OPINION:
ANTHONY POWELL: DANCING TO THE MUSIC OF TIME
By Hilary Spurling
Alfred A. Knopf, $35, 480 pages
Biographies written by a friend of the subject have warmth and immediacy — often a sparkling immediacy. Think of Boswell on Johnson, or Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte.
Hilary Spurling is this sort of biographer. She met novelist Anthony Powell in the early 1960s, when she was a newcomer to literary London. He was already an influential literary journalist, author of five pre-World War II novels and well into his 12-volume sequence “A Dance to the Music of Time.” Knowing that she was a devoted reader, he asked her to write “a kind of handbook or glorified guide,” clarifying who among its crowd of characters was who, and what they had done.
She became both a friend of Powell and a distinguished biographer — notably of Henri Matisse — so Powell later asked her to undertake his biography “on the understanding that nothing whatever was to be done for as long as possible.”
Now published, her “Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time” is a sympathetic account based on her knowledge as friend moving in the same literary circles, and able to make convincing assessments of their dynamics.
She also makes a convincing assessment about the sources of Powell’s habits of mind, beginning by putting her finger on a crucial point: “Small, inquisitive, and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly underpopulated world.”
His father was an army officer, hence the constant moves. His mother, who was much the older parent, was temperamentally reclusive. He had no contact with other children until he was about 10. He spent his days drawing. “I cannot remember a time when I did not draw,” he wrote. He also played with his toy soldiers and read books. These activities perhaps helped him develop the acute observational skills he needed to understand social behavior when he went to Eton and Oxford.
After graduation he worked in London as an apprentice publisher for Duckworth’s — a shambolic establishment, determined to avoid contact with serious fiction. Powell introduced one or two young authors, and published his own first books with them. But as these won him some reputation, he increasingly earned a living by reviewing and, briefly, writing screenplays. This all ended in 1939 when Britain declared war on Germany, and he enlisted in the army, emerging in 1945 as a major.
Hilary Spurling keeps efficient and empathetic track of this history, describing Powell’s jobs, feelings and friends. She also records his affairs, pinpointing Marion Coates as inspiration for Jean Duport, the woman who fascinates Nick Jenkins, the narrator of “A Dance to the Music of Time.”
Powell rejected the idea that his fictional characters were descriptions of real people, yet Ms. Spurling’s careful record of “A Dance” identifies several who resemble people he knew. His close friends, painter Adrian Daintry and composer-conductor Constant Lambert, appear as Ralph Barnby and Hugh Moreland for example.
Her account of Powell’s life leads up to and then away from “A Dance to the Music of Time.” This centrality is inevitable since he spent a quarter of a century producing it. Many novelists and critics have claimed it as a masterpiece, the most important novel of post-war Britain. Others accuse it of triviality and snobbishness. And not a few — including V.S. Naipaul and Philip Larkin — have both praised it highly then reviewed it critically. Ms. Spurling puts this down to jealousy.
While her biography has the verve and assurance that come from her long knowledge of Anthony Powell, it lacks the outside view provided by biographers who have not known their subjects personally, perhaps did not even live during the same epoch. Such biographers must build a picture of their subject by interviewing friends and colleagues or delving into contemporary accounts. The result can be a more probing or nuanced biography than is possible for a devoted friend to write.
Powell was himself a biographer. Foreseeing that novel-writing would be impossible in wartime, he worked on the first real biography of John Aubrey, a 17th-century polymath, best known for his “Brief Lives.” These short accounts of famous people, mostly those he or his friends had known, are remarkable for vivid portrayals and shrewd commentaries. Aubrey thought Shakespeare’s comedies would survive “as long as the English tongue is understood” because he wrote about the ways of mankind. In contrast, he said his own contemporaries “reflect so much on particular persons and coxcombeities [sic] that twenty years hence they will not be understood.”
This distinction can be usefully applied to “A Dance to the Music of Time.” Its melancholy comedy derives from observation of essential human characteristics. Yet is it not also true that the narrative reflects “particular persons and coxcombeities?” Some readers have scorned these as the atypical trivialities of well-educated, privileged, affluent 20th-century members of the upper-middle class of southern England. Others prefer to see them as eternal types, stepping their way through a circle dance to Time’s music.
No doubt Time will resolve differences of opinion about Powell’s magnum opus. Meanwhile, its aficionados will enjoy Ms. Spurling’s biography.
• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.
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