To Keep the Ball Rolling.(Review)

Anthony Powell To Keep the Ball Rolling. The University of Chicago Press, 456 pages, $27.50

"I don't like to meddle in my private affairs," Karl Kraus once quipped, and his aphorism would have made a perfect epigraph to this book. For few memoirists have been less impatient to plumb their own depths than Anthony Powell. When, for example, his first child is born, Powell confides in us, "I found that becoming a father had a profound effect on the manner in which one looked et the world"--and not a word more on the subject. Note how, by sentence's end, even the pronoun has withdrawn into impersonality.

To Keep the Ball Rolling--an abridged and revised edition of the four autobiographical volumes that Powell (1905-2000) published between 1976 and 1982, and which now appears for the first time in this country--does not recount a career of any great outward drama. Eton, then Oxford; a stint in publishing, another in screenwriting, a third as literary editor of Punch; a more or less even flow of increasingly acclaimed novels; a bit of unadventurous travel now and then; and, dullest of all, if rather shocking in view of his obsession with conjugal misery and divorce, a single happy marriage: Powell's life was hardly more tumultuous or exciting than that of Wallace Stevens.

A third letdown awaits devotees of Powell's twelve-volume masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, whose characters tend to stir in readers an almost prurient curiosity about their real-life models. Is Sillery based on Maurice Bowra, as has often been conjectured? Powell doesn't say. Widmerpool, that sublime toad, isn't even mentioned. Almost grudgingly, Powell allows that the composer Moreland harbors elements of Constant Lambert, and that the flamboyant writer X. Trapnel is a dead ringer for Julian Maclaren-Ross (who, as a friend and fellow Dance-enthusiast wryly remarked, is now more famous for having inspired Trapnel than in his own right). "The less novelists descant on their own works the better," Powell opines, and in all fairness he can't be faulted for this reticence. But still. Those looking to play the a clef game are better directed to the Anthony Powell website, which boasts pages of gossip about who's who in Dance.

I might add that To Keep the Ball Rolling is rather indifferently written, full of lazy segues and tepid formulations, and that it seems prompted by nothing stronger than a vague sense that an English man of letters, having reached a certain age and distinction, should, after all, produce his memoirs.

And yet the book, for all its shortcomings, has just enough of Powell's singular elan to scrape by. One reads it not for a deep view into the soul of its creator, but for telling, sometimes hilarious glimpses of his contemporaries. From Orwell to Muggeridge, Compton-Burnett to Kingsley Amis, Powell knew nearly everyone worth knowing, and his anecdotes do not disappoint.

Here's one set at the notorious Hypocrites Club: