Anthony Powell, the sublime novelist and author of The Fisher King was once known as ' the English Proust.' Hilary Spurling, who was a friend, has written the definitive life, now out in paperback.
Anthony Powell, the celebrated critic, editor, and novelist was once known, perhaps most frequently by journalists looking for a handy tag, as ' the English Proust.'
Powell (1905-2000) is best known for his 12-volume comic tour de force, A Dance to the Music of Time, which her began in the 1950s. The series bears some comparison with À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) by the French author Marcel Proust (1871–1922) which ran to seven volumes.
Powell lived in Paris for a time and did in fact read À la Recherche du Temps Perdu as an undergraduate at Balliol College in Oxford. He re-read the seven-volume work in the mid-1940s, a feat worth noting, given that many people who read Proust have got no further than the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way.) The English novelist found the series 'much funnier and poetic' second time around, by the way.
Ireland comes into the story, but tangentially. Enlisted in the British army, Powell was stationed for a period in the 1940s at Ballykinler Barracks in County Down, described here as `a former concentration camp for IRA prisoners.' A short time later, his company were ensconced in Newry, closer to the border and a town which, according to Spurling, had at the time 'an ingrained tradition of IRA sympathies and murderous hostility to British soldiers.'
Meanwhile, Powell's wife Violet was seven months pregnant back in Dynevor in Wales. The biographer writes: 'Tony's original impatience to get into the army was already mutating into an equally feverish eagerness to get out, or at least to find some sort of job better suited to his age and aptitude.'
In the 1920s and 1930s, Powell hung out with a Bohemian, often penniless set in London, enlivened by the presence of doughty individualists such as Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. The novelists Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green were companions, and the wider social circle also included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene and George Orwell. A motley crew of alcoholics, journalists, musicians and aristocrats occupy the teeming middle distance of the story.
Spurling, who was a friend of Powell, has meticulously studied the interviews, diaries and letters to help her achieve a highly-detailed but never weighty portrait, not just of a gifted writer but of a fertile, highly imaginative milieu. By way of background, the biographer tracks back through some 16 earlier novels, along with plays, biographies, memoirs, and three volumes of journals. The author also wrote the fable-novel, The Fisher King which was first published in 1986.
It is best ideally for the prospective reader to first read one or two of the sparkling novels from A Dance to the Music of Time before embarking on this 500-page life which is narrated with wit and flair.
