Michael Barber’s Anthony Powell: A Life
Early last summer I re-read Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. It was as entertaining as I remembered it to be and, motivated both by curiosity and the sense that they might contain some legitimate research material, I plunged into Powell’s memoirs. These were interesting, because they showed just how much the life of Nicholas Jenkins in Dance mirrored Powell’s own experience. The memoir was full of incidents and stories that had been recycled in Powell’s novels in some form or another, especially from the Second World War period: many of the best and funniest anecdotes in the three wartime novels were taken almost directly from things that actually happened. Just recently, I followed these reading projects up by diving into Michael Barber’s biography of Powell. It was the least satisfying read.
Throughout the biography, readers find out about how different people or incidents may have influenced characters or stories in Dance and in Powell’s other novels. Barber is very familiar with Powell’s work, and includes some clever and subtle interpretations of it (although he indulges too often in unwarranted speculation). But there is less insight (especially for those who have read Powell’s memoirs) about the author’s life itself. As I read the biography, I constantly had the sense of déjà vu: not only did things happen in the same order as in Powell’s memoirs, which is entirely reasonable, but he also discussed the importance of other people exactly the same order as they appeared in the memoirs. And given how much of Powell’s autobiographical writing is devoted to talking about his friends and acquaintance, this means that the biography, too, seems to dwell more on the antics and personalities of Cyril Connelly, Constant Lambert, Evelyn Waugh or Eric Blair (whom Barber refers to as George Orwell more often than not) than those of Powell himself.
What did Powell believe? What were his politics? What did he think about Jews/other races/other classes/women? All these questions are answered, but answered unsatisfactorily (partly because Barber wants to protect Powell). They seem incidental rather than central to the narrative. Barber prefers recapitulation of Powell’s attitudes and views to actual analysis or critique. The first mention of Powell’s ‘Toryism’ is on page 46, where it is discussed (not really explained or introduced) then dropped after a few sentences on its wider social context. All this is interesting, but given that Powell himself was (Barber acknowledges) extremely cagey about his own beliefs – and his own personal life – Barber is extremely reluctant to spend a satisfactory amount of time excavating the person behind the Dance. These sections are unsystematic and make up only a small fraction of the book.
Barber’s biography of Powell is probably a good piece of work. It is scholarly, well-written, and even manages to capture hints of Powell’s own mischievousness in its style. But it isn’t the biography I wanted to read. It seemed like a distillation of Powell’s memoirs, which themselves read a little too much like a distillation of Dance. I wanted to read about Powell himself, not Powell as a model for Jenkins and his friends as a model for the cast of the novels. The fleeting glimpses of Powell’s character and attitudes are too fleeting, and the analysis eschews getting into these in favor of explicating the wider social context of the different periods in Powell’s life, and (more than anything else) the relationships between it and his novels. It is extremely frustrating.
One of my favorite things about Powell’s work is the contrast between narrator Nicholas Jenkins’ reticence about discussing details of his own personal life (balanced by the occasional tantalizing revelation) and his voyeuristic fascination with the details of the lives and personalities of the people around him. For me Jenkins, not Kenneth Widmerpool, X Trapnel or Pamela Flitton, is the most enigmatic character in the series. There are revelations about Powell in his own memoirs and in Barber’s biography, but the focus in both tends to default back to the interesting and famous characters Powell knew rather than Powell’s own convictions and personality. Ultimately, Barber treats Powell like the narrator, and not any other character, in Powell’s fiction, and in doing so misses an opportunity to offer something that goes far beyond what we already have in the memoirs and the novels.