The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter Issue 56, Autumn 2014, ISSN 1743-0976, £3 Annual General Meeting Saturday 25 October 2014 To be followed by a talk Architecture in Dance Annual Lecture given by in collaboration with The Wallace Collection Harry Mount Stephen Lloyd Full details on page 18 on The Curious Case of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant: London AP Birthday Lunch Constant Lambert and his Saturday 6 December 2014 Friendship with Anthony Powell 1200 for 1230 hrs Friday 21 November Oxford & Cambridge Club Wallace Collection, London 71 Pall Mall, London SW1 Tickets £14 – see page 18 Full details on page 19 Contents From the Secretary’s Desk ............. 2 Meet the Editor ............................... 3 What Became of Waring ............. 4-6 REVIEW: Constant Lambert ...... 7-9 Denis Capel-Dunn .................. 10-11 BBC Arena: George Orwell .... 12-13 Kaggsy’s Ramblings – HSH ... 15-17 Dates for Your Diary ............... 18-20 Society Notices ............................. 21 Local Group News .................. 22-24 Summer Saturday Stroll .......... 25-28 Cuttings ................................... 29-33 Merchandise & Membership .. 34-36 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #56 From the Secretary’s Desk The Anthony Powell Society Sometimes we need to go backward Registered Charity No. 1096873 before we can move forward. Six months The Anthony Powell Society is a ago it felt as if the Society was going charitable literary society devoted to the backwards: we had lost two valued life and works of the English author Trustees, our Chairman, our Editor and Anthony Dymoke Powell, 1905-2000. our conference organiser. Everything was falling back on my shoulders, which is Officers & Trustees definitely not good for the Society. Patron: John MA Powell But wow! Are we now going forward! President: The Earl of Gowrie PC, FRSL We have two new volunteers as Trustees Hon. Vice-Presidents: – Graham Page and Robin Bynoe – who Julian Allason have to be formally elected at the AGM. Patric Dickinson LVO We have a new Editor in Stephen Walker Michael Meredith (see page 3) who is also taking on the role Dr Jeremy Warren FSA of Social Secretary; Robin Bynoe has taken over the role of Merchandise Society Trustees: Secretary; and John Roe is working on Jeffrey Manley (USA) possible plans for a conference in 2016. Dr Keith C Marshall (Hon. Secretary) Dr Derek WJ Miles (Hon. Treasurer) Added to that we have had several most Harry Mount enjoyable events over the summer in both AC (Tony) Robinson (Acting Chairman) London and NE USA culminating in the Prof. John Roe most amazing London pub meet ever – Elwin Taylor (Switzerland) eighteen people taking over three alcoves of the Audley for several hours on a Membership Secretary: Keith Marshall Saturday lunchtime. Social Secretary: Stephen Walker On the horizon in October we have the Merchandise Secretary: Robin Bynoe Venice Conference (first mooted on the Newsletter & Secret Harmonies Editor: night we formed the Society) and the Stephen Walker AGM, at which Harry Mount is talking to us about architecture in Dance. Then in Hon. Archivist: Noreen Marshall November Stephen Lloyd, biographer of All correspondence should be sent to: Powell’s friend Constant Lambert, is Hon. Secretary, Anthony Powell Society giving the Annual Lecture. Details of all 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford these events are on pages 18-20. UB6 0JW, UK Suddenly it all seems to be coming Phone: +44 (0) 20 8864 4095 together. Between us we have lots of Email: [email protected] ideas for events and for the Newsletter. But we would still like you to tell us what Cover photograph © John S Monagan 1984 and reproduced events you want; and of course we’d like by kind permission. © The Anthony Powell Society, 2014. All rights reserved. you to write something for the Published by The Anthony Powell Society. Newsletter. Onward and upward! ■ Printed and distributed by Lonsdale Direct Solutions, Wellingborough, UK. 2 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #56 Meet The Editor – Stephen Walker When Keith asked ‘Will you take over But I want to extend an invitation to you from the legendary Stephen Holden as all to imagine this is Fission. Release your Editor of the Newsletter?’ there was only inner Widmerpool or Trapnel and send in one outcome. He told me that I had the pieces redolent of Affirmative Action and necessary qualifications: my name is Negative Values or for the parodists Stephen and I also have a beard. amongst you, of which there are many, Assumptions of Autarchy v Dynamics of This is my first issue. You will as yet see Adjustment [BDFR]. little change. A policy of evolution not revolution is to be pursued. Some readers If these titles are not music to your ears have already made suggestions. One nor make your fingers dance across the rather sniffily described the Newsletter as a keyboard then let me know what you fanzine. But I ask what is wrong with would like to read or write. Early that? printable suggestions have included “Meet the Marxists” in Dance, “Uncle Giles’ The word may be distinctly unPowellian, Corner”, “My First Time: why I read coined as it was for the October 1940 issue Dance and still do”. of Detour by Russ Chavenet, a stone deaf My mobile is 07770 875 681 for calls and texts; my email is I want to extend an [email protected]; or just tell me invitation to you all to when you see me. I look like this … imagine this is Fission … release your inner Widmerpool or Trapnel American chess champion and sci-fi enthusiast who worked in IT for the US Defence Department. But the definition of fanzine as a publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest seems to me to sum up the Newsletter perfectly. Fanzines do not usually pay their publishers, editors or contributors or charge their readers. By contrast a fan magazine is professionally produced for fans instead of by them. Photo Keith Keith Marshall Photo So Keith, as publisher, and I, as editor, will I look forward to hearing from you. continue to rely upon you, as readers, for your support and contributions. We are Thank you. very lucky to have several professional Stephen Walker ■ writers amongst you who do contribute. 3 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #56 What Became of Waring By Michael Barber This is the first in an occasional series in which we will take a look at Powell’s non-Dance fiction. I can’t remember when I discovered Lombardian interior, which always Anthony Powell, but I do know that what seems like a place you are shown caught my attention about his first novel, round after the revolution, the guide Afternoon Men (1931), was somebody’s pointing out celebrities among the description of it as ‘the party novel to end carved names, rather than a church all party novels’. The young Powell, it in regular use. The congregation turned out, was a party animal whose hung about for a while among the spiritual home was the Twenties, when art sad, tattered colours and glittering got mixed up with life. Hence his disdain Victorian blazonry, until they were for the Thirties when, as he put it, ‘the disgorged at last from under the artists and good-timers’ gave way to ‘the massive pediment on to the barrack politicians and the prigs’. And yet the square. novel of his I return to again and again, We never learn the narrator’s name but his What’s Become of Waring, was written in tone of voice – cultivated, speculative, 1938, long after the public’s appetite for ironic – could be that of Nick Jenkins, the frivolity had waned. So although you narrator of Powell’s magnum opus, A suspect that his narrator, like Powell Dance to the Music of Time (see Slightly himself, is a good-timer at heart, the only Foxed, no. 16). Almost immediately there party he attends is a low-key affair at the is a further link with Dance in the person remote south London depot of a dowdy of another wedding guest, a raffish ex- Territorial unit. But there’s another way in which Waring differs from Afternoon Men and Powell’s three other pre-war novels. It is told in the first person: I was sitting in the Guards’ Chapel under the terracotta lunette which contains the Centurion saying to one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to his servant, Do this, and he doeth it. The occasion was the wedding of a girl called Fitzgibbon who was marrying a young man in the Coldstream … There was a wait while the photographers did their business; and the crowd began to struggle towards the doors of that extravagant 4 Anthony Powell Society Newsletter #56 Guards officer called Eustace Bromwich. As part of his research for the book, Bromwich, known for his ‘enormous Hudson meets a vamp called Roberta histrionic gifts’, is the prototype of Dicky Payne, as mysterious in her way as TT, to Umfraville, the much-married gentleman whom she claims to have been engaged. rider and self-styled ‘professional cad’ Like the writer Inez Holden, on whom she who has some of the best lines in Dance. is based, Roberta is pretty, witty and at It is also worth noting, given the home in a variety of London circles, some importance that Powell attached to time quite exalted, yet without any visible and chance, that a few years later the means of support except her journalism, ‘extravagant Lombardian interior’ he which can’t bring in very much. Despite evoked was demolished by a flying bomb being averse to ‘cosmetics, painted just as the Sunday morning service had fingernails and equivocal conversation in begun.