The Daily Mail‘s books editor, Kenneth Allsop, gave his weekly “book column for book-lovers” a particularly provocative headline on Wednesday, 22 June 1960. His question is one that Anthony Powell’s readers have been arguing about ever since. As is sometimes the case with the Mail, the article itself — part interview, part profile — was more moderate that its headline. I offer the complete text here because it may represent Powell’s first published interview, at least since the start of A Dance.
With a bundle of review books under his arm, a stocky figure in an oldish bird’s-eye suit, a period piece flowery tie, and a trilby, made apparently from moles’ pelts, jammed over long silver hair, is hastening thankfully out of the hurly-burly of Fleet Street back to what he calls his “world of enchantment.”
Exercise for amateur sleuth: Whom do these clues identify? The air of raffish elegance, the confident unsmartness of the class that is upper, and knows it; the insouciant suggestion of both county and clubland; the literary journalist ana the gentleman novelist; the Etonian voice and the Proustian works?
Anthony Powell is the answer.
But with the answer comes a further and more complex question. Publication this week of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, fifth in his continuing sequence with the general title of The Music of Time, is again fanning into names the controversy that has simmered about him for ten years.
Why the fuss? It is a fascinating odd issue. He is famous but unknown. The personality is fastidiously anonymous for this time of TV author-celebrities. The books which arouse such passionate partisanship have not a large sale—2,000 a time in Britain, as little as 3,000 in America.
Yet his influence and reputation are towering. Any critic would either unhesitatingly place him among the half-dozen most important novelists writing in the English language today—or angrily decapitate him with an edged phrase.
As often as he is acclaimed as “brilliant” and “great”, he is dismissed as ‘a trifler” and “a gossip columnist.”
He is both a cult and a battleground—and an indication of that is one Sunday newspaper giving his latest book a top-of-the-page separate three-column reception and another allotting it a four-line paragraph.
Far away from the din and the contention, in his Somerset Regency house where he lives with his wife (who was Lady Violet Pakenham) and his two sons when on holiday from Eton, Mr. Powell, at 55, with unperturbed urbanity, continues to set down his 1,000 words a week of his immense chronicle.
And what are these books which split intelligent opinion so ferociously?
They are a delicately meshed web of upper-class relationships, a saga of the in-bred well-bred of between the wars, a tiny, tight circle seen in depth and with amused irony—what might be called a comedy of manors.
They are hypnotically period; The characters’ names could be only of the 1930s—Sunny Farebrother. Dicky Umfraville. Lady Molly.
In the dim background is the Slump, the Spanish War, Marxist politics; in the bright foreground . is the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, and his public school contemporaries, enacting their class tribal customs in Soho and Chelsea pubs, where the blondes are peroxide, and in Mayfair salons where the champagne is golden.
Mr Powell’s opponents see his books as prattling and plotless. To them his characters seem to fall over backward to be poised, to be grim-jawed with flippancy.
To them he is no more significant than P. G. Wodehouse: he covers the serious problems of that age with a piquant Wooster sauce. It is all tittle-tattle.
Yesterday, before he fled from a brief London visit to the obscurity of the country, I talked with Mr. Powell about this.
“Rather surprising,” he said, “to find oneself so argued about. After all, I’ve just been steadily writing. Fame? Well, I still meet lots of people at parties who don’t know that I ever put pen to paper.
“They say, ‘What do you do?’ I say, I’m a journalist, which is true. They say, ‘What sort of journalist? ‘I review books.’ They then say, ‘How do you get a job like that?’and I have to explain the whole thing.
“Then there are those who know my books, who complain that I’m excessively enamoured of an extinct race, of stratospheric snobs. The 30’s was a period of transition and change, which one is trying to show, but we, who were young then, aren’t extinct.
“I don’t feel extinct. I’m sure Britain is far more class conscious now than ever. Snobbery is misleading word. It was invented in the French Revolution. Before then a gentleman was just a gentleman without being aware of it.
“Aristocrats are thought of as an isolated group, but, of course, when you know a duke he ceases to be duke and becomes a person as fascinatingly complicated, as any other.
“When you look back closely at your life it is the unnoticed things that happen to you that are the most extraordinary. If the whole truth were known about the sex life of the dullest man he would be considered a fiend—that’s an extreme example, but the writer must try to peel off the layers to reveal people.
“There will finally be ten or even 12 novels in this series. I’m now working on one covering 1938 and 1939, and at least two will be set in the war.
“With a canvas of this size, you have to spend time examining all the sides, taking in the whole surroundings—which may be why some critics accuse me of lingering on certain social aspects. I try to look down on the whole thing, rather than use the painfully chronological approach.
“During the dreadful days when I was a film script writer, we sat at conferences saying, ‘Let’s have a fat man in.’ Then we’d decide how to emphasise his fatness—by showing him loosening his collar—that kind of obvious character- building. Exactly the wrong way to write novels.
“You are in the hands of your characters. It is like meeting someone for the first time in real life. You find yourself being attracted to a girl you have almost off-handedly brought in, and gradually she captures you. Another character you feel unsympathetic towards takes over the situation and you change your mind about him.
“It is a strange mixture of reality and magic, in which the writer has no need to invent anything-it is a world that- forms itself and draws you. into it, a world of enchantment which you can only hope readers will also: want to enter.”