The unauthorized Anthony Powell.(Book Review)

The question of "authorized" versus "unauthorized" biographies has always been a troubled one. Authorized lives, on the one hand, tend to be too polite, too considerate of the feelings of the subject and his family--necessarily so since these people usually control access to vital materials and memories, so that their goodwill becomes essential for the success of the project. Unauthorized biographies, on the other hand, are often either scurrilous (authorization being withheld on that very account), or, if sympathetic, badly weakened by the author's lack of access to sources.

Michael Barber's new life of Anthony Powell falls into the latter category. (1) The Powell family (Powell himself died in 2000, at the age of 94) had chosen Hilary Spurling, the author of well-regarded lives of Paul Scott and Ivy Compton-Burnett, as the authorized biographer. But Barber, notable for his highly entertaining book on the disreputable novelist Simon Raven, refused to acknowledge rejection and pressed ahead with his own Powell biography, which was published recently in England mad is now appearing here.

The bad news: not only did Powell's family and friends withhold help from Barber, they seem even to have tried to hinder him: never have I read a biography, and this is particularly notable in a subject who died only recently, that used fewer primary sources. The book contains no unpublished material, nothing that cannot be found in Powell's own four volumes of memoirs (collected under the title To Keep the Ball Rolling), his three volumes of Journals, or the published memoirs and journals of his friends and contemporaries. Nor will the reader find any original or even particularly thoughtful approaches to Powell's work; Barber is less interested in criticism than in providing a clef to Powell's romans, though even in this department he presents us with very few surprises, for To Keep the Ball Rolling already gave all the clues we really need to the various characters that inspired A Dance to the Music of Time.

The good news: the book is extremely readable. Barber, with his Rabelaisian humor and his characteristic style, brisk almost to the point of crudeness, did a brilliant job with the equally crude and Rabelaisian Simon Raven, but he might have been a very bad mismatch for the fastidious--in the subject's own words, "frightfully buttoned up"--Powell. Oddly, this has not proved to be the case, and at times Barber's plain talking, set against Powell's coy elusiveness, has a bracing effect. British reviewers (including Spurling herself in Powell's own longtime venue, the Telegraph) expressed pained disgust at Barber's use of vulgarisms, specifically "up your arse," but it should be noted that David Pennistone, one of the few entirely charming and sympathetic characters in A Dance to the Music of Time, uses the very same phrase. Powell could have a tendency to seem stuffy; Barber's breeziness undercuts this slight pomposity without ever tainting his sympathy for the man and his work.

A case in point is Powell's interest in genealogy,, which he stuffed into his memoirs, tracing his family back to South Wales in the fifth century A.D. Barber would seem to be of the opinion that a taste for genealogy, like a taste for pornography, is best enjoyed in private, and he refuses to indulge Powell's little hobby in his own narrative.

Such interests--Powell claimed that Debrett's was his favorite bedside reading--and the often Blimpish, high Tory attitudes expressed in the Journals, have not helped Powell's posthumous reputation, and as we move into a century so vastly at odds, socially and technologically, with the world he wrote about, he is becoming marginalized as the specialized taste of the old-fashioned, the Tory, the aesthetically conservative. John Carey, reviewing the Barber book in London's Sunday Times, brutally lambasted Powell as a man with "no ideas," a second-rate Evelyn Waugh, a snob "incapable of conveying deep feeling" who "knew about only a tiny upper stratum of English society." This is so patently wrong that it deserves a thorough rebuttal, more thorough even than Barber gives us.

A snob? First of all, even if the charge were true, we must remember that snobbery has never proved a fatal handicap either to good writing or deep feeling. Proust, Henry James, Fitzgerald were all snobs of the deepest dye. But there is really nothing of the snob in Powell's narrative consciousness or in his treatment of his characters. The most deeply sympathetic characters in Dance, like Hugh Moreland and X. Trapnel, come from the middle classes; those from still lower strata, like Ted Jeavons, or Rowland Gwatkin, the idealistic Welsh bank-clerk-turned-wartime-officer, possess as ...