BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM

Having Danced to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, the English gentleman novelist, Keeps the Ball Rolling in his abridged autobiography (out this month). DUNCAN FALLOWELL reports

DUNCAN FALLOWELL

Deeply sunk in Somerset verdure, Anthony Powell and his wife, Lady Violet, are at home at the Chantry and taking tea on a hot afternoon. “I’d absolutely hate to live abroad,” says Tony (as his friends call him). “It would get me down no end. Frightfully bad at foreign languages too. But I’m good at broken English.”

“Yes, he’s very good at that,” says Lady Violet, “very good at getting foreigners to speak English even when they can’t.”

He wears a jacket with exceptionally wide lapels, like the wings of a manta ray. He holds himself upright but with ease on a high sofa, and from this position he tends to talk out of the side of his face in a way that is both cheerful and slightly conspiratorial. As man and writer he lives very close to the edge— of a giggle.

Lady Violet lies full length on a lower, more frayed sofa—so low, in fact, that it appears to be collapsing into the floor. Her feet, in running shoes, are up, and so is her hair, in a sort of informal bluish bush. She is needlepointing a cushion cover—another cushion cover, for the house is padded with her industry. Lady Violet is Anglo-Irish, but she seems very settled here.

“I have the strongest possible dislike for Ireland,” says Powell. “That awful national egotism, always going on about what it means to be Irish—but this is very un-English of me, I know. Wyndham Lewis said that the Irish resemble the English in being sentimental about the Irish, but I find it the least intoxicating place in the world. You asked me earlier if I had any eccentricities. This is the sort of thing I’m eccentric about. Would you say, Violet, I was eccentric?”

Lady Violet, who has tied up her needle for the moment, waves a bit of custard cream biscuit and mumbles something that is negative but not positively so, then bursts out, “Trelawney, stop it!.. .You don’t mind cats, do you?” Trelawney is their Cornish rex, who periodically destroys pieces of upholstery.

“Do you know The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams?” asks Powell. “It’s the best book that any American has ever managed to produce. He was a friend of Henry James. His father was an American minister in London during the Civil War. He’s quite interesting about the English. I have—oh, how very tiresome, I think I threw away only the other day this thing an American sent me about Adams. They like sending me photocopies of things. Anyway, the book is most enjoyable. It perhaps tails off a bit at the end, but...”

“But why do you mention it?”

“Oh, yes, exactly, what I was coming onto was, Adams says the great point about real eccentrics is that they are trying to be tremendously ordinary. I was always brought up to be tremendously ordinary, which can perhaps lead to sort of.. .but I don’t think I have any peculiar habits.”

‘‘Do you like Americans in fact?”

‘‘Of course. There’s this thing called the Anthony Powell Society, at Kalamazoo, and they bring out a thing called Anthony Powell Communication, which comes out twice a year and has sort of information in it about, er. . .me. The very nice lady who runs it, Miss Nancy Cutbirth, which I believe is simply a wonderful form of Cuthbert, she sent me a photograph of—they have sort of conferences—all the people who were reading papers on my work, and it looked exactly like the—um, the—um, first Politburo of 1917. The thing is I always rather enjoy myself when I go to America. In my early days, in 1937, I tried to get a job in Hollywood as a scriptwriter and failed to do so. The only interesting thing that happened was that I met Scott Fitzgerald, who was drinking milk then and had been totally forgotten. Ten years later every one of his books was in print—but he was dead by that time. He’s that very rare thing, in my opinion: a bad writer who really did turn himself into a good writer.”

‘‘Are you much of a traveler?”

‘‘I like sort of touring about in sort of civilized places. I like to know where I’m going. India was marvelous, although there were one or two moments when—in the Golden Temple at Amritsar one felt intensely that anything might happen. Just after we left, they murdered a whole lot of Muslims. I’m always fascinated by their army because they’ve got this curious business of looking very smart and being very languid at the same time, which is so English.”

Powell’s father was a soldier. Sometimes one has the impression that Powell is a man of public affairs—commerce, diplomacy, the armed forces— accidentally deflected into books. ‘‘Oh, no, I don’t think being a man of action was ever quite my thing. To extend it a bit, the writer-cum-man of action is rare in England, but he’s quite a figure abroad, like Malraux, or Mailer, or Mishima in Japan. They all seem to be M’s.”

‘‘Yes, isn’t that extraordinary that they are all M’s,” echoes Lady Violet.

“Yes, it is extraordinary, isn’t it,” says Tony, as if they had just unearthed some wondrous fragment of Attic pottery. The shuttlecock of observation passes lightly to and fro. The atmosphere is very English, taken to the subtly exotic point where the name Powell is pronounced “Pole,’.’ and where Pole indeed would be pronounced “Pool.” The Chantry is near Frame, which is pronounced “Froom.” Auberon Waugh has called the “Pole” pronunciation a provincial pretension to gentility. “Auberon Waugh lives at least fifty miles away,” says Powell with bewildered indifference, “and, should we meet, he always goes out of his way to be rude to me. Perhaps it’s because I was a friend of his father’s.”

Cyril Connolly, in his recently published journal, makes the following reference to an evening on the eve of the Second World War: “Powells to dinner, very nice. He asked for opinion on him and Evelyn. I said I thought Tony had more talent and Evelyn more vocation. Tony is likely to dry up and Evelyn to make mistakes, but you can learn from mistakes, you can’t learn from drying up.”

“Oh, Cyril Connolly... ” Tony cogitates a little. “Now that he’s dead, I really can’t tell even myself quite what his thing was, quite why one wanted to see him, because he could be fearfully sort of tiresome. There was something slightly hypnotic about him. He was very intelligent indeed, but I think intellectually ... corrupt is perhaps going a bit far, but still...”

Powell did not dry up, although his literary style is certainly dry—some say wooden, colorless, boring; others say supple, finely pointed, addictive, hilarious, even quietly sinister. Both the Powells are fascinated by family names, gossip, social connections, without being at all stuffy about these things. Various worn volumes of Burke’s Peerage & Baronetage are so placed on the bookshelves as to be grabbable at one lunge from where Lady Violet subsides on the sofa.

Powell’s social curiosity resembles the lepidopterist’s concern for markings much more than it does the Proustian snobbery of intense values, and therefore the art built upon it is not intense. He thinks that to be personal, that is, to express feelings too directly (whether good ones or bad), is to be rude, and he does not want to be rude. He wrote a review of George Painter’s biography of Proust, and this is his version of a rave: “Mr. Painter has done his work so well that it is hard to speak in moderate terms of his skill and unobtrusive wit.’’ Powell is the Englishman’s idea of a fine writer: civilized without being feminine. His books express design rather than feelings. “I’d say I was quite sort of keen on form, yes.”

(continued on page 106)

ANTHONY POWELL

(continued from page 42)

Powell’s lifework is the twelve-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time, a segmented and contrapuntal picture of the upperish classes from the beginning of the century to the seventies, which took him twenty-five years to write. And in what way is he unhappy with it?

“Oh, I see, yes, unhappy, ummm—I don’t think anything went radically wrong at any stage, rightly or wrongly.”

He must have experienced a great sense of loss after dispatching the final volume. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t. I experienced an enormous sense of relief that I’d managed to get to the end of the thing without running out of steam.”

What, then, does he consider his particular virtue as a writer?

“Staying power.”

Dance, as he calls it, is built on a symphonic scale; obviously he is very musical.

“Totally not. Couldn’t be less musical. I can often tell with certain books whether the author’s musical or not— there’s this curious sort of flow. You get it in Kierkegaard.”

“Garcia Marquez is very musical.”

“Oh, really? I haven’t read that book One Hundred Years of.. .something. I ought to read it, ought I?”

Powell’s most recent novel, O, How the Wheel Becomes It!, is by far the shortest book he has produced. “Well, yes, having done this twelve-volume affair, which, you know, was rather a sweat... ”

What was the purpose of the last novel? What was he trying to say?

“The problem is, one really doesn’t know what to do with one’s mornings. One can’t keep just hanging about downstairs.”

“Here’s what I’d call a French question.”

“Oh, should I leave the room?” flutes Lady Violet, allowing her needle to pause in midair.

“No, not that sort of French. What I mean is: What have you sacrificed for your art?”

“Stop it, Trelawney, no!”

“Um—rather a lot of time, actually. I have fairly often not gone to parties from here because I was writing. If I had been up to London one night, I pretty well never went up again for another party immediately the next night, even if it was rather tempting.”

Bom in London in 1905, Powell lived most of his adult life there until 1952, when he and Lady Violet moved to the country. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to stand the country at all, because I loved going to nightclubs and so on, but London was awfully depressing after the war, with all those bombed bits and frightfully disagreeable coal shortages, and then the telephone goes morning, noon, and night, and if one’s working in the house, you answer it and it turns out to be for your wife but you can’t very well hang up, and the whole bloody morning’s gone. I’ve always liked to write in the morning, when I feel after-breakfast-like. I’ve never been able to write after even so much as half a glass of sherry. I have a glass of Guinness at luncheon. My wife always liked the idea of living in the country. We looked at dozens and dozens of houses before settling on this one. It was in a terrible state when we moved in. We have ninety acres here, which is more than we need, but it’s easy to let.”

The Chantry is a Regency house, small, with the occasional pillar, and although the Powells are not rich or grand, the property is pending manorial in the sense that it has that all-important lodge at the entrance to the drive. Outside, there is a lake and two grottoes. Inside, it is done up in the English country style whose integrating ideas are: Nothing should match anything else, and there should be plenty of it to dispel a cold atmosphere; most but not all of the furniture should be old; and here and there notes of appalling taste should be struck. In the Powells’ case, a bohemian effect is introduced by lurid black-and-red wallpaper in the hall— bohemian, that is, until you realize that the pattern involves an assemblage of armor and weapons.

“Do you go hunting, shooting, fishing?”

Mirth.. .“I’ve never done any form of exercise. I s’pose I do a bit of gardening—when I say gardening, it’s really just hacking things down.”

Powell’s first novel, Afternoon Men, was published in 1931. “When I appeared on the scene, every literary young man was writing a novel. Quite extraordinary not to have been. Not that I’m at all one of those who wrote from the age of four. At Eton and at Oxford I did drawings.”

“Was Oxford fun?”

“I didn’t really in a way enjoy Oxford. I mean, one went to parties. There were several very rich people, mostly of rather obscure origins, and you would be invited by someone you didn’t know to a party for thirty with a bottle of champagne placed in front of each guest and that sort of thing. There was a man called Lulu Waters-Welch who entertained in this fashion. But a lot of the time one felt lonely and depressed. The Brideshead Revisited picture was, in my view, totally wrong. My objection is that, well, among other things, the clothes Evelyn puts them in are of course totally wrong, beyond all expression. I don’t know what Evelyn was thinking of with those clothes, and always meant to ask him about it.”

Lonely and depressed at Oxford—almost a confession from a man whose four volumes of autobiography (coming out in America this month from Penguin Books in a condensed volume entitled To Keep the Ball Rolling) are called “memoirs” because, Powell says, “autobiography” has too many serious, confessional overtones.

Powell’s levelness, his clubbability, has meant that he has avoided the terrors and the brilliance with which his contemporaries Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have had to contend. And levelness is presumably the quality which his friend George Orwell so valued in him. “Yes, we were good friends, I’d say. I arranged his funeral, that sort of thing.”

No angst? No trauma? No psychiatrists, no bile, no Russian roulette, no insomnia?

“Oh, quite wrong. Almost permanent insomnia! I’m better than I used to be, but in my early days I never slept a wink. I think it was largely from drinking too much.”

“You didn’t take to sleeping pills? Yours was the barbiturate era.”

“No, never. I’m tremendously antimedicine! I think taking one aspirin is being hooked on drugs.”

“Anyway, despite all that, it’s very refreshing to encounter someone of your generation who isn’t a raging pessimist, full of the ghastliness of modem life.”

“Well, I mean, I think I’m generally, er, fairly, you certainly wouldn’t describe, I don’t know, that’s to say, well, the fact that one can go on existing at all must be pretty optimistic, don’t you think? You asked about fear, and I would have to say that fear wasn’t particularly one of my big things—without setting up in the least as being brave,” and he bites into another brown Bourbon biscuit, sips a little tea. There is something changeless and reassuring here. He must always have looked fifty years old, as he looks it still when almost eighty. Even the hair has refused to fall out. Powell is wide-awake and in the swim—and a compulsive reader. So whom does he consider to be the most underrated living writer?

“Oh, yes, I see, living writers—most of the ones I read are dead. It’s quite a sort of good question. Is there anybody? They all seem to get rather a lot of attention these days. The older one gets ...you say I really ought to read Mdrquez?”

“Well, it’s not an order.”

“But let me write it down. Which titles do you recommend? All right. Do you know a Peruvian character called Vargas Llosa? Wrote a book about trying to establish a military brothel somewhere up the Amazon. Quite funny, but rather labored.”

“Have you ever been involved with the secret service?”

“Never. I must be the only man in England—I mean, I hardly know anybody who hasn’t been involved in some way.”

Politics? “Tory. Always. Our local M.P. is Bob Boscawen, a good backbencher, Military Cross in the war, Cornish family, you’ll find him in the Peerage under ‘Falmouth.’ ”

But, of course, for a man of perception and wide sympathy, the Margaret Thatcher worldview is rather lacking in.. .“I love her! I find her quite incredibly attractive. Um, yes, sexually. It’s not at all uncommon. I was at dinner the other day—A1 Alvarez was there, Isaiah Berlin was there, people like that—and they found her enormously attractive too.” Knighthood is likely—unless Powell has already refused one (as Evelyn Waugh is said to have refused one, because he admired only hereditary titles), but that would seem to be very out of character. Powell has what the Tories call “bottom.” That is, he is what he appears to be, and what he appears to be is a gentleman who isn’t a bore. This is an illusion, however. A gentleman has interests, not obsessions. Anthony Powell is a writer, and a writer is only as good as his obsessions. Hence the element of concealment—not of inconvenient truths in the outer world, but of self from self.

“I’m not a great examiner of myself,” he says, trying to decide between a Bourbon and a custard cream. “I think people are very much divided into those who are interested in themselves and those who are interested in other people, which has nothing to do with being especially virtuous or anything, it’s just the way one’s mind works.”

The sun, given a wide berth by several plump clouds as they advance across the blue, thrums through the tall bay window, heating the room like an engine. The external world cannot always be so threatless, so merely objective, can it? People cannot for long be divided into these simple categories, can they? Powell’s insistence that they can is his great forte as a writer, or, to put it another way, his great weakness. Does the more complex drama of the blood and the psyche and the landscape draw no response? “Well, do you know Dunne’s theory of dreams?”

“The poet?”

“No. D-u-n-n-e, I think it is. I don’t know what his initials are, no. He had this theory that you had prophetic dreams. I did keep my dreams for a while, which is an awful bore, because you have to write them down the second you wake up. I did have a few vaguely prophetic.. .but I believe Dunne’s theory is totally exploded now. Of course,” he adds, “there are things that are not understood,” as if the mysteries were to life what canned food is to cooking.

“Do you believe in life after death?”

“Generally speaking—not. But I s’pose it is not absolutely inconceivable that maybe sort of quite odd things might happen.. .later.”