The death of the novelist and critic Anthony Powell on March 28th at the age of 94, leaves the British literary world much impoverished. He was one of modern literature's most perceptive, ironic and urbanely entertaining elder statesmen.
Anthony Powell belonged to that legendary generation which flourished after the first World War and before the second. The social aspirations and eccentricities of that group have been chronicled ad nauseam. He was an example of how, in the literary field, these could be combined with steady professionalism.
His literary career began in 1931 with Afternoon Men, his first novel. It peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, when most volumes of his 12-part novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, appeared. No sooner was that important achievement behind him than he set off, in 1976, on another marathon: four volumes of memoirs under the overall title To Keep the Ball Rolling.
In the 1980s, when a lesser mortal might have felt, understandably, that the ball had been rolling for long enough, he began again to publish self-contained novels such as The Fisher King. From the earliest to the most recent, his fictions contain dozens of superb moments of social comedy, depending on the nuances of minutely-observed behaviour. Equally, they are full of delightful characters. The most memorable of these is Kenneth Widmerpool, his comic triumph, who appears in each part of A Dance to the Music of Time. Widmerpool, from his schooldays on, is someone who always gets his way whatever the cost in human terms; a goad in the flesh of Nicholas Jenkins, Anthony Powell's fictional alter ego.
He always avoided personal disclosure in his work. In his few, rare interviews on radio or television, he refused to be drawn on any matter of importance. Even in his memoirs, when he is not airing a passion for genealogy, his focus is on others, not himself - for example, on Alick Dru, the translator of Kierkegaard with whom he worked during the second World War. But he did reveal in an interview in 1991 that Widmerpool was based on Denis Cuthbert Capel-Dunn, his superior in the Cabinet Office in 1943. "He was the model," he said, "inasmuch as you can say that characters in novels are modelled on anyone."
Anthony Powell was born in 1905, the only son of a senior army officer. He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1934 he married Lady Violet Pakenham, sister of the present Lord Longford, and they had two sons.
Before the second World War, as a young man with a name to make, he had short spells in publishing and films, including a trip to Hollywood. He travelled also to central Europe and the Baltic. All these youthful wanderings show up in early novels such as Venusberg (1932), Agents and Patients (1936), and What's Become of Waring? (1939). By the time war came, a discerning band of readers already regarded Anthony Powell as, with the possible exception of Evelyn Waugh, the funniest of the new "British society" novelists.
In 1939 he joined the army, serving in the Welsh Regiment and then in the Intelligence Corps. His military experiences were reflected in three separate volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time. The Soldier's Art, and The Valley of Bones benefit from an infusion of down-to-earth Welsh types, taken from members of his regiment. His knowledge of the Free Czech forces and other allied governments-in-exile appears in his novel, The Military Philosophers.
Released from army service in 1945, the world Anthony Powell had satirised as a young writer had vanished.
A much more austere world replaced it; employment openings in literary journalism, a skill he had begun to develop, were limited. The Times Literary Supplement invited him to take charge of scrutinising new fiction and assigning it to reviewers. After that he became literary editor of Punch.
Later, he became a regular reviewer on the Daily Telegraph book page, where he had a long and stylish innings.
Every reader will have his or her favourite section of A Dance to the Music of Time. The early part gives an unforgettable picture of one pre-war Etonian set; subsequent parts brilliantly evoke the contiguous worlds of Bohemia and Belgravia, and there is a fascinating attempt, in the volumes set in post-war England, to pull its (clearly distasteful) elements together.
In later years he rarely left his home in Somerset to go to London, but the publication of three volumes of his diaries covering the 1980s and 1990s briefly brought him back into the spotlight, as did Channel 4's 1997 serialisation of A Dance to the Music of Time.
Anthony Powell is one of the great comic depicters of group behaviour, and his books are full of gregariousness and riotous living.
He is survived by his wife and their two sons.
Anthony Powell: born 1905; died March, 2000