'Hilary Spurling spells out how odd and alienating Powell’s upbringing was': Colin Donald on Anthony Powell: Dancing

Hamish Hamilton, £20

Reviewed by Colin Donald

PG Wodehouse once wrote a fan letter to Anthony Powell describing how he studied the latter’s technique “under a microscope”. Himself a Swiss watchmaker amongst literary craftsmen, Wodehouse gushed: “I still can’t see how you do it.”

In recent years analysis of what PGW called the “stunning artistry” of Powell’s 12-volume sequence A Dance To The Music Of Time has often been subsumed by a sterile debate about his alleged snobbery and implied artistic conservatism.

Hilary Spurling’s long-awaited book, as good as you would expect from the Whitbread Award-winning biographer of Matisse, encourages hope that we can get beyond all that and into the more fertile consideration of Powell’s place in post-modernist Brit lit and his debt to his European and Russian mentors. In other words, we can get nearer to discovering how Powell “did it”; the components of his translucent, comic, ironic, classical-meets-gothic technique that has given his novels their radioactive power. As described by Spurling herself, by Michael Frayn, Ian Rankin and others quoted here, this is nothing less than the power to change his readers’ lives.

Those of us whose world view was irreversibly shifted by encountering Powell’s many-roomed fictional mansion have been waiting for Hilary Spurling’s book, not in expectation of great revelations about a well-documented life, but for the same reason we would welcome an unearthed cache of papyri from the architect of the Great Pyramid. Any new information on the construction of a great edifice is to be seized on.

We knew already that his life was not notably more eventful than that of other disciplined artists. After Eton and Oxford, his youth involved scraping a living in publishing, pleasantly suspended between the worlds of bohemian Fitzrovia and what used to be called “society”. Once settled in Somerset, non-writing time is spent entertaining, gardening, and taking Swan Hellenic cruises.

We also knew about the friendships with George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, along with more faded figures like Constant Lambert, Henry Greene and Gerald Reitlinger. And we knew about his spectacular bust-ups with Graham Greene, Malcolm Muggeridge and Auberon Waugh, though the new material here is interesting.

Fresh information includes his romantic adventures involving various femmes fatales of the 1920s and 1930s, married and unmarried. There is confirmation of the depths of his depressive tendency, inseparable from a gift for comedy, which is deeper than the “melancholy” he anatomises so comprehensively in Dance.

One of the worst bouts followed Powell’s unglamorous but gruelling war service. This seems to have followed the revelation that his wife Lady Violet had had a wartime affair with an unnamed man, whom she described to Sonia Orwell as “the love her life”. Given their closeness and the importance of their literary partnership this barely computes, but such is life.

Hilary Spurling spells out how odd and alienating Powell’s upbringing was, even by the standards of the Edwardian upper middle classes, with a near-pathologically ill-tempered army officer father 14 years younger than his wife. She hints at how the psychic heavy weather of his peripatetic childhood might have determined the clinical, detached calm that distinguishes Powell’s fictional voice, making him the great comic connoisseur of the infinite strangeness of mankind

It was certainly an odd parental relationship. The novelist’s mother, Maud Wells-Dymoke, unmarried at 33, decided to join her future husband, aged 19, in South Africa where he was serving as a subaltern in the Boer War. This would count as a reckless gesture in any age, let alone in 1901. Once married, a neurotic terror of being labelled a “cradle-snatcher” turned her into a recluse, making it a strange solitary life for her only child.

Her husband Philip Powell, a passed-over army officer, was himself a victim of seemingly routine Victorian emotional cruelty to children, whose intemperate and spiteful behaviour placed burdens on his offspring almost as onerous as those imposed by the father of Dickens (feckless) or Joyce (drunk). Unlike them he was a miser, bequeathing his son an unexpected fortune, equivalent to £1.5m, relieving the novelist from the money worries that strained the first half of his life and enabling him to complete his fictional marathon.

Unlike, say, Henry James who verbalised at length on how and why he wrote his books, Powell never liked to “descant” on his own work. While his life is now laid out, it appears that he did not confide much, even to his old friend Hilary Spurling, about how he worked his effects. This is not perhaps surprising, as the enduring power of Powell’s art lies in what seethes and bubbles beneath an impenetrable shell of irony. As to how he “did it”, the shell remains intact.