Anthony Powell and His People

One surprising aspect of Spurling’s book is the disclosure that not only did Powell draw many of his characters very directly from life—not even assembling them as composites—but that friends and acquaintances for the most part were delighted and began to act like the characters in his books and offer the novelist suggestions about how to represent them. Only on a few occasions did anyone threaten to sue Powell; even then, Powell or others managed to point out aspects of the characters that mollified their real-life models. His work earned the cooperation even of those he was satirizing because he had the uncanny ability to make his character models believe that he and they shared an important undertaking: the creation of a great novel series depicting a society in which everyone had a vital part to play.

Overall, this biography seems a little complacent, too satisfied with Powell as a good man and great novelist. Spurling does little at the beginning to introduce her subject and to explain why his work is important—failing to acknowledge that novelists are not the major cultural figures they once were. Should her book be regarded as a biography deliberately aimed at a small readership? Perhaps in the United Kingdom, where Spurling’s book was first published last year, Powell’s work retains a large and lively audience. Surely the situation is different in the United States. To appreciate Spurling’s book fully, you would need to know a good deal about English society and have memories of, for example, who Malcolm Muggeridge was and why he became so successful on English and American television and then turned against his friend Powell.

If you don’t know the history out of which Powell arises, you won’t appreciate that he was a great Tory, which makes his friendships with writers like George Orwell all the more fascinating. Spurling pretty much takes Powell and Orwell’s relationship for granted, imparting only a vague admiration for the conservative Powell as a man tolerant of a writer on the left.

And it’s not just English society and 20th-century letters that are given short explanatory shrift. Powell decided to go to Hollywood in the early 1930s, supposing he could pick up some of the loot being laid out for screenwriters; Spurling offers no context to understand his failure to attract attention. (You don’t go to Hollywood looking for work, as the British filmmaker Ivor Montagu explained in his 1968 book With Eisenstein in Hollywood. You have to announce that you are too grand and that you are unavailable, and then Hollywood comes calling.)

In Spurling I miss the wit to be found in Michael Barber’s unauthorized 2004 Powell biography. Barber is a keen commentator on Powell’s own volumes of autobiography, which get little attention in Spurling. When Powell writes that he had a “lonely . . . but not unhappy” childhood, Barber comments: “It is natural to conclude that . . . he may have left something out.” As to the surprising affinity between Powell and Orwell, Barber’s eye for detail helps. When Orwell saw Powell in his World War II full-dress uniform, Orwell, formerly a policeman in Burma, asked, “Do your trousers strap under the boot?” To Orwell’s satisfaction he learned they did, and remarked: “Those straps under the feet give you a feeling like nothing else in life.” What Powell and Orwell had in common, Barber shows, is a sense of good form. Powell thought Orwell wore “his shabby clothes with style, hinting at the latent dandyism revealed by his comment about the boot straps.” Barber capitalizes on Powell’s insight into Orwell by including a description of Orwell at Eton (where Powell also went to school) after a swim:

Authorized biographers have all the archives and interviews coming to them, and that is why their work sometimes seems under-researched compared with the go-getting unauthorized writers. Barber had no access to the papers that were reserved for Spurling, but he did interview Powell, and Barber develops a style that complements his subject’s own wit. To be sure, Spurling adds many new details that amount to a fuller picture of the novelist. And yet the privileges of authorization do not yield a more vivid biography. One reason is that while Spurling knew Powell and could question him, the results, as she admits, were not edifying:

He was a friend, and in his declining years she was there to buoy him, not study him.

The most moving parts of Spurling’s biography deal with Powell’s service as a flunky (Spurling’s word is “dogsbody”) for publisher Gerald Duckworth. Powell’s job in publishing, obtained with his father’s help, was unfortunately in a firm that, as Spurling puts it, treated books like so many racehorses. If a book or author did not look like a winner, all bets were off. Early on, Powell had a great instinct for important writers and was constantly frustrated because he could not guarantee they would make money for the firm. Even worse, Duckworth hated publishing and seemed to be in business to take his revenge on it. In these hostile and demeaning circumstances Powell labored many a year, eventually turning his experience into one of the great novels about publishing, What’s Become of Waring.

Spurling is also a splendid guide to the slow, incremental buildup of Powell’s magnum opus. A Dance to the Music of Time did not come all at once to Powell, and there were periods when he got stuck and did not know how to go forward. He made a fortunate marriage that proved a constant goad and mainstay, with a wife who knew how to read his books and offer constructive, even severe, criticism that prevented him from ever settling for less than the best he could do. Powell’s quiet, steady courage and unwavering dedication to his project make for inspiring reading.

Even if you have never read a Powell novel and know nothing about his great villain Kenneth Widmerpool, Spurling’s account of the character’s creation will intrigue you. Widmerpool begins his life in the novels as a nonentity, pathetic with women but dogged at making a success of himself in the army and in politics, ultimately securing a life peerage. Here is how Spurling defines him: “Widmerpool has passed into contemporary folklore as the lumbering, initially comical but in later volumes steadily more sinister embodiment of the quest for power that is one of the hinges on which the Dance turns.” I wish she had said even more. As with so much in Powell’s novels and characters, Spurling is always catching them on the fly, never slowing down to explore their significance.

Widmerpool is, in a way, a character for our age as much as for Powell’s. He is without a literary sensibility, which means, in Powell’s book, no sense of humanity, which is why, alas, he triumphs. More could be made in Spurling’s biography of Widmerpool’s seemingly innocuous but deadly truncated sensibility. “It doesn’t do to read too much,” Widmerpool says to Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator. “By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.” Even the nod to the classics is perfunctory. If Widmerpool has read much of anything at all, it is not reflected in his words or his character. Powell, even in the publishing world, felt an estrangement because, with some significant exceptions, not even publishers cared that much about books.

Because Widmerpool has no sense of nobility, no humiliation can set him back. In short, he cannot empathize with others or imagine a world in which all the slights he has endured should diminish his own sense of his superiority. Especially in this character, we see that Powell is much more than a chronicler of his times. He understood fascism and its incipient inroads into English culture. Fascists, to begin with, can seem as feckless as Widmerpool at the start, but because they lack any sort of civilized inhibitions, they forge ahead, intent on winning their way at whatever cost to others. Even worse, they believe, like Widmerpool, in their definition of duty and success without any of the qualms or reservations that trouble finer sensibilities.

For quite some time, Powell was disparaged as merely a chronicler of the upper classes, a snob who paid no heed to the radical social and political movements of his day. Spurling spends virtually no time defending Powell against this charge—but she does not have to because she is so good at showing how Powell created living characters, visceral, palpable beings, that readers as choosy as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis adored.

Powell earns our respect and affection as well because, even better than Barber, Spurling shows how Powell struggled. Duckworth never accorded Powell the respect he deserved, and for much of his career, the critics seemed content to say Powell was not Waugh. Powell persevered while having to crank out copy for Punch, the Daily Telegraph, and other publications, earning barely enough to live a comfortable life. Financial security eventually came—in part through an inheritance—as did belated accolades for his work. Through it all, with the example of his choleric father to bear in mind, Powell remained almost always calm and determined no matter how humbled circumstances might leave him.

To say Powell played the long game might seem obvious in describing a writer who undertook to write a 12-novel epic, but Powell, as Spurling shows, went ahead not knowing whether he would have the time to complete his grand project. As he labored, his novels and his life came, with some grace, to dance together to the music of time, constantly responding to the vagaries of existence, making the man and his work one and the same.