Anthony Powell: A Life

Anthony Powell (pronounced "Pole") wrote the twentieth century's greatest English novel of manners, the twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, along with a group of sparkling and sadly neglected novels of the 1930s. He also wrote a lot about himself: four books of memoirs and three of journals. Although the memoirs are, characteristically, elaborately unrevealing and the journals blusteringly so, his life has been thoroughly recorded, which eliminates the immediate need for a biography. And Barber can't dig deeper, because Powell, who died in 1998, rejected him as his official biographer and chose instead Hilary Spurling (whose longtime friendship with the self-destructive and somewhat tawdry Sonia Orwell gives her unusual insight into the world of high bohemia, the cynosure of Powell's fiction). Because Powell's (and his wife's) papers are closed to him, Barber resorts to such lame stratagems as the following: "I should like to say more about Powell's marriage, but I can't. What I can do, however, is draw the reader's attention to how he treats aspects of married life in a couple of reviews." Powell and his onetime great friend Malcolm Muggeridge agreed that a bore was one who "takes the greatest pleasure in telling you at great lengths what you know already," and Barber, who tells us nothing new or important about, say, the close and complicated friendships Powell had with George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh (the two English contemporaries whose work he probably admired most), nicely fits that definition here. (To be fair, Barber does assiduously mine Muggeridge's unpublished diaries, which give some texture to his account of the two writers' once daily interactions, but the great question regarding their relationship -- What reasons lay behind Muggeridge's nasty 1964 review of Powell's The Valley of the Bones, a piece that ended their deep friendship? -- remains unresolved.) Nothing could jar more with Powell's measured, ironic persona and precise, understated prose than Barber's clumsy, sophomoric humor (at Oxford "many young men thought it sapiens to be homo") and slangy, cliché-clotted writing (in a single paragraph he gives us "arm-twisting," "cross the pond," "would not take no for an answer," and "an offer he couldn't refuse"). One can understand how Powell arrived at his chilly verdict: "An uninspiring figure, to say the least," he jotted after an interview with Barber. But Barber self-deprecatingly quotes that assessment, and manages throughout to make his oafishness more endearing than obnoxious. Moreover, he effectively conveys the intricately interconnected milieus of Grub Street, Fitzrovia, and high society between the wars that Powell inhabited, imbued, and made the subject of his fiction, while he synthesizes the memoirs of Powell and his contemporaries, the vast and ever growing secondary literature on literary life in the 1920s and 1930s, and Powell's semi-autobiographical novels. Despite its conspicuous flaws and lack of critical acuity, Barber's chronicle is smooth and surprisingly compelling. This is that rare literary specimen: a pretty good bad book.

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