The Quotable Powell

The critic John Bayley has remarked that "nothing shows the complete originality of Powell's technique more than the way his fiction imitates memoir, and almost in a double sense, like a trompe-l'oeil painting", so that the novel becomes "an anecdote arranging itself in the elaborate composition of a picture".

[Allan Massie; The Novel Today]

'One of the strange things about the Victorians,' wrote Antony Powell in one of his notebooks, 'was seeing refinement in women, whereas one of the attractions of women is their extreme coarseness'. From the scrappy unannotated nature of the great novelist's cahier it is impossible to know whether this contention was intended to be placed in the mouth of one of the more outrageous characters in A Dance to the Music of Time or whether it was an opinion he held himself.

[AN Wilson; The Victorians]

No novelist has more than a few stories to tell. They are the myths of life which each novelist creates for himself.

[Anthony Powell on John Galsworthy]

There is a French saying that 'a bottle of Chambertin, a ragout a la Sardanapalus, and a lady causeuse, are the three best companions at table in France'. I have been unable to trace a recipe for this particular dish, apparently a well-known one, but not to be found in several French cookery books.

[Anthony Powell; "Cyrus Redding: Wine and Friends" in Cyril Ray (ed), The Compleat Imbiber 10]

I have only twice in my life been aware of the 'scent of violets' bursting from the uncorked burgundy bottle as one reads about – once in Beaune, the other occasion in England in the second or third year of the war, when all wine at the Travellers' Club was being drunk up by the members, whatever the price.

[Anthony Powell; "Cyrus Redding: Wine and Friends" in Cyril Ray (ed), The Compleat Imbiber 10]

Parents ... are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.

[Anthony Powell; A Buyer's Market]

Later on in the evening, while sitting out with Miss Manasch, I was suddenly made aware of him [Widmerpool] again when he stumbled over her foot ... 'I know who he is!' she said, when he had apologised and disappeared ... 'He is the Frog Footman. He ought to be in livery. Has he danced with Anne yet?' 'Anne Stepney?' 'They would be so funny together.'

[Anthony Powell; A Buyer's Market]

There is a strong disposition in youth, from which some individuals never escape, to suppose that everyone else is having a much more enjoyable time than we are ourselves.

[Anthony Powell; A Buyer's Market]

From time to time throughout the course of the evening, I saw Widmerpool ploughing his way round the [ball]room, as if rowing a dinghy in rough water.

[Anthony Powell; A Buyer's Market]

Sillery, I thought, was like Tiresias: for, although predominantly male, for example, in outward appearance, he seemed to have the seer's power of assuming female character if required. With Truscott, for instance, he would behave like an affectionate aunt; while his perennial quarrel with Brightman – to take another instance of his activities – was often conducted with a mixture of bluntness and self-control that certainly could not be thought at all like a woman's row with a man: or even with another woman; though, at the same time, it was a dispute that admittedly transcended somehow a difference of opinion between two men.

[Anthony Powell; A Question of Upbringing]

Twenty million monkeys typing into infinity would type the works of Shakespeare much sooner than twenty million professors of linguistics.

[Anthony Powell; A Writer's Notebook]

Atwater ... began to bite the apple. It was green and tasted of absolutely nothing. It was like eating material in the abstract.

[Anthony Powell; Afternoon Men]

He was bald but seemed to be bearing up well.

[Anthony Powell; Afternoon Men]

I suppose, the one and really only possible mitigation and excuse for the unbridled incoherence of this existence of ours, it is then, and only then, that we realise fully, that we shall realise in its entirety, that we shall in soon come to know with any degree of accuracy. What was I saying? I seem to have lost the thread.

[Anthony Powell; Afternoon Men]

... she's not a great one for bed. A chap I knew in the Ordnance, who'd carried on quite a bit with the girls, told me those noisy ones seldom are. Don't do much in that line myself nowadays ... Feel too cooked most of the time. Never sure the army vets got quite all those separate pieces of a toffee-apple out of my ribs. Tickles a bit sometimes. Still, you have to step out once in away.

[Anthony Powell; At Lady Molly's]

I spent Christmas Day cleaning out the kennels', said the General. 'Went to Early Service. Then I got into my oldest clothes and had a thorough go at them. Had luncheon late and a good sleep after. Read a book all the evening. One of the best Christmas Days I've ever had'.

[Anthony Powell; At Lady Molly's]

The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

[Anthony Powell; Books Do Furnish a Room]

Pacing with Bag-Pipe in a bosky Square,
One morn a Piper rent the vernal air,
Dispelling by his savage, baleful Strains
That Freudian Pageantry, which Night-time gains.
(He wore a garb deprived of all amenity,
Save for vile jest and Smoking-Room obscenity.)
And hearkening to the Pibroch's raucous Note,
Bursting as if from tortur'd porcine Throat,
To Reverie did errant Fancy yield ...

[Anthony Powell; Caledonia]

A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise.

[Anthony Powell; Casanova's Chinese Restaurant]

... as if they had heard that enchanted horn of Astolpho, that English duke in Ariosto, which never sounded but all his auditors were mad, and for fear ready to make away with themselves ... they are a company of giddy-heads, afternoon men ...

[Anthony Powell; Epigraph to Afternoon Men]

People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk.

[Anthony Powell; Hearing Secret Harmonies]

It was Dr Trelawney's view - and also that of his old friend Mrs Erdleigh - that death was no more than transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. To be fair to them both, they seemed to some extent to have made their point. Mrs Erdleigh (quoting the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan) had spoken of how 'the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies'.

[Anthony Powell; Hearing Secret Harmonies]

The method is all part of his [John Aubrey's] presentation of life as a picture crowded with odd figures, occupying themselves in unexpected and sometimes inexplicable pursuits. He wrote down what appeared to him the truth, but it is often the truth of poetry rather than the truth of science.

[Anthony Powell; John Aubrey and His Friends]

Wednesday, 23 July [1986]
V and I watched on TV the wedding of Prince Andrew & Miss Sarah Ferguson, now Duke & Duchess of York. Unusually good show. The bride's father, Major Ronald Ferguson, late The Life Guards, had braid piping on his tailcoat. As he is not old enough for this to have been a normal fashion for tailcoats (Goodhart, for instance, had it on his) one presumes him still wearing coat he had at Eton when in Pop, braid being a Pop privilege. It would be interesting to check this.

[Anthony Powell; Journals 1982-1986]

The [Compton-Burnett] novels ... are primarily concerned with human passions, and the ruthless manner in which these are usually satisfied ... [In] the [Victorian-Edwardian] accepted routine of manners ... much that is said and done is not made explicit ... Of course, much of Victorian life was licentious. Everybody knew that at the time ... However, the particular social technique of that epoch was to deal with such matters obliquely ... All these subjects are dealt with in the [Compton-Burnett] novels in a manner ... unlikely to be made more effective or convincing by the recital of elaborate physical details.

[Anthony Powell; Miscellaneous Verdicts]

Each recriminative decade poses new riddles, how best to live, how best to write. One's fifties, in principle less acceptable than one's forties, at least confirm most worst suspicions about life, thereby disposing of an appreciable tract of vain expectation, standardized fantasy, obstructive to writing, as to living. The quinquagenarian may not be master of himself, he is, notwithstanding, master of a passable miscellany of experience on which to draw when forming opinions, distorted or the reverse, at least up to a point his own. After passing the half-century, one unavoidable conclusion is that many things seemingly incredible on starting out, are, in fact, by no means located in an area beyond belief.

[Anthony Powell; Temporary Kings]

I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed ... Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech ... Even the bare facts had an unreal, almost satirical ring when committed to paper, say in the manner of innumerable Russian stories of the nineteenth century: 'I was born in the city of L-, the son of an infantry officer ...' To convey much that was relevant to the reader's mind by such phrases was in this country hardly possible. Too many factors had to be taken into consideration.

[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]

I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]

It was that prolonged, flat, cheerless week that follows Christmas ... those latter days of the dying year create an interval, as it were, of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic. Imminent change of direction is for some reason often foreshadowed by such colourless patches of time.

[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]

Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.

[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]

To be circumscribed by people constituting the same professional community as myself was no wish of mine: rather the contrary. However, an inexorable law governs all human existence in that respect, ordaining that sooner or later everyone must appear before the world as he is. Many are not prepared to face this sometimes distasteful principle. Indeed, the illusion that anyone can escape from the marks of his vocation is an aspect of romanticism common to every profession: those occupied with the world of action claiming their true interests to lie in the pleasures of imagination or reflection, while persons principally concerned with imaginative or reflective pursuits are forever asserting their inalienable right to participation in an active sphere.

[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]

What will happen to people like him [Trelawney] as the world plods on to standardisation? Will they cease to be born, or find jobs in other professions? I suppose there will always be a position for a man with first-class magical qualifications.

[Anthony Powell; The Kindly Ones]

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.

[Anthony Powell; The Kindly Ones]

Here, among these woods and clearing, sand and fern, silence and the smell of pine brought a kind of release to the heart, together with a deep-down wish for something, something more than battles, perhaps not battles at all, something realised, even then, as nebulous, blissful, all but unattainable: a feeling of uneasiness, profound and oppressive, yet oddly pleasurable at times, at other times so painful as to be almost impossible to bear.

[Anthony Powell; The Kindly Ones]

One of the things about being deserted by Matilda or anyone is that it leaves you in a semi-castrated state incapable of fixing yourself up with an alternative girl. Deserting people, on the other hand, is positively stimulating. I don't mind betting that Matilda is surrounded by admirers at this moment ...

[Anthony Powell; The Kindly Ones]

Those who no longer walk beside us on the void expanses of this fleeting empire of created light have no more reached the absolute end of their journey than birth was for them the absolute beginning.

[Anthony Powell; The Kindly Ones]

Finn pushed back his chair. He spoke slowly. "Borrit told me when he was serving on the Gold Coast one of the Africans said to him: 'What is it white men write at their desks all day?'"

[Anthony Powell; The Military Philosophers]

[Bithel] "Told me you were quite a reader – like me – didn't you?"
[Jenkins] "Yes, I am. I read quite a lot."
I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications. At least admitting to it put one in a recognisably odd category of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run.

[Anthony Powell; The Soldier's Art]

'Are you waiting for something, Greening?'
'The General bade me discourse fair words to you, sir, anent traffic circuits.'
'What the hell do you mean?'
'I don't know, sir,' said Greening.
That's exactly how the General put it.'

[Anthony Powell; The Soldier's Art]

Cocksidge's demeanour to his superiors always recalled a phrase used by Odo Stevens when we had been on a course together at Aldershot:
"Good morning, Sergeant-Major, here's a sparrow for your cat."
Cocksidge was, so to speak, in a chronic state of providing, at a higher level of rank, sparrows for sergeant-majors' cats.

[Anthony Powell; The Soldier's Art]

Sole nantua,' said Isobel, firmly bringing the conversation back to the point. 'That's a sauce is it?'
'Yes, made with crayfish' Adam explained, 'You would poach about a dozen small crayfish in a court-bouillon with white wine and herbs.'
'Murtlock and his friends caught crayfish in Somerset,' said Tom but nobody took up the reference, Adam remarking that the flavour of Somerset crayfish would hardly be up to a nantua sauce.

[Barbara Pym; A Few Green Leaves]

Many critics have called Dance a comedy of manners. They're right, to be sure, but they've missed the point. "It is always difficult," Powell observed, "to know how human beings really live. If you describe it, you often appear to be a humorous writer, even if you have merely reported exactly what happened." In its uniquely backhanded, understated, supremely ironic way, A Dance to the Music of Time comes as lose as a novel can come to telling us exactly what happened.

[Bill Ott; American Library Association Booklist; 15 May 2000]

What really needs to happen ... is for Powell's critics to follow the advice he himself doled out to those of Evelyn Waugh: to stop talking about what a snob he was and start talking about how good the writing was.

[Brooke Allen; New Criterion, 25(1), September 2004, reviewing Michael Barber, Anthony Powell: A Life]

Anthony Powell should be read by anyone who is sick of the minimalist tripe that passes for contemporary fiction. His characters are among the most memorable created by any novelist writing in English since Dickens. The positive virtues of courage and honor are celebrated, but perhaps the ultimate moral value of Powell's work is as a cautionary tale. As Sir James Murray, a former British Ambassador who looks like he stepped out of the pages of a Powell book, once reminded me: 'The question is not whether we know a Widmerpool in our own lives, but whose Widmerpool are we?'

[Dwight Sutherland in The University Bookman, Summer 2002]

It has been said (by Anthony Powell whose twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time provided the greatest reading pleasure of my first 40 years) that we date ourselves by the standards against which we rebel.

[George F Will; quoted in Newsweek; 27 April 1981]

A friend bought me the first three of this sequence [Dance] for my birthday one year. I was sceptical at first, but was soon won over by some of the most magical prose in the English language. Powell made me care about these old Etonians and titled ladies, this crew of bohemians, charlatans, whingers, malcontents and survivors. He created some of the most complex villains in all literature, and transports the reader to a fully realized world - a world I revisit whenever I can.

[Ian Rankin in The Good Book Guide, March 2000]

Powell is above all funny, and makes humour out of both the gravity and perceptiveness to which the narrative aspires, as witness the scene between Henchman and Sir Dixon Tiptoft at the breakfast table. ... In the end, it is not the way it is done which matters but the personality who controls it. ... But I could read whatever Powell writes from here to eternity, or at least until the Sultan decided that execution could no longer be stayed.

[John Bayley reviewing The Fisher King in London Review of Books, 17 April 1986]

As troubles get worse, small satisfactions increase, both in intensity and in expectation. I look forward with passion to the moment after I put Iris to bed. I come down, pour myself a drink, and while enjoying it read a page or two of a book, some old favourite that is lying near the kitchen table. Nothing new – never a newspaper or periodical – but nothing old and famous either, and nothing demanding. Something I have read many, many times before. It might be a Barbara Pym or a James Bond novel, or Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, or a travel book by Ian Fleming's brother Peter ... All these lie about within easy reach.

[John Bayley; Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories]

Although wholly idiosyncratic and personal, Anthony Powell’s humour shares with Proust’s the same irresistibly comic feeling for human differentiation, and the immovable misunderstanding which results from it. If there is any summing-up of A Dance to the Music of Time, it is the narrator’s observation that whatever happens to people comes in time to seem appropriate ...

[John Bayley; London Review of Books; 12 October 1989]

In the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence occurs there is usually someone at hand to comment, "It's just like Anthony Powell." Often the coincidence turns out, on the shortest examination, to be unremarkable: typically, it might consist of two acquaintances from school or university running into one another after a gap of several years. But the name of Powell is invoked to give legitimacy to the event; it's rather like getting the priest to bless your car ... I don't even care for harmless, comic coincidences. I once went out to dinner and discovered that the seven other people present had all just finished reading A Dance to the Music of Time. I didn't relish this: not least because it meant that I didn't break my silence until the cheese course.

[Julian Barnes; Flaubert's Parrot]

Mr Powell is, mercifully, a writer without a 'message', either philosophical, religious or political; he is content to examine without comment, and to illustrate through character in action, the changes in human nature brought about by the changing face of the social order in which we live: in other words, he is attempting to fulfil the novelist's only true function.

[Julian Maclaren-Ross; "From a Chase to a View" (review of A Question of Upbringing), TLS, 16 February 1951]

'In vino veritas – I don't know,' Anthony Powell once said to me, 'but in scribendo veritas – a certainty.'

[Kingsley Amis; Memoirs]

It is tempting to regard The Fisher King as Anthony Powell's Tempest – for even though one hopes that this profoundly touching comic novel is not Powell's final work, the book deals openly with questions of decay and rebirth, and also includes a singularly shrewd set of musings on Powell's fictional techniques. Indeed the 80-year-old author salts his tale with so many clues about how he feels novels ought to work that The Fisher King could serve as an after-the-fact guide to his 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, which I am not alone in regarding as the century's finest English-language work of fiction.

[Larry Kart reviewing The Fisher King in Tribune, September 1986]

Having reread A Dance To the Music of Time fairly often, always with increased pleasure and understanding, I used to feel that I liked the work more each time only because I was more familiar it. But now, with The Fisher King, I'm quite sure that Powell's fiction has been designed to stir just such a response – that all the while he has been perfecting a technique I'll call "spiral narrative", which virtually guarantees that his novels will inexhaustibly renew themselves.

[Larry Kart reviewing The Fisher King in Tribune, September 1986]

She passed her convalescence [in the London Clinic, from a face-lift] reading Anthony Powell's latest novel which, with a bold stab at accuracy, she called 'At Aunt Mabel's'. She liked it greatly but it filled her with disquiet. 'Quite a bit of Evelyn Waugh, a dash of Proust, and the purpose - description of the slow decay of top people due to social revolution – a grim subject to me, excruciatingly funny for those who are not of noble class.

[Philip Ziegler; Diana Cooper: A Biography (Penguin, 1983)]

What did you do today?' Daniel would ask at dinner.
'Messed about in the car ... Read that novel of Anthony Powell's you lent me. I didn't realise you English could be so oblique.'

[Simon Raven; The Sabre Squadron]

Such prodigious gifts might seem the stuff of fiction, and sure enough, Lambert was the model for Hugh Moreland, one of the principal characters in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. Indeed, the fictional Lambert at one time seemed more likely to be remembered than the real one, who died of drink two days short of his 46th birthday and was promptly relegated to deepest obscurity ...

[Terry Teachout; "A British Bad Boy Finds His Way Back Into the Light" (story about Constant Lambert); New York Times, 02 May 1999]

"Now in London, Mr Lushington, how is it with girls? Always I collect addresses. Is it true there are no maisons? No quartier reservé?"
"Absolutely."
"That I cannot understand. Comment s’amuse la jeunesse?"

[Anthony Powell; Venusberg]

By this time we had come to Grosvenor Place, in sight of the triumphal arch, across the summit of which, like a vast paper-weight or capital ornament of an Empire clock, the Quadriga’s horses, against a sky of indigo and silver, pranced desperately towards the abyss. Here our ways divided.

[Anthony Powell; A Buyer's Market]

Nothing is interesting unless you are interested, and conversely.

[Anthony Powell; A Writer's Notebook]

Life becomes more and more like an examination where you have to guess the questions as well as the answers. I’d long decided there were no answers. I’m beginning to suspect there aren’t any questions either, none at least of any consequence, even the old perennial, whether or not to stay alive.

[Anthony Powell; Books do Furnish a Room]

"Hullo, Nicholas. I hope my dear old Finn is not still cross with me about Szymanski?"
"There may still be some disgruntlement, sir."
'Disgruntlement', one was told, was a word that could be used of all ranks without loss of discipline. As I heard myself utter it, I became immediately aware of the manner in which Farebrother, by some effort of the will, made those with whom he dealt as devious as himself. It was not the first time I had noticed that characteristic in him.

[Anthony Powell; The Military Philosophers]

I am sure you will agree with me, Lady Warminster, in thinking, so far as company is concerned, enough is as bad as a feast, and half a loaf in many ways preferable to the alternative of a whole one or the traditional no bread. How enjoyable, therefore, to be just as we are.

[Anthony Powell; Casanova's Chinese Restaurant]

He was not drunk in any derogatory sense, had merely taken a little more than accustomed, which had transformed a prickly detachment into discursiveness not to be checked. He hurried along, the old grey hat jammed down on his head, swinging his stick …

[Anthony Powell; Temporary Kings]

"What about these decomposing lip-sticks Gwen is always leaving about the house? They make the place look like the ladies’ cloak-room in a third-rate night club."
"Do you spend much of your time in the ladies’ cloak-rooms of third-rate night-clubs, Peter? What a funny boy you must be."

[Anthony Powell; A Question of Upbringing]

"I don’t think St John Clarke is interested in either sex", said Barnby. "He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which ha has always remained faithful."
"Self-love seems so often unrequited."
"But not in the case of St John Clarke", said Barnby. "He is entirely capable of getting along without what most of the rest of us need."

[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]

... we had arrived before a dilapidated stucco facade in a side street, a house entered by way of a creaking, unlatched door, from which most of the paint had been removed. The hall, empty except for a couple of packing-cases, gave off that stubborn musty smell characteristic of staircases leading to Chelsea flats: damp: cigarette smoke : face powder. We climbed the uncarpeted boards …

[Anthony Powell; At Lady Molly's]

I heard the news without regret; although in the army – as in love – anxiety is an ever-present factor where change is concerned.

[Anthony Powell; The Valley of Bones]

To be told something that comes as a surprise, then find everyone has known about it for ages, is no uncommon experience.

[Anthony Powell; Hearing Secret Harmonies]

But anyway, it takes a bit of time to realize that all of the odds and ends milling about round one are the process of living.

[Anthony Powell; Casanova's Chinese Restaurant]

Sorceresses, more than most, are safer allowed their professional amour propre.

[Anthony Powell; Temporary Kings]

A low melancholy wailing … notes of a hidden orchestra, mysterious, even a shade unearthly, as if somewhere in the vicinity gnomes were thumbing strange instruments in a cave.

[Anthony Powell; At Lady Molly's]

What are the English like? Worse answers might be given than "Read Aubrey's Brief Lives and you will see".

[Anthony Powell; John Aubrey and His Friends]

[Templer's] habitual tendency was to look just a little too well dressed, and that evening he gave the appearance of having walked straight out of his tailor's wearing an entirely new outfit.

[Anthony Powell; At Lady Molly's]

Until you have dealings with Blackhead, the word "bureaucrat" will have conveyed no meaning to you. He is the super-tchenovnik of the classical Russian novel. Even this building can boast no on else quite like him …
"Blackhead is a man apart," said Pennistone. "Even his colleagues are aware of that. His minutes have the abstract quality of pure intention."

[Anthony Powell; The Military Philosophers]