Anthony Powell may enjoy the most peculiar reputation of any novelist writing in English. Although many well-read Americans have apparently never heard of him, for others his recently completed 12-novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time, is the most sophisticated chronicle of modern life we have. Both admirer and uninitiate will be disappointed if they go to this first volume of memoirs [Infants of the Spring] expecting to learn anything directly about Powell the man or the writer. They will find instead a puzzling volume as artful as any of his fictions and employing many of the same devices—a vastly clever and informative narrative that deliberately plays with and perhaps even mocks its readers.

Powell belongs to the great generation of British writers who came to maturity just after World War I. Many, including Waugh, Betjeman, Connolly, Orwell and Muggeridge, were Powell's friends and as...