Powell Anthony - Anthony Powell: his work, his life, his loves

Ivy When Young: The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett. 18841919

Invitation to the Dance: A Guide to Anthony Powells Dance to the Music of Time

Secrets of a Womans Heart. The Later Life of I. Compton-Burnett. 19201969

Elinor Fettiplaces Receipt Book

Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet

Paper Spirits: College Portraits by Vladimir Sulyagin

The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse. 18691908

La Grande Thrse: The Greatest Swindle of the Century

The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell

Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse. 19091954

Burying the Bones. Pearl Buck in China

Hilary Spurling

---

ANTHONY POWELL

Dancing to the Music of Time

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Hamish Hamilton is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2017

Copyright Hilary Spurling, 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover image Topfoto.co.uk

Endpapers: the boiler room collage at The Chantry The Estate of Anthony Powell. Photographer: Hugh Gilbert

All integrated images from the archives of both Anthony Powell and Violet Powell at the Chantry are used by kind permission of the Powell family The Estates of Anthony Powell and Violet Powell

Inset images:

ISBN: 978-0-241-25655-8

For John, who first gave me Anthony Powell to read

Anthony Powell made me his biographer long ago on the understanding that nothing whatever was to be done for as long as possible, terms that suited all parties, including his wife, Lady Violet Powell. Three decades after that undertaking, I owe by far my greatest debt to their sons, Tristram and John Powell, for their trust, patience and unconditional support. This book would not have been possible without the knowledge and archival skills of John Powell, who provided unrestricted access over the past four years to the Powell family papers at the Chantry in Somerset, as well as answering questions, supplying documents and offering unfailing hospitality.

My third great debt is to the indefatigable Patric Dickinson, Clarenceux King of Arms, former chairman of the Anthony Powell Society, whose remarkable powers of detection made him indispensable at every turn, especially in the early stages of tracking down material and mapping it out. I am especially grateful to Marion Coatess two daughters, the late Laura Cohn who, with her husband Stephen, talked to me at length, and allowed me to reproduce her mothers portrait by John Banting; and to Catherine Chamier, who gave generously of her time and trouble.

Next I thank the many people who supplied background material and provided access to private papers: Venetia Bell for particulars about her father, Gerald Reitlinger, and for her company on an instructive tour of his incomparable collection, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Bernard Dru for his assistance, kind hospitality and access to his fathers Powell correspondence; Julia Elton for the loan of an unpublished memoir by her mother, Margaret Elton, and for an illuminating account of Eve Disher; Martha James for much information about Enid Firminger, and for lending me her own unpublished family memoir; Bryan Newman for his help, and for lending me an unpublished autobiography by his mother-in-law, Miranda Wood, ne Heyward, ex-Christen; Celia Goodman and Ariane Banks for talking to me about Inez Holden; and Sir Richard Heygate for access to his fathers Powell letters.

My thanks go to the late Roland Gant of Heinemann, and to T. G. Rosenthal for access to publishing archives; to my successive agents, Bruce Hunter and Lizzy Kremer, for their help in general, and in particular for access to the David Higham Archive in the UK and at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; to Michael Meredith, former College Librarian at Eton College; to Dr Andrew Topsfield, Keeper of the Islamic Department, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford; to Sheila Vanker, Senior Curator of Chinese Art; to Francesca Leoni, Jameel Curator of Islamic Art; and to Bonhams Fine Art Auctioneers for photocopies of the Powell correspondence sold at auction in 2016.

I am grateful to Anne Bedish for showing me Adrian Daintreys portrait of Varda, and to John Harris for allowing me to reproduce it; and for assistance and information to Lady Rachel Billington; Jenny Chamier-Grove; Jilly Cooper; Lady Antonia Fraser; Victoria Glendinning; Lord Gowrie; the late David Holloway; Paul and Marigold Johnson; Jonathan Kooperstein; Alison Lurie; Benedict Nightingale; the late Sonia Orwell; Thomas Pakenham; the late Henrietta Phipps; Michael Richardson of Art Space; Christopher Scoble; and Francis Wyndham.

My warmest thanks go to all the people who provided me with the peaceful and secluded places where I wrote successive chapters: Dame Drue Heinz, John and Catrine Clay, Ian Collins and Joachim Jacobs, Carole Angier, Anne Dumas, Phillida Wiggins and the late Lydia and Ian Wright.

Lastly, I thank Bruce Hunter again for reading my manuscript, and giving good advice; and Brigadier Nigel Still for checking the sections dealing with military matters in the First and Second World Wars. I am grateful to my editor at Hamish Hamilton, Simon Prosser, for his constancy, forbearance and long-term enthusiasm; to his indomitable assistant, Hermione Thompson, who prepared this book for the press with exemplary efficiency, speed and good humour; and to Ellie Smith for smoothing its path to the printers. My best thanks go to my friend and fellow biographer Carole Angier, for moral and philosophical support backed by practical assistance (including her supplementary interview of a key witness). More than anyone else I thank my husband, John Spurling, for his kindness and generosity, for never complaining in face of consistent provocation, and for giving me courage and strength throughout.

Small, inquisitive and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a childs point of view. His mother and his nurse were for long periods the only people he saw, in general the one unchanging element in a peripatetic existence. , he wrote, it would have been a painter. I could fancy a thing so strongly & have so clear an idea of it.

which dominated his writing, Tony wrote of Aubrey, and he might have said the same of himself. As a small boy the books he read or had read to him were the standard diet of his age and sex in the decade before the First World to let him come near her again on the grounds that a grandchild made her feel old.

Genealogy joined him up to an extended family he never knew. His immediate ancestry was not encouraging. His mothers family of Wellses and Dymokes had once possessed a small country house in Lincolnshire with a modest parcel of land, both squandered in attempts by his great-grandfather to lay bogus claim to a peerage. The same man, Dymoke Wells, tried and expensively failed to seize for himself the obsolete hereditary title of Kings Champion. Of his three sons, two died unmarried and the third ended the male line by producing three daughters, each of whom abandoned on marriage the name of Wells-Dymoke. Tonys Powell grandfather was less ineffectual but irretrievably unromantic. He had once dreamed of becoming a cavalry officer but his father died when he was eight years old, leaving no money to buy him a commission. Instead he migrated as a young man to Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire and became for the rest of his life, in his grandsons words, . He funded his habit by setting up his plate as a surgeon, still a low-grade job for most of the nineteenth century, strenuous, smelly and mucky, a branch of butchery traditionally associated with screaming by him).