Miscellaneous Verdicts:
Writings on Writers 1946-1989
By Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 501 pages, $34.95
Among English-language novelists regarded in some quarters as great, Anthony Powell may be the most amusing. And while questions of definition and judgment arise right away in both spheres-greatness and the ability to amuse- Powell would seem to have few rivals in the amusing-and-great line:
Fielding, Jane Austen, Dickens, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, perhaps James Joyce and how many others?
As it happens, Powell touches upon several of those artists in his
”Miscellanous Verdicts: Writing on Writers 1946-1989.” And even though a kind of professionial testiness is evident at times (”Dickens never really got the hang of the upper classes . . . nor for that matter of his soupily sentimental proletarians”; Joyce`s ”passionate interest in words and language” can impose ”an almost intolerable strain on the reader”), his comments on fellow novelists often throw light on his own fiction.
For example, reviewing a collection of Mark Twain`s autobiographical writings, Powell notes that this ”cocksure, materialistic, anti-religious, anti-capitalist” man ”could not avoid . . . becoming involved in truckling to the causes he was ostensibly attacking. . . . This would all make very good material for an autobiography. . . . (But) Twain had little or no gift for objectifying such experience. He had no power whatever of self-examination. He cannot tell you what he himself is like. . . .
”He can brilliantly describe violent, grotesque, savage situations . . . but they are not, so it seems to me, humorous ones. In fact they are desperately melancholy. . . . In saying this, I do not, of course, mean that Twain could never tell a funny story; merely that his approach to life was not individual enough, not objective enough, to be truly humorous.”
Individuality, objectivity and self-examination rank high among the matters at issue in ”A Dance to the Music of Time,” the 12-volume serial novel that is Powell`s chief claim to fame. Balance reasserting itself is the typical path his humor takes, and what matters most over the course of a million or so words are the ways the author`s narrator-alter ego, Nick Jenkins, wins his share of equilibrium. ”In the end,” Nick muses at one point, ”most things in life-perhaps all things-turn out to be appropriate.” Powell (the name rhymes with ”troll,” not ”towel”) was born in London in 1905, the son of an army officer, attended Eton and Oxford, married a sister of the seventh Earl of Longford and served as a captain in Military Intelligence in World War II. Facts such as these lend support to the view that ”A Dance” and Powell`s seven other novels offer a feast of documentary social detail in which the sauce of satire is used to disguise a rather hearty endorsement of the status quo. (”In the Fifties,” V.S. Pritchett has written, ”Mr. Anthony Powell was the first to revive the masculine traditions of English social comedy. He did so on behalf of the upper classes.”)
Powell has never been shy about his political-social affinities, and there are times in ”Miscellaneous Verdicts” when a genuine aesthetic preference (Kipling is ”one of the country`s great writers”) becomes linked to defensive gestures (”Of course Kipling wrote (some) dreadful things . . . (and) had a disagreeable strain of rather schoolboyish sadism. But what writer can be named who does not possess certain bad habits?”) Yet such moments of special pleading only emphasize how rare it is in Powell`s fiction. Not really a satirist, Powell also has little interest in scoring points in the name of class or in documenting the passing social scene. Instead, determined to show ”what life is like” (the blandness here conceals great ambition) and believing that ”all novels must have a point of view,” he chose to make Nick Jenkins ”a man who has lived the same sort of life as myself” for the essentially practical reason that his narrator then would
”be looking at things from an angle always familiar to the writer.”
But endorsements of angles of vision are not the novelist`s business, Powell feels-a point he makes in ”Miscellaneous Verdicts” by citing a very Powellian passage from a letter of Joseph Conrad`s.
”I`ve finished (Somerset Maugham`s) `Liza of Lambeth,` ” writes Conrad, ”. . . . (and) have nothing to say except this: that I do not like society novels, and Liza to me is just a society novel-society of a kind.
”I am not enough of a democrat to perceive all the subtle difference there is between the two ends of the ladder. One may be low and the other high-a matter of pure chance-just as the ladder happens to be stood up. The principal thing is that the story gets on a rung and stays there; and I can`t find it in my heart to praise it because it happens to be low. Rungs are artificial things, that`s my objection.”
Powell adds: ”This seems to make a critical point worth bearing in mind”-the apparent blandness this time concealing a deeply held conviction.
There is abundant evidence in ”Miscellaneous Verdicts” of Powell`s sly, ”slow-motion style” (the phrase is critic John Russell`s), in which hitches in rhythm and diction interrupt the normally stately pace of his prose. This works almost as well in a review or a literary appreciation as in his fiction.
Reviewing a book on ”the genteel tradition” in 19th and early 20th Century America, which placed great emphasis on ”the purity, remoteness, sacredness, of a woman as such,” Powell comments: ”The natural result of this idealization of women . . . was a growing, if unspoken, fear that, if women were really so unapproachable as all that, perhaps they were also less attractive than had hitherto been supposed.”
Similar principles are at work in this sentence from Powell`s second novel, ”Venusberg” (1932), in which the chief character, a newspaperman, is leaving his place of employment: ”Lushington went down the stairs, which were of stone like those of a prison or a lunatic asylum and were, in effect, used to some considerable extent by persons of a criminal tendency or mentally deranged.”
Again from ”Miscellaneous Verdicts,” here is a passage on Italo Svevo`s novel ”Confessions of Zeno”: ”There has been a tendency on the part of critics in this country . . . to imply that Svevo might have been well advised to choose a more decisive character as a hero. This is, at best, rather like complaining that Cervantes might have found a subject of greater edification in the adventures of a Spaniard of more progressive outlook than Don Quixote. . . .”
Details of verbal technique certainly have much to do with what makes those passages amusing. But in each case the humor also exists because the path the words take has led to a truth-about fraught relations between the sexes, about the traits of some newspaper employees, about obtuseness in the book reviewing trade and so forth.
Geneology has always been one of Powell`s passions, in part, he says, in the course of reviewing a book on the subject, because it ”teaches the complexity and unexpectedness of society, especially in this country, where impassable social barriers have never existed. . . .” Elsewhere in
”Miscellaneous Verdicts,” he notes that ”in Domesday Book,” the 11th Century census made by the order of William I, ”nothing is more remarkable than the varied status of members of the lower middle class in England before the Norman Conquest. . . .
”There is not a village in England,” he continues, ”that does not still reflect these subtle, labyrinthine relationships to this day. Is it something innate, a subtlety in human contact due as much to appreciation of special circumstances, even friendly diffidence, rather than to less desirable characteristics sometimes put forward in explanation?”
Living evidence of society`s ”complexity and unexpectedness” and of a potential ”subtlety in human contact”-to his admirers that is what the work of Anthony Powell abundantly provides.
