Anthony Powell and His Critics

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2005 by Pritchard, William H

Anthony Powell and His Critics

ANTHONY POWELL DIED IN MARCH OF 2000, months short of what would have been his ninety-fifth birthday in December. Since a fall some years previously, he had largely been confined to his home at The Chantry in Somerset. The last of his volumes of journals, covering the years 1990-1992 and published in 1997, marked the close of his writing career, although a volume of pithy jottings from a notebook appeared posthumously. Valedictory tributes were to be expected, after such a long and productive life; yet there have since been some snipings at his reputation, admiration for the man and his work being something less than universal. His old editor at the Daily Telegraph, Sir Max Hastings, recently described him as "priggish, pretentious, and pompous," while pointing out that Powell is little read among the under-forties crowd (whom does that crowd read?). In return the Anthony Powell Society bestowed upon Sir Max their annual Widmerpool Award, given to commemorate "petty abuse of power." It is unlikely that reasoned debate about Powell's place in the lists of twentieth-century English novelists is going to occur in these terms, and perhaps not at all, since it seems you're either for or against.

I have always been very much for, and on a recent rereading of most of Powell's work, my estimate of his place in the literature of the last century, and particularly with regard to A Dance to the Music of Time, is a high one indeed. The rereading was spurred by the appearance of two books on Powell, one by an Englishman, one by an American,1 The Englishman, Michael Barber, had produced the first biography of Powell, an extremely readable, good-humored account stringing together what mainly we knew already from his memoirs, journals and fiction. That Mr. Barber's is very much an interim report he acknowledges in the preface, noting that the Powell estate had "someone else in mind for the job." (Powell's close friend Hilary Spurling, an accomplished biographer, is at work on the "official" version.) So the archive at Heinemann, Powell's long-time publisher, was interdicted, and surviving members of the family (Lady Violet Powell died in 2002, leaving two sons and some grandchildren) did not make themselves available for interviews. At one moment, Barber confesses his dilemma to us-"I should like to say more about Powell's marriage, but I can't." This has been seized upon by some reviewers as demonstrating the biographer's inadequacy to his task: he just didn't know much about his subject's internal and domestic life.

There might well be another way to look at Barber's confession of inability to give us the facts on what the Powell marriage was really like. In the third volume of Powell's memoirs, Faces in My Time, occurs the following reflection on the married state:

Even in marriage at least twenty or thirty years are required to test the implications of a given partner; both parties, in the nature of human beings, changing in the Hegelian manner all the time. On this delicate question it might be added that, by the age of close on twenty-nine, I had never asked another woman to marry me-and, after nearer fifty than forty years, to speak unequivocally, have never wished to be married to another woman. In consequence, taking a risk in the matter seems something not always to be condemned.

After the superb, deeply playful pretense that, having looked gravely at his own marriage, it "seems something not always to be condemned" (not always, mind you), does the curious reader really want the lowdown on Powell and Lady Violet? With all due respect to the biographical enterprise, isn't this an instance where the subject has spoken so measuredly and finally that there is really little more to say? With all due respect for the talents of Hilary Spurling, one doubts that she will manage-or try-to say it.

One of the appealing things about Barber as biographer is that he never proposes to know things about his subject that the poor subject never knew about himself. Granted that this "knowing" might be called the only justification for writing biography, still the opportunities for misconduct are legion. Early on Barber identifies, with reference to Powell's speech (he had interviewed the novelist years previously), its "extraordinary mixture of overstatement and understatement." This immediately puts its finger on Powell's distinctive wit and suggests why the narrative voice of Dance is so engaging, as are lucubrations like the above one about marriage. What strikes one first and last about Barber is how much he truly likes the man and writer he's engaged with, and how his aim is no more nor less than to put events in orderly compass so as to share with readers the story of an original life and sensibility.

Barber's idiom has been objected to as inappropriate to a serious biography, and I admit to not having previously encountered "clapped out" (with reference to Dance's St John Clarke, the Edwardian novelist no longer read by literati in the 1920s), or "far below the salt" as designating a less than significant place at an officer's mess. A reference to Powell's 1961 trip to America as "crossing the pond" provoked especial contempt in reviewers, although I took it in stride. It is perhaps going a bit far to refer, as Barber does, to the superman hero of Powell's From a View to a Death, Arthur Zouch, as "undoubtedly a shit," even if Zouch undoubtedly was. And to speak of a lover of Powell before his marriage, Nina Hamnett, as "not exactly a 'free poke,'" borrows, rather cheekily, officer Borrit's memorable phrase from The Military Philosophers. Borrit, whose "relations with the opposite sex took an exclusively commercial form," confided to Nick that "I've never had a free poke in my life . . . Subject doesn't seem to arise when you're talking to a respectable woman." At any rate, my defense of Barber's diction, if it needs one, is that not being graced or burdened with the role of authorized biographer, he may have felt authorized to employ unofficial, slangy locutions. To me they gave the book zest, something few academic biographers, especially American ones, manage to achieve.