We’ve talked about several of the great British authors of the last century or two – Waugh, Greene, Trollope, and others – and now it is time to address Anthony Powell, a true titan, a master of the novelist’s art – and a writer hardly known to the American public.
I was put onto Powell about 30 years ago, when at a financial conference in London I struck up a conversation with a British portfolio manager about – what else? – books. He told me, in a tone that reeked of triumphalism, that he had just finished reading Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time – a second time!! The full impact of this feat hit me only when I learned that Dance is not a book but a series of 12 novels spanning the period from just after World War 1 through two decades after World War 2. The period is well traveled, but Powell’s characters make it seem brand new.
Powell wrote the first novel in the series, A Question of Upbringing, in 1951, the twelfth, Hearing Secret Harmonies, in 1975. How many writers can labor on a single narrative for 24 years? Just keeping the characters straight is an achievement, especially as a character may enter in volume 3, exit in volume 4, and resurface in volume 11, by which time you may have forgotten all about him or her. I found this a problem as I worked my way through the 12 books, and I must also say that the best of the 12 are the first three or four and that the last few are the weakest. The series is nevertheless an impressive achievement and one of the literary landmarks of our time.
The novels begin by examining the friendship of four boys in an Eton-like school in the early twenties: the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, his friends Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, and – unforgettably, Kenneth Widmerpool, one of the major comic creations of twentieth-century literature. At the outset Widmerpool’s cluelessly inane behavior seems to mark him as comic relief, but by the end of the series, the buffoon emerges as a darker, more threatening presence.
Powell (rhymes with pole, not with towel) lived a long, productive life, which ended in 2000 when he was 95. There were many other novels (his first was published in 1931), biographies, critical essays, and at least two plays. He was a contemporary of Waugh and Greene at Oxford. In World War 2 he worked for British Intelligence, and the three Dance volumes dealing with the War are widely regarded as among the best covering that territory.
There is something about a novel series that is especially satisfying. Finish one good read, then greet many of the same characters again in a new book, and so on, until the whole tapestry is hung – at which point you feel either relief or loss, depending on the quality of the story. Some of Dickens’s and Trollope’s best works first appeared as serials in newspapers, with readers anxiously awaiting each new episode. The literary serial seems to be out of style today, the nearest counterpart being a television series like Upstairs, Downstairs or Dallas.
Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, ideal miniseries material, was in fact produced for television in England about 10 years ago. The cast included John Gielgud, Edward Fox, and Zoë Wannamaker. The 50-year span was compressed into four two-hour segments, and reports from abroad say it was superb. For now, we’ll have to take their word for it; the series was never aired in the U.S., nor is it available in the standard (NTSC) format for American VCRs or DVDs. If you have a player that can handle the British format (PAL), you can probably find a tape or disc at Amazon or eBay.
