Novelist, born in London, UK. He studied at Oxford, worked in publishing and journalism before World War 2, and by 1936 had published four satirical novels, beginning with Afternoon Men (1931). After the war he began the series of novels he called A Dance to the Music of Time (195175; televised, 1997) - 12 volumes, covering 50 years of British upper middle-class life and attitudes. At Lady Molly's (1957) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Temporary Kings (1973) won the W H Smith Literary Award. He also published four volumes of memoirs under the general title To Keep the Ball Rolling (197682). Later books include the novel The Fisher King (1986) and a volume of criticism, Under Review (1992). He was made a Companion of Honour in 1988.
Anthony Dymoke Powell, CH (December 21, 1905 - March 28, 2000) was a British novelist best known for his A Dance to the Music of Time duodecalogy published between 1951 and 1975.
Childhood
Born in Westminster, England, to Philip Powell and Maud (née Wells-Dymoke).
When Powell was two his father was posted as adjutant to the Kensington Regiment, a London battalion of the Territorial Army.
His father's posting lasted six years, so Powell's early childhood was spent in a flat in Kensington, overlooking the Gardens, where he often played.
On the outbreak of war in August, 1914, the regiment went to France and was heavily engaged in the early fighting. After attending a private day-school for a short time, Powell was sent to a boarding school in Kent, popular with military families. In early 1919 Powell passed the Common Entrance Examination for Eton where he started that autumn.
Youth
Powell's career at Eton was marked by what he recalled as "well-deserved obscurity" in "the worst house in the school". (Powell later argued that this made too much of his lack of bonhomie; he had easy relationships with people he liked.)
He came to spend a lot of his spare time at the Studio, where a sympathetic art-master encouraged him to develop his talent as a draughtsman and his interest in the visual arts. The Society's members produced an occasional magazine called The Eton Candle,and Powell was represented by "a not very interesting drawing" published under the title (not chosen by Powell) of Colonel Caesar Cannonbrains of the Black Hussars. In the examinations during his final year Powell was graded 9th in the school and 3rd oppidan (i.e.
Powell went up to Balliol College at the University of Oxford to read history in the autumn of 1923.
Away from the Hypocrites he came to know Maurice Bowra, then a young don at Wadham College and enjoyed his company, without subscribing to his article of faith that Oxford was the centre of the civilised world. During his third year Powell lived out of college, sharing digs with Henry Yorke. Powell travelled on the Continent during his holidays and in Paris, in December, 1925, in his twenty-first year, lost his virginity to Lulu, of whom little is known, not even, alas, the bare details.
Powell had worked hard, expected a second-class degree, hoped for a first but, in the event, was awarded a third.
Early adult life
Powell came to work in London in the autumn of 1926.
One strand of his social life developed around attendance at formal debutante dances in white tie and tails at houses in Mayfair or Belgravia.
He renewed acquaintance with Evelyn Waugh, whom he had known at Oxford and was a frequent guest for Sunday supper at Waugh's parents' house, between Hampstead and Golders Green.
He came to know the painters Nina Hamnett and Adrian Daintrey, who were neighbours in Fitzrovia and was soon to meet the composer Constant Lambert, who remained a close friend until Lambert's death in 1951.
In 1929 he moved from Shepherd Market to a flat at 33 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury.
Powell in the 1930s
Powells first novel, Afternoon Men, was published by Duckworth’s in 1931, with Powell supervising its production himself.
Shortly after its appearance Powell’s own position at the firm changed. The original agreement had provided that in 1929, by which time Powell would have had three years to learn the ropes, his father would invest a capital sum to buy Powell a directorship. When the time came, Powell’s father refused to proceed with this arrangement and Powell became a simple employee of the firm. In 1932, Balston told Powell that, with hard times threatening in the publishing world, he could either continue to work full-time at a reduced salary, with no guaranteed future, or he could take a bigger cut and work mornings only. Powell chose the latter.
Powell’s third novel, From a View to a Death, was published in 1934.
All three of Powell’s novels had been favourably noticed in the London literary world, without selling more than two- or three-thousand copies.
In the spring of 1934 Powell was invited by telephone to a party given by Lady Pansy Lamb, wife of the painter Henry Lamb and the eldest sister of Powell’s future wife. Powell proposed at the end of September, and on 1 December, 1934, they were married at All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge.
Powell, who had very few relations of his own, had married into a large, diverse and talented family. Powell was unsympathetic to the popular-front, Leftist commitment that was asserting itself in literary and critical circles, and a holiday trip to the Soviet Union in 1936 did not change his attitude.
In the autumn of that year he left Duckworth’s and took a job as a script writer at the Warner Brothers Studio in Teddington.
The approach of war
With money saved from his work for Warner Brothers, Powell and his wife moved home again, buying a lease of 1 Chester Gate in Regent's Park, which they were to own for seventeen years. Powell heard of possible further employment in the film industry, this time in Hollywood where, it was reported, A Yank at Oxford was about to be commissioned. The Powells set out for Hollywood on the understanding that a job was likely to be negotiable once on the spot. Through a mutual acquaintance the Powells met Scott Fitzgerald over lunch in the commissary at MGM, where Fitzgerald was working. The Powells returned to London in August, 1937.
It was by now clear that the threat of war was growing. Powell got his name accepted on to the register of the Army Officers Emergency Reserve. During his time in California Powell had contributed a couple of articles to the magazine, Night and Day, which had recently been founded to provide a London equivalent of The New Yorker. Powell wrote a few more occasional pieces for them until, in March 1938, a libel case over a review by Graham Greene of a Shirley Temple film put paid to the publication.
Powell eventually began work on his fifth novel, What’s Become of Waring, which he completed in late 1938 or early the following year and offered to Duckworth’s.
The expectation as war approached was that London would be immediately subjected to heavy bombing. The day war was declared Lady Violet Powell received confirmation that she was again pregnant, having suffered two earlier miscarriages. For three months Powell remained alone and uncalled at Chester Gate.
Early war years
The war years were important to Powell as a writer. During the months leading up to the outbreak of war he had realised that the inner calm necessary for creative writing, unattainable in the existing state of tension, would be even more so once the war started.
Once war came his determination to get into the army and to work hard in whatever posting he found himself ensured that long hours and physical fatigue put paid to any thought of writing extensively.
Powell himself came to believe that the enforced lay-off from novel writing was not without value to him. Three volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time are devoted to the war years: The Valley of Bones, The Soldier's Art, and The Military Philosophers.
Powell joined his regiment as a second-lieutenant at the age of 34, more than ten years older than most of his fellow subalterns and next in age to the Battalion’s Second-in-Command.
Powell had joined a Territorial battalion of his father’s old Regiment, but without his father’s assistance.
The 1/5th Battalion of the Welch Regiment, referred to as the First-Fifth, owed its peculiar numbering to an esoteric practice favoured by the Army to preserve the links between regiments and the localities they recruited from.
A number of the second-lieutenants, aged from 19 to 23, had been commissioned from the ranks a few months earlier. This close-knit community took pains to welcome Powell, who began a period of intensive learning-on-the job as he led troops on a church parade, commanded them on field exercises and mastered the techniques of military administration at platoon level. All this was made easier at this early stage of the war, when the relaxed and friendly atmosphere of a peace-time Territorial camp still set the tone, but Powell’s application and success in adapting to his new circumstances should not be underrated.
Just before Christmas, 1939, the 53rd (Welsh) Division, of which Powell’s unit formed part was ordered to Northern Ireland, the 1/5th ending up in Portadown. On his return Powell found that his Commanding Officer (who had been in poor health) had been replaced by a Regular officer, who had served as a younger contemporary of Powell’s father. began the process of gingering up the Battalion, removing older or less efficient officers (a process that Powell survived), and promoting the young and promising.
Powell learned in April,1940, of the birth of his first son, Tristram, and was given leave to see his wife and baby.
Later that summer Powell left the battalion after seven months with them on posting to Headquarters 53rd Division, located in Belfast, as assistant Camp Commandant, “one of the least distinguished jobs in the army” which, because of the incumbent’s proximity to the Divisional Commander, required a man “less than utterly uncouth in habits”.
Lady Violet , with Tristram, was by now living in Sussex, a less than ideal location as the Battle of Britain raged in the skies overhead. Powell arranged for them to move to Belfast, which had until then been free of air-raids, though this was to change almost immediately.
In January, 1941, a War Office telegram arrived ordering Powell to attend a Politico-Military Course at Cambridge. Powell never established how this came about and he himself had made no attempt to escape from the lowly job to which he had been consigned. Twenty officers attended the course, which lasted eight weeks and was designed to produce a nucleus of officers to deal with the problems of military government after the Allies had defeated the Axis powers.
The report on Powell at the end of the course noted that he was “Able, but with no very obvious qualifications”. While the transfer wound its way through the administrative machine, Powell returned to 53 Division HQ, by now located at Castlewellan in County Down.
Whitehall service
On transfer Powell, who had completed eighteen months commissioned service and been promoted Lieutenant, spent six weeks on a War Intelligence course at Matlock in Derbyshire, followed by several weeks at the Intelligence Corps depot at Oxford. He was then posted on probation to the War Office in Whitehall, where he was attached to the section known as Military Intelligence (Liaison). After some weeks of miscellaneous jobs Powell was taken onto the permanent staff on acting promotion to Captain, as assistant to the officer dealing with the Poles.
Lady Violet and Tristram had moved back from Northern Ireland to Shoreham in Sussex, which lay beneath the main flight path for bombing raids on London and, from June 1944, a busy corridor for the V-1 flying bombs. Powell was living in a one-bedroom flat in Chelsea, dining most evenings in a near-by pub then retiring immediately to bed (often to read more Aubrey material).
In March,1943, to Powell’s surprise, he was summoned to cross Whitehall to the Cabinet Office, located in the subterranean levels of Government Offices, Great George Street, to serve on the Secretariat of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Powell had met him with a mutual friend on two or three occasions and had not greatly taken to him. He would become the principal source for Powell's most celebrated character, Kenneth Widmerpool.
Powell was thrown into testing job in a high-powered organisation at the centre of the strategic war effort with no preparation and little support. After nine weeks his appointment was terminated, Powell reverting to his substantive rank of Lieutenant.
Powell’s former section, Military Intelligence (Liaison), in the War Office, welcomed him back, enabling him to reassume his acting captaincy.
In November 1944, by which time Allied forces had just crossed the German frontier, Powell acted as assistant escorting officer to a group of fourteen Allied military attachés taken to France and Belgium to see something of the campaign. The tour included a night at Cabourg, which Powell failed at the time to recognise as Proust’s Balbec. (Most of the attachés, though not Powell himself, stayed in The Grand Hotel whose varied delights had enchanted the young Marcel in the early years of the century).
In the last months of the war Powell and his family moved back into 1 Chester Gate, various friends or colleagues lodging with them from time to time. Powell celebrated VE Night lying in bed and reading the Cambridge History of English Literature.
Post War Years
Powell was 39 when the war ended and was about to begin some remarkably productive years as a creative writer and reviewer, (to say nothing of his pursuit of genealogical interests, which involved much detailed research into original and obscure sources.)
His first task was to resume work on Aubrey. Powell offered it to the Oxford University Press but, unimpressed by the advance they proposed, took it to Eyre & At one stage they even threatened a further postponement, which led to a row between Greene and Powell and the annulment of Powell’s contract to offer them future books.
In 1949 The Cressett Press commissioned Powell to compile and edit a volume that they brought out under the title Brief Lives and Other Selected Writings by John Aubrey.
Powell was now ready to return to novel writing and began to ponder a long novel-sequence.
In parallel with his creative writing he served as the primary fiction reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, and in 1953 was appointed Literary Editor of Punch magazine, in which capacity he served until 1959.
Later life
Through his writings, Anthony Powell would go on to international fame. Powell's Journals, covering the years 1982 to 1992, were published between 1995 and 1997.
Anthony Powell died peacefully at his home, The Chantry, near Frome, Somerset aged 94 on 28 March 2000.
A Dance to the Music of Time
Powell's masterpiece is A Dance to the Music of Time. The cycle of novels, narrated by a protagonist with experiences and perspectives similar to Powell's own, follows the trajectory of the author's own life, offering a vivid portrayal of the intersection of bohemian life with high society.
The characters, many loosely modelled on real people, surface, vanish and reappear throughout the sequence: it is not, however, a roman à clef; The most memorable is the monstrous Kenneth Widmerpool, partially based on Denis Capel-Dunn, under whom Powell served in 1944 in the Cabinet Office. The three wartime novels are widely considered by scholars to be amongst the best to emerge from the second world war, and are arguably the most powerful in the sequence.
As Robert L.
A synopsis of the plot of each volume and commentary is linked below.
Exhibitions
A centenary exhibition in commemoration of Powell's life and work was held at the Wallace Collection, London, from November 2005 to February 2006.
Bibliography
A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve-volume series of novels published between 1951 and 1975 consists of:
A Question of Upbringing (1951) A Buyer's Market (1952), The Acceptance World (1955) At Lady Molly's (1957) Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960) The Kindly Ones (1962) The Valley of Bones (1964) The Soldier's Art (1966) The Military Philosophers (1968) Books Do Furnish a Room (1971) Temporary Kings (1973) Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975)Partial bibliography of other novels, plays, and works:
The Barnard Letters (1928) Afternoon Men (1931) Venusberg (1932) From a View to a Death (1933) "The Watr'y Glade", in The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands, ed. (The movie of the same name has nothing to do with Powell's last novel).To Keep the Ball Rolling: Memoirs of Anthony Powell
vol. 4, The Strangers All are Gone (1982)A one-volume abridgment, called simply To Keep the Ball Rolling, was published in 1983.
Diaries
Journals 1982-1986 (1995) Journals 1987-1989 (1996) Journals 1990-1992 (1997)
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