Despite Powell's inexhaustible interest in the highly competitive literary and artistic life of London, he has never shown the slightest desire to gain power for himself, a characteristic that helps explain the strange, almost anthropological interest with which he examines those men—of whom the power-hungry are the most obvious example—whose public image of themselves is so important to them that they subdue their whole natures to it. With this insight into the folkways of men of will,...

'Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them' is a favourite saying of X. Trapnel's, and one perhaps specially appropriate to the work in which he figures. For one could hardly find a work of fiction which more clearly demonstrates what Trapnel himself calls 'the heresy of naturalism' than this sequence of novels in which, for the reader, the deepest satisfaction comes less from character and incident than from the structure that supports them both: a struct...

It is astonishing how an epoch can grow cold. All it takes, or so it would seem, is a sufficient number of memoirs mixed with the requisite stories and nicknames, all repeated and confused by whatever rendition is at hand. It has happened before and, undoubtedly, will happen again…. Now, in the second volume of Anthony Powell's memoirs [Messengers of Day], the cast of London in the '20s is brought forth for one more turn at the footlights, a cast wearily familiar by now: He-Evelyn and S...

Anthony Powell was born on 21 December, 1905, with a silver-plated spoon in his mouth, his father being a regular officer in a dim regiment of the line and his mother a Wells-Dymoke (of the Lincolnshire family which supplies the new Monarch's Champion at coronations). From the time when he was first old enough to assess these circumstances Mr Powell has accepted them, as he has accepted all others of his life, with quiet, well informed and ironic amusement, unperturbed by envy on the one hand or guil...

My old teacher, F. R. Leavis, would spend critical time only on novelists who reach the level of "significant fiction"; and the "insignificant" category turned out to include Trollope and even Thackeray. Recently I've rejected that criterion, and preferred a vertical slicing of writers into different kinds or qualities of significance, instead of his horizontal slicing between adequate and inadequate quantity. But Anthony Powell reawakens the old idea in me; his is such a ...

At the close of the second volume of Anthony Powell's memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling, Powell had published his first three novels; at the opening of this new volume [Faces in My Time] he continues to work part-time for the publisher, Duckworth's. The major event of the early chapters is his marriage; Eton and Oxford friends are less in his life than formerly as he tries his hand in the more lucrative Grub Street of scriptwriting. This existence has its hazards but Powell's setbacks a...

It is one of Anthony Powell's most disarming characteristics that his anecdotes exist for themselves, at most illustrating some nuance in the custom and fashion of an epoch: 'the period flavour of the incident must excuse its triviality,' as he remarks in his leisurely way, or 'social hairs are the most enjoyable ones to split.' His fiction draws its subtle contentment from highlighting such trivialities, as in their different style do his current series of memoirs, [Messe...

Readers of [Powell's] autobiographical series will be able to trace the origins of some of his characters, a veritable goldmine for future thesis-writers. In his third volume, Faces in My Time, he introduces us to more friends and acquaintances in the course of his literary career and service as a military intelligence officer during the last world war, explaining how some of these contributed to his fictional narrative. Certain figures, like Constant Lambert and his own brother-in-law Henry Lamb, re...

It is difficult to determine whether Anthony Powell's stance as a completely unremarkable man is the result of art or nature. Occasional passages [in Infants of Spring and Messengers of Day] seem to contain irony so subtle as to be almost invisible, but for the most part his portraits of contemporaries are neither vivid nor searching, and his literary judgments, including those of his own work completed or in progress, are commonplace. (pp. 511-12) Others have conveyed more vividly the atmosphere of ...

The Strangers All Are Gone displays the same desultory qualities as the preceding three volumes [of Powell's memoirs]: reticence, arbitrariness, sketchiness. No one would guess from these memoirs that Powell is a novelist of considerable grace and humour. This book is not so much poorly organised as not organised at all. Episode follows vignette follows reflection seemingly at random. It is not simply that the book has no shape but that it suggests a life the author is too lazy to shape for the reade...

Most that is memorable [in Infants of the Spring] is derived: other men's witticisms, other men's adventures, the force of other men's characters. The portraits of Orwell and Connolly stand out, Bowra and Henry Green disappoint. But far from a tale told by an idiot savant, here are reminiscences of a seasoned novelist, full of years and clear memories, surrounded by the ghosts of famous friends, speaking over port beside a wood fire. Let me suggest that there are much worse ways to spen...