Notes on a shy genius

ANTHONY POWELL by Hilary Spurling (Hamish Hamilton, £25)

A STRIKING pair of images appears in Hilary Spurling’s biography of the novelist Anthony Powell. The first is Powell’s account of the working methods of the artist, Edward Burra: “An immensely complicated design would be begun in the bottom right-hand corner of a large square of paper... moving in a diagonal sweep upward and leftward ... until the whole was covered with an intricate pattern of background and figures.”

The second image is Spurling’s description of a montage created by Powell in the boilerroom of his Somerset house, The Chantry: “A monstrous collage of a size and surrealistic disturbance beyond anything he had so far attempted ... There is something elemental, even horrifying, about the scale and impact of this torrential outpouring ...” In each case, Spurling associates the epic accretion of images with Powell’s technique when composing his masterpiece, the 12volume Dance to the Music of Time.

Like the 17th-century diarist John Aubrey, whose biography he wrote, Powell’s imagination was, Spurling argues, “essentially pictorial ... Both drew a steady stream of pictures in childhood, making sense of a chaotic and confusing external reality long before either learned to write.” As a wartime soldier, Powell made small, savage drawings of dwarves in letters to his wife, Violet, using these comic pictograms to convey otherwise inexpressible emotions. And the collective title of his novel sequence is taken from Poussin’s enigmatic picture, whose gyratory structure it echoes.

To write the biography of a literary novelist of retiring character (albeit with a genius for friendship) and diligent but sedentary habits is a challenge which Spurling, Powell’s friend and appointed biographer, meets with fortitude. Powell, she notes, even contrived largely to leave himself out of his memoirs. “I have absolutely no picture of myself,” he admitted. “Never have had.”

To counter this vanishing tendency, Spurling devises her own version of Powell’s collage technique, embedding him in pungent evocations of his milieus: the lonely childhood that made him “a connoisseur of boredom”, the Eton schooldays; the seedy London years of his 20s, where he worked for the publisher Duckworth and had affairs with (among others) the painter Nina Hamnett. She introduced him to rackety Fitzrovia, where he found the characters who would people his fiction: a company — in the line from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy that he would use as the title of his first novel — of “afternoon men”.

At times Spurling’s supporting cast threatens to overwhelm her central figure. But as she reaches the point when Powell — middle-aged, critically admired but penniless and gripped, like his friend Malcolm Muggeridge, by a longing for death — began to compose the Dance, a pattern emerges from her montage of personalities and atmospheres.

Discretion is not a cardinal virtue in a biographer, and there is a sense of something witheld in Spurling’s briskly reticent treatment of Violet’s wartime affair. But she is faultless on the bookish world in which Powell spent his life: the meanness and philistinism of publishers; the drudgery of reviewing, the sustaining praise of fellow novelists (Evelyn Waugh, not generally associated with milk of human kindness, shines here), the shock of spiteful reviews from former friends (Philip Larkin, VS Naipaul and the ineffable Muggeridge), the rise and fall of reputation.

Powell in old age compared himself to Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow but he was defended against critics who found him “dim, provincial, insular”, by Tariq Ali who wrote, “Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists.”

Spurling puts it more simply. As Powell himself said of Shakespeare, he had, she concludes, “an extraordinary grasp of what other people were like.”