TAS Notebook/Kudos for Anthony Powell
Osborne, John W.
experience into two periods: The first period--the late1940s, the '50s, and the early '60s--is still, I think, not sufficiently appreciated as one of the great periods of European history and...
...This is an important part of his psychology, and his most sympathetic characters are men and women of common sense who work hard to get things done right in their own little corners of the universe...
...This reminds the r~ader of Evelyn Waugh's hero, Tony Last, who, in A Handful o f Dust, ended his days as the captive of a Dickens-loving lunatic in the jungles of South America...
...Tradition and individual conscience rank high in his scale of values, and, like Evelyn Waugh whose conservatism was more sardonic and bitterly expressed, Powell has a great sense of the fitness of things...
...He has great sympathy for the masses but is unable to get along with individual members of the human race, including his own family...
...After 1945 these men returned to their own countries and were liquidated by'the Communist governments of Eastern Europe...
...This period began with the youth movements and rise of the New Left in the mid-1960s, and its distinguishing features are by now familiar...
...Powell's principal accomplishment-his great series of twelve novels A Dance to the Music o f Time that traced Nicholas Jenkins from an early 1920s schoolboy to old age over a period of fifty years--endeavored to show "the gentle disintegration of society in its traditional form...
...Powell is no ideologue, and he has no patience with system builders of either the political right or the left...
...someone like Nicholas Jenkins seems to drift along the stream of life...
...As Labour member of Parliament and active supporter of friendly relations with the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe, Widmerpool eventually sails too close to the wind...
...And by that he meant that a city and a population that had been battered, corrupted and humiliated by the catastrophe of the Third Reich still was able to find enough inner resources to hold out against the Soviet Blockade in 1948-49, despite all the seductive offers of pe~ce with coal and extra rations...
...Basic to Widmerpool's advancement, in addition to a sheer opportunism that Powell detests, was his worship of power which took the form of active fellow traveling...
...Lasky's essay, with its focus on the story of his generation (a group of New York intellectuals who immersed themselves in the study of the Soviet Union, fought in World War II, and joined in the ideological battles of the Cold War), leads one to believe that he himself might emphasize the importance of one's age, the nature of the ideological and political struggle when one comes of age...
...Compared, for instance, to his ideological contemporary Angela Thirkell, whose sour stories of postwar England are in the process of being forgotten, Powell's writing has a certain wit and perspective...
...There he describes how he was inspired to write A Dance to the Music o f Time while standing in front of a Nicholas Poussin picture of the same name...
...There are traces of both Cobbett and Dickens in this character...
...Those who make the effort to discern the conservative in Anthony Powell will be rewarded, and those, like the Ingersoll Foundation, who have recognized his contribution to our intellectual and cultural life are to be congratulated...
...Powell's most unpleasant characters are distinguished by their lust for power, while it is noticeable on the other hand that looters in blacked-out London during the blitz...
...Who reads today the proletarian novels of the 1930s...
...These are the establishments which are viewed with sympathy by men like Widmerpool, on their way to fame and fortune under socialism...
...And for that matter, who places Shelley's bitter political poems that were written in England beside his nature poems which seem to have Italian backgrounds...
...Powell's handling of Widmerpool shows more than literary sophistication...
...experience into two periods: The first period--the late1940s, the '50s, and the early '60s--is still, I think, not sufficiently appreciated as one of the great periods of European history and Western civilization: the magnificent recovery of the Old World, aided by the New World, out of the rubble of the most fratricidal war in the annals of mankind . . . . For many of us it was symbolized by the phrase of the unforgettable Berliner Oberburgermeister Ernst Reuter: "the Miracle of Berlin" ("das Wunder Berlins...
...The average citizen may, like Lobkowicz, worry about the license he sees about him, but on the whole it doesn't seem that the bulk of Western citizenry is consumed with doubt about the bonafides of its way of life...
...Powell sums him up as "a rebel whose life has been exasperatingly lacking in persecution, had enjoyed independence of parental control, plenty of money, assured social position, early in life...
...Widmerpool makes his first appearance as an unappealing schoolmate of Jenkins and goes on to dominate the novels as the embodiment of personal ambition and craving for success in any worldly thing...
...Notably absent from Powell's heroes are Conservative party politicians...
...After a spectacular rise in fortune, Widmerpool meets his gruesome end as a life peer and the prisoner of a by John W. Osborne Charles Manson-like cult figure...
...One can only guess why and how intellectual style changes...
...Then one by one they fall...
...Powell is no ordinary conservative, then...
...In that goal, there was a subtly stated but firm conservatism, as Powell makes clear in the recently released fourth (and final) volume of his memoirs, The Strangers AreAll Gone...
...Powell isn't so blunt and didactic that he simply denounces socialism, but ridicules it as he does pretension and personal ambition...
...Most telling of Powell's leftist characters, next to Widmerpool, is Erridge, Lord Warminster, scion of an ancient noble house, who lives in squalor in a corner of his home...
...he resolved to attempt for literature what Poussin had done for painting: John I4I...
...We see him as a supporter of the "soviet experiment" in the 1930s, but it is in the climate of socialist Britain and the post-World War II Labour government that Widmerpoof' is in his element...
...Thoroughly self-centered, he is ye t at the mercy of the publicists of the left and is an active financial contributor to all "progressive" causes which feed his revolt against his class and his family...
...In the three post-World War II novels in the series, the good suffer while left-wing fanatics and opportunists wax fat, at least for a while...
...If the world is to be improved, it will have to be as the result of exertions by individuals, not by schemes or ideology...
...The situation is made more melancholy by laconic references to the deaths of honorable officers in Allied armies whom Jenkins met in England during the war...
...In his serpentine fashion, Powell alludes to the great international issues of the day from the Stalinist purges of the thirties to the revolutionary terror of the 1960s...
...Erridge is less unpleasant because of his upperclass, left-wing fellow traveling than he is due to his insensitivity to family and other human responsibilities...
...Left-wingers are treated unsympathetically by him, partly because Powell considers that they hold the wrong views but mainly because of flaws in their character...
...We see Powell's concern with the fitness of things in the chief character in the series of novels...
...This makes his message not less compelling but only more sophisticated and subtle...
...The antitotalitarian consensus has disappeared: The virtues of liberal civilization have become more suspect...
...Its relative importance can be guessed at by imagining how a politician would choose, if he could, between the inarticulate support of a supposed majority and the demonstrable backing of large numbers of journalists, writers, film stars, teachers, and religious leaders...
...Treason is mentioned, but a parliamentary inquiry is quashed for national security reasons...
...In other words, anticommunism in a most surprising and heartening way w o n . . , its new democratic, libertarian credentials . . . . Out of the Cold War came a European renaissance...
...Conyers dies a nonagenarian fire warden chasing Ideology and literature are uneasy companions...
...his works are not political tracts, and readers in search of conservative ammunition are warned that Powell has a habit of communicating more by implication than directly...
...Powell is perhaps saved this fate by his comic gifts, as well as his sense of the relative importance of ideas and events...
...he asks...
...One of Powell's most appealing characters in the early novels is General Aylmer Conyers, " t a l l , distinguished with grey moustache and flashing eyes," who is the embodiment of common sense and practical morality...
...One can answer that something of that thought survives in books like this one...
...The postwar renaissance, Lasky argues, was marked by a consensus in the West that there existed a liberal civilization, not a flawless one but one worth defending...
...What Lasky is talking about, as he makes clear, is the changing of intellectua ! styles...
...Eliot Award marks one of the few times anyone has recognized the strong conservative viewpoint that runs throughout the work of the man some have called the English Proust...
...Being a politician, he would of course choose both...
...This is not the faceless and often naive Nicholas Jenkins, but instead Kenneth Widmerpool, a creature who could have stepped from the pages of Stendhal or Balzac...
...Generally it seems that English adherents of the fashionable progressivism win the day...
...Powell's conservatism is an intuitive type--what Clinton Rossiter called "temperamental conservatism...
...It was a period characterized by the self-confidence of democratic nations, which expressed itself in alliances and agreements between those nations--NATO and the Common Market, to name the two most obvious examples...
...Instead of ambition, honor and conscientiousness are valued...
...Erridge is the quintessential rich parlor pink of the thirties, an enthusiastic adherent of every fashionable left-wing 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 cause of the moment...
...Of what value is a half-century's anguished thought on 'the Russian question' when all the lessons of the past are so easily overlooked by another generation...
...the intent of its enemies less so...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 51...
...he demonstrates as well an awareness of the qualities which are valued in a socialist society when it deals with the Communist bloc...
...The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance...
...KUDOS FOR ANTHONY POWELL Anthony Powell's recent selection for the Ingersoll Foundation's T.S...
...Lasky's second period, the one we are living through, is marked by a loss of confidence in, if not outright hostility toward, Western civilization...
...Thus, the splendid characterization of Erridge (Lord Warminster...
...Because of his putting everything in a proper perspective, Powell is one of the most important moral influences in contemporary English letters...
...Widmerpool suffers a miserable death, another loses his twin daughters to the counterculture, a third meets a mysterious demise in Czechoslovakia-all in keeping with Powell's effort to restore a moral balance to the universe...
...Lasky concentrates on intellectual style for the obvious reason that insofar as it sets the tone of political discussion, intellectual style has a more immediate impact on policy than does the personal morality of the populace at large...
...Writing, lecturing, teaching, publishing, and holding conferences surely have some effect, though at times the movement they cause may be as imperceptible as continental drift...
...Osborne teaches history at Rutgers University, Newark...
Vol. 17 • December 1984 • No. 12
