(Written from a vantage point both high and deliberately n...)
Written from a vantage point both high and deliberately narrow, the early novels of the late British master Anthony Powell nevertheless deal in the universal themes that would become a substantial part of his oeuvre: pride, greed, and the strange drivers of human behavior.
(Novel. First American edition stated. Blue cloth covers v...)
Novel. First American edition stated. Blue cloth covers very nice, spine ends bumped. Dust jacket rubbed and sunned some soil and edge wear. Interior clean and tight.
(The first novel Anthony Powell published following the co...)
The first novel Anthony Powell published following the completion of his epic A Dance to the Music of Time, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! fulfills perhaps every author’s fantasy as it skewers a conceited, lazy, and dishonest critic.
(Miscellaneous Verdicts represents the best of Anthony Pow...)
Miscellaneous Verdicts represents the best of Anthony Powell's critical writing over a period of four decades. Drawn from his regular reviews for the Daily Telegraph, from his occasional humorous pieces for Punch, and from his more sustained pieces of critical and anecdotal writing on writers, this collection is as witty, fresh, surprising, and entertaining as one would expect from the author of Dance to the Music of Time.
(Third in a series of journals, this book includes the aut...)
Third in a series of journals, this book includes the author's memories of Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin, John Benjamin, Kingsley Amis, and Marlene Dietrich.
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth-century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I.
Anthony Dymoke Powell was a distinguished British novelist. He is best known for his autobiographical and satiric 12-volume series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."
Background
Anthony Dymoke Powell was born in Westminster, London on December 21, 1905, to Philip Lionel William Powell, lieutenant colonel in the British Army, and Maud Mary Wells-Dymoke. As a child, Powell lived wherever his father, a regular officer in the Welsh Regiment, was stationed.
Education
Powell attended Eton College from 1919 to 1923 and Balliol College, Oxford, from 1923 to 1926.
After graduation Powell entered the publishing business in London and launched his career as a writer in 1931 with the publication of Afternoon Men, featuring a hero who lacks all ambition and who drifts aimlessly through bohemian circles, finding meaning nowhere. Powell's next novels - From a View to a Death (1933), Agents and Patients (1936), and What's Become of Waring (1939) - deal with variations on the theme of prostituted talent and the will to dominate personal relationships.
In 1936 he joined Warner Brothers on a six-month contract as a scriptwriter. He soon left Warner Brothers and became a full-time writer after traveling the United States and Mexico.
Sometime in the late 1930s, he had the idea for a novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, designed to illustrate the responses to change of the British upper classes. The advent of World War II, however, forced Powell to put aside all writing. From 1939 to 1941 he served in the Welsh Regiment, and from 1941 to 1945 he was a liaison officer in the intelligence corps. Powell was decorated often and raised to the rank of major.
The first volume in Powell's series, A Question of Upbringing, appeared in 1951. A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market (1952), and The Acceptance World (1955) form the first trilogy in the sequence. Covering the period after World War I up to the Depression, they depict the lives of Nick and his associates as they reflect upon and attempt to understand the effect of family and schooling upon character, as they examine what the world offers in the way of work and love, and as they quit their aimless wanderings and come to realize what decisions they may be capable of making.
The second trilogy covers the period from the Depression to the beginning of World War II. At Lady Molly's (1957), Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), and The Kindly Ones (1962) show, respectively, the complexity of deepening commitments, the struggles and the failures of marriage, and a fresh appraisal of 20 years of personal history on the eve of political chaos.
The third trilogy, which covers the years of World War II, is made up of The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier's Art (1966), and The Military Philosophers (1968). These novels follow Nick through his realization that war is hardly romantic and that a fighting unit is only as effective as the men who are in it, to his perceptions of the powerful men who have directed the war and his often melancholy musings on the state of Europe and his own life.
The fourth and final trilogy Books do Furnish a Room (1971), Temporary Kings (1973), and Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975) closed out the series and covers the post-World War II years with all of its changes and modern dilemmas. In 1987 the entire twelve volume set was published as The Album of Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music of Time.
After publishing the novella The Fisher King (1986). In 1991 The Fisher King was adapted as a feature film directed by Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python's Flying Circus fame) and starring actors Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, and Mercedes Ruehl. His most recent work, Journals 1990-1992, was published in 1997 and is a still further look into the man and his personal art of writing.
Quotations:
"Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work."
"I get a warm feeling among my books."
"Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity."
"It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them."
"I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already."
"The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it."
"One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be."
"One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy."
"When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance."
"He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Selflove seems so often unrequited."
"For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."
"Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life."
"Books do furnish a room."
"Writing is above all a question of instinct."
Personality
Powell was a reserved man.
Connections
Powell married Violet Packenham, sister of Lord Longford, in 1934 after a brief acquaintanceship. For many years they lived in a handsome Regency house near Frome in Somerset.