Powell was not, of course, caught up in the left-wing political enthusiasms of
the 1930s, but Orwell, charmed by his blend of solicitude and humour,
described him as the only Tory he had ever liked. Powell's own somewhat
surprising taste at this time was for the writings of Nietzsche.
For a while he worked as a scriptwriter in London and (briefly and with no
success) in Hollywood in 1937, where he once lunched in the MGM canteen with
Scott Fitzgerald. This was as close as he came to the glamorous life, and
much of the work was drudgery, but it provided him with useful experience in
the construction of plots.
In the mid-1930s Powell also began writing for The Daily Telegraph, though the
literary editors then, he declared "didn't have a clue how to run a
books page". He soon stopped writing for them and it was only when H.
D. Ziman, (whom he had known in Oxford days as a fellow member of the
ramshackle Hippocrites Club) became literary editor in the 1950s that Powell
was to return to the paper as its lead reviewer.
Powell married Lady Violet Pakenham in 1934 after a courtship of only three
weeks. The relationship was cemented on walks taken together during a
weekend at Pakenham Castle in County Westmeath. "On those walks,"
Lady Violet said much later, "we began a conversation which has
continued unabated to this day." The fact that she was the daughter of
the 5th Earl of Longford naturally pleased Powell, who spent many happy
hours clambering around in her family tree.
During the Second World War Powell served in the Army, initially in his
father's old regiment, The Welch Regiment, and later in the Intelligence
Corps, where he became a major and a liaison officer at the War Office. His
military life provided the material for the war trilogy at the heart of the
Dance sequence: The Valley of Bones, The Soldiers Art and The Military
Philosophers. "With the war one came into much deeper waters,"
Powell said. "It stirred up so many feelings, at private levels."
This central trilogy has a personal intensity mostly absent from the other
books in the series.
In 1945 Powell was demobilised and returned to his literary career. For five
years he was on the staff of The Times Literary Supplement, becoming fiction
editor before moving on to take up the literary editorship of Punch, working
under Malcolm Muggeridge. His was a typically witty, pithy type of
reviewing, and he amused himself by trying his hand at parody (Kipling was
his piece de risistance). While he was there he also instituted the brief
200-word review with the injunction to writers: "Say what it's about,
what you think of it, and make a joke." When Bernard Hollowood became
Editor of Punch in 1957 Powell was sacked.
Then, for more than 30 years Powell was a lead re- viewer for The Daily
Telegraph, contributing every fortnight. He was naturally protective of
other writers, and when their work was not up to its highest standard he
ensured that good points were not overlooked. Connoisseurs of his reviews
used particularly to treasure the final paragraph with its magisterial
corrections. Perhaps the most famous is the imperious ticking off given to
Mark Amory which reads: "The note on p.90 should read Lady Diana
Bridgeman, not Bradford, the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay on p.340, the same
as she on p.559, was n‰e Hennessy not Hamilton; the dog that acted in La
Dolce Vita belonged to Iris Tree, not Miss Taffy Rodd." To him, it
sometimes seemed, this was the stuff of life.
In 1948 Powell published a not-so-brief life of the antiquarian John Aubrey
(which remains the best). The 17th century fascinated him and his reading of
writers such as Burton and Vaughan was to change his perspective in the
second half of A Dance to the Music of Time. He edited a handy selection of
the Brief Lives, and perfected Aubrey's trick of sidestepping "the
boring bits", mastering the literary technique which Henry James called "foreshortening":
the creation of an illusory depth by emphasising certain details while
allowing others to fade into the background.
In 1951 Powell published A Question of Upbringing, the first novel in his
sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (the title taken from Poussin's
painting in the Wallace Collection). Originally he had had the idea of
writing one very long novel, but his conception changed to a series of
shorter works - initially six, ending with the outbreak of war. Hooked, he
went on publishing a volume every two or three years until 1975, ending the
tale boldly by tackling the psychedelic culture of the 1960s. Though the
sequence lacks a true plot, the incidents have a fine cumulative effect.
For 24 years he worked with routine diligence. "As far as I can see,"
he said, writing "is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and
appallingly hard work." At 9.30 every morning he would sit down at a
low chair and table in his dressing-room and, after knocking off a few bills
and perhaps a letter, he would begin. "I type out 30 words, then I turn
the 30 into 50, the 50 into 80 and so on, going back over it again and again."
In the end he extended it to around a million words.
Powell's four volumes of memoirs were published between 1976 and 1982. "There
is so much rubbish written about people, really terrible rubbish, whether
they are alive or dead, stuff that bears no relation to the truth," he
said. "I wanted to get a few things down on paper." The memoirs
run from 1952, when the second volume of the Dance sequence was published,
and the technique in both novels and memoirs is not dissimilar: there is a
blend of anecdote and observation, a deliberate looseness of structure which
enables Powell effortlessly to incorporate extended vignettes of literary
contemporaries. The portrait of Muggeridge was one of Powell's classics. He
described him at a time when he was still Editor of Punch but was being
seduced away by the temptations of television. Powell portrayed the "three
persons making up the Muggeridigian Trinity each pulling violently in a
different direction from the others as they took an increasingly separate
state". First Muggeridge is seen as a sceptical wit, second as a
serious and ambitious man, and third as a Bible-bashing, almost Messianic
figure. "He who was not with the Third Muggeridge was against him,
including First and Second Muggeridge," Powell wrote. The original
jesting character becomes "a thief crucified between two Christs".
(It is probably only fair to add that Powell, who was not without his
portion of amour propre, had taken grave offence at Muggeridge's review of
one of his novels.)
Powell returned to fiction in 1986 with The Fisher King, a novel which in some
ways recalls his prewar manner, but with Arthurian overtones that reflect
his passion for ancient history. Although a late work, it was as full as
ever of sharp observation, and was, to use one of Powell's characteristic
phrases, "by no means to be underestimated".
