Agents and Patients

Powell’s fourth pre-war novel marks a return to the comic tradition that characterized the first two as compared to the darker tones of From a View to a Death.

In Agents there is no hero or antihero but rather a group of three protagonists (or perhaps antagonists would be a more accurate description): Peter Maltravers and Oliver Chipchase, on one side, and Blore-Smith, on the other. Maltravers and Chipchase are London opportunists living to a large extent on their wits: the former as a scriptwriter and would-be film director, the latter as an art critic who would rather be a psychoanalyst. Blore-Smith is an innocent with a trust fund who is just down from Oxford. He lacks companions (especially feminine) in London and the two schemers see an opportunity to separate Blore-Smith from some of his money.

Blore-Smith is introduced to and becomes infatuated with Maltravers’ wife, Sarah, described as outstanding beauty. He also meets Mrs Mendoza, an equally beautiful but more mature divorcée. He is enticed to engage Chipchase as his psychoanalyst to help him overcome his lonesomeness and is also induced to become the financier of Maltravers’ projected film, which has no plot but will simply involve filming interesting people interacting with each other.

There are also extended sequences on the continent. In Paris, Chipchase takes Blore-Smith to several of the well-known Bohemian haunts as well as a bordello where he is relieved of both his innocence and his notecase. He is also introduced to a seedy French opium-addicted aristocrat, the Marquis de la Tour d’Espagne, and a shady international antiques dealer named Schlumbermayer, who is trying to acquire the Marquis’ collection.

After Paris, most of the London characters fetch up in Berlin for one reason or another. Maltravers is there to assist in a multi-lingual film production, and the others merely hang about. The sequence takes place in the period just before the Nazis take power, and there are frequently Nazis seen in the background, to whom Maltravers rather truckles. While there, Blore-Smith forms a liaison with Mrs Mendoza and escapes with her back to London, leaving the two adventurers behind. They contrive to allow him to stay with her long enough to tire of the attachment, which he does upon their return to London a few weeks later when she tries to move with him to a cottage in the country.

There follows a Powellian set-piece in which the principals gather in a country house where Maltravers is filming his magnum opus and where Blore-Smith comes to his senses and returns to his old flat in London. Maltravers and Chipchase later catch up with him and announce that they are off to Hollywood but only after he pays them what they claim to be due, which he meekly does, relieved to see the last of them.

In his 1988 Journals, Powell describes his impression of the book upon rereading it after many years. He finds it to be “frivolous … even bordering on farce … but not altogether without ‘serious’ implications.” Although frequently dismissed as “light-weight,” Powell feels the pre-war novels are worth reading because of their “bearing … on what came later.” He also, somewhat uncharacteristically, reveals several models for the principal characters, including John Heygate for Maltravers, himself for Chipchase, Varda (a noted London beauty of the time) for Mrs Mendoza and Evelyn Gardner (former wife of Evelyn Waugh and later married to Heygate) for Sarah Maltravers. The book was written during the period of Powell’s courtship of and marriage to Violet Pakenham, to whom it is dedicated.

[First published in Anthony Powell Society Newsletter, 21 (Winter 2005)]