Hilary Spurling - Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time

Hilary Spurling

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ANTHONY POWELL

Dancing to the Music of Time

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The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse. 18691908

La Grande Thrse: The Greatest Swindle of the Century

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Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse. 19091954

Burying the Bones. Pearl Buck in China

For John, who first gave me Anthony Powell to read

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.

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, by him).

Lionel Powell relied throughout his career on the hunting shires around Melton for a steady supply of fresh fractures. His great stroke of luck was marrying a local brewers daughter, Jessie Adcock, an only child like her husband who, unlike him, stood to inherit a useful sum from her father. One of fourteen children of a local farmer, William Adcock had built up a successful brewery on the north-east edge of Melton, erecting a sizeable red-brick pile for himself and rising to the rank of captain in the Leicestershire Volunteers. An earlier, equally go-ahead Adcock had been the first to market the pork pies that made Meltons name (he sent them up by stagecoach to London in the 1830s). By the time Powell got there a few decades later the town had consolidated its position as the world centre of fox-hunting. Fashionable aristocrats descended for the winter season on Melton, where their needs were met by enterprising tradesmen like Adcock and Powell, the one providing beer for thirsty riders, the other patching up bones cracked or broken on the hunting field.

They made a boisterous couple. Short, tubby and emphatically bearded, on the station platform at Melton for the future King Edward VII (who hunted there regularly as Prince of Wales). Powell, his much younger crony and drinking companion, was a tall skinny gangling beansprout of a boy who towered over him as they plodded home together from a days hunting, or from carousing afterwards, bedraggled, mud-plastered, clearly half-cut, the younger with one arm draped round the shoulders of his stocky friend. Hunting became a passion as well as a livelihood in a town that offered access to four packs of hounds, all based on the rolling grasslands studded with spinneys and coverts that stretched for miles in every direction: the Quorn, the Belvoir, the Cottesmore and the pack eventually known as the Fernie. The town owed its fame in hunting circles to the legendary Nimrod, whose sporting journalism had established him in the early years of the century as the father of fox-hunting in headquarters at the centre of Melton, opposite St Marys Church, simply known as The House. A solid and capacious hunting lodge with fifteen or twenty bedrooms upstairs, first-class stabling attached, and a long pillared portico opening at the back on to an acre of grounds, The House had belonged in its heyday to a daughter of the Duke of Rutland, and it still retained considerable splendour by 1878 when the friendship between Adcock and Powell culminated in a dynastic wedding. The bridal couple nineteen-year-old Jessie and Lionel who was ten years older started married life at The House, purchased presumably with Adcock money and discreetly renamed The Elms.

They put on a fine show with sumptuous hats and dresses for Jessie, and stayed two or three months, perhaps longer, said their grandson). They produced in short order two children, who inspired more resentment than anything else in their giddy young mother, and got scant attention from their fond, convivial, extrovert father, himself increasingly preoccupied elsewhere. The Elms grew more and more uncomfortable as the paths of its owners diverged, and their marriage began to go badly wrong. Old friends invited to stay, like the three Wells-Dymoke girls, found themselves making excuses to leave again almost as soon as they arrived.

Young Philip Powell Lionels son, Adcocks grandson was , more than a little sinister.

making his way up the social scale rather too rapidly in local opinion. Either way, Tony owed much to this great-grandfather he never knew. Adcock was the draughtsman in the family whose gifts a sharp, noticing, humorous eye matched by vigorous attack and a decisive line Tony clearly inherited. Both collected paintings, both actively cultivated the arts unlike anyone else on their side of the family, and years later Tony was more amused than dismayed to be told by a fortune-teller that Adcock the brewer was presiding from beyond the grave over his great-grandsons career as a novelist.

But as a boy it was an altogether different aspect of his family history that interested Tony. The Leicestershire Powells had long since lost sight of a Welsh connection that petered out with a Philip Lewis Powell born at the end of the eighteenth century, who squandered the family inheritance in quarrels over money and land, debts, fistfights, lawsuits and bankruptcy. His namesake, Tonys father, was a serving soldier with no interest in his own origins or anyone elses. But genealogy became a kind of anchor for Tony himself in the years when he was growing up out of suitcases, rejoining his parents in his school holidays on their current army posting, often abroad, always in temporary accommodation, of force and prudent marriages by ancestors from whom the generations had left him separate and strangely remote.