The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 46, Spring 2012 ISSN 1743-0976 TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE with Dr Nicholas Birns The Many SSaidtesurd ayo f17 A Marnthcho 2012ny P owell’s Art St James’s Church, Piccadilly, London Details page 17 Contents From the Secretary’s Desk … 2 Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men … 3-6 Anthony Powell and CP Snow … 7-11 Avid Reader … 12-13 Local Group News … 14 Society Notices … 15-16 Dates for Your Diary … 17 REVIEW: Edward Burra … 18-20 REVIEW: Duncan Fallowell … 21-23 Cuttings … 24-27 Christmas Quiz Answers … 28-29 Merchandise & Membership … 30-32 2011 AGM Minutes … centre insert Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #46 From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society Registered Charity No. 1096873 The Christmas and New Year festivities The Anthony Powell Society is a have been and gone. So too have “the charitable literary society devoted to the worries”: Janu-worry and Febru-worry, life and works of the English author and with them hopefully the worst of Anthony Dymoke Powell, 1905-2000. winter’s snow and ice. Having had a break for the festivities work here has Officers & Trustees started again in earnest. Patron: John MA Powell The next event on the agenda is Nick Birns’s visit to London to lead Borage President: The Earl of Gowrie PC, FRSL and Hellebore on 17 March. This is an Hon. Vice-Presidents: opportunity for everyone to spend an Julian Allason afternoon discovering and discussing Patric Dickinson LVO Powell’s non-Dance works with a world Michael Meredith expert – and partake of tea/coffee and Dr Jeremy Warren cake! There is still time to book tickets, Society Trustees: so if you would like to come along Dr Christine Berberich please get in touch as soon as possible. Stephen Holden After Borage and Hellebore there are no Jeffrey Manley (USA) set events in London apart from the Dr Keith C Marshall (Hon. Secretary) quarterly pub meets. Members will have Dr Derek WJ Miles (Hon. Treasurer) seen in the last Newsletter, and will see Paul Nutley (Chairman) in the AGM minutes, that we have asked Tony Robinson for a volunteer to take on organising a Prof. John Roe small number of London-ish based Elwin Taylor (Switzerland) events each year. So far no-one has Membership & Merchandise Officers: come forward. I cannot continue to do Dorothy & Graham Davie everything, so events may be taking a back seat. If the Society is to flourish Newsletter & Journal Editor: and prosper long-term we need you to Stephen Holden volunteer to help! Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall The Annual Lecture, AGM, London pub meets and biennial conference are, at All correspondence should be sent to: least for now, excluded from this and Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society will continue (although 2013 is the last 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford conference I will organise). Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK Phone: +44 (0) 20 8864 4095 The Trustees have started to make Fax: +44 (0) 20 8020 1483 arrangements with the Wallace Email: [email protected] Collection for this year’s Annual Lecture. We are also negotiating dates Cover photograph © John S Monagan 1984 and reproduced and a venue for the 2013 conference and by kind permission. © The Anthony Powell Society, 2012. All rights reserved. hope to make an announcement before Published by The Anthony Powell Society. the next Newsletter appears. ■ Printed and distributed by Lonsdale Direct Solutions, Wellingborough, UK. 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #46 Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men by Nick Birns I feel I have come to a more ‘lyrical’ view whether the author is or is not included in of what Powell himself thought was his the set. Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans most “lyrical” novel – one which gets to is obvious; Kerouac was a subterranean. the heart of what’s afoot in the book rather So is CP Snow’s The New Men: Snow was than skips and starts in response to the a new man. On the other hand, many distractions that a book so short Dostoyevsky was certainly not one of the surprisingly offers. Does the author possessed (or the devils), although approve of “afternoon men” or not? And insightful enough to know their is he an “afternoon man”? We know what psychology. Nor was Balzac one of the an afternoon man is, someone (as indicated Chouans, although there is historical in the quote from Robert Burton, a distance involved. Throughout his career, seventeenth-century author just, in the Powell seems to want to avoid the sort of early 1930s, beginning to be noticed again novel that delves into the depths of a in the wake of the new, post-Eliotic single character. But how to create a point interest in that century) who is lazy (but of view and also describe a set of people? not deliberately so), hedonistic (but not Dance proffers the ultimate Powellian foolishly so), and aimless, although, as solution to this, but the experimentation Powell himself said of his Third at Oxford, towards this goal begins in Afternoon Men. without the reassurance of having worked It is unclear whether the novel means to hard to have an aim. Roughly, it is a celebrate afternoon men, excoriate them, synonym for “Bright Young Things”. It is rib them, or something in-between. The one of four of Powell’s novels – Agents novel clearly shows the influence of and Patients, The Military Philosophers, Hemingway and a generally stripped- Temporary Kings being the others, about a down, austere syntax. Whereas John “set” of people. (The Kindly Ones does Galsworthy, Hugh Walpole and Somerset not qualify, as Furies are presumably not Maugham were clearly the next step on “people”.) In all four cases, I would argue, from the Victorian novel, as in a different, Powell’s stance towards that set is and less admitted, way were EM Forster observant, not judgmental, neither and Virginia Woolf. Powell’s style, propagandizing for nor against the set, though, is not just a further step, another merely registering it as a part of life. Yet generation down, of the sort that can be part of the book’s tacit mission is seen in the work of Snow and Sir Angus “generational”: the young first novelist Wilson, who remain in recognizable, recently down from Oxford and living a continuous touch with Victorian modes. bohemian life in Shepherd Market, taking With this novel, there is deliberate stock of his own generation, as with most severance. The social tableau has been accused by its elders of being slack and atomized into shards and fragments, and at having thrown out too many of the the end of the book is still not remotely put previous cohorts’ absolutes. together. When Powell does re-stitch the Most times it is fairly clear, when a novel fabric in Dance, it has been totally has a title denoting a set of people, disassembled and reassembled. This is 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #46 how and why Dance is not just a slightly the author who created him is anti-Semitic. later Forsyte Saga and why Jenkins cannot Indeed, Atwater – not any overarching share General Liddament’s love of narrator, but Atwater, the man who did not Trollope. get the girl, concludes that Verelst deserves Susan, at least to an extent. The only There is no nineteenth-century mildly anti-Semitic remark is made by Mr omniscience in Afternoon Men, no general Nunnery, an older man of a stodgier assertions about society or life. In a sense, generation, not particularly thrilled to see the book is reportage, not opinion or his daughter go off with a Jew, and summation, and none of the other pre-war Atwater’s even milder assent to that may novels have quite this quality of reporting just be to get through the conversation on a “scene”. In a sense there is more with this difficult old chap. In the first naturalism here than elsewhere in Powell’s printing, “jew”, along with all other 1930s oeuvre, although comic and/or adjectives, was not capitalized in ee metafictive elements, such as Pringle’s cummings style, but that does not make it reappearance after his presumed death, the anti-Semitic either. Similarly, when Wodehousian quality of names like Fotheringham speaks of wanting to find Nosworth, militate against this. “something that brings me into touch with Two longstanding critical questions can people who really mattered, authors and so now be seen as conclusively settled: the on” this is clearly the final form of the line book is not anti-Semitic; just because in the A Writer’s Notebook to the effect Verelst is said to be a Jew does not mean that “I want to meet Chesterton, Belloc, writers who count” – exempting Powell from the conclusion of having had Roman Catholic tendencies otherwise unevidenced (which some reviewers of A Writer’s Notebook thought he was actually professing). In other words, this phrase was meant to be dialogue (given to a minor character, Fotheringham), not avowed utterance. In general, Afternoon Men is ideologically uncommitted – in a way that Dance is not – and books and ideas do not play a large role in the character’s lives, even though several are involved in publishing or the arts. We are far from the elevated, intellectually plugged-in world of Powell’s post-war sequence. The most important difference between Afternoon Men and Dance, though, is that Dance is a first-person retrospective narrative by someone who has “gotten the girl”, Afternoon Men a limited, third- person account of someone who has not 4 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #46 “gotten the girl”.