The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 39, Summer 2010 ISSN 1743-0976 Society 10th Anniversary Edition Contents From the Secretary’s Desk … 2 Dance for Everybody? … 3-5 Mrs Widmerpool’s Bridge-Coat … 6-13 Nancy Cutbirth … 14 Society News … 15 Dates for Your Diary ... 16-17 The Early Steps of the Dance … 18-19 SRB’s Sacred Music … 20-21 Literary Anniversaries in 2010 … 22-23 Cuttings … 24-29 Merchandise & Membership … 30-32 Please note the Hon. Secretary’s new fax number: +44 (0) 20 8020 1483 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #39 From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society I’ve just returned from the London dinner Registered Charity No. 1096873 to celebrate the Society’s 10th birthday th The Anthony Powell Society is a charitable and the 50 anniversary of Casanova’s literary society devoted to the life and works Chinese Restaurant (full report in the of the English author Anthony Dymoke next Newsletter). Ten years ago a handful Powell, 1905-2000. of us gathered in VP Julian Allason’s Chelsea rooms to plan a conference in Officers & Executive Committee celebration of AP, who had recently died. Patron: John MA Powell Realising that as a group of individuals President: Simon Russell Beale, CBE we would never attract sponsorship, but needing an “organisation” to back the Hon. Vice-Presidents: Julian Allason conference, we summarily formed the Patric Dickinson, LVO Anthony Powell Society; and as its first officers we proceeded to organise what *Chairman: Dr Christine Berberich *Hon. Secretary: Dr Keith C Marshall became the Eton conference of 2001. *Hon. Treasurer: Dr Derek WJ Miles Ten years on we have covered a huge *Committee Members: amount of ground, not the least of which Dr Nicholas Birns (USA) have been five conferences and AP’s Stephen Holden centenary. It has been (and still is) fun Jeffrey Manley (USA) but it has also been hard work for all the Paul Nutley Tony Robinson trustees. Many members have made Elwin Taylor some good friends and met interesting people, as I have. I hope you’ve had fun Membership & Merchandise Officers: Graham & Dorothy Davie too – I like to think one of the things I have personally achieved through the Newsletter & Journal Editor: Stephen Holden Society is to bring enjoyment to many of Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall you. And that is one of the satisfactions PR/Media Adviser: Julian Allason of sitting in my chair. What saddens me is that for the first time All correspondence should be sent to: Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society we have recently had to cancel a couple 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford of events. Cancellations are, of course, Middlesex, UB6 0JW, UK occasionally inevitable as speakers fall ill Phone: +44 (0) 20 8864 4095 or encounter family problems. But it is Fax: +44 (0) 20 8020 1483 dispiriting to cancel an event because Email: [email protected] people don’t sign up for it; it also doesn’t * Members of the Executive Committee and the show the Society in the best light to the Society’s legal trustees. All trustees are resident in outside world. Event organisers England or Wales unless stated. everywhere do their best to arrange events people will enjoy and want to Cover photograph © John S Monagan 1984 and attend; where possible events they are reproduced by kind permission. asked for. I certainly will continue to do © The Anthony Powell Society, 2010 and the this, but we need you all to play your part individual authors named. All rights reserved. Published by The Anthony Powell Society. too! So here’s to many more years of AP Printed and distributed by Lonsdale Print fun!! Solutions, Wellingborough, UK. 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #39 Dance for Everybody? Teaching, and Living, Powell’s Fiction by Nick Birns This piece is reprinted from the foreword to Dance Class: American High School Students Encounter Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, edited John A Gould In 1964, Anthony Powell, in the course of cocoon as to the popularity of “their” what the US Embassy in London author. The people committed to Powell’s denominated as “informal lectures to Ivy work are so committed, as witnessed by League colleges” stopped off, in the the four or five prominent critics who company of a friend, at Phillips Academy, mention his name in their writing at every Andover, a boarding school in conceivable opportunity, that we are apt to Massachusetts. Among his observations forget that it is teaching that keeps a book was that the student writing showed alive. All of the books deemed literary evidence that the study of Latin was long classics are so largely because they are since renounced. The essays by Andover taught as such. Kept within a milieu of students on Powell in this volume give fans, Dance will wither on the vine. inferential evidence that this is no longer Taught to students who can transmit their the case. Their wide and precisely knowledge forward, Dance will live, as it employed vocabulary indicates that some deserves to live. at least have studied Latin assiduously. Gould challenged this last difficulty by But this slight re-classicization, as it were, proudly labelling his course (solecistically) in US student prose styles is not the point “the Longest Novel Ever Written”. This of this collection. The point is that there is had the merit of making an asset out of a a place in the world where the fiction of liability. It also transcended the entire Anthony Powell has been taught regularly. issue of putting Dance in context or That this is happening is laudable; that it finding a context for Dance. Free to should happen is necessary. Powell has concentrate on the novel itself Gould got always had a profusion of fans. But, down to the nitty-gritty of teaching. And though many of these are in academia, nobody is a more ideal candidate to do this very few have taught Powell. Much of this than Gould. John Gould knows literature has to do with the academics being likelier inside out, has written literary fiction, to be historians and classicists and social memoir, grammar textbooks, and familiar scientists and even palaeontologists or essays, and has the intimacy with the mathematicians than teachers of modern written word that can only come from literature; some of it has to do with the persistently teaching it and dwelling upon struggle of getting a still too little-known it. He is also one of Anthony Powell’s author into an already overcrowded canon; most dedicated and reflective readers, and some of it has to do with the difficulty of Gould’s insight into Powell is evident not teaching the long novel in an era when only in his own introduction but in the even specialists in Victorian studies feel insights of all the students included who self-conscious about teaching a long have been taught and nurtured by him. Victorian novel – a Middlemarch, a Little As the essays reveal, the students are Dorrit, a Vanity Fair – to even talented ordinary American kids with no especial college undergraduates. But still the effort access to Powell’s world. They are as at must be made to teach Powell. Admirers sea as most Americans would be to the of Powell’s work often live in an artificial 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #39 idiolects of the British aristocracy, the end of A Buyer’s Market, something military, and educational system. And the important for understanding the narrative great delight of these essays is these arc of the sequence. One wishes an adult students read Powell without any critic would write a full-fledged article preconceptions. Freshly regarding the about the tolerance towards homosexuality work, they see Powell’s world as it is, not so rightly pointed out by Mike Donelan, as it is so often characterized to be. And it and so missed by people who would is this straightforwardness, which should characterize Powell as a “conservative” in suggest to any high school teacher, at US terms. Nathaniel Miller’s delicious whatever level, in whatever milieu – even description of Erridge as “ironically in say an inner-city public high school – executive” and James Yang’s stress on the that their students can learn from Powell. fundamental mystery about Jenkins’s love And to college teachers as well. On both for Jean Templer (given ballast by Luke levels, we have foreclosed options to our Spears’s parallel observations) crystallize students by underestimating their insights that might have otherwise lain on intelligence and adaptability. As a later the cusp of the Powell reader’s awareness. British cultural product (one connected to Thankfully, not all the papers are Powell through Constant and Kit Lambert) expository. We have pithy poems and put it, “the kids are alright”. Seeing mordant haiku, Matthew Cranney gives us Powell through the eyes of this, students a Gypsy’s-eye view of the deflowering of should make all of us who are teachers Nick Jenkins, Alex Svec’s hilarious jettison whatever excuses or fears we have pastiche of Julian Maclaren-Ross, William about not teaching them and proceed to Koven’s play on Matilda Wilson/ offer our students access to the treasure Moreland/Donners, who might well have Gould has unlocked for those fortunate been a character better suited for a drama enough to study with him. The (or opera) than the novel-sequence in distinguished Australian critic David which she plays a minor role. Equally, not McCooey, an admirer of Powell’s, once all the essays are “literary” – Jason said that Dance is not for everybody; Myung’s decoding of the economic Gould gives the strongest argument for the references in Widmerpool’s speech, Kim opposite point of view.