Impersonally Yours

Anthony Powell was 89. His wife, Lady Violet, walked me up the stairs to a bedroom in The Chantry, their house in Somerset, England. She said I had half an hour, closed the door behind her and left. A man reclined in his bathrobe in a chair. He had a strong nose and a high, lightly lined forehead. His eyes glowed. White hair seemed to come out of every pore. He had eyebrows like a camel’s, brambly ears, clusters of hair under his chin and in his nose. He shouted for a glass of Chambery. I was face-to-face with an old literary lion.

To the extent one can be, I was ready for such an interview. I had read Powell’s four volumes of memoirs, entitled jointly “To Keep the Ball Rolling,” which, condensed, have been published as one volume in the United States. The memoirs, which cover Powell’s life from his birth in 1905 into a military family through the ‘80s, are compendious and waspish.

They are true to the Powell of popular reputation: amused, distanced, a man interested in social life. In the ongoing debate that surrounds his work--how seriously should we take him?--they tend to play to those who see him mostly as a country house snob. Any claim to the contrary has to rest on Powell’s major work, his “Dance to the Music of Time.” Over the course of the 12-book sequence, a narrator named Nicholas Jenkins grows from an uncertain teenager to a mature observer and social being as he lives the life of upper-class England from the 1910s through the ‘60s. But again the question can be raised: Does this focus on the elite in society limit the series’ value, or does it have a claim to universal importance? On Powell’s death last year, the fight among English critics was revived once more. One obituary writer called “Dance” “a soap opera for toffs.”

In reducing the books to a manageable size, the editors of the American edition have taken out those entries that tend toward the diary-like, such as Powell’s records of his visits to the dentist and of the wines he liked to drink. Even with them, the memoirs are unusually impersonal. Powell is a good observer of other writers, though. He knew them all. T.S. Eliot is “inscrutable only in his mild amiability.” He briefly lives upstairs from E.M. Forster. They never speak (a loss for literature), but one day walking down the stairs, Powell catches Forster “thoughtfully arranging his ties.” He can be cutting. Of Ford Madox Ford, he wrote: “An immense self-pity, in general an almost essential adjunct of the bestseller-infected Ford, while at the same time for some reason never boosting his sales.”Virginia Woolf was “humorless, envious, spiteful.” Henry Green and, surprisingly, the fiercely republican George Orwell come in for praise.

Nowhere, though, is Powell as sharp about himself as he is about other people. This, especially for American readers, makes the memoirs feel odd, almost as if they were a collection of observations and mots justes, a commonplace book. For instance at one point, Powell writes: “I found that becoming a father had a profound effect upon the manner in which one looked at the world.” But you wait in vain for an example.

Some of this was constitutional and--British understatement--part his choice. Powell quotes with approval Eliot’s dictum that “no artist produces great art by a deliberate attempt to express his own personality.” Barring the door to scrutiny, even his own, appears to have been a necessary step in his becoming a writer.

By the time I met him, Powell was pretty good at it. He had not, for instance, told me that, some months before my visit, he had taken a bad fall. He had become very depressed. When I met him he was using crutches--”sticks” he called them. “I don’t do very much walking,” he said. “I just go to the corridor and come back in, that sort of thing.”

His home was a gorgeous Italianate villa set in the countryside, playfully decorated with angels suspended from archways and statues of blackamoors in the entry hall. There were the ruins of a castle down the road. He no longer cared. “If I cling on to the banisters, I can go down one step at a time,” he said, “but there’s no point in my doing it at all, so that’s that.”

Powell’s prose is funny with a cool, satiric cast. “A Dance to the Music of Time” is often compared to Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” There are two major differences. It is less momentous, more taken up with coincidence than portent. And the writing is more stylized, elliptical, running around the point like a diffident house guest. In “Dance,” the technique is stunning. In the memoirs, it can take all your strength to get to the point. Here is Powell on a long-forgotten London host named Bobby Roberts: “If Roberts went out of his way to exhibit some individual, male or female (including wives designate) encountered on a devious and almost consistently intoxicated pilgrimage through life, such persons--not necessarily types with whom one wanted to spend a great deal of time again--were nevertheless of authentic interest in one direction or another.” Translation: Roberts knew interesting people.

I happen to admire this writing, which has an almost Latin balance. It suggests an original mind, one pushing English to its limits. Powell was looking for art in the way volleys of words can hide their meaning. But many readers may find it self-parodic. Good or bad, it’s prose that takes a lot of work to produce. When I asked Powell what he was writing about then, he answered with a mini-lecture. “The thing people don’t understand about writing is, frankly, that it is hard physical exercise. It’s like one’s saying, ‘You used to climb that gate, and why don’t you now?” he said. “You know with old age the memory goes. I can’t remember what was my last book published.”

He had refined what he cared about to a few things. He particularly loved his cat, Snoop. “He’s rather inclined to spending the entire day out and then coming in in the evening.” I got the feeling Powell envied him.

In America we tend to misread Powell. It’s no coincidence that he enjoyed a mini-boom in readers during the early ‘80s, along with Evelyn Waugh’s snobby “Brideshead Revisited.” His fans like to correct people who pronounce his name to rhyme with “towel” (he pronounced it in the Welsh way to rhyme with “Lowell”). I think he never quite made up his mind whether this sort of adulation was a good thing. “Social hairs are the most enjoyable ones to split,” he writes in the memoirs. And the well-born were in fact Powell’s native turf. He was a descendant of The King’s Champion. But he was also keenly aware that literary fame could not be borne only on the shoulders of snobs. One reason I think he had wanted to meet me, despite his failing health, was the knowledge that without younger readers an author’s fame dies with him. I don’t think he should have worried. Powell certainly had a snobby side--famously he had a Burke’s Peerage displayed on his living room shelf. I believe him when he said that if there had been a Burke’s of bank clerks, he’d have owned that too. Would it have been better if he had met the world fresh rather than relying so much on family and class to codify it? That’s impossible to say. Anyway, such interests were in the marrow of his art--they were to him what Catholicism was to Graham Greene or machismo to Hemingway. I can’t imagine he would have been a writer without them. The “Dance” series is a sneaky work too. It starts with life in a repressive prep school and widens into the story of upper-class England, a subtle and ironic depiction of a society which, like the Earth itself, appears stable if you are part of it but wildly spinning from without. Read once, the books are about social status. Read again, they are about the limits of what we can know about others, how our own assumptions shut us off from much of the world--class as prison, mortality. After Powell’s death, one English obituary writer got it right when he wrote that once you got past all the snobbery, the thing that was extraordinary about Powell was how well he understood what it felt like to be alive.

Not long after our interview started, Powell told me, “I’ve had enough.” Lady Violet hurriedly showed me out. “I do rather wish you wouldn’t ring again,” she said when I called to follow up on some fact. Soon after, she would publish her own memoir and hold court in her living room, Powell reduced to a mute figure in a wheelchair in the next room. His time on center stage was over. It is difficult enough to accept that is what life does, even to genius, but harder still to accept that in his effort to survive, Powell was letting go of his writing first, whereas I wanted him to let go of it last. He was ready to change places with a tabby, whereas I wanted him to keep being a literary lion. The most striking thing about the memoirs--I realized this only after I met Powell--was that they break off when he is in his 70s, before he withers. That day visiting him at his home, it was not hard to imagine he would have liked to do the same.

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D.T. Max is a contributing editor to The Paris Review.