Book of the week
Anthony Powell by Hilary Spurling Hamish Hamilton 528pp £25 The Week Bookshop £22 (incl. p&p)
Anthony Powell (1905-2000) was the “least colourful and most English” of a “brilliant” literary generation that included George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, said Robert Mccrum in The Observer. His most famous work, the 12-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, was once widely regarded as a “masterpiece”, even earning comparisons with Proust. Yet thanks to its upper-class milieu and stately narrative, it has “not worn well”, and now “lingers as a curiosity in second-hand bookshops”. In her long-awaited biography, Hilary Spurling, a friend of Powell’s, reminds us of his “quiet genius”. Unsurprisingly, hers is an uncritical portrait, which struggles with the fact that much of the second half of Powell’s life was spent “chained to a desk, writing 300 words a day” – experiences that are “hard to animate”. Luckily, Spurling’s “wit, intelligence and deep, ironic affection for her subject” come to the rescue. This is a “compelling portrait of a lost Englishman”.
The greatest surprise of this absorbing biography is its stress on Powell’s “sense of insecurity”, said D.J. Taylor in The Times. The son of a lieutenant-colonel, he attended Eton and Oxford before going into publishing. Yet he was always on the fringes of the beau monde, held back by his lack of “prospects” and “connections”. He took refuge in late 1920s London bohemia, where his early novels are set. In 1934, he married the aristocratic Violet Pakenham, but the couple were “hard up” for at least a decade. After the War, they moved to Somerset, and Powell (who insisted that his name be pronounced “Pole”) embarked on his Dance sequence. His final decades were spent agreeably “sequestered” in the countryside, writing books and making “occasional trips to London”, before lapsing into “acerbic old age”.
The “tweediness” of Powell’s late-life persona has come to obscure his “radicalism” as a writer, said Claire Messud in The Guardian. Despite appearances, he was an “understated child of modernism” who eschewed the “tyranny of plot in favour of the actual rhythms of human experience”. And as Spurling shows, he was a man of “great wit, impressive modesty and firm integrity”. Not everyone thought so, said Craig Brown in The Mail on Sunday: there are “plenty of stories about Powell’s snobbery and curmudgeonliness” – which are “few and far between” in Spurling’s pages. This is, all told, a mixed biography: its portraits of Powell’s contemporaries are “wonderfully vivid”, but the man himself “remains curiously colourless and hard to pin down”.