Anthony Powell has been variously called “the English Proust” and “a master of wit, paradox and social delineation”; Kingsley Amis said, “I would rather read Mr. Powell than any English novelist now writing.”  He was an admired contemporary, friend, or patron of such important 20th-century figures as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell, Osbert Lancaster, Sacheverell Sitwell, Constant Lambert, Cecil Beaton, John Betjeman, and Malcolm Muggeridge.  His 12-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time has been dubbed “the greatest modern novel since Ulysses” (Clive James) and “one of English fiction’s few twentieth-century masterpieces” (John Lanchester).

It is unnecessary here to provide full details of Powell’s life, which are comprehensively supplied in both of the books under review, but it may be useful to sketch in the chief landmarks.  Powell (pronounced “Po-ell”) was born in London in 1905, the only child of an army captain of Welsh squirearchy antecedents who later rose to the rank of colonel, and of Maud Wells-Dymoke, distantly descended from the Lincolnshire family who were—indeed still are—hereditary King’s Champions.  (King’s Champions are supposed to be present on horseback, fully armored, whenever each new monarch is being crowned in case there are any challengers to the throne—a ritual which sadly hasn’t been performed since the coronation of George IV in 1820.)

He attended Eton between 1919 and 1923, then went to Oxford to study history.  Powell had his first novel (Afternoon Men) published in 1931.  In 1934, he married Lady Violet Pakenham, daughter of an Irish peer, to whom he remained married until his death.  (She died in 2002; they had two sons.)  During World War II, he served in the Intelligence Corps, rising to the rank of major.  In 1948, he published the highly regarded John Aubrey and His Friends; it was followed in 1951 by A Question of Upbringing, the first of the dozen volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time.  (The final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, appeared in 1975.)  Anthony Powell was awarded a CBE in 1956.  In 1958, At Lady Molly’s, the fourth volume in Dance, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.  In 1973, Powell declined a knighthood, from his belief that writers should not be honored for services to literature alone—a sentiment he shared with Kipling and Galsworthy.  In 1974, Temporary Kings, Dance’s 11th volume, received the W.H. Smith Prize.  In 1988, Powell was named a Companion of Honour.  He died at home in Somerset on March 28, 2000.

Although Powell wrote seven other novels, two plays, four volumes of memoirs, and edited or contributed to journals including the Times Literary Supplement, Punch, the Spectator, and the Daily Telegraph, he is chiefly commemorated for A Dance to the Music of Time, a roman-fleuve named after Nicholas Poussin’s famous 1638-40 painting in the Wallace Collection in London.  (“An almost hypnotic spell seems cast by this masterpiece on the beholder.  I knew all at once that Poussin had expressed at least one important aspect of what the novel must be,” Powell once noted.)

The narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is enigmatic, almost a cipher, acting mostly as a mere observer and recorder of a cast of over 300 characters, most notably the odious, Uriah Heep-reminiscent Kenneth Widmerpool.  Widmerpool, whose name Powell borrowed from an historical Roundhead captain of horse—a hint, perhaps, of Powell’s political sympathies—is a contemporary of Jenkins (albeit slightly older).  He is oleaginous, ambitious, and self-absorbed; his most salient trait is what Understanding Anthony Powell’s author, Nicholas Birns, calls “craven acquiescence to whatever he perceives to be the prevailing power of the day.”  Throughout the book, Widmerpool is a leitmotiv, metamorphosing from socially insecure schoolboy derided by his “fellows” to, in turn, go-ahead businessman, friend of Mrs. Wallis Simpson, Stalinist fellow traveler, and member of a hippie cult, always wishing to be a part of whatever he thinks to be the prevailing Zeitgeist.  Widmerpool, though almost sociopathic, is also pitiable for his gaucheness, loneliness, want of imagination, and ultimate failure.  He may be viewed, as Tories such as Evelyn Waugh (and indeed Powell himself) seem to have viewed him, as a fictional summation of all that went wrong with Britain during the 20th century, as the country fell into the fumbling hands of the technocrats and “managers of decline.”

It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that Michael Barber’s book should be the first full-length biography of this undoubted literary leviathan.  The chief reason is that Powell was opposed to any biography appearing during his lifetime (although there were later suggestions that he had changed his mind and had even selected a biographer) and, in fact, actively hindered Barber’s researches by ensuring that various archives were made inaccessible to him.  Yet even had Powell been a willing subject, doing justice to someone that complex was always going to be a daunting prospect.

Powell’s is a voluminous and highly sophisticated oeuvre, and his life was inextricably and confusingly intertwined with a galaxy of enormous talents.  Powell is still close in historical time, perhaps too close for objective analysis.  He was also an essentially private person, his four volumes of memoirs (To Keep the Ball Rolling) notwithstanding; but then Powell always regarded memoirs as being fundamentally unreliable, owing to the author’s need to entertain and engage readers.  He was once described by the New York Times as “a writer of mordant succinctness who rewards the reader while revealing little of himself.”  James Lee-Milne concurred: “[Powell] discloses nothing about himself, but is revealing, albeit cautiously, of his contemporaries’ follies,” while Nicholas Birns notes that Powell’s works are characterized by “the amused, reserved acceptance of what happens.”  Powell himself admitted that he was “frightfully buttoned-up.”  These qualities ensured that he avoided the kind of widespread fame during his life that was extended to comparable figures such as Greene and Betjeman during their lifetimes, and they make him often difficult to define.

Powell’s political sympathies may also have deterred potential biographers.  Powell was an instinctive Tory, acutely aware of “the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence” (as he makes Jenkins say about his school in A Question of Upbringing), who admired Margaret Thatcher.  He disliked ideologies and ideologues, and abstained wholly from “Vin Audenaire” (as he cleverly dubbed the favorite hallucinogenic drug of the 1930’s); and several Soviet fellow travelers, including Quiggins and St. John Clarke, are gently mocked in Dance.

It is easy to imagine how some would-be modern Boswells might have been put off by various of Powell’s expressed sentiments (cited by Michael Barber), such as “a democratic upheaval ensures only that the reins of government are given over into the hands of the morally and intellectually deficient” (Cherwell, June 14, 1924), or (in a letter of 1992) “much against my taste I would have been for Franco in preference to a Left dominated by Communists.”  Some left-of-center litterateurs probably view him as a British Junger or Raspail.  In later life, Powell certainly felt that he had suffered professionally by refusing to become “committed” to one or other modish cause.  Yet he was always careful never to let his visceral sympathies run too far in the other direction.  When nominated for the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing by the Ingersoll Foundation in 1984, Powell made it clear that he would only accept if he were not expected to endorse the foundation’s tenets of “Judeo-Christian values” and the Ten Commandments, confining himself to saying that he was “broadly speaking sympathetic” to them.

Other potential biographers might feel troubled by Powell’s perceived “snobbery”—an accusation that appears to have no more basis than that he went to Eton and Oxford and wrote mostly about the social milieu in which he was lucky enough to live.  Further criticism has been made by Christopher Hitchens, generally a Powell fan, who scolded him for not featuring any pro-fascist characters in Dance, as if Powell were covering up for upper-class Hitlerism.  Yet, as both Barber and Birns are at pains to point out, this omission simply reflects the fact that Powell did not know many—or any—such people and, therefore, could not draw upon them for so autobiographical a work.  Both authors are also anxious to absolve Powell from occasional allegations of antisemitism—allegations that are risible, based as they are solely on such bland fictive exchanges as “‘I suppose he’s a Jew.’  ‘I suppose so’” (from Afternoon Men).  Today, no doubt, Powell’s well-known interest in genealogy and inheritance (he believed, says Barber in his first sentence, “that it was rare to find exceptional people without exceptional antecedents”) could be ascribed to “classism,” a belief in eugenics, or maybe even subtle “racism.”

Both Barber and Birns have made heroic efforts to come to grips with their intriguing subject, and both have largely succeeded.  Birns (who teaches humanities at New School University in New York City and was a cofounder of the Anthony Powell Society—www.anthonypowell.org.uk) has overwritten in places—so anxious to cover every possible Powell angle that he gets carried away.  On page eight, for instance, he is talking about some misunderstandings about Powell that have crept in on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, which is useful—but then he feels constrained to digress about some (wholly unrelated) U.K. misunderstandings of U.S. subjects.  This looks a little bit like showing off.  There are also slightly tedious literary in-jokes, such as that on page 92: “the segment of Dance most suitable for inclusion in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which event would indeed be a sign of the apocalypse.”  Curiously for a Powell aficionado, there are even hints of class-based aggrievedness.  On page 11, for instance, Birns speaks of

the build up of the American university system along German lines, which ratcheted up the degree of rigor with which Anglophone academic scholarship was pursued and evicted sherry-drinking amateurs from the Edenic bowers.

Quite apart from the question of whether Anglophone academic scholarship really became more rigorous in the postwar period, the clichéd imagery and sentiments are clunkingly reminiscent of lines spoken by Jenkins’ embittered Uncle Giles in Dance.

One feels a little guilty mentioning these foibles, because, overall, this book is a remarkable achievement and will prove invaluable to anyone who really wants to know about Powell’s world.  (Birns covers not Dance only but also Powell’s fiction of the 1930’s and 1980’s, his memoirs, and his journals.)  Its very earnestness—and earnestness is surely a sine qua non for the sort of person who sets up literary societies—makes Understanding Anthony Powell seem reliable and solid to the point of stolidity.  The chronology is comprehensive, the bibliography is detailed, the text is highly informed, and the insights are illuminating; really, I could not imagine a more useful guide to have conveniently at hand, whether one is reading Powell for the first time or the tenth.

Barber, whose previous book was an acclaimed biography of Simon Raven, and who has written the entry on Powell for the New Dictionary of National Biography, has a lighter touch.  (Overlook Press, incidentally, is connected to Duckworth, Powell’s first publisher.)  Sometimes, indeed, his touch is slightly too light for my taste (as Powell said in 1962, “people often put their preferences in literature down to a number of things that don’t count, when it’s all based on personal preference!”), with words like floozy and lousy cropping up, along with such remarks as that Oxford “undergraduettes” are so lacking in sex appeal that “many young men thought it sapiens to be homo.”  Perhaps, however, such breezy slang is appropriate when dealing with Powell’s Oxford days, which encompassed the Jazz Age, whose flippant echoes reverberate so marvelously in Powell’s books.  Moreover, Barber’s prose tone does darken as a fitting accompaniment to the changing historical background and is generally more elegant than not.

Because of the circumstances enumerated above, and because there is no other full biography of Powell to compare this to, an evaluation of Barber’s book is really quite difficult.  The lack of access to various archives he complains about does not appear, on the surface of it, to have made any material difference to the work in hand—but then, as we do not know what is in the closed archives (or even which particular archives he is talking about), how are we to judge competently, one way or another?  Anthony Powell: A Life certainly feels satisfyingly well researched and aesthetically rounded, and it is hard for a nonspecialist to suggest how it might be improved.  Perhaps the best policy is simply to conclude, in true restrained, Powellian fashion, that “when a book is bad its faults are pretty obvious, so you say to yourself, well, here’s how not to do it.”

 

[Anthony Powell: A Life, by Michael Barber (New York: Overlook Press) 338 pp., $29.95]

[Understanding Anthony Powell, by Nicholas Birns (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press) 408 pp., $39.95]