Tony at the Travellers: Anthony Powell as clubman

Spectator, The, Dec 14/Dec 21, 2002 by Massingberd, Hugh

'We might go straight into lunch ...' The utterer of this dread phrase (categorised by Kingsley Amis as the most odious sound to be heard in Clubland) is, of course, Widmerpool. He is entertaining hardly the mot juste - the narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nicholas Jenkins, to luncheon (the term the novelist Anthony Powell preferred) at his club in order to check on the form for sleeping with his fiancee before their wedding.

The meeting had been proposed by Widmerpool when he ran into Jenkins at Lady Molly Jeavons's house in South Kensington. Presumably Widmerpool then mentions at which club the lunch is to take place, but - characteristically of the author - this precise information is not vouchsafed to the reader. 'The name of the club surprised me a little,' writes Jenkins, with its 'mild suggestion of cosmopolitan life and high card stakes'. In Hugh Whitemore's much underrated adaptation of Dance for Channel Four, the viewer was left in no doubt that Widmerpool belonged to Brooks's. That might seem a reasonable inference - especially in view of one of its present-day members, Desmond Seward, having been so bold as to identify a former member, Denis Capel-Dunn (known as 'the Papal Bun') with whom Powell had briefly served in the Cabinet Office during the war, as the model for Widmerpool. Capel-- Dunn, though, had originally been a member of the St James's Club, which subsequently merged with Brooks's.

Tony Powell himself tended to be annoyed by such bald assertions as to the origins of his fictional characters, but I remember him cryptically conceding that Seward was 'a clever fellow and might be on to something'. He told me, 'I only knew the Papal Bun for nine weeks, but he certainly made an impression. I've never met anyone so materialistic in outlook. But then, of course, he wasn't at school ['school' being Powell's shorthand for Eton] with me so he was only partly the inspiration for Widmerpool. Fiction isn't as straightforward as that.'

At their luncheon Widmerpool says to Jenkins, 'Have anything you like to eat or drink. Personally I am on a diet - a little gastric trouble - and shall restrict myself to cold tongue and a glass of water.' (One thinks of this sparsest of lunches as 'a Widmerpool'.) Jenkins adds, 'I ordered all I decently could in the face of this frugality.'

Yet Brooks's seems about right for Widmerpool. Certainly I can think of several present-day members who fit the image of my Widmerpool. Such is Powell's genius that this universal character crops up in all our lives. We all have our own Widmerpools - people who initially strike you as grotesque absurdities but then gradually exert their inexorable will to achieve power over your lives.

I have concentrated on Widmerpool's club as, curiously, clubs do not feature a great deal in Dance or indeed in Powell's other novels. That is to say gentleman's clubs. There are plenty of more louche and raffish establishments featured - such as Foppa's, where Jenkins plays Russian billiards with his mistress, Jean Duport; the Bronze Monkey, where the pederastic artist and antique-dealer Mr Deacon takes a fatal tumble during his birthday party; and the Merry Thought, where the fancy-- dress get-up of the lesbian pianist Heather ('Hoppy') Hopkins brings to mind Widmerpool in army uniform.

Nick Jenkins does not allude to his own club, though somehow one presumes that he must have one. This would be in keeping with the more conventional side of his life that blends so sympathetically with the bohemianism that is the leitmotiv of Dance - despite the persistent ignorant prejudice that Powell wrote only about toffs. Anthony Powell himself was elected to the Travellers as early as 1930 - a year before he published his first novel of bohemian life, Afternoon Men (very much a precursor of Dance).

Why, one might ask, the Travellers? It was, after all, not a particularly literary club. Founded in 1819, it was dominated by the Foreign Office. Edward Bulwer-Lytton and William Thackerary were both blackballed. 'We don't want any writing fellahs here,' muttered one member. The Travellers had long been a byword for gloom. Conan Doyle is supposed to have based the Diogenes Club - favourite haunt of the melancholic Mycroft Holmes and distinguished by the members' disinclination to talk to one another - on the Travellers. The atmosphere was not improved by two members shooting themselves in the billiard room. After one of these suicides, the club chairman commented, 'I'll take damn good care he never gets into any other club I have anything to do with.'

Yet to someone rather drawn to melancholy - Tony Powell's alter ego, Nick Jenkins, wrote a book on Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy the glorious gloom of the Travellers must have been irresistible. One of the chief attractions of the Travellers to Tony was, as his younger soon, John, pointed out to me, that 'he wouldn't have to talk shop'. As a young publisher with Duckworth, and a budding novelist, the natural course of action would have been for Powell to join the Garrick - conveniently near Duckworth's offices in Covent Garden. But Powell, never especially stage-struck (though he later wrote a couple of plays) and particularly averse to backslapping heartiness, was far from a Garrick type.