Anthony Powell - Writing

Writing

Powell's first novel, Afternoon Men, was published by Duckworth in 1931, with Powell supervising its production himself. The same firm published his next three novels, two of them after Powell had left the firm. During his time in California Powell contributed several articles to the magazine Night and Day, edited by Graham Greene. Powell wrote a few more occasional pieces for the magazine until it ceased publication in March 1938. Powell completed his fifth novel, What's Become of Waring, in late 1938 or early 1939. After being turned down by Duckworth, it was published by Cassell in March of that year. The book sold fewer than a thousand copies.

Anticipating the difficulties of creative writing during wartime, Powell began to assemble material for a biography of the seventeenth-century writer John Aubrey. His army career, it turned out, forced him to postpone even that biographical work. When the war ended Powell resumed work on Aubrey, completing the manuscript of John Aubrey and His Friends in May 1946, though it only appeared in 1948 after difficult negotiations and arguments with publishers. He then edited a selection of Aubrey's writings that appeared the following year.

Powell returned to novel writing and began to ponder a long novel-sequence. Over the next 30 years, he produced his major work: A Dance to the Music of Time. Its twelve novels have been acclaimed by such critics as A. N. Wilson and fellow writers including Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis as among the finest English fiction of the twentieth century. Auberon Waugh dissented, calling it "tedious and overpraised—particularly by literary hangers-on". Long-time friend V. S. Naipaul cast similar doubts regarding the work, if not the Powell oeuvre. Naipaul described his sentiments after a long-delayed review of Powell's work following the author's death this way: "it may be that our friendship lasted all this time because I had not examined his work". While often compared to Proust, others find the comparison "obvious, although superficial." Its narrator's voice is more like the participant-observer of The Great Gatsby than that of Proust's self-regarding narrator. Powell was awarded the 1957 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the fourth volume, At Lady Molly's. The eleventh volume, Temporary Kings, received the W.H. Smith Prize in 1974. The cycle of novels, narrated by a protagonist with experiences and perspectives similar to Powell's own, follows the trajectory of the author's own life, offering a vivid portrayal of the intersection of bohemian life with high society between 1921 and 1971.

The title of the multi-volume series is taken from the painting of the same name by Poussin, which hangs in the Wallace Collection. Its characters, many modeled loosely on real people, surface, vanish and reappear throughout the sequence. It is not, however, a roman à clef. The characters are drawn from the upper classes, their marriages and affairs, and their bohemian acquaintances.

In parallel with his creative writing, Powell served as the primary fiction reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. He served as Literary Editor of Punch from 1953 to 1959. From 1958 to 1990, he was a regular reviewer for The Daily Telegraph, resigning after a vitriolic personal attack on him by Auberon Waugh appeared in that newspaper. He also reviewed occasionally for The Spectator.

He published two more novels, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! (1983) and The Fisher King (1986). He reprinted many of his book reviews in two volumes of critical essays, Miscellaneous Verdicts (1990) and Under Review (1992). Several volumes of Journals, covering the years 1982 to 1992, appeared between 1995 and 1997. His Writer's Notebook was published posthumously in 2001, and a third volume of critical essays, Some Poets, Artists, and a Reference for Mellors, appeared in 2005.