From a View to a Death

The third of the Powell novels of the thirties transports us to a sleepy, peaceful, small English country town. It is supposed Powell used Salisbury as the model. Here we find an England now all too unfamiliar. An England where, for example, Mr Vernon Passenger can walk across the main road without getting promptly knocked down by a car. The London based artist, Arthur Zouch, a predatory “tuft hunter”, arrives in this quaint environment, invited by Miss Mary Passenger, and proceeds to impose himself upon the quiet town. Quiet that is apart from a local petty feud between Mr Passenger and Major Fosdick over shooting rights. This dispute is wickedly concluded by Powell, who portrays Fosdick as a transvestite who through the novel becomes less and less careful so eventually gets caught wearing a dress by his adversary Passenger. Fosdick feels compelled to capitulate and hurriedly does a deal with Passenger over the shooting rights before getting himself committed.

Zouch quickly claims the pliable Joanna Brandon as a conquest but in order to win the better bred Mary he has to gain the approval of her father, who proves to be the equal if not the better of Zouch. Mary suggests that Zouch could impress her and ingratiate himself to Mr Passenger by agreeing to hunt. Mr Passenger elegantly “kills” Zouch by mounting the inexperienced interloper on Creditor, a horse that “pulls a little”. Creditor manages to throw Zouch to his death and peace can then resume.

Nietzsche is credited with challenging the foundations of morality. He posited the Ubermensch concept which we translate perhaps clumsily as “Superman”. Zouch insinuates himself as Powell’s Superman who thinks himself above everyone and everything within the provincial milieu and with his savage freethinking is capable of willing himself to power (superseding Passenger). It is therefore much to Powell’s credit that the real “Superman”, Mr Passenger, is triumphant and Zouch easily and literally brought to ground.

Powell continues to delight us with a fresh array of characters. Major Fosdick has a couple of wet sons, Jasper and Torquil (who is “rather odd”). The amenable Mary Passenger has an interesting, independent much older sister Betty who was once married to an Italian aristocrat with whom she had the precocious five year old Bianca (a budding Pamela Flitton?) who goads Zouch with her pointed retorts. Joanna’s mother and Mrs Passenger are portrayed as virtually comatose. Mr Brandon’s maid, Mr Dadds, is an irritable gossip. All these characters and others are quite closely examined and all are given the comic treatment. Powell finds no such thing as human equality. Everyone is treated at face value but all are subjected to the author’s acid wit and sometimes bland cruelty.

This novel was published in 1933, one year before Powell’s own marriage, and one searches fruitlessly for clues or links between the author’s own situation and that of Zouch. Another bright, fast romp of a read with some sex, violence and philosophy. What more could a reader require?

[First published in Anthony Powell Society Newsletter, 20 (Autumn 2005)]