The friends and fights of the author of ‘A Dance to the Music of Time.’
Anthony Powell Dancing to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling Knopf, 452 pp., $35
A uthorized biographer Hilary Spurling begins with the assumption that Anthony Powell (1905-2000) deserves his reputation as the English Proust. The work supposed to justify the comparison is Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. In that 12-volume sequence, he set about to canvass his society from the 1920s to the 1970s, presenting a comprehensive array of character types that has often invited comparison to the flashier Evelyn Waugh. Powell is more subtle than Waugh and sometimes so low-key he has been accused of banality. His work seems so close to life as it is actually lived that certain critics have been staunchly anti-Powell, claiming, essentially, that he is artless. Spurling won’t countenance such debunking, although she dutifully reports the disparaging reviews of heavyweight Powell denigrators like Auberon Waugh, Evelyn’s son.
One surprising aspect of Spurling’s book is the disclosure that not only did Powell draw many of his characters very directly from life—not even assembling them as composites—but that friends and acquaintances for the most part were delighted and began to act like the characters in his books and offer the novelist suggestions about how to represent them. Only on a few occasions did anyone threaten to sue Powell; even then, Powell or others managed to point out aspects of the characters that mollified their real-life models. His work earned the cooperation even of those he was satirizing because he had the uncanny ability to make his character models believe that he and they shared an important undertaking: the creation of a great novel series depicting a society in which everyone had a vital part to play.
Overall, this biography seems a little complacent, too satisfied with Powell as a good man and great novelist. Spurling does little at the beginning to introduce her subject and to explain why his work is important—failing to acknowledge that novelists are not the major cultural figures they once were. Should her book be regarded as a biography deliberately aimed at a small readership? Perhaps in the United Kingdom, where Spurling’s book was first published last year, Powell’s work retains a large and lively audience. Surely the situation is different in the United States. To appreciate Spurling’s book fully, you would need to know a good deal about English society and have memories of, for example, who Malcolm Muggeridge was and why he became so successful on English and American television and then turned against his friend Powell.
If you don’t know the history out of which Powell arises, you won’t appreciate that he was a great Tory, which makes his friendships with writers like George Orwell all the more fascinating. Spurling pretty much takes Powell and Orwell’s relationship for granted, imparting only a vague admiration for the conservative Powell as a man tolerant of a writer on the left.
And it’s not just English society and 20th-century letters that are given short explanatory shrift. Powell decided to go to Hollywood in the early 1930s, supposing he could pick up some of the loot being laid out for screenwriters; Spurling offers no context to understand his failure to attract attention. (You don’t go to Hollywood looking for work, as the British filmmaker Ivor Montagu explained in his 1968 book With Eisenstein in Hollywood. You have to announce that you are too grand and that you are unavailable, and then Hollywood comes calling.)
In Spurling I miss the wit to be found in Michael Barber’s unauthorized 2004 Powell biography. Barber is a keen commentator on Powell’s own volumes of autobiography, which get little attention in Spurling. When Powell writes that he had a “lonely. . but not unhappy” childhood, Barber comments: “It is natural to conclude that . he may have left something out.” As to the surprising affinity between Powell and Orwell, Barber’s eye for detail helps. When Orwell saw Powell in his World War II full-dress uniform, Orwell, formerly a policeman in Burma, asked, “Do your trousers strap under the boot?” To Orwell’s satisfaction he learned they did, and remarked: “Those straps under the feet give you a feeling like nothing else in life.” What Powell and Orwell had in common, Barber shows, is a sense of good form. Powell thought Orwell wore “his shabby clothes with style, hinting at the latent dandyism revealed by his comment about the boot straps.” Barber capitalizes on Powell’s insight into Orwell by including a description of Orwell at Eton (where Powell also went to school) after a swim:
Authorized biographers have all the archives and interviews coming to them, and that is why their work sometimes seems under-researched compared with the go-getting unauthorized writers. Barber had no access to the papers that were reserved for Spurling, but he did interview Powell, and Barber develops a style that complements his subject’s own wit. To be sure, Spurling adds many new details that amount to a fuller picture of the novelist. And yet the privileges of authorization do not yield a more vivid biography. One reason is that while Spurling knew Powell and could question him, the results, as she admits, were not edifying:
He was a friend, and in his declining years she was there to buoy him, not study him.
T he most moving parts of Spurling’s biography deal with Powell’s service as a flunky (Spurling’s word is “dogsbody”) for publisher Gerald Duckworth. Powell’s job in publishing, obtained with his father’s help, was unfortunately in a firm that, as Spurling puts it, treated books like so many racehorses. If a book or author did not look like a winner, all bets were off. Early on, Powell had a great instinct for important writers and was constantly frustrated because he could not guarantee they would make money for the firm. Even worse, Duckworth hated publishing and seemed to be in business to take his revenge on it. In these hostile and demeaning circumstances Powell labored many a year, eventually turning his experience into one of the great novels about publishing, What’s Become of Waring.
Spurling is also a splendid guide to the slow, incremental buildup of Powell’s magnum opus. A Dance to the Music of Time did not come all at once to Powell, and there were periods when he got stuck and did not know how to go forward. He made a fortunate marriage that proved a constant goad and mainstay, with a wife who knew how to read his books and offer constructive, even severe, criticism that prevented him from ever settling for less than the best he could do. Powell’s quiet, steady courage and unwavering dedication to his project make for inspiring reading.
Even if you have never read a Powell novel and know nothing about his great villain Kenneth Widmerpool, Spurling’s account of the character’s creation will intrigue you. Widmerpool begins his life in the novels as a nonentity, pathetic with women but dogged at making a success of himself in the army and in politics, ultimately securing a life peerage. Here is how Spurling defines him: “Widmerpool has passed into contemporary folklore as the lumbering, initially comical but in later volumes steadily more sinister embodiment of the quest for power that is one of the hinges on which the Dance turns.” I wish she had said even more. As with so much in Powell’s novels and characters, Spurling is always catching them on the fly, never slowing down to explore their significance.
Widmerpool is, in a way, a character for our age as much as for Powell’s.
