T T Waring

As the title of this site will tell you, I am an avid fan of the novels of Anthony Powell, especially the twelve volume series Dance to The Music of Time, written between 1951-1975.  I read them every year - normally once, but occasionally more often - and I estimate that I have notched up 35 readings overall.  When I next embark on this joyous marathon, I assure you that you will hear all about it, and if you want to share my pleasure, Hilary Spurling’s excellent guide to the novels, Invitation To The Dance, is invaluable.  These novels are one of the supreme literary achievements of the twentieth century, and are illuminating, funny and vividly immediate to each of our individual experiences.  He may not be in quite the same class as a novelist, but in tone and method, he is the Austen of the modern age.

But my reading of Powell was largely confined to these novels, and the wonderful Fisher King, his last novel, published in 1986.  But last year, I read his biography, Anthony Powell, A Life by Michael Barber. This is well worth reading as a picture of literary London from the 1920s to the 1980s, especially the earlier decades of that period. Barber’s book reinforces what you suspect from the novels, and what is clear from Powell’s memoirs (To Keep The Ball Rolling - four volumes, and a rather dense and unrewarding read, if the truth be told) and diaries (Diaries, in three volumes), that his work was unusually autobiographical.  Powell was open about this, asking how anyone could write about things they didn’t know about and hadn’t experienced - and, for example, explaining that one of the reasons that his account of Nick Jenkins’ childhood (Nick is the main protagonist in the Dance, and his alter ego) occurs so late in the sequence - its in The Kindly Ones, the sixth novel - is that his parents were by then dead, and were therefore ‘available’!  But the biography also makes it clear that the early novels, before Dance, are well worth reading, and I have put them on my list.

Afternoon Men (1931), Venusberg (1932 ), and From A View To A Death (1933) await in the book tray, but I have just read What’s Become of Waring? For some reason I don’t understand, this title has always put me off (anyone who tells you not to judge a book by its cover or its title preaches in vain) and made me think that the novel must be a piece of vapid juvenilia, only childishly amusing.  I confess to being completely wrong.

Published in 1939 - after the first two novels of the Dance sequence - What’s Become of Waring? is set in pre-war London, with a holiday in south of France.  Much of the story revolves round a publishing house (which is where Powell started his career, at Duckworth & Co), where T T Waring is an elusive but successful author of off the beaten track travel books.  His sudden death is the catalyst for a chain of events involving the publishers, his would be biographer and his alleged former fiancée, Roberta Payne.  (The photograph is of one of Marc’s illustrations to a modern edition, showing Hugh Judkins, the elderly publisher, and the fatale Roberta). It’s a fine portrait, lightly written and gently allusive, of a slightly rackety and uncertain period - the “twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres” as T S Eliot has it.

Comments

[Harriet]

I've never read any of these but you have convinced me I should give them a try! Thanks.