OBITUARY : Anthony Powell, R.I.P

National Review, May 1, 2000 by David Pryce-Jones

ANTHONY POWELL was the last of a generation of British writers that included Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, W. H. Auden, and George Orwell. Those were the days. After a conventional upbringing and education, Powell began to write fiction and to work in a small but select publishing firm. Almost the only unconventional thing he ever did was to accept an invitation in 1937 to Hollywood as a scriptwriter. This didn't work out, but at least he met Scott Fitzgerald and fell under the influence of Nathanael West. During the war, he was a liaison officer to the numerous foreign military missions in London. Afterward, at the impressive rate of one every two years, he published the twelve volumes of a series which he called A Dance to the Music of Time. Here, as in a giant warehouse, he accumulated the stories of all the people he had ever met. Caricatured without much invention, these people came from rather limited circles of society, the aristocracy and bohemia, crowding together at that rather privileged crossroads where smart and art converge. The raw material was spread wide rather than deep. Never really a bestseller, this work nevertheless attracted a hard core of fans- faddists, cultists even-among them Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and V. S. Naipaul.

As the title of that series implies, life was a human comedy to Powell. While not a writer out for comic effects in the manner of Thurber, say, or S. J. Perelman, he believed that people and things were intrinsically funny, but otherwise purposeless to the point of absurdity. Here was someone essentially conservative, who relished everything established, and mocked the strivers and the seekers on the grounds that things never do change for the better, only for the worse. Gossip and good wine are all that the wise should expect. Laughter is the remedy. A learned man in his way, he dearly loved useless information, for example heraldry and genealogy, timetables, abstruse words, peculiar names. His wife was the daughter of an earl, and he could discourse by the hour upon the grandeur and vagaries of her family, the Pakenhams. When he came to write his memoirs, also in several volumes, he began in much the same spirit, with a Welsh ancestor in 1234 by the name of Rhys the Hoarse.

Malcolm Muggeridge was a bosom friend, and for a while also a colleague on Punch, then a humorous weekly. Unlike Powell, though, Muggeridge had a genuine interest in politics, and this led him to religion. One day, he wrote a disrespectful review of Powell's latest book. One of those literary rows ensued which so amuse onlookers. Muggeridge was never forgiven for what in the end boiled down to having beliefs, unlike Powell. For fifty years Powell had reviewed in the Daily Telegraph, but after a dismissive review there of one of his books, he never wrote again for that paper.

English literature has many great men, but a special glory is its minor masters, and Powell, in all his crustiness and idiosyncrasy, was one of them.