterously” on one occasion. Snook handsome Snook, with an indignant frequently asserted his presence. On 26 expression, being held in a slightly October 1989 Anthony Powell was talking undignified pose by Anthony Powell. The to a goat in the Paddock Field when he interview ends with Anthony Powell found himself “roughly pushed aside by addressing Snook who has been asleep Snook. The goat and Snook greatly behind the curtains: “’Would you like to interested in each other, eventually go outside, Snook?’ he asks with grave touched noses in recognition of formality.” As the interviewer writes: “he friendship.” Two years later Snook caught speaks of his cats as if they are old friends, a bat which had somehow got into the with unselfconscious affection.” Powell library. Snook died of kidney This article first appeared in Newsletter #5. failure in autumn 2001 at the age of

47 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Lady Violet Powell: association with the Travellers’ Club, An Appreciation which is to be the subject of my talk for the Society at the Club on 4 March 2002. by Hugh Massingberd From the start she took a typically

th encouraging interest in the activities of the Although she was approaching her 90 Society. As she said in her pithy and birthday – which would have fallen on 13 perceptive message which was read out at March – the news of Lady Violet’s death the beginning of the Eton Conference in on 12 January came as a devastating April 2001, she was delighted “that there shock. Her bright, vital, life-enhancing is every prospect that the Anthony Powell personality had blithely banished any hint Society will Keep the Ball Rolling”. The of old age. Indeed if the question had ever captivating friendliness with which she occurred to me, after taking “a dish of welcomed members of the Society to the tea” (as Sillery would have put it) with her Service of Dedication in Chantry Church at The Chantry, following a day at Wincanton Races shortly before Christmas, I would confidently have backed her to emulate the years of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, with whom, as a girl in , Violet used to play the then popular game of “Beaver” – they lived on opposite sides of Bruton Street, where the present Queen was born in 1926. Violet liked to recall how a winning hand was dealt her by her “Uncle Eddie” (the 18th Lord Dunsany, himself a mighty bearded poet and big-game hunter), who spotted a long-bearded priest crossing Berkeley Square. At what turned out to be our last meeting, Violet’s delicious anecdotes were as acute and amusing as they had been throughout the thirty heady, happy years of my visits to The Chantry. Her warm “Welsh brown eyes” (she rejoiced in sharing a descent from the Rhys dynasty with her husband) sparkled with that extraordinary benevolent beadiness which was all her own. No one I have ever met had such a subtle and sympathetic sense of the ridiculous or a more oblique and deft appreciation of the absurdity of the human condition. With her characteristic imaginative kindness Violet was recalling Memorial plaque for Lady Violet Powell vignettes about Anthony Powell’s long in Chantry Church. Photograph by Keith Marshall, 2005. 48 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 for the memorial plaque to Anthony Significantly, their whirlwind courtship Powell following the Society’s first annual featured Tony reading Violet some of his general meeting last September will never work-in-progress. The handling of the be forgotten by all those present. Nor will complex ramifications of Dance, in her generous hospitality and lively particular, owed much to Violet’s masterly curiosity in entertaining everyone to tea grasp of plot. For example, it was Violet afterwards and giving Society members who reminded Tony that Canon Fenneau, the thrill of exploring The Chantry, with its Murtlock’s patron in Hearing Secret powerfully Powellian atmosphere. Not the Harmonies, had been one of the least of the pleasures of that magical anonymous freshmen at Sillery’s tea-party afternoon was the opportunity to see some in A Question of Upbringing. of Violet Powell’s exotically illustrated So strong was the bond of the Powells’ travel albums. collaborative partnership that one wonders Violet was an avid reader of the whether the Society should even be Newsletter. She vetted Michael renamed “The Anthony & Violet Powell Goldman’s fascinating article on “Anthony Society”. Violet’s of Anthony Powell’s Cats” with the same enjoyment Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is and editorial zeal that she used to correct certainly an illuminating pictorial the drafts of the great novelist himself – as companion to the addictive twelve-volume well as of all those who wrote about him sequence. It was Violet who saw the three and had the gumption to submit their volumes of Anthony Powell’s Journals drafts to her shrewd scrutiny. She was the through the press, as she devotedly cared supreme expert on the Sage of The for him during his years of illness; and she Chantry, the unique repository of also arranged the posthumous publication Powelliana. of his A Writer’s Notebook last year. Yet Violet Powell’s contribution to her Naturally, many have assumed that Lady husband’s work has tended to be Isobel Tolland in Dance must be a portrait underestimated. Surely, though, her of Lady Violet Pakenham. Much as phenomenal memory, encyclopaedic Anthony Powell disdained such crass knowledge, meticulous accuracy, conclusions, the impish personality of intelligent observation and incisive insight Lady Isobel – so admirably delineated in into human nature all played a major part Cathleen Ann Steg’s paper at the Eton in the creation of Anthony Powell’s Conference – bears a vivid resemblance to novels? Anyone fortunate enough to have the novelist’s wife. Isobel’s “remarkable overheard even a smidgen of the hilarious knowledge of obscure and forgotten and harmonious conversation between fiction” rings a resonant bell, for instance, Tony and Violet, which began in and the first reference to her is irresistible. September 1934 at her ancestral home of “You might like Isobel,” the gossipy Chips Pakenham Hall (now Tullynally Castle) in Lovell says to Nick. “I believe she is a bit County Westmeath and continued of a highbrow when she isn’t going to ‘unabated’ – as Violet put it in the second .” volume of her autobiography – until his Violet’s own “remarkable knowledge” of death in March 2000, will be in no doubt literature bore fruit in more than a dozen on that score. books, which included studies of such

49 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 varied authors as Jane Austen, Somerville return to her birthplace at North Aston in and Ross, Flora Annie Steel, Ivy Compton- Oxfordshire (where her father Brigadier- Burnett, Margaret Kennedy and EM General the 5th Earl of Longford’s death in Delafield. She also wrote a biography of action at Gallipoli in 1915 is her grandmother, Margaret Countess of commemorated in the Roll of Honour in , founder of the Victoria League, and the church). Her younger son, John, had three volumes of autobiography. She was, spotted a face in the window of the old in short, a very fine writer in her own schoolroom in the house. “I did not pause right, with a brilliantly light touch that to see who was looking out of the combined dry irony with gentle sympathy. window,” wrote Violet, “in case it should As HD Ziman, literary editor of The Daily have been myself. Nor was I able to Telegraph, wrote when reviewing Five Out identify which among a group of oak trees of Six (her autobiographical masterpiece), was the one grown from an acorn at my she had “a sense of social comedy birth and planted out by me on my seventh qualified only by her affection. It would birthday. Indeed, they all seemed equally be difficult to portray with less malice or gnarled.” more mischief the eternal war of high- Later in the grey afternoon, Georgia spirited children against grown-ups.” scattered her grandmother’s ashes from a The high-spiritedness of her own great- boat rowed by her brother, Archie, on the grandchildren struck a special chord with lake below the house. (Two years earlier her in her last years at The Chantry. Their their father, Tristram, and uncle, John, had mother, Georgia Coke, read a haunting performed a similar ceremony for Anthony passage from the last volume of her Powell.) Suddenly the sun shone through grandmother’s autobiography, The the clouds evoking an imperishable Departure Platform, at the Thanksgiving memory of Violet’s sparkling eyes. Service for Violet’s life at Chantry Church This article first appeared in Newsletter #6. on 18 January. This described Violet’s

Lady Violet Powell with William Pye’s bust of Anthony Powell. Photograph Auke Leistra. 50 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 The Girl with the Long Back by Bill James

reviewed by John A Gould Banana Manse Shale, and the recent upstart Ferdy Dubal. Iles uses a At the end of each of Bill James’s Machiavellian network of grasses, mordant, witty Harpur and Iles novels blackmail, and dark legerdemain to keep readers are left to count the bodies: dead this slimy ensemble in order. enforcers, drug-dealers, grasses (British for stool-pigeons), undercover detectives, The Chief is being promoted somewhere even (in Roses, Roses, #10) Harpur’s wife else out of town, however, and his Megan. The Girl with the Long Back, replacement may destroy the fragile twentieth in the series, is no exception. It ecology Iles has promoted for so many opens with Harpur’s primary grass, Jack volumes. The ACC is further distracted by Lamb, shooting down two of drug Fay-Alice Rideout, the 18-year-old executive Ferdy Dubal’s low-lifes, Percy daughter of his lately run-over grass, who Kellow and Jerry “Mildly Sedated” is heading off to Oxford on a police Henschall, to protect an undercover officer scholarship for children of grasses. Fay- with a somewhat blown cover. (Harpur is Alice is the Girl with the Long Back, and present, but as a British cop, he doesn’t Iles is quite taken with her: “The ACC normally carry a handgun.) It ends with loved to get among teenage schoolgirls if two different bad folks being gunned down they looked clean and were wearing light by other bad folks. And in the middle, a summery clothes.” (pp 40-1) couple of less than savory sorts are on two Holding things together in this book – as separate occasions run over by persistent in all the others – is Detective Chief bad guy vehicles. Six are dead; Bill Constable Harpur, the real hero of the James’s criminals are their own worst series. The only person who can keep enemies. pace with Iles, he must constantly pour oil These murders tend to happen off-stage, over the waters his superior has roiled. He around the corner or just over the hill. disagrees with what he calls “pacts with Perhaps more significantly, like most of villains. Lawlessness was then James’s corpses, the dead crooks are killed normality.” (p136) Without Iles’s by live ones, albeit with the approval and knowledge he places Louise Machin, a occasional encouragement of the police young detective, undercover in Ferdy officers closest to the action, especially Dubal’s drug-pushing organization, and ACC Desmond Iles and DCS Colin does his best to keep her alive thereafter. Harpur. With her help and that of favorite grass Jack Lamb, he somehow manages to find Desmond Iles, the Assistant Chief out nearly everything, almost in the nick of Constable of James’s fictional city’s force, time. is ruthless, egotistical, brilliant, and marginally insane. Under (or perhaps Harpur also holds together his own because of) Chief Mark Lane’s ineffectual domestic ménage – his two daughters, Jill leadership, he has been able to orchestrate and Hazel, perpetually 13 and 15, and his a peace of sorts among the various drug girlfriend, Denise, a university student barons: Panicking Ralph Ember, Top who has been 19 since just before his wife 51 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 was killed, ten volumes ago. Denise has passionate remarks. Similarities exist, brought monogamy and stability to however. Both authors love playing with Harpur’s household, virtues absent in the names: for Powell, Dickie Umfraville, earlier books. Scorpio Murtlock, Bijou Ardglass, and of course Kenneth Widmerpool – along with A few of his readers may be yet unaware some 400 other characters – weave that Bill James is really a Welshman through his 12 volumes. James, too, has named James Tucker, the author of The great fun naming his crooks. Take some of Novels of Anthony Powell, an early study the late drug-dealers: Beau Derek (as ugly of Powell’s work, including the massive as his namesake Bo is not), Eleri ap 12-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Vaughn (elderly but effective) and Stan Time. Powell is the grand master of the Stanfield (“What,” asks Iles, “his mother serial novel. It’s an interesting game to see run out of sounds?”) The most striking what Tucker/James has brought from similarity between the two serialists is the Dance to his long detective series. In relationship between their two main earlier volumes he has tucked in sly asides, characters. In the seventh novel of Dance, such as in The Lolita Man (#3) a remark The Soldier’s Art, Powell’s narrator, the by Megan Harpur at her literary group, watchful, reserved Nick Jenkins, here a about the sexual inadequacy of wartime Army lieutenant, finds himself Widmerpool, Powell’s boorish, egotistical working for his nemesis, Widmerpool, antagonist. But none of these appear in now a major doing divisional Long Back. administrative work. Widmerpool is There are of course many more differences ambitious beyond measure, continually between them than similarities. Whereas manipulating the military system for his Powell is scrupulous about the passage of own ends. He is, Powell explains, one time – not surprisingly, given his title – for who lives by the Will, and he makes James time is utterly frozen. Harpur is Jenkins’s life miserable. Here is the model still in his late thirties after 20 volumes, for Harpur and Iles. Most fictional and Denise is forever young, bless her. detective pairs fall into one of two Quite obviously both men’s styles lie miles categories. Either they are both equals at apart. Powell writes things like, “There is solving crimes – eg. Tony Hillerman’s a strong disposition in youth, from which Chee and Leaphorn or James McClure’s some individuals never escape, to suppose Kramer and Zondi – or the sleuth superior that everyone else is having a much more in rank gets the credit – Holmes and enjoyable time than we are ourselves.” Watson or Colin Dexter’s Morse and Such Latinate vocabulary and construction Lewis, say. As ACC Iles should be the are missing entirely from James, who is main crimebuster, but he is so clearly something of the master of the adverb. beyond the pale that we regard him with a After the ACC delivers an impromptu, sort of appalled amusement: brilliant but sardonic eulogy at Fay-Alice’s father’s bent, living entirely by the Will. Harpur, funeral, in which he names four drug- just clever enough to understand what Iles dealers present at the ceremony, Harpur is up to, is our Nick Jenkins, struggling to muses: “So this was the pulpited Iles, and keep the beat of his Dance while the crime the real Iles, most probably.” (p80) The plays on. “most probably” liberates the sentence, This review first appeared in the 4 July 2004 sending clouds of ambiguity over Iles’s edition of the Boston Globe.

52 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

The Quotable Powell

Oh, my brethren, think on that open valley, think on it with me ... a valley, do I picture it, by the shaft of a shut-down mine, where, under the dark mountain side, the slag heaps lift their heads to the sky, a Anthony Powell Resides Here valley such as those valleys in which you CRAWFORD DOYLE BOOKSELLERS seeks yourselves abide ... Journey with me, my and sells early editions of Anthony brethren, into that open valley, journey Powell’s works together with those of with me ... Know you not those same dry other distinguished British authors such bones? ... You know them well ... Bones as Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, , Henry Green and without flesh and sinew, bones without James Lees-Milne. In addition to rare skin and breath ... They are our bones, my books, we offer a complete collection of brethren, the bones of you and of me, new books in our store near the Metropolitan Museum. Catalogs issued bones that await the noise and the mighty upon request. shaking, the gift of the four winds of 1082 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10028 which the prophet of old did tell ... Must Open seven days per week Telephone: 212 289 2345 we not come together, my brethren, [email protected] everyone of us, as did the bones of that Member, Antiquarian Booksellers’ ancient valley, quickened with breath, Association of America, Inc. bone to bone, sinew to sinew, skin to skin ... Unless I speak falsely, an exceeding great army … [Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones. Quoted in Writers Photographs by Sally Soames] Why Not Advertise Here? *** –––––– Display Advert Rates Wednesday, 23 July [1986] Full Page: £30 V and I watched on TV the wedding of ½ page or full column: £20 Prince Andrew & Miss Sarah Ferguson, now Duke & Duchess of York. Unusually 1/3 page (horizontal): £15 good show. The bride’s father, Major ¼ page (½ column): £10 Ronald Ferguson, late The Life Guards, 1/6 page (1/3 column): £8 had braid piping on his . As he is B&W artwork only not old enough for this to have been a *** normal for (Goodhart, for Flyer inserts: £20 per A5 sheet instance, had it on his) one presumes him + printing at cost still wearing the he had at Eton when *** in Pop, braid being a Pop privilege. It Small Ads would be interesting to check this. Free to Society members [Anthony Powell, Journals 1982-1986] Others 10p/word, minimum £3

53 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Home Sweet Home: Anthony Powell was born at 44 Ashley Gardens in Powell’s Residences Westminster – a block of flats very close to Westminster Cathedral which still exists by Dr Keith C Marshall today. By the time he was nine, at the outbreak of the Great War, the family had already moved several times, although Anthony Powell, that great fictional there had been some settled time at 25 th chronicler of the early 20 century beau Albert Hall Mansions in Kensington Gore monde must have lived at some wonderful (almost opposite the Albert Memorial; and places. Well no, he didn’t. Not for him again still there today). In autumn 1914 at the elegant Italian villas of Sir Harold the outbreak of the Great War the Powell Acton or homes in both fashionable family were at Stonedene – the 1890s Chelsea and rugged North Cornwall of Sir haunted bungalow near Bordon, . Powell spent much of his which was to be the model for life in what were, by contrast, relatively Stonehurst in The Kindly Ones. Stonedene modest, though not always unfashionable, was demolished in the late 1980s to be homes. replaced by Stonedene Close – so at least Being brought up in a military family the name lives on! takes people one of two ways as adults. Once the Great War arrived, and Powell Some are terminally tired of being père was off to the front, Powell admits itinerant and moving every year, two at that he and his mother moved regularly; most; they put down roots somewhere and living here and there, mostly in London, never move again. Others have with friends, relations and in rented rooms. permanently itchy feet and remain Powell himself gives no detailed locations itinerant for the rest of their lives. of these residences, only a few clues: as Anthony Powell appears to have been Lady Violet commented to me on the more like the former: the Powell family occasion of the dedication of Powell’s moved in 1952 from London to The memorial plaque at Chantry Church Chantry in Somerset where AP and Lady (Saturday 15 September 2001), Powell Violet were to remain for the rest of their probably didn’t even remember the exact days – almost 50 years. whereabouts of most of these living quarters. The desire to get out of London and put down permanent roots is hardly surprising Of the clues he offers, Powell mentions he when one considers Powell’s childhood and his mother staying at a boarding house and his own war service. As the son of a in Glendower Place, South Kensington – serving Army officer, home was always unknown to me at the time just 50 yards going to be on the move and life from Khan’s, venue for the Society’s fifth unsettling. This would have been birthday celebration. Powell also recalls exacerbated with the Great War arriving at his attending Mr Gibbs’s Day School – about the time Powell should have been then near Sloane Square – between going off to prep school. In fact he didn’t January 1915 and summer 1916, prior to go off to boarding school, The New going to prep school. Beacon near Sevenoaks in Kent, until mid- Given such upheaval, coupled with his life 1916 (at age 10½) – an experience which at prep school, it is little wonder that the he found far from congenial. 54 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 young and sensitive Powell found this spent living in rented rooms in Shepherd unsettling. Market, where he gleaned source material for the backdrops to A Buyer’s Market and After the Great War was over, Powell’s . Then during the father remained in the Army and on the years from 1929 to his marriage to Lady move. Powell himself went to Eton at Violet in December 1934, Powell lived in Easter 1919 and at last found himself in an Bloomsbury: first at 33 Tavistock Square; environment where he actually felt then at 26 Brunswick Square (which has comfortable, something Lady Violet subsequently been demolished). echoed in her message to the first Anthony Powell Conference at Eton: When the Powells married, and following their honeymoon in Greece, they spent a It would, I believe, be a particular short while at Powell’s Brunswick Square gratification to Anthony Powell that flat before moving into the top two floors the first Conference of the Anthony th of 47 Great Ormond Street – an 18 Powell Society should be held at a century terraced house facing the place for which he had such a lasting Children’s Hospital. Then, like most affection. To the son of a serving young married couples, and after Powell’s soldier, whose itinerant career abortive sojourn in Hollywood, they dictated holidays without fixed moved to somewhere with more space for address, Eton was immutable, a a family: 1 Chester Gate in the grander substitute for a settled home. surroundings of Regent’s Park. (In fact the Again this is hardly surprising. Between Powells had acquired the lease of Chester 1919 and 1926, while he was at Eton and Gate before leaving for Hollywood.) Oxford, Powell documents that his parents The Powells had been at Chester Gate for lived in St John’s Wood, Camberley, scarcely two years before it was shut up Helsinki and Andover with interludes in of WWII. Quite why Paris and Reading – and who knows where Powell should have chosen not to live else in between! Meanwhile Powell there when he was attached to MIL in himself spends his long summer vacations from Oxford touring Europe (the remnants of the 18th and 19th century young gentleman’s Grand Tour), two short vacations in Helsinki with his parents, and another in Paris. While at Oxford Powell spent a year in typical student lodgings at 4 King Edward Street – just five minutes walk from Balliol. These he shared with his friend Henry Yorke (novelist Henry Green) who he had first met at prep school. On leaving Oxford Powell was largely on his own and, working in London, chose Rear view of The Chantry with main also to live there. His early, and it seems entrance; the grander side looks out over to me, formative, years in London were the Somerset countryside. Photograph Keith Marshall. 55 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Whitehall (1941-45) rather than live again was for sale and thought that my in rented rooms I have not yet understood. parents might like it. Perhaps it was purely convenience, Everything about the place was especially with Lady Violet and the young curious and interesting – very run Tristram safely in Shoreham, Kent? Was down, and decayed since 1825, the Chester Gate too badly bomb damaged? year when the Fussell family, local (Although it did take some minor bomb ironmasters who made agricultural damage there is no indication this would implements, had built it. In those have prevented occupation.) Or was there days you could, I’m assured, drive a some Army regulation about living in little pony and trap right round the billets as opposed to one’s own house? artificial lake that they had made in Surely WWII must again have re-ignited the valley below the house, and there in Powell any loathing he had for the were grottoes with fake stalactites itinerant nature of military life. We know and eaves – a miniature estate, in fact, from his memoirs that he spent military complete with its own ruins, derived service in Haverfordwest, Gosford Castle perhaps from Stourhead or Cheddar (Co. Armagh), Belfast, Cambridge, Gorge. Of course our parents fell for Castlewellan (Co. Down), Matlock, it immediately. I can remember their Oxford and London – as well, no doubt, as excitement, the “for sale” notice short sojourns in other even less desirable going up on our London house … military encampments. And then, some months later, the furniture was packed up along with As WWII drew to a close 1 Chester Gate our then cat, Albert, and we set off for became once again the Powell family Somerset with Albert wailing in his home: a family now including Tristram basket. and from January 1946 John, born in London while Powell was working in And in true fairy-tale style there, with Oxford on John Aubrey. But given all the views over the rolling hills of Somerset, upheavals in Powell’s residences is it to be the Powells lived happily ever after. wondered at that the family eventually wanted to escape London; the post-war Bibliography Michael Barber, Anthony Powell: A Life decrepitude; and what must have been (London: Duckworth, 2004) constant reminders of the privations of an Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling, itinerant military lifestyle? Thus came 4 volumes (London: Heinemann, 1976- about the move to The Chantry, recalled 1982) by Tristram Powell at the thanksgiving “Address by Tristram Powell at a Service service for Lady Violet (Saturday 7 May of Thanksgiving for Lady Violet 2005): Powell”, Anthony Powell Society It was in 1951, when I was eleven Newsletter, 19, Summer 2005 and John was six, that our parents, Lady Violet Powell, The Departure who’d been searching unsuccessfully Platform (London: Heinemann, 1998) for a house in the country, were rung up by my Aunt Julia … she’d seen This article is a summary of work in that a Georgian house near Frome progress and I hope to return to the theme in future articles or at a future conference.

56 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Epic and Anti-Epic: Substance and ‘official’ sense, even on the side of the Style in Anthony Powell’s Writing largely conservative causes he preferred. Similarly, the four volumes of memoirs by Nicholas Birns and three volumes of journals each reveal different faces of Powell. Of course, the Not only did Anthony Powell possess a Journals are by definition more informal, marked personality and style, but also as Lady Violet Powell notes in her there is striking continuity in his long introduction to the first volume of literary career between his early style and Journals. But they go beyond this generic his later. For instance, the tone of Powell’s difference to reveal a more informal letters to Balliol College, Oxford, Powell, one far more open about his arranging for his matriculation there in prejudices, allegiances and relationships 1923, exhibited at the 2003 Anthony than the grave, reserved memoirist. Powell conference at Balliol, was strikingly similar to that of his late reviews I would like to suggest that this slight and journal entries, written nearly seventy generic difference pertains to his fiction as years later. This sense of a fixed, albeit well – most particularly, the difference in subtle, perspective is one of the attractions style between Powell’s great, twelve-book of Powell. There is no flabbiness, no sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, wallowing around in eddies of diffuse, and his seven non-Dance novels. Five of murky viscosity. Yet Powell’s perspective these were written before World War II nonetheless is slightly different in the and published in the 1930s. The last two different genres in which he wrote. One of were written after the election of Margaret the many benefits to the reader of Powell Thatcher and were published in the 1980s. afforded by Powell’s long correspondence Not only does this huge gap between non- with former US Congressman John Dance novels attest to Powell’s longevity, Monagan is to show just this. For the it attests to a powerful consistency of tone, latter part of Powell’s 24-year as the novels of the 1980s are very like the correspondence with Monagan, we have a novels of the 1930s: relatively short, parallel record in Powell’s journals; even containing an ensemble of characters from before that, there is ample evidence of which no ‘hero’ or ‘villain’ stands out, and what Powell is thinking at the time. The with a point-of-view character who is not face Powell shows in his letters to omniscient, somewhat imperfect, and Monagan is slightly different from that certainly not to be confused with Powell shown in the journals – more concerned himself. Shadbold in O, How The Wheel with politics, for instance. Because Powell Becomes It! is as much what the critic Neil was writing a former Congressman – a Brennan termed a “parody-raisonneur” as sitting Congressman when the Lushington in Venusberg, or Atwater in correspondence began – he might be Afternoon Men. Powell’s novels of the expected to include pro forma remarks 1930s and 1980s depend heavily on about politics out of politeness. But dialogue, and lack long discursive Powell’s comments display a keen and passages; there also are few literary or observant intelligence about politics cultural allusions, although this is less true (perhaps befitting a former Military of the 1980s novels than those of the Intelligence officer), although he is the last 1930s. Dance is very different. The writer to be “politically engaged” in the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, has far more 57 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 authority than the point-of-view characters Maltravers and his wife, Sarah, (modelled of the other novels, all but one of which, on Evelyn Waugh’s first wife, Evelyn What’s Become of Waring, is not told in Gardner) in Agents and Patients: the first person. Jenkins seems virtually There you go, twisting everything I coextensive with Powell, and assumes a say as usual. You know as well as I wide degree of authority as far as the do that I’m only too anxious for you reader is concerned. Moreover, Dance is a to lead a life that won’t bring my heavily discursive and allusive work, full name into disrepute. It’s an old name of long, if eccentric, Latinate sentences, and until my marriage was a good and containing a welter of allusions, overt and covert. Dance transcends what Walter one. (143). Allen described as the “aesthetic disdain” There may be some -dramatic of the pre-war books, where there are no reverberations here (the name Maltravers, real heroes or villains. Though Dance’s in real life, is associated with the Howard only real hero is its reticent narrator, family, the Dukes of Norfolk) but the Nicholas Jenkins, it certainly has a villain primary effect of the dialogue is dramatic: in the outrageous, and loathsome, it could well be an exchange in a staged Widmerpool. Widmerpool does not evoke play. Dialogue in Dance, on the other an aesthetic disdain, but frightened hand, often has a silent expository amusement and appalled horror. function, and operates on several levels. Witness this exchange, at the end of Sir It is remarkable that Powell, after spending Magnus Donners’s party at Stourwater nearly thirty years conceiving and writing between Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson, that Dance, went back so seamlessly to the cashiered diplomat, and Prince Theodoric, technique and viewpoint of his early novels. The novels of the 1980s could not the eventually cashiered Balkan potentate: help being affected by Dance, and by “Getting on in life now, sir,” he said, Powell’s far greater maturity as an artist. in answer to some comment made by Yet in many ways they read as if Powell the Prince. “Got to make way for had managed, like a snake, to shed the skin younger men”. of Dance and reassume the mode of his “Nonsense, Sir Gavin, nonsense.” early novels. The style of Dance, in other (BM 216) words, did not totally take over Powell. The alternative style remained there, as a The stated themes are the least of the talk perpetual possibility. Powell refers to this here. Sir Gavin is, most likely, only half- in his Journals, when he wonders if genuinely self-deprecating; he is hoping “discursive, relatively rambling passages the Prince will reassure him that he is not a could have been broken down into set back number, has one more shining pieces of incident, explanatory diplomatic moment in him. The Prince, dialogue” (Journals 1987-89, p. 163), for his own part, is jocularly reassuring Sir suggesting that Powell felt a more Gavin, yet in likelihood has, as an actual dramatic and dialogue-filled style in opinion, the same sense of Sir Gavin’s Dance might have been preferable. obsolescence as the diplomat does rhetorically; he does think Sir Gavin is To see the contrast in the dialogue between past his prime. the non-Dance and Dance novels, let us look at this bit of repartee between Earlier in the Stourwater scene, we can see how Dance presents dramatic elements 58 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 even in exposition, while maximizing the symbolic sense, immured in the prison of effect of one spoken word of dialogue. his own ambition, as evidenced in his Jenkins has had to tie his shoelace and thus desire to further himself in the eyes of Sir becomes separated from the rest of the Magnus, his “Chief.” Widmerpool utters Stourwater party when he hears his name only one word, but the atmosphere uttered in sepulchral tones: conveyed in the exposition has spoken volumes. Much of the drama of Dance is “Jenkins?” in these reflective narrative passages, not I have to admit that I was at that in dialogue. moment quite startled by the sound. The tone was thick and interrogative. Thus when Powell posits his more It seemed to emerge from the dramatic, dialogue-filled alternative, he is surrounding ether, a voice from out of thinking of the kind of writing he did in the twilight of the stair, isolated from his non-sequence novels. And how did human agency, for near approach of this style first emerge? It is best to think any speaker, up or down the steps, about this in relation to a now-obscure would have been audible to me novel. Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat before we could have come as close (1924) was a best-seller in its day and, to as the sound suggested. A second use the phrasing of Quiggin’s querulous later I became aware of its place of query to Jenkins, is about ‘fashionable origin, but instead of at the life.’ Reading The Green Hat as an simple explanation of what seemed a undergraduate at Oxford inspired Powell mysterious, even terrifying to move to the London neighbourhood of phenomenon, a yet more nameless Shepherd Market, whose dances and apprehension was portentously parties provided the background for the occasioned by the sight revealed. London scenes of the pre-war novels and Just level with my head – as I early Dance books. Arlen enacts a critique returned a step or more up the stair – of the hearty, optimistic, John Bull was a narrow-barred window, or mentality that Powell inherits from the squint, through the iron grill of previous generation. Thus he does not which, his face barely distinguishable have to make this critique himself. in the shadows, peered Widmerpool. Indeed, Powell greatly admires Kipling, (BM 204) who is one of the targets of Arlen’s generational ire. Arlen was of the Despite the lengthy, discursive exposition, generation old enough to fight in World there is a sense of tension, a Gothic War I, and suffered the end of the apprehension, on its own, reminiscent of, “Careless-Days-before-the-War” (65). to cite Powell’s fellow Etonian, Horace Arlen saw his contemporaries die in the Walpole, The Castle of Otranto. The neo- war pursuing “an idea and a vision.” The medieval surroundings of Stourwater also Green Hat critiques this idealism, seen bring out an allegorical level, as, even most particularly in Gerald March’s hero- though Widmerpool is not literally in the worship of Boy Fenwick (a hero-worship dungeons of Stourwater where Sir Magnus that is the ancestor of many similar half-jocularly had earlier said was the situations in Powell’s work, from Captain place for “the girls who don’t behave”, Hudson’s fixation on the travel writer TT nonetheless there is something dank and Waring in What’s Become of Waring, to squalid about Widmerpool, and he is, in a Russell Gwinnett’s darker obsession with 59 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 X Trapnel in the last two volumes of Arlen’s narrator asks, “Was there ever such Dance). But Arlen’s novel is intensely an England as I myself saw in the magic of romantic, and its confessedly impure a spring morning of London?” (82) Arlen heroine, Iris Storm, is seen by the narrator is willing to entertain the idea of “the to point towards a “purity” (51) which, England that I love.” In Powell’s work, even though it is counterbalanced by the this England is only evoked through a disillusioning “fall of the emerald” scrim of wit and understatement. But it is remains as an ideal. Powell uses Iris there, and it is one of the reasons why so Storm as a model for his own beautiful many readers find Dance, for all its debutante, Susan Nunnery, in his first melancholy, so inspirational. novel, Afternoon Men. Arlen’s novel ends Another reason for this inspirational with a tragic, senseless death, a death quality is the sequence’s humour. which symbolizes the obliteration of Kingsley Amis unintentionally launched Victorian optimism by the tragic vision his forty-year friendship with Powell by induced by post-war disillusionment. observing, in a review for the Spectator, Powell grew to maturity in the midst of that the US had writers categorized as this disillusionment. Thus there is no need “humour writers”, such as James Thurber, for a death, what Arlen calls “that death,” whereas in England there were simply in Afternoon Men. In fact, in Powell’s serious novelists who were also funny, novel a character named Pringle is thought such as Anthony Powell. (Amis was to have committed suicide, then turns up writing of the pre-war novels, and again, rather inconveniently, a few hours especially about that marvellous hybrid of later, as if to say that we are so far “into” hunting and cross-dressing, From A View disillusionment that whether people live or To A Death.) Amis was cogent in die does not matter, leaving a quirky, suggesting that to define Powell’s work comic-ironic indifference as the only only in terms of his humour would be to viable attitude. Powell derives the severity belittle his art. But the humour is an and economy of his early style from Ernest inescapable part of Dance, and it ranges Hemingway, but the substance of the early from broadly funny occurrences such as novels derives from The Green Hat. It is Barbara Goring pouring sugar on The Green Hat flattened down, its flowery Widmerpool’s head, which has a slapstick rhetoric trimmed, but Arlen’s vision deeply quality virtually anyone can enjoy, to the informs Powell’s. And “vision” is the title of the treatise by Dr Emily right word, for Arlen sounds a note of Brightman’s remote ancestor Salathiel, lyricism which is still audible, in far more muted fashion, in Powell’s early and even Attick and Roman Reckonings of Capacity later work. For all of Powell’s for Things Liquid and Things Dry Reduced to the Common English Mensuration for antiromanticism, for all his immersion in Wine and Corn, which relies for its après-guerre disillusionment, twentieth- humour on a far more subtle grasp of century scepticism, and modernist- intellectual history and the querelle des classicist astringency there still remains an anciens et des modernes. The range of idealism in his work that echoes Arlen’s humour in Powell’s work from the in-your own. In Afternoon Men, this idealism is -face to the ultra-subtle is one of the most associated with Atwater’s yearning for decisive gauges of his general breadth of Susan. In later books, including Dance, it becomes more diffused, more impalpable. coverage as a novelist.

60 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Powell is closely associated with a there is a certain anti-epic quality in all generation of writers often called the five writers. Even a book such as Orwell’s “Brideshead generation” after Evelyn 1984, overtly conceived as a political tract, Waugh’s most famous novel. Powell had is perhaps most resonantly about personal many preoccupations – Welshness, relationships, or the lack thereof in the interests in genealogy and military history society the novel depicts. And even when – which distinguished him from his Waugh is at his most didactic, there is a contemporaries. But there certainly was a genuine depth of effect that, though in common generational style. Powell, another writer perhaps presaging Waugh, Orwell, Henry Green and Graham sentimentality, in Waugh works to give the Greene were all second- generation modernists, born in the twentieth century, and coming to adulthood as the modernist masterworks of Joyce, Eliot and Woolf were published. Henry Green was by far the most experimental of the group in terms of prose style, but, in all of these writers, an awareness of modernist experimentation and of the playfulness and imaginative possibility afforded by that experimentation was an ever-present element even when they wrote apparently conventional novels. And this contributed to a sense of lightness, of charm, of tact, which is again most evident in Henry Green but is there even in books like Waugh’s and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock – a provisional, improvisational, dance- like quality that wrests the novel form away from dull, mechanical The title page from a 16th century edition of exposition. Interestingly, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso 61 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 work a vulnerable quality that fends off 2005 is Snow’s centennial year as well. any dogmatic tendencies. Thus, given But although there are still those who Powell’s generational disposition, it is make a case for the Snow series as a somewhat surprising he wrote a twelve- modern classic, there is no doubt that most novel sequence which is certainly epic in people today would say that Powell’s its scope, and has been compared to the sequence has stood up better than Snow’s. twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid (though The sequence’s first book, A Question of Powell seems to suggest in his final Upbringing, gives us the first foretaste of volume of Dance that his model is more an Widmerpool’s quest for power in his epic-romance hybrid such as Ariosto’s dogged running routine and his mediation Orlando Furioso). For all Dance’s of the “international incident” between the multitudes of characters, settings, Scandinavian tennis-players at the French references, there is always, in the asperity guest-house where both he and Jenkins, in of the dialogue, the intimacy of Jenkins’s the first of the sequence’s many casual, personal remembrance, and the coincidences, end up staying at the same love of idiosyncrasy and eccentricity, an time. But the first volume is in a way anti-epic aspect to Dance as well. unrepresentative of Dance. It is set mainly This is just what is lacking in the novel- at school and university, has no bohemian sequence of Powell’s exact contemporary, characters, and no scenes in London apart CP Snow, whose Strangers and Brothers from Jenkins’s visit to Stringham’s family. has roots in the nineteenth-century People who read the first book might be naturalistic novel that Powell’s Dance tempted to assume the entire sequence avoids. Snow’s sequence partakes of an takes place in upper-class circles and that epic realism, unleavened by anti-epic the four original boys – Jenkins, irony. Snow’s saga has often been Stringham, Templer, and Widmerpool – dismissed as “Dance as if had been written will, in various circumstances be its four by Widmerpool.” This is unfair. Though major characters. Most of the sequence Lewis Eliot, Snow’s quasi- takes place in London, however, and is set autobiographical protagonist, is a amid the ‘contact zone’ where high society plodding, earnest stick-in-the-mud, what and Bohemia meet. Class boundaries Martin Seymour-Smith has called a “stiff- dissolve, as Stringham has a liaison with lipped man of affairs”, and has the louche Milly Andriadis, Jenkins is Widmerpool’s dogged determination to brought into the circle of the homosexual rise in the world, he does not have either artist Edgar Deacon, and Widmerpool, the the aggression or opportunism of the man scholarship boy who hopes to brown-nose with the wrong . The tinge of powerful industrialists such as Sir Magnus truth in the Snow/Widmerpool comparison Donners, instead cleans up after the sexual is perhaps reflected in the irony that Snow, adventures of the disreputable left-wing the Socialist scientist, became a Life Peer activist Gypsy Jones. Jenkins has whereas Powell always remained Mr relationships with women, most Powell. But Powell and Snow should not particularly with Peter Templer’s sister, be set against each another. After all, they Jean (a more down-to-earth avatar of the got along well when they went to Bulgaria Iris Storm/Susan Nunnery type). But together for a writers’ conference in 1977, Jenkins’s life seems to be drifting as recorded in the final volume of Powell’s aimlessly until, in the fourth book, he memoirs, The Strangers All Are Gone. meets Lady Isobel Tolland, whom he 62 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 knows he will marry the moment he sets force in his life. Stringham is saved from eyes on her. Though Isobel does not alcoholism by his mother’s secretary, the appear often in the sequence, she is its sine doting Miss Weedon, but even she is as qua non, as the sense of Jenkins as an much captor as caregiver. Stringham does achieved consciousness that makes not lose simply because he is an aristocrat possible the narrative retrospection of the too good for a world dominated by sequence is guaranteed by his marriage to striving, opportunistic Widmerpools. her. Dance is often said to be set among the Although the original four friends have an aristocracy. But other than Lady Isobel iconic hold on the reader, one of Powell’s and Erridge (Lord Warminster), there are tricks is that only Jenkins and Widmerpool no titled aristocrats among the major remain throughout the books; Stringham characters. Erridge, the only Peer to figure and Templer not only die but the narrator in the action in a major way, is a left-wing has lost significant touch with them by the activist devoted to bringing down the time they die. Somebody like Moreland is political system. He is Lord Warburton in far more central, and even Jenkins’s Henry James’s Portrait of A Lady run friendship with Barnby, far less on stage in amok and grown scraggly. Jenkins’s only the book, is as important to him. visits, in the entire course of the sequence, Stringham, in particular, is a difficult to a great country house lived in by character to understand. It is often said aristocrats are to Erridge’s Thrubworth, that Stringham represents the old order, which is ramshackle, badly managed, and Widmerpool the new. Widmerpool was hardly Bridesheadian in its magnificence, thus a representative of a group of novi and to the preposterously neo-Gothic homines (CP Snow translated this Latin Stourwater. Some critics of Dance act as phrase literally in The New Men, one of if its events take place amid historic seats the Strangers and Brothers books) that in rural England. Yet only one action in takes over leadership from the dissipated the sequence at all fits these terms, and it aristocrat Stringham, even though is a fiasco. This involves Widmerpool’s Stringham is far superior in terms of plans to consummate his relationship with morality, character, and taste. Widmerpool the Hon. Mildred Haycock at the storied does triumph over Stringham, as seen in seat of the Sleaford family, Dogdene, once his carrying Stringham home when the visited by Samuel Pepys. Widmerpool latter is drunk, his sending Stringham off imagines this as his moment of arrival. to wartime Singapore and what turns out But in fact it is his moment of humiliation, to be his death in a Japanese prison camp. perhaps the most determinative of his Widmerpool’s marriage to Stringham’s many comeuppances. Not only can he not beloved niece, the unlovable Pamela sexually perform with Mrs Haycock, but Flitton, is the ultimate fulfilment of his he will never be the sort of man who is desire to master and in a sense replace invited to consort with the landed Stringham. But Stringham is also defeated aristocracy. The point is, though, that it is by his traditional marriage to Lady Peggy Widmerpool who has deliberately tried to Stepney – he despairs of even finding the crash this aristocracy, whereas the languid bathroom at her father’s country seat, Jenkins, who does marry the daughter of Mountfichet – and by the traditionality of an Earl, comes into this by sheer his naval stepfather, Lt Cmdr Buster Foxe, happenstance. who dislikes Charles and is not a positive 63 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 The third trilogy, “the war trilogy” is many key events that have taken place.” “Each people’s favourite. Jenkins serves at first recapitulation”, says Davin, “tends to add in a Welsh regiment stationed, to no some detail that was not given in the first particular point, in Northern Ireland, and relation. This not only binds the sequence then is posted to a not-very-efficient together as a whole but gives it an Divisional Headquarters before finding, in enriched density ...” In the last books, we the ninth volume, more stimulating work see this enriched density at its greatest. as a liaison officer with Allied The eleventh book, Temporary Kings, is governments-in-exile such as the Poles, particularly notable for the quantity of Czechs and Belgians. The egalitarian characters whirling in from the past and effect of war means that people from a present. Powell’s penchant for delayed broader range of classes are represented in revelation is present in details such as the the war books, and Powell shows that he is way we only meet Daniel Tokenhouse, the as interested in the lives of nondescript elderly, irascible Stalinist amateur painter, Welsh bank clerks serving as mid-level in the eleventh volume, even though he Army officers as in metropolitan had been Jenkins’s boss at the art-book intellectuals. The war novels also offer, in publishing firm for which he had worked the midst of their vivid portraits of a world in the third novel, when the ever-practical crisis, hilarious send-ups of bureaucracy, Widmerpool had asked Jenkins if anybody capped by the depiction of the civil servant actually bought “art books”. Blackhead, author of verbose memos who There is a particular paragraph in is hoist on his own petard when a friend of Temporary Kings that has often struck me Jenkins, David Pennistone, asks as both a triumph of this recapitulatory Blackhead, after he has authored a expansion as well as an illustration of both particularly detailed paper, to “please the polish and the eccentricity of Powell’s amplify”. style: Powell had moved out of London in 1952, In days when Peter Templer had been and, living in Somerset, was less in touch pursuing Pamela, he might easily with the main currents of English life. have talked to her about Sir Magnus, People who grew up in the 1950s and even taken her to see him, but not at 1960s often complain that Powell has not Stourwater, the castle by then devoted caught the tone of those eras as they to wartime uses. The fact that his remember them. But others very much former home was now a girls’ school, admire the last trilogy, and see it as rather a fashionable one, could not be particularly notable. Not only does Powell unpleasing to the shade of Sir round out the sequence with a conclusion Magnus, if it walked there. The that is at once satisfying yet not overly practices attributed to him, justly or resolved, he manages to superimpose layer not, had to be admitted as inescapably upon layer of character and event and yet grotesque; humour never more preserve the sense of an overall pattern. patently the enemy of sex. Perhaps The New Zealand-born critic DM Davin, Gyges, too, had felt that; living his author of a rare but highly influential next forty years in an atmosphere of pamphlet on Dance, refers to Powell’s meticulous sexual normality. I should technique of “enlarged recapitulation,” have liked to discuss the whole through which, in each new instalment of matter with Moreland but, although Dance, Powell gives “an understanding of 64 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 he was no longer married to Matilda, around it virtually unmodified, seeming the habits of Sir Magnus and his nearly gratuitous. Yet it accomplishes a mistresses remained a delicate one to great deal. Jenkins lets us know that, even broach. He was like that. Moreland if he has seen Moreland rarely, that he has was not well. In fact, things looked kept in touch with him enough to know pretty bad. He would work for a time such a detail as the name of his cat. In its with energy, then fall into a lethargic homeliness, it removes Moreland’s condition. There had been financial relationships from the morally disreputable strains too. One of his recordings sexual entanglements described early in becoming in a small way a popular the paragraph. Powell, of course, also hit, made that side easier lately. We shows in this passage his love of cats, and rarely met. He and Audrey his knowledge of history. That Maclintick – whom he had never Hardicanute is an early eleventh-century married – lived, together with a black English king reminds us of the cat named Hardicanute, an obscure, encyclopaedic aspect of the work; this secluded life. (TK 153). reference to that rather obscure area of history again leavening the Classical In one paragraph, we are reminded of decadence of the Gyges citation with a several characters from the past, two now reference more straightforward in its dead, Templer and Donners. But these are Anglo-Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon-Danish, tied in via a spiral-like structure to the hardiness. But most saliently, the disclosure, previously unknown to the confluence of cat and king reinforces the reader, that Moreland is seriously ill. juxtaposition of great and small through There is not only a tacit reference to the which Powell stitches together the fabric second book of the series, A Buyer’s of memory to make his sequence remain, Market, where Sir Magnus used the and resound, in the mind of the reader. Stourwater dungeons, half-seriously, as a place to put “the girls who don’t behave”, As this recapitulatory technique indicates, but to the wartime books, and the wartime part of the achievement of Dance is how it period as a whole, when the days of handles its length. The length of Dance is sinister play at Stourwater had been to some extent contingent on Powell’s own replaced by those of functional utility. We longevity. By the time he finished Dance, also see how Powell modulates his diction three leading literary contemporaries – – elaborate and Latinate halfway through, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Henry then becoming curt and monosyllabic as Green – were dead. Only Graham Greene Jenkins relates the news about Moreland’s survived to anything like Powell’s great health. In this paragraph as well is old age. Part of what is impressive about Powell’s stylistic mastery – and Dance is the mere fact Powell completed eccentricity. Few writers would put a semi it. But it was not just mortality that -colon right after “Gyges, too, had felt threatened its not being completed. So that,” and the use of the breezy, colloquial could have fatigue, distraction, “felt that” as associated with a figure of involvement in external disputes, such as ancient renown such as Gyges is the quarrels into which Thackeray and incongruous. The clause concerning the Wilkie Collins were always getting Moreland ménage’s black cat, (Powell’s break with Malcolm Muggeridge Hardicanute, is even more distinctive. The in 1964 came the closest), or diversion into Hardicanute clause leaves the clauses journalism. This last could have 65 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 potentially happened to Powell. He was a that of Perceval/Parsifal. Perhaps the regular reviewer for The Daily Telegraph heaviness of the historical novel, its felt after serving as Literary Editor of Punch. obligation to reanimate the past, is But, notably, despite his steady production inimical to the spirit of lightness and self- of reviews, his journalistic work never effacement that emanates from Powell’s kept him from producing novels on work. schedule. Powell is not a historical novelist. But he In fact, Powell used his strengths as a non- is a novelist with relevance to history. fiction writer to buttress his novel-writing This is indicative of how Powell’s skills. Much of the cultural richness of perspective allows him to deal with Dance is reflected in Powell’s reviewing, concrete circumstances, while not being and even the interest in the visual arts that constrained by any overly rigid definition is so apparent in Dance will now finally of those circumstances. His intent is receive its place in Powell’s non-fictional always substantive, but it is substance as oeuvre with the release in the fall of 2005, relayed through style, perhaps partially by Timewell Press, of his third volume of even in style. Like Henry James, Powell is collected criticism, Some Poets, Artists, exceedingly complex and ramifying, and and ‘A Reference for Mellors’. Here, yet was always very conscious of the Powell writes on works of art as various as precise goals he intended to achieve in his the Bayeux tapestry and the paintings of fiction. James has often been associated David Hockney. Like his friend VS with modernist indeterminacy and Naipaul, Powell wrote fiction that tends, in ambiguity, which are not inherently bad, its expository flow, towards non-fiction. but, in thinking about James, critics have Powell wrote one – the DH confused those two concepts with James’s Lawrence parody A Reference for Mellors own super-refined complexity. What that appears in the Timewell volume, and James thought was highly complex, and even this is a conversation about a perhaps impossible to reduce to anyone reference-letter, itself au fond a non- else’s words. But there is a discernible fictional genre. Powell wrote one long quality to his thought, which can be poem, the satiric Caledonia, as well as isolated, if not totally comprehended. The several poems embedded in his fiction and same is true of Powell, who after all took even non-fiction, but wrote no serious some Jamesian surnames (such as poetry. The other genres in which Powell Stringham) for his characters, even if he wrote – memoir, journal, book review, and, thought James’s names for country houses as we see in the Monagan correspondence, often ludicrous. In one of his last letters – were non-fictional ones, and in his recorded writings on literary subjects, own reading he tended to focus as much Powell writes to the critic John Bayley, on non-fiction as on fiction. We must taking issue with a piece Bayley had begin to see Powell’s non-fiction – written years earlier on James’s Golden especially the Journals – as a major part of Bowl. Bayley responded, according to his work. Surprisingly, given his interest Powell, “Henry James was a matter of in both fiction and history, Powell never what he, himself, thought”. In manifesting wrote a historical novel. The Fisher King, his own idiosyncratic yet palpable mode of his last novel, is, if anything, an anti- thought, Powell was James’s great historical novel despite being immersed in successor. learning about medieval legends such as 66 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Some Poets, Artists and ‘a Reference for Mellors’ Anthony Powell Published by Timewell Press, November 2005 at £25 (ISBN 1857252101)

Some Poets, Artists & ‘A Reference for Mellors’ is Anthony Powell’s long-awaited third and final volume of critical writings. Drawn from over four decades of regular reviews for the Daily Telegraph, as well as pieces for Apollo, Punch, the TLS, Encounter and Sotheby’s Preview Magazine, this collection shows Powell at his most incisive and beguiling. From Chaucer to Dylan Thomas, Powell covers the length of the English canon. Lesser -known figures like John Skelton and William Davenant are reconsidered, while forgotten best-sellers and nineteenth-century minor poets are uncovered. The artists vary from van Dyck to David Hockney and take in such eclectic subjects as portrait painters in India, Dickens’s illustrators, London statues and artists’ models. The collection closes with A Reference for Mellors, a gem of a parody, in which Mellors seeks a new career in the Dominions, only to have his prospective employer write to Lady Chatterley for a reference. AN Wilson described Powell as ‘one of the twentieth- century giants of English literature’, and this collection certainly demonstrates his outstanding talent as reviewer and critic.

Seeing Secret Harmonies: Pictures of Anthony Powell Published by TLS / Wallace Collection, November 2005 at £6 (ISBN 9007857398) This is the book which accompanies the Wallace Collection’s magnificent Anthony Powell exhibition, Dancing to the Music of Time: The Life and Work of Anthony Powell. It isn’t an exhibition catalogue but contains pieces by Hilary Spurling, DJ Taylor and Ferdinand Mount as well as some images from the exhibition with long explanatory captions. Available from the Wallace Collection shop.

67 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Sir Ian Blair Wins Feared Widmerpool Award

The Anthony Powell Society inaugurated an annual Widmerpool Award in 2003, for the public figure who most embodies the characteristics of Kenneth Widmerpool. The award takes the form of an engraved “wrong kind of overcoat”, purchased by the Society (at no small expense) from some local flea-market or charity shop. Sir Ian Blair follows in a distinguished line are in the public eye. Nominations must of Widmerpudlians. In 2003 the first be accompanied by a short citation in winner (by several lengths) of the justification. Widmerpool Award was Lord Irvine of Lairg. The citation referred to his The nomination of Sir Ian Blair (Britain’s “unabashed exercise of the powers and top policeman) notes his privileges of his office without care of combination of PC cringe and public opinion.” Barely two months after personal ruthlessness that make him receiving the award, Lord Irvine “retired.” appear by far the closest to Kenneth Not only that, but the abolition of the very Widmerpool in character, as ongoing office of Lord Chancellor (which dates events continue to demonstrate. The th from the 11 century) was announced. It mixture of accomplished climbing, is believed by some members that winners political trimming and recently may be the subject of a curse similar to revealed disregard for the law are that which afflicted Widmerpool. entirely what one would anticipate in st The 2004 winner was Sir Max Hastings. a 21 Century Widmerpool. The nominations were “on the grounds not Among the others short-listed in 2005 only of physical traits (thick specks, were: booming manner) but for petty abuse of power” in using the medium of a review of Jack Straw – a new biography of Powell as an excuse For his fatuous pomposity, for personal score-settling (Powell had unmitigated hypocrisy, and self- been very mildly disparaging about Sir regard in equal measures; and Max in his published Journals.) Hastings because his own career is built on a certainly revealed a Widmerpudlian lack of reputation for climbing on the self-knowledge in referring to Powell as shoulders of others in his sempiternal “priggish, pretentious and pompous” and path to the top. He has also taken to “a snob”, the irony being much enjoyed by wearing a Kremlinesque , Society members which is neither British Warm, union The Editor of The Anthony Powell Society geezer, nor New Labour Armani – in Newsletter formally invited members and short, the wrong sort of overcoat. It friends of the Society to submit is only Straw’s “success” with Turkey nominations for this prestigious award. and the EU that prevented a dead heat Nominees have to be living figures who for the prize. 68 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Karl Rove – There is something about Rove’s working like a maniac for a President whose nickname for Karl is “Turd Blossom” that evokes Widmerpool’s interactions with the Captain of the Eleven. The description of Rove as a ‘hard-nosed political geek’, and his involvement in the Valerie Palme affair (shades of Widmerpool sending Peter Templer to his death) also featured strongly in Rove’s nomination. Mark Felt [Deep Throat] – Felt cheerfully violated the constitutional rights of various Americans, superintending illegal break-ins, etc., while the going was good, but then he was passed over for promotion as Hoover’s successor at the FBI. Like Widmerpool, Felt was violently ambitious, trafficked in secrets, and was not burdened by any need to be too gentlemanly. Greg Dyke – Self-centred and self-pitying, he was not backward in immediately criticising the actions of his former friends. King Carl Gustav XVI of Sweden – Pompous, self-important and demonstrating a complete lack of self -knowledge that constantly leads him to violate the agreement with the Swedish government that states that he is not allowed to make any statement whatsoever of a political nature. In his king’s speech he urged his people to work harder and not to Runners up, from top to bottom: ‘expect cooked sparrows to come Greg Dyke, Karl Rove, Mark Felt and flying into your mouths’. King Gustav XVI

69 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

The Widmerpool Award [2004]

by Stephen Pollard

The Anthony Powell Society is to give its annual Widmerpool award this year [2004] to the journalist Sir Max Hastings. The award is in honour of Kenneth Widmerpool, one of the 20th century’s great fictional characters, a recurring presence in Powell’s series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time.

According to the society: “Widmerpool is politicians variously pompous; self-obsessed and self- and, in a spirit of generosity, I offer some important; obsequious to those in authority suggestions. and a bully to those below him. He is ambitious and pushy; ruthless; Tracey Emin is gloriously Widmerpoolian: humourless; blind to the feelings of others; she takes her outpourings entirely and has a complete lack of self- seriously and appears blissfully unaware knowledge.” that most of society sees her as a standing joke. The description is redolent of so many characters in public life that more must be In the same vein, Martin Jacques, a former made of it. I therefore have a modest editor of Marxism Today and now self- proposal: that at a time when the honours appointed political seer, is an ideal system is in disrepute, the Queen bestow candidate: he has published many Widmerpool awards just as she awards hundreds of thousands of words; not one is other honours. Those invested need not worth reading. exhibit every detail of the above Sir David Hare continues to display description but they should be true to the admirable Widmerpooldom. Other essential spirit of Widmerpool. winners might include Lord Lloyd- Rather than allowing the award to be Webber, Baroness Blackstone, Sir John determined by the existing honours Drummond, Dame Kennedy, QC, committee, it should instead be placed in Patricia Hewitt and Lord Birt. the hands of a triumvirate of Widmerpools, The heavy burden of nomination is an uniquely qualified to adjudicate as to the onerous task. Recipients must understand Widmerpool-worthiness of their fellow the weight of public feeling which will citizens. To wit, from each of the main underpin their award. Let us salute parties: Lord Hattersley, Lord Hurd of Kenneth Widmerpool, icon of the modern Westwell and Sir Menzies Campbell, QC. age. Sir and Lord Irvine of Lairg, QC, would make delightful patrons. * To be accepted as a worthy honour, it is Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre important that the award is not confined to for the New Europe 70 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Agents and Patients Revisited

by Mike Jay

After handling Nietzsche’s Űbermensch within From a View to a Death, Powell now considers Rousseau’s “men in chains” concept in Agents and Patients, the fourth of the five pre-war Powell novels. The novel opens with our two anti-heroes – Chipchase and Maltravers – watching an escapologist entertaining people on a foggy pre-war London street. The time is circa 1935, a period of insecurity with war distinctly a looming possibility while personal financial collapse represents a daily preoccupation. Oliver Chipchase is an art critic but, more importantly, an adherent to the relatively new fad of psychoanalysis. Peter Maltravers is a former civil servant and now an aspiring film director. Both need finance for their various schemes. Also watching the street show is Blore-Smith, just down from Oxford, meant to be reading for the Bar, wealthy through inheritance and ready for adventure! couple of drinks and then takes him to Blore-Smith leaves the street entertainers meet Mrs Mendoza (undeniably a beauty) to visit Reggie Frott’s gallery, relieve at her flower shop (la cattleya). At the himself of some money and thereby loosen flower shop Blore-Smith is introduced to his chains. By coincidence (!) Chipchase the ideas of Chipchase and Maltravers has already arrived at the gallery and is which Blore-Smith easily accepts. He impressed at Blore-Smith’s profligacy in finds that, as their “Male Madame buying “art”. Blore-Smith leaves the Bovary” he has agreed to be gallery in somewhat of a daze and psychoanalyzed by Chipchase, to fund clumsily walks into Maltravers car. Maltravers non-commercial film ambitions Maltravers has just had one of his and to bankroll the necessary continental meetings with his wife, Sarah, where they travel. Blore-Smith is malleable and also appear to torture each other with naïve in dealings with the opposite sex. conflicting expectations of marriage. He misreads the Maltravers’ marriage and Sarah is a modern woman with a job with is attracted to blousy Mrs Mendoza. the motor magazine Mode and has racing All this has occurred in one 70-page driver friends. Chipchase deals with this chapter – Powell’s longest to date and a by pretending he will leave her. forerunner of the Dance chapters. We are Maltravers dusts Blore-Smith down with a now treated to a French and German farce 71 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 as the Maltravers–Chipchase extended can well afford to lose money to “family” group wheels around pre-war Maltravers and Chipchase. Europe from London to Paris, London to The whole grotesque farce is made Berlin and finally London to the entertaining and fast paced throughout by countryside largely at Blore-Smith’s Powell’s witty style. Blore-Smith is considerable expense. prodded frequently into action by the In Paris, Chipchase takes Blore-Smith to “Agents” – “Friendship with the opposite the inevitable night club “A la Vache sex is not openly put a stop to by the Enragée” where other voracious members authorities” is one taunt; “Women won’t of the menagerie are enjoying themselves. bite you – not immediately anyway” is Blore-Smith talks to Pauline de Borodino another. I find that nobody is a loser at the before some of the group repair to Chez novel’s end. We may not have learned Zouzou, a brothel, where Yoyo (the nicest much but we have all experienced plenty. girl he had ever met) fleeces him. Another member of the group, Schlumbermayer, invites Chipchase to his home, Broadacres, to make the film he and Maltravers are proposing. The next adventure is to the Nazi-drenched Berlin film studios (Powell was there in 1932) where in a brief snapshot we are shown the brownshirts selling newspapers, and where following machinations from the anti-heroes and yet another long expedition to a night club, Mrs Mendoza and Blore-Smith finally flee in each others arms. Blore-Smith having already clumsily declared his feelings for Sarah Maltravers before departing for Berlin. Blore-Smith and Mrs Mendoza’s ridiculous partnership is short lived. In the final scene, as in all good farces, all the participants agglomerate at the film making in Broadacres. Mrs Mendoza elopes again, this time with Gaston de la Tour d’Espagne to France. Maltravers and Chipchase flee to Hollywood and Blore- Smith and Colonel Algy Teape retreat to the Côte d’Azur. While Blore-Smith is mercilessly abused by his “Agent” tormentors, we need not feel too sorry for him. He is after all buoyed by considerable inheritance and

72 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Venusberg: Anticipating Dance, Reaching Across Time

by Nicholas Birns

Venusberg is one of the least appreciated reminiscent eg. of Jenkins’ rivalry with components of the Powell œuvre, even Tompsitt (and Widmerpool) over Barbara given the general neglect of the early Goring in A Buyer’s Market. Given that fiction. Possibly this is because of its the plot of Venusberg, contemporary with foreign setting, although the La Grenadière the novel’s writing, takes place in the same section of A Question of Upbringing is, time period as that of A Buyer’s Market, rightly, one of the most popular of the Venusberg is a place one can view the sort entire sequence, and few would not want of romantic drama present in the later the Venice portion of Temporary Kings. work isolated from the panoply of event Part of the problem may be that Powell, and spectacle that surrounds all action in who, as recorded in Infants of the Spring, Dance. visited Finland and Estonia, though not Venusberg can also serve as a parabolic Latvia, in the 1920s, does not portray the instance of how time can alter the specifically Baltic aspects of his setting reception of a work. When Powell wrote very deeply. But this misses the point that, it, the Baltic countries were independent, at the time, these countries were still just but for most of the book’s published emerging from a long occupation and existence Estonia and Latvia, two of the cultural colonization, and that the largely three possible models for the book’s Russo-Germanic contours of the culture setting, were under a Soviet domination portrayed were probably what Powell which seemed to most to be irreversible. observed at the time. The world of Venusberg seemed This objection sidelined, the reader can see irrevocably gone. But Powell lived to see some aspects of Venusberg which the collapse of the , and foreshadow Dance. The sarcastic mention Venusberg lives still, although this of Galsworthy’s play Loyalties in certainly does not mean its world has Venusberg adumbrates the character of St. come back anywhere in today’s world. John Clarke – the older writer thought That the book written in the aftermath of inferior. The question “Vous en avez vu, the Baltics’ first freedom is still around Madame? Le Loyalties de Galsworthy au during their second is not only heartening Théâtre National” posed by the Female but somehow weirdly clairvoyant, much Deputy to Madame Theviot is an early like Powell inventing a Latin American instance of a kind of hilarity in utterance ruler named Carlos Flores, only to find out that is a hallmark of Dance’s humor. that, in 1998, the Central American nation Powell pokes fun at Galsworthy’s old- of Honduras actually inaugurated a fashionedness and also the tendency of President named nothing other than Carlos foreigners to always be interested in just Flores. In a very low-key and decidedly the writers in one’s own country, whatever non-utopian way, the interaction of the it is, that are at the moment hideously out fiction and the world outside it produces of style. In addition, Lushington and Da “truth unveiled by Time”. Costa’s romantic rivalry over Ortrud is This article first appeared in Newsletter #1.

73 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Anthony Powell and Kingsley Amis realise that, “far from being a professionally philistine book it is one that by Stephen Holden could only come from a writer who had thought a great deal about the arts.” Anthony Powell first became aware of Amis himself was introduced to Powell’s Kingsley Amis in 1953 from a review novels by Phillip Larkin in the 1940s, (possibly of James Thurber’s writings) in particularly From a View to a Death. which Amis, then an unknown writer However, Amis did not take immediately having not yet published his first novel to A Question of Upbringing when it Lucky Jim, praised Powell’s novels. He appeared in 1951, not appreciating that, in wrote to Amis thanking him for the a roman fleuve, “undeveloped characters comment, and they subsequently met. In and potential situations must be introduced appearance Amis reminded Powell quite whose purpose might be unresolved” in strongly of Scott Fitzgerald (met while in that first volume. Amis, in a letter to Hollywood in 1937). The Powells and the Larkin, describes the novel as, “the sort of Amises became friends, visiting each other book where you wonder whether someone in Somerset and Swansea, although Amis has torn the last quarter out.” In this view was obviously nervous before he first he was not alone, as Powell later remarked visited the Powells at The Chantry. He that, “very few critics of the opening wrote to Phillip Larkin shortly before volumes showed themselves capable of asking, “Shall I have to take white tie, appreciating that, in reality, quite simple ? Hunting pink? Guns, dogs?” A principle.” By the time that Amis came to sense of their differences in class and review The Acceptance World he had come upbringing was never to desert Amis. to appreciate Dance to the extent that he Before they met Powell reviewed Lucky could end his review with the sentence, Jim for Punch, stating that the author was reproduced on many a Powell book jacket, “the first promising young novelist who “I would rather read Mr Powell than any has appeared for a long time.” Whereas other English novelist now writing.” most critics and writers of Powell’s Amis can be a perceptive critic of generation were singularly unimpressed, Powell’s. In this review of The even angry, with what they perceived as Acceptance World Amis mentions the the book’s rampant philistinism, Powell scene where General Conyers was astute and open-minded enough to psychoanalyses Widmerpool, and Jenkins’ comment that Conyers “was complete master of himself in allowing no trace of ribaldry or ill-nature” to appear in his diagnosis of Widmerpool. In this, says Amis, Conyers resembles Powell in the latter’s treatment of all his characters in Dance. As ever Amis is keen to highlight what he believed to be the basic duty of the writer: to entertain the reader. He says, for instance, that “a conversation between Powell-readers is liable to turn into a competition of erudite gossip.” 74 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Powell and Amis remained friends who has a telly programme made about throughout the years, reviewing each him ... Can’t he make anything up?” other’s books favourably as they appeared. This accusation is, however many grains In the 1960s Amis and his new wife (the of truth it might contain, a somewhat novelist ) even unfair one on Amis’ part as he himself put considered buying a house very near The into novels (as his Memoirs show) many Chantry. In the 1970s they met often at scenes and characters from his own life. the so-called “fascist lunches” (so-called In Lucky Jim, for example, Professor to annoy the “Lefties” that Amis disliked) Welch is based on his then father-in-law in Bertorelli’s in Soho, where other and Margaret on Monica Jones (Larkin’s frequent guests were , long-time on-off girlfriend), and his 1994 , Tibor Szamuely, and John novel You Can’t Do Both is a direct Braine. fictionalisation of his own adolescence, In public, that is, both were favourable of student days and courtship and marriage of each other’s books. Amis, for example, his first wife, Hilary Bardwell. And even could write to Powell after the publication if Powell does put real-life scenes and of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant about characters in his novels (as his memoirs reading the novel and doing, “my Music of and Journals show), this is inevitable: a Time reader-reaction act half a dozen writer does not live in a vacuum, and it is times: laughter signified by a cessation of the mark of a good writer that “real life” is breathing and a kind of seated bow.” In somehow transformed and added to when his book On Drink he even recommends put into fiction. Powell as beneficial hangover reading, Powell, too, could find faults in Amis’ high praise indeed from Amis. In his novels. While admiring , letters to Larkin and in his Memoirs he for instance, he notes in his Journals that could be scathing about Powell’s writing, Amis’ technique of describing the different complaining often in later years, “what a characters’ thoughts makes them all sound hopelessly unliterary mind he [Powell] as if coming from the same character as has.” His main criticism was that Powell they are all in the author’s “voice”. And put characters and events from real life in writing about The Folks That Live on the his books without making an attempt Hill he remarks, “Kingsley is never either to invent them or subsequently to exactly boring, but the writing is introduce them into his novels for a dreadfully slipshod, determination not to specifically literary purpose. He remarks be pretentious developing into a kind of to Larkin, after interviewing Powell for a pretentiousness.” This latter comment is newspaper, “how fed up I was about all especially true. Amis enjoyed posing as a those real people and incidents he’s put in philistine mainly because of the annoyance his books. I thought you were meant to it caused (a case of épater la haute- make them up, you know, like a novelist.” bourgeoisie), but in later years took this In 1982 he writes again to Larkin, shortly after Powell had been the subject of a pose to extremes. television documentary: “Anthony Powell In 1982 Amis was particularly churlish has a novella [O, How the Wheel Becomes (again, in a letter to Larkin) about Powell’s It!] on the stocks: subject, a famous writer first contact with him. With the benefit of

75 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 curmudgeonly hindsight he wrote about Amis offered some sort of apology for his Powell’s 1953 letter to him, “I think he behaviour. To be fair to Amis, Powell thought, ‘Huh, 48 in December, not getting himself in the Journals (the first volume of any younger, ah, here’s a new shag who which was published the year Amis died) seems to like me, better get his support is not averse to slightly malicious, gossipy right away.’” Well, anyone with any sense comments about Amis and other friends. who has read anything by or about Powell Indeed, speaking of Alan Ross he notes knows this is patent nonsense. Then again, approvingly that he “possesses a pleasant Powell is wise enough to note in his degree of malice about friends.” Journals (coincidentally writing about Amis called his Memoirs an “allography” Anthony Thwaite’s then forthcoming book rather than an autobiography, meaning a of Larkin’s letters) that a “savage remark” selection of anecdotes about others rather about a friend in a personal letter is than a more traditional life of himself. In “probably acceptable within a circle of this he resembles Powell, whose To Keep three old friends as satire that will be the Ball Rolling also reveals little about understood, but rather different when the man himself, but provides much in the offered to general public.” way of anecdote and story about other They appeared to fall out in a mild way people. when Amis published his Memoirs in Both writers have suffered at the hands of 1991. In his memoirs Powell treats Amis blinkered critics, though Amis was to kindly, as he does most of the people receive a good deal of unfair criticism mentioned in the four volumes. In the rare while he was still alive. It became a tenet instances where Powell does disparage of faith among many critics (usually ones someone it is in a dry, understated way. Of who had not read his novels) that Amis the novelist Gerald Kersh he says, “When was misogynist, racist, homophobic, I met him once … I had the impression “English” (a pejorative term) and that a little went a long way”; of Sir Arthur generally reactionary. Amis always went Quiller-Couch that he “gave the some way to rebutting these critics, but his impression of thinking not too badly of public persona of the blimpish philistine himself”; and he says he had “not been did not help. Powell, too, has received taken greatly with” Lord Alfred Douglas. some unfair criticism since his death, but In his Journals Powell quotes, without this seems aimed not so much at how he comment, an acquaintance saying to him, wrote but who he was perceived to write of Powell’s description of his (the about – in other words, he was perceived acquaintance’s) wife, “you pulled your to be an “English” snob who just wrote punches, but then of course you always do, about toffs. As with Amis, an actual your books are the greatest pulling of unbiased reading of the novels would soon punches.” dispel that notion. Powell admits he comes off better than Finally, they both had another, slightly most in Amis’ Memoirs; nevertheless, odd, possibly tongue-in-cheek similarity: Amis’ anecdotes about Powell are slightly they both wrote, at some length, about malicious and he ends up by implying how physically attractive they found Powell is a snob. The Memoirs did, according to the Journals, cause Powell . annoyance. However, they made it up, and This article first appeared in Newsletter #2. 76 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

The London Geography of the Dance

by Julian Allason

“Change, all change,” cried the conductor, the residence of the German Ambassador, shooing uncomprehending Japanese a hint of flamenco from that of his Spanish tourists off the number eight bus at confrere. It raised the question of how Victoria Station. “Too true,” I muttered. much of the London geography of the In a matter of weeks the old double-decker Dance had survived thirty years and more buses taken by Nicholas from the terminus of change. to his digs in Shepherd Market would be Outwardly Shepherd Market remains little scrapped. One more landmark of the altered, and the cards of strict mistresses Dance would disappear from the streets of and adventurous au pairs posted in the capital, victim not of obsolescence, but telephone kiosks suggest that Uncle of compulsive Brussels regulation and a Giles’s successors might still lurch out of mayor’s broken promise. their clubs for a “good time, dearie”. For although the In & Out is now shuttered,

the Cavalry & Guards continues to serve latter-day Conyers with mess food washed down by smartly turned out second growths. A little further along Piccadilly the Ritz stands, a 19th century Burgundian chateau marooned upon the shores of Green Park. True, the manager has just been eased out following the illumination of an hairdressing bill of £46,000 charged by his wife. It is a sum that would hardly have troubled Prince Theodoric or his character model, who kept his country’s gold A Routemaster, the quintessential London reserves in an antechamber of his suite. bus which, despite its reliability and Rumour has it that the Ritz Club, a casino of maintenance, is being replaced favoured by expatriate Islamists, will soon because of safety fears concerning he return to the hotel the subterranean open platform at the rear. chamber in which Le Bas held his reunions. Cutting through the Belgravia evening I To the south St James Street falls away to passed stuccoed terraces, outwardly the low gothic of the eponymous palace, unchanged. At which of these had sugar whence the Prince of Wales is occasionally cascaded over Widmerpool’s oily locks? A to be seen to scurry from his office. closer look disclosed multiple doorbells, Perhaps on a mission to meet and greet indicating division of the houses into flats. first growths in the 18th century cellars of Only the embassies retained structural and Messrs Berry Bros & Rudd, wine social integrity, Beethoven issuing from merchants by appointment to the princely. 77 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Further up St James’s, Whites Club, where must more than once have been silenced Randolph Churchill and Waugh tormented by a Trapnell homeric. It is still a each other, remains as Powell knew it. gathering place of gossip columnists. When the Queen expressed interest in Chips Lovell, I fancy, ran a tab here. attending its 250th birthday celebration a Nearby are several drinking clubs, low motion was suggested that she be elected dives for low lifers. About them wafts an an honorary man for the day. air of impropriety as thick as a Dickensien smog. Admission is still gained following Self-discipline requires the bypassing of inspection through a spyhole. Mention the Powell’s other haunts – even Brooks’s name Maclintick. It may help. where Denis Capel-Dunn, model for Widmerpool was club bore. Instead we But do not count on hopping aboard the continue towards Piccadilly Circus, number eight as it dawdles its way past the resisting an incursion into Fortnum & emptying theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue Mason for gulls’ eggs due to the press of Fitzrovia-bound. Brussels, Health & yet more Japanese tourists. Ahead lie the Safety, and the London Mayor have all sinful alleys of Soho. Somewhere in their decreed its open platform unsafe. maze is the Coach & Horses, an inn that This article first appeared in Newsletter #15.

The Ritz, Piccadilly

78 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Other 2005 Literary Centenaries

2005 sees numerous literary centenaries celebrated. Henry Green (at Eton and Oxford with Powell), Geoffrey Grigson, HE Bates, Arthur Koestler, Lillian Hellman, John O’Hara, Elias Canetti, Erskine Childers, John Dickson Carr, Jean- Paul Sartre and fellow roman fleuve writer CP Snow were all born in 1905. Jules Verne, meanwhile, died on 24 March 1905 and General Lew Wallace (author of Ben- Hur) on 15 February 1905. 1905 was also a bumper year for fiction. The following novels were published: Tales of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett, Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Clockwise from top Forster, The Golden Bowl by Henry James, left: HE Bates, CP The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy Snow and EW and Kipps by HG Wells. And the Hornung following crime novels appeared in 1905: GK Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Thief in the Night, a collection of stories Trades and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The by EW Hornung (the creator of Raffles), Return of Sherlock Holmes were both and The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace. published in March 1905; they were Robert Bridges, WH Davies and followed by A Swinburne published poetical works and ’s De Profundis was published posthumously on 23 February 1905. The Nobel Prize for Literature was won in 1905 by the Polish novelist, Henryk Sienkiewicz. In 1905 Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were banned from Brooklyn Public Library for setting a “bad example”. Fifty years earlier, Charlotte Brontë died aged 38 on 31 March 1855. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley, Maud, and Other Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Warden by Anthony Trollope and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman were all Clockwise from top published in 1855. And, back another 100 right: Arthur Conan years, Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of Doyle, HG Wells, the English Language was first published Henry James in 1755.

79 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

80 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 The Punch Magazine Table

The main staff meeting of the week on that he did not want part of his magazine Punch magazine took place over dinner. edited at the meal table. The dinners were first held in a pub on The lunch became an opportunity for the Ludgate Hill run by the publisher’s brother staff and regular contributors to meet -in-law. Nobody can remember when the outside guests – writers, artists, politicians, Punch Table made its first appearance, but business people, showbiz celebrities, even it was probably around 1855, by which the occasional member of the Royal time the dinners were held at the office. When Punch moved to a new building in family. 1865, the tradition was so well established It was probably after a good deal of brandy that the magazine was given its own and port that some bright spark decided banqueting hall. It had quickly become that Table members should carve their the custom to discuss the contents of the initials in the table itself. It became a week’s main political cartoon when the tradition for editors and proprietors to meal was over. It quickly became clear carve their initials: editors at one end, that creative minds were often not at their proprietors at the other. Selected guests best at the end of an enjoyable meal, and were also invited. These guests ranged table members wisely decided to consider from William Makepeace Thackeray, the weekly cartoon before lunch, a author of Vanity Fair, to the Duchess of tradition which continued until 1969, when York, author of Budgie the Helicopter. Sir William Davis became editor and decided John Tenniel, Sir John Betjeman, James Thurber, AA Milne, Basil Boothroyd have all carved. The Duke of Edinburgh carved a Greek ‘Phi’ in the table. Prince Charles’s “C” surrounds a finely-carved set of Prince of Wales feathers. The tradition is lost on some, though. The Prince of Wales’s detective was not impressed when he was first shown the table. “My God,’ he said, ‘you’ve certainly had trouble with vandals, haven’t you?” (Powell was appointed Literary Editor of Punch in 1953 and remained there until 1959.)

Close up view of the Punch table showing Anthony Powell’s initials. 81 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 My Day at Lady Molly’s House in the depths of Middlesex, dreary semi-countryside on the outer fringes of by Colin Donald London. Breakspear House is an uninhabited 17th Fifteen years of failure to convert literate century mansion often used as a location friends and loved ones have made me by film crews, which explains its state of philosophical; people either take to advanced dilapidation. At the time of my Anthony Powell or they don’t (and visit, shooting had progressed to the extreme reactions are more common than middle of the third of the four films, not). I no longer give or lend copies of the depicting scenes from The Soldier’s Art. books. Why risk being a literary Jehovah’s Witness hovering on the The dining room was set up as F Mess, doorsteps of your acquaintance and Northern Irish home of the “seedy and bad leaving samples for further discussion? mannered middle-aged officers” whose contribution to the war effort was to tell For the same reason, on hearing in 1995 dirty jokes and bully the mess waiter, that Dance was, at last, to be expensively Stringham. Another large downstairs filmed by Channel 4, I was never very room served as the bombed out drawing hopeful that it would greatly popularise the room of Lady Molly Jeavons’s Kensington books. Other feelings were also mixed. house, though by this time the hostess was Like anyone who has read of the constant dead, killed in an air-raid whose effects false starts and disappointments of were in evidence in the set’s authentically Anthony Powell’s hopes to see the series rusty wartime-era scaffolding, and plaster filmed, I was delighted that it was finally cracks carefully painted in the wall. happening in his lifetime. But I was also strongly wary of how a TV version might At Lady Molly’s is a key book in my life, fix an erroneous interpretation on these and I doubt I will ever forget its initial dynamic and subtle texts. impact on me. Actually to be “there”, rubbing shoulders with the wartime Anyway, as a journalist writing about the vintage of its odd-assorted and transient arts for The Scotsman newspaper, this was inhabitants was disorienting and something I had to write about, if only to wonderful, the same rush of emotions a prevent some jobbing writer from taking it Dickensian might feel in Fagin’s kitchen on as routine TV “preview” and or a “Janeite” at Mansfield Park. regurgitating the usual half-baked received opinions about Anthony Powell. Upstairs in this makeshift studio, littered with bits of carpentry, cables and coloured Also, flattering to journalistic vanity, Town fixtures for lights, was a room served as a House Publicity, the PR company attached blanched asylum cell where Mrs Taylor (or to Channel 4 for the series got in touch was it Porter?) was seen in a brief shot with me. Having interviewed Powell at after Templer drove her crazy. The Chantry, I was on a list of Powell-ite journalists submitted by Mr John Powell Anyone who, unlike me, is well- as potential soft touches for appetite- acquainted with film shoots will know that whetting articles. That is how I found a half a day’s visit to a set won’t yield myself on a wet autumn day in an much in the way of action. In the several unfamiliar, excited state at Breakspear hours I was there I saw two lines from two

82 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 different scenes being shot over and over filming was an experience stamped on the again, though most of that time was spent memory. in the slick but still arduous commotion Already in character, with a kind of all- that goes on between takes. over sneer, she gave the impression of These chores comprise obsessive tinkering trailing a kind of retinue of make-up girls with hair and makeup, photographing the and assistants, in a brown ripped jersey position of drinks on a tray so they don’t and an unforgettably beautiful brunette “jump”, blowing atmospheric steam, 1940s film-star perm, she looked as getting everyone to shush, and – formidable as any of Powell’s awed surprisingly infrequent and low key – descriptions. I have never seen a more giving performance notes to the actors. dramatic entrance, and that was just her arriving at work. To digress on the subject of actors, it should be noted here, that Dance scored “Miranda is a nightmare for directors,” high as “ casting” in that it featured someone told me afterwards. “She will the best performers you could possibly give them the choice of 10 different think of for the roles, even if they were readings of a line in 10 takes, and they will effectively “cameos”. There was a all be amazing, but they will take you in combination of long-established stars like completely different directions and the Sir (St John Clarke), Edward director has to choose.” Fox (Uncle Giles) and For different reasons I am just as glad to (Sillery), combined with the pick of up- have witnessed a Ted Jeavons scene, he and-coming talent like James Purefoy being one of my own favourite characters, (Nick Jenkins), Jonathan Cake (Peter and played in the series by that specialist Templer) and Claire Skinner (Jean at understated bumbling characters Templer). Michael Williams. A shy, blinking With hindsight this starriness seems a good presence in an ARP boiler- and example of what pompous critics call Hitlerian moustache, Williams (husband of “over-casting”. Audience involvement in the actress Dame ) was giving the story – theoretically ensured by hiring what must have been one of his last the best interpreters of character in the performances, as he died of cancer a few business – is in practice impeded by a years later. recurring reaction: “Oh look, he/she got to The lines from Hugh Whitemore’s be in it as well!” adaptation that are fixed in my mind – That said, who but a major star like probably inaccurately – were Pamela’s would be capable of graceless reply to Ted’s offer of a gin and bringing Pamela Flitton to life? Seeing orange (a drink always associated with her work was a highlight of the day. wartime Anthony Powell tells us). She muttered this line while tossing her head Richardson is a unique actress, equally at back towards Jeavons “like an angry home with comedy and serious roles, horse” I noted at the time: “Not too much usually conveying that total insanity is just orange. Peter always drowns it.” a step away. Merely watching her walk down the Jacobean staircase to begin The other line was the egregious Soper’s (played by Rupert Vansittart) whimsical

83 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 announcement of the suicide of Biggs When they arranged the visit, the PR “Poor old Biggsy. Who would have staffer apologised that the day I visited thought it? In the cricket pav (pavilion) would be a day without Widmerpool. This too. And him so fond of the game.” was certainly regrettable, as Widmerpool (despite Anthony Powell’s protestations TV acting is an understated craft, and what that he was one character among many) the actors are actually doing is not clear would be a key to how the adaptation until seen on the small screen. would turn out. In any case the Professionals won’t be surprised to hear Cambridge-educated Simon Russell Beale that the director – a distinguished-looking who was playing him is a fascinating actor, Canadian with specs on a chain called who I had seen effortlessly and Alvin Rakoff – was heard from far less mysteriously, upstaging everyone in minor than the first assistant director. She was a parts in Royal Shakespeare Company youngish woman in a black puffy anorak, productions at Stratford. Widmerpool was clipboard, loud voice and an air of not his first major TV role, an enormously anticipating disagreement. difficult one, given the character dwells in Rakoff, who reminded me a bit of Gore what Ferdinand Mount calls “fictional Vidal, hovered almost in the background, Valhalla”. like a liberal parent who was aware that he Widmerpool is memorably described in might have to step in eventually, but who Dance as having a “piscine countenance”, knew that letting things run their own giving “the impression that he swam rather course might be quite interesting. than walked through the rooms he I chatted a bit with the urbane Mr Rakoff inhabited”, Russell Beale is more toad or during the lunch break, but didn’t get frog than fish, but still, most viewers much out of him. What sticks in my mind would probably agree that he got the was an air of immense experience and character’s aggressive discomfiture very confidence, and the fact that he wasn’t a well. paid-up Powellian. In fact I think he told “I feel quite sorry for Widmerpool in a me he hadn’t read the books before. way.” Russell Beale told me on the phone; I can’t remember if this fact shocked me or “He’s doing his best; everything that he not, but now I am convinced that lack of does can be explained by what happens to long-ingrained preconceptions would be him. I don’t see him as a monster, and I an advantage in choreographing a project certainly haven’t played him as one.” of this scale and complexity. In another telephone interview, Hugh The only actual directing I heard from the Whitemore who adapted the books director was a laconic note to James described to me how he “sat like a Purefoy, who he obviously thought was schoolboy” while he awaited the verdict of taking Jenkins’s habitual coolness a bit too the 90-year-old Anthony Powell on the TV far in his reaction to Soper’s news. treatment of his magnum opus: He asked for a bit more reaction. “You He was very nice about it, which was know,” he drawled, “‘every man’s death a relief, although he is only able to diminishes me’, that kind of thing”. a bit at a time [because of age and infirmity]. His son Tristram, who is a well-known TV director tells me

84 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 he is pleased with what he has seen of Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy). the tapes. Naturally the elevation of these admired, but relatively obscure works for a The trick of adapting novels for TV is mainstream audience must have raised the to aim to give the audience the same hopes of Waugh’s old friend, who by his kind of experience that has affected own admission had never been a mass- you. Something may be lost and market player. something may be gained, but you have to be true to the Powellian Comparisons are particularly odious of vision. If you’re making a film you course because Brideshead is a single – interpret it for a different audience, admittedly quite fat – novel spread over not by coarsening it, but by giving it twelve nearly hour-long episodes, and the an equivalent visual impact; I didn’t TV Dance was twelve entire novels want it to be too ‘literary’ or slavish, compressed into four two-hour films. and I didn’t want some Brideshead Brideshead could afford to dawdle, to voice-over intoning away. stretch its legs. Adapter John Mortimer and director Charles Sturridge had space to An adapter has to treat a story like a embellish, to indulge an indisputable child; you can’t fuss over it too much televisual genius, and not be compelled to but give it its own life and the chop out entire strands and important freedom to make a fool of itself. characters as were the Dance team. What is noticeable from the finished Random examples of that genius for the films is that distilling the books down image in Brideshead might include the to eight hours of television, shows sepia-tinted sequence of Julia in her you the pattern of the Dance very 1920s taking a hurried drag clearly. All those sudden deaths, and from a cigarette before her “sordid, hole- sexual acts; the way the saga is put in-the-corner” marriage to Max. together becomes much more apparent when you see it on film. Or a shot of the sick Lord Marchmain’s Also, when you see Simon as opulently well-shod foot poking Widmerpool, you feel the pain of the tentatively out of the Rolls on his return character far more than you do in the from exile to die at Brideshead. book. Dance of course abounds in opportunities That passing reference to Brideshead to visualise offstage activities – Mrs Revisited begs some questions, ones that Taylor/Porter’s sad fate is one example. have recently been much exercising But with so much plot to cram in, such APLIST members on the web. An Evelyn moments of resonance that are the making Waugh novel that Anthony Powell of adapted literary works were a luxury particularly disliked, Brideshead was that the series seemed not to be able to adapted by TV in twelve episodes afford to indulge. One that does spring to in the early 1980s that set a tough mind in the TV Dance is Nick’s return benchmark for quality literary adaptation. from the war, to the strains of Vera Lynn, It was a more financially lavish age in the embracing Isobel and child (the latter world of TV drama (other serial notoriously offstage in the novel) on a adaptations admired by Powell were of station platform. This is an irresistibly Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown and touching scene (it got to me anyway) but

85 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 in retrospect too hackneyed to count as weaknesses, grist to their gag-writing authentically Powellian. intentions. If this is all beginning to sound defensive But that, as they say, is showbiz. The it is because, despite many good things, I English playwright and director David think I speak for many if not most Powell- Hare once said that he gave up directing enthusiasts in conceding that the TV films because the sheer randomness of it Dance was not the triumph that my day at bothered him. Even with long experience, Lady Molly’s led me think it might be. Or he couldn’t stand not having any inkling if that the author and his friends and he was arduously in the process of making supporters must have hoped it would be. a masterpiece, or a turkey. The atmosphere of the shoot, and even the Readers of this Newsletter will have their production ingredients themselves, he said, own views about this of course, but to this seemed to have so little bearing on the fan, despite some magnificent results. performances and excellent production values, the screening of the Channel 4 But why end on a negative note, just Dance was not the resounding ending that because the films didn’t herald a mass the tortured history of the project invited. conversion? As well as the imprimatur of To this viewer, heavily freighted with literary status and consequent sales that expectations but armed with the best will Powell had a short time to enjoy, the films, in the world, the series didn’t quite accompanied by ‘TV tie-in’ books must “work”. But I would never discourage have brought thousands of readers to the anyone from seeing it. door of one of the great multi-faceted mansions of modern literature. Admittedly Those friends I had tried to proselytise some won’t have got further than the outer taunted me that it confirmed their worst hall before turning back, but others will prejudices about Powell: a load of smart walk right in, make themselves at home, people in evening dress who keep meeting and never move out. each other by coincidence. Unsurprisingly, the TV critics weren’t This article first appeared in Newsletter #7. particularly kind, pouncing on its Members of the Great Lakes Local Group in the Red Lion Pub in Chicago at Halloween. From left to right: Tony Edmonds, Eileen Soderstrom, Joanne Edmonds, Steve Pyskoty-Olle Anthony Bruozas, Dick Goerne. See report on page 20.

86 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Anthony Powell’s Recipe for Curry

Mutton, pork, chicken, shrimps, prawns or hard-boiled eggs 3 or 4 onions 2 cloves garlic Olive oil 1 tbsp flour 2 tbsp curry powder 1 small apple 3 tomatoes 1 pint stock Raisins Sugar Cinnamon Nutmeg Mixed spices The Curry Cook Slices of pimento Picture by courtesy of John Powell Coconut Herbs Mango chutney especially if the curry is made a day or two Lemon before. Again it is a question of taste as to Worcestershire sauce and/or Angostura how liquid you like your curry to be. Add For serving with the curry: Bombay duck; salt, a handful of raisins, a teaspoon each Popadums; Bananas; Cucumber; Rice. of sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, along with other mixed spices, a few thin slices of Take three or four onions of medium size pimento cut small, a tablespoon of (I like plenty of onions) and chop them coconut, any herbs available, a tablespoon coarsely. Add two cloves of garlic (again of mango chutney and a squeeze of lemon to taste, I like garlic) and chop or press juice. Pour rest of stock in gradually and fine. Put these to cook very gently in three stir. tablespoons of olive oil. Cook till soft and This can simmer all day; I favour making a just about to brown. Add a tablespoon of curry on, say, Thursday, to be eaten on flour and stir in. Add curry powder Sunday. If you leave the curry to cool it (obviously varying amount according to should be taken from the pan and put in a strength of curry powder and taste of dish, then put back into the pan and guests). Cook very gently, making sure warmed very slowly. Half an hour before onions do not stick to pan. Add a small you propose to eat the curry, put the meat apple, peeled, cored and cut into thin in, cut in fairly small chunks. It must have slices. The longer you can cook at this all the fat removed. Pork is always good, stage the better. Add three tomatoes cut with chopped-up sausages of all kinds. small, with all their juice. Add some stock Personally, I like mutton best and chicken and let the curry bubble and hiss. At first a least. If you use uncooked meat it must be pint of stock may seem too much, but as cooked with the onions and curry powder. the curry cooks the stock will be absorbed, People are naturally inclined to use 87 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 leftover meats for curry. This is perfectly all right, but if really good meat is used the result is correspondingly good. A dash of Worcestershire sauce and Angostura may be added during the cooking process. Serve with boiled rice (keep separate from the curry). Bombay duck is dried in the oven, but popadums are not at all easy to cook without making them greasy. A fish- slice is useful in holding them down and removing them at the right moment from the pan. Fried banana (at least one per person) is good at relieving the hot taste of the curry, as is cucumber cut in small chunks and dressed with vinegar and brown sugar. Shrimps, prawns and eggs can be used instead of meat. If eggs are used they should be hard-boiled and set in halves on the curry. Odds and ends of potatoes and vegetables may also be called into play, though the last should be used in moderation. A purely vegetable curry can be very good. Allow half a cup of rice per head. Put in two cups of water for every cup of rice (I usually add about half a cup to allow for the rice not being too solid when tipped into the colander). Cover and boil. When cooked, pour cold water from the tap over the rice in the colander, separating it with a fork. You should previously have warmed a dish in which some melted butter has been placed. Pour the rice in and again separate with a fork. The rice should be put in a fireproof dish, which is then put under the grill or in a not too hot oven for a minute or two before serving. The curry when served up may be sprinkled with dried coconut. Leftover curry may be used for mulligatawny soup. This recipe was originally privately published in 1985 on behalf of the Cornwall Historic Churches Trust in a book called Men’s Menus by Alice Boyd. It has subsequently been reprinted in The Spectator; 8 November 1997.

88 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Suits You, Sir flying grouse. Even shotgun pellets are deflected according to one gamekeeper. by Julian Allason Tailors disapprove of dry cleaning, preferring occasional airing, preferably in Terry Empson [on the email APLIST the Highlands, and where necessary attack discussion of Bill Brandt’s photograph of with a brush. Jeeves employed a sponge Anthony Powell] recently detected that to remove Bertie Wooster’s breakfast from “Powell has clearly borrowed Evelyn his , a technique superfluous on a Waugh’s suit to be photographed in”. Highland tweed. The rigidity achieved by Savile Row A would have been worn with a tailors of that period, especially when single breasted suit, the coat of the latter using the tweed favoured by Evelyn having two side vents, one vent being Waugh, was said to be sufficient to enable considered ‘common’. Absence of venting a drunken subaltern to pass Colonel’s marked one out as of Italian or Balkan inspection. Naturally it would only have extraction, not necessarily attracting the been worn west of Chiswick, south of social cachet now attached to Italian Croydon or north of Hampstead. tailoring by the media (although not (Cavalrymen and members of the perhaps in St James’s). Household Brigade were not thought to go east). Some magnates had their suits worn The correct accessories were a silk in by their butlers. Even so Waugh’s handkerchief (not matching the tie) in the achievement in rumpling his deserves coat’s outer breast pocket and a watch salutation. chain worn across the waistcoat, or, on a single breasted suit descending from The pecking order in Saville Row remains into breast pocket. The bottom button of little changed today: Huntsman, Henry the waistcoat was only buttoned by Poole, Anderson & Sheppard, then bounders and bank managers. Trouser Kilgours, although Gieves are considered turnups were the norm from about 1911- to have lowered standards in a bid to 65, and in my childhood recollection, often appeal to New Labour. This is roughly yielded a three-penny bit. Zippers were reflected in their prices which start at considered ‘fast’ until fairly recently. around £2500 ($4800) for a two-piece Powell appears to have been a button man. suit, less at Gieves. Although softer fabrics, lighter in weight, are now For evening wear, white (bow) tie and tails preferred by clients the internal were usual until the Second World War, construction retains the shape with the dinner suit (tuxedo) or a velvet characteristic of each house, and a degree with braided worn of crease resistance foreign to off-the-peg to dinner parties well into the 1980’s. It suits. The jacket is still referred to as the was white tie that Widmerpool donned for coat, a usage employed by Powell. the Huntercombes’ dance. The white or cream tuxedo began as tropical wear, To this day Scottish tailors display bolts of occasionally appeared at county dances in estate tweed worn only by employees of June, but was otherwise the province of that estate. These have the consistency bandleaders. It is doubtful that Nick ever familiar to Powell and are capable of owned one. Or Powell. warding off rain, snow, brambles and low- This article first appeared in Newsletter #19. 89 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Michael Arlen and The Green Hat Upbringing. Nick Jenkins and Quiggin are up at Oxford and, returning together by David Butler from a lecture, Quiggin stops by Nick’s rooms to borrow some books. Although “Can I take The Green Hat too?” Quiggin never subsequently articulates his asked Quiggin. views on the book, it is safe to say that he “Don’t lose it.” would not have liked it. Powell, with “It is all about fashionable life, isn’t typical obliquity, does not spell that out, it?” assuming (one imagines) that his readers “Well, yes.” would know enough about the novel to I had myself not yet fully digested the work that out for themselves. subject matter of The Green Hat, a But, in terms of its popularity, The Green novel that I felt painted, on the whole, Hat has not worn well and its author a sympathetic picture of what London Michael Arlen has fallen into comparative had to offer: though much of the life obscurity. Allusions to his life and work – it described was still obscure to me. I within Dance or elsewhere – stand a was surprised at Quiggin asking for diminishing chance of being recognized by it. He went on: “In that case I do not the 21st century reader. Yet during the expect that I shall like it. I hate 1920s Michael Arlen was a famous and anything superficial. But I will take hugely successful author and society the book and look at it, and tell you figure, The Green Hat a runaway what I think of the writing.” bestseller. In its initial edition, the book This brief reference to The Green Hat was selling out as fast as publisher Collins Michael Arlen’s bestselling novel of 1924, could get it off the presses. The book was appears towards the end of A Question of quickly adapted for the stage both in London, where in 1925 took the leading role, and in the USA. It also had cinematic incarnation as in 1928, starring Greta Garbo. Michael Arlen was born Dikram Kouyoumdjian in 1895 in Rustchuck, Bulgaria, of Armenian parents fleeing persecution in the Turkish Empire. The family (Dikram, his parents, along with three brothers and one sister) emigrated to England in 1901 and established themselves in commerce in the Manchester area. Dikram was educated at Malvern College and was briefly a medical student at the , but decided instead to pursue a journalistic and literary career in London, to where he moved in 1913. He was prevented by his alien status from engaging in active

90 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 service when war broke out. As Powell would later do, Dikram set himself up in the quirky Mayfair enclave of Shepherd’s Market (today known as Shepherd Market) in a small flat over a shop and there embarked on a writing career, submitting pieces for a magazine called The New Age. At that time he received advice and support from DH Lawrence, among others. Having become a naturalized British citizen and then changed his name by deed poll to Michael Arlen, he found a good measure of success with novels and short stories in the early 1920s (among them The London Venture, The Romantic Lady, and Piracy) and at the same time became well-established in the racy society circles epitomized by (with whom Arlen fell in love, and had a close relationship in the early 1920s). At one level the novel can be read as Like Arlen’s previous works, The Green sentimental romance, and this no doubt Hat (sub-titled “A Romance for a Few contributed to its popular success. Iris People”) drew heavily on that first-hand Storm’s tale is a tragic and engaging one experience and is set amongst the and Arlen’s prose style, highly lyrical and fashionable Mayfair set of the early 1920s. full of archaisms, adds to the melodrama. Recounted in the first person by an Arlen- This speech, uttered by Iris herself towards like narrator, it is the tale of Iris Storm, the end of the story, is a good example of “shameless, shameful lady”, wearer of the this style: eponymous green hat, of her scandalous life and ultimate redemption. The action She said: ‘In the ancient love-tales takes place between 1922 and 1923, taking and the songs of the Jongleurs we the reader from London to Paris and back, read of maidens sacrificed on the after a powerful opening in which the altar of circumstance. I was a narrator meets Iris for the first time maiden, even I, once upon a time. amongst the dingy streets of Shepherd’s Dear, I am afraid you must take my Market. A supporting cast – including word for that. And I, a maid, was such characters as Hilary Townshend, sacrificed to the vulgar ambitions of a staunch defender of “conduct” and pre-war Sir Maurice. So let us not talk of values; the cynical and worldly Guy de sacrifice. It makes me sick with Travest; Gerald March who, as Iris’s anger.’ brother represents the epitome of war- So persistent is this affected tone engendered distress and disillusionment; (“everything [Iris] says bears the mark of and simple pleasure-seekers such as the having been written out for her by Mr narrator’s unnamed sister – are employed Michael Arlen”, noted the Times Literary by Arlen to create the moral cross-currents Supplement) that the novel has an almost to Iris’s story. 91 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 dreamlike quality to it. At the same time as it was from first hand experience, was Arlen dared to take on some comparatively very accurate: the locations and even some risqué, or at least unsettling, themes, such of the characters clearly identifiable in real as adultery, venereal disease, alcoholism life. Scenes such as that depicted in the and suicide, which no doubt added to its Loyalty Club (a thinly disguised version of popular allure, to its sheer modernity: that the well-known real-life Embassy Club of racy element of the book which, as The that period – so thinly disguised, in fact, Times rather condescendingly put it in its that Arlen mischievously has his narrator 1956 obituary of Arlen, “shocked” a deny the connection) were instantly seemingly all too shockable reading public recognizable, while some (but only some) at the time. aspects of the character and experience of Iris Storm were clearly based on those of On another level, The Green Hat operates Nancy Cunard herself. There are countless as a satire on the mores and manners of contemporary literary and artistic that particular social group in the references as well, ranging from Clemence immediate post-war period. By no means Dane to James Joyce. lacking in wit and playfulness, Arlen enjoys poking fun at this group and their At the time, serious reviewers tended superficial ways. “It has only been open either to dislike the novel simply for its three nights, so it will be very modish for “excesses”, or to be puzzled by the another two”, says the narrator facetiously, awkward juxtaposition of sentimentality of a new dancing club in Paris. But and cynicism within the novel. The Times overall the picture it paints of these people, Literary Supplement asked of Arlen: people who are wealthy and leisured but “Which is fundamental in him: his who lack imagination, are shallow and pleasant, polished cynicism or his morally confused, is rather depressing. In a romantic sentiment?” but then conceded notable set piece of the novel, Arlen that “once one has decided to accept the describes a group of night clubbers at the convention of its extreme artificiality, the fashionable Loyalty Club in St James’s as book proves captivating in its idle, airy young people who “ignored everything but fashion.” A brusque review by LP Hartley themselves, in whom they were not very in The Spectator was more or less interested”, and who “looked bored with dismissive of Iris as a “most unconvincing boredom”. This is the generation of demi-mondaine”. people who slightly pre-date the Bright In any event, the reading public lapped up Young Things later fictionalized in Evelyn The Green Hat and its success propelled Waugh’s Vile Bodies, a Arlen to new heights of generation who had fame and wealth. come out into society Perhaps its hybrid prior to 1914 only to character, to be taken as find the social and romance or social moral certainties of critique according to that time ripped apart taste, helped it to by the upheavals of succeed. In any case, war. Arlen was in demand. To those in the know, In 1927, he appeared on Arlen’s picture, painted the front cover of the Nancy Cunard 92 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 York, Arlen remained there for the rest of his life, dying in 1956. Ultimately, it seems, despite his polished manner and undoubted celebrity status Arlen never shook off the sense of being an outsider; never really allowed to forget this by others, he also seems to have felt it keenly from within, jokingly describing himself once as “the last of the Armenian atrocities”. Powell, when they lunched together shortly before Arlen’s death, detected in him a “national awareness I am sure never left him”. In truth, the secrets of the success of The Green Hat probably contain the seeds of its inevitable fall into obscurity. It was written to strike a particular chord at a Still of Nick Jenkins in particular time; in the words of The Times, Shepherd Market. to chime with “an unexacting fashion of By courtesy of Channel 4 TV. the ‘post-war’ period for verbal smartness, youthful cynicism, and a display of American publication Time, a sure sign, if equally immature romantic temperament.” any were needed, that he had “arrived”. In this it was highly successful. But its Always well-groomed and impeccably flowery prose and melodramatic tone do tailored, he became a regular fixture not sit easily with more recent generations amongst the wealthy and well-born in of readers, whilst the wealth of London, on the Riviera and at St Moritz. contemporary allusions and in-jokes He married Atalanta Mercati – the within it have the effect of dating the story daughter of an American heiress and a all too narrowly and are inevitably lost on Greek nobleman – in 1928 and took up later generations. Nevertheless, The Green permanent residence in the south of Hat should have continuing relevance and France. However, although he continued interest, if for no other reason than for its to publish novels and short stories right up careful, amusing and insightful portrayal until the Second World War, nothing else of a unique and troubled generation of post quite lived up to the success of The Green -Great War Britons. Moreover, enthusiasts Hat. This appears to have been a source of for Dance owe a particular debt of increasing melancholy to the author over gratitude to Michael Arlen, for as Powell the ensuing years. At the outbreak of the discloses in his memoirs it was the Second War, eager to serve, Arlen re- Shepherd’s Market scene at the opening of established himself in England while his The Green Hat which prompted him to set wife, son and daughter were sent to safety up home there after coming down from in America; but he was effectively Oxford, the same locality from which, hounded out of his job in civil defense by hardly by coincidence, Nicholas Jenkins in prying politicians suspicious of his foreign due course embarks on his fictional background. Rejoining his family in New London life.

93 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Absent America How Anthony Powell Ignored the Elephant in Britain’s Living Room

by Michael Young

This year is the centennial of author Anthony Powell’s birth, so it seems only fitting to look back at his classic twelve- volume A Dance to the Music of Time. Yet when the passage of a century also happens to be the fifth anniversary of an author’s death, somewhere in there someone has played a momentarily insolent trick on time. At this stage writing yet another review of Dance is pointless, particularly when there is little hope of approximating the careful readings of others, notably in his remarkable “Powell’s Way”, collected in his 2000 book Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. Nor is there much sense in extensively an atmosphere redolent with answering what Dance is about; otherwise impermanence and decay. Jenkins’ you risk hearing echoes of Professor Eric recollections – in fact Dance as a whole – Idle chastising you for failing to are awash with Tory nostalgia, so that, summarize the oeuvre in fifteen seconds: ironically, the collective mood of this “A good try though and very nice posture.” sprawling work is one of insularity. Hitchens notes that this insularity causes Powell has often been compared to Marcel Powell to overlook the rise of in Proust, and the essence of his cycle of British society. “The fascist and crypto- novels is to examine how art can best fascist element in upper-class British express the passage of time. The context society makes no appearance at all.” is roughly 60 years of the life of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, assumed to be But the most flagrant absence, the one that Powell himself, and the British society he cries out for mention, and that Hitchens moves in. The account spans the 20th more than anybody else should have century from the first decade to the 1960s, noticed, is that of the United States and its and the characters are mostly from the post-World War II inheritance, if only prosperous middle class (many of them, in through British imperial insolvency, of the today’s parlance, “upwardly mobile”), old empire’s global millstone. Why does though the frequent appearance of peers, Powell determinedly fail to mention the lifelong or hereditary, speaks to a time American elephant in Britain’s living when Britain’s class divisions were room? beginning to fray. In creating a changing Actually, he doesn’t, quite, but the social context for the interplay between his references are slight and not easily characters and time itself, Powell creates intelligible when they do come. 94 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Throughout most of the twelve volumes, alongside Britain’s decline. Instead, we America is a distant place, less immediate are offered this passage in The Soldier’s to Jenkins’ characters than , South Art, the eighth novel in the series, when Africa or an all-purpose “South America”, Jenkins learns that the Soviet Union has whose specificities Powell never bothers entered the war: to elucidate. The first mention comes An immediate, overpowering, almost early in the first novel of the cycle, in an mystic sense of relief took shape aside Jenkins offers on his Uncle Giles, a within me. I felt suddenly sure perpetual malcontent. He notes that Giles everything was going to be all right. had once thought of moving to This was something quite apart from Philadelphia to take up a “commercial even the most cursory reflection upon post” there. The idea is made to sound slightly absurd, and seems calculated to strategic implications involved. define Giles through that absurdity, as if he Now contrast this with what Evelyn had contemplated investing in a banana Waugh has one of his characters, Guy plantation in Finland. Crouchback, think in , the second novel of his Sword Much later on, America makes another of Honour trilogy, after learning of the cameo appearance, as Jenkins describes his friend (and future brother in law) Soviet-German alliance of 1939: “Chips” Lovell, the two of them [A] decade of shame seemed to be scriptwriters at a film studio whose owners ending in light and reason, [...] the are American. Lovell’s traces of blue Enemy was plain in view, huge and blood prompt one character to hint that he hateful, all disguise cast off; the was hired because the “American bosses modern age in arms. of the company dreamed of some intoxicating social advantage to be reaped For Crouchback, like Waugh, the alliance by themselves, personally, through was a defining moment because the true employing an eligible young man of that nature of the Soviet state, whose sort.” It’s not as savage as Evelyn communism he despised, had been Waugh’s lampoon of Hollywood exposed. Perhaps more sensibly, Jenkins anglophilia in , but it chose to focus on the new hope provided clearly involves mockery of American by Moscow. Yet he utters not a word social earnestness. Had Powell wanted to about America when it enters the conflict. touch on America, he could have done so More importantly, Powell never most easily in the tenth or eleventh novel investigates what it says about Britain’s of his cycle, both of which cover the post- disintegrating grandeur that his character war period and the beginnings of the Cold must look to Stalin for moral sustenance. War. Or perhaps even earlier, as Jenkins One gets the sense that Powell either did spends part of the world war as a liaison not think of the implications, or preferred officer to the military attaches of countries not to. The son of a officer, overrun by the Germans – an unused married to Lady Violet Pakenham, a opportunity to sketch bargaining over the daughter of the Earl of Longford, Powell future of many of these countries and navigated among the very social classes illustrate the American and Soviet rise most sensitive to the empire’s termination,

95 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 but that also pragmatically created with (Jenkins’ niece through his wife) – all in Washington what became the so-called some way speak to the sudden, vigorous, “special relationship.” Was Powell’s not slightly disturbing intrusion of America mentioning this an oversight? Could he into European life, whether as promise of just not be bothered? Not quite. death or resurrection. Sidestepping British decline, Powell, at the The resurrection theme is sounded in the start of the eleventh volume, Temporary last novel in the cycle, Hearing Secret Kings, takes us to another , Harmonies, which recounts, among other as Jenkins attends a cultural conference in things, the downfall of Kenneth Venice. The period is the late 1950s, the Widmerpool, who glides through the era of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles; narrative as the supreme embodiment of but it isn’t paramount power to which we the treacherous and grotesque. We are told are introduced, but rather two apolitical that Widmerpool had earlier been invited Americans: an academic named Russell to America by an Ivy League university, Gwinnett, who is writing a biography of a before moving to a “Californian center for dead British novelist loosely based on political research” (a wink at Robert Julian Maclaren-Ross; but also an Conquest, to whom the novel is American film producer, Louis Glober. dedicated), where he had thought of being Gwinnett is obsessed with death – though naturalized. Widmerpool’s departure to death for him is a source of creativity (and America was understandable: his political sexual conquest and expression); Glober, career had been on the skids, his wife in turn, is all life, and his later demise in a (Gwinnett’s sacrificial lamb) had died, and car crash on the French Riviera is wryly he was suspected of shady dealings with described by Jenkins as “the sort of end Soviet intelligence. His time in America Glober himself would have approved.” promised rebirth, a new personality, a break with the crumbling past. But Whether Powell saw any deeper truth in Widmerpool returned to Britain, ultimately making their paths cross in Venice is descending to increasingly abject depths of irrelevant; the opportunities for humiliation, until his death in a scene interpretation are too good to miss. reminiscent of an early one in the first Europe was abounding with American novel – time having rotated full circle. visitors during the post-war period, and no self-respecting continental city failed to The moral of the tale is ambiguous: have a trans-Atlantic producer to entertain. America could have created a new man, However, it’s tempting to go overboard but he chose, instead, to return home. and say that the Gwinnett-Glober Jenkins at one stage mentions the tyranny encounter in the city of the doges, the of time. Perhaps it’s Powell’s partiality to centrality of both characters in their understatement that makes him believe in respective environments during the Venice that far more than he ever could the sojourn, the subsequent “triumph” of alleged perennial rebirth of American life. Gwinnett over the most elusive character in the novels (who, sensing his * necrophiliac tendencies, commits suicide Michael Young is opinion editor at the Daily Star as the ultimate sacrifice to love), newspaper in Beirut. Gwinnett’s eventual marriage to the This article originally appeared in the journal daughter of a British noble family Reason on 25 August 2005.

96 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 They lunched together Powell and Larkin at Frome (where they apparently ate more by Stephen Holden onion sauce at luncheon than any of Powell’s Anthony Powell first met previous guests) and through their mutual friend Kingsley Amis afterwards went back to in 1958, when they all lunched together at The Chantry. In his the Ivy in August of that year. Larkin was letters recalling the occasion, Larkin careful not to seem impressed after the moans that Powell only “showed us the meeting, writing to a friend, “Powell is estate – but not the house, wch wd have about Kingsley’s size & very ‘charming’ & interested me more.” To Robert Conquest funny, at least he never says anything he wrote, “I don’t know that I much really funny, but he’s full of droll enjoyed the tour of the estate, but anecdotes & laughs a lot, so one imagines everything else was all right”, adding, “AP he’s funny. He dresses in country style & was just reading the Waugh diaries for the has a spotted handkerchief to wipe D.Telegraph: he was careful in his review the tears of laughter away with.” to point out that some ‘Anthony’ engaged Larkin had long been a fan of Powell’s in flagellant orgy wasn’t him.” Two novels, especially the pre-Dance novels, months later he was still moaning about recommending them to Amis when they the visit in a letter to Anthony Thwaite: “I were at Oxford in the 1940s. Larkin read hadn’t been to P.’s mansion before: he A Question of Upbringing when it first showed us round the ‘natural’ estate rather came out, remarking to a friend that it was than the house, wch I’d have liked to see.” “rather like The Magnet written by Larkin also met up with the Powells at a Proust.” And when Amis published Lucky dinner given by Margaret Thatcher to Jim in 1953 Larkin was moaning to friends various well-known writers. Larkin, about the favourable reviews it was getting writing to Anthony Thwaite about Tom from people like Powell in Punch. Stoppard, said, “I met him [Stoppard] at No. Ten, Downing Street. Lady Violet Powell and Larkin appear to have Powell whispered to me, Is that Mick corresponded very little. In April 1985 Jagger? And I was able, from the wealth Larkin wrote thanking Powell for sending of my infinitely greater savoir vivre, nous, him a copy of Cuthbert Bede’s Adventures sens d’occasion and what not, to put her of Mr Verdant Green (Powell had written a wise.” foreword to a new edition); and in August 1985 he wrote saying how bold it was of The two men do not appear to have met Powell to buy an electric typewriter (“the after the 10 Downing Street dinner, though only time I tried one I was scared to death, Larkin features quite often in Powell’s as it seemed to be running away with me. Journals from 1982 onwards. In July I felt as if I’d been put at the controls of 1983, for instance, he lunches with Concorde after five minutes tuition”). Andrew Motion (later Larkin’s biographer) and he (Powell) remarks, “Larkin, one of Larkin and Powell did meet occasionally, the most selfish men on earth.” And the most notably in summer 1976 when Larkin following year, after the Poet Laureate, and Monica Jones (his long-term, on-off John Betjeman, had died in May 1984, girlfriend) were touring the West Country. Powell met Lord Gowrie (Minister for the 97 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

Arts from 1983-1985) who asked him for bothered by this behaviour to raise it again his views on who should succeed in a review in Miscellaneous Verdicts. Betjeman as Laureate. “I said Philip Two years later Powell re-read Larkin’s Larkin should certainly have it in my works and compared him to Kingsley opinion, notwithstanding certain Amis, mentioning their “possibly shared objections like not being a particularly Zeitgeist … Difference between them is nice man, reclusiveness, occasional public Kingsley’s acceptance (if not actual indiscretions such as saying he did not enjoyment) of life, notwithstanding want it, and living in Hull.” In the event, colossal grumbling … as opposed to Larkin refused the Laureateship, and it Philip’s very real dislike of every personal went to Ted Hughes. involvement in living … Both Philip and In mid 1985 Larkin was admitted to Kingsley oppressed by crushing hospital with an illness in his throat, and preoccupation with Death tho’ in slightly died on 2 December 1985 of cancer. A different manner; Kingsley so to speak television news channel telephoned Powell having another drink to forget about its the same day to ask him to comment on imminence; Philip welcoming prospect of Larkin’s death. Powell refused on the getting out early …” The following year grounds he didn’t know Larkin well Powell re-read Larkin’s novel Jill and also enough, but used the occasion in his A Girl in Winter, which he claims to be Journals to muse about Larkin’s life and reading for the first time. This is strange work: “Larkin was obviously extremely as Powell actually gave A Girl in Winter a intelligent, a good poet, if essentially not good review when it first appeared in on a very extensive scale, tho’ output on 1947. Powell was not impressed with the whole is beside the point …” Powell either novel, calling Jill “totally also complains about Larkin’s negative uninspired” and concluding, “Larkin had a obituaries, saying many concentrate great ambition to be a novelist but my own unduly on Larkin’s right-wing attitudes (a feeling is that he had little or no talent for prejudice Powell himself would that.” encounter). Yet Powell ends up giving In 1990 Powell re-read the longish review Larkin a fairly negative obituary himself: Larkin had written of Books Do Furnish a “There was something of a dyed-in-the- Room, describing it (accurately) as a wool provincialism about Larkin that also “curiously unfriendly piece.” The review, suggested a kind of resentment of the which appeared in the New Statesman in modern world. He was perhaps not really 1971, veers between somewhat grudging a very nice chap is one’s final conclusion, praise and fairly scathing criticism. Larkin but a good if limited poet.” writes, “Even bearing in mind that the Powell also complains (rather oddly, in my Music of Time novels read better the opinion) of Larkin’s habit of including second time than the first … I found the himself in photographs: “Larkin took one literary element in this one disappointing.” of his interval-shutter photographs, in Larkin says, rather oddly, “I am, I suppose, which he himself returns to be included in a Powell fan” and compares receiving a group. Some kind of power or narcissistic new Powell novel to AL Mencken element perhaps coming into play, as he receiving some bootleg booze: “it was always does this.” Powell was sufficiently accepted in the editorial office of the

98 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

American Mercury that a delivery from the preference for Evelyn Waugh’s depiction bootlegger should suspend all work until of Ritchie-Hooke over Powell’s of General the treasure had been unwrapped fondled, Liddament and Magnus Donners, noting and even tasted.” Yet Larkin then goes on that “This seems to me to show a taste for to describe Dance as essentially a failure, very coarse texture.” saying that, “It’s ironical, in my view, that When Larkin’s Selected Letters were the main element lacking in The Music of published in 1992 Powell notes the various Time should be the sense of time itself – unfriendly remarks Larkin makes about time passing, people getting older, the him (“horse-faced dwarf” etc.) but says “I feeling of lines shortening and choice was surprised how little I minded Larkin’s decreasing”, adding that, “To show life as offensive remarks.” Powell adds that, a dance or a spectacle means concentrating “Latterly his unfriendly comments on on the dance-like and spectacular aspect of myself are all but insane. They are it, and ignoring precisely those factors obviously inspired by jealousy …” He which are essential if ‘mortality’ is to be agrees with Hilary Spurling’s view of portrayed: the drawing of characters in Larkin: “With regard to individuals, Hilary depth, the involvement of the reader in Spurling put her finger on it in her review, their fortunes, the evocation of suffering.” saying he hated everyone who showed Larkin describes Powell’s style (or rather themselves in the smallest degree in what he perceives Powell’s style to be) as competition with himself, in fact Larkin a “frigid design” only permissible in a was not a very nice man. That is the case comic novel. He further describes Powell’s “Comic Mandarin” style as with many poets.” suggesting nothing it describes should be Relations between writers, whether in taken seriously as “it imparts a glaze to the private or public, are frequently uneasy action.” “The dance is not only a dance, it and both Larkin and Powell are guilty of a is performed behind gauze,” he says, certain touchiness whenever the other is seeming to miss the important point that mentioned. Powell, for instance, often the voice in question is actually the makes the rather de haut en bas comment narrative voice of Nicholas Jenkins. about Larkin being “provincial” and Larkin mentions that “A final and having an “innate sense of inferiority.” fundamental reservation … Is how far we Perhaps the last word on the fractious are reading a work of imagination …” relationship of one writer to another saying that “later books suggest that we should go to an anecdote told by Larkin are simply reading what happens to have when interviewed for the Paris Review happened to Nick Jenkins, with the interview: “You remember Tennyson growing suspicion that something very reading an unpublished poem to Jowett similar happened to Mr Powell.” He ends [Dean of Balliol]; when he had finished, his review saying he prefers Powell’s pre- Jowett said, ‘I shouldn’t publish that if I Dance novels, and that “it may be the fate were you, Tennyson.’ Tennyson replied, of a mural to lack the concentrated effect ‘If it comes to that, Master, the sherry you of a single canvas.” gave us at lunch was downright filthy.” On re-reading the review Powell quite This article first appeared in Newsletter #12. rightly disparages Larkin’s stated

99 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 X Trapnel

“Based on the impecunious and thirsty bohemian writer Julian Maclaren-Ross, even down to the dark-glasses and walking stick.” [Anthony Powell, The Strangers All Are Gone, p 6] * Bitten by the Tarantula; and other writing – Julian Maclaren-Ross

by Paul Willetts

The life and literary career of Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) are inextricably entwined with Soho’s bohemian heyday, with the era of rationing, basement drinking clubs and smog-shrouded streets. Still, it’s easy to imagine Maclaren-Ross thriving in today’s media-dominated world. If he was a young writer now, he’d be the subject of countless fawning magazine profiles, dissecting his a writer of fiction, he pioneered a style that flamboyant , quoting his droll was often slangy and conversational, its comments, as well as savouring his aura of unpretentious clarity, casual tone, and unbreachable self-confidence and deadpan mordant humour contributing to its cool. Such profiles would be accompanied enduring appeal. What’s more, in short by dramatically composed photos of him. stories such as The Rubber Cheque, he I can just see him posing in the indulges in jokey formal games that memorabilia-lined French House pub or prefigure the post-modern tricksiness of on some neon-lit West End street. He’d be many current writers. dressed in his trademark outfit: a pale suit, His essays on film and literature were gaudily patterned tie, and aviator-style similarly innovative, yet their originality is , his famous -bear coat less conspicuous. Despite penning only a draped round his shoulders, a silver-topped limited amount of film criticism, all of it cane clasped in one hand and a cigarette- reproduced here, he broke new ground in holder in the other. that genre. As a literary essayist, the Though his habitual get-up harked back to enthusiasm, knowledge and seriousness the sleek sartorial style of the 1890s dandy, with which he treated both high art and the it also looked forward to the fancy-dress easily dismissed products of popular posturing of pop stars from the 1960s culture anticipated the approach taken by onwards. He was, in many ways, ahead of so many subsequent critics. Bitten By The his time, not least in his literary output. As Tarantula and other writing provides a showcase not only for these little known 100 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 and under-appreciated aspects of his career cheekily titled Five Finger Exercises, an but also for his versatility. Difficult apprentice-work describing his brief though his life was, alcoholism, drug- romantic entanglement with a fellow guest fuelled paranoia and lack of money being in the seaside hotel in which he’d been among the obstacles strewn across his staying after he left the Riviera and moved path, he maintained a surprisingly high back to England. By the standards of the output that spanned numerous literary mid-1930s when Five Finger Exercises genres. During the latter half of the 1950s, was written, its subject matter was for instance, he juggled novel-writing with sufficiently risqué to make magazine work as a journalist, screenwriter, and editors reluctant to publish it. Thanks to radio dramatist. But he is now Maclaren-Ross’s growing reputation, it remembered chiefly for his memoirs and finally appeared in print in Fortune fiction, the boundary between which tends Anthology, a 1942 collection, issued by the to be indistinct. shady publisher, LS Caton, later lampooned in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Like innumerable other major writers, Caton’s unwillingness to pay contributors ranging from to led Maclaren-Ross to joke about how the John Updike, he relied on direct Fortune Anthology should be known only experience as the source of the majority of by its initials. his best work, an obvious exception being the short story about colonial India that A much more substantial example of his brought him to prominence. For inclusion fiction is provided by the long out-of-print in this volume, I’ve chosen a cross-section novella, Bitten By The Tarantula. I was of Maclaren-Ross’s fiction, encompassing recently encouraged to re-read it by the a novella, nineteen frequently brief and pungent stories, not to mention several previously unpublished fragments of novels. In all but one case, the stories have been plucked from his 1956 miscellany, The Funny Bone, plus his three published collections – The Stuff to Give The Troops (1944), Better than a Kick in the Pants (1945) and The Nine Men of Soho (1946). The stories, few of which have ever been reprinted, explore four main periods in his strange and troubled life. These comprise his upbringing on the French Riviera between 1921 and 1933; his early adult years on the south coast of England; his unhappy spell as an army conscript, culminating in his desertion and subsequent incarceration in a military psychiatric hospital; and his itinerant post- war existence, much of it spent in the pubs and clubs of Soho. Of the stories featured here, the latest is The Gem, dating from the beginning of 1955. And the earliest is the Julian Maclaren-Ross 101 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 writer Jonathan Meades, who regards it as Under the more catchy title of Bitten By being far superior to Cyril Connolly’s The Tarantula, it was eventually published much better-known book, The Rock Pool, in 1946 by Allan Wingate Ltd, a new also set against the Riviera’s sybaritic, imprint launched by the young André inter-war bohemian scene. I soon realised Deutsch, to whom Maclaren-Ross had that I’d been wrong to bracket Bitten By been introduced by Graham Greene. The The Tarantula with Maclaren-Ross’s book scored a commercial hit, no doubt disappointing late novels. True, it isn’t in aided by its subject matter and the relative the same league as his 1947 masterpiece, exoticism of its pre-war setting, so far Of Love and Hunger, but it has plenty to removed from the prevailing austerity of recommend it. Like Of Love and Hunger, post-war England. it was written during the 1940s, yet its No matter how chaotic his relationships sparse, dialogue-laden style, and bleak and domestic arrangements were, hedonism belong to the pre-war period in Maclaren-Ross never allowed himself to which it’s set. As if to emphasise this, the be distracted from his raison d’être, narrator is reading Vile Bodies and there’s namely his literary vocation. From 1945 a scene, involving a sports car speeding right through until his death, he subsidised round the local market square, that both his heavy drinking and creative work possesses the bleak symbolism of Evelyn with journalism. This consisted of book Waugh’s novel. reviews, literary parodies, essays on the Once Maclaren-Ross had completed the cinema, facetious profiles of fictional first half of the novella, by which time he characters, and lengthy ruminations on had been posted to a military training writers he admired. In one of the many camp in Dorset, he showed it to Cyril intriguing paradoxes evident in his career, Connolly, editor of the influential he was capable of writing with level- magazine Horizon, where he had just headed clarity even when his life was in made his triumphant debut. Connolly disarray. responded very positively to the Regrettably, Maclaren-Ross was under- manuscript. On condition that the book employed as a film critic. By the 1950s, ended up being no longer than 10,000 he had made the transition from being a words, Connolly was prepared to set aside critic to being a screenwriter. His an entire issue of the magazine to it, an experiences on the practical side of the honour only bestowed on Evelyn Waugh’s film business informed his two remaining The Loved One. But The Simple Life [the contributions to the genre. For Encounter novella’s original title] soon expanded way he wrote an expansive, well-informed beyond the specified limit, probably essay on the silent films of DW Griffith because it offered Maclaren-Ross a and Erich von Stroheim. For the Times nostalgic escape from army life, which had Literary Supplement, he wrote about soon lost its novelty. Even so, the Storytelling and the Screen, his comments completed manuscript was still too short to permeated by the resentment he felt be regarded as a full-length novel, towards the film companies and producers ensuring that it was hard to place with a who had employed him on a series of suitable publisher, irrespective of Maclaren-Ross’s status as a marketable ultimately disappointing assignments. young author. 102 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Screenwriting was not, however, Maclaren editorship of Malcolm Muggeridge. In -Ross’s only sideline during that period. addition to dashing off short book reviews, Towards the end of 1947, his friend, the he wrote pieces on specific themes, novelist Anthony Powell, who was amusing reminiscences, comic articles, working part-time for the TLS, helped him and literary parodies, several of which are out of his latest financial mess by reproduced here. These include his parody employing him as a book reviewer. of HE Bates’s work, a seemingly Maclaren-Ross insisted on the TLS defying innocuous send-up that led Bates to both convention and its accounting system instigate a successful High Court libel by paying him ‘cash-on-delivery’, his action against him. payment all too often finding its way with For all Maclaren-Ross’s well-documented disconcerting speed into the cash-registers self-absorption, he was both receptive to of favoured West End pubs and clubs. Self other writers’ work and keenly aware of -conscious though he was about his lack of their stylistic nuances, his output in this a university education, he rapidly field prompting Malcolm Muggeridge to demonstrated his abilities as a critic. He hail him as ‘the best living parodist’. To was soon pressed into supplying so-called his delight, Maclaren-Ross even earned ‘middles’ for the TLS – essays on appreciative responses from PG individual writers, literary forms, or Wodehouse, Georges Simenon and movements. His initial contribution was devoted to Henry Green, whose books he rated highly, their abrupt rhythms reverberating through his own work. He went on to produce middles on a diverse selection of other cherished subjects. Whatever he was commissioned to write about, be it the arcane fiction of Jean Cocteau or the popular novels of C Forester, he offered fresh observations as well as tangential insights into his own life and work. Within only a few years, he was regarded as a literary critic of sufficient stature for to give him the chance to expand his TLS middles into a collection of essays on modern novelists. But he never seized the opportunity, preferring to pursue other ventures. Throughout the rest of his life, literary criticism provided him with an invaluable source of much-needed ready-cash. Besides writing for the TLS, he received regular commissions between 1953 and 1959 from Punch, the humorous magazine that was enjoying a resurgence under the

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William Faulkner, whose work he had Sheridan le Fanu, the work of Mary spoofed with such obvious affection. McCarthy and ’s posthumously published A Moveable Feast When word got round that he was a which, most likely, inspired Maclaren- contributor to Punch, the entrance to the Ross’s own memoirs of bohemian Soho. magazine’s premises became blocked by a Even when the chosen topic is as obscure jostling crowd of bailiffs hunting the as the florid fantasy novels of MP Shiel or elusive, debt-ridden Maclaren-Ross. the pulp fiction of Robert Bloch, Maclaren Incensed by the consequent -Ross’s criticism is always worth reading. inconvenience, the owners of Punch were As a rule, he tended to write about books keen to dispense with his services. But he or writers who interested him. For that was saved from dismissal by the generous reason he seldom delivered the type of intercession of Anthony Powell, by then scathing verdicts which are the stock-in- installed as its Literary Editor. trade of many of his fellow critics. Maclaren-Ross combined his work for Though he had a reputation for being Punch with book reviewing for other abrasive when encountered face-to-face, publications such as The Sunday Times, his essays are erudite, incisive and, more The Listener, and John Lehmann’s recently often than not, appreciative. Like all the launched, bi-monthly London Magazine. best critical writing, they nourish the A staunch believer in his talent, Lehmann reader’s understanding of the work in commissioned him to write what would be question. a shrewd overview of Patrick Hamilton’s Whether Maclaren-Ross was producing Gorse Trilogy, his familiarity with which reviews, essays, fiction or memoirs he had enabled him to parody the novels for that happy knack of being able to make his Punch. prose feel vibrant, immediate, effortless Preferring to concentrate on his creative and individual. His writing conveys the writing, Maclaren-Ross opted out of his unmistakable voice of what his friend the role as a critic near the end of the 1950s. critic Anthony Cronin called ‘one of the But it was a role that he couldn’t escape doomed men of Soho’. Reading his work for long. Early in 1963 his precarious now is akin to viewing some miraculously circumstances compelled him to solicit untarnished film footage, the colour work from the poet Alan Ross, who had undimmed by the intervening decades. taken over the London Magazine. It was Ahead of the game in so many respects, to be a fortuitous, mutually beneficial Maclaren-Ross’s time has, it seems, finally association. During the remaining months arrived. of his life, which came to an unforeseen * conclusion in November 1964 when he suffered a fatal heart-attack, Maclaren- This is an edited version of Paul Willetts’ Ross became a regular visitor to the introduction to Bitten by the Tarantula; and other magazine’s offices. He delivered a writing (Black Spring Press, £9.95). Black Spring also publish Paul Willetts’ biography of Maclaren succession of dazzling reviews and essays, -Ross, Fear & Loathing in Fitzrovia; and along with instalments of his Memoirs of Maclaren-Ross’ Collected Memoirs and Selected the Forties. His critical writing for the Stories (both featuring introductions by Paul London Magazine covered such wide- Willetts). ranging subjects as the Gothic stories of

104 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Manure Widmerpool’s father had a more elevated status, owning, perhaps, the firm that by Michael Henle & Joe Trenn manufactured the fertilizer, at least participating in the invention of the line of From Michael Henle products it sold. The latter is suggested by Eleanor’s revealing that “They [the A few comments on manure: Widmerpools] had a small house on the 1. Widmerpool’s father is described by Pembringham estate while experimenting Eleanor Walpole-Wilson in A Buyer’s with the manure”. It is probably true, Market as providing her Uncle George however, for two reasons, that with his “liquid manure”. This is Widmerpool’s father’s firm was not transmuted by Jenkins to “artificial particularly successful. First his estate manure” on the next page. was not large enough to send Widmerpool to the university (as Widmerpool explains I assume that in 1928 (approximate date of in A Question of Upbringing). Second, he A Buyer’s Market), these terms are was unable to achieve good results with synonymous. I’d rather assume this than his fertilizers at Hinton Hoo, the Walpole- accuse Jenkins of distorting Eleanor’s Wilson estate. words. In addition, if these terms are different, then what I say in the next 3. So, on account of 1 and 2, I believe that paragraphs is probably incorrect. it is inaccurate to call Widmerpool’s father a “manure salesman”. What he traded was Neither “liquid manure” or “artificial not manure and I believe he did more than manure” is much used in the US, at least, simply sell it. until recently (see 4, below). I have always assumed that both refer to what in 4. In any event, the passages I’ve cited the US is called “artificial fertilizer”. This above have always fascinated me because is a substance not connected with animal of the possibility that an American reader waste (manure) but produced by some would not properly understand them. The kind of industrial process of a chemical situation has gotten worse in the last few nature. A brief look just now at some web decades because the term “liquid manure” sites convinces me that the term “artificial has come into use in the US (but not the manure”, at least, is still used in this way in Europe. If this is true, then Widmerpool’s father’s profession – provider of artificial fertilizer – does not seem so embarrassing as the terms, “liquid manure” or “artificial manure”, with their barnyard association, suggest. It is no doubt to escape this association that the term “artificial fertilizer” has been promoted in the US. 2. No suggestion is made in Dance that Widmerpool’s father was a salesman. It seems more likely to me, because he was able to send his son to Eton, that 105 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

the money to send Kenneth to Eton was almost certainly her family. It does not matter if Mr Widmerpool’s profession was or was not embarrassing. The fact is that Kenneth found it to be so. Since I live on a dairy farm in one of the most agricultural areas of Vermont and therefore New England I offer the following: Liquid manure and artificial fertilizer are two very different things. Artificial fertilizer is primarily a chemical based product. Liquid manure is made by separating the liquid content of manure from the solid content. The two are then stored and applied separately. The solids can more efficiently be worked into the term “artificial manure”). Liquid manure soil and the liquids can be stored until is now used over here to denote “swine, spring when they are applied to the fields. dairy and feedlot runoff”. So “liquid The primary advantages of this are greater manure” now is directly connected with control of the delivery of the components animal waste, at least in the US. and the reduction in agricultural runoff into the water supply through streams, * rivers and lakes. Under the old system From Joe Trenn employed on dairy farms the manure is spread on the fields everyday. When the There is no indication that Widmerpool ground is frozen the material is washed off pere sold liquid or artificial manure or the surface continuously and then in very owned a firm that manufactured the large quantities when the snow melts. substance. What we are told is that the Widmerpools lived at Pembringham in a In Atonement, Ian McEwan describes the small house on Lord Goring’s estate smell of a traditional farm thus, “the faint during the time of the liquid manure leathery scent of cow dung, always present experiments. And that the Walpole- except on the coldest days, and noticeable Wilsons tried using some of the material only to those who have been away.” unsuccessfully. Lord George Goring is However if you are in a farm area when described as the pioneer in the scientific liquid manure is being applied to the fields approach to agriculture. Mr Widmerpool it is a stench you will never forget. What assisted in the process in some is interesting is that Nicholas Jenkins undescribed fashion. I suspect he was conflates liquid and artificial manure, some part of the farm management or was which is to be expected, but at the time of employed for his agricultural science Lord Goring’s experiments the new expertise. theories of soil conservation and fertilization were being tested. I wonder The social connections all come from Mrs where Powell got his knowledge. He was Widmerpool, who is described as having certainly not a country fellow. married below her station. The source of 106 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

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In this 40 page monograph recent authors on Anthony Powell describe writing about one of 20th century English literature’s important figures in the talks originally given as part of the Anthony Powell Society 2004 AGM. Contributors: Dr George Lilley. Michael Barber, Dr Nicholas Birns.

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107 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

… Cuttings … Cuttings … Cuttings … Cuttings …

From the Daily Mail Dancing to the Music of His Time 14 October 2005 The BBC Radio documentary on Contributed by Prue Raper Powell which was pulled at the last ’s Nobel Prize for minute back in July because of the Literature has some literary figures London bombings is to be wondering why arguably greater rebroadcast on Sunday 4 British writers such as, say, George December at 1330 hrs on BBC Orwell, Graham Greene, W Radio 4. Unfortunately this clashes Somerset Maugham, Thomas Hardy nicely with the Sunday lunch and VS Pritchett weren’t so following the post-conference walks, honoured. “Pity it wasn’t given to so many members will need to set up Harold’s uncle-in-law, Anthony their tape recorders before leaving Powell,” says novelist AN Wilson – for London. Mr Pinter’s wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, having been the late Mr Powell’s niece.

Wedding Guest The Berberich wedding was not the only one recently with Powellian overtones. At Ypres, Belgium on 16 April of this year Ailsa Camm – a London Group attender until she moved to Hampshire – married the Hon. Ralph Douglas-Scott-Montagu Honour for Patric Dickinson (elder son of Lord Montagu of The Society’s Chairman, Patric Beaulieu). During the speeches both Dickinson, has been honoured by A Dance to the Music of Time and being elected as President of the the Society received their due. And Society of Genealogists in sharp-eyed guests noticed that the succession to HRH Prince Michael beautifully prepared plan de of Kent who has become the SoG’s placement for the wedding breakfast Patron. Patric, who is Richmond included a place for a guest in the Herald, was previously one of the event unable to turn up – a Mr SoG’s Vice-Presidents, having been Kenneth Widmerpool. elected to this position at the same time as Anthony Powell in 1997.

108 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

… Cuttings … Cuttings … Cuttings … Cuttings …

From the Sunday Times 2 October 2005 Contributed by Stephen Holden “On Friday, Radio 4 is putting out a play called Brought to Book. It’s a satirical look at book prizes just before the real Booker on Monday week. Joan Bakewell’s play ends with the announcement of the winner of the fictional Widmerpool prize, An Email from John Monagan to named after the character in Anthony the Hon. Secretary Powell’s A Dance to the Music of John Monagan’s final email to me, Time. Bakewell had originally on 2 October, was typically brief but written, larkily, that “the winner is enthusiastic: Jeffrey Archer”, but the BBC got Keith: We had a very fine cold feet. Archer, it thought, might program celebrating Tony’s object to being linked to the 100th anniversary here on bumptious Widmerpool. So the Friday last Nick set it up ending now has the judges saying beautifully and all went they couldn’t decide on a winner.” perfectly. A beautiful setting, a good program and a Stephen has written to the BBC responsive audience. The pointing out that the Widmerpool extensive exhibit including 1st editions, letters and Award is anything but fictional! printed material was well set out. Prof. George O’Brien of Georgetown moderated well and stimulated discussion. Nick Birns gave an excellent talk and Prof. Facknitz of James Madison U. and I spoke as well and were a panel for the discussion. The exhibit was extensive and included letters of Tony and Violet as well as 1st editions with original jackets and pictures. A reception followed. We gave Tony a worthy tribute. JOHN

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From the APLIST Recent Discussions on the Society’s Email Discussion Group

From Colin Donald From John Gilks We should note the passing of Sir Edward Well I’m going to disagree on this one on Heath KG, former Prime Minister (1970- the following grounds: 1974) of Great Britain. 1. Heath’s war record was as a An exact contemporary, whose political distinguished combat officer not a rise coincided with Kenneth bureaucrat in the bowels of Whitehall. Widmerpool’s, he was often suggested as a 2. He pursued, with considerable source for Widmerpool, and by all distinction, activities other than the accounts they did have a lot in common: impressive war record, quick change into furtherance of his own career. politics, charmlessness, ruthless efficiency, 3. While I disagreed with many of Heath’s intense strength of will, pomposity, and policies he seems to have pursued his gaucheness towards the opposite sex (“he beliefs with a rather impressive degree of never married”, unlike Widmerpool). consistency and principle. He achieved far more with far fewer 4. Overall, Heath lived his life very much material advantages (his father was a in the public gaze rather than primarily as carpenter rather than a manure salesman) a behind the scenes manipulator. Rather a but there are profound spiritual great man in his way. similarities. Perhaps if one were looking for a Would it not be in order to mark the prominent Widmerpudlian this week one passing of a great Widmerpudlian by might give consideration to Mr Karl Rove laying the ceremonial overcoat over his who appears to epitomise much of the bier? nastier side of our Ken. ––––––

From Doug Russell True: he [Heath] showed some appreciation for the arts. He loved classical music and did some guest in his day. That said, his manner was very Widmerpudlian.

The late Sir I met Mr Heath in the company of Edward Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelich. What I Heath, remember most about the statesman – Prime aside from his rather stunning tobacco- Minister coloured Hush Puppies – was his petulant 1970-74. manner toward everyone even, in some 110 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 degree, toward Ivo. This, I think, was very much less familiar species than, say, the Widmerpudlian. French or Italians. The Eng Lit of the 1920s and 1930s not infrequently presents What makes it slightly ironic is that the an exotic portrayal of Americans event in question was a reception at the suggestive of ignorance rather than dislike. Inaugural Ivo Pogorelich International It was WW2 that rectified that. None the Solo Piano Competition, a two-week event less Powell seems to have preferred that I managed in my performing arts days. writing about what he knew well. From Ed Bock Thanks to films, television and books my Young’s review [see Michael Young’s children feel familiar with American life, article Absent America on page 94 of this (although they get the occasional shock Newsletter] says that Powell sidestepped visiting a region less frequently rendered Britain’s relative decline in Temporary in the media). That was not the case when Kings. But after the “Seraglio” I was a child in the 1950s, and even then performance, a senior civil servant alludes Americans were rarely sighted in to US aid when asking the American Oxfordshire. These days the Duke of Glober for a lift home for the Marlborough could hardly keep Widmerpools and himself. Blenheim going without their welcome –––––– support. Although on reflection From Joe Trenn it was Vanderbilt money that plumbed it. I imagine that the lack of American –––––– prominence in Dance is because Powell From Glyn Jones wasn’t particularly interested in us. He True, but even in the war trilogy of Dance, had an unsatisfactory spell in the film where most of the action takes place on the business in the UK and in California home front, there’s no trace that I can which he touches on only briefly. His recall of Yanks being “overpaid, oversexed attention is always drawn across the and over here”. Perhaps the officer class Channel rather than the Atlantic. The weren’t affected. character Glober is not very different from Scheigan in Afternoon Men. Powell –––––– formed his opinions on Americans early From Ed Bock and seems to have seen no reason to See the intrusive American character of Lt change them. It was the American system Padfield (“The Loot”) in Waugh’s of meritocracy leaking into Britain that Unconditional Surrender. propelled Widmerpool and his ilk into higher reaches of the new ruling class. PS. The traditional relationship between British officers and other ranks was –––––– challenged in Japanese prisoner of war From Julian Allason camps that contained both British and Not sure that I would read too much into American soldiers. The American enlisted this [Young’s article]. To Powell’s men’s more egalitarian relationship with generation (and even more so to that of his officers seemed like insubordination to parents) Americans were members of a some Brits and, over time, in some camps, eroded the British pattern.

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From John Gould As Julian points out, Powell – at least through the mid-1960s – wasn’t very precise about Americans. Especially their speech. In The Military Philosophers, he quotes Milton Wisebite (Harrison’s nephew) on “Courthouse” Cobb, military attaché. The words are my private choice From John Gould for A Sentence Least Likely to Have Been Yes, he did [do some screenwriting in Uttered by an American: “There was Hollywood], in 1937. He spent six months reference to a supposed predilection there, never sold a thing. Apparently he towards severity in the exercise of and the studio execs couldn’t understand discipline.” what each other was talking about. Perhaps that’s where he met the prototype Towards the end of the series as he dealt for Milton Wisebite. with more Yanks – Glober and Gwinnett, especially – he got more focused. He –––––– asked a college classmate of mine, Hank From James Doyle Harrington (author of an interesting piece An aspect of Gwinnett that interests me is about Dance and the Zodiac) to read that I would have expected an American Hearing Secret Harmonies before English-Lit professor, obsessed with publication to vet the Americanisms. Fitzrovian goings-on and soaked in (When Hank told me this, I was insanely Trapnel lore, to be Anglophile in a fairly jealous.) determined way: eg. eager to say “” –––––– for “trunk”, “lift” for “elevator”, “braces” for “” etc., and display his in- From Mark Hall the-knowness about things British. Powell In later years Powell had direct contact resists this, whether because he has had with the American academic world little actual contact with the breed or (Cornell); his son went there and he seems simply because he avoids stereotype is the to have spent considerable time in and question. around Ithaca, New York. Didn’t he do some screenwriting for Hollywood during –––––– the 1930s? From Jim Scott –––––– I can’t imagine why James Doyle would have expected that. None of the Brit-Lit From Jeanne V Reed professors I knew when I was a graduate This Powell American thread is so very student at an American university ever interesting, especially since I’m deep into attempted to sound like imitation Robert McCrum’s biography, Wodehouse: Englishmen. And it seems to me that a Life. Now there was a writer who anyone as mature as Gwinnett (even the practically commuted between England young Gwinnett of Temporary Kings) and in the early 1900s, would have recognized that attempting to most unusually, it appears, and his ape the speech and mannerisms of Americans are types based on real people, Englishmen would have made him a target apparently. for ridicule. 112 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21

From James Doyle From Ellen Jordan Ah, experiences differ, and I have to admit While Powell may not have met many that mine were with American academics Americans before beginning Dance (apart of a slightly earlier generation and not perhaps from the “studio executives” in specific to English Lit. I raise it partly London whom he found so uncongenial because it does seem that Powell’s when he worked on scripts for the “quota” rendering of American speech seems to fit in the early 1930s) the development of his his (perfectly defensible) “what the unique style certainly owed a great deal to narrator heard” school rather than the pure Americans like Hemingway and transcription mode from first-hand models. Fitzgerald. (eg. the remarks on “Courthouse Cobb.”) I remember when I first read Afternoon Men (in the early 1960s) feeling that I had encountered the world of an Aldous Huxley novel being described by Hemingway.

William Pye’s bust of Anthony Powell. Photograph by Keith Marshall.

113 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 Letters to the Editor

MLA Bibliography former Times journalist Bernard Levin. It is particularly striking in a cartoon of From Jim Scott Widmerpool running, one of the rejected On my annual visits to the United States, I cartoons for A Question of Upbringing. I drop by the University of Oregon library wonder if there is any significance in this? to see if the MLA Bibliography has any Did Boxer perhaps view Levin as his new listings pertaining to Powell (I live in Widmerpool? If so I would think I can see a Japanese village, far removed from most why, from having regularly read Levin’s English-language reference works). journalism. Or perhaps Powell was of this During this summer’s visit, I discovered view? Or is it really just coincidence? (what those members of this Society Thoughts anyone? affiliated with American universities –––––– already know) that the bibliography referred to above now includes references Widemerpool Award to most – perhaps all – of the articles From Nick Hay published in the Anthony Powell Further to recent debates I have to admit to Newsletter. being puzzled. It seems that most of the The MLA (Modern Language Association) nominations [for the Widmerpool Award] Bibliography is the research tool of choice are mere indications of political prejudice for most literature students at American (as with Heath). Now I can see this is an universities (it lists articles from 6500 amusing and stimulating game in which I journals and periodicals world-wide, in could easily join. But what relation does it addition to numerous books and other have to Widmerpool? What is the point of publications). In effect, the overwhelming these awards? majority of American university students It seems to me that many of the researching criticism of Powell’s works contributors have a very different idea of will now encounter references to articles Widmerpool to my own. Is not an published in the Newsletter. essential point that in fact he never –––––– achieved anything very much at all? That he wasn’t in fact that successful in the Widemerpool and Bernard Levin pursuit of power? Of course he achieved From Keith Marshall enough to make himself thoroughly We were at Eton College recently with objectionable to those around him (and in other members of the Society looking at war-time very dangerous because the their Powell exhibition. Seeing copies of a consequences of his holding even limited couple of Mark Boxer drawings for power in such a time were more far- Widmerpool – ones which were not used reaching and deadly). on the paperback covers – something Widmerpool is variously pompous; struck me which I had started on before self-obsessed and self-important; and not fully realised. There seems to be a obsequious to those in authority and a great likeness between Mark Boxer’s bully to those below him. He is representation of Widmerpool and the 114 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 ambitious and pushy; ruthless; agreeable (or disagreeable depending one’s humourless; blind to the feelings of view of these things) political scrap, or is others; and has a complete lack of it to probe further the character of self-knowledge. Widmerpool (or is it something else [Taken from the Society’s note on the entirely)? Widmerpool Award.] If it is to probe Widmerpool then surely Such I think are the terms in which the Heath is discounted because in the 1980s character is portrayed? I have to say – and he did not go with the flow, was very far I am speaking as a libertarian/socialist/ from obsequious to those in power? atheist – that much as I hate many current Widmerpool would surely have become an political leaders (eg. Bush, Blair) I refuse ardent Thatcherite – not from conviction to believe that anyone can achieve power or ideology but because of his endless even in the very limited democracy of the attraction to power and those who possess West today who is quite “blind to the it? But he would have failed in this as in feelings of others”. Indeed it might be everything else. argued that it is precisely this failing in Widmerpool which dooms him to –––––– obscurity and failure – but I think the likes Eton and the Class System of Bush and Blair are very much aware of at least some of the “feelings of others” – From Tom Miller and play on them to a very considerable Issue 20 of the Newsletter had many extent. merits, but one minor error stood out: the picture on page 8 gave us the central “Real” political leaders also surely possess square at Eton, but, though the drawing is to a far greater degree than Widmerpool accurate topographically, the place was both the ability to make themselves identified as “the quadrangle”. As popular and a gift for dissimulation? someone who walked (or sometimes ran) through it nearly every working day for How dangerous (leaving aside war-time) about six years, I can say with authority could the Widmerpool of the book be? that the space is always referred to as When one considers how he is so comprehensively out-witted by Trapnel? School Yard. Or the tragedy of his end? No-one seems to have taken exception to Keith Marshall’s delineation of the English The point I am laboriously trying to make class system in issue 19, though is that part of Powell’s genius is that unfortunately I think that it is Widmerpool’s character contains the seeds insufficiently subtle, especially in the of his destruction – and an appalling upper register. destruction it is. I distinguish (today as well as in the period No doubt in this letter I am myself described by Powell) the aristocracy from exhibiting a Widmerpool characteristic in the lower upper class, a point that is I being humourless and most probably believe to be justified by a reading of the pompous but recent threads [on the APLIST] have prompted what is really a novels of Evelyn Waugh. question. What is the point of the The aristocracy consists of, I suggest, Widmerpool award? Is it to have an junior members of the royal family,

115 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #21 holders of titles that go back until at least Keith Marshall replies: 1900, and persons closely associated with Tom Miller is correct it pointing out that such people. (Thus children of, eg., the there are sub-divisions and gradations Duke of Kent fall into this class, but within the Upper Class as there indeed are ennobled Labour politicians do not.) within all the English classes – far more gradations, across all the classes, than one The lower upper class, a group of about could hope to describe in anything less 25,000 people, comprises members of the than a substantial volume, let alone a Royal Yacht Squadron, (Scottish) Archers, briefly sketched overview. alumni of two or three ancient public schools and of Christ Church (or many of However I do not agree with Tom that them), the wives, sisters and daughters of merely going to the right school such male individuals, and people fairly automatically makes one upper class. A closely related to the aristocracy as defined wealthy Middle Class boy remains Middle above, especially successful ones. (Thus Class regardless of the fact he is, say, an an Old Wykehamist judge or bishop, Old Wykehamist or an Old Etonian. What married to the niece of a peer, would the right school does, of course, do is to obviously fit in here.) This group does not make that wealthy but Middle Class boy feel equal to royalty, but it does feel more socially adept and at ease with the slightly superior to the ordinary Upper Classes, and thus more able to professional man, though such persons move upward given other suitable will be treated as equals, and intermarriage circumstances. is quite all right. Yes, sport and entertainment are another Keith Marshall is however right in hinting minefield and worthy of several books in that going to prison does not reduce a their own right. person’s status; thus, jail did not lower the rating of (and –––––– ennoblement made no difference to that of Eton and the Class System another convicted person, Jeffrey Archer). From Ellen Donald Keith Marshall does not open up the topic The mention of Umfreville Street of entertainments as class-symbolic reminded me of the possibility that Powell activities: Powellians will have their own got Dicky Umfraville’s name from the opinions, but I suggest, to start a putative children’s book Countess Kate by debate, that classical music, especially if Charlotte M Yonge. The heroine becomes performed at Glyndebourne, is an upper- Countess of Caergwent, but her family class endeavour, and so is cricket, if played name is Umfraville. Since Powell’s wife at Lord’s, but not at the Oval or was a dedicated reader of Yonge (and a Edgbaston; and that rugger is a middle- founding member of the Charlotte M class game in England, but a working – Yonge Society), he must have been aware class game in Wales … of this echo.

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Society Merchandise

Society Postcard SPECIAL CENTENARY OFFER B&W postcard of Powell with his cat Buy both the Eton and Oxford Proceedings for just £15 (post free) Trelawney. Picture on page 46. Price: £1.75 for 5 (postage rate B)

Oxford Conference Proceedings Wallace Collection Postcard The collected papers from the 2003 The Wallace Collection’s luxurious conference at Balliol College, Oxford. postcard of Poussin’s A Dance to the Price: £7.50 (post free to all members) Music of Time. Picture on page 21. Price: £2 for 5 (postage rate B) Eton Conference Proceedings Limited edition of 250 numbered copies Wallace Collection Poster each signed by the Society’s Patron. The Wallace Collection’s 48.5 x 67.5 cm Now only £10 (post free to all members) (half life-size) poster of Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Mailed in a poster Writing About Anthony Powell *NEW * tube. Picture on page 21. The talks given at the 2004 AGM by Price: £5.75 (postage rate D) George Lilley, Michael Barber and Nick Birns, introduced by Christine Berberich. Newsletter Back Issues Price: £4 (post free to all members) Back numbers of Newsletter issues 1, 6 and 8 to 20 are still available. The Master and The Congressman Price: £1 per copy (postage rate B) A 40 page monograph by John Monagan describing his meetings with Anthony Postage. All Society merchandise is post free to Powell. A small treasure. members in the UK. Regrettably we have to ask Now only £4 (post free to all members) overseas members to contribute to airmail postage using the following rates: BBC Radio Dramatisation of Dance Rate UK Europe World Available to members only. Single CD of 26 MP3 files. Price: £2.50 A free 25p 60p + Donation: £7.50 minimum (Total £10; B free 40p £1 post free) 26 Audio CDs. Price: £20 + Donation: C free 60p £1.50 £40 minimum (Total £60; post free) D free 80p £1.75

Audio Tapes of Dance Non-members will be charged postage & packing Copies of the following audio tapes of at cost. Simon Callow reading (abridged) volumes Gold and Founder members of the Society receive of Dance: a 10% discount on the cost of all merchandise  A Question of Upbringing (but not on postage charges).  The Kindly Ones Ordering. Post, phone or fax your order to the  The Valley of Bones Hon. Secretary at the address on page 4. Payment  The Soldier’s Art by cheque (UK funds drawn on a UK bank), credit card (Visa or Mastercard) or cash. Price: £2.50 each (postage rate C) 117 The Anthony Powell Society Registered Charity No. 1096873

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Type of membership (please tick): Total amount payable: £ ______ Ordinary Member – £20 a year. (No. of years x membership rate)  Joint Membership – £30 a year. Any two persons at the same address.  I enclose a sterling cheque drawn on a UK  Gold Member – £30 minimum a year. bank. Please make cheques payable to The  Student Member – £12 a year. Please send Anthony Powell Society. a copy of your student card.  Organisation – £100 minimum a year.  Please debit my Visa / MasterCard

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Number of years membership being paid: 5 years membershipI am a UK taxpayerfor and Iprice want all donations of I’ve 4 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / more (please state): made since 6 April 2000 and all donations in the future to be Gift Aid until I notify you otherwise. **

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Please send the completed form and payment to: Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society Phone: +44 (0)20 8864 4095 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford, Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK Fax: +44 (0)20 8864 6109