Anthony Powell

Anthony Dymoke Powell CH CBE (21 December 1905 – 28 March 2000) was an English novelist who devoted the central decades of his career to a single, immense work: A Dance to the Music of Time, a twelve-volume novel sequence published between 1951 and 1975 that chronicles English social, cultural, and political life from the early 1920s to the early 1970s. It is one of the longest and most ambitious works of fiction in the English language, and it is — for those who fall under its spell — one of the most rewarding.

Early Life and Early Novels

Powell (pronounced “Pole”) was born into the English upper-middle class — his father was a military officer — and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, where his contemporaries included Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh, both of whom became lifelong friends and fellow novelists.

In the 1930s Powell published five satirical novels — Afternoon Men (1931), Venusberg (1932), From a View to a Death (1933), Agents and Patients (1936), and What’s Become of Waring (1939) — that are sharp, funny, and stylistically accomplished comedies of bohemian and upper-class London life, influenced by Firbank, Huxley, and the early Waugh. They were well reviewed but did not sell in large numbers.

A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–1975)

After the war, Powell conceived a far more ambitious project: a multi-volume novel sequence that would follow a group of characters from youth to old age, charting the social transformations of England across half a century. The result was A Dance to the Music of Time, named after Poussin’s painting, published in four “movements” of three volumes each:

Spring — A Question of Upbringing (1951), A Buyer’s Market (1952), The Acceptance World (1955): School, university, and the London of the late 1920s and early 1930s — literary parties, debutante dances, and the first stirrings of political engagement.

Summer — At Lady Molly’s (1957), Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), The Kindly Ones (1962): Marriage, bohemian life, the film industry, and the gathering shadows of the Second World War.

Autumn — The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier’s Art (1966), The Military Philosophers (1968): The war years, with Jenkins serving in the Army and encountering old friends and enemies in military settings.

Winter — Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), Temporary Kings (1973), Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975): The postwar world — literary London, the 1960s counterculture, and the long decline into old age and death.

Kenneth Widmerpool

The sequence’s greatest creation is Kenneth Widmerpool — a relentless, humourless, socially ambitious figure who first appears as a ridiculous schoolboy at Eton and who rises, through sheer determination and a total absence of self-awareness, to positions of increasing power and influence in politics, the military, and business. Widmerpool is one of the great comic characters in English fiction — a monster of ambition whose trajectory from absurdity to menace to final degradation provides the sequence with its narrative spine.

Style and Method

Powell’s method is Proustian in its attention to the passage of time and the slow revelation of character, but his tone is very different from Proust’s. Where Proust analyses, Powell observes; where Proust agonises, Powell is drily amused. The narrator, Nick Jenkins, is a deliberately passive, watchful figure — a man to whom things happen rather than one who makes them happen — and this passivity allows Powell to treat the enormous social panorama of English life with an ironic detachment that is the sequence’s distinguishing quality.

The prose is elegant, allusive, and syntactically complex — Powell’s sentences unfold at a leisurely pace, with subordinate clauses and parenthetical observations that reward close reading.

Memoirs and Later Work

Powell published four volumes of memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1976–1982), and two further novels, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! (1983) and The Fisher King (1986). His journals, published posthumously, reveal a man of wide culture, sharp opinions, and considerable personal reserve.

Powell and Waugh

The comparison with Evelyn Waugh — his exact contemporary, fellow Etonian, and lifelong friend — is illuminating. Both were social satirists who chronicled the English upper classes with mordant wit, but their temperaments were fundamentally different. Waugh was a moralist: his satire carries the force of outrage, and his later work is shaped by his Catholic conversion. Powell was an observer: his comedy arises from the absurdity of human behaviour witnessed with a detachment so complete it approaches philosophical acceptance. Waugh creates explosive scenes; Powell creates slow-building patterns. Waugh’s reputation has always been higher with the general public, but Powell’s devotees argue that the Dance sequence is the greater achievement — wider in scope, subtler in characterisation, and more truthful about the way time changes people.

Legacy

Powell’s reputation is that of a writer’s writer — he has never been as widely read as Waugh or as academically studied as Greene, but his admirers are passionate. The Dance sequence has been compared to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, and while these comparisons are ambitious, they are not absurd. The 1997 Channel 4 television adaptation, with a script by Hugh Whitemore, introduced Powell to a wider audience, though the series inevitably compressed the novel’s long, discursive rhythms.

Collecting Powell

The twelve individual first editions of A Dance to the Music of Time (Heinemann, 1951–1975) form a collected set that is the holy grail of Powell collecting, valued at $5,000–$15,000 for a complete run in dust jackets. Afternoon Men (1931, Duckworth) in first edition is scarce and valuable. Powell’s books were never printed in huge quantities, so first editions of all titles are desirable.