1951 The first paragraph of A Question of Upbringing (published on this day), the opening volume of Powell’s twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time sequence, begins with a London road-mending, in winter. Nothing is happening:
The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with hurricane lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes.
The description meanders on for another 200 words, ending: ‘The grey, undecided flakes continued to come down, though not heavily, while a harsh odour, bitter and gaseous, penetrated the air. The day was drawing in.’
Where, the reader wonders, is all this going? Nowhere very quickly, it’s safe to assume, like the hole in the road. But the effect is instantly hypnotic. No writer in English is more the master of the slow tempos of life than Powell.
Anthony Powell was born the only child of a distinguished soldier and a mother some fifteen years older than her husband. He was officer class; she had her roots in the land-owning classes of England. Somewhat perversely, he grew up prouder of his Welshness than his Englishness (his surname, he ordained, should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘Noel’ and not ‘towel’).
At Eton he fell in with Henry Green and Cyril Connolly and at Oxford (Balliol) with Evelyn Waugh, as one of what would later be called the Brideshead Generation. One of Powell’s critics wittily retitled his great work ‘A dance to the Eton Boating Song’.
Powell left Oxford (although in one sense he never did) with the de rigueur ‘gentleman’s third in history and drifted to London, as if drawn by a magnet’. ‘I am a metropolitan man’, he once said of himself. He joined the publisher Duckworth (his father had ‘friends’ who arranged it). One of his early signings was Evelyn Waugh, whose Decline and Fall would influence his own work. Afternoon Men came out under the Duckworth imprint in 1931, to be followed in quick succession by From a View to a Death (1933) and Venusberg (1932).
In late December 1934 (always his favourite month – he liked the gloom) Powell married Lady Violet Georgiana Pakenham, a scion of the English Catholic aristocracy. The couple would have two sons.
On the outbreak of war, he gave up writing for the duration. After a false start in the infantry Powell found his niche in ‘intelligence’, working as a liaison officer with expatriate allies from occupied countries in Europe. He was demobilised in 1945 with the rank of major, a chestful of decorations and a sense of vague remorse that he had had such a cushy war. And, as he said, a very ‘boring’ one.
In 1948 Powell fell, as he always did, into a comfortable berth as the Times Literary Supplement’s fiction review editor. In 1950, he inherited a fortune from an uncle he barely knew. Money, too, always seemed to fall his way. It enabled him to move into a fine country house, The Chantry, in Somerset. Another bequest, when his father died in 1959, insulated him against the inconveniences of post-war austerity. Financial security also enabled him to embark on his grand project, A Dance to the Music of Time, and to take his time doing it.
The sequence was launched in 1951 – the year of the Festival of Britain which, in his prelude to his own grand project, The Sword of Honour trilogy, Waugh portrayed as the end of English civilisation. Under his series-hero’s less jaundiced, but equally gloomy, eye Powell surveys 50 years of England. The viewpoint is conservative, like Waugh’s, but less angrily so. Powell rarely put people’s backs up. ‘Tony is the only Tory I have ever liked’, said George Orwell – someone who elsewhere repudiated everything Powell’s class stood for.
Alongside Dance, which was completed in 1975, Powell kept private journals which, when published in 1982, revealed an increasingly bilious temperament. His last novel was The Fisher King (1985). He turned down a knighthood – even though it was offered by a Conservative administration. It would, probably, have looked paltry alongside his wife’s lineage. Or perhaps too Widmerpoolian. He left over £1.5 million on his death and a fictional sequence to rival Balzac’s.