Anthony Powell

In his 12-volume masterpiece, "A Dance to the Music of Time," he manipulated hundreds of characters through seven decades, creating a social history of the 20th century.

By John Perry

April 15, 2000 | "Only a novel can imply certain truths. Biography and autobiography are forced to attempt exact definition. In doing so truth goes astray." -- Anthony Powell, "Hearing Secret Harmonies" (Vol. 12 of "A Dance to the Music of Time")

When the English novelist and critic Anthony Powell died March 28, at 94, the literary world lost one of its greatest figures.

A reserved man with a dislike of bad manners and personal publicity, but a keen interest in gossip, he continued working almost until the end, publishing three acerbic volumes of journals covering 1982-1992, the last of which appeared in 1997.

He produced plays, literary criticism, biography and 50 years' worth of book reviews for the Daily Telegraph, but will be best remembered for a sequence of 12 novels written between 1950 and 1975, the roman-fleuve "A Dance to the Music of Time."

Powell was the last surviving member of that prolific, gifted generation of English writers who came out of Oxford in the mid-1920s. Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Henry Green, John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, Howard Acton, George Orwell and Powell himself were all born between 1903 and 1906, and all attended the university, with the exception of Orwell, who was a schoolboy at Eton with Powell, Acton and Connolly.

Members of an exceptionally witty and amusing group whose friendships and rivalries provided material for their books, they were undoubtedly among the brighter cliques of their century -- though not necessarily eternally relevant. And they certainly weren't the only game in town. It is Powell's ability to create a universal fiction out of the dynamics, interactions and interrelations of his own relatively narrow upper-class set that accounts for the breadth of the books' appeal.

Given that Powell's life is so entwined with that of the "Dance's" narrator, Nick Jenkins, and his view that fiction evokes a higher truth than biography, the truest picture can be drawn by selecting a few favorite episodes from the work and allowing them to speak.

Though the books aren't strictly autobiographical, Jenkins' career runs exceedingly close to Powell's own. Both are soldier's sons, Eton and Oxford men who find lowly employment in the publishing world. In the '30s, both publish minor novels and briefly find lucrative but uncongenial work scriptwriting "quota-quickies" (for every foot of U.S. film shown, a proportionate amount of British film had to appear: The Hollywood studios worked around this by churning out locally made second features). Both men marry into large, titled English families, enlist in their father's regiments when WWII is declared, rise to the rank of major and move to the Intelligence Corps, where they perform liaison work with exiled Free French, Polish, Czech and Belgian military attachés.

Powell's art lies in the deftness with which he turns raw experience into fiction, a process elucidated in the final volume by his character X. Trapnel, a down-at-heel novelist (based on the underrated, underread, amphetamine-gobbling late 1940s Fitzrovian, Julian Maclaren-Ross).

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it's true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist lays it down. His decision is binding.

This is a key to Powell's work. His rare sense of balance and delicacy of touch allow him to manipulate a cast of 500 through seven decades, creating a web of shifting relationships impossible in any "factual" literary form -- and a 20th century social history, more rigorous, multilayered and infinitely more entertaining than any academic publication.

Recurring patterns are a central device. Like the dance depicted in Nicholas Poussin's allegorical painting, which inspired and lent its name to the novels, the sequence is circular in structure, its four trilogies corresponding loosely to the seasons (or four aspects of the human condition -- pleasure, riches, poverty, work -- take your pick). Subtle variations on repeating patterns lie at the core of Powell's elegantly simple method. The progress (or degeneration) of English life and manners is viewed through the eyes of a single character, Nick Jenkins, an observer who rarely usurps the foreground but whose career allows him to witness the great events of the century and the backwaters of haut-Bohemia.

Powell deplored the habit (popular among British and American readers) of identifying "real-life" models for his characters, regarding it as a gross simplification of the novelist's art. He always denied that the "Dance" was a roman à clef, yet his denials could be amusingly ambivalent when a palpable hit was scored -- especially if the I.D. followed one of the faint trails he occasionally left, like crossword clues, in his memoirs.

The composer Hugh Moreland is plainly modeled on Powell's close friend Constant Lambert (commissioned by Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev to write for the Ballet Russes at the age of 20, and father of the Who's late manager, Kit Lambert). The Anglo/Frenchman Alick Dru (a cousin of Waugh's and another prodigy, who taught himself Danish in order to translate Kierkegaard's Journals) provided the basis for the philosophical, existentialist, military-intelligence liaison officer, David Pennistone. Powell notes that Dru would have enjoyed Delmore Schwartz's dictum "Existentialism means no one can take a bath for you."

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